For others the most difficult part of Catholicism is losing their job or their career if they are employed by a Protestant congregation. I’ve been there, too. Perhaps I’ll share some personal thoughts on that in the days to come. Today, I want to focus on family. I get emails and phone calls from Protestants considering conversion. I’d say that most of them experience difficulties with their families and usually with their spouses.

I’ve also noticed that some people have difficulty with how their parents will perceive them if they are Catholics. Cradle Catholics (those raised as Catholics from the cradle) might find this odd. What they do not understand is that Protestant denominations have their own customs and expectations when it comes to holidays, meals, and important life events like marriage…and the Catholic Church has her own customs.

Let me give just ten examples that will likely come up. If you have others, please share them in the comments:

1. At Christmas and other holidays, you will have to go Holy Mass with your family. This creates problems with scheduling wider family events on Christmas.
2. When you pray at meals, your family and children will make the sign of the cross. This will startle your extended family.
3. When the grandparents pray with your children, your children will at some point innocently and rightly start praying to Mary or to some saints. That might cause grandma to go into a conniption.
4. You won’t contracept. This means you’ll start having lots of babies. This means your family will constantly say things like, “Aren’t you finished?” or hurtful things to your wife, “Don’t you want to do something more important than have children and pack lunches?”
5. You will have a crucifix in your house which will draw comments.
6. Marriages will be Catholic and Catholic only. That means no weddings at the family’s favorite chapel.
7. You won’t be able to attend a family wedding if Catholics are getting married in Protestant chapels and in sometimes in difficult situations where there is divorce.
8. If you’re practicing, you’ll be praying the Rosary daily. I invite Protestant family to join us, but that may not be comfortable for everyone.
9. On Fridays, especially on Fridays during Lent you’ll have to ask questions about dinner before accepting an invitation, because you cannot eat flesh meat (beef, pork, chicken, etc.)
10. You’ll have one family member who is very aggressive and challenging. They’ll be playing Johnny Apologetics every time you gather as a family. There will the be uncomfortable debates about sola fide, sola scriptura, Mary, the Pope, Catholic history, and more.

Hard words, I know. Yet when we consider the gift of the beatific vision of God’s essence and our union with Him for ever, all created happiness and goods fail to compare. Everything is worth it. Catholicism is the pearl of great price. Also, think of it this way. Early Catholics struggled with becoming martyrs. When they were martyred they offered their deaths for the conversion of their accusers and enemies (St Stephen martyrdom and St Paul’s conversion is an example).

Today we do not worry about martyrdom (yet), but we do worry about the disgrace we will experience from our families. That is a small price when you think of it. Moreover, whenever your family ridicules your mocks your for being a Catholic, you can offer that pain for their conversion. It might be the trigger that releases graces upon their souls.

To read the two previous posts about becoming Catholic, click here.

ad Jesum per Mariam,

Taylor Marshall

Scenes from the Life of Joachim and Anna
Master of Alkmaar (c. 1500)

The Evangelical statement reads as follows:

Immaculate Conception. Evangelicals find unnecessary and unbiblical the notion that Mary was preserved from the stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception. Still, we affirm much of what this teaching is intended to convey—that Mary was the object of God’s gracious election in Christ; that she was uniquely prepared to become the mother of our Lord; that she is an extraordinary model of the call to discipleship and the life of holiness; that her assent to the purpose of the Lord was itself the result of God’s unmerited favor toward her—an example of sola gratia; and that she should be honored and called “blessed one” in all places and by all generations.

Much interconfessional discussion has centered on the Greek kekaritomene of Luke 1:28 which the Vulgate renders gratia plena and the Douay-Rheims version as “full of grace.” In its clearest form, this perfect passive participle expresses divine favor in the passive voice, as in the King James Version: “Hail thou that art highly favoured” (cf. Luther, holdselige, and Calvin, agréable). Luke 1:28 does not mention Mary’s conception, though Scripture does teach that God’s redemptive call can take place before birth or even conception (Jer. 1:5; Gal. 1:15).

The concrete manifestation of divine favor occurred through the descent and overshadowing of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35), whose sanctifying activity enabled Mary’s response of faith and thus inaugurated the renewal of all creation in her womb (Luke 1:38). Calvin affirms this point by stating that “to carry Christ in her womb was not Mary’s first blessedness, but was greatly inferior to the distinction of being born again by the Spirit of God to a new life” (Commentary on the Harmony of the Gospels, 42). By divine grace alone Mary was enabled to give birth to the Son of God, and from her alone he received his human nature. It is not to be doubted that this was wrought by the power of God in a way no less miraculous or mysterious than the virginal conception itself.

Immaculate Conception is not accepted as a dogma by the churches of the East and was much debated in the West before and after the Reformation. Augustine held to a high view of the personal holiness of Mary but believed that God’s abundant grace was conferred on her “for vanquishing sin in every part” (On Nature and Grace 36.42). The idea that Mary was conceived without original sin was rejected by Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas, among other notable teachers of the Church. Their thinking about Mary deserves fresh consideration.

Evangelicals confess the sinlessness of Christ but not the sinlessness of Mary. Hebrews 7:26 refers to Jesus as our High Priest. He alone was perfectly holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners. The Bible makes clear that no other human being can claim this (John 8:46; Rom. 3:23, 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:22; 2Cor. 5:21; Eph. 2:3; Heb. 4:15). Jesus taught his disciples, among whom Mary was the first, to pray “Our Father who art in heaven . . . forgive us our trespasses” (Matt. 6:12). The Bible declares that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and he was the Savior as well as the son of his blessed mother (1 Tim. 1:15; Luke 1:46–47).

What disagreements lie behind the disagreements stated here by Evangelicals concerning the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception? I find five underlying disagreements.

The first is the notion that only what is explicitly stated in Scripture, or follows by logical entailment from what is taught explicitly in Scripture, is necessary for Christians to believe. That can be seen in the claim that “Evangelicals find unnecessary … the notion that Mary was preserved from the stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception.”¹ (emphasis mine) The Catholic teaching, by contrast, is that the deposit of faith comes to us through both Scripture and Tradition. See “Sola Scriptura: A Dialogue Between Michael Horton and Bryan Cross VIII. Scripture and Tradition.” Therefore, from this Catholic perspective a doctrine not being explicitly stated in Scripture does not make it unnecessary.

The second underlying disagreement visible here is the notion that Tradition is not an authoritative guide in the interpretation of Scripture, but is instead itself judged by the interpretation of Scripture one arrives at apart from that Tradition. That notion can be found in two claims made in the Evangelical statement above. Evangelicals find the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception “unbiblical” because in their view (a) “The Bible makes clear that no other human being can claim [to be perfectly holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners]. (John 8:46; Rom. 3:23, 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:22; 2Cor. 5:21; Eph. 2:3; Heb. 4:15), and (b) “The Bible declares that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and he was the Savior as well as the son of his blessed mother (1 Tim. 1:15; Luke 1:46–47)”

Regarding the second claim, Evangelicals assume that since Christ was the Savior of His Mother, therefore it must follow that was a sinner, and that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is false. But that conclusion does not follow, as Lawrence Feingold explains in “Mary’s Immaculate Conception, drawin from Scotus.”² Through His Passion, Christ gloriously saved His Mother by preventing her from falling into original sin and actual sin.

Evangelicals think Mary was not sinless, on account of their interpretation of five verses:

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (Rom 3:23)

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— (Rom 5:12)

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Cor 15:22)

Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. (Eph 2:3)

For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. (Heb 4:15)

Evangelicals assume that the ‘all’ (and ‘our’ in the Hebrews passage) in each case is intended to include Mary, because they do not find in Scripture any exegetical evidence to justify qualifying the extension of the term to everyone but Mary. Then having concluded that the ‘all’ must include Mary, they claim that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is “unbiblical,” i.e. contrary to Scripture. And they thereby conclude that the Tradition regarding the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception must be the result of a false accretion that worked its way into the Church’s beliefs and liturgical practices. What is therefore at work in this claim that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary is contrary to Scripture is the notion that Scripture is to be interpreted only by Scripture, apart from Tradition, and then the interpretations thus attained are the standard by which Tradition is to be judged. The Catholic position, by contrast is that Tradition is the authoritative guide for the interpretation of Scripture, and therefore informs us that the ‘all’ should be interpreted as qualified. (See “The Tradition and the Lexicon.”)

The third underlying disagreement concerns the nature of grace. Evangelicals view grace as only divine favor, whereas in Catholic doctrine grace is not only divine favor, but also the divine gift God gives as a result of that favor, namely, a participation in the divine nature. (See “Lawrence Feingold on Sanctifying Grace and Actual Grace.”) This difference in our conceptions of grace changes how we understand the implication of Luke 1:28. A conception of grace as mere divine favor allows for a simul iustus et peccator view of Mary’s soul even while Gabriel is speaking to her or at any other point in her life. But a Catholic understanding of grace as participation in the divine nature, along with Luke 1:28, not only indicates a prior infusion of grace, but allows a Catholic to see Christ as Mary’s Savior through preventing her at every moment from being deprived of sanctifying grace.

The fourth underlying disagreement is an implicit denial of the development of doctrine. This can be seen in the Evangelicals’ claims that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception “is not accepted as a dogma by the churches of the East and was much debated in the West,” and “The idea that Mary was conceived without original sin was rejected by Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas.” Their appeal to these facts as evidence that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is false presupposes that doctrine does not develop. If doctrine develops, as St. Vincent of Lérins describes in his Commonitory, and Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman describes in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, then the fact that at some earlier time not all Christians recognized or affirmed it is not in itself evidence that it does no belong to the Tradition.

The fifth underlying disagreement in this Evangelical statement regarding the Immaculate Conception concerns the basis of ecclesial authority. When the Evangelicals assert that the reasoning by which St. Bernard and St. Thomas rejected the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception “deserves fresh consideration,” they are not only implicitly denying the development of doctrine; they are also denying the magisterial authority of the Catholic Church, because Pope Pius IX infallibly defined the dogma in 1854, writing:

Accordingly, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, for the honor of the Holy and undivided Trinity, for the glory and adornment of the Virgin Mother of God, for the exaltation of the Catholic Faith, and for the furtherance of the Catholic religion, by the authority of Jesus Christ our Lord, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own: “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.” (Ineffabilis Deus)

Moreover the Evangelical statement implicitly affirms the ecclesial authority of Calvin and Luther. The statement not only appeals to Luther’s and Calvin’s translations of terms, but writes, “Calvin affirms this point by stating that “to carry Christ in her womb was not Mary’s first blessedness, but was greatly inferior to the distinction of being born again by the Spirit of God to a new life.” Why do Luther’s and Calvin’s opinions come up in an explanation by Evangelicals of their reasons for not accepting the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception? The appeals to Luther and Calvin demonstrate performatively that these Evangelicals believe that Luther and Calvin hold some kind of ecclesial/interpretive authority. But Catholics do not believe that Luther or Calvin had ecclesial/interpretive authority. So one more disagreement underlying Evangelicals’ disagreement with the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is the basis for ecclesial/interpretive authority. For Evangelicals, that authority reduces to agreement with their own interpretation of Scripture.³ For Catholics, that authority comes through apostolic succession.⁴

Conclusion

The resolution of a disagreement, and especially a seemingly intractable disagreement, typically requires locating the underlying disagreements that are the fundamental source and cause of the disagreement in question. In this case, the Evangelical statement concerning their disagreement with the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary reveals five underlying disagreements: (1) the notion that only what is explicitly stated in Scripture, or follows by logical entailment from what is taught explicitly in Scripture, is necessary for Christians to believe, (2) the notion that Tradition is not an authoritative guide in the interpretation of Scripture, but is instead itself judged by the interpretation of Scripture one arrives at apart from that Tradition, (3) the notion of grace is merely divine favor, (4) an implicit denial of the development of doctrine, and (5) the notion that ecclesial authority is grounded in agreement with one’s interpretation of Scripture and not in apostolic succession in union with the episcopal successor of the one to whom Christ gave the keys of the Kingdom. Subsequent attempts to resolve the Evangelical-Catholic disagreement concerning the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception will require turning to these underlying disagreements.

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, 2011.

1. This assumption is also manifested in the statement that “Luke 1:28 does not mention Mary’s conception.”
2. For more detail, see Volume XX of Scotus’s Lectura in Librum Tertium Sententiarum (Q.1 dis. 3), titled “Utrum Beata Virgo fuerit concepta in peccato originali (whether the Blessed Virgin was conceived in original sin).
3. See “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”
4. “Sola Scriptura: A Dialogue Between Michael Horton and Bryan Cross, IX. Apostolic Succession.

Jason Kettinger
Easter Vigil, 2011

As we survey the interesting “space” that is the internet, we find intellectual pursuits and human interactions of varying quality. This is no less so in the field of religion, where the Lord Jesus Christ is often obscured behind a veil of ignorance and even needless hostility. It is my sincere hope that this meager contribution be a step toward affirmative dialogue and reconciliation.

With my purpose stated, the humble reader turns to ask the question he wants to know: Why? What makes a Reformed future pastor toss it all aside, and become Catholic? That is of course complicated, but I’ll try to explain. The story is really one of the harmony and convergence of truth, and the place where that convergence led was the Catholic Church.

The story begins with God, as it always does. What do we do when we offend God, who has graciously given us all things? Even in light of Christ’s sacrifice for us this turns out to be a deeper question than it seems. A friend once remarked that the sacrament of Reconciliation “does do justice to the existential reality of sin.” Every Christian I know, and every Christian community of which I have been a part, understands and attempts to take account of the individual and personal dimension of sin. The individual and corporate experience of union with Christ tells us that we cannot be cavalier about sin. Our relationship with Christ is bilateral, real, and demanding. We all have done business with God; I’m not surprising anyone here, I trust.

The church family from whom I’ve learned the most taught me that what we did mattered; we had a liturgy that reflected the reality of what I’ve just written. Before we enjoy the benefits of sonship, we have to acknowledge our sins, and allow God to restore us. Then we are exhorted to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel. Then we shared the meal which proclaimed our restoration: the Eucharist. We didn’t fear to call it that, because if Eugene Peterson can do it, so can we. We were intentionally liturgical; we were intentionally ecumenical; we were doggedly Eucharistic. We believed that our life in prayer with God would lead us to ask new questions, and that the answers could lead us to revise aspects of our Reformed tradition. At the same time, if the Reformers or others gave us anything, it was that “faith once delivered to all the saints.” Truth doesn’t change; truth stands the test of time; the Church of Jesus Christ is old; His truth is both old and new. We were creedal, because the gospel was given to us, and we will give it in turn. There is a Great Tradition, we said, and we’re only a part of it. We read not only Calvin and Edwards but also O’Connor and Chesterton. I might have heard it a thousand times: “The Church did not start in 1520.” Continuity. Love. Simplicity. Jesus. There are so many stories I could tell. Just know that when I left for seminary in 2005, the unity of all Christians wasn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream; it was how we lived, and what we worked toward. Need I say more about that?

