The selective right of private judgment

Over at Called to Union with the Scarlet Woman, Michael Liccione has been conscientiously digging an ever deeper hole for the Catholic position:

“The chief difference between the old leadership of Israel and the Magisterium arises from the fact that divine revelation was definitively completed in Jesus, whereas it had only been unfolding gradually under the OC. Hence, the old leadership had the charism of authority, as Jesus said, but there is no suggestion that it had the charism of infallibility. The new leadership did and does, however, at least under certain conditions. If it didn’t, then the question whose interpretation of the sources conveying the definitive and complete revelation is binding as a matter of faith, rather than more or less persuasive as a matter of opinion, could not be answered with anything more than–well, opinions. We would be limited to the latter-day equivalents of warring parties like the Pharisees, Sadduccees, Essenes, etc. That would not compatible with the transmission of a complete deposit of faith from God in the flesh, or with the unity of his Body, the Church.”

i) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is the chief difference, Liccione is conceding that fallible private judgment was sufficient for OT Jews.

ii) He then says the church operates on a higher principle.

a) However, he doesn’t give an exegetical argument from the example of the NT church itself to substantiate this claim. Rather, we seem to have an a priori argument based on the allegedly unacceptable consequences of not having an infallible church.

b) And even on a priori grounds, it’s unclear why fallible “opinion” was sufficient to interpret OT revelation, but insufficient to interpret NT revelation.

Sure, the former is incomplete whereas the latter completes the former, but in both cases we’re dealing with divine revelation, and in both cases we’re dealing with the interpretation of verbal revelation.

Why is the possibility that OT/Second Temple Jewish leaders might misinterpret revelation tolerable, but intolerable in the case of church officers?

Was fidelity to God’s word any less important in OT times or Intertestamental times than it is during the church age?

Likewise, nothing could be more catastrophic than misinterpreting Messianic prophecy–which is what befell so many 1C Jews.

“Until the Pharisee/Sadducee/Essene split developed in the century or so before Christ, the two primary matters of dispute were how to apply the Law when in cases where it was not explicit, and how much weight to give the post-Mosaic ‘prophets’ and the ‘wisdom literature.’ Such disputes could not be resolved in the OC, which is why the Jews never developed a biblical ‘canon’ beyond the Pentateuch until the challenge of Christianity caused them to.”

I don’t know where he gets his information on the Jewish canon, but let’s waive that for now. Disputes over how to apply the law are pretty fundamental. Not to mention the “Pharisee/Sadducee/Essene” split.

Yet if those disputes were insoluble, because God didn’t see fit to introduce a mechanism for resolving such disputes, then why insist on the necessity of that mechanism during the church age?

“Revelation was not complete and definitive as yet, and the fullness of God’s people, i.e. the Church, had not yet developed. Hence, it was natural and inevitable that the Jews would get certain important matters wrong, which is one reason why Jesus and the Apostles had to set them right.”

Well, that’s also one reason God sent prophets to set them strait in OT times. Yet that was an extraordinary vocation, not a regular office.

“The situation became different once the Church was established as a covenant family open to all peoples, entrusted with the task of preserving, transmitting, and interpreting the complete and definitive divine revelation. At that point, it became crucially important for people to be able to identify, as a visible body not maintained by physical descent, God’s new covenant family as such before they could understand what the definitive divine revelation was.”

i) That’s an interesting theory, but it’s not an exegetical argument. The NT doesn’t give that rationale.

ii) Moreover, physical descent was never sufficient to faithfully preserve, transmit, and interpret divine revelation.

iii) In addition, the Jewish community of faith was always open to converts (e.g. proselytes and Godfearers). It was never confined to ethnic Jews (i.e. lineal descendents of Abraham).

iv) Furthermore, the Babylonian exile also blurs the argument from ethnic purity. Consider the status of the Samaritans.

v) You also had apostate kings and apostate high priests. So you couldn’t look to the institutional leaders for sure guidance in times of national apostasy.

Liccione is giving us a schematic description which has to steamroll far too much inconvenient counterevidence to be convincing or accurate.

“If the situation were reversed–that is, if people were in the position of having to identify and interpret the complete deposit of faith as individuals, so that they could then decide which visible body counted as the Church faithful to that deposit–then there could be no criteria other than personal opinion for determining which ecclesial community is the unitary, visible, historically continuous people whose leadership speaks with divine authority.”

i) Personal opinion is not a “criterion.” Personal opinion applies criteria.

ii) There is also a strangely blinkered quality to Liccione’s arguments. He acts as though there was all this intractable diversity in 1C Judaism, but God fixed all that with the advent of the Roman Magisterium.

