I happen to believe that the fundamental principle of the Reformation, consistently applied, leads all the way to naturalism-atheism. Private judgment, encapsulated in Sola Scriptura. Blessedly, most people have no interest in severing every possible connection between themselves and the Catholic Church, if they are Christians. And as I work with Barthian Butler, and we talk about how to do ministry together, Sola Scriptura means practically, “We’re gonna mine this divinely inspired written word for everything it has,” not, “Let’s go evangelize the Catholics, before the Whore of Babylon leads them into Hell.”
Dr. Cross is right, though: if your lexical tools and your hermeneutical method make it near-impossible to consider full communion with the Catholic Church, those things of themselves lead away from reunion, by the nature of the case.
I bring this up with the haze from my recent arguments just beginning to clear. Remember Rachel Held Evans? (Eternal rest…) And she deserved some legitimate criticism for (apparently) simply wanting to be a liberal Democratic feminist who identified as a Christian. I found her predictable and boring, rather than courageous. But here’s the key: she loved the Bible. She was as devoted to Scripture Alone as Al Mohler. She didn’t blather on about the Spirit moving in a new way, in an obvious Boomer liberal Christian way. What she said was that no reader of the Bible is bound by a “historic” interpretation of any text. No church authority, no matter how forceful, is above that Scripture. Sounds like Luther, Calvin, and others. That’s why there’s so much appeal to history in the conservative denominations, whilst trying to hold Sola Scriptura. They know that the ancient Church got a lot right; they just don’t want to submit to Pope Leo.
And to be fair, you’ve got men in Reformation communities holding ancient doctrines but being discipled by American culture, not by God. A lot of that is vicious and misogynistic, without question. But we need to know what is true, not what pleases us.
How is it that Sola Scriptura leads to naturalism and atheism? If something is a dogma, that means God revealed it. We have no other way of knowing that thing, except that God revealed it. But in Sola Scriptura, the mediator between God and my knowledge of what he revealed is me. I can’t really appeal to the Holy Spirit, because I can’t know in every instance whether God protected me, or whether I was left to my error. I could ask another person, but that person cannot know, either. The Spirit is not uniquely protecting your denomination, because that violates Sola Scriptura, and moots the reason for rejecting the Catholic Church in the first place. Catholic theological method begins with the divine protection of the Church. The appeal to history is the appeal to the faith journey of the faithful in the visible Church, protected from error in and by her divine dimension, via the Holy Spirit. The human understanding of how to live together with God and each other may develop; that which is “of the faith” cannot. The Holy Spirit is actually protecting what God is communicating to humanity. The Church is the supernatural society of people who believe and receive what God says.
I cannot possibly blame a person unconvinced of the truth of the Catholic Church for wanting to preserve a general Reformational theological stance that sees those variations dogmatically within (and with the Catholic Church) as permissible. But this is a big key: whether God said all of them or none of them is irrelevant; the person committed to this stance is now committed to dogmatic indifference. Perhaps s/he says that ones not chosen are merely human. But s/he cannot say that one dogma in its particularity must be true. He can argue about various things; he can find Bible passages to support what he prefers. But separating from the Catholic Church, with the justifications used, carrying forward a faith truncated and under attack by endless debate and ironically, unavoidable uncertainty, never again could bind the conscience of all. If the word of God is an indifferent matter, perhaps faith and eternal life are not important. Perhaps all of this is just nice stories, whose main point is, “Be nice to each other.” Or, in the lame parlance of today, “Be a good human.” How? What is “good”? What is bad? If we can’t know, we’re guessing, at best.
But the Church wasn’t indifferent when it demanded an end to the exposure of infants. Or the end of the gladiatorial games. Fabian didn’t lose his head to people for being indifferent. Our ethics flow from who God has revealed Himself to be, how that demands a response from us, and how Christ himself embraced our common humanity. No person can be irrelevant now, because every person is dignified by the humanity of Christ.
It would seem like blather, but for the fact that we still agree on many things, dogmatically and ethically. If the Catholic Church was there in the beginning, perhaps that Church is the source of our certainties. Perhaps it is our home.
Comments