But why do Catholics keep claiming they have infallible knowledge? It seems like you are saying the church is infallible, but the people can be error? If you can be in error how do you know you are right in reference to the church being infallible?
SS, I can tell you’re an honest inquirer, and not an anti-Catholic bigot like another poster recently banned here. God bless you.
Your question is a fair one. It’s true that the canon of the Bible is, for Catholics in place by the authority of the Church. We believe that by the charism of infallibility promised by Christ, the Church had the authority to determine that these (72) books in our canon are inspired. Because this is a matter of faith, the Church indeed had to claim infallibility here.
Before continuing, let us make it clear that the individual Catholic does not claim infallibility for himself. That lies with the Church’s teaching authority.
Ok, now we Catholics cannot use Scripture to prove the authority of the Church, then use the authority of the Church to prove the canon. That would be circular reasoning, and is a fallacy. Perhaps it will help for us to break down how we reason it.
- We use Scripture. BUT, we do not assume that Scripture is inspired. We don’t even need to know whether what’s said is true. For now, we only need to determine whether what we have are accurate copies of the original texts.
- We know this because of centuries of critical studies. We can be sure of the accuracy of other ancient literature, like Caesar, or Virgil, or Plato, and our Biblical manuscripts date back even closer to the originals. Textual criticism has determined that our texts are rather accurate. Now, Protestants accept this premise, so we have no problem here.
- Then we treat Scripture, specifically, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, as mere history (again, not yet inspired). In other words, now that we know the texts are accurate, we must now see whether they are historically correct. Since we’re treating the Gospels as mere history, we can compare them alongside other historical and secular works. Criticism tells us that the Gospels, especially that of Luke and Matthew were specifically written for historical purposes, and is confirmed by other non-biblical writers of the ancient world.
- But the most important witness is that the ancient Christian martyrs shed their blood rather than give up their witness to Christ. Their witness included all that Jesus did and said in the Gospels (remember, just historical for now). Including all his outlandish claims to be God and strange deeds that attest to this claim. Given that truth, there are two options: he was a madman, or he was exactly who he was: God
But the witness of the martyrs was of the Christ who rose from the dead, and was worshipped as God. The Gospels attest to the Resurrection, and Paul identifies it as the central point of our faith. The martyrs died for this belief, and no one dies for a hoax such as this (remember, that the martyrdom dates back to apostolic times, and these people claimed to WITNESS, not merely believe, the Resurrection). Why would they die for a known madman? It’s by this we know that Jesus was who he claimed to be: he was God, because he rose from the dead, and that’s a historical fact.
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