So I had an instinct for unity, and a tendency to express my theology in liturgical action. I was political, which is another way of saying I wanted my faith to make a difference in the world. We chalked up theological disagreements as historical anachronisms that awaited the clarity of God’s grace, which would show a truer, deeper unity in the times to come. I didn’t yet see the tensions which were coming to the fore.

I admit, I always enjoyed being branded as “dangerous.” But what struck me as I read more about liturgy and covenant theology was how warmly these theologians spoke of Jesus, how liturgical action was the way they not only experienced God’s love, but declared it. It was missional. If on some gut level they spoke with such resonance about the Christian life I understand, how bad could they be? If one reflects on what we’re saying here, it’s that liturgy has an ability to speak a language that bridges traditional hostilities.

If we begin theology with the simplicities of liturgy, and work outward, it is highly possible that we will face tensions with traditional formulations. The question we ask is what we will do about it. I’m not a systematic theologian; in the truest sense, I am an evangelist. The life of prayer, the liturgical life, needs settled truth to ground it as we reach out in faithfulness to God. I have never been averse to correction. What I began to experience and to attempt to describe was the inability to reconcile a contradiction, between righteousness imputed and righteousness shared. Essentially, something had to give. Either the righteousness of Christ was imputed to me by faith and fully completed, leaving the life of the church and repentance a good, but not necessary step by us, or Chapter 15 of the Westminster Confession of Faith was more correct: repentance and perseverance are an absolute requirement of the Christian life. It absolutely could not be both, despite how much we may insist on it. The buzzword “union with Christ” only makes it worse. Imputation either puts God in union with manifestly unholy people, or the participation suggested by the life of sanctification undercuts the truth of imputation extra nos. You have to choose.

What I do dare to say is that these sympathies in the direction of continual necessary repentance do undercut the principled basis for the Reformed separation in the 16th century. Why? Because we had insisted that true participation (as it was articulated in medieval Catholic theology) denigrated the work of Christ and the reality of our victory in Him. We had no cause to pretend otherwise, nor to smuggle in that which we opposed in the vanity of having a “fully-orbed” theology. Does this protest still have merit? What should we do if the battle-cries we raised once have no correspondence to our Christian lives? It is a life grounded in experience; we would not dare say that our liturgy, sustained by the interplay of repentance and forgiveness, of humility and exaltation, was a formality. In fact, this was both its liveliness, and its danger. Now on the table as never before are issues of apostasy and sacramental objectivity that never would have been asked among the Reformed. In one sense, there has always been a variety of perspectives within Reformed theology, and tensions therein. But never before have the tensions demanded an answer. Against the backdrop of my basic view of church history — continuity — the tensions or contradictions became such that questions like, “Why do we seek forgiveness for sins we say have already been forgiven?” are brushed aside at one’s peril.¹ What I’m illustrating here is a tension between historic and systematic theology, and lived experience in the pews.

If we might criticize some people with a certain lack of precision, a riposte with no good reply is that we don’t need answers to questions that no one is asking. What we were fighting about is the sacramental life versus an historic faith, with due respect, that is at its core anti-sacramental. If any of the sacraments have an objective character, the Church which gives them must also. Our communities were forged in the white-hot fire of theological disputation; our fathers in Protestant and Reformed faith would not share this new tolerance. If we have been led here because the law of prayer is the law of faith, I reasoned, it is a cause for serious discussion. I need only allude to those Reformed congregations who have opened their Lord’s Supper to Catholics and Orthodox to show that we have arrived at such a moment.² Even if the occasion only served to sober the hasty when such people refrained in obedience to their communities, the discussion will occur by necessity. In any case, we can see that the questions of the 16th century are giving way to the questions of the 21st. At the least, I assert that the issue isn’t on the front-burner. If so, maybe it’s time to lay down arms. For me, I could not stand apart on the strength of a slogan that meant nothing. Not even out of loyalty.

But what of the basic claim of the Reformers, that they had better captured the spirit and intent of the Church Fathers? It’s true that they were not ignorant of them. As for me, I knew nothing of the Fathers on their own terms. It had to be an open question, if I were to be intellectually honest. After all, any group can read history in such a way as to vindicate themselves. And this leads directly to the question of history, and because salvation history is at issue primarily, we are asking, “What is the Church?” This was a question like a shard of glass in my heart starting in 2006. The magnitude of the social and political issues we are facing absolutely demands that we reject most forms of “co-belligerence” as insufficient, because the answer to all of them is Christ; it is our love, it is our striving together in Christ and for Christ that can answer these problems. And they stem from existential questions surrounding the identity and purpose of man. If Christians do not answer these in the same way, how will people know that it is Christ who meets them? Moreover, if we do not accept one another as brothers, which Christ shall they follow? But do we dare force one another to adopt differing paradigms of the Church and salvation? How could that be anything but a failure? We may rightly say there is much that unites us. But if those things do not impel us toward one another, they are folly at best, and a violation of our consciences at worst, if we pretend the differences aren’t real. On both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide, we conceive of the Church and of history in very different ways. Which view of history and Church does justice to the ancients?

Confessionalism may indeed preserve those ancient elements of truth which predate the schisms, but it does a terrible job of indicating how we are to pursue unity practically. This was the second thing I realized: being confessionally Reformed is in contradiction with the very definition of the Church found in the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter XXV.³ An invisible Church cannot define itself, or what it believes. But the certainty of Reformed distinctives depends on the authority of a visible Church. There is a quotation attributed to one John L. Girardeau within the essay “The Discretionary Power of the Church” that took my breath away every time I read it. It reads in part:

The delivery of Christ’s doctrines and commandments by men does not make them the doctrines and commandments of men. … Their dogmas are not man’s, they are God’s dogmas.

I’ve got to drop the guard a bit, take leave of that measured tone for which this site is known, and I beg your pardon if it sounds rude, but does that sound like an invisible church to you? Take your pick: Either the Westminster divines re-constituted the visible community that Christ established (which was obviously contrary to what I had been taught, not least the promise of Christ in Matthew 16:18) or we cannot be reasonably certain that our conclusions are more than opinion; that is, there could be also more fundamental truth possessed by those who are not us. In fact, our very definition presupposes that that is the case. In the twenty-fifth chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the first article tells us that the catholic church is invisible. The second article, by contrast, strongly asserts the visibility of that church. Moreover, the fifth article in this same chapter discusses the purity and truth of various “Churches” on Earth. First, which of the first two articles actually controls here, so that we might find out where we ought to reside, and what we are to believe? Second, what authority did this assembly have to make such a determination? The fifth article utterly depends on the invisible church asserted in Article I, but the comfort of being in the supposed household of God comes from Article II. Which is it? And who are they?

“Ah,” says the alert reader, “but Scripture is our guide.” We’ll get to that. For now, the guest post by Fred Noltie will be my answer. All this is to say that one question would not leave me alone, and it is the question that people of my generation are asking: “What is the Church?” The traditional definition for the Reformed is fine to a point, and that point is where our distinctives meet their doom against the presumption of historical continuity. If our communities as Protestants existed and subsisted on the unstated premise of ecclesial deism, then the concrete action taken in regard to history to explain it is what I call “ecclesial plagiarism.” The ancients may be dead, but we owe them at least the right to tell us what living for Christ was actually like before we retroactively re-write them into a history more amenable to the community we inhabit. I have already said that my fundamental approach to history was and had to be continuity. This is often claimed to refute the charge of schism. I had warmly sung “The Church’s One Foundation” for years as a prayer for unity, unaware that my own ecclesial commitments prevented me directly from ever realizing my hope. That may seem unfair, but I do believe the creeds themselves help explain it.

In that wonderful but critically unexamined tutelage of sympathy and continuity with history, the creeds figure prominently. In even the popular mind, we recite the creeds in solidarity with our ancestors in the faith, and even with those Christians who are separated from us. This is largely a lovely expression of catholicity, and would pass without a mention if not for the minor inconvenience of Sola Scriptura. As a principle, it does not admit any external authority for the creeds. The final authority is presumably Scripture, and the creeds would function as a norm only after they had been tested by it.

But as I heard one elder speak about the creed (the Apostles’, in this case) I came to realize — as though I had been hit by a brick in the face — the truth of this assertion that welled deep within me, first, after I read Mathison’s The Shape of Sola Scriptura, and now loudest in Sunday School just days before I entered the Catholic Church: “Derivative authority is a sham.”⁴ The elder said in effect that if we wanted to edit the creeds (to delete the word “catholic” as I recall) we could, because the Creed wasn’t Scripture. I saw then that Mr. Cross’s claim contra Mathison was true. There is no real, principled distinction between the “Solo Scriptura” that Mathison abhors, and the Sola Scriptura that he commends. If there is a difference in practice or in result, it has to do with the person’s own piety, and God’s grace lovingly keeping him from a more severe individualism. In fact, the chapter in Mathison’s book on the error of Solo Scriptura almost made me Catholic by itself. Why would I pay as much attention to the text, context, place in the canon, authorial intent, and myriad other things in order to rightly handle the word of truth, and completely ignore the same with respect to the creeds? This is the ecclesial plagiarism I mentioned. If I edit the creed, it no longer functions as an authority over me, but I over it. In this sense, we cannot say we are in solidarity with anyone, either today or long ago, in the recitation of the creeds as Protestants. Why would the ecclesiology which gave it birth and the battles therein be incidental to its meaning? Can I think that St. Augustine is with me when I spurn the Church to which he submitted?⁵ Thanks be to God for various creeds and their use in Protestant communities. But it is not altogether clear that a principled creedalism actually exists apart from the Catholic Church and the individualism of “me and my Bible.”

I have made two perhaps frustrating assumptions: that the Church of Christ is visible, and that the Catholic Church today is that Church. I can only say that Petrine primacy was rather easily established from the Fathers,⁶ and that patristic authors on the Eucharist and apostolic succession cast more than a reasonable doubt on both the authority of my community to believe otherwise (and still be the Church) and the antiquity of those particular beliefs. Some might say that I have been a rebel from day one, and there is some truth in that. However, even as I actively investigated Catholic claims, and explored Catholic life, I never lost sight of Christ Jesus. I found Him there as I went; I pleaded with Him to guide me. I gave Jesus every question.

Even as I entered RCIA last August, I was uncommitted. Yes, I had dared to walk on the dangerous ground of uncertainty of all but Jesus. Yes, I put my career on hold, and then ended what it would have been. Yes, I struggled, and hurt, and cried, and prayed. You bet, I was afraid. It wasn’t as bad as what Francis Schaeffer went through, and though he took a different path, I thank God that I never doubted Jesus as he did. I knew Him, and He knows me. But the heart of it all is that Jesus asked me to surrender everything to follow Him, even to Rome, and the vicar who sits on Peter’s chair. The intellectual and historical collided with the personal; I had to do it in the peace of conscience. In that peace, and for that peace.

The most damaging chimera, the most serious error of the Reformation, is Sola Scriptura. It caused me to kidnap our ancient brethren in the faith, to claim them as my own against their wills. I had to ask my own heritage boldly, “Who asked us?” and be willing to live with the reality that no one did. I could not live with a hermeneutic that couldn’t silence the Baptist down the street (and bring us into harmony) much less the heretic. I had to face the reality of Christian division, and the reality that these divisions were caused by false principles I’d inherited from a movement I’d thought necessary. Its animating principle conspires to make invisible and without doctrine the Church we’d rightly claimed as our mother, outside of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. The old saw that, “If I’m wrong, I’ll be on me knees tomorrow morning outside the Vatican doing penance” is just a toothless phrase if one’s hermeneutic of Scripture, history, and Church disallows the very consideration that one is wrong.

My beloved brethren in Christ Jesus scattered in many places, let us prayerfully consider whether the convergence of truth now leads us to begin again, to return home in peace.

Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mother

1. See “Reformed Imputation and the Lord’s Prayer.”
2. For example, see Trinity Kirk’s “On Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Reformed Catholicity.”
3. See WCF XXV.
4. See, for example, “C. The Delusion of Derivative Authority.”
5. Think of his statement to the Donatists, “You know what the Catholic Church is, and what that is cut off from the Vine; if there are any among you cautious, let them come; let them find life in the Root. Come, brethren, if you wish to be engrafted in the Vine: a grief it is when we see you lying thus cut off. Number the Bishops even from the very seat of Peter: and see every succession in that line of Fathers: that is the Rock against which the proud Gates of Hell prevail not.” (PL 43.30.) See also his statement against the epistle of Manichaeus quoted in The Chair of Peter: D. Fifth Century.
6. See, for example, Steven Ray’s book Upon This Rock. Other relevant works can be found in “The Papacy” section of Suggested Reading.”

This Baptist-turned-Catholic went on to say that, in addition to his love of history (think of Newman’s famous aphorism), it was his passion for doctrine that led him to the Catholic Church. Those who are to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church must first make the following profession of faith: “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.” So, when the Catholic Church “believes, teaches, and proclaims” that something has been revealed by God, every Catholic is solemnly bound to believe and profess the same, with the full assent of faith, with no exceptions. That, at the very least, is what it means for a Catholic to “take doctrine seriously.”

(Presumably, most readers of this website will already agree that doctrine is important. However, for the sake of clarity, I should at least define the term. Christian doctrine is the concise, propositional expression–that which is believed, taught, and confessed–of the content of divine revelation, as interpreted by the Church, the churches, and individuals. It is true that doctrine, in this sense, is not to be conflated with revelation. It is also true that the Church’s way of life, her tradition, is much more than an exercise in doctrinal development. However, the Church’s tradition is not less than doctrinal, and the way that her doctrine develops has profound consequences for her life.)

