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An Important Concession

 Catholics can have conversations among themselves concerning the ingenuity of a living Magisterium that can answer higher order questions that the Bible text itself cannot answer, because the purposes of it and parts of it are legion. But as a matter of faith, the relevant questions are these:

Did Jesus establish a visible Church united in governance, sacraments, and profession? Is your local Catholic parish a current outpost of that Church? What might I expect to find if the answer were "yes"? What would invalidate the claim, or at least serve as a significant rebuttal to the claim?

You see, it doesn't actually matter if one paradigm of the story of God interacting with humanity has features that someone finds appealing or advantageous. The only real question is whether Jesus established that putative Church and the features that are helpful, advantageous, or however you might describe them. Christianity and religions related to it presuppose that God reveals things that human beings with their natural intellect alone could not realize and profess. Some religions are more properly classed as philosophies, in the sense that the truths are within the person, not without.

I remember realizing the intellectual possibility that divinely revealed truth does not exist. It's not atheism; that would be the claim that no God exists. This alternative would be that the Creator has no will to interact with the creatures and universe He created. It was common among the Greeks. Among the founding Americans, it's called "deism." Revealing--especially in the form of self-disclosure--and communicating--creates obligation on the part of people to respond. God has no obligation per se, except to be consistent with His nature.

It seems very popular to deny infallibility as Christians with respect to divine revelation. I think it's because Catholics make the claim that infallibility attaches to the Catholic Church as the source of God's communication with humanity. Listen, I didn't like it, either. And it used to be so that infallibility was claimed by Reformation Christians through the aid of the Holy Spirit in the individual interpretation of Scripture. It's at that point, and that point alone, that Protestant disagreements in biblical interpretation become a problem. The divine indwelling is synonymous with adoption and justification before God. If at least one person in a two-person (or more) discussion on interpreting and applying Scripture has the divine assistance of the Holy Spirit, we have a huge problem: Either the person or people are wrong, God is in error, or the whole methodology of Sola Scriptura is wrong. Let's exclude the possibility that God is in error or could deceive. What do we do?

You can't just shout, "40,000 denominations!" as a jab to guilt people to submit to the Catholic Church. In fact, it gets more devastating as a conundrum precisely when and if those divisions are in good faith.

Let me add a wrinkle: Most Reformation Christians have some form of a church body above the individual. Strength in numbers, at the very least. Get ready, because this is a bomb: If none of those bodies has the protection of divine infallibility, why would you submit yourself to them? Granted, Catholics claim the Church as they understand it is infallible. But for the moment, it's just a claim.

But just suppose we could screen out variations and disagreements, and we had a way to decide which variations were acceptable, and which are unacceptable. And if you happened to slam into the Church God was protecting, well, you'd submit to that one. And the thing is, we can actually do all that. If Christians had wildly unrecognizable doctrines, maybe not. But we don't! We share a lot. Meaning the true God has been speaking, and true disciples, though tragically divided amongst themselves, aren't totally nuts. And therein lies the basis for the belief that the faithfulness of God is reflected in history, but especially dogmatic history. Because the Bible could be argued to be a story of God's faithfulness, and perhaps that alone. Look at Christian history; what do you see? What is the Church? Where is it?

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