Skip to main content

"God-Breathed And Inerrant" Is Not Synonymous With "Perspicuous"

Protestant objectors like to implicitly or explicitly make this argument that the two ideas are interchangeable. The next claim is that the Catholic apologist believes the Bible cannot be understood or read with profit in any sense. They say the Catholic sows doubt at the same time he promises dogmatic certainty in his own paradigm. This is of course nonsense, but it's not immediately obvious why this is so.

The very reason for asserting the perspicuity (full clarity) of Scripture had been the occasion of asserting that the Magisterium (teaching office; pope and bishops in communion with him) of the Church was incorrect in many of its dogmatic pronouncements. If you dispute the very organ at the heart of the Christian's method of knowing divine truth, it stands to reason you'd leave something in its place. The protestors were not atheists, after all. So, if you said the Scriptures were sufficiently clear to establish what the Christian is to believe de fide, you are by necessity denying the ecclesiastical authority at the heart of the older method. You could argue therefore that the Catholic Church's authority is unnecessary, and even harmful. The Scriptures are clear, and anyone can access them, they said. It's amazing how little has changed since this challenge was made to its greatest effect, in the 16th century. There had always been someone to claim the Church was wrong, and he or she was correct instead, with favorite Scriptures in tow. But never the perfect storm that was the Protestant "Reformation."

In any case, we can also agree that these leading figures among the protestors didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were, to varying degrees and effects, depending on the group and its leader(s). The doctrines across the divide are not wholly dissimilar, and even in methodology, searching the Scriptures is an important part of knowing God, for both groups.

Yet if you argue that Church authority was unnecessary and even harmful to the true knowledge of God, does it matter if you keep the hierarchy in a functional capacity only? As the more radical (and principled) elements in the movement might have said, "If the Pope is a usurper of Christ, there is no merit in feigned submission." We can almost hear St. Robert Bellarmine say of incrementalists like Luther, "They have a form of godliness, but deny its power." Titular authority without jurisdiction is a bit like the modern British figurehead monarchy. Would the method of governance really change if they went away? Conversely, could the reformers claim that little has changed, when the reigning king has been robbed of his scepter?

Moreover, the Catholic apologist doesn't claim any defect in the Scriptures, or in God who reveals. It's the methodology he disputes. Here's the juicy part: If the objectors say that man is depraved in every part of his being, such that he cannot do anything to move toward God, he can't search the Scriptures with profit unto salvation; even after his conversion, he cannot have any ground to prefer one interpretation over another, whether in reference to another similar community, or to the Catholic Church. He's cutting off the very hermeneutical branch he's standing on. The positivist faces the strict theological version of the Noltie Conundrum: if man's inability is asserted via total depravity, the only person left in the system to account for the obvious remaining ambiguity in dogmatic truth is the Holy Spirit. (This should be an obvious impossibility, since He is God.) On the other end, the "I don't need certainty" camp not only can't account for the divine origin of a particular set of assertions, they can't account for the similarity between us! It's impossible to posit a saving, incarnational consensus of dogma that was formed somewhere in the past if man cannot, and need not, be certain. The various dissenters from it could simply say, "Well, nothing is certain; you could be wrong." To say nothing of the ad hoc nature of identifying it! Whatever that consensus is could be as varied as the competing interpretations of Scripture!

I agree that there is a saving, incarnational consensus of dogmatic truth, in the Catholic Church. The Scriptures are God-breathed, and inerrant. Now what?


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Friend I Once Had, And The Dogmatic Principle

 I once had a friend, a dear friend, who helped me with personal care needs in college. Reformed Presbyterian to the core. When I was a Reformed Presbyterian, I visited their church many times. We were close. I still consider his siblings my friends. (And siblings in the Lord.) Nevertheless, when I began to consider the claims of the Catholic Church to be the Church Christ founded, he took me out to breakfast. He implied--but never quite stated--that we would not be brothers, if I sought full communion with the Catholic Church. That came true; a couple years later, I called him on his birthday, as I'd done every year for close to ten of them. He didn't recognize my number, and it was the most strained, awkward phone call I have ever had. We haven't spoken since. We were close enough that I attended the rehearsal dinner for his wedding. His wife's uncle is a Catholic priest. I remember reading a blog post of theirs, that early in their relationship, she told him of the p
Hilarious Com-Box Quote of The Day: "I was caught immediately because it is the Acts of the Apostles, not the Acts of the Holy Spirit Acting Erratically."--Donald Todd, reacting to the inartful opposition of the Holy Spirit and the Magisterium. Mark Galli, an editor at Christianity Today, had suggested that today's "confusion" in evangelicalism replicates a confusion on the day of Pentecost. Mr. Todd commented after this reply , and the original article is here. My thoughts: By what means was this Church-less "consensus" formed? If the Council did not possess the authority to adjudicate such questions, who does? If the Council Fathers did not intend to be the arbiters, why do they say that they do? At the risk of being rude, I would define evangelicalism as, "Whatever I want or need to believe at any particular time." Ecclesial authority to settle a particular question is a step forward, but only as long as, "God alone is Lord of the con

Just Sayin.' Again.

One interesting objection to this chart has been to say that one gets stuck in a "loop" that doesn't resolve. This is a thinly-veiled way of putting forward the argument that we don't need absolute certainty in religious dogma. But Fred Noltie already dealt with this in the comments on another post. And to the specific objector, no less. I'll be blunt: The only principled thing to do is put down your Bible, resign your pulpit, and lead tours in Europe. Because a man must be able to distinguish dogma from human opinion, and this epistemology doesn't allow us to do that. One of dogma's distinguishing characteristics is infallibility; another is certainty. Without this, essential characteristics of God Himself are put into question. If we say that the most important Person any person could know is God, and the content of that knowledge (doctrine) is the means by which we know Him, it must be certain. This Reformed argument that certainty is a dangerous or un