In their own way, confessional Protestants also take doctrine seriously. The Leithart trial is evidence of this. Leithart was charged “with holding and defending theological views that strike at the fundamentals of the doctrinal system of the Westminster Standards, against the peace, unity and purity of the Church, and the honor and majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ, as the King and Head thereof” (source). Specifically, Leithart was charged “with contradicting the Westminster Standards and Scripture” on five counts, in his teaching concerning: (1) baptism, (2) the covenant of works, (3) justification and sanctification, (4) imputation, and (5) union with Christ and apostasy. (Leithart’s views on each of these matters are well worth considering, especially his “socio-theological,” or personalist-relational, understanding of Baptism. At one point in the trial, Leithart and his interlocutors touched on the question of how a priori theological commitments can dictate the way we interpret what Scripture says about Baptism. This is something that was considered on this website a couple of years ago in the post, Baptism Now Saves You: Some (More) Prolegomena. Leithart also alluded to the relation of Baptism to personal assurance of being a part of God’s family. This topic was discussed at CTC as well, in the post, Protestant Angelina, Catholic Angelina.)

I am not particularly interested in the question of whether Leithart is guilty of contradicting the Westminster Standards. One could say that that is none of my business. (As it turned out, the Standing Judicial Commission, in a unanimous decision, declared Leithart not guilty on each charge.) However, I am interested in those aspects of the trial that bear upon issues that have been discussed and debated here at Called to Communion. These include (though are by no means limited to) the differences between the prosecution and the defense on the necessity of conjoining “and Scripture” to “contradicts the Westminster Standards” in the charges against Leithart. Sorting through the different perspectives on the place of Scripture in this controversy of religion led me to wonder, “What is ultimately at stake here? What of real consequence would follow if Leithart’s views are shown to be incompatible with the views expressed in the Westminster Standards?” This aspect of the Leithart trial, which calls to mind the extensive Sola versus Solo Scriptura discussion at CTC (see the entries under Keith Mathison’s The Shape of Sola Scriptura), is the subject of the reflections in this post.

Scripture within the Limits of Westminster Alone

In its opening statement (from Transcript of Proceedings, PCA v. Leithart), the prosecution claimed that “we [ministers in the PCA] are not Biblicists who insist on retaining ultimate interpretive authority but are members of a confessional denomination that is supposed to take very seriously the theological tradition handed down to us.” Furthermore, the prosecution maintained that Leithart’s views being in some sense based on Scripture is a “non-issue,” due to the facts that (1) Scripture needs to be interpreted, and (2) Leithart has vowed to uphold the interpretation of Scripture put forward in the Westminster Standards. (It might be instructive, however, to compare these claims to the first of the “Preliminary Principles” in the Preface to the PCA’s Book of Church Order:

God alone is Lord of the conscience and has left it free from any doctrines or commandments of men (a) which are in any respect contrary to the Word of God, or (b) which, in regard to matters of faith and worship, are not governed by the Word of God. Therefore, the rights of private judgment in all matters that respect religion are universal and inalienable.

I am not sure that the above conclusion follows from the stated premises, but in any event the affirmation of a universal and inalienable right to private judgment in all matters that respect religion seems a lot like individuals “retaining ultimate interpretive authority.”)

As related in Attachment B: Chronology, no reference to Scripture was made in the original charges against Leithart. The defense requested that “portions of the word of God” which Leithart is supposed to contradict be listed in the charges. The prosecution amended the indictment, adding “and Scripture” to “contradicts the Westminster Standards,” together with 20 Scripture citations. The prosecution refused, however, to assume the burden of proving the case against Leithart from Scripture. This was presumed to be unnecessary,

Given that (1) our denomination’s constitution already states that the Westminster Standards are “standard expositions of the teachings of Scripture,” and (2) in our ordination vows all PCA ministers promise that they “sincerely receive and adopt Westminster Confession and Catechisms as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures,” the prosecution’s answer to the defense is that we will neither comply with request #1 by confirming for the record that we will attempt to prove that TE Leithart violates each and every passage listed in the indictment….

Nor is it our aim to prove to the court that the Westminster Standards provide us with the Bible’s system of doctrine (since we have already vowed before God and his Church that such is the case).

Given that “the Westminster Standards provide us with the Bible’s system of doctrine,” it would seem to suffice, at least for the “us” for whom those Standards are a given, to resolve the issue, which of course involves the doctrinal content of Scripture, with reference to the Westminster Standards alone. The prosecution continues:

Our aim is not to reinvent the wheel or to reconvene the Westminster Assembly and redo all its hard work. Our aim, rather, is to take seriously the vows we affirmed at ordination and demonstrate that Leithart’s views and teachings, while perhaps proof-textable, are not confessional and, therefore, are not biblical either.

In the second sentence of this statement, the first clause should probably be taken as qualifying the second, to the effect that Leithart’s views are “not confessional and, therefore, given our ordination vows in which we all affirmed that the Standards are biblical, not biblical either.” That is, this statement of the prosecution is probably not meant to imply that the views set forth by the Westminster Assembly are ipso facto biblical. Nevertheless, it remains a strong assertion of confessional authority.

The defense’s interpretation of how Scripture and confession are related as standards by which Leithart should be judged was made evident in its response to the prosecutor’s comments about how Scripture relates to the indictment and the trial. The defense was quite eager to appeal to the “supreme judge” in this controversy of religion, relegating the confession to a subordinate and “helping” role:

It is an absolute and fundamental confession of our heritage and faith that the only rule of faith is the Word of God. To set this rule aside in judicial process within the church courts, the highest place in which the rule must be kept, would be to set aside one of the fundamentals of our system of doctrine, if not strike at the vitals of religion. To assert that one need only appeal to the constructions of the Westminster Assembly to act as a judge by which this controversy of religion is to be determined, would be an assertion in direct violation of the very standard adopted by that Assembly:

The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. (WCF 1:10.)

As a theological and historical note, it is impossible to overestimate the centrality of this statement in the Confession to our Reformed tradition. To set it aside for any reason, so that the decrees of a council might act as the judge in this matter with only indirect or secondary reference to the Word of God would amount to a repudiation of the driving doctrine of the early Reformed churches and the principle by which all Reformed churches derive their name.

Pursuing the thesis that judgment in a religious controversy must ultimately depend upon the law of Scripture alone, the defense went on to quote F.P. Ramsey (1856-1926) from his Exposition of the Form of Government and the Rules of Discipline of the Presbyterian Church in the United States:

But if [the church] should be on the point of judicially prosecuting for something  contrary to the standards indeed, but not to the Word of God, she must not enforce the standards as law rather than the Scriptures; for only the Scriptures is law in this Church.

In human government, where the legislature is as fallible as the judiciary, the interpretation of the law by courts may be treated as itself law, within certain limitations; but not in the Church, whose law, the Scriptures, is infallible, but whose standard interpretation, the symbols of doctrine and order, are fallible.

In its appeal to Scripture, the defense seemed to be pulling back the lens, so to speak, indicating that the significance of the charges against Leithart is not ultimately relative to the opinions found in a fallible document affirmed by the ministers of a single denomination. The defense appeared to be urging the prosecution to go to the heart of the matter, i.e., the truth or falsehood of Leithart’s views, by appealing directly to the absolute law that alone can bind the (Protestant’s) conscience–the written word of God.

Clearly, the prosecution did not want this trial to devolve upon its own interpretation of Scripture versus Leithart’s interpretation of Scripture. Therefore, the Westminster Standards were invoked as the interpretation of Scripture having authority in the PCA, as containing, by the common agreement of the ordained ministers in that denomination, the essentially correct interpretation of God’s word. In which case, the charge that Leithart “contradicts the Westminster Standards and Scripture” reduces to “contradicts Scripture as understood within the limits of the Westminster Standards.” In what follows, I will examine the significance of the charge that Leithart has contradicted God’s word in the relative sense of contradicting the Westminster Standards.

Confessional Authority and the Rules of Golf 

Appeal to confessional authority is only so good as the authority of the confession to which one appeals. Almost everyone agrees that the Westminster Standards are both fallible and (in principle) subject to the higher authority of infallible Scripture. But being both fallible and subject (in principle) to an infallible authority is not sufficient for derivative or secondary authority, at least, not in any interesting sense of “authority.” Every (Protestant) interpretation based on the Bible is both fallible and (in principle) subject to the word of God, but not every such interpretation is authoritative. This is, I think, the point that the prosecution was making in its opening statement: “basing one’s beliefs on the Bible is easy as long as we remain the ultimate arbiter of what the Bible means. In fact, it’s not just easy, it’s almost tautological and self-evident.”

The Westminster Standards are obviously distinct from the private interpretation of a single person in that they are the result of the collaborative effort of some 150 men, working together for six years, towards the reconstruction of the Church of England, as instructed by the Long Parliament in the context of the English Civil War (cf. The Westminster Assembly). However, given the prosecution’s claim that “we are not Biblicists who insist on retaining ultimate interpretive authority but are members of a confessional denomination that is supposed to take very seriously the theological tradition handed down to us,” it is ironic that the men who produced the confession to which the prosecution appeals did not take seriously the theological tradition handed down to them, nor did they take seriously the secondary authority by which that tradition was handed down, as evidenced by the fact that they cast aside both the doctrine and the bishops of the Church of England, and set up themselves, and their own doctrine, instead. In other words, the Westminster Standards represent a repudiation of church authority. Granted that a stream cannot rise higher than its source, the authority of these Standards cannot be ecclesial authority, at least, not in the conservative sense of passing on a tradition that has been received from the ecclesia.

Nor are the Westminister Standards authoritative in the sense of being the collective interpretation of Scripture that is agreed upon by the majority of people who desire to be subject to the supreme authority of Scripture. The Standards are consensus documents, but they do not represent the consensus of most Bible believers. Furthermore, the environment of collective interpretation of Scripture is a competitive one. The Westminster Assembly does not stand out among the groups of Bible believers who have composed collective interpretations of the word of God, either by virtue of institutional prestige, or scholarship, or antiquity, or some other indicator of relative authority, so to be able to say, with distinct authority, that such-and-so is the system of doctrine taught in Sacred Scripture. What seems to be the case is that the Westminster Standards are authoritative in the way that club rules are authoritative for everyone who plays golf at a particular course. Club members do not, in principle, conflate the authority of their club rules with the authority of the rules of golf. They simply insist that, if you are going to play golf at our course, you play by our rules.

Something like the latter sense of authority was obviously involved in this trial. Leithart’s club membership (i.e., his place among the ordained ministers in the PCA) hung in the balance. However, it seems almost as obvious that the prosecution had something more in mind, in its appeal to the Westminster Standards. In fact, those who adhere to the Westminster Standards as authoritative in matters of religion commonly claim that this authority depends upon the conformity of those Standards to the word of God. The prosecution appeared to be maintaining that the Standards conform to the word of God in such a way that to break the club rules on a matter that is essential to those rules (as Leithart was accused of doing) is to break the rules of golf. Thus, the “club rules” sort of authority, while applicable here, does not cover the case. The prosecution, as made clear in the revised indictment, was charging Leithart with breaking the rules of golf (contradicting Scripture), as judged by the authority of club rules (the Westminster Standards). And that, if nothing else, makes this case a matter of interest for everyone who plays golf. (I hope that this analogy does not seem trite. Its the most handy thing I could come up with so to convey my understanding of the dynamics of the prosecution’s appeal to confessional authority.)

Westminster in the Dock

How do its adherents, including (by profession) all parties in the Leithart trial, know that the Westminster Standards are conformable to the word God, such that the system of doctrine set forth in this confession is essentially that system of doctrine taught in Scripture? If the Westminster Assembly is not distinctly authoritative in essence, in either an absolute or relative sense of authority (excepting the “club rules” sort of authority), then the distinct authority of its teaching can only be grounded in some accidental property of that Assembly. Having the correct interpretation of Scripture would be an accidental property for an ecclesial community not protected by the gift of infallibility. Unfortunately, for those who appeal to the Westminster Standards as a secondary authority, being correct in this way does not involve any interesting sort of authority, since any individual or group (Christian or otherwise) can be “authoritative” in the sense of being correct in its interpretation of Scripture. Furthermore, this sort of “authority” is obviously unhelpful as an indicator of the correct interpretation of Scripture, that is, for those who have qualms about begging the question. In the prosecution’s own words, “basing one’s beliefs on the Bible is easy so long as we remain the ultimate arbiter of what the Bible means” and “basing one’s own doctrine upon one’s own interpretation of scripture apart from being sort of obvious is tantamount to saying that one agrees with himself….” These claims, made in the context of arguing that Leithart’s views should be subject to the confessional standards of the PCA, have the same force when applied both to those very standards and whatever group subsequently adopts them as its own. The “we” who remain the ultimate arbiter of what the Bible means could just as easily be the Westminster divines, or the ministers of the PCA, whose “biblical basis” is just as tautological as Leithart’s own biblical basis, i.e., agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture.

The prosecution asserted, and the defense agreed, that the Westminster Standards were not on trial in the case at hand. However, the significance of that case does depend, from the prosecution’s point of view especially, on the intrinsic authority of those Standards. Thus, if we wish to understand what is ultimately at stake in the Leithart trial, we must put the Westminster Assembly itself in the dock. That is what I have tried to do, briefly, in this post. Bryan and Neal, extensively and more generally, have done something similar in their article on Sola Scriptura and the question of ultimate interpretive authority. If these analyses are right, then the authority of the Westminster Standards is in principle no greater than the authority of one’s own interpretation of Scripture, since this confession is not authoritative in any sense other than being the club rules of one among many denominations, and the only way to judge of the correctness of those rules is by private interpretation of Scripture.

I can appreciate the fact that the prosecution was, at the very least, concerned to maintain the relative doctrinal integrity of the PCA, to hold a brother presbyter accountable to their common, agreed-upon (though in principle reversible) system of doctrine. But that system of doctrine, insofar as it originated from men who were contradicting and rebelling against their own church’s doctrine and government, and insofar as it is not unique in kind nor notably distinct from its competitors in any respect other than content, cannot plausibly be taken as a correct exposition of the teaching of Scripture on grounds other than private interpretation; i.e., agreement with the Westminster Standards is not in principle distinct from agreement with oneself. Insofar as the Leithart trial was an internal matter of the PCA (and was not a case involving a proposed revision of its doctrinal standards), this fact is irrelevant. But insofar as the trial involved absolute truth claims on matters of doctrine, then the status of the Westminster Standards as an indicator of doctrinal truth is relevant to anyone interested in assessing the truth of various doctrines, including the doctrines of baptism, grace and works, justification and sanctification, imputation, and union with Christ and apostasy. For the reasons given in this post, it seems to me that the Westminster Standards are not particularly significant as an indicator of doctrinal truth. This does not entail that the collective opinions of the Westminster Assembly, as adhered to by their denominational posterity for some 350 years, are in all respects insignificant (far from it), only that they do not bear such marks of authority as should make for a substantial difference (say, anywhere from indicating probability to being decisive) in the hermeneutical process of discovering the doctrinal content of Sacred Scripture.

