Orthodoxy's sinking ship

Although Robinson’s comments were specifically directed at Jason Engwer, they are germane to my position as well since this is part of an ongoing thread involving my critique of Perry’s position, and his critique of mine.

“Once again, it is quite true that I am fallible and I could revise my beliefs about the Orthodox Church, but that is irrelevant. All it shows is that I am not sufficient to produce unrevisable theological formulae. Moreover, the question isn’t about what is known but about what kind of thing is necessary to produce unrevisable statements. You’ve already admitted the point that your ecclesiology is insufficient to do so. While I may be individually in the same situation with respect to my inability to produce such statements as you are, ex hypothesi, your church and the Orthodox Church are not.

i) One of the problems in this debate is Perry’s habit of oscillating between normative claims and hypothetical claims.

ii) Sure, he can, in the above paragraph, limit this to a hypothetical metaphysical claim about the necessary preconditions of irreformable dogma, as over against a normative, epistemic claim, but Perry plainly wants to go far beyond that modest restriction himself.

Something could be the case (a fact) without my knowing it to be true (a belief in the fact).

But Perry is claiming much more for Orthodoxy, as over against Evangelicalism, than the bare claim that, “if” there is irreformable dogma, then certain preconditions must be met.

No, what Perry is really angling at is that since there is irreformable dogma; and since, what is more, there must be irreformable dogma, then the Orthodox church supplies the mechanism for generating irreformable dogma.

“I don’t view Ecumenical Councils as mere messengers or sentential conduits. They teach unrevisable truth unrevisabLY, which is something Protestant bodies are incapable of.”

Is he making this statement ex hypothesi, or as a normative, factual claim?

“The mission of the church is characterized as being sent as Jesus sent the Apostles, which is why the Church is apostolic in character. If after the apostles die, that apostolic character is lost, then the church can’t either be what it was or carry out its commission. If you disagree with that, fine, but it just supports one of my initial points, namely that Protestant ecclesiology is that of a purely human institution and therefore everything it proclaims are the teachings of men about God. Nothing they teach is beyond revision.”

Is he making this statement ex hypothesi, or as a normative, factual claim?

“The formal doctrine of the Trinity for example is, by Protestant lights, a human arrangement and construction-it is an explanatory model to explain the Biblical data and as such it is in principle provisional in nature. (This is another mark of theological Nominalism.)”

Provisional relative to what? It is provisional on condition that there might be some good reason to revise it in the future. But absent that condition, it is not provisional.

“I don’t think that the family has the kind of binding and loosening authority that is given to the church. Parents can relay information in a kind of delegated status within the church, but they are not producing formal doctrine and they don’t take themselves to be doing so. Parents then teach in a secondary and derivative sense, which is, for the reasons I gave above, different from what is under dispute. Therefore it is a weak analogy at best and therefore not relevant. The family and the church are two different spheres. I know that the church can’t be like that parent, because the church produces formal doctrine and parents don’t.

Is he making this statement ex hypothesi, or as a normative, factual claim?

“What a body formally professes concerns me, since if I join it I might have to recite a doctrinal statement every Sunday.”

Speaking for myself, I only recite the parts of the creed I agree with. Whenever, for example, I come to the article about our Lord’s descent into hell, I don’t recite that part of the creed since I don’t believe it.

“Furthermore, you are mistaking my argument for a claim for the absolute necessity of an infallible church. This is a mistake. My argument is a transcendental argument and as such it points out the necessary conditions for the necessity of an infallible church IF there is unrevisable formal doctrine.”

i) Actually, a transcendental argument is more than a hypothetical syllogism, is it not? Doesn’t a transcendental argument take some phenomenon as undeniable, and then reason back to the necessary truth-conditions which make that possible?

ii) Again, Perry’s claim is surely a good deal more ambitious than the mere postulate that if there is irreformable formal doctrine, then, under that condition, an infallible church must supply the necessary truth-condition.

One of the persistent difficulties with Perry’s position is how he is able to build a bridge from the hypothetical proposition to the existential proposition.

A fallible believer is still the point of access.

“I claimed at the beginning that Protestants teach that there is no unrevisable doctrine taught by them. That claim is true. Protestants can evade my argument in one of two ways. First by showing that they can teach unrevisable formal doctrine.”

As I’ve said before, this claim is ambiguous. It is revisable if you posit certain conditions. And while you’re at it you can just as well posit certain conditions which would render Orthodox dogma revisable.

Our beliefs are revisable if we have good reason to revise our beliefs, but absent that, our beliefs are not revisable.

Is my belief in the Trinity revisable? Since I have no good reason to question the exegetical argument for the Trinity, which is pretty massive, the answer is no.

Give me a good reason to think otherwise. But to say that Protestant doctrine is revisable, not for any particular reason, but just out of the abstract, indefinable possibility that something sometime might pop up to undermine it, is not a serious theological criterion.

“Second, they can deny that unrevisable formal doctrine is necessary or that there is any such thing.”

That’s true, and that’s where we shift from hypothetical propositions to existential propositions.

And it’s also where the fallible individual comes back into play.

“No one has done the first, and admitting the second is at odds with the idea that there are some formal doctrines that are unrevisable, like the Trinity. If you dump the latter, that there are some formal doctrines that are unrevisable, then my argument up to that point is successful.”

His first claim is simplistic while his second claim is fallacious since it depends on a hidden or suppressed premise which he never defends to bridge the gap between the hypothetical and the normative or existential.

“The next stage is for you to admit that formally speaking fallibly teaching the matter of the Bible and teaching it as God taught it, aren’t equivalent. If you admit the previous points, the formal difference should be obvious.”

And since I don’t admit the previous points, the formal difference is less than obvious, to say the least.