Yet church history has been a history of theological diversity. It’s not as though everything changed once Peter became the first pope.

“Accordingly, infallibility in the NC is necessary if fidelity to the complete, definitive deposit of faith is to be anything more than fidelity to one’s own fallible interpretation of ‘the sources.’ One must first be able to identify some visible body as ‘the’ Church, the Body of Christ on earth speaking with his authority, before one can know by what authority disputed doctrinal matters can be resolved.”

i) Does this mean Liccione regards all the Lutherans and Anglicans and Baptists and Anabaptist and Presbyterians and Pentecostals as infidels?

ii) And what does he mean by “the” Church? How is “the” Church manifested in history? Why does Liccione treat the church like a franchise? The Church, Inc.?

Seems to me that Stephen, in Acts 7, as well as the author of Hebrews, in Heb 11, operate with a more nomadic view of God’s people. The remnant. The Diaspora.

“In the OC, God’s people were understood to be Abraham and his descendants. Given that physical bond, there was no dispute among God’s people about what the phrase ‘God’s people’ denoted. Accordingly, there was no dispute among about just which collectivity God had chosen as the special object of his love and the bearer of his self-revelation to man.”

That’s patently false. There are provisions in the Mosaic law to incorporate Gentile converts into the covenant community.

“If the Magisterium could always be wrong in its doctrinal determinations, then it would always and ultimately be up to the individual believer to decide which church leaders were orthodox and which were heretical, so that it would always and ultimately be up to individuals to decide who are the legitimate authorities of ‘the Church’ and who are apostates and usurpers.”

i) Don’t various books of the NT warn their readers to beware of false teachers? Is it not, then, incumbent on Christians to distinguish between true and false claimants?

ii) Isn’t Liccione deciding for himself which church leaders are orthodox and which are heretical when he opts for the Roman Catholic church over the LDS church or the Swedenborgian church?

iii) And what about times in Catholic church history when the true successor to Peter was in dispute? Is this man a pope or antipope? The real deal or a usurper?

So what about the times in church history when the Magisterium was a house divided? Who decides?

Or what about the Arian bishops? Was their succession in dispute–or their doctrine?

“In the final analysis, it would always be up to individuals to decide, on the basis of their own doctrinal opinions, which body of people is truly ‘the Church’ founded by Christ and which bodies were only pretenders.”

This assumes that you should view the church as a franchise. It’s then a question of “finding” and joining the one true franchise. There can only be one. Any other franchise must be a “pretender.”

McDonald’s versus Burger King–or Taco Bell, or Wendy’s, or IHOP, or KFC. In Liccione’s world, if you eat at one, then you can’t eat at the other. Instead, you must search and search until, by process of elimination, you discover the one true fast-food “chain.” But why should we accept that model in the first place?

Or, to switch metaphors, Liccione treats “the Church” as if he were rooting for his high school football team. You show your school Spirit by being loyal to the hometown team. You can’t be a fan of more than one team at a time. That would be treasonous.

It’s our team v. their team. Our school v. their school.

“On Catholic doctrine, it is not up to ‘the faithful,’ as individuals or in groups, to decide who are the legitimate authorities of the Church. The legitimate authorities of the Church are the bishops who stand in unbroken apostolic succession through the laying on of hands by other bishops.”

In which case the “legitimate authorities” are accountable to no one below them. Subordinates answer to superiors, but superiors never answer to subordinates. And in a fallen world, it isn’t hard to predict how that scenario plays out.

For someone who judges truth by consequences, Liccione is oddly myopic about the consequences of his own system. The priestly abuse scandal is just one case in point.

“The situation in OT times was different. The identity of the ecclesia, the ‘assembly’ of the people of God, was not in question, and what counted as fidelity to the covenant was not in question either. Fidelity to God was fidelity to the Law, which was mostly about doing certain things and avoiding others.”

But there was a crucial distinction between the tribes of Israel and the faithful remnant. There was a crucial distinction between physical circumcision and circumcision of the heart.

“A Jew knew when a leader was unfaithful to the covenant when that leader–be he priest, prophet, or king–violated the Law himself and/or caused others to do so. It was quite important for Jews not to follow that example, and it was not a difficult matter for the average Jew to decide; but it was only the ‘faithful remnant’ which persevered, because the siren song of ‘the world’ was too seductive, as it is for many today.”

Which takes for granted the legitimacy of private interpretation. Why does Liccione think it’s easier to interpret “the Law” than it is to interpret the NT?

