II. Bible Criticism
1. Miracles
Hume’s objection to miracles shares a criterion in common with his objection to natural theology—namely, the principle of proportionality. An extraordinary report demands extraordinary evidence.
By defining a miracle as a "violation" or "transgression" of natural law, Hume makes it sound as if God were a squatter or house-burgler, whereas, from the Scriptural standpoint, God is the homeowner. The Creator doesn’t "break into" his own house. Rather, the world was designed as a divine billboard. For a Christian, every "natural" event is an act of God.
This is also why the definition of a miracle as an "improbable" event is question-begging. A miracle would be a work of personal agency. It is not a random event. It is not a throw of the dice. There are no odds either for or against the occurrence of a miracle. And even on statistical grounds, the evidentiary value of a word (prophecy) and sign (miracle) in tandem (Isa 35:5-6; Mt 11:4-5) is far higher than either in separation.
To judge the objection on its own grounds, Jesus is not an ordinary person doing extraordinary things, but an extraordinary person. So there's a natural match between the nature of the agent and the nature of the deed.
But to judge Scripture on Scriptural grounds, the reason why folks don’t ordinarily rise from the dead is the same reason they die in the first place. It is not owing to natural causes, but God’s judgment on Adam’s sin. The impediment is not natural law, but moral law. So the claim that the Second Adam rose from the dead is perfectly consistent with the ordinary state of affairs inasmuch Christ reverses the curse and begins to restore the primordial norm. As Bishop Wright remarks,
"The fact that dead people do not ordinarily rise is itself part of early Christian belief, not an objection to it. The early Christians insisted that what had happened to Jesus was precisely something new; was, indeed, the start of a whole new mode of existence, a new creation. The fact that Jesus' resurrection was, and remains, without analogy is not an objection to the early Christian claim. It is part of the claim itself," N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress 2003), 712.
And this brings us to another problem. Why assume that we must begin with a definition of the event rather than the very event itself? Definitions are ordinarily descriptive, not prescriptive. We begin with the phenomena and then set about to classify them. But Hume is using his grid to as a fine-mesh filter to screen out miracles in advance of observation. Yet you could establish a miraculous event qua event before you establish a miraculous event qua miraculous. While a miracle assumes the prior existence of God, it doesn’t assume a prior belief in God. That confounds the orders of being and knowing. If Hume were an Egyptian, would he say to himself, "I won’t believe my own eyes unless I can attribute the plague of hail to freak atmospheric conditions!" Methinks he would stuff his scruples and dive for cover or run for dear life!
It is also illogical to say that I need an unusual amount of evidence for an unusual event. How could there be more evidence for a rare event than for a commonplace event? One reason we believe that snow leopards are rare is the rarity of their sightings. It is unclear how Hume would establish any out-of-the ordinary event. Moreover, how many inductive instances to I need? The only evidence I need of a four-leaf clover is a four-leaf clover. One will do—no more, no less.
Hume discounts the testimony to miraculous incidents on the grounds that the witness pool is recruited from the backward and barbarous peoples. One can’t help but sense a suppressed circularity in this objection: Why don’t you believe in miraculous reports? Because the reporters are ignorant and barbarous! How do you know they are ignorant and barbarous? Because they believe in miracles! At most, all Hume’s argument amounts to is that dumb people believe dumb things. But that is hardly argument for the proposition that any particular witness is dumb.
In addition, the general character of a witness is not only irrelevant to a specific claim, but may be all the more impressive when out-of-character. Even liars only lie when they have a motive to lie, and not when it runs counter to their own interests. And it is not as if the Apostles and prophets were rewarded for their testimony with a tickertape parade.
Hume tries to play off the miracles of one sect against another. However, most major religions don’t stake their dogma on miraculous attestation. But even if they did, the Bible doesn’t deny the power of witchcraft (e.g. Exod 7-8). And there is no reason why a living faith should have to duel a forgotten faith. Killing it once is quite sufficient. One hardly needs to disinter the remains and have another go at them. For if the "gods" of a long dead faith were unable to defend or resuscitate it (Judges 6:31; 2 Kgs 18:27), then does that not expose them as false gods?
2. Mythology
Critics of the Bible discredit the claims of Scripture on the basis of comparative mythology. The unargued assumption is if mythology is false, and if there are parallels between the Bible and mythology, then that falsifies the Bible.
To say that pagan mythology is false is an ambiguous charge. Does it mean that that never happened, or that nothing like that ever happens? There is quite a difference. In a novel, none of the incidents may be historical, and yet they are true to life. So even if mythology were wholly fictitious, it might still be lifelike in certain key respects.
Indeed, one of the problems with this dismissive approach is that it fails to explain anything. For it fails to explain why pagans believed in magic and evil spirits and paranormal events. Was there something in their experience which gave rise and substance to these beliefs?
There is, of course, a stock explanation, or what purports to be an explanation, which attributes such credulity to ignorance. But even if this enjoys a measure of truth, it suffers from the circular limitation of any tautology: it's true when it's true, and not when it's not. Even if it holds true for the uneducated masses, it doesn't apply to the educated classes. And the fact is that illiterate peasants don't write mythology, for they don't know how to read and write. So, by definition, the record of mythology comes down to us by the hand of the educated classes.
