Is our decision to embrace the faith fallible?

[Gary_Bandal]

I was in a discussion with a Calvinist and I pointed out that he had no way of knowing what the canon of Scripture was, because he did not have an infallible Church to tell him; he countered by stating that my decision to believe in the infallibility of the Catholic Church was also fallible, so that we are basically in the same boat. How would I answer this?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

It is true that you are fallible. So am I. So is your friend. People can and do embrace the Catholic faith for the wrong reasons. But just because we are fallible does not mean that infallibility does not exist at all. It does not mean that Jesus Christ could not have chosen to found a Church that he would endow with his own authority and protect from moral and doctrinal error. It does not mean that Jesus could not have chosen to gift his Vicar with a special charism of infallibility.

I think your friend will agree that since Christ is God himself, all things are possible for Christ. The only question on which we as Catholics and he as a Calvinist will disagree is this: Did Christ actually grant infallibility to his Church and in a special way to his Vicar, the Pope? Rather than allow your friend to shift the discussion from debating the Church’s infallibility to debating your own, keep bringing him back to the topic of whether or not Christ gave his Church and the Pope the gift of infallibility.

And, as a side note, it is worth mentioning that this discussion with your friend got to the point that it did because, by your account, you first made it personal by telling him that “he had no way of knowing what the canon of Scripture was, because he did not have an infallible Church to tell him.” When debating with a non-Catholic, do not make the issues personal by saying things like “you can’t know” or “you don’t have.” Such argumentation is known as ad hominem and should be avoided.