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larkin31
Guest
So, you are actually not asking a question then. My mistake. I thought you were asking a question for discussion.
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PRmerger
Guest
Actually, we see what happens when someone believes the paradigm of “the Holy Spirit guided the CC in some of its doctrines, but not all”.
We have the obscene 40,000 Christian denominations, each claiming that it is the one that teaches the Truth.
Because of that paradigm, now there’s millions of people who don’t know for sure whether:
Code:
-the Eucharist is the true presence of Christ or it is only a symbol-Saturday is the day of worship or is Sunday
-the Blessed Virgin Mary was and remains always virgin or if she had other children
-if we’re "once saved always saved’, or we can lose our salvation
-if we ought to baptize infants or wait until the “age of reason” or adulthood or not baptize at all…and do we baptize by immersion, sprinkling or by going down deep into the river
-Holy Trinity is three separate persons or is the Trinity is three persons in one GOD
etc etc etc
Now, I suppose you might argue that it doesn’t really matter what the truth about those topics are above…as long as one believes in Jesus.
But I would respond with a couple things:
-that belief (above) contradicts Scripture, for we are to love God with our entire heart, MIND, soul and strength. Understanding the Truth about God’s revelation is loving God with our entire MIND. If we don’t know what the Truth is, then we cannot know Him truly, and therefore we cannot LOVE him truly and fully.
-not knowing the Truth about the above doctrines puts us at a kindergarten level of knowing. God has given us (analogy may fail here) a doctorate-level understanding of his truth.
So if one wants to stay at a kindergartener’s understanding of Truth, and of who God is, I suppose we could say none of the above differences in doctrine matter…
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crazzeto
Guest
Because of the nature of God’s promise to the Church, that the 1) Gates of Hell would never prevail against it and 2) Christ would be with it till the end of the age. Christ established a Church with authority, so that the truth might be known.
By using a “well some times maybe, but perhaps not in this case, and well this sounds good to me, but maybe not that” approch the truth may never be known. You simply could not know the truth.
The fact is, in order for any of us to be saved we have to know what the true, pure Christian doctrine is. That can’t happen if the Holy Spirit isn’t there all the time, lighting the way for us. None of us are that good.
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larkin31
Guest
Indeed. We see through the glass only darkly. If at all.
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Gabriel_of_12
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Contarini
Guest
Yes, although the balance among them is quite different.
By some definitions, but the U.S. has certainly moved much closer to democracy and therefore away from republicanism to some extent.
With a considerable number of amendments.
I’m not arguing that it does. In the case of the U.S. I frankly don’t care, except in the specific places where I think the changes are bad. And in the case of Catholicism I never claimed that the “core fundamentals” are different. My point is simply that once you start using that language, you have to decide what the “core fundamentals” are, and people can have different views about that.
So, for instance, I put a lot more emphasis on the one-bishop/one-city principle than RC’s do, and a lot less emphasis on union with the bishop of Rome.
Chant at every Liturgy as opposed to the “Low Mass with hymns” model, use of the human voice instead of instruments, Eucharist on Sundays and holy days rather than daily, only one Eucharist at a time (or on a Sunday) in one parish, so that the entire congregation is gathered around one altar, adoration of Christ sacramentally in the context of the Liturgy but not otherwise, communion in both kinds for the laity as the normal practice. These are just the first examples to come to mind.
Edwin
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Contarini
Guest
Your description of their attitude lacks a certain nuance. The Reformers would have said that the Papacy did not give us the Scriptures. And they would not have said that there was no true Church in the later Middle Ages. They said that the Church had become increasingly corrupt, so that the Gospel had become obscured.
There is a certain lack of consistency in their statements, admittedly. Calvin’s statement to Sadoleto in 1541 that the churches in union with Rome (or at least some of them) were true churches has to be balanced against his later insistence that Protestants who attended Mass or participated in Catholicism in any way were committing a terrible sin. And while the Reformers typically pointed to the later Middle Ages as the point where things went seriously wrong, they were aware that the Fathers held to many beliefs and practices which the Reformers thought were wrong, and Luther in particular could be brutally blunt about this. (Contrary to the common stereotype, the Reformed were generally more concerned about continuity, at least in the first generation or so.)
Edwin
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PRmerger
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Brings to mind a quote that’s a new fave of mine:
The original 16th-century revolutionaries had the mysterious conviction that you could attack a procession of Catholic worshippers, knock the miter off the priest’s head, dash the Eucharist to the ground, burn the vestments, smash the images, and overturn the altar – yet inexplicably seize their Holy Book and declare it an infallible oracle. - G. K. Chesterton
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Contarini
Guest
The classical, traditional Protestant definition of “Sola Scriptura” does not say that the Church has no authority. That’s one reason why I think the phrase is misleading, myself.