___________________

The claim in the Westminster Confession of Faith that all controversies of religion ultimately are to be determined by the Holy Spirit speaking in Sacred Scripture contradicts the testimony of the Church Fathers, who repeatedly teach the necessity of judging such controversies by way of the Church and Sacred Scripture. The Westminster Confession of Faith is a classic restatement of Reformed theology born in the 17th century from an assembly of ‘Divines’ convened by the British Parliament. In its Chapter One, the Divines took up what is perhaps the clearest point of distinction between Protestant Reformers and Catholics, namely the locus of ecclesial authority to settle the doctrine of the faith.

The Westminster Confession addresses the matter this way:

The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.¹

Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Westminster Confession, expounds upon this point:

That the Supreme Judge, by which all controversies in religion are to be determined, is no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture, is asserted in opposition to the Papists, who maintain that the Church is an infallible judge in religious controversies; though they do not agree among themselves whether this infallible authority resides in the Pope, or in a council, or in both together. Now, the Scripture never mentions such an infallible judge on earth. Neither Pope, nor councils, possess the properties requisite to constitute a supreme judge in controversies of religion; for they are fallible, and have often erred, and contradicted one another. Although the Church or her ministers are the official guardians of the Scriptures, and although it belongs to them to explain and enforce the doctrines and laws contained in the Word of God, yet their authority is only ministerial, and their interpretations and decisions are binding on the conscience only in so far as they accord with the mind of the Spirit in the Scriptures. By this test, the decisions of councils, the opinions of ancient writers, and the doctrines of men at the present time, are to be tried, and by this rule all controversies in religion must be determined.²

That is, for the Reformed subscriber to the Westminster Confession, every controversy of religion, and every theological decree, opinion, or doctrine, is to be put to one test: the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. This is meant to avoid ultimate reliance upon human ecclesial authorities (specifically, the Catholic Magisterium) who, from the Reformed perspective, can, and have, erred on religious matters.

Given the finality with which the very Word of the Third Person of the Trinity must be taken, it might seem straightforward enough to rely on this Word to settle controversies. With this rule, the English Reformers were marking out a bright dividing line between the Church of England and those Churches in communion with Rome. The reformational church authorities were not over the Bible, could not declare contrary to it, and would not be taken as having a voice against the Holy Spirit. But how does this work practically, this putting a controversy of religion or theological doctrine to “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture”?

Shaw explains that it works this way: a controversy may properly be put to the Church or her ministers, who, acting as ‘guardians’ of the Scriptures and enforcers of the law contained therein, yield ‘ministerial’ authority. However, he also cautions, their decisions on any given controversy are only binding on the believer’s conscience insofar as the decisions are in line with “the mind of the Spirit in the Scriptures.” The believer may, under this scheme, try the word of the ministerial authorities in an effort to ensure it is sound.

Because a believer-disputant can cross-check his ministerial authorities before being bound by their settlement of any given controversy, these authorities offer “final judgment” on nothing. The relationship is one of ‘guardianship,’ but the guardians are followed only to the extent that the guarded are in consent and agreement with the guardians’ interpretations. But the believer-disputant, too, is a fallible and often-erring authority, so fails the very test Shaw attempts to apply to Catholic authorities. This leaves the believer-disputant in no better position than his guardian to render “final judgment” on a controversy of religion. Given these deficiencies, what the ministerial authorities and believer-disputants cannot do individually, they cannot do in conjunction. As both authorities who could determine what the Holy Spirit has said have failed the test Shaw believes he has properly applied to the Catholic Church, there is no practical way in the Reformed scheme to settle a controversy of religion with certainty through “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”

With that background, I would like to explore how the Church Fathers treat the question of whether the final judge of controversies of religion, or of theological decrees, opinions, or doctrines is Scripture or the Church, or whether there is a third way. I will also briefly identify what the Catholic Church itself officially teaches on this matter.

II. Church Fathers

A great deal of extant writings from the early Church Fathers have “controversies of religion” as their very topic or subject matter. The early Church Fathers penned these works, which were mailed and passed amongst the early Churches with great zeal, to combat a host of disputes, controversies, and heresies. From them we can glean an understanding of how the early Church resolved controversies, or measured theological decrees, opinions, or doctrines. This makes for a useful comparison to the conclusion on the same subject drawn by the Westminster Divines.

The works of St. Ignatius of Antioch provide a fine example. He lived from around the year AD 50 to approximately AD 107, and wrote on the subject of resolving controversies of religion on the way to his martyrdom, just a few years after the Apostle St. John died. He wrote that:

For, all who belong to God and Jesus Christ are with the bishop. And those, too, will belong to God who have returned, repentant, to the unity of the Church so as to live in accordance with Jesus Christ. Make no mistake, brethren. No one who follows another into schism inherits the kingdom of God. No one who follows heretical doctrine is on the side of the passion.³

For St. Ignatius, returning to one’s bishop is identical with returning to the unity of the Church. One lives in accordance with Jesus Christ by way of seeking unity with the Church. There is no apparent place for conflict between belief necessary for unity with the Church and belief in accordance with Jesus Christ.

Elsewhere, he writes:

Let all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ did the Father, and the priests, as you would the Apostles. Reverence the deacons as you would the command of God. Apart from the bishop, let no one perform any of the functions that pertain to the Church. Let that Eucharist be held valid which is offered by the bishop or by one to whom the bishop has committed this charge. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful to baptize or give communion without the consent of the bishop. On the other hand, whatever has his approval is pleasing to God. Thus, whatever is done will be safe and valid.⁴

From this text we see how inextricably intertwined are the authorities of the Church and the Word of God. Theirs is not a non-binding guardianship over Scripture. Rather, they have the shepherd’s authority to lead. Consider St. Ignatius’ claim that “whatever has [the bishop’s] approval is pleasing to God.” Of course St. Ignatius does not have in mind a bishop who invents novel doctrines that are contrary to the deposit of faith. But nor could he mean to say that whatever has the bishop’s approval is pleasing to God only insofar as the bishop is ruling in a way that is subordinate to and fully consistent with the Bible. Since one could say the same of the determinations of non-bishops (i.e., that their decisions are pleasing to God insofar as they conform to Scripture), this incorrect interpretation of St. Ignatius would leave the Bishop with no ruling authority at all.  A third way to view this question of final doctrinal decretal authority starts to emerge – the Church and revealed truth resolve controversies of religion together; they are the inseparable, final authority.

To take up just one other brief example, the works of St. Irenaeus provide a helpful perspective on this subject. St. Irenaeus, born in the early second century, speaks with great clarity in identifying what is a proper authority to settle controversies of religion. He does not teach that the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture is our final authority in controversies of religion, as the Westminster Confession claims. Rather, he says:

Since therefore we have such proofs, it is not necessary to seek the truth among others which it is easy to obtain from the Church; since the apostles, like a rich man depositing in a bank, lodged in her hands most copiously all things pertaining to the truth: so that every man, whosoever will, can draw from her the water of life. For she is the entrance to life; all others are thieves and robbers. On this account we are bound to avoid them, but to make choice of the things pertaining to the Church with the utmost diligence, and to lay hold of the tradition of the truth. For how stands the case? Suppose there arise a dispute relative to some important question among us, should we not have recourse to the most ancient Churches with which the apostles held constant intercourse, and learn from them what is certain and clear in regard to the present question? For how should it be if the apostles themselves had not left us writings? Would it not be necessary to follow the course of the tradition which they handed down to those to whom they did commit the Churches?⁵

For St. Irenaeus, “[t]he supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined” for the individual Christian is not the Holy Spirit speaking in Sacred Scripture. In cases of controversy of religion, we should “have recourse to the most ancient Churches with which the apostles held constant intercourse, and learn from them what is certain and clear in regard to the present question.” In helping to shed light on how to resolve a dispute about an important question among the Christians, St. Irenaeus argues from a hypothetical scenario wherein the Apostles had left us with no writings (that is, imagine if there was no New Testament by which to judge a matter). In that case, he argues, Christians would be left to turn to the traditions handed down by the Apostles to the most ancient Churches. Likewise, for disputes that persist even though all disputants have the Apostolic writings in hand, his argument concludes that we must “lay hold of the tradition of the truth,” which was passed on through the apostles.

These examples are from just two of the early Church Fathers, but each of them would support this recurring theme. These are not cherry-picked snippets from the early Church Fathers, but exemplary of early discourses on this question. And this question is one that came up routinely as the early Church struggled with settling the proper procedure necessary to address substantive theological debates in a binding fashion. We learn from the ancient Church that controversies of religion are resolved by ecclesial authorities expounding upon the Sacred Scriptures and Sacred Tradition together.

III. Catholic Teaching

There are noteworthy similarities between the Reformed and Catholic doctrines on Sacred Scripture. Both would agree that Sacred Scripture is the word of God.⁶ God is its author.⁷ He chose human authors, and inspired them to write what He wanted, and nothing more.⁸ The inspired books that make up the canon teach truth, and are truth without error.⁹ The Church venerates Scripture as she does the Body of Christ itself.¹⁰ In Scripture, “the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them.”¹¹ The concept of personal communication from God to believer in Scripture is not antithetical nor even foreign to a Catholic understanding. The Catholic Church’s teaching and the Westminster teaching coalesce even insofar as they teach that the Holy Spirit is our interpreter of Scripture.¹²

But there is certainly a difference between Protestants and Catholics when it comes to belief about Sacred Scripture, and this difference relates to the section of the Westminster Confession I began by quoting. The Catholic Church teaches that Christianity is not a “religion of the book,” but rather a religion of the Eternal Word, a “Word which is incarnate and living.”¹³ While the Holy Spirit interprets Scripture, He does so for the Church and through the Church, not in a private-yet-authoritative fashion.

This contrast highlights an essential feature of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church does not believe that the Holy Spirit ordinarily operates directly and immediately in the heart of the individual Christian to teach Scripture and illuminate its meaning. If the Holy Spirit ordinarily operated in this way, the individual would not have need for the Church as a teaching agent of God. This view denies that Christ established a visible organ through which the Holy Spirit ordinarily operates. Such is the view of the Montanists. The Catholic Church, against Montanism, believes that Christ did establish a visible organ through which the Holy Spirit operates, including the key operation of illuminating revealed truths for the Church’s benefit so that she can, in turn, reliably and authoritatively teach the faithful.

In regard to the roles of the Church and Sacred Scripture in resolving controversies of religion, the Reformers seemingly had to reach the conclusion articulated in the Westminster Confession because they subscribed to a false dichotomy between the Scripture and the Church as the final doctrinal authority. For the Westminster Divines, and for Calvinists today, the starting point for analysis is that either the Magisterium or the Bible can settle controversies of religion, or bind upon believers a theological decree, opinion, or doctrine. It could not be both together because, they believe, any human agent cooperating with Scripture qua Word of God would compete with or detract from its Divine character.  (And it goes without saying that, for Calvinists, it could not be the Magisterium.)

According to the Catholic Church, all interpretations of Scripture — and we could say all attempts at resolving controversies of religion — are “subject to the judgment of the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God.”¹⁴ While believers can and should read Sacred Scripture with great devotion, listening for the voice and guidance of the Holy Spirit while they do so, their conclusions are always subject to the guidance and correction of the Church’s teaching authority. Without Her divinely given authority, there is no safeguard on the deposit of faith from dilution and admixture of human or sinful error.

There is no middle ground between this divinely given authority of the Church to guide scriptural interpretation, on the one hand, and complete individualism in interpretation which leads to unceasing division, on the other. This is because the method dependent upon individual interpretation cannot compensate for the admixture of sinful error without resort to the Montanist’s view of the Holy Spirit’s action in guiding each individual’s interpretation of Scripture — a view which experience with diverse interpretations of Scripture betwixt the faithful, if nothing else, has proven invalid. The early Church Fathers saw the need for having resort to the Church’s teaching authority in settling controversies of religion, and they addressed this need time and again. It is this the Catholic Church sees today while it stands firm on its own teaching authority while simultaneously yearning for reunion with the separated eastern churches and Protestant ecclesial communities.

IV. Conclusion

The Westminster Confession’s claim that every controversy of religion, and every theological decree, opinion or doctrine is to be taken to none other than the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture is ahistoric. The primary subject of the extant writings of the early Church Fathers is precisely controversies of religion; this is far from an alien topic to them. And the recurring answer they give is that controversies of religion are settled ultimately from the Church and Scripture in inseparable unison. Only this position allows for binding answers to disputes within the faith. The Catholic Church has held this position steadfastly through two millennia.

1. WCF, ch. I, sec. 10.
2. Robert Shaw, Exposition of the Westminster Confession, ch. 1, available here.
3. Letter to the Philadelphians, ch. 3, MG 5, 700; FC I, 114.
4. Letter to the Smyrnaeans, ch. 8, MG 5, 713; FC I, 121.
5. Against Heresies, bk. 3, ch. 4, MG 7, 855; ANFI, I, 416.
6. Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 104.
7. Id., para. 105.
8. Id., para. 106.
9. Id., para. 107.
10. Id., para. 103.
11. Id., para. 104.
12. Id., art. 3, sec. III.
13. Id., para. 108, quoting St. Bernard, S. missus est hom. 4, 11: PL 183, 86.
14. Dei Verbum 12, sec. 3.

This is a guest post by Brent Stubbs, in which he reviews Christian Smith’s recent book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. Brent is a convert to the Catholic Church from the Pentecostal tradition. However, his theology became Reformed while he was pursuing a BA in Theological Historical Studies at Oral Roberts University (’03). He has studied graduate philosophy at the University of Dallas, has an MBA and writes about his reasons for conversion at www.almostnotcatholic.com. Brent started blogging after participating in the comboxes at Called To Communion. He and his wife and four children live in central Florida. On August 22 at 8pm EST, he will be sharing his story with Marcus Grodi on EWTN’s “The Journey Home.” You can also hear Brent discuss the “The Scriptures He Never Saw” on Marcus Grodi’s radio show “Deep in Scripture” — which will air August 24 at 2 pm EST.

