Skip to main content
What that dude said. Seriously, if I write like jazz, he writes like a symphony. Being the spiritual infant that I am, I'm going to keep asking, "Where does dogma come from?" of my putative debate partners on this site. When a Catholic says, "Your appeal to authority is unprincipled," he is saying that it is unclear how you arrive say, at Nicene Trinitarian faith by the means you have chosen (the Protestant canon of Scripture, and appeal to the Holy Spirit). It's just as easy to arrive at somewhere else entirely by the same means. Nicea and Chalcedon (and whatever one decides were "correct" appeals to Scripture) didn't come from thin air. Absent some principle (like, "An ecumenical council is always infallible by its nature") you can't accept one and reject others arbitrarily. You can see just by talking to people that if Tradition in the Catholic Church stands as a monument to...something, that each community formed at the Reformation (and the persons within them) agrees and disagrees at different points with it. That's quite apart from the question of whether that monument is a monument to the Truth. But I realized the nature of the beast in this: We can't all be right. That is, to be more specific, the Methodist dissent and the Reformed dissent (for example) cannot both be correct in the same way at the same time.
In fact, the subjectivity problem inherent in Sola Scriptura is not an argument for Catholicism so much as it is an argument against any one confessional position within Protestantism. Thus, it requires a person to identify the true bases of authority for the particular claims made from that position. By the nature of the case, Sola Scriptura cannot coexist with a visible Church. If I cannot identify one concrete real community with the Church Christ established (because in humility, I want to recognize Christians outside of us--sound great and heroic, doesn't it?) I am saying at the least that my community does not have the authority to bind and loose, to proclaim to the world definitively "the true gospel." I could believe that it doesn't matter, but no one does this, because it does. But who has the real power in this scenario? The individual does. The church has already agreed with the man that they are not divinely sanctioned by Christ with the infallible Truth. "The purest Churches under Heaven..." and all that. Well, how does anyone know truth from error in the first place? It'd be enough to make a person an agnostic but for two things: There's still this matter of the Monolith (the monument from earlier). Where'd it come from? HAL keeps saying that it thinks it is the Guardian of All Truth. The other screeching monkeys are none too pleased, but oddly enough, it keeps leaving stuff that the various monkey-tribes use from time to time. It's obvious to all the monkeys, when the fighting dies down, that they're the same, largely, anyway. And sometimes, the monkeys join in fighting the Monolith, as pointless as that is. (And of course, there's always a few renegade monkeys who don't listen to any others, nor borrow things, but they usually die.) But how'd it get here? What if everything the monkeys are did come from the thing? I digress by way of a horrid sci-fi metaphor.
The second thing is, this monument has an account of how it got here. It lives and speaks, and it tells the story of how we all got here. It could be lying; one of the other tribes could be our point of origin, but it doesn't seem very likely. Nothing else accounts for what the monkeys know.
So we all have to ask ourselves, "Is the Catholic Church the one Christ founded?" If this is the wrong question, simply tell me which one is. Better yet, why is your (invisible) "Church" and "catholicity" any better than anyone else's? Unless you speak for God, who cares what you say? And I might've tried one of the other guys, but he can't say he speaks for God, either. Each Protestant story has a plausibility structure at least as plausible as any other, within the system. That's not a difficult problem to be overcome; that's a crisis. It flat-out calls the Holy Spirit a liar or a lunatic, not the Lord and giver of life He is.
The Catholic paradigm is better before we even start, because it at least explains how we arrive at Divine truth. The Protestant paradigm can't even do that. There is no infallibility at all. Sure, God doesn't lie, but we can't know what He said exactly. We'll just tell each other we've got it mostly right, and we'll see when we get to Heaven! Well, let me at least make sure you're not a JW or a Mormon, even though I can't exclude you in a principled way, either.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Friend I Once Had, And The Dogmatic Principle

 I once had a friend, a dear friend, who helped me with personal care needs in college. Reformed Presbyterian to the core. When I was a Reformed Presbyterian, I visited their church many times. We were close. I still consider his siblings my friends. (And siblings in the Lord.) Nevertheless, when I began to consider the claims of the Catholic Church to be the Church Christ founded, he took me out to breakfast. He implied--but never quite stated--that we would not be brothers, if I sought full communion with the Catholic Church. That came true; a couple years later, I called him on his birthday, as I'd done every year for close to ten of them. He didn't recognize my number, and it was the most strained, awkward phone call I have ever had. We haven't spoken since. We were close enough that I attended the rehearsal dinner for his wedding. His wife's uncle is a Catholic priest. I remember reading a blog post of theirs, that early in their relationship, she told him of the p
Hilarious Com-Box Quote of The Day: "I was caught immediately because it is the Acts of the Apostles, not the Acts of the Holy Spirit Acting Erratically."--Donald Todd, reacting to the inartful opposition of the Holy Spirit and the Magisterium. Mark Galli, an editor at Christianity Today, had suggested that today's "confusion" in evangelicalism replicates a confusion on the day of Pentecost. Mr. Todd commented after this reply , and the original article is here. My thoughts: By what means was this Church-less "consensus" formed? If the Council did not possess the authority to adjudicate such questions, who does? If the Council Fathers did not intend to be the arbiters, why do they say that they do? At the risk of being rude, I would define evangelicalism as, "Whatever I want or need to believe at any particular time." Ecclesial authority to settle a particular question is a step forward, but only as long as, "God alone is Lord of the con

Just Sayin.' Again.

One interesting objection to this chart has been to say that one gets stuck in a "loop" that doesn't resolve. This is a thinly-veiled way of putting forward the argument that we don't need absolute certainty in religious dogma. But Fred Noltie already dealt with this in the comments on another post. And to the specific objector, no less. I'll be blunt: The only principled thing to do is put down your Bible, resign your pulpit, and lead tours in Europe. Because a man must be able to distinguish dogma from human opinion, and this epistemology doesn't allow us to do that. One of dogma's distinguishing characteristics is infallibility; another is certainty. Without this, essential characteristics of God Himself are put into question. If we say that the most important Person any person could know is God, and the content of that knowledge (doctrine) is the means by which we know Him, it must be certain. This Reformed argument that certainty is a dangerous or un