The Red Romanist

Jonathan Prejean has offered a characteristically thoughtful reply to my comments.

crimsoncatholic.blogspot.com/2005/08/steve-hays-gets-it-right-again.html

Basically, he has chosen, instead of a blow-by-blow reply, to present a more global and presuppositional counter-argument. That’s entirely legitimate.

Before I dive it, I wish to make a preliminary observation. Prejean, at least in his dealings with me, has a disagreeable habit of being agreeable, which makes it harder for me to disagree with him. I hope that in the future he will make a good faith effort to be more offensive and unpleasant, as that shall greatly simplify my own task.

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Which brings me exactly to the current controversy. Certain people of an Evangelical persuasion have recently declared Catholicism "unhistorical" for its inclusion of certain dogmas without independent positive historical corroboration. In doing so, they have exactly exceeded the proper boundaries of what can be considered historical. Moreover, they have, in my opinion, relied on some highly dubious historical conclusions in making the judgment that their own views are historical. This is the content of my objection.

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I don’t spend much time surfing the web. I’m more bookish than geeky. So I’m not in a position to venture a general comment on how various unnamed evangelical epologists define and apply the historical method.

The only individual I’m in any position to comment on at this juncture is Jason. At the end of this little essay I’ve posted some excerpts from his exchange with Prejean.

As I construe his statements, Jason distinguishes between defensive and offensive apologetics. Under defensive apologetics he accords a valid place for the argument from experience. However, this argument is only useful to insiders, not outsiders—since, by definition, an unbeliever is not privy to a believer’s experience of providence and grace. We might dub this existential evidence.

Under offensive apologetics, he distinguishes between internal and external lines of evidence. Both are forms of historical evidence, in contradistinction to existential evidence.

I’m retooling some of my own categories to classify his distinctions, and I realize that he isn’t attempting to present an exacting or exhaustive model of his criteria, but even so I think that he has already offered us a highly inflected paradigm of the various forms and rules of evidence. So I don’t recognize his own position in Prejean’s strictures, however applicable they may be to others.

In addition, I don’t see Jason or myself imposing a standard of independent historical corroboration on Catholic theological method. Rather, I see Jason and myself judging Catholicism by its own pattern and policy of appeal to historical evidence—at least up until the theory of development became official.

Of course, Prejean will have more to say about that very issue as we proceed. So let us proceed.

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Properly, "historical" ought to be predicated of the appropriate application of techniques against anachronism, which forbids the inclusion of concepts like "authority" at all, as Hays no doubt recognizes. And if one sticks to the "historical," then as Hays wisely notes, it is a shield and not a sword. It can defend against historical objections on the probabilistic terms the opponent offers, but it cannot in and of itself "prove" the case.

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Not directly, no. But that leaves open the question of whether it’s possible for historical evidence to bear on the establishment of an authority-source. And once that authority source is thereby established, it is in a position to authorize other truths for which direct historical evidence is wanting. So we should not exclude the possibility of a second-order authority-source contingent on a first-order historical source.

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I would disagree only in that I don't believe that it is a requirement for anyone to have compelling reason for the source of information, but rather, one needs only a defensible position that does not deny the veracity of historical methods (at least if one wishes to be "historical").

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As a general proposition, I agree. For, as a practical matter, it is not possible to justify most of our beliefs. They are too trivial and too numerous.

However, there is an obligation to prioritize some of our beliefs so that we discharge our primary duties to God and man. So, to the best of our abilities—which varies greatly from one individual to the next—it is incumbent upon us to have well-warranted beliefs in fundamental matters of the faith where we are answerable to God for our response to revealed truth.

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Historical methods do not speak to how God, Who commits anachronism simply by knowing the end from the beginning, acts in human history.

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That’s an arresting way of putting things. However, in God’s self-revelation there is, of necessary, a measure of divine accommodation whereby God makes himself known in ways knowable to man.

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Because of the Catholic theology of revelation, it is entirely fair to say that a later dogma was truly expressed in what was used to derive that dogma (in that God put that objective bit of revelation in knowing that it would be expounded in this manner later). It cannot be called anachronism because, strictly speaking, it is not a historical question. Thus, when a Pope says that there was "unanimous consent of the Fathers" or that something was "clearly taught in Scripture," he means it exactly in hindsight rather than prospectively, because the objective content of revelation is defined by the development it undergoes later. The move of the Church to a certain belief is evidence of its earlier content, not in the subjective minds of the people holding the dogma, but objectively. So when someone speaks of holding the Catholic "to his own standards," it must be recognized that those standards cannot be interpreted according to the historical methods of an external system. Catholicism and Orthodoxy have always "read back" later formulations into the nascent seeds of a dogma, so if the person can correctly be said to have held the belief that led to the development of the dogma (even if there is no evidence that he foresaw its use in this way), he is viewed to have held the belief in the dogma.

