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I Still Want To Go Outside

But there are things that must be done. Like this post. And to finish the Romans thing, I hope. In my view, you are absolutely right: Problems with Protestantism do not a Catholic make. But they might re-open an intellectual door or five. And that's all God needs. The Big Interesting for me was the relation between the Holy Spirit, the believer, and the ecclesiastical authority to which he submits, and why. If I was not already thinking in this direction, I doubt Mathison's book would have been so compelling and troubling. Everybody needs to ask themselves on very specific terms, "Why do I believe this and not that? By what means and to what end? I realized very quickly that the reality that most disagreements in theology were absolutely in good faith, and that made it "worse." If I can say it like that. This is what I mean when I call the problem the Tyranny of the Plausible. Because it is not as though to baptize one's children or not has absolutely no scriptural support, no learned defenders, no holy men to speak for it on either side. That's just one example. Not adiaphora. Not even close. I could think of 10 others. And that's just "conservative" Protestants! When one believes another man has made an obvious and easily correctible mistake, it is easy to believe one is correct. When it becomes clear that it is far from "obvious," that's a crisis. You can ignore it if you want to, but it's still there. That's why I used the Captain Jack example with Gerhard Forde. The one cannot convince the other that his distinctives are correct. I find it horrifying that they wouldn't even try, but I digress.
So it stands to reason that each man would appeal to his church/ecclesial community, and on we go. But that's exactly where the question of the individual and the nature of his mediating authority demands an answer. And I don't find the Roger E. Olson version of "it's not important" all that terribly compelling, because choices in theology are more than just expressions of preference. They had better be. Or else we sin gravely right from the hop for no purpose. When I say the disagreements are in good faith, I mean that I do not believe that each man is intentionally holding a position for whimsy or deception. And so, unless one is entirely comfortable deciding for himself and blithely dismissing all others, the problem is not a small one. And most "nuanced" Protestants recognize exactly this problem, and want to deny the wisdom of individualism. This is why Mathison attempted to distinguish "Sola" and "Solo" in the first place. This is why we have communities in the first place.

But I've been asking if the distinction is real. Pastor Terry Johnson wrote "Our Collapsing Ecclesiology" (not gonna link it; find it yourself) and it amounts to a concession that the distinction cannot be made in a principled way. He does not say this; he does not intend it, but it's there to be had. It doesn't matter if you don't want to be Catholic; it doesn't matter if you think Dr. Bryan Cross is a cheap hack; it doesn't matter what sites you visit and avoid, sooner or later you're going to ask yourself, "Who is my ultimate interpretive authority?" If it is me, I must decide if I am more intelligent, more honest, and more holy than everyone else in the world. Probably not. (And I've known very few consistent fundamentalists, anyway.) And then, I think one ends up saying this: Well, if I myself am not infallible, someone or something is." You may want to say, "I don't need infallibility or certainty," but the fact remains: You're doing theology. The One with whom you are attempting to commune is both supremely honest, and cannot err, by definition. Because of the weight of what you are attempting, and your partner in the effort, personal preference is not sufficient reason to make a theological distinction. So, I cannot say that I have no access to what God has said, and do not require it, because the theological particularities of what I propose would neither be known by me, or worthy of proposal. The fact that you have proposed a distinct set of ideas or propositions is sufficient proof that you believe them to be true, and to have come from God. The fact that any two people do not agree on what God has precisely said does not mean the question is not relevant.

I leave it to you to decide when or if the Catholic Church has a compelling answer. But I can say that even apart from how I conceived of authority, what I knew for a certainty about Jesus Christ predated all the major divisions of which we are aware. It only remained to see if I had the same reasons for holding it as they did. In a word, no. When I critiqued the prevailing notion of Mere Christianity before, I was not critiquing the reality of what Christians hold in common; I was critiquing the conceit that the rest of it didn't matter, and I was asserting that to say we held it for the same reasons on the same bases was a falsehood. It is a comforting falsehood, but it is a falsehood nonetheless.

Comments

At the risk of repeating myself, I don't arrive at the questions you suggest one should arrive at, because I assume that a human being cannot achieve absolute intellectual certainty. I think the expectation one can ties in to a different set of presuppositions and those are what you ultimately need to attack to make your case.

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