The gingerbread house-part 3

Continuing my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018).

(Joshua Charles) There are, in the Scripture itself, always two voices of authority: the authority of the Scripture and a living authority, where in the guise of Moses, the Judges of Israel, the priests, the prophets, King David and Solomon, and then finally Jesus and the Apostles. These stood side by side–Scripture and Living Authority–throughout the Bible (99).

i) Here he jumbles together civil authorities and religious figures.

ii) The office of kingship didn't confers infallibility on OT kings. Some kings might be inspired, but not by virtue of their kingship. 

iii) The office of priesthood didn't confer infallibility on OT priests. Their job was to present offerings in the tabernacle and temple. 

iv) There wasn't a continuous series of prophets, year after year.

If I was a 1C peasant and Jesus was speaking to me, was what he was saying authoritative? Of course…But that means something outside of Scripture is fully authoritative…Let's say I was hearing the Apostles preach outside the Temple in Acts. Is what they are saying authoritative to me?…Once again, something outside the Scripture had full divinely given authority (100).

i) That's a classic uncomprehending objection because sola scriptura takes effect after the era of public revelation. 

ii) What Jesus and the Apostles orally taught is fully authoritative. My recollection of what they orally taught is not. There's an elementary difference between the inspired record of what they said and my fallible memory of what they said. 

That gets us to the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. This council delivered dogma…It was made up of the Apostles and the elders (e.g., non-Apostles). Thus, non-Apostles, already in the very first few decades of the Church, are themselves somehow invested with binding, divine authority (100). 

That's clearly fallacious because it's not an example of elders operating independently, apart from apostles taking the lead. So it provides no presumption or precedent for conciliar authority consisting of bishops without apostles participating and presiding. And James isn't an elder but a close relative of Jesus. 

Scripture itself never says when this living voice of authority ceased (101). 

i) To begin with, his objection is predicated on a false premise. As I already explained, his appeal to "a living authority" is equivocal, and, what is more, there wasn't a continuous, infallible authority side-by-side Scripture. Is never ceased because it never existed. You don't need to be told when something ceased if there was nothing to cease in the first place. 

ii) In addition, historical knowledge isn't generally based on being told that something ended. Rather, we infer that it ended because there's no evidence that it still exists. We don't need to be told that the Irish elk became extinct. The fact that there have been no confirmed sightings of the Irish elk for millennia is sufficient reason to believe it became extinct. 

iii) Likewise, we don't need a mathematical cutoff to know that, as a rule, reports are less reliable as the interval between the report and the reported event increases beyond living memory. Normally, one qualification to be an apostle was to be an eyewitness of Jesus during his public ministry. And some Christians who weren't apostles met that criterion as well. But that runs out. 

iv) We have no NT examples of apostles transferring their full authority to "successors". And even if we did, we have no NT examples of their immediate "successors" transferring full apostolic authority to "successors" of "successors" of apostles. 

But if I adhered to sola scriptura, which says that the Bible is the sole infallible authority in the Church, then the idea of an infallible canon was simply no longer coherent, because by necessity, one would have to appeal to things outside of the Bible for the contents of that canon, as the Bible never defines it, either in the OT or NT. So the final question was: whom do I trust to get the canon correct? Who is the divinely ordained authority by which we may be certain that we have the correct canon? (102).

1. That's a loaded question. To see that, compare two different ways to frame the issue:

i) What's your authority for the canon?

ii) What's your evidence for the canon? 

Why should a Christian frame the issue in terms of authority rather than evidence?

2. Constantly appealing to authority is regressive. If that's the criterion, then it doesn't stop with the church, for you must go outside the church to find some infallible yardstick to authorize the church. It's funny how many Catholic converts and apologists haven't caught on to the self-defeating logic of their own appeal. 

3. Suppose, for argument's sake, we can't be certain of the canon. Suppose no one can be certain of the canon. Suppose God hasn't made it possible for Christians to be certain of the canon. What if we must settle for probable evidence? 

Put another way, assuming for argument's sake that Protestants only have a fallible canon, it doesn't follow that Catholics have an infallible canon. A fallible Protestant canon doesn't entail an infallible alternative waiting in the wings. Notice how illogical the Catholic argument really is. 

4. What's so great about infallibility, anyway? You don't have to be infallible to be right. We hold many fallible but true beliefs. 

5. If your salvation hangs on whether or not 2 Peter is canonical, then certainty regarding the canon becomes all-important, but what reason is there to think that God will damn you if you make an innocent mistake about a canonical candidate because the evidence is uncertain? 

6. Then there's the mechanical Catholic trope about not having an inspired table of contents or infallible list. Catholic converts and apologists talk about the canon as if there's a room full of books to choose from, and there's nothing about the individual books that distinguishes one candidate from another. But that's an abstract, fact-free way of viewing the issue. To my knowledge we have fewer than 30 extant Christian writings from the 1C. Other than the NT documents, what other religious literature is early enough to have been written by the attributed or implied author? What other documents do we have from the lifetime of the apostles, or their younger contemporaries? Certainly not the Gospel of Peter, or Mary, or Thomas, &c. Besides 1 Clement, what else is there? The date of the Epistle of Barnabas is disputed, and in any case, the work is pseudepigraphal. 

Clement, Papias, Polycarp, and Ignatius are third-generation Christians. At best they're disciples of disciples of Jesus. That's two steps removed from Jesus. 

