A
Aelred_Minor
Guest
This thread as gone on from where it was when I asked the question (and indeed this answer was already there when I asked it). Anyway, I agree that God is the break in the circle, though I’m not sure whether we are on the same page in terms of how and why.
The Church produced the Bible and defined it as inspired scripture, and the Bible supports the claims of the Church to authority. This can be seen as circular reasoning. Granting the God-given authority of either of the two breaks the circle and allows us to accept both. But on what basis can we accept that a claimed divine revelation or religious authority is authentic?
We can look at the effect of the purported revelation on history and on individual people’s lives. We can observe what appears by our own lights to be beauty and goodness in the message itself. But these things are only motives for belief. They may make us want to believe in the revelation, or may prompt us to put a sort of partial faith in it, but the complete faith and trust that are called for by the revelation itself are not rationally possible on the basis of these kind of motives of credibility alone.
Likewise when it comes to interpretation, we have our own intelligence and that of “experts” to rely on, but neither of these is worthy of complete trust. So again, even if for the sake of argument the validity of a certain religious text were granted, our own interpretation of it would still be suspect and so our ultimate beliefs would still be built on sand.
What is the answer to this problem? The answer to the first part of it is easier: divine faith. By natural human faith alone neither the authority of the Bible nor that of the Church can be accepted in an absolute sense. Attempts to accept them in an absolute sense by one’s own power would simply amount to contemptible self-deception, something which could only lead someone farther from the true God. It is only by the supernatural intervention of God that we can accept revelation with complete confidence without any self-deception. This we call “divine faith” to distinguish it from the ordinary natural “human” kind of faith which is necessarily always a partial, hesitant faith that holds off complete intellectual assent.
This answers the first issue of how one can accept the Bible and the Church. Or, rather, in answers how we can accept Scripture, Tradition, and the authority of the Magisterium all at once, not axiomatically accepting one of the three and deriving the authority of the other two from it, or worse using circular (or in this case, we might say “loopy”) reasoning to accept each of the three on the basis of the other two.
That still leaves the question of interpretation. An objection could be raised, and is in fact sometimes raised, that a Catholic still must privately interpret the teachings of his own Church once they are heard. There is some truth to this. Perhaps, therefore, the idea of private interpretive guidance by the Holy Spirit should not be rejected as completely as it sometimes is by Catholics. However, there is at least this distinction: the Church, unlike the Bible, can respond to and reject misinterpretations of Her teachings and can clarify matters that many people find unclear. Thus the problem posed by private interpretation is at least lessened as much as it can be and there is far less excuse for bizarre interpretations.