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Authority And Fullness

As I think back over the journey from Reformed seminarian to Catholic theologian impersonator, one of the hardest and best questions concerns the nature of the Church. If we say that the church catholic is fundamentally invisible, we then essentially eviscerate the visible community as a means of discerning divine truth, because the concept necessarily includes both what my visible community holds, and presumably its opposite held by someone else, provided that I have concluded this variance is permitted, and is not damnable heresy. Why I have the right to conclude anything concerning the true doctrine of God, and thus the contours of the community which declares it is a question I had avoided for too long. You either have to be a true-blue evangelical and say we lucked out, that the evangelical "consensus" (whatever that means) emerged context-less and chaotically--paging Mark Galli!--or you are duty-bound to submit to whomever and whatever you find that actually produced that consensus. So, we're actually asking twin questions: "Who is the actual arbiter of divine revelation?" and "What is the necessary function of my visible community, given that we are committed to a fundamentally invisible Church?" Man alive, you get hit with those two questions together, and your Protestant life will be over faster than "Firefly." Because it's really the same question/problem considered from two slightly different angles. The fundamental posture of any believer in the context of revealed religion is that of a receiver. Depending on one's dialogue partners, you could be discussing either the content or the means of reception, but if it is supernaturally revealed, that posture will not change. When my band-mates and I say, "There is no principled distinction between Solo Scriptura and Sola Scriptura" what we essentially mean is that the believer is not, and cannot be simply a receiver in the Protestant paradigm. If he is the arbiter, he cannot give unqualified assent to what has been revealed, because that arbitration is the qualification. You can lodge whatever objections you want to the fundamentalist, who explicitly states that he needs no help, no witness from history, but do you think you escape the same charge by coming up with a clever phrase ("derivative authority") and paying lip-service to "historic orthodoxy"? If I may stand in judgment of the epochs and heroes of Christian history, I do not kneel to them. Eventually, this becomes evident to all of clear mind, even if the alternative(s) seem fearfully unpalatable.
This is why the alternative is what I called, "Incarnational Exegesis." The dust had barely settled on the hill where Our Lord suffered, and He had already given Peter and His other apostles his own authority to bind and loose.
It has never been true to say that the Reformation gave us redemption accomplished, in contrast to Catholic error. All Christians openly confess that the ministrations of the New Covenant utterly rely on the person and work of Jesus Christ. This has always been about the application of that redemption. In the same way that a person who claims not to need "liturgical" worship really means, "You have the wrong liturgy," the person who says, "I have no need for further mediation between myself and God" really means, "You have the wrong mediator."
You can call it "ecclesial deism" or a "hermeneutic of rupture" or countless other things, but our hearts and minds ring out against it when we simply ask, "Would the God who gathered His people who were not a people, who wove a tapestry of truth with the threads of time over centuries until the coming of Christ, would he leave that Church, its gospel hidden for nearly as long?" Yeah, nothing personal, but it sounded pretty silly to me, also.

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