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The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not A Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, by Christian Smith, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, is his effort to understand why the Bible, in his view, does not seem to work as the “sole rule of faith” within his evangelical tradition — hence the term “impossible.” The book is divided into two parts: the first part a diagnosis of the problem of biblicism and the second part Smith’s proposed solution.

What is Biblicism?

According to Smith, Biblicism is a belief that assumes at least one of the following to be true about the Bible:

1. The Bible is identical to God’s very words
2. The Bible is the total representation of God’s will for humanity
3. The Bible covers every topic you need to know about anything
3. Democratic perspicuity- “almost anybody can read the Bible and get it”
4. “Common sense” hermeneutic- just take it literal
5. Solo Scriptura
6. Internal harmony- everything in the Bible fits together
7. Universal applicability of all direct teachings of the Apostles
8. Inductive method as the preferable method for understanding the Bible

As to #5, Bryan and Neal have demonstrated how sola reduces to solo here. Smith points to the way Westminster Theological Seminary refers to the Westminster Confession Faith (WCF) as fallible on the one hand, yet treats it as though “the likelihood…of detecting or admitting error or revisions is effectively nil” (p.14). He goes on to point out the way the WCF affirms many of his biblicist criteria. In the end, Smith’s criticism virtually includes almost all of Protestantism by implying that both confessional and evangelical Protestant denominations treat the Bible in a biblicist way.

What to think of all of this?

Having defined biblicism, Smith next considers how the belief in the Bible as the rule of faith has fared in history. As evidence of the hermeneutical confusion, he quotes from the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith:

“In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinion, I often said to myself, What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right? Or, are they all wrong together? If one of them is right, which is it, and how shall I know? The teachers of religion of the different sects destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible. At length I came to the conclusion that I must…ask of God.”

The fact that Joseph Smith’s sentiments reflect the average Christian’s should be startling. Of course, the average Christian doesn’t run out and start a completely new church. The broader question, and the one Smith is asking in the use of this quotation and others he deploys, is how do Christians of good faith sort through all the thousands and thousands (probably millions) of pages of competing interpretations?

Christian Smith’s greater point, and the one he makes well in the first half of the book is that the notion of the “Bible alone” as understood in the biblicist tradition has simply failed as a method for resolving theological conflict of almost any kind. For example, he argues that even on the “essentials” — a concept that is an undefined ‘moving target’ as well — there is a plethora of resources espousing three to four plausible views (pp. 22-23). Whether on the atonement, church governance, communion or moral teachings, Christians of good will, trained in Scripture, simply cannot agree on what the Bible actually teaches. Even more alarming, biblicists seem to believe that on very important teachings three to four incompatible views can be accepted as “plausible,” yet their own view of the Bible would seem to require something more like dogma than plausibility. In other words, no biblicist would admit that the Bible “teaches” only plausible ideas but is rather “profitable for doctrine”: positive, perspicuous dogmas clearly articulated in the Bible.

Smith goes on to explain why none of the possible solutions to the problems of biblicism work, because all of them undermine an essential biblicist belief about the Bible as detailed in the aforementioned list (pp. 37-41). For example, Peter Leithart recently responded to Smith’s book by arguing that the problem is not in the Bible but rather in our failure to grasp its “essential” teaching regarding unity. Leithart also claimed that evangelicals just need “more time,” and that in charity Smith should give more consideration to the length of time it took Catholics to promulgate dogmas such as transubstantiation or the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.

Regarding Leithart’s first claim, his point merely proves that what is “essential” is both difficult to grasp and plainly not obvious to all — both of which undermine the basic assumptions biblicists have about the Bible. Leithart’s second claim, that evangelicals “need more time,” is an unfalsifiable assumption that, given enough time, someone will get to the “right” theological conclusion. The claim also assumes that given some present-yet-unknown hermeneutical method, all true followers of Christ will come to see the truth of a particular solution and all previous exegetical chaos will simply vanish. The fact that we have no historical precedent or principled reason to believe that this is possible points to the difference between the Church promulgating and a theologian opining — a distinction simply not available in the Protestant paradigm.

The Bible as a Jig-Saw Puzzle

Subsequently, Smith introduces what I think is a perfect analogy for the problem of biblicism. In the Bible-only paradigm, Scripture acts like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. He explains:

The only difficulty is that this is a very unusual puzzle. For, as far as anyone working on it can figure out, different puzzle pieces can fit together in different ways to make distinctly different pictures. Nearly all of them are portraits of people… the puzzlers discover that many of the pieces that make one portrait can be rearranged differently, with some pieces removed and others added, to make other portraits…. Every picture, no matter how well it is put together, still has some missing puzzle pieces…. Nevertheless, despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the unusual nature of this complicated puzzle, it is very popular…. Some are proud of being “scowling-man puzzlers,” claiming that his is the real portrait that the puzzle makes when rightly put together…. Partiality to different puzzle portraits tends to run in families… puzzlers like to sweep the unused pieces that do not fit their portraits into Ziploc bags and put them into their closets. (pp. 45-46)

At this point, Smith is ready to make the claim that the Bible is “exponentially multivocal, polysemic, and multivalent, [and] semantically indeterminate” (p. 48). In other words, the Bible does not speak with one voice, intrinsically has the possibility of having multiple meanings, can cohere in various ways that seem incompatible with other possible combinations, and does not produce an effect of meaning in the reader that is exact. The result is a “pervasive interpretive pluralism” among most Protestants that somehow goes ignored.

The question still remains, “why is pervasive interpretive pluralism a problem?” Pervasive interpretive pluralism isn’t a problem if Christians who come to different conclusions are using different methods. However, if ten Christians are using the same method, using the same rules, and reach different conclusions, then the method/rule must not be able to produce a homogeneous result. Aristotle might say that what we find in an effect, we should also find in the cause. However, since the biblicist method of using Scripture consistently produces a plurality of results, we have good reason to believe that the Scripture — when used under the paradigm of biblicism — cannot effectively operate as a singular, definitive “rule” of anything.

Who Cares? Why Not?

Christian Smith

Why is this not a problem to most biblicists? In chapter three, Smith is at his best because above all, Smith is a professional sociologist. In chapter three, Smith demonstrates how and why biblicists tend to associate in groups that believe like themselves, and how this behavior significantly diminishes the impact of the real problems caused by their theory of the Bible. When Christians always live among like-minded believers, “camps” emerge that create an “us” vs. “them” effect. In turn, differences are magnified in such a way that the entire existence of one camp is predicated on the falsity of the other camp (while all the other camps get left out of the picture, thereby diminishing the problem). Conversely, the “tribalism” of biblicists tends to diminish the real differences of the “other” simply because, according to the data, evangelical Christians tend to live more isolated from other belief systems than do persons of other faiths. So on the one hand, biblicists, like Leithart, propose various theological or philosophical reasons why interpretative pluralism–which undermines the very assumptions of biblicism — is not problematic for biblicists, and on the other hand their social behaviors tend to further diminish the effects of biblicism by alienating them from the real effects of pervasive interpretive pluralism.

To close out his critique of biblicism, Smith in chapter four points out “Blatantly Ignored Teachings” (p.68), and the interpretive decisions that are made about those passages of Scripture that seem to be direct commands but are often directly ignored. The examples he uses are: (1) “Greet one another with a holy kiss,” (2) “Women should remain silent in the churches,” and (3) our Lord’s instructions to wash feet (Jn. 13:14-15). Smith also points out other strange passages and extra-Biblical terminology that are essential to make the Bible “work” in the biblicist paradigm. At first glance, any student formally trained in theology can imagine a number of ways to massage away Smith’s problems with any one of the passages he cites. However, Smith’s larger argument is that to employ any one of those interpretive strategies is to exert on the text what is in fact not there. If Scripture is perspicuous and able to work-by-itself, then it should not require extensive exegesis, extra-biblical language, etc. to work out problems in texts that are direct commands. For Smith, this shows the absolute necessity for some type of agency external to the text, but Smith does not address what that implies.

The Barthian Way Out

When reading the second part (in chapter five), I couldn’t help but wonder why it sounded all too familiar. Smith’s solution to biblicism was the Chistocentric hermeneutic common to Protestant seminaries for decades, but was being presented by Smith as a possible theological break-through. In the second half of the book Smith introduces a solution to a problem, but surprisingly, he gives credit to its source only at the end of the chapter. Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics was hiding at the end of chapter five (p.121). The deja vu feeling I had was from a Systematic Theology II class, where my professor, Dr. Daniel Thimell — a Calvin and Barth scholar (University of Aberdeen) — trained in the ways of the Christocentric hermeneutic against the “10 ways to improve your marriage” biblicist themes, fed us the bread of Barth. Smith sups at Barth’s table, and at the end of the book imagines that such communion can truly lead evangelicals to a new theological vision for the Bible that overcomes biblicism’s problems.

When I originally sat down to write the review, I thought I would have to point out where, in the end, Smith begs the reader to employ the same problem he laments, namely another version of biblicism. One could say that in a way, the entire book is a project that fails if ‘success’ is defined as a solution to the problem. However, to be fair, Smith doesn’t posit that as his purpose but rather that the book should serve as a kind of “first shot” that will get biblicists discussing their inherently flawed assumptions about the Bible. Kevin DeYoung’s review here misses that purpose altogether, and therefore over-emphasizes the way Smith’s Barthian solution begs the question or is unoriginal. I have tried to resist that temptation. In the combox at DeYoung’s review, Smith has responded, pointing out the glaring fact that DeYoung’s critique fails to consider any of his germane criticisms of biblicism.

Taking It Personal

One commonality I notice about the gentlemen who write at CTC that is common to my journey as well is that we all “got out of the tribe.” Generally, Protestant converts to Catholicism who knew Protestant theology did not remain all their days in one camp within Protestantism. Instead, they ventured out, and it was precisely in that venturing out that they came into contact with “irreconcilable problems.” It is only when you finally work face-to-face with theologians and live in community with believers who pray, study and commit their lives to Scripture and are as convinced as yourself that they are interpreting the Bible correctly — yet you disagree — that you begin to wonder if “the Bible alone” is a workable theory. Even more unsettling is a case where the “church” that one associates with loses its authoritative hold on you because you realize that in fact, it has no authority (see A Reflection… and Why Protestantism has no visible…) and therefore no right to bind its members’ consciences.

How did we resolve this? At one time (before Catholicism), we may have arrived at a new way of doing theology, the method that would eliminate all the problems and bring order to Protestantism again. “If only they would listen or see,” we might have yelled in the quietness of our studies, and like Smith, struggled to come up with the “better way” only to figure out later on that we had just joined the crowd or worse yet created a new one. On page 117, we get evidence that Smith has begun to read the Church Fathers seriously, with an ear inclined to their wisdom. Like us, as Smith has recently converted to Catholicism, he apparently figured out that there is no way to solve the problems from within the Protestant paradigm.

Smith’s book does not necessitate becoming Catholic, but it does necessitate dealing with the divergent theologies that are accepted as orthodoxy among Bible-only Christians. For that reason, I believe Smith’s book is important because it asks biblicists to look not just in their mirror, but in a larger mirror that can capture all of the problems within the larger community that claims the Bible as their rule of faith. It is in that encounter, with the broader Christian community, that the force of Smith’s argument can gain the illocutionary force he intended.

Stephen Beck was raised Evangelical, but read his way into the Reformed world. He became a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and then the Presbyterian Church in America. Stephen and his family were received into the Catholic Church on the Easter Vigil of 2011 at St. Andrew’s by the Bay Catholic Church in Annapolis, Maryland. He has a Master’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Greek and Latin at the Catholic University of America. Stephen is a brilliant thinker with a deep love for Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. In this episode, Stephen’s personal friend and regular CTC contributor, Jeremy Tate, interviews him to find out the reasons behind his conversion.

Right click here to save the MP3 file.

The Ascension

Protestant dogma insists that Sola Scriptura is an article of faith.¹ By its own criteria, articles of faith must be established by divine revelation. In the words of Zacharius Ursinus (d. 1583), author of the Heidelberg Catechism, “The doctrine of the church has God for its author . . . whilst the various religious systems of sectarists have been invented by men.”² It is strange, then, that the Protestant apology for this article of faith rests almost entirely on an alleged logical inference, and not from the direct witness of divine revelation. The syllogism runs as follows:

1) We need a final authority,

2) Scripture, because of its unique attributes, is the best candidate,

3) Therefore, Scripture is the final authority.

This syllogism is found again and again, in various forms, throughout the history of Reformed dogmatics. The Dutch theologian Leonard van Rijssen, for example, argued simply, “From these attributes of Scripture it follows that it is a canon and norm of the things to be believed.” According to Richard Muller, Rijssen understood Scripture’s canonical authority “as a deduction, not directly from divinity or divine authority but from several attributes of Scripture.”³ Rijssen’s argument was not unique. Luther and Calvin both suggest it. Others, like Musculus, Polanus, Turrentin, Hyperius, and Vermigli, teach it more explicitly.⁴

We can and should debate these premises of this syllogism, since they are not self-evident, but even if we grant them for the sake of argument, does this syllogism meet the Ursinus test? Can it demonstrate that sola scriptura is an article of faith, revealed by God?

The Catholic position has always been that Christ did give explicit instructions concerning the transmission of the Christian faith. We are not left to inferences, deductions, and “funny, internal feelings.” He gave us the Church. What follows below is a brief survey of some of the Biblical and historical evidence for this claim.

The Final Authority Established by Christ: the Teaching Church

All Christians agree that Jesus Christ is the ultimate authority. During his earthly ministry, He was the Final Authority. His authority superseded the Old Testament, human reason, Jewish Tradition, and the power of the state. But after His ascension, He did not leave us without direction. Before He ascended, He made provisions for a continuing doctrinal authority.

Jesus commissioned his apostles to teach with authority:

Jesus told his disciples, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:18-20)

Jesus sent his apostles to teach, and promised to remain with them. Many passages of Scripture show that Christ’s authority accompanied their teaching:

• “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” (John 20:21)
• “Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.” (Luke 10:16)
• “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matt. 16:18; Matt. 18:18)

These texts answer our question. Christ did give us a rule of faith before His ascension. He gave us the teaching of the apostles. It is important to note that Christ never mentions the writings of the apostles. He gave them no command to write, and never restricted their authority to the written word. His authority attached to their persons and their teaching.

The Apostles Appointed Successors to Teach with Authority

Protestants usually admit that the apostles taught with authority. They deny that the apostles transmitted this authority to their successors. However, Scripture and history refute them.

