Is the Church Flawed?

It seems to me that this is the real question behind Protestant-Catholic disputes. The fact of human sin constitutes the open and shut proof against the Catholic notion of holiness, which is really indefectibility. We are the members of the Body of Christ; we are flawed; therefore, the Church is flawed, or so it goes.

But hold on a minute. Setting aside the difference in ascertaining the content of divine truth--Sacred Scripture* vs. Sacred Scripture and Tradition--it seems like we're owed an answer as to where unsullied dogma comes from. If we can't trust the visible institutional church made up of sinners, somehow we are supposed to trust one person who himself is a sinner? The Holy Spirit protects a man, but not a whole group of them?

Even if we were to ignore the "Church" part of this question, upon what basis would we hold any one of our opinions as a result of the hermeneutical process, given rival claims flowing from the same process? Adding "Church" back in, it cannot both be visible and invisible at the same time. Protestants are supposed to place a nearly absolute trust in the ecclesiastical determinations of a very visible community, while claiming that the real "Church" is invisible, especially when confronted with the dogmatic contradictions of those communities in dialogue!

This reality is exactly what we're talking about when we say that the ecclesiology is "collapsing." It's only as strong as the individual's "suspension of disbelief" as it were in regard to this inescapable truth: He is the arbiter--and he alone--of the real content of revelation, and the extent of the community's external authority. Indeed, it's not external at all, if its juridical decisions are presumed as provisional as his doctrinal conclusions.

Something has to give. Either you presume your hermeneutical process is infallible--which eliminates the need for the church to moderate the excesses of individualism--or the community is infallible. The community can't be infallible in the Protestant paradigm, because it was fallibility that provided the justification for the new communities in the first place. Even if it were asserted in contravention of the Protestant principles themselves, the historical anachronism of discontinuity poses a problem for each community in that regard.

Here's the crazy part: Whichever part you eliminate--whether the fallible church, or the fallibility of the hermeneutical process, we can't escape this: What's different from what we see, and how do we address it?

The Catholic Church's claim to be the Church Christ founded has this going for it, at least: It doesn't deny any of the data that pertains to things held in common. Put it this way: There is no principled reason to accept the first two ecumenical councils while rejecting the others. If we agree that they constitute orthodoxy, they constitute it on the terms offered by the councils themselves. On the other hand, if we consistently apply the idea that councils may err, we have no reason to suppose that Nicene or Chalcedonian Christology is the mark of true Christianity at all.

We are fooling ourselves if we think that interpreting the Bible by the methods we know leads inoxerably and inevitably to that Christological orthodoxy, as history and present experience surely show.

Brothers, if we cannot accept the Catholic Church's authority on the terms with which we engage the gospel at present, we owe it to ourselves to ask whether our terms with Christ are the right ones. Suppose we engage the Catholic claims on their own terms. If we find we have lost nothing of what we know now, the claims have the ring of likely truth, no? Suppose the accretions were added by us?

*Note: The Catholic Church has a larger canon of Sacred Scripture: 73 books, as opposed to the Protestant canon of 66 books.