My wheelchair was nearly destroyed by a car last night. That's a bit melodramatic, I suppose, because it is intact and undamaged. But we'd left my power chair ("Red Sam" in the official designation) in-between the maze of cars parked out front of Chris Yee's house for Bible Study. [Isn't that a Protestant Bible study?--ed.] They are good friends, and it is not under any official auspices. [Not BSF?--ed.] They're BSF guys, but it's not a BSF study. Anyway, I wasn't worried; I made a joke about calling the vendor the next day: "What seems to be the problem, sir?" 'Well, it was destroyed by a car.' As it happened, a guy bumped into it at slow speed. His car got the worst of it. And this only reinforces what I've said for a solid 13 years [Quickie commercial coming] If you want a power wheelchair that lasts, get a Quickie. They're fast, obviously, and they're tanks. Heck, my old one still would work, but the batteries are shot. Probably the greatest invention in the history of power wheelchairs is the metal foot-rest. When the things were mostly plastic (and we're talking the swing-away rests here) you could snap them by driving fast with them swung out, even if you didn't run into anything. Stupid.
I didn't come here to tell you that, as the great Cosby says. I'm beginning to realize what my role in the world is: I'm a provocateur, and I bring clarity when people are content with unclarity. It happened last night. And it made me sound angry. I wasn't. I just took note of the fact that all the possible answers for how to understand this text we were addressing were on the table except the right one. The Kingdom of God and the Church have to be the same thing. This was the text. I take it for granted that Jesus views the Kingdom of God in positive, glowing terms. I still haven't figured out why the Reformed separate the two. Why did we even begin to talk about how "leaven" often refers to sin in the New Testament? It obviously doesn't here, even if we grant that the birds of the air are evil, like they appear to be in the Parable of the Sower. Is not the Kingdom of God the place where God reigns? Has He not promised to be our God, and we will be his people? Last I heard, we were a spiritual house where God dwells by His Spirit. Oh, wait, he's talking about the Church. Exactly! But if somehow they were separate, isn't this a way of saying, "To hell with the Church"? The Reformed, we might say if we were being impolite, got around these thorny problems by absolutizing our lack of freedom and responsibility, and relativizing the Church. [That's not fair.--ed.] Oh? I think it is. If you can't find it, you're not guilty of being outside it. That solves one problem. Also, it is granted to be much easier to believe in the Church as the spotless bride of Christ if none of these terrible collections of people is put forward as the actual intended. Pardon me for being rude, but I've never known an invisible pillar in my entire life. If I were you, I wouldn't trust the guy promising to build your house on an invisible foundation, either. True, it didn't stop the Westminster assembly from trying to have it both ways on the matter. Not that it'd help if they chose the visible, because the fractions in that family allegedly following the same will would be hilarious, if it weren't so sad (and confusing). I do have to salute them, though; at one point, they were as opposed to 'toleration' as any medieval papist, and probably worse. They'd surely freak out if they saw what passes for 'normal' in ecclesiology today. Man, I didn't come to talk about that, either. I can't encapsulate the core of a really big problem any better than this. It doesn't commend the solution as obvious, true; still, it deserves a real answer, now.
I didn't come here to tell you that, as the great Cosby says. I'm beginning to realize what my role in the world is: I'm a provocateur, and I bring clarity when people are content with unclarity. It happened last night. And it made me sound angry. I wasn't. I just took note of the fact that all the possible answers for how to understand this text we were addressing were on the table except the right one. The Kingdom of God and the Church have to be the same thing. This was the text. I take it for granted that Jesus views the Kingdom of God in positive, glowing terms. I still haven't figured out why the Reformed separate the two. Why did we even begin to talk about how "leaven" often refers to sin in the New Testament? It obviously doesn't here, even if we grant that the birds of the air are evil, like they appear to be in the Parable of the Sower. Is not the Kingdom of God the place where God reigns? Has He not promised to be our God, and we will be his people? Last I heard, we were a spiritual house where God dwells by His Spirit. Oh, wait, he's talking about the Church. Exactly! But if somehow they were separate, isn't this a way of saying, "To hell with the Church"? The Reformed, we might say if we were being impolite, got around these thorny problems by absolutizing our lack of freedom and responsibility, and relativizing the Church. [That's not fair.--ed.] Oh? I think it is. If you can't find it, you're not guilty of being outside it. That solves one problem. Also, it is granted to be much easier to believe in the Church as the spotless bride of Christ if none of these terrible collections of people is put forward as the actual intended. Pardon me for being rude, but I've never known an invisible pillar in my entire life. If I were you, I wouldn't trust the guy promising to build your house on an invisible foundation, either. True, it didn't stop the Westminster assembly from trying to have it both ways on the matter. Not that it'd help if they chose the visible, because the fractions in that family allegedly following the same will would be hilarious, if it weren't so sad (and confusing). I do have to salute them, though; at one point, they were as opposed to 'toleration' as any medieval papist, and probably worse. They'd surely freak out if they saw what passes for 'normal' in ecclesiology today. Man, I didn't come to talk about that, either. I can't encapsulate the core of a really big problem any better than this. It doesn't commend the solution as obvious, true; still, it deserves a real answer, now.
