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Don't Need Infallibility? Hurry Up And Become An Atheist

From a Facebook comment:

Jamie Stober "It doesn't bother my Lutheran mind that the Councils have the possibility of erring. God does not fail. We do not get to order his words or works of providence. The Father provided the Son in flesh for us because he loved us and we needed saving, not because we decided on Christ's atonement and commanded it from below to God on high. Historically, we can trust the Christological Councils as faithful witnesses to the Holy Scriptures' witness about the Incarnate Word and Holy Trinity because of the miraculous consensus among Christians that has surrounded them. . Explain to me how 99% of Christendom throughout history has accepted the substance of the Christological Councils' teachings about Jesus in light of the confusion about who He was that existed among many in the early Church on into the tumultuous times of the later Christological Councils and the confusion of a few a heretical Christians that has continued today. There is really no need for a few Arians', Cathars', Socinians', Christadelphians', JWs',and Latter-Day Saints' denials, or for the Roman Catholic apologist's need for philosophical infallibility to believe anything concerning religion steal from Protestants the ability to believe and teach the ancient Councils as true witnesses to Jesus Christ on the basis that they teach what Scripture teaches and that their acceptance and validity has been as miraculous and perspicuous to Christians on the level that Old Testament miracles were to those who witnessed them with their own eyes and did not require the authority of an infallible Church Magisterium to believe what they saw was true and have their accounts later become what we know as the Old Testament. All Protestants need in order to faithfully believe and use the creeds of the Christological Councils is to accept that they are true on the basis that they teach what Scripture teaches and that they were and are providential witnesses to true faith in the Father, Son (both before and after the Incarnation), and Holy Spirit, given from above when they could least be expected and were most needed. express They have been believed by a miraculous near-consensus of followers of Jesus ever since."

We've got a few problems. Firstly, the distinguishing feature of divine revelation is in fact infallibility, because God cannot err, and he cannot lie. God cannot bind us to the contents of such if we do not know what he said. Give up on it if you want, but it's a bullet-train headed for agnosticism, and I'm not going. Secondly, there is no principled reason to accept the first 2 ecumenical councils, and not all others, and to accept them on the basis in which they were put forward: as the most solemn invocation of the Church's authority. The same Church headed visibly by the successor of Peter. Thirdly, I deny that Christendom outside the Catholic Church is united in anything, save their non-Catholicism. It's an arbitrary decision, to make once-central doctrines into non-essentials, and without consent, no less.

It is in fact when we remove the bad-faith assumption from the Noltie Conundrum (that the other person lacks the Holy Spirit) that Sola Scriptura collapses very fast, because it becomes a theological problem in the strict sense. I am left with 2 possibilities: Either the Holy Spirit is lying/confused, or this is the wrong way to find out what God is saying, and has said. Gotta go with (B).

I could not account for the faith of the early Church without the authority of the Catholic Church, which means that the Catholic Church is Christ's own. In order to believe otherwise, I would have to believe that the God of Israel, the God of faithfulness, who never ceased to send true prophets, no matter the stubbornness of His people, decided--even after the coming of His Son, who promised to protect the Church and draw all men to Himself--that God gave up on this, and said essentially, "Do the best you can." I don't think so.

The beauty of it is, Christians are united...in treasures which belong to the Catholic Church. The problem with your average fundamentalist isn't that he believes in Truth; it's that he is a Church unto himself. And if you find what's true in what he says, underneath the "paint"...it's Catholic. I can respect the biblicist's desire for truth. His rude awakening is simply the fact that when he's right, he's not as original as he thinks.
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Jamie Stober said…
Jason, what I am refusing to do is to place infallible knowledge of divine revelation in any way in anything owed to the receivers of said revelation, or to require it as a condition of truly knowing any of God's truth at all. This infallibility of the knowledge of divine revelation resides in the source, God the Holy Trinity, and the fact that the Son promised in the person of the Counselor to communicate to faithful ones in the future whatsoever He spoke concerning the Father and Himself to the Apostles. What is unique in the case of the Christological findings of the early Councils is in the way the acceptance of their teachings through time both resulted from top-down teaching by the bishops to the laity and from bottom-up refusal of the laity to accept the teachings of bishops who denied the substantial oneness of the Son with God the Father, or the personal divinity of the man Jesus, and the pericoretic union of the full and complete humanity of Jesus with the full and complete divinity of Jesus, as well as the bottom-up way the worship and prayers of the Church influenced its doctrine. The bishops in Council simply could not declare Christ or the Holy Spirit of a different substance from the Father or for Christ to be anything other than simultaneously fully human and fully divine by substance and truly divine by person if the faithful were affirming this in their worship and prayers. I'm telling you that the bishops did not go into ecumenical Councils in a vacuum devoid of the knowledge of their own readings of the Scriptures and the findings of previous ecumenical Councils or of the doctrines the laity and other bishops were believing. Even if the bishops went into ecumenical Council under the leadership of the Pope a priori believing God had granted them the grace of infallibility in their findings, they knew that the grace of infallible knowledge of divine revelation they were receiving did not reside in anything He strictly owed them but mysteriously entered the proceedings by the promises of God, that He was free, not bound, to keep, but, because of who He is, who doubted that He was not freely going to keep those promises? Nevertheless, because of the former and in spite of the latter, these men would have constantly been on their faces in prayer asking God to help them understand, come to the right conclusions, and ultimately end with a result pleasing to Him and salutary (or, infallible, if you will) to the Church.
8:35 PM
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