From the Evangelical perspective, that is entirely backward, but it is important to recognize that this comes from a reversed priority in historical determinations. The Catholic (and Orthodox) method is to reason from the existence of Christians to everything else; the Evangelical method is exactly reversed. We begin by looking at the existence of people who profess belief in the risen Christ, identify common themes of their practice including their methods of developing dogma, and reason therefrom to the dogmas themselves. In other words, we posit the actual existence of a Church even prior to a philosophy of revelation or theology, because we see the effectiveness of revelation as a necessary element of any philosophy of divine revelation. Consequently, the absolute universality of the three-fold apostolic succession and the Eucharist would make it highly probable that only churches having these things could even possibly be Christian. Formally speaking, then, evidence from Scripture is only evidence of self-consistency, not external evidence used to prove the belief (and we believe that this is exactly how Scriptural evidence was used in the patristic method). Although technically speaking, this means that one could conceivably "disprove" the requirement of apostolic succession, as a practical matter, the evidence is so overwhelming that it would be impossible to do so (hence, the historical defensibility of Catholicism and Orthodoxy against any competing claims). Later developments are then admissible so long as they take place within this communion of apostolic succession reasoning communally from sources to the conclusion.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, identify Christians by isolating a number of Christian beliefs (defined as the most historically/exegetically probable beliefs based on the textual evidence of the NT) and then judging everything and everyone by the standards of those beliefs.

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This brings us to the nub of the issue. And I’d just say the following by way of reply:

i) Prejean seems to be saying that Catholics and Protestants operate with incommensurable rules of evidence. If so, then it’s nonsensical of him to charge the evangelical epologist with a hypocritical double-standard, for by his own admission no neutral or uniform standard is even available.

ii) A problem that I and many others have with modern Catholicism isn’t merely that Catholicism is inconsistent with its own rules of evidence; rather, our problem is that Catholicism changed its own rules of evidence when it foresaw checkmate a few moves deep.

Modern Catholicism may well be consistent with the dynamic theory of tradition. But one problem lies in the fact that the dynamic theory of tradition is not the traditional theory of tradition.

So, from my side of the board, the Catholic is acting like a chess player who hadn’t lost, but it suddenly dawned on him that he could no longer win given the remaining pieces in their current configuration. So he stops the clock. Then he moves some of his own pieces around, relocating them at strategic positions, and replaces a few of the captured pieces for good measure.

In the meantime, all my pieces remain where they were. After that he restarts the clock as if nothing had happened, and looks in askance at my raised eyebrow.

And this is not just an outsider’s impression of what’s going on. Here’s an account in the words of Benedict XVI. I’ve quoted this before, but it bears repeating:

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Before Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was defined, all theological faculties in the world were consulted for their opinion. Our teachers’ answer was emphatically negative. What here became evidenced was the one-sidedness, not only of the historical, but also f the historicist method in theology. “Tradition” was identified with what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner, the patrologist from Wurzburg…had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the 5C; this doctrine, therefore, he argued, could not belong to the “apostolic tradition. And this was his conclusion, which my teachers at Munich shared. This argument is compelling if you understand “tradition” strictly as the handing down of fixed formulas and texts. This was the position that our teachers represented. But if you conceive of “tradition” as the living process…

J. Ratzinger, Milestones (Ignatius 1997), 58-59.

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Here we have a paradigm-shift from a static to a dynamic theory of tradition. The rules of the game have been unilaterally revised in the middle of the play. The ruler has turned to rubber, to stretch or contract as need be.

Dropping the metaphor, what has occurred here is that a principle of immanental revelation (from within or from below—vox populi=vox dei) has supplanted the traditional principle of transcendental revelation (from above).

And this also reflects a metaphysical shift from the essentialist categories of Thomism to something more fluent—occurrents over continuents or substances.