Comments
Second, if Church and Kingdom are analogous entirely, is Christ only king over those within the Church? Or, if Christ is king over all the earth, then how do we intelligibly define the Church?
Third, if things must be visible to be believed in, if God's kingdom is loving and shows his glory, and the church is both entirely visible and completely analogous with his kingdom, then what do we do when that Church was far more wicked (or, at least, as wicked) than that which was outside it? What do we do if it is so today?
Second, of course Christ is King over all the Earth, and he has authority over every person. This is not in serious dispute. In addition, Lumen Gentium deals with that question better than I could, and since the people which produced that make the claim to be the Church which Christ founded, all the better reason to consider it and that claim.
Wickedness is irrelevant to the claims themselves; there is wickedness in every group of people, and in fact, the 16th century was no more wicked than any other period. What relation does the evil have to the novel doctrines of the Reformers? The fact that a person of any stripe can look at those events and call them evil testifies to the purity of God and the truth. I never met perfect people anyplace, have you? This is a silly argument. Another serious problem is that the means provided by the Reformers is not able to provide ANYTHING CLOSE to a reasonable level of confidence as to what this 'Church'--whether visible or invisible--is supposed to believe. If faith AT LEAST requires assent to revealed Truth from God, this is a huge problem. You end up with something 10 times more universalist than the worst Roman cleric thought of, because "conscience" is about as useful a guide as a screen-door on a submarine. Sooner or later, the Church has to be something external, binding its members to the Truth with which it has been entrusted. If "heresy" (and schism) is as transient as our denominational affiliations, we really can't know anything concerning Christ. I thought Fred put it well there: Either the Holy Spirit is leading people to mutually contradictory truths about doctrine, or someone has made an error with respect to how Truth is ascertained. Jesus promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church; what you must decide is whether you mean to say that the Church you envision is a Church of one, or if you've made a mistake in identifying the Church.
Ultimately, your argument is a fine one, but it only makes sense if I assume what you assume. To a Protestant, it does not make sense. (Nor to someone outside of Christianity altogether.) It makes a little more sense for the Orthodox, but they'd say, "yes, so that's why you should give up your Western innovations."
And thus we return where we always return. I think the key point I'd make is that we as Protestants are not necessarily less interested in the question you raise in your post. But, for the life of me, I can't get that question to lead me where it leads you. My epistemology is very comfortable where I am, thus my point where I get stuck is where it always is: we agree all the way up to the end of the New Testament; now, show me (without assuming anything) how I move from those books to the Magisterium.
That is, if this is true, I should be able to take what came before and feel necessarily compelled to what follows without first having to assume what follows is inerrant.
You think I'm assuming something; All I did was ask what the church looked like (how she understood herself) prior to 1517. Who were her leaders, and how do you know? It's a red herring to suggest that I believe personal holiness is irrelevant; of course it's pertinent. But the question still remains: Who speaks with authority for Jesus Christ? Where is His Church? Where did it go after the apostles died? What is the faith once delivered to all the saints? Can we claim to hold it if we cannot declare it? If there is no ordinary means of salvation outside the Church, (WCF, by the way) then I'd say this is no minor question. I take the ecclesio-epistemic uncertainty that you're allegedly comfortable with as definitive proof that Reformational ecclesiology was wrong. And the theology that followed can't be tested or disproven! I don't need to prove Rome correct; what it claimed was never completely without precedent. Obviously, western cultural captivity is not the essence of being Catholic; I attended an Eastern Catholic liturgy where its only distinguishing feature from John Chrysostom's liturgy practiced by the Orthodox was a profession of loyalty to the Bishop of Rome.
If I say that I am right, I have to ask how it is possible that the Church could be wrong. If the Church could be wrong, then we are left with ecclesial deism: I am forced to conclude that God does not preserve the Church (however it is defined) from error. But if that is the case there is likewise no reason to suppose that I have been preserved from error. Consequently there is no principled reason to suppose that I am right rather than the Church. But if this is the case, then there seems to be no way that I can know what God has revealed, and Protestantism’s claims about how we know revealed truth do not work. Consequently they are false.
So I think that this is a fair question to put to the Reformers. If the Catholic Church can be wrong in what she teaches, why should we accept what Luther and Calvin said instead?"
I've posted the sharpest part of Noltie's article "The Accidental Catholic," and http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/05/the-tu-quoque/ as a possible answer to part of your question.
As to the church having error in the second century, I don't find that difficult to accept, given that God's people have always had a mix of error and truth. As I said before, back before Christ, you had actual prophets trying tobcorrect the people, and the establishment still would get off course. Jesus himself taught and there was still error within the "church." For that matter, even within the apostles, you had one traitor and one well meaning, but quick to put his foot in his mouth guy.
You admit that the church could show wickedness, so the question becomes "how can it err, just as it did even before Christ, but yet it is never erring on doctrine?"
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