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If God Says Something

Let us leave aside what has been already said, and zoom in for a moment on supernatural revelation and communication. It is no trouble to grant that man would not be able to receive revealed truth from God unless he were assisted. In fact, he has been assisted. But if we are to say that salvation rests in the assent and application of divinely revealed truths, then man's deficiency must be overcome. It would seem that this has not been difficult, for the prophets have spoken infallibly even under the first covenant. One obvious reason why God would cause this to occur is that he wishes to be known, and in that knowledge, humanity may obtain salvation. Even granting that salvation does not consist solely in knowledge, but in love, we call to mind the axiom that one cannot love what one does not know.

God wishes to be known, and man has the capacity to know. The question is therefore, "To whom has God made Himself known?" In the first place, the patriarchs, Moses, and those who succeeded him. Though God was never averse to sharing His mercy outside of Israel, their centrality in the plan of God was understood by them, and those they encountered. We all know of Korah's rebellion. There was an authorized spokesman then; why not now?

My interlocutor reminds me that the Councils did not occur in a vacuum. That's really the point: It doesn't matter what the bishops had cluttering their minds and hearts; what comes out is the work of God. There is no principled reason to accept the Council of Nicea as true, and reject all others. Likewise, there is no reason to prefer the orthodox reading of the Scriptures, either. Here is the billion-dollar question, and I really want you to think and pray about this: Would we even know what "orthodoxy" was, without the Catholic Church?

This is why I'm not terribly enamored of enumerating all of the great truths that come out of Lutheranism, or the Anglican Communion; to borrow something I said earlier, I've seen this movie before. The distinctions are what matters, because those distinctions make the difference between a Lutheran and a Catholic. If they didn't, we wouldn't bother discussing it. This should, by the way, murder any notion that we are united in those essentials that people are going on about. Or I suppose the polite word is "distinctives." Well, I'll save you some time: the "distinctives" are important, and supremely so. That's why I appreciate those who hold unswervingly to those distinctives, no matter their origin or content. In my mind as a Catholic, I think of it this way: There is theological meaning in historical, dogmatic, and ecclesial continuity. The basis for the Catholic Church's claim to be the Church Christ founded is in fact this continuity, and that it has its origin in God who reveals.

If Nicea is the work of God, then the Catholic Church is the Church. It was under the authority of the Bishop of Rome, and the bishops in communion with him. If he had somehow hijacked the true Church from someone else, nobody there seemed to mind. Well, those people you named minded; but they don't count, right? Let's be plain for a moment: Why would the Church treat a dissenter from Trent any differently than a dissenter from Nicea? It's ad hoc to say it was a heroic defense of the faith in the first, and a needless abuse of power in the second.

You object that I presuppose a visible Church, and that it's Catholic. In the first case, it must be. A fundamentally invisible Church calls the Holy Spirit a liar. Two mutually exclusive doctrines concerning the same thing cannot both come from God, and thus, be true. This is why I turned in my own journey to how the visible communities function. It proved to me that the Church had to be visible. If you try someone for heresy, but you have already decided that the Church is not limited to this community or that one, but somehow spans them all, both the punishers and the punished may believe legitimately they are correct. That is, still in the Church! Literally, who's to say? What are you going to do? Invent a category of super-duper heresy, that somehow actually means the heretic is going to Hell? On whose authority? Just reason this out with me: In order for that to stick, the church must be visible, and it must be, at least in certain circumstances, infallible. Say this for Calvin: he at least had the guts to say that if you didn't agree with him and his community, you were headed for Hell. That little voice in our head tells us (rightly) that Jesus didn't leave the keys in the hands of a random French guy in Switzerland in 1540 or so. Actually, nothing Jesus does concerning eternal life gets lost, and needs "recovering." I digress. Suffice to say this: Nobody goes to eternal fire for violating the rules of the 'ol boys club. If your community is not divinely infallible, at least in certain circumstances, feel free to completely ignore what they say. "If God didn't say it, it doesn't matter." Not eternally, anyway. Isn't this why your ecclesiology is collapsing? The world of Sola Scriptura creates a million "Here I stand; I can do no other" moments, maybe even each day, and whether those are good or bad is a matter of taste.

Let me be clear: I think the appeal to "historic Christian orthodoxy" is a good one. I daresay only that you have failed to realize the full implications of its reality; it does not need fashioning or rebuilding, at least not in the main. Where we agree, we agree. What of the rest of it?

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