Yes, that can certainly be said from a traditional Protestant perspective.
Indeed. It does not however follow necessarily either that the Church is formally infallible or that any present Christian community possesses exactly the same kind and degree of authority as the early Church.
I don’t think it’s gibberish, although I do think both sides need to talk to each other about what they mean by the language they use. What Protestants mean by this is that the Church did not give the Bible any intrinsic quality it did not already possess. The Church recognized that God had inspired Scripture. The Church did not have the right or authority to choose different books. I think we can argue over whether that is really anything different from the Catholic position. But it itn’t gibberish–it excludes for instance the suggestion of Alexei Khomiakov that the Creeds of the Councils are part of Scripture and that more Scripture might yet be written, since Scripture is simply any writing that the Church acknowledges. (Note: Khomiakov was Orthodox, not Catholic, and many Orthodox criticize him on many counts.)
It is quite possible to trust A on the authority of B while granting A more authority than B. The example C. S. Lewis used is that of a college professor. I tell my students all the time “such-and-such a book is one of the best treatments of that subject–the author knows a lot more than I do about this.” There is nothing illogical about the students trusting my (limited and fallible) authority and thus trusting the book even more on my recommendation.
Of course, the analogy is limited by the fact that the scholar to whom I send my students is also fallible. This is a problem only if you think that infallibility is an epistemological problem–that what I need is infallible knowledge of the truth. But in that case, as Protestants have frequently pointed out, you have infinite regress–at some point you have to accept the infallible authority on a fallible basis.
I think that this is the wrong way to approach the issue entirely. I don’t think that infallible authority is the only meaningful kind, and I don’t think that the question of authority in the Church should be approached as an epistemological problem. (See William Abraham, Canon and Criterion.)
The length of the process surely indicates that it wasn’t as simple as the Magisterium issuing the appropriate decree. I know that this is a caricature of the Catholic view, but it’s the impression you’d get from a lot of Catholic posters on this forum.
Or that it does not belong to the body currently in communion with Rome. In that case Protestants need to look more seriously at the Orthodox. I have become convinced recently that I need to look more seriously at the Orthodox, but I’ve had this impulse before and we’ll see if it goes anywhere.
Edwin
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Contarini
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That sounds like a paraphrase, not a quote, of Chesterton. Certainly the passage I remember to that effect was differently worded.
But yes, that’s the point Chesterton made.
Edwin
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PRmerger
Guest
Do you believe the corollary is also possible: It is quite possible to trust A on the authority of B, while granting B more authority than A?
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Contarini
Guest
It would be a reach to say that this is enough to describe their view of the churches in communion with Rome (of course they wouldn’t have called those churches “the Catholic Church,” and it’s confusing to use that language when talking about them, because then a statement like “they didn’t intend to break with the Catholic Church” becomes highly ambiguous). But it wouldn’t be a reach at all to say that they used that language quite frequently.
Reconciliation with whom or with what? Luther said that if the Pope would allow the preaching of the Gospel, Luther would be happy to submit to the Pope. Of course, Luther was confident this wouldn’t happen, so it was easy to say. Since Luther was convinced that the Papacy was Antichrist by about 1520, I think it’s a stretch to say that he was genuinely interested in reunion with the Papacy at any point after that. Melanchthon and Bucer and others were engaged in dialogue, and Luther frequently expressed his reservations about these efforts. Furthermore, even these more moderate figures seem to have been looking for reunion not with the Papacy but with reform-minded Catholic theologians. Melanchthon and Bucer agreed in an exchange of letters around 1537 that they did not expect or desire union with the Papacy. What they seem to have been aiming for was the formation of national churches in which Protestant teachings could be proclaimed freely under a broad umbrella. Many Catholic liturgical practices which the Protestants questioned could be allowed to continue until “clearer” and “purer” ideas prevailed. In other words, they were looking for something very much like Anglicanism, and even then they expected that there would be a progressive movement away from elements of the “old church” which they saw as insufficiently Biblical. (The dilemma the moderate Puritans faced later on was what to do when that movement looked like it was being stalled or even reversed.)
I think it does.
It was established, at least in the final stages in the fourth century, by people who thought monasticism was the highest form of Christianity. Don’t you think this creates problems for people who agree with Luther that monasticism is intrinsically evil, and that the purer and holier forms of monasticism prevailing in the early Church were actually *worse *because they gave a color of godliness to a form of life rooted in workd righteousness?