It is no accident that Newman was a Victorian churchman while Rahner was a close student of Hegel and—literally—of Heidegger.

iii) It is hard to differentiate Prejean’s position from the perfectly vicious principle that whatever is, is right. How is it possible, on his view, to ever challenge the status quote? Decadence becomes its own best justification.

iv) I don’t think any intelligent evangelical has a problem with the progress of dogma in the sense of a logical inference from a true premise. And if that were the process if view, it would be possible to see the process in reverse, after the fact.

But what we see is something much looser than that. To begin with, what we often see is a false premise. But let’s waive that for the time being.

Assuming the premise to be true, what we often see is, at best, a development which is merely consistent with the premise, but not entailed by the premise. And at worst what we often see is a development in which the original premise is contradicted over time. So we don’t see it in hindsight.

v) Another problem with this open-ended, Hegelian dialectic is that you can only know the true dogma or its true interpretation at the tail-end of the historical process, and not during the course of church history. So we couldn’t see it in hindsight.

vi) Finally, and I don’t mean to be insulting about this, but when I read his defense of Catholicism, quoted above, I can’t help thinking of how Jesus and the apostles and the prophets used to challenge the corrupt religious establishment by direct appeal to the word of God, and how very convenient it would have been for the religious establishment to repel that appeal by the line of argument he is using to defend his own communion.

Indeed, the Pharisaical doctrine of the dual torah, commingling the written torah with the oral torah, was their version of living tradition. Religious history repeats itself because human nature is the same, and certain personality-types recur throughout the course of religious history in particular.

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Jason said:

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But what's being addressed here is apologetics, how we defend a system in public. In other words, we're addressing how we show the truth, not how we know it.

I didn't deny that more than apostolic authorship and textual accuracy would be involved in arriving at the conclusion of Biblical inerrancy. I'm not excluding philosophical considerations. I'm including historical considerations in areas where you've neglected them.

Keep in mind what I said earlier about the distinction between knowing and showing. God can lead people to a conviction about the inspiration of scripture without the sort of evidence mentioned above. But if we're going to attempt to show the inspiration of scripture in a public setting like this forum, what alternative would you suggest to the argumentation outlined above?

Again, if we have evidence for Jesus' reliability, and Jesus refers to the authority of His apostles, why would you deny that we have historical evidence for Matthew being authoritative? Are you denying that we have sufficient evidence for Jesus' reliability? Are you denying that we have sufficient evidence that Jesus referred to His apostles having authority?

You keep referring to "independent evidence", and I don't know what you mean by that term. Are you suggesting that all evidence for my conclusions must come from non-canonical sources, such as Josephus or Ignatius? If so, that's an absurd standard that I reject. External evidence is relevant, but so is internal evidence.

We have a lot of evidence for the inspiration of the Bible. If you're saying that we can't "prove" it in the sense of complete certainty, then I would ask what the relevance of that observation is. We can show that it's a probability that the Bible is inspired, and it makes no sense to reject a probability on the basis that it isn't a certainty.

Regarding "independent historical verification", I would repeat what I said earlier. External evidence isn't the only evidence we have. Internal evidence is relevant as well. When the apostle Paul refers to his own experiences seeing the risen Christ, for example, no historian will dismiss Paul's testimony just because it comes from Paul. We always consider the potential bad motives of a source, but we also consider their potential good motives. If the historical context in which Paul wrote, the nature of his arguments, what other people said about him, etc. suggest that he's credible, then we can accept his testimony on historical grounds. That's why most New Testament scholars accept facts such as Jesus' burial by Joseph of Arimathea and a group of His female followers finding His tomb empty, even though these facts aren't corroborated by a non-Christian source like Josephus or Tacitus.

Again, we have evidence for Jesus' reliability. We have evidence for Jesus' assigning authority to people like Matthew and Paul. Thus, we have reason to believe what people like Matthew and Paul taught. Even if somebody like Matthew hadn't been given apostolic authority by Jesus, we would still have good historical reasons for accepting his testimony about what Jesus said.

The subject we're discussing at this point is the inspiration of scripture. Since Jesus commented on that subject many times in the gospels, anybody who would want to argue that He didn't hold a high view of scripture would have to dismiss a large number of passages in those gospels. It's more likely that Jesus did hold such a high view of scripture. From a historical standpoint, the plausibility of Jesus holding such a high view of scripture is greater than the plausibility of Jesus not holding such a view.

The Bible is historical evidence. I don't know of any historian who would argue that we can't know anything about Paul from his writings, for example. Nor do I know of any historian who would argue that we must gather all of our historical information about Josephus from sources other than Josephus.

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