Scripture:

• “They appointed presbyters for them in each church.” (Acts 14:23)
• [Paul to Titus] “For this reason I left you in Crete so that you might . . . appoint presbyters in every town, as I directed you.” (Titus 1:5)
• [Paul to Timothy] “And what you heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will have the ability to teach others as well.” (2 Timothy 2:2)
• “For a bishop as God’s steward must . . . be able both to exhort with sound doctrine and to refute opponents.” (Titus 1:7-9)

These texts show clearly that the apostles appointed the bishops and priests (presbyters) who took over the leadership of the infant church. They also show that leaders were 1) stewards of the Gospel, 2) given authority to teach and refute false doctrine, 3) ordered to entrust this charge to others.

History:

The earliest sources outside the New Testament attest the belief that the apostles appointed successors who continued to teach with authority.

• The First Epistle of Clement, c. 42 (written sometime between A.D. 70-96): “Christ therefore was sent forth by God and the apostles by Christ . . . [T]hey [the apostles] appointed the first fruits [of their labours], having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe.”
• St. Ignatius to the Ephesians, (between A.D. 98-117): “For we ought to receive every one whom the Master of the house sends to be over His household, as we would do Him that sent him. It is manifest, therefore, that we should look upon the bishop even as we would upon the Lord Himself.”

The Earliest Christians Confirm the Authority Established by Christ

Doctrinal controversy struck Christianity in the second-century church. The Gnostics taught esoteric doctrines, and claimed to be the inheritors of secret wisdom passed down from the apostles. They also appealed to the Scriptures. The Church Father Tertullian (ca. 160-ca.220) responded to their claims and offered one of the earliest and clearest statements of authority established by Christ.

From this, therefore, do we draw up our rule. Since the Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles to preach, (our rule is) that no others ought to be received as preachers than those whom Christ appointed . . . Now, what that was which they preached — in other words, what it was which Christ revealed to them — can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very churches which the apostles founded in person. (Prescription against Heretics, 21).

Conclusion

The heart of the Protestant apologetic for sola scriptura is not the teaching of Christ, but the alleged failure of the Church’s magisterial authority. Consider Luther’s famous argument at Leipzig: Councils can err; therefore Scripture is the final authority. The Protestant position infers canonical authority from inspiration. But this is not a valid inference. God can inspire a text without intending that text to serve as a final authority for all matters doctrinal.

I am well aware that Protestants will dispute the Catholic understanding of the texts I have cited. This is not threatening, and we should have a lively discussion about what they mean. What Protestants must concede, however, is that Catholics attempt to ground their doctrine of authority on the teaching of Christ and the apostles. They do not resort to tenuous logical inferences. Can Protestant apologists do the same?⁵

1. Cf. Westminster Confession, I.1-10.
2. The Commentary of Dr. Zacharius Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. G.W. Williard, 2^nd edition (Columbus: Scott & Bascom, 1852), 3.
3. Rijssen, Summ. Theol., II.xv. Cited in Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2: Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 409.
4. See Muller, Post-Reformation, 357-409. I also find it suggested by Keith Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2001), .262-265.
5. My special thanks to Fr. Lambert Greenan, O.P., the inspiration for this article.

Sacra Conversazione
Fra Angelico (c. 1443)
Fresco, Convento di San Marco, Florence

In November 2009, two of this site’s co-authors, Bryan Cross and Neal Judisch, posted what has become its best-known contribution to Catholic-Protestant dialogue: the article “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.” It was devoted mostly to a critique of Keith Mathison’s argument, in his book The Shape of Sola Scriptura, that there is a principled difference between solo scriptura (henceforth ‘solo’) and sola scriptura (henceforth ‘sola’) as ways of upholding the primacy of the Bible and interpreting it so as to expound the true doctrinal content of the “faith once given to the saints.” Since then, the article’s combox has run to well over 1,200 entries conducting debates about both the central issue and the numerous ones related to it. In defense of the article’s main thesis, I gladly contributed to those debates. But much of it had the feel of a busy conference hall awaiting a speaker’s arrival. For it was over a year ago that Mathison promised a considered reply. Now that he has delivered that reply (see here for the links), I shall deliver a critique of my own. My page references will be to the PDF version of Mathison’s paper.

The main thesis of the Cross-Judisch article is that, pace Mathison, there is no “principled difference” between solo and sola, inasmuch as the latter requires as much as the former that the individual’s interpretation of Scripture be the ultimate interpretive authority. Mathison of course denies that and, in his reply, backs his denial with many arguments. Now my aim is not to speak for Cross and Judisch — who are quite capable of defending themselves, and doubtless will — but to focus attention on what I believe to be the fundamental issues needing to be addressed directly. Those issues are philosophical, and so far have not been seen or addressed as such. Largely for that reason, I shall not discuss in detail most of the subsidiary arguments Mathison makes in a paper that runs to over 50 pages of double-spaced text. They are quite uneven in quality, ranging from the historically well-informed to the downright fallacious. Many who follow this site are well able to assess most of Mathison’s arguments piecemeal; if they do, I think they will verify for themselves what I have just said about those arguments. Instead I shall frame the broader context of debate, summarize and criticize Mathison’s main argument, and point up how it illustrates the radical difference of interpretive paradigm (henceforth ‘IP’) between Catholicism and conservative Protestantism (Reformed or otherwise) quite generally. At the end, I shall explain what is involved in assessing those paradigms against each other so that the uncommitted inquirer may determine which is the more reasonable. The unavoidable need to determine which IP is the more reasonable is the most important philosophical issue in the debate.

I.

I say “conservative” Protestantism because, unlike liberal Protestantism, it shares two basic assumptions with Catholicism that allow us to specify a clear context of debate. First, the divine revelation in and through Jesus Christ is public, definitive, once-for-all, consistently and authoritatively identifiable through time, and expressible as the doctrinal content of the “deposit of faith.” Second, the ultimate “material” object of faith is God. That is to say, what we have faith in when we make the assent of faith is ultimately a who: God, as revealed in and through Jesus Christ. It is ultimately on divine authority that we must believe what we do as belonging to the deposit of faith “given once for all to the holy ones.” The main difference between Catholicism and conservative Protestantism as a whole is not about that, but about the proximate, “formal” object of faith. In other words, the two represent different answers to the question: Just which ensemble of secondary authorities must we trust, and in what relationship with each other, in order to reliably identify all and only what the primary object of faith wants us to believe, namely the deposit of faith? Now as a theologian of the Reformed tradition, Mathison is committed to a way of answering that question that not all conservative Protestants would accept. But the points I shall make at the end, after I have addressed his main arguments directly, apply to conservative Protestantism generally.

A conservative Protestant would say that inspired Scripture is the highest authority, the authority-beyond-appeal, in what I have called the “ensemble of secondary authorities.” Of course some Protestants deny that there is any other secondary authority, but that should not be taken at face value. Protestants as well as Catholics rely to some extent on other secondary authorities such as tradition, churches, pastors, scholars, and the experience of believers. Protestants disagree among themselves about the weight such authorities have relative to each other and to Scripture, and we will need to consider one aspect of Mathison’s understanding of that relation. For now, though, note that Catholicism too acknowledges the primacy of Scripture in a certain sense.

Catholic theologians generally understand Scripture as the divinely inspired norma normans for other secondary authorities, including the Church. That means that, once the biblical canon was formed, whatever was admitted from other authorities had to conform to and cohere with Scripture. No authority may introduce anything as de fide that is logically incompatible with Scripture or otherwise fails to cohere with it. Other authorities are thus norma normata: they are “normed” by Scripture rather than vice-versa. Many Catholic theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas, have also held that Scripture is “materially sufficient,” in the sense that it somehow contains, either explicitly or implicitly, all the doctrinal content assent to which is necessary for salvation. But given that it’s not a definitive teaching of the Catholic Magisterium, the material sufficiency of Scripture is considered only an acceptable opinion among Catholics rather than a doctrine binding on the conscience of believers. On the material-sufficiency view, even though the Church affirms extra-scriptural Tradition as another “source,” older than and concurrent with Scripture, from which we receive the Word of God, Tradition does not convey any revealed truth that is not “somehow” contained in Scripture. Of course many conservative Protestants would go further and claim that the canon is formally as well as materially sufficient, thus obviating unwritten Tradition as a source of knowledge of revealed truth. But that too is only an opinion, one which I regard as at best conceptually confused and at worst as actually self-refuting, depending on how it’s formulated. And of course, Protestantism diverges from Catholicism and Orthodoxy in holding that only the Masoretic canon of the Old Testament, rather than the larger Septuagint canon, is truly inspired. That difference will also be important later in my own argument. For now, the main point to keep in mind is that both parties to the debate accept some version of the biblical canon as the norma normans among secondary authorities, in virtue of its being the inspired, inerrant Word of God in fixed, written form.

Accordingly, the main focus of disagreement between Catholicism and conservative Protestantism is less about the importance of Scripture as a secondary authority — both receive it as the norma normans in some sense — than about the importance of other secondary authorities relative to it and to each other. This is where Mathison’s distinctively “confessional” conservative Protestantism — in his case, the Reformed tradition — becomes relevant. According to confessional Protestantism of whatever brand, ecclesial creeds and confessions are very important secondary authorities for identifying the deposit of faith as the proximate object of the assent of faith. The authority of the churches that produce them is correspondingly important. Ecclesial authority is seen as scripturally justified, even necessitated; and as Catholics, Cross, Judisch, and I would agree. And here is where we find the main difference between solo and sola within Protestantism itself. Let us now consider Mathison’s own view of that.

II.

Mathison agrees with Cross and Judisch that all reading of Scripture, like “communication”” generally, “requires interpretation.” But the questions naturally arise: Whose interpretation of Scripture is authoritative for Christians, and to what degree? Any answer to those questions will identify a secondary authority in addition to, but not opposed to, Scripture. And in a paragraph that Mathison does not gainsay, Cross and Judisch wrote:

[Mathison] is arguing that solo scriptura undermines legitimate ecclesial authority established by Christ. It does so by denying the “authoritative teaching office” in the Church, and the “hermeneutical authority” of those holding that office. How does it do that? Mathison is explicit: “the individual measures his teacher’s interpretation of Scripture against his own interpretation of Scripture.” For Mathison, God did not establish the Church as a democracy; rather, He gave specific gifts to men to teach and govern His Church.

For Mathison, then, what’s wrong with solo is that “the individual measures his teacher’s interpretation of Scripture against his own interpretation of Scripture.” If it’s the individual being taught who is the interpreter-beyond-appeal, that is only an ersatz authority, since the individual cannot claim authority greater than, or even as much authority as, that of something called “the Church,” understood as the “assembly” (ecclesia) of God’s people as a whole. Solo is thus untenable. It amounts to saying “I submit to the Church only when I agree,” which is no submission at all. We must rather adhere, in good confessional-Protestant fashion, to sola. We must indeed affirm that Scripture is the sole inerrant rule of faith, because unlike the deliverances of any other secondary authority such as ecclesial creeds and confessions, Scripture is divinely inspired and thus inerrant; but Scripture cannot be authoritatively interpreted by individuals. The authoritative interpretation of Scripture belongs to something called “the Church.” On that score too, Cross and Judisch agree with Mathison.

This suggests, correctly, that getting the true identity of “the Church” right is pivotal for interpretation of Scripture that is truly authoritative, not just personal opinion, no matter how many people may share a given interpretive opinion at any given time. So on one level, it would seem that the disagreement is only about which body now constitutes “the Church” that Christ founded and to which he gave authority. And indeed there is sharp disagreement about that. But it is at just this point that I find Mathison’s argumentative strategy so curious.

He does not argue that his Reformed denomination, or indeed any particular church body today, is “the Church” that Christ founded. Instead, Mathison takes up more than the first half of his paper with a sprawling, surprisingly strident argument that the Catholic Church is not that Church. In due course, I shall review and criticize his most important subsidiary arguments against Catholicism; but as we shall see, the interest of that is primarily what it reveals about the general quality of Mathison’s arguments, not how it contributes to debate about the immediate point at issue. Next, he briefly summarizes his book’s argument — against the Cross-Judisch interpretation of it — as to how to identify “the Church.” He begins with the assertion: “I defined the church in terms of the rule of faith, and I as an individual did not determine the content of the rule of faith” (p. 36). He goes on to explain both what that means and how it can be supported by historical inquiry. On that account, the “rule of faith” in terms of which “the Church” is to be “defined” is embodied in the creeds that developed progressively out of the early church’s baptismal formulas and confessions of faith, culminating in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed of 381. I see no reason to doubt that Mathison’s account of early creedal development is substantially correct.

Now those creeds were clearly backed by the authority of something calling itself even at the time “the catholic church” (I use the lower-case ‘c’ intentionally). So one might think that, given the importance Mathison attaches to getting right the identity of “the Church” as a secondary authority, he would argue that such creeds were true and authoritative regulae fidei because they were propounded with the authority of a body identifiable as “the catholic church.” But that is not quite what he argues. And on reflection, that is understandable, because Mathison’s actual position forbids him to argue it.

He argues instead that such rules of faith were authoritative inasmuch as they were, and were regarded by the self-described catholic church as, “uninspired summaries” of the plain teaching of inspired Scripture. But they were only thought necessary because some people, for whatever flimsy reasons, didn’t “get” the plain sense of Scripture. In other words, the rules of faith could be known to be authoritative less because the-Church-as-secondary-authority propounded them than because they plainly were correct interpretations of Scripture, which is why they were regarded as such by the early “catholic church.” So “the Church” as secondary authority is to be identified as that body of believers whose rules of faith conformed to Scripture, by virtue of clearly summarizing and correctly interpreting Scripture in her rules of faith, and doing so in a way that can be validated even without invoking her authority. Accordingly, it’s not as though we have to get the identity of “the Church” right before we can know the correct interpretation of Scripture. We must first get the plain sense of Scripture, so that we can go on to identify “the Church” as that body of believers whose rules of faith clearly reflect it. Only then do we have reason enough for saying that “the Church” is authoritative as interpreter. That is how Mathison “defines” the Church, and the authority of the Church on the sola view.