That’s just one example. The Christianity of the Reformers is radically different from the Christianity of the early Church. Many of the things which the Reformers saw as the *root *problems with Catholicism can easily be traced back to the early Church. Protestants typically avoid dealing with this by focusing on the obvious “fruit” issues such as indulgences. But Luther had the insight to recognize that the roots went much further back.
But the old attitude was much *more *defensible. If the Papacy is the Antichrist, then the actions of the Reformers were justified. If the doctrines and practices of the Papacy and the churches in union with the Papacy were basically Christian, then Luther was a schismatic and the Reformation a horrible mistake.
Edwin
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Contarini
Guest
Well obviously, although actually this is less useful because why not just listen to B! It’s only relevant if one has limited access to B or if B hasn’t spoken on the issues in question (or, in the professor analogy, if one just wants multiple opinions since both A and B are fallible).
This is the most basic argument in favor of some form of Sola Scriptura. If the living teach of the Church is at least as authoritative as Scripture, there is really no need for Scripture at all. But if Scripture is more authority than the Church, we still obviously need the Church for all the reasons Catholics give (Scripture doesn’t interpret itself and doesn’t speak explicitly on many issues at all, and we need a living community to help us live out the teachings of Scripture).
The way around this is to say–as the Orthodox typically do–that Scripture is part of the Church’s Tradition.
Edwin
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Contarini
Guest
It’s obviously open to question which of the teachings and practices which one can find proposed or engaged in by members of the Church, even members in positions of teaching authority, are guided by the Holy Spirit and which are not. For instance, the mind of your Communion presently seems to be that the doctrine of limbo was not the result of the Holy Spirit’s guidance–that it was a well-meaning but unnecessary human theory. Of course, the typical Catholic response to this is that limbo–and many other things that Catholics of the past would have thought were Church teaching–was never official teaching at all. In other words, you have to make very fine and careful distinctions between various ways in which things commonly taught and believed in the Church are or are not “Church teaching.” You have to do this because many things commonly believed in the Church are obviously *not *the result of the Spirit’s guidance.
In short, your claim that “all the Church’s doctrines” were guided by the Holy Spirit can only be maintained after you have made a lot of rather elaborate distinctions to clarify what is and is not a “doctrine of the Church.” And it’s clear that different Catholics in different times and places, and even at the same time and place, differ on how to make these distinctions.
So there’s no way to escape the fact that when you hear a priest preach a sermon, or read something in a Catholic book, or even read a papal encyclical, whether or not what you hear or read is guided by the Holy Spirit or not (and hence entirely and infallibly true) is very much open to question.
This doesn’t refute the Catholic position. It refutes your overly simplistic argument for the Catholic position.
Edwin
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PRmerger
Guest
'zactly! And the fact that B has declared A to be C is known only because B has declared it so.
Except, as I stated above, if the Church has declared that one needs Scripture.
Huh? How does it follow that if Scripture is more authoritative than the Church we would need the Church to interpret?
Yup! I’ve heard that said in Catholic circles as well.
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Contarini
Guest
You’re making some very big assumptions about what that means.
You couldn’t know it with utter clarity and certainty. But that’s only a problem if you start from the highly dubious assumption that this is either possible or necessary.
With complete clarity and certainty? Why? What makes you think this?
Why not just seek truth the best we can, and trust in God’s mercy? What makes you think that this is insufficient?
Never mind that your position obviously falls apart because it’s circular–you would have to have an infallible authority telling you that the infallible authority is infallible in the first place. Karl Keating attempted to avoid this problem by an argument drawn from the “Old Princeton” Calvinist theologians, saying that you can establish the historicity of Scripture by purely rational methods and then have complete confidence in the Church based on that. But this attempt fails hopelessly for two reasons:
- Most basically, the evidence regarding the historicity of Scripture simply isn’t enough to support this. The only way Keating gets that kind of confidence is by starting with the assumption that Scripture is historically accurate. (Leave alone the question of whether Scripture really teaches that Jesus established an infallible Church.) Most scholars think that Mark 8 is probably closer to what Jesus actually said than Matt. 16, for instance, if they think that the “confession of Peter” incident happened at all.
- Even if Keating’s argument worked, it wouldn’t in fact get around the “infallible interpreter” problem. If you could have that kind of certainty based on historical investigation with regard to the historicity Scripture, then you could presumably be confident as to which books were canonical as well. That is in fact what the Old Princetonians who originally invented this argument thought.