“A protestant may believe that Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith, but that isn’t sufficient for Protestantism. Sola Scriptura is more than that, namely that every individual is the ultimate judge in using the only infallible rule. Since no one is infallible, it is always open to an individual to question and overturn the judgment of others.”

This objection either proves too much or too little. For even if you subscribe to the Orthodox rule of faith, this must be appropriated at an individual level.

“Since evangelicals are by and large schismatic (even between each other) and the definition of what constitutes an evangelical lacks consensus.”

This depends on how you define “schism.” If you adopt Perry’s high-church ecclesiology, then a schismatic is someone who is no longer in communion with the true church.

Of course, I reject his ecclesiology.

I don’t believe that the true church is instantiated in any one visible institution. The elect either leave a false church, or else they leave one exemplum of the true church for another exemplum of the true church.

“I do rely on probabilistic arguments, but probability given a certain philosophical and theological paradigm. Probability isn’t theory neutral. And what do I rely on them for? They may be sufficient for knowledge, but they aren’t sufficient for the commitment of faith. Nor are they sufficient for the kind of normativity necessary to bind the conscience of a man. That requires teaching like Jesus taught-with divine authority. Therefore my argument is a transcendental argument, and transcendental arguments aren’t probabilistic, but principled arguments. Consequently I am not relying on probability here.”

This is a clear example of Perry’s apriorism. Why is knowledge insufficient to bind the conscience? Why is it not enough that something be binding because it is true, and because we are in a position to know that it’s true? What isn’t truth authoritative? Why aren’t be duty-bound to believe what is true, period?

“Again, I could be wrong or even right in the beliefs I have and as a consequence revise them in the future. That has nothing to do with what is necessary for there to be a formal equivalence between what the Bible says and what a theological statement explicating its meaning says.”

This is another example of Perry’s apriorism. Why does he insist on “formal equivalence” between Scripture and dogma as a theological criterion? How does he justify his criterion?

“This doesn’t amount to “God speaking” in terms of inspiration but it does amount to divine teaching. And plenty of knowledgeable Protestants have thought that there are some beliefs taught by their church that are beyond revision. You can see this belief at work in the debates about the New Perspective on Paul for example, with people acting as if sola fide is unrevisable.”

This is about the only time he comes up with a specific example of his general claim that Protestants regard some doctrines as unrevisable.

Is this the best he can do? If we argue against the New Perspective, we do so on exegetical grounds, not axiomatic or a priori grounds.

“Moreover, Protestant theological formulae are not just human affirmations of what God has taught, but formal explications of the matter of Scripture. Scripture contains no formal doctrine and Scripture’s form is divine. Therefore if the model constructed lacks that property, it isn’t equivalent to what Scripture teaches, since it isn’t and cannot be taught as Scripture teaches it. Even if a protestant body gets the concept right as reconstructing the matter of Scripture in a formal way, it does so by leaving out the formal character of Scripture, which is why it isn’t the teaching of Scripture as Scripture teaches.”

Even if we were to stipulate to the claim that to teach what Scripture teaches means that we must reproduce the formal character of Scripture, then if, as Perry admits, “Scripture contains no formal doctrine,” then if Protestant theology lacks formal doctrine, it is, in fact, teaching Scripture as Scripture teaches. Scripture lacks the “property” of formal doctrine, Protestant theology lacks the property of formal doctrine; hence, it is sufficient to get the concept right minus the property of formal doctrine since the property of formal doctrine is no part of the formal character of Scripture. So we could accept Perry’s premise, but derive an opposing conclusion.

“Yes, again, it is quite true that at the level of knowledge, I make fallible judgments as to knowledge. But I do not make judgments as to constructing formal doctrine. When was the last time you formulated the equivalent of the Nicene Creed? Are you judgments with respect to formal doctrine the kind of thing that can bind the conscience of another man? Again, to be the kind of thing sufficient to produce unrevisable statements has nothing to do with epistemology. If I fallibly know that the Orthodox Church is the true Church, then I know it, unless of course I only think I know. I could lack knowledge because the belief might be false, I might lack sufficient justification or warrant. But my epistemic status leaves untouched the metaphysical status of the Orthodox Church. I could fail to know and it still be the true Church. I can know what was taught at the council of Nicea just like you can know what a passage of Scripture means.”

But unless an individual is situated to know there is such a thing as irreformable dogma, that irreformable dogma is a necessity, and the Orthodox Church is where you go to find irreformable dogma, then all we’re left with is a bare possibility or postulate suspended in thin air. Why should we believe that any of this is true? How does Perry move us from conjecture to reality?

“But when it comes to constructing formal doctrine, the construction out of the matter of scripture is, on your view, a purely human act. I don’t see how a product of purely human effort can be formally sufficient, having the character of divinity, to bind the conscience of another man. Why is anyone obligated to adhere to your theological formulas, even if they do not understand them? Your church’s teaching may in fact be the teachings of God if we mean by that the mere conceptual content, but formally speaking they can’t be since they are a human production. It is analogous to the difference between the Bible and a theology textbook. I am obligated by the formal character of the Bible, but with a theology textbook no such formal character exists and hence no obligation. Why? Because the latter is a purely human product, whereas the former isn’t. Capiche?”

Why isn’t it obligatory to believe something simply because it is true, irrespective of how the proposition was derived? Don’t we have a standing duty to believe whatever is true as long as we know where the truth lies?

For that matter, if something is known, then it is known to be true. You don’t have to add other modifiers like “unrevisable” or “infallible.”

It is, of course, possible for me to change my mind. I could go from a true belief to a false belief. But there’s nothing in Perry’s epistemology or ecclesiology to prevent that.