Frankly, how Mathison could suppose that that argument rebuts the Cross-Judisch thesis is beyond me. He is in fact doing precisely what they criticize him for doing in his book. He has not managed to depict “the Church” — be it the post-apostolic, “catholic” church or any church today — as an indispensable measure of any particular person’s interpretation of Scripture, which is what his version of sola would require. Rather, he holds that a certain interpretation of Scripture, embodied in the Creed of 381, is plainly correct, and supports that view by arguing that the early church took it that way too. Citing the creeds and the attitude of the early church is supposed to reinforce the point that the correct interpretation is plain, without thereby suggesting that its being plain logically depends on its being endorsed by the authority of the church. So if the early church was authoritative in the sought-after sense, that is only because her relative closeness to the time of the apostolic tradition’s “inscripturation” in the canon makes it likely that she got the interpretation of Scripture right — not that said interpretation can be known to be right only if she says it is. And so, for the purpose of identifying the doctrinal content of the deposit of faith, the authority of “the Church” as interpreter is dispensable in principle, even though in practice it is always needed for the disciplinary purpose of calling out the errant and recalcitrant.

Thus it would seem that sola reduces to solo after all. For as individuals, we are to identify “the Church” as that body of people whose leadership has got Scripture essentially right. We needn’t and shouldn’t say that the true identity of “the Church” Christ founded must be known before we can identify the correct interpretation of Scripture as such; indeed, on Mathison’s account, any attempt to approach the matter that way would get it backwards. Rather, the inquirer into these matters must learn the identity of “the Church” by means of exegetical and historical arguments that the early “catholic church” got Scripture right in her summary rules of faith. “The Church” today is thus identifiable as whatever collection of people attends church and adheres to such rules as the correct interpretations of Scripture. But of course, no visible body today is co-extensive with that collection; therefore, no set of authorities within any such body can be identified tout court as the authorities of “the Church.” The Church, such as it is, has authority because it is right about Scripture; accordingly, the individual churchgoer cannot know that “the Church” has interpretive authority without his already knowing the correct interpretation of Scripture. But that destroys any principled difference between solo and sola. Which, of course, is just the Cross-Judisch thesis.

So much for the second half of Mathison’s main argument. Its first and far lengthier half, which concludes that the Catholic Church is not the Church, fares no better. But before getting to the substance of that case, we need to consider why Mathison finds it necessary to make such an argument.

He finds it necessary because, according to him, the “difference” between solo and sola “becomes invisible only when one begins by assuming the correctness of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the church” (p. 1), so that it’s necessary to demolish such an “assumption” in order to uphold the difference. But in Mathison’s paper, I can detect no explanation why Cross and Judisch must assume, for purposes of their own argument, that the Catholic Church today is the Church, or even an argument that they actually do so. The closest they come to doing so is in this statement: “Our point is to show that implicit within the claim by proponents of sola scriptura to be submitting to the Church, is always a prior judgment concerning which body of persons count as the Church, and a theological assumption about how that judgment is to be made.” That, of course, is true of anybody who would appeal to something called “the Church” for the sake of authoritatively interpreting the “sources” by which divine revelation is transmitted to us. For if an appeal to the living authority of something called “the Church” over biblical interpretation is to be anything but circular, we need an extra-biblical reason for saying which church is…well, the Church. The extra-biblical reason Mathison gives for his definition of ‘the Church’ is his interpretive opinion, which is by no means shared by all in the fourth century or today, that the Creed of 381 promulgated by the church of the time was only conveying the plain sense of Scripture. That is not the same as saying something that Cross and Judisch would agree with, namely that said creed’s was the correct interpretation of Scripture. For his purpose, Mathison must adopt such an extra-biblical premise, because to argue that we don’t need anything beyond statements of the Bible to identify which church has the authority of “the church” mentioned in the Bible would be justified only by the sort of reasoning that would make the church dispensable for the purpose of authoritatively interpreting the Bible quite generally. The philosophical problem for Mathison is that, although he needs and wants to avoid that result, it is exactly the result his argumentative strategy yields.

Still, what is of interest for the debate here is not the question which church today actually is the Church — on that, agreement will obviously not be reached — but whether the identity of the Church today must be established prior to determining whether sola does, in fact, collapse into solo. That’s the sort of epistemological question philosophers love to consider. From that point of view, Mathison’s main argument requires showing that sola does not collapse into solo because we can reliably identify the early “catholic church” as the Church, and thus as the authoritative interpreter of Scripture. But of course, Cross and Judisch would agree with the identification itself; they too believe that the church that promulgated the Creed of 381 is in fact the Church. So the question whether the church then was in fact the Church is not the question we need to consider in order to get at the root of the disagreement. The root of the disagreement is about not whether the early “catholic church” was the Church or even that she had interpretive authority, but about the method by which that church is to be so identified, a method which would also identify which church is the Church even now. Cross and Judisch say that the right method is to discover which church enjoys “apostolic succession,” which is probably why Mathison says that they must assume, for purposes of their argument, that the Catholic Church is the Church. But for the reasons I’ve already given, their commitment to that method as Catholics is not needed as a premise for their argument against Mathison’s thesis.

To be sure, Mathison makes much of the fact that Catholics and Protestants today view history and Scripture through quite different lenses. That indeed has been a fact since the 16th century. But as I shall show later after completing the review of Mathison’s main argument, he doesn’t get the difference of IP between Catholicism and conservative Protestantism quite right either. And that is a severe defect of his argument against Catholicism.

III.

Mathison makes his argument against Catholicism (or what he prefers to call ‘Rome,’ as if the Latin Church were all there is to the Catholic Church), on historical, exegetical, and logical grounds. But he takes virtually no account of the fact that many highly intelligent and scholarly Catholics have disagreed and do disagree with him, using far more thorough arguments of precisely those sorts — for example, Yves Congar and Joseph Ratzinger. With only one exception I shall discuss below, Mathison’s foil is not thinkers of that caliber, but only unnamed Catholic “apologists” who aren’t really scholars. And he concludes his argument with this bold claim: “…there is absolutely zero evidence that the leadership of the local church of Rome is uniquely protected and abundant biblical and historical evidence that it is not” (p. 22).

The question to raise here is: “Protected from what?” If the answer is “sin,” Catholics willingly grant that “the local church of Rome” is by no means protected, uniquely or otherwise, from sin. At certain points in its history, the papacy would have been grist for tabloid newspapers, had there been any. All one has to do is read Chaucer or Boccacio, and listen to weightier Catholics from the era who criticized the abuses but never left the Church. The Reformation, whether itself justified or not, was in part a response to justified grievances, and most Catholics, including the present and the previous pope, have acknowledged as much. As far as I know, nobody claims that the members of any church, including popes, have ever been protected from sin, even grave sin; indeed, the Apostles themselves, including Peter, were not so protected. What is at issue is whether any church is ever divinely protected from doctrinal error, not moral error, under certain conditions. In other words, is any church ever gifted by God with doctrinal infallibility, and if so under what conditions? The Catholic Church claims that she is, and the claim is supremely relevant to a discussion of the nature of ecclesial authority to interpret whatever “sources” transmit divine revelation to us.

But even though Mathison is well aware of that claim, and its logical difference from any claim of impeccability that would be a mere straw man, some of the evidence he cites against that claim is moral. Thus he argues that, prior to the Reformation, the papacy and the bishops had “abandoned the flock,” thereby and obviously forfeiting their claim to be successors of the Apostles. But even assuming that the pope and the bishops were often poor pastors, that sort of pastoral judgment is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The relevant question is: In what way is “the Church” necessary to reliably and authoritatively interpret the sources by which divine revelation is transmitted to us? The question is not whether the rulers of the Church, at any given time, are otherwise ruling well. If it were manifest that the claims of the Catholic Magisterium for itself are false for that or any other reason, than most Catholic prelates and theologians for at least a millennium would have to be either poor scholars or willfully blind, and every faithful Catholic layman an illiterate or a willing dupe. Depicting one’s opponents as either incompetent or in bad faith, mostly by ignoring the best among them, is not an effective argumentative strategy.

To be fair, I note that Mathison does adduce some relevant arguments against the Catholic Magisterium’s claim to infallibility under certain conditions. One is the standard Protestant argument that some Catholic doctrines are contrary to Scripture — especially the papal claims themselves. But regardless of any particular example it may use, that sort of argument is radically question-begging. A good part of what is at issue here — indeed, the main part — is the question how Scripture is to be interpreted authoritatively. To argue that Scripture interpreted authoritatively goes against Catholicism requires already premising one particular answer to the very question at issue — which of course is precisely what Mathison charges Cross and Judisch with doing for their own purpose. And so I shall ignore this sort of argument from Scripture against Catholicism.

Another of Mathison’s arguments is that there’s no evidence of mono-episcopacy in Rome until the late second century, and that some Catholic scholars agree with that judgment, which indeed they do. That requires arguing, as he does, that St. Irenaeus and one of his sources, Hegisippus, misstated the evidence from the post-apostolic Church of Rome, even though Irenaeus himself had been to Rome and known St. Polycarp of Smyrna personally, who in turn had been to Rome and had himself known the Apostle John personally. Such an argument would have us believe that, roughly 1,900 years after the fact, we can understand the meaning and reliability of the late first-century sources better than people who had lived less than two generations after the fact and had known eyewitnesses to it. That dubious sort of move is rather common among liberal scripture and patristic scholars; it’s just special pleading when made by a conservative theologian who would often find liberal scholarship dubious on just such grounds. The argument in question, which is fairly common, also trades on an ambiguity in the use of the word ‘presbyteros’ in the early Church. And it has been vigorously contested on that and other grounds by Catholic scholars whom Mathison simply ignores. The selective use of secondary scholarly sources is not a reputable form of argument. So Mathison’s present argument doesn’t merit more attention here either.

Needless to say, Mathison has many other arguments. Indeed, he seems to have thrown almost all the tomatoes at the target, hoping some will stick. I shall focus on the most important, which alas are not made with the care they require.

One is that the course of Catholic doctrinal development (henceforth ‘DD’) has yielded significant internal inconsistencies, which could not obtain if the Magisterium’s claim to infallibility under certain conditions were true. But that argument isn’t enough for Mathison’s purpose. For no party to the debate denies that some Catholic teachings have changed, yet it doesn’t follow that that poses an insurmountable logical problem for the Magisterium. Doctrinal change would be an insurmountable, internal logical difficulty for the Magisterium only if at least one of the changes involved negating a doctrine which the Magisterium had deemed irreformable, i.e., infallibly set forth, by its own criteria. But Mathison makes no argument to that effect — at least none that I can detect.

Another argument from Mathison on this score is, in effect, that the very notion of DD is a deceptive name for unwarranted additions to or corruptions of the deposit of faith: essentially, a con job. I’ve heard that a lot in my time. Of course DD would be exposed a con job if Mathison had shown what I have just said he’s made no argument to show. But pretty much all he has to offer is the following ill-considered remark centering on John Henry Newman, the primary advocate of DD in the 19th-century Catholic Church:

…the Roman Magisterium has lost and corrupted and changed her theological and moral teachings over time. It takes the genius and ingenuity of a Cardinal Newman to blind one to this fact. The doctrine of papal infallibility itself is one of the most obvious examples of an invented doctrine that was never believed always, everywhere, and by all, but more on this below. (p. 22, emphasis added.)

So according to Mathison, Cardinal Newman used his admitted “genius” to blind not only himself, but a host of later Catholic scholars, to an obvious truth that he, Mathison, has by no means made obvious. Res ipsa loquitur. The only good part is that one real Catholic theologian is actually cited, and acknowledged as a genius. But of course, the genius does not begin or end with Newman.

Mathison also cites against the Catholic Church what’s known as “the Vincentian Canon,” stated in the fifth century by St. Vincent of Lerins: “Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all.” Thus:

…Rome’s version of apostolic succession ultimately led her to replace the Vincentian canon with the “magisterium of the moment.” Instead of that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all, the Roman standard is whatever Rome happens to be teaching today. If she teaches it now, it must have been taught by the apostles and the early church, even if there is no evidence of that in Scripture or the history of the church. The Vincentian Canon is an inductive principle based on the evaluation of evidence. The Roman standard is a deductive principle based on a bare assertion. (p. 50)

That argument too is sloppy. For one thing, Rome does not claim that “whatever” she now teaches was actually taught by the Apostles. She claims only that what she teaches as de fide, and thus as irreformable, belongs to the apostolic deposit of faith, whether or not we happen to know, on independent grounds and in every case, that the Apostles themselves would have said the same. Of course, as a Protestant Mathison would reject that claim too, but it is a much narrower claim than the one he formulates, and arguing against it requires much more care than he devotes.

Notice also that the Vincentian Canon is not true without careful contextual qualification. It is not true, without qualification, that every doctrine St. Vincent professed as a Catholic had been held “always, everywhere, and by all,” even if we take the ‘all’ to be quantifying only over people who had been baptized as Catholics. As I argued here on textual grounds, to understand and apply the VC as St. Vincent did, one must already know what the phrase ‘the Catholic Church’ refers to, and even then limit the VC’s use to those with some sort of authority in said church — which must in turn be weighed by the statements of the highest ecclesial authorities. Acccordingly, citing the VC against the Catholic Church today just begs the question.

I could go on and would enjoy doing so in such a target-rich environment, but I’ve said enough to paint a fair picture of the quality of Mathison’s case against Catholicism — a case which he needn’t make anyhow, because for the reasons I’ve given, one needn’t assume that Catholicism is true in order to show why the solo-sola distinction ultimately collapses. Rather than dwell on the disservice Mathison had done himself, I now turn to the deepest root of the debate.

IV.

In many comments on this site as well as old posts on my own blog, I have argued that there is an irreconcilable difference between the respective “hermeneutical paradigms” of Catholicism and Protestantism, meaning conservative Protestantism. Here I shall call the difference one of ‘interpretive paradigms’ (IPs) so as to lighten the jargon. An IP is a systematic framework for interpreting the data that is “underdetermined” by the data, meaning that the data do not dictate it, but are themselves are interpreted by means of it, and that more than one IP is logically consistent with the data. Now when the dataset is as large as that of theology, no interpretation of the data that’s alleged to yield the doctrinal content of the deposit of faith can be made without bringing some IP to the data. In fact, given the size and complexity of the dataset, more than one IP can be at least rationally plausible, even though no two such IPs are entirely consistent with each other. Now in my experience, no debate between Protestants and Catholics, including the one that’s occasioned this contribution, makes any genuine progress without directly addressing what amounts to that difference of IP. And so I shall now characterize the difference so that the debate can be fruitful, and the uncommitted inquirer accordingly better positioned to discern which is the more reasonable of the two.