Another problem with this elitist criterion is that there's a sense in which a man of letters is at least as gullible and superstitious as a peasant, for a man of letters gets his information second-hand whereas a peasant is an amateur scientist who lives off the land, relies on his eyes and ears, survives and prospers by dint of his direct and accurate observation of the natural world.
Actually, the real correlation is not between ignorance and belief but quite the reverse, between ignorance and unbelief. What I find credible or incredible has a whole lot to do with the measure of my personal experience. If nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened to me, then I find the report of an extraordinary event less believable than if I've had some brush with the paranormal. For a psychologist, the abnormal is normal, and for an exorcist, the paranormal is normal. So some men don't believe the Bible because the world of the Bible doesn't resemble the world they see out the window, whereas other men do believe the Bible because the world of the Bible does resemble the world they see out the window. It's like the old saying about the face at the bottom of the well.
In fact, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't pray because I don't believe in prayer, and I don't believe in prayer because I don't pray!
For some, the objection takes a more philosophical form. Especially for those approaching every truth-claim from a scientific standpoint, you often get the argument that they don't believe in the supernatural because nature is all there is. But that's a rather prejudicial stance to strike, even on its own grounds. Science is supposed to be a descriptive rather than prescriptive discipline, based on observation rather than stipulation, discovery rather than definition. To insist, in advance of the facts, that every event must be confinable to naturalistic parameters is not knowledge, but secular superstition. From the assumptions of empirical science, the only way of knowing what is knowable is by investigation.
The Bible has its own analysis of mythology. It identifies mythology with idolatry. Fallen man is a mythmaker. His strategy is to suppress and supplant the knowledge of God with surrogate deities and proxy pieties (e.g., Jn 3:20-21; Rom 1:18ff.). And lying in the background is the Devil, who has many front-organizations and aliases (Rev 12-13).
So what we read in Genesis is not a myth of origins, but the origins of myth. Genesis can account alike for piety and idolatry, miracle and magic. For the account of creation unveils the origin of all our cultural universals, as God ordains the social institutions that recur in art and literature, religion and drama; while the account of the Fall unveils the origin of their debasement, as apostate men and angels bow before the creature rather than the Creator of all.
The popularity of the occult, ufology and the SF genre go to show that science does not extinguish the mythic impulse. Indeed, evolution repristinates a number of stock mythical motifs, viz., Everyman, the quest, rites of passage. In the Darwinian creation myth, the "hero" comes down from the safe-haven of the trees (fall from innocence). By passing through various ordeals (survival of the fittest) he attains enlightenment (higher brain functions) and achieves apotheosis (monkey to man). The popularity of evolution owes much its popularity to this folkloric appeal. (Cf. M. Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution [Yale, 1991].) It’s just variation on Puss-n-Boots and the domestication of Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Sometimes the parallel is said to be more precise, in terms of genealogical dependence. But the only case I've seen where there's a persuasive parallel is the Flood account. Yet since, according to Scripture, both the Babylonians and the Jews were descendents of Noah (Gen 10), the fact that Mesopotamian literature possesses a parallel account of the Flood is hardly prejudicial to the historicity or independence of the Biblical account, for their synoptic outlook is easily attributable to factual rather than literary dependence. They share a common source in a shared historical event.
Another case is the alleged parallel between Gen 1 and the Enuma Elish. Cf. A. Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis (Chicago, 1963), 129. But all Heidel has done is to use the narrative framework of Gen 1 as an interpretive grid, and then map that back onto the Enuma Elish. But if Heidel had begun in the opposite direction, without using Gen 1 as his point of reference, the alleged parallels would have sunk back into the cluttered plain of events, for there are no structural parallels between the two.
Since real life has a cyclical character, the stereotypical pattern of many literary themes needs no special explanation. Art imitates life. Cultural universals derive from the universality of human nature and experience in the natural world. God made mankind a racial unit with natural needs and a normal life-cycle. There are patterns in biography as well as history. Great men often exemplify the trials and traits of the epic hero (e.g. quest, ordeal, rites of passage). To classify common literary themes as mythical only pushes the question back a step, for it fails to account for the origin of the "mythic" category itself. So there’s a danger of substituting a disguised description for an efficient explanation. As Pierre Benoit remarks,
"A merely literary comparison does not authorize any such [fictitious] conclusion. The truth-value of these forms depends on the circles in which they have their origin, not on the forms themselves.
Is there any other way of relating a miracle? Do they follow a different method at Lourdes? Nothing is more like the story of a true miracle than the story of a false one. It is not the literary form which distinguishes one from the other; it is the substance, the external authentication, the internal probability," Jesus & the Gospel (Herder & Herder 1973), 1:33-34.
Since Genesis records the historic origin of our archetypal institutions, mythical and literary parallels, such as they are, cast no prejudice on the veracity of Scripture. In the nature of the case, certain formative events in Genesis and Exodus acquire a thematic status. And the cultural diffusion of such themes makes all the more sense if the human race radiated out from a common point of origin—as the sons of Noah repopulate the earth, both by land and sea (Gen 10-11).
