a) To be Christian, one must know what it means to be truly be a Christian
If we are to hold that Christianity is the true faith, then it must follow that we must be able to know what it is.
Depends on what you mean by “know.” We must have legitimate grounds for our belief that Christianity is true and has a particular “shape.” But if by “knowledge” you mean what Aquinas means by it, then (according to Aquinas, and I think he is right) no such knowledge is possible of matters known solely from divine revelation. At the purely intellectual level, these things will always be a matter of opinion. (Note: that doesn’t mean what many modern people mean by it–a whim or a hunch–an opinion held by a rational, intelligent person will of course have plenty of rational grounds, just not demonstrative proof that puts it beyond the possibility of doubt.) The certainty, according to Aquinas, comes from the virtue of faith, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
More modern Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, have responded to the reality of Christian disunity and the challenges of modern secularism by seeking a more “solid” epistemological foundation. These efforts seem to me to be consistently misguided.
At a given time we may not now it completely but we must know it as much as it pertains to the circumstance at hand and in full.
I’m not quite sure what this means.
If we cannot know the actual true faith, then it does follow that Christianity is pointless since no one really knows if what they believe is actually Christian.
Not pointless, just dependent on faith, as the truth of Christianity itself is. (Again, that doesn’t mean that we have no
grounds for our faith.)
b) To know what it truly means to be Christian, one needs an infallible source
This too seems to follow. We see this in the practice of even Protestants as they hold Scripture to be infallible. Of course, how they come to know if it is infallible is a big issue that suggests something missing in their thinking.
Some Protestants do fall into the error of grounding epistemological certainty in the infallibility of Scripture. The Catholic version of this is perhaps a bit better, but has the same fatal flaw. How do you know the Church is infallible?
The only answer to this that I’ve seen is the “spiral argument” popularized by Karl Keating (though it’s found in the Catholic Encyclopedia, so Keating didn’t make it up–the Protestant version, pertaining simply to Scripture, was made by Benjamin Warfield, I believe.) According to this argument,
- we can establish by purely historical grounds that Scripture is reliable;
- Scripture teaches that the Church is infallible
But both 1 and 2 are subject to all kinds of doubt. Most historians think that the “upon this rock” passage in Matt. 16, for instance (a key passage in the argument for infallibility from Scripture) was not said by Jesus but was added by the author of Matthew as a kind of theological commentary. Now they may be right, or they may be wrong, but just the possibility that they are right is enough to overthrow the argument. It is plainly false by any reasonable standard to claim that
purely by historical methods one can establish the complete reliability of Scripture. Where this is believed, it is believed as a matter of faith.
Furthermore, even if all historians agreed on the reliability of Scripture, the argument would still fail, for reasons pointed out by Aquinas: as a matter of principle, no claim about history can be proven with complete certainty by reason alone. It always remains possible that some evidence not yet discovered will knock currently accepted theories into a cocked hat. (This, of course, is also why one should be slow to abandon one’s beliefs based on current scholarly theories.)
Thus, positing the infallibility of the Church doesn’t help you with the basic “certainty problem.” You still have to explain how you know that the Church is infallible in the first place.
I think if one were to think a bit on this issue, the above seems clear. With respect to writings and oral traditions, we do know that it can appear ambiguous at times. There has to be someone who can step in and say “THIS is the right interpretation”.
But for this to have a chance of working (as an answer to the problem–in my opinion a false problem–you have raised), you’d have to have a person possessed of infallibility in
all their utterances. Catholicism does not claim this. (If you really want to be picky, you could argue that even a Pope who was infallible in everything he said would be subject to a kind of infinite regress–each statement clarifying the previous one would in turn need to be clarified. But in fact no such personal infallibility exists, by the common consent of all Christians, so we needn’t get that abstruse.) Only certain Papal and conciliar statements are infallible (besides the “ordinary magisterium,” which is, if anything, even harder to discern than the proper interpretation of Scripture). These statements often need to be explained, and the explanations are not usually themselves infallible (let alone the problem of discerning just which Papal and conciliar statements are infallible).
d) So infallibility seems to be a logical necessity for any religion
No, it doesn’t.
As for posterior arguments, they cannot be used because one cannot prove infallibility posteriori. It would be impossible to prove it logically because one has to presume knowledge of the infallible kind about what is been pronounced infallibly.
There is no demonstrative proof possible. But there are plausible arguments that show the reasonableness of the Catholic (as of the more broadly Christian) position.
Edwin