Edwin
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crazzeto
Guest
@Cortani,
It’s quite possibe & necessary because we do need know with certain what exactly is required to be saved. If we can’t even know with cirtainty what the canon of scripture is (and unless what I state is true, then there is absolutly no reliable means of knowing this) then exactly how do you think we’re supposed to know how we are saved (a much more complex issue, which rely’s upon the scripture to discern)?
It’s quite possibe & necessary because we do need know with certain what exactly is required to be saved. If we can’t even know with cirtainty what the canon of scripture is (and unless what I state is true, then there is absolutly no reliable means of knowing this) then exactly how do you think we’re supposed to know how we are saved (a much more complex issue, which rely’s upon the scripture to discern)?
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Contarini
Guest
The declaration itself is evidence that Scripture has some kind of authority that nothing else has. Of course we can say that Scripture is the most authoritative part of Tradition, or that in Scripture the Church speaks most authoritatively, being most indubitably guided by the Holy Spirit, or whatever. But the only reasonable conclusion from the way the Church has historically spoken about Scripture is that Scripture has a unique authority *in the context of *the life of the Church.
I think you are confusing “more authoritative” with something like “more useful for answering any question we might have.” This is understandable, since many enthusiastic Protestants have made exactly this confusionHuh? How does it follow that if Scripture is more authoritative than the Church we would need the Church to interpret?
My point is that Scripture is much more limited in its range and extent than the teaching of the Church (if we are distinguishing the two, that is). The life and [non-canonical] teaching of the Church extends over two thousand years now, whereas the NT was written in a matter of decades. The Church is still around and can still speak to new issues. The Church can further clarify its position, etc.
In other words, I’m making all the points that Catholic apologists make. Obviously we need the Church, no matter how authoritative Scripture is.
I suppose I’m just repeating what I said earlier. I don’t know how to make it clearer, since I don’t understand why you find this odd, unless as I said you are giving “authoritative” a very broad meaning indeed.
Indeed. But Catholic doctrine seems to distinguish more clearly both between Scripture (as something inspired by the Holy Spirit once for all) and Tradition (as the ongoing life of the Spirit in the Church), and between Tradition (the Word of God still living and active in the Church) and the Church (the Body of Christ which listens to the Word of God). Hence the statement that the Church is the servant of the Word and not its master–the Word here referring both to Scripture and Tradition.Yup! I’ve heard that said in Catholic circles as well.
The Orthodox seem less interested in these distinctions (typical of them), which allows a maverick lay theologian like Khomiakov to make the extreme statement he did.
Edwin
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Contarini
Guest
Why do we need to know this with certainty? We don’t save ourselves. God saves us. Yes, we need to cooperate with God, but the point is that salvation isn’t like studying a manual and figuring out which buttons to push to make the machine work. It’s more like (to use a metaphor from Scripture itself) listening to the voice of the shepherd. You don’t need to have a set of infallible criteria to tell you when the shepherd is speaking. You just need to develop a relationship with the shepherd, and to pay proper (but not unquestioning) respect to the sheep who are older and wiser and know the shepherd better than you do.
You are wrong there too. Infallible and reliable are not the same thing.
Why do you think that? It seems the other way round to me.
How exactly is knowing whether Judith is canonical or not going to affect my salvation? And don’t give me “because if Judith isn’t canonical then the Gospels might not be either.” Maybe I have criteria for knowing about the Gospels that don’t apply to Judith. I’m asking how Judith specifically affects my salvation.
What about the Rule of Faith? I think you’re being the “sola scriptura” person here
The Bible isn’t a salvation manual, as the fundamentalists believe.
But the bigger issue here is that I don’t think we are saved by knowing how to be saved. Again, salvation isn’t a technique. It’s the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. All we need is to respond to the voice of the Holy Spirit. And since God is merciful, we can be humbly confident that if we *do *make an honest mistake God will not allow our souls to be lost as a result.
Edwin
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PRmerger
Guest
Well, yes, Contarini, it does indeed have some “kind of authority that nothing else has”. It is the Word of God.
No Catholic here is going to dispute that with you!
Yes, and?
I am only using your words, Contarini. YOU said this:I think you are confusing “more authoritative” with something like “more useful for answering any question we might have.” This is understandable, since many enthusiastic Protestants have made exactly this confusion
Then we are agreed.
What we find odd is that Protestants believe that Scripture is the final arbiter of theological disputes.
Clearly, Scripture cannot be the final arbiter. (See the 40,000 Christian denominations reference).
The final arbiter, that is, the “authority”, must be the Church.
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