"Papacy Roundup"

Jason J. Stellman said,

August 2, 2012 at 9:24 pm

Here’re CTC’s arguments for succession and the papacy:

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/08/papacy-roundup/

Papacy Roundup

Aug 2nd, 2012 | By David Anders | Category: Blog Posts

There has been a great deal of discussion at CTC about the rational superiority of the Catholic interpretive paradigm  over the Protestant interpretive paradigm. As Michael Liccione, and others, have pointed out, Protestantism has no principled way to differentiate dogma from theological opinion – no coherent way even to identify the contours of Christian doctrine – that does not reduce to question begging or subjectivism. Catholicism, by contrast, posits an objective way to draw such distinctions.

But the logic and coherence of a system does not make it true. It is also important to recognize that there are objective, biblical, and historical grounds for finding the Catholic claims credible. (Whereas the biblical and historical case for Protestantism is weak and contradictory.)  Catholics refer to these evidences collectively as The Motives of Credibilty. This evidence is not sufficient to compel the assent of faith. (It wouldn’t be faith, then, it would be knowledge.) But it is sufficient to show that the assent of faith (aided by divine grace) is rational.

We have treated some of this evidence – especially for the divine foundation of the Church and Papacy – before. What follows is a brief roundup of some of those articles.

Christ founded a visible Church and Magisterium

    That Christ founded a visible Church

    That Christ founded holy orders and established a sacrificial priesthood

    That Christ established a Magisterium in the Church

    St. Ignatius of Antioch on the Church

    St. John Chrysostom on the Priesthood

The Papacy in Scripture and History:

    That Peter is the Rock of Matthew 16:18

    That the New Testament ascribes Primacy to Peter

    The witness of history on Petrine/Roman Primacy

    St. Vincent of Lerins on the Magisterium

    St. Optatus on Schism and the Bishop of Rome

    St. Cyprian on the Unity of the Church

The witness of history against key Protestant doctrines

    The witness of history against Sola Fide

    The witness of history against “primitivism” and the claim to have “recovered” the Gospel.

    The witness of history on baptismal regeneration

    St. Augustine on Law and Grace

    St. Clement of Rome on soteriology and ecclesiology

To go no further, doesn't this impale them on the horns of their own dilemma? In assessing the "objective, biblical and historical grounds" for the papacy, is the Catholic apologist using the Catholic interpretive paradigm or not?

If, on the one hand, he can assess the biblical and historical evidence without recourse to the Catholic paradigm, then it's not begging the question for Protestants to do the same thing.

If, on the other hand, he must use the Catholic paradigm to assess the biblical and historical evidence, then how does he establish the Catholic paradigm? He can't appeal to the papacy to validate his paradigm at this stage of the argument, for at this stage of the argument he's still making his case for the papacy.

So he needs an argument independent of the papacy to justify his Catholic paradigm. But that's self-contradictory, for it wouldn't be a Catholic paradigm apart from uniquely Catholic assumptions.