“To be sure, there were always legitimate, duly recognized authorities in the OC, which is why Jesus preached (Matt 23): ‘The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses…’”

And what made them “recognized authorities”? Was it their institutional standing? But they had no institutional standing. Scribes and Pharisees didn’t have an official position in the way the Levitical priesthood did.

“For the average Jew under the OC, the pertinent question was whether the leaders of God’s people at any given time were following the precepts of the Law or not. To what extent were the leaders doing the specific things the Law prescribed and avoiding the specific things the Law forbade? That was not a hard question for any faithful Jew to answer in principle–if and when said Jew had the written Torah available to him, and also had the relevant information about what his leaders were doing. Now in one respect, the same is true for average Christians in the NC. If and when they know what church leaders should be doing and avoiding, it’s not that hard for average Christians to find out what their leaders are actually doing and avoiding, and then to assess their performance accordingly.”

That’s a pretty deadly concession, although Liccione will try to resuscitate his argument.

“But the controversial question for our purposes is how to fill out that ‘if and when’ clause when the matter at hand is what doctrines the leaders should be teaching as belonging to the deposit of faith, and what doctrines they should be condemning as incompatible with the deposit of faith.”

How is that the key question? Isn’t the key question the interpretation of any text? Whether or not a text is dealing with doctrine is secondary. For principles of interpretation remain the same, whether the text is dealing with doctrine or practice.

“When that is the question, average Christians have nothing so clear and simple as a rather small body of texts containing explicit commandments to do such-and-such things and avoid others.”

i) Why does Liccione think the ethical teaching of Scripture is so “clear and simple” that Christians can figure that much out on their own, but it requires the services of the Magisterium to clarify the doctrinal teaching of Scripture? That’s a highly artificial disjunction.

ii) Moreover, magisterial teaching hardly limits itself to doctrine. Magisterial teaching is also concerned with Christian ethics, viz. divorce, contraception, &c.

“Christians have a larger body of data, written and otherwise, conveying not merely the preparatory stages of divine revelation that we find in the OT, but the complete and definitive revelation in the God-man Jesus Christ.”

Actually, there’s a sense in which it’s easier to interpret the Bible once you know how the story comes out. Easier for us to interpret the OT now that we now where God was going with that story. Having read the ending, we see more clearly how the preparatory stages were leading up to that denouement.

So, by Liccione’s logic, there would be more need for a Jewish Magisterium than a Christian Magisterium.

“Hence it is of critical importance that there be a way of resolving doctrinal disputes which doesn’t leave believers merely with a human opinion about how to interpret the sources, but with statements that bear the credentials of Christ’s authority itself.”

Why is that of critical importance? Just because Liccione regards the consequences of not having that mechanism unacceptable? But how can he presume to say what is antecedently unacceptable?

Why was it not unacceptable for God to allow the Three Chapters controversy? Why was it not unacceptable for God to allow the Photian Schism? Why was it not unacceptable for God to allow the Avignon papacy? Or the Borgia papacy? Why was it not unacceptable for God to allow the Reformation? Why was it not unacceptable for God to allow the priestly abuse scandal?

“Two pertinent things need to be said about that. The first is that one can see the apostolic hermeneutic developing throughout the New Testament, in such a way that there is no one point in the New Testament where one can safely say that no more questions need be asked, no more of the truth needs to become manifest over time.”

i) Sure, we can always ask more questions, but the real issue is whether the Bible answers all the questions that God intended to answer.

ii) For that matter, there are far more questions than the Magisterium has ever ventured to answer.

“But the Holy Spirit did not stop leading the Church, the ‘pillar and bulwark of truth,’ into all truth when the last Apostles died. The second point that must be stressed is that such a situation required that the duly ordained leadership of the Church inherit the authority of the Apostles to teach in Christ’s name and with his authority. If that were not the case, then the Church would have ceased being the pillar and bulwark of the truth, and that role would have been narrowed down, uselessly, to the writings that the Church leadership agreed were of apostolic origin.”

I own two Catholic commentaries on 1 Tim 3:15 (by Monsignor Quinn and Luke Timothy Johnson), neither of which interpret that verse in the way Liccione does. And these two are the major Catholic commentaries on that epistle.

“Rather, said writers all spoke as though they had inherited from the Apostles the same mantle of authority in and by the Holy Spirit.”

i) So did Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Swedenborg, and Sun Myung Moon (to name a few).

ii) But I also suspect that Liccione is equivocating. For example, do the Apostolic Fathers presume to write Scripture?