7. I haven't conceded that the Protestant canon is necessarily infallible. 

i) One problem is that certainty and infallibility are distinct concepts. In addition, you don't have to be certain to be right. 

ii) Catholic apologists operate with a model of certainty based on verbal guidance. The pope or church councils telling you what's true or false. 

But that neglects or overlooks nonverbal guidance. Consider how God providentially guided Abraham's servant to find a wife for Isaac (Gen 24). That involved nonverbal guidance rather than verbal guidance. Another example is how God directed the course of Joseph's life (Gen 37-50). Much of that is providential rather than propositional. God operating behind-the-scenes. God can providentially cause his people to form true beliefs without a living oracle to give explicit directives. 

8. This brings us back to the issue of authority. For instance, Beaumont defines authority as "the right to compel agreement", D. Beaumont, ed. Evangelical Exodus: Evangelical Seminarians and Their Paths to Rome (Ignatius 2016), 247. 

Suppose we apply that concept to revelatory dreams in Scripture. Are they "authoritative"? In many cases, they contain no divine commands or prohibitions. Although many revelatory dreams provide divine guidance or even certainty regarding the future, that's nonverbal guidance. Showing rather than telling. 

In principle, then, it's possible for the Protestant canon to be certain without being infallible (in the propositional sense). Likewise, it doesn't require authority to yield certainty. God can guide people into the truth through nonverbal means. 

I was always disturbed by the idea that the Church got it wrong for 1500 years (i.e. the vast majority of its history), but only 500 years ago, we suddenly got it right (103). 

i) Whichever side you come down on, many professing Christians got it wrong. If that's disturbing, it's not disturbing for one faith-tradition rather than another. Rather, it means God protects some Christians or professing Christians from certain theological errors but doesn't protect others. 

Indeed, from a Catholic standpoint, God doesn't protect the vast majority of Catholics from theological error. And he doesn't ordinarily protect popes and bishops from theological error. The "charism of infallibility" is very rare, even by Catholic standards. 

ii) I'm not disturbed the the idea that "the Church" got it wrong. What would be disturbing is if the Bible got it wrong. 

Why, I wonder, are there some who insist that reading the writings of those Church Fathers who both knew and were discipled by the Apostles (or their disciples) is somehow less reliable than reading Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the like, who lived 1,500 years later? Who would common sense dictate is more trustworthy in their doctrine? (105).

How could I take the words of Ignatius, who was discipled by the Apostle John, or Clement of Rome, who is mentioned in the Bible, as seriously as some megachurch pastor, or some Protestant theologian thousands of years after the fact (108)?

i) Was Clement's proof of the Resurrection (i.e. the legend of the Phoenix) handed down to him by apostles who "discipled" him? 

ii) I see Catholic converts and apologists make broad claims about the apostolic fathers, but when I compare their claims to the primary sources, there's a shortfall:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-apostolic-fathers.html

(Vermeule) I eventually couldn't help but believe that the apostolic succession, through Peter as the designated leader and primes inter pares, is in some logical or theological sense prior to everything else–including even Scripture, whose formation was guided and completed by the apostles and their successors, themselves inspired by the Holy Spirit. A corollary is the very great evil of schism and private judgment, brought home to me when the Episcopal Church essentially decided to go its own way based on novel views…Ultimate I think with Newman–and with the Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory, whose brilliant book The Unintended Reformation crystallizes the idea–that there is no stable middle ground between Catholicism and atheist materialism. One must always be traveling, or slipping unintentionally, in one direction or the other (59-60). 

i) No books of the Bible were written by the "successors" to the apostles (as Vermeule defines apostolic succession). And some NT books weren't authored by apostles (i.e. Mark, Luke, Hebrews, Jude). 

ii) Gregory's book may be impressive if you only read one side of the argument. For another side of the argument:

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/rebel-ranks-martin-luther-brad-gregory/

(Ward) I asked him how submission to the pope differed from submission to the leader of a cult. In becoming a Catholic, wouldn't I be agreeing in advance to anything the pope might say? What if the pope told me, like Jim Jones told his disciples at Jonestown, to drink poisoned Kool-Aid? My friend, rather than dodging the term "cult leader," took it head on…The Christian cult was established by Jesus Christ with a particular constitution, an apostolic constitution, with Peter  and his successors at its head, holding the keys, serving as prime minister to the king. "Whoever receives you receives me," Jesus said, to the Twelve. It is Christ's Church, but his authority is deputed to his apostles, the chief of whom is the holder of the Petrine office, Christ's particular vicar. Now, I had always said that I would follow Christ whoever he led, would obey Christ whatever he required of me, so I was evidently not adverse in principle to "agreeing in advance to whatever my cult leader asked." The question I was really struggling with, I began to see, was not about authority as such, but about where that authority, Christ's authority, was located. If it wasn't to be found in a two-thousand-year tradition of magisterial teaching, headed by the pope, where was it? (189). 

i) Jesus doesn't require Christians to agree in advance to whatever "the cult leader" demands. Our commitment to Biblical authority is retrospective, not prospective. That phase of redemptive history is behind us. We agree to it after the fact, not in advance of the fact. In a Bible-based faith, we know ahead of time what we're getting into. 

Of course, that represents the Protestant perspective, not the Catholic perspective-but that's my point. At best, Ward's argument only goes through if you buy into Catholic ecclesiology. Otherwise, we're not signing a blank check.  

ii) It's revealing that he never circles back around to answer his own question. If the pope ordered Catholics to drink poison, should they obey? 

iii) "If it wasn't to be found in a two-thousand-year tradition of magisterial teaching, headed by the pope, where was it?" Try the Bible.