I shall omit consideration of any liberal-Protestant IP for a reason I gave at the beginning: none share with Catholicism two crucial assumptions, which I set forth, that frame a clear context of debate. In fact, I would argue that any “liberal” IP reduces religion straightaway to a matter of opinion, thereby making it impossible to identify anything as divine revelation rather than as mere human opinion about how to interpret sources that have been alleged to transmit divine revelation. Now according to the conservative-Protestant IP, the only way to reliably identify the formal, proximate object of faith — which means identifying the correct ensemble of secondary doctrinal authorities and their proper relationship to one another — is to study the written sources from early Christianity, mainly but not limited to Scripture, and make the correct inferences from them. Inconsistencies in such a body of inferences can only be resolved, when they can be resolved, by appeal to inspired Scripture, which trumps anything to the opposite effect in the other, uninspired sources. Hence the slogan ad fontes, a rallying cry of the Renaissance humanists who so influenced the early Reformers. On this approach, the doctrinal content of the deposit of faith consists in what is (a) explicitly asserted in Scripture and (b) what can be inferred from those assertions with valid deductive and inductive arguments, such as those made in the early “catholic church” to yield Nicene orthodoxy. Once we’ve identified a set of such statements, we’ve learned all we need to know about which doctrines are revealed and apostolic, which in turn are all and only the doctrines we must believe. Anything beyond that is human opinion masquerading as divine revelation, and thus a deception. So much for DD as the Catholic Church has come to understand that idea.

But according to the Catholic IP, such a methodology is insufficient for reliably identifying the formal, proximate object of faith as distinct from human opinion. Though necessary, studying the early written sources and making inferences from them can only yield human interpretive opinions, unless validated by some clearly identifiable authority whose interpretation of the relevant data is divinely protected from error under certain conditions — a gift which, all sides would agree, is at least logically possible, given what and who God is. That interpreter is, of course, understood to be the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, which consists in the “college” of bishops in communion with the bishop of Rome. The Magisterium is not only the divinely appointed authority that distinguished which early writings were divinely inspired from which were not, but is also the authoritative custodian and interpreter of the inspired books and all else that has been handed down from the Apostles, which includes extra-scriptural Tradition such as the liturgy, creeds, and certain pious beliefs and practices. Those are taken to cohere with Scripture to form one “deposit of faith,” even though, in many cases, they are not inferable from Scripture by rules of logic alone. Hence, as Vatican II says:

Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church. Holding fast to this deposit the entire holy people united with their shepherds remain always steadfast in the teaching of the Apostles, in the common life, in the breaking of the bread and in prayers, so that holding to, practicing and professing the heritage of the faith, it becomes on the part of the bishops and faithful a single common effort.

But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission; and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed.

It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God’s most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls. (Dei Verbum §10; references omitted, emphasis added).

The general conditions on infallible teaching are described in another document of Vatican II, Lumen Gentium (§25 ff). Now as a matter of history, only rarely does a pope infallibly teach unilaterally. A more common way in which infallibility is exercised is in the issuance of dogmatic as distinct from disciplinary “canons” of “ecumenical” councils. And ordinarily, the college of bishops as a whole teaches infallibly when “though dispersed throughout the world, they are in agreement that one position is to be definitively held.” That was the situation for the entire time before the first ecumenical council, that of Nicaea in 325, and remains the situation in many cases of doctrine today.

Now there is a certain sense in which a “confessional” Protestant such as Mathison could accept the formula: “Sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church are so linked… that none can stand without the others.” That may be seen in how Mathison argues for sola as opposed to solo. Even though his argument is unsuccessful, he does consider all three secondary authorities — Scripture, Tradition, and the Church — severally indispensable and mutually interdependent, together forming the proximate, formal object of faith. The fundamental disagreement that confessional Protestants have with the Catholic Church should thus be seen as over (a) which body of people forms the church with the requisite teaching authority, and (b) how that church is to be identified. The answer to (a), whatever that is, derives from the answer to (b), whatever that is. Unsatisfactory though it is, we’ve at least seen Mathison give an answer to (b), and accordingly to (a).

Now I do not say that Mathison’s argument for his answer to (b) is the only or the best that a confessional Protestant can give. But it is evident that, on the Protestant IP, the only way to answer (b) with anything more than provisional human opinions is to construct a rationally unassailable set of inferences from Scripture and from other early sources that enables us to grasp what is, and can readily be seen as, the plain sense of Scripture. “The Church,” both then and now, is accordingly identifiable as whatever collection of people faithfully assents to what is thereby grasped. But under no circumstances is she to be considered infallible. Given as much, the question fairly arises: How to explain the fact that many baptized, churchgoing people don’t agree about what the plain sense of Scripture is, or even that it’s always and necessarily inerrant even when agreed to be plain? If the proximate, formal object of faith can be clearly identified by a rationally unassailable set of inferences from the pertinent early sources, the primary one of which is assumed to be inerrant, does that tell us that those who don’t find that set rationally unassailable are either unlearned or willfully irrational? Remember: the “rationally unassailable” set of inferences is not itself inerrant, because nobody holding it can be considered an infallible interpreter, even if at least one of the sources is itself inerrant.

The historical and scholarly evidence, which I have no time to review in detail, would suggest that the answer to the above question is no. Even during those intermittent periods over the last two millennia when there was relative consensus about what Christian orthodoxy is, there never has been a time when all dissenters could be fairly dismissed as either unlearned or willfully irrational. Wrong, yes; disobedient to what is, in fact, duly constituted ecclesial authority, yes; but not unlearned or willfully irrational. In these matters, some people just don’t see as “plain” what others do, and that is not always a vice, because revealed theology is not like mathematics or natural science — where what is obvious in itself, but not obvious to many people, becomes obvious to the person who has been fully initiated into of the discipline. Yet unlearned or willfully irrational is how we would have to view dissenters, if the conservative-Protestant IP were itself the one most rational to adopt.

Along that line, I am reminded of this:

The Reformers unequivocally rejected the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This left open the question of who should interpret Scripture. The Reformation was not a struggle for the right of private judgement. The Reformers feared private judgement almost as much as did the Catholics and were not slow to attack it in its Anabaptist manifestation. The Reformation principle was not private judgement but the perspicuity of the Scriptures. Scripture was sui ipsius interpres and the simple principle of interpreting individual passages by the whole was to lead to unanimity in understanding. This came close to creating anew the infallible church…It was this belief in the clarity of Scripture that made the early disputes between Protestants so fierce. This theory seemed plausible while the majority of Protestants held to Lutheran or Calvinist orthodoxy, but the seventeenth century saw the beginning of the erosion of these monopolies. But even in 1530 Casper Schwenckfeld could cynically note that “the Papists damn the Lutherans; the Lutherans damn the Zwinglians; the Zwinglians damn the Anabaptists and the Anabaptists damn all others.” By the end of the seventeenth century many others saw that it was not possible on the basis of Scripture alone to build up a detailed orthodoxy commanding general assent. (A.N.S. Lane, “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey,” Vox Evangelica, Volume IX – 1975, pp. 44, 45; emphasis added).¹

I would add that Schwenckfeld made his wry observation thirteen years after Luther had nailed his theses to the door, and two years after the ill-fated Colloquy of Marburg.

To see Protestant theological antagonists treating each other, as well as Catholics, that way is evidence that the Protestant IP is not the most rational one to adopt. For treating all determined opponents as either unlearned or willfully irrational is itself unreasonable — even when Catholics do it, as not a few have done in the past, including but not limited to the Arian controversy. Yet Mathison treats Catholicism as though Catholics would have to be unlearned or willfully irrational to believe it. If he doesn’t treat all non-Reformed Protestants similarly, that might be because, now that centuries have passed, Protestants can find it in themselves to treat charitably any Christian who is not a Roman Catholic. The Catholic Church has got beyond the old, insultingly dismissive attitude toward Christians who do not accept her claims; other Christians, especially the Reformed, would do well to reciprocate. Fortunately, some have.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that Reformed Protestants have what seems to them good reason for such hostility, which is why it’s hard to blame them for their attitude. That reason would be that the conservative-Protestant IP is itself, unlike the Catholic, rationally unavoidable for anybody who share the two assumptions which I said, near the beginning, “frame a clear context for debate.” And they have what qualifies as an argument for that belief. I shall conclude by outlining that argument, which is now common among Protestants, and showing why it fails.

V.

In various forms, the argument that the conservative-Protestant IP is itself rationally unavoidable (for anybody who shares the two above-referenced assumptions) appears in what Cross has called the tu quoque objection to the Catholic Magisterium’s claims for itself. Mathison himself uses a version of the tu quoque against Cross’ advocacy of apostolic succession as the way to identify “the Church” as interpretive authority. But particular examples are not important here, for the argument takes pretty much the same form regardless of which particular doctrine is at issue, and its primary application is to the Catholic Magisterium’s claim to infallibility under certain conditions.

The argument is that, even if we suppose arguendo that some ecclesial authority is in fact infallible under certain conditions, such an authority cannot be infallibly known to be infallible, so that infallibility cannot in any instance supplant private judgment, which of course is fallible. In other words, supposing for reductio that the Catholic Magisterium can’t be wrong under certain conditions, the only reasonable basis for believing as much would be an argument that can only be made fallibly, and is therefore not certain. If one argues that the Catholic Magisterium, being infallible under certain conditions, infallibly teaches under those conditions that it is infallible, one is merely arguing in a circle. So one cannot rely on ecclesial infallibility to make the Magisterium’s claim to infallibility credible — a conclusion I readily accept as a Catholic. Now according to the objector, one must argue instead, but of course fallibly, that a study of early Christian sources makes such an affirmation rationally unassailable as an inference from those sources. For absent infallible arguments, that’s the only way to approach the requisite level of certainty. Yet such an affirmation is far from rationally unassailable, as the history of doctrine amply demonstrates. So there is reason enough after all to believe not only that the Catholic IP is rationally avoidable, but that the conservative-Protestant IP is rationally unavoidable. For the Catholic himself must make use of its characteristic methodology to support his own position, and that use is performatively absurd, because it commits the Catholic to making precisely the sort of judgment that the Catholic Magisterium is supposed to obviate.

Now the authors of this site have produced their own responses to that sort of argument, and I do not want to criticize those responses here, because I believe they are substantively correct. But to bring out more clearly why the above argument fails, I shall frame the rebuttal a bit differently.

Nobody disputes that “arguments” of whatever kind in theology can only be made fallibly, even when they are made by councils or popes. But in view of that fact, consider two things. First, the proponent of the Catholic IP is not committed to claiming that his IP is rationally unavoidable, because he is not committed to claiming that the Magisterium’s claims for itself, as part of the formal, proximate object of faith, are rationally unassailable given a study of the early “sources.” He is committed to claiming only that, when interpreted in light of the Catholic IP, the sources make the Magisteriium’s claims for itself seem reasonable enough, which is not in dispute. On the other hand, the proponent of the conservative-Protestant IP is committed to claiming that his way of identifying the proximate, formal object of faith is rationally unassailable, given such a study. So the Protestant IP here entails making a stronger claim than the Catholic, and accordingly requires stronger support. But that support is not forthcoming, for if it were, then dissenters could only be unlearned or willfully irrational — a dyspeptic conclusion that cannot be justified on independent grounds that would corroborate it. So the methodology to which the conservative-Protestant IP commits its user is not only fallible, but also does not yield rationally unassailable conclusions.

For example, the Protestant has no way, other than fallible arguments, to secure his account of what belongs in the canon, which account, in the case of the OT, runs counter to what the older traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy eventually concluded. Therefore, he has no way, other than the use of fallible arguments, to show how the canon should be identified. And if he doesn’t have more than that, then he has no way of making certain that the way he identifies the norma normans for the other secondary authorities is correct.

Second, there is a positive reason for holding that the Catholic IP is the more reasonable one to adopt for somebody who shares the two basic assumptions framing the debate. That reason is that, if the Catholic Magisterium’s claims for itself are true, then we have an authoritative interpreter whose judgments, though not unassailable from the standpoint of reason alone, are nonetheless secured by divine authority. Of course that by itself in no way shows that said claims are true. What it shows, in conjunction with the reason I’ve already cited against the conservative-Protestant IP, is that, if said claims are true, then there is a principled as opposed to an ad hoc way to distinguish the formal, proximate object of faith from fallible human opinions about how to identify it in the sources. And that is the way in which the Catholic can distinguish the assent of faith from that of opinion. Eschewing any interpretive infallibility from any quarter, ecclesial or individual, the advocate of the conservative-Protestant IP has no principled way to make that distinction.

For the above two reasons, the tu quoque objection fails. The Protestant IP is rationally avoidable because it cannot present the conclusions reachable by means of it as rationally unassailable. And the Catholic IP is rationally preferable, even though also rationally avoidable, because it offers a principled way to make the distinction that the two basic assumptions framing the debate call for making. By contrast, just as sola appears to be just solo waiting to show itself, conservative Protestantism appears to be liberal Protestantism waiting to happen all over again. That is why the inquirer who shares said assumptions, but isn’t sure whether to become Protestant or Catholic, does better to choose the latter.

Of course nothing I’ve said so far shows that that the Catholic IP is superior to the Eastern-Orthodox IP. Both are committed to ecclesial infallibility, and thus do not share the basic defect of any Protestant IP. Both are committed to apostolic succession as a necessary condition for identifying “the Church.” And both are rationally defensible. In my opinion, answering the question which IP, the Catholic or the EO, is the more reasonable depends on subtler considerations of the development of ecclesiological doctrine than I’ve broached here. But that is a task for another time and place.

Feast of Blessed John of Fiesole (Fra Angelico)

1. I am indebted to David Waltz of Articuli Fidei for this quotation.

Keith Mathison

In his book Keith argued strongly against solo scriptura, and endorsed sola scriptura as the rightful alternative. In our article, we argued that there is no essential difference between solo scriptura and sola scriptura. The defining feature of solo scriptura is the retention by each individual of ultimate interpretive authority, but under sola scriptura, each individual likewise retains ultimate interpretive authority, even if that fact is somewhat hidden by forming associations of those sharing similar interpretations of Scripture and appointing officers among such associations.

Last year Keith assured us that he would write a reply. Today, he announced that he has completed his reply. It can be read at the following link: “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and Apostolic Succession: A Response to Bryan Cross and Neal Judisch.” A pdf version of his reply is available here. Take a look, and let us know what you think. I expect that in the coming weeks we will write a reply to Keith’s reply.