Because some giant animals have become extinct in historic times (e.g., Irish Elk), we should not exclude the possibility that "mythical" animals in Scripture (e.g., Rahab? Leviathan?) are stylized versions of once living beasts. For example, the dragon-motif is quite widespread in world mythology. Sometimes mythopoetic imagery is used for decorative, polemical or ironic effect. In Ps 104, Yahweh is pictured in the regalia of a storm-God, yet this is no more descriptive than the personification of the waters (v7).
At the same time, there are disanalogies as well as analogies. For there is a subversive element in Biblical typology that breaks with conventional associations. Images of descent carry a classically negative connotation, yet Yahweh’s descent on Mt. Sinai, the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost and the baptism of Christ, as well as the descent of the New Jerusalem, reverse the ordinary expectations. In addition, a number of stock themes in world mythology are missing in Scripture, viz. apocatastasis, apotheosis, primordial chaos, primeval caverns, ritual masquerades, magic circles (labyrinth, mandala, wheel of karma), transmigration, descensus ad infernos, &c. (Acts 2:27, Eph 4:8-9 and 1 Pet 3:18-20 have been widely misconstrued. See commentaries by Grudem, Hoehner, Marshall, Schreiner, and O'Brien)
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The history of Scripture is remarkably restrained in comparison with pagan mythology. If the Bible writers felt free to make up fantastic incidents, it is odd that they passed up so many tempting opportunities to indulge their over-heated imagination. For example, Mark records the empty tomb, and the other Gospels record some Easter appearances of Christ, but none of the canonical Gospels record the actual moment of the Resurrection, or have Christ appearing to Pilate or Caiaphas and saying, "I told you so!"
Moreover, the miracles of Scripture have always some moral or meaningful purpose to them, in manifesting the mercy and judgment of God, or advancing his redemptive designs. This is quite different from the frivolous entertainment value of magical or supernatural incidents in so much mythology.
And beyond their historic origin is their prehistoric origin. We live in a sacramental universe. In the Fourth Gospel, sensible events are a form of heavenly sign-language—a visible pointer to the invisible God. The reason why so many natural metaphors are religious metaphors around the world is that God has established a code language linking the inward and outward, moral and material, visible and invisible, sensible and spiritual realms, viz. ascent/descent; bondage/release; light/dark, death/rebirth; straight/crooked; lost/found.
We must also make allowance for the role of dead metaphors. Based on bare etymology, one could conclude that Holy Week (Ash Wednesday, Maundy-Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday) was a pagan rather than Christian festival; but allusions to Wodin, Thor, Freya and Saturn are purely conventional. Likewise, I can identify a chemical substance as "spirits of turpentine" without endorsing its alchemical background, just as I can "fumigate" a house without trading on necromantic associations.
Folklorists tend to read a lot of symbolism into mythology (e.g., Sisyphus, Prometheus, Midas, Narcissus, Psyche, Phaeton, Pygmalion, Tantalus). But is that the way an old bard and his audience took the tale, or was it just a great campfire story? Hard to tell at a distance.
3. Contradictions
It is commonplace for unbelievers to say that Scripture is riddled with contradictions. We can spare ourselves a lot of unnecessary time at the outset by precisely defining our terms and drawing a few elementary distinctions. For this charge often commits a level-confusion. Scripture is inerrant if it's a truthful account of a historical event, if it is harmonious with the facts.
To express this distinction rather differently, we need to distinguish between the first-order historical harmony and the second-order literary harmony, or the first order factual harmony and the second-order formal harmony.
There is nothing essentially errant about a formal disharmony. For example, the variant accounts of the temptation of Christ in Matthew and Luke are formally discrepant inasmuch as they present the order of the temptations in a different sequence.
That does not, however, render them factually erroneous or unhistorical unless it was either the aim of the author to replicate the original sequence, or unless such replication is somehow essential to the veracity of the record.
What makes a record true is whether it is true to the fact it does report, and whether it supplies the minimal amount for information relevant to its aim and fair to its subject.
Formal variants would only falsify the historical record if the historian has set out to produce a linear, chronological, verbatim account, and if that's a necessary condition of accurate reportage. I can't see why. The difference between inerrancy and errancy is a difference between truth and error. Merely formal discrepancies do not impugn the inerrancy of Scripture because they don't go to matters of fact.
To express this distinction from another angle, it is one thing to say that synoptic accounts record underlying events which all line up in space and time; quite another to say that we can deconstruct the editorial process and recover the original order.
The issue is not so much whether synoptic accounts harmonize with each other, on a formal plane, but whether they harmonize with the underlying events, at a factual level—just as tree branches reconnect, not at the top, but at the trunk.
For us, the historical trunk is submeged. The evidence of the historical trunk exists at the surface level of the literary twigs. By tracing out the curvature we can extrapolate a trajectory from the twigs back down to a common trunk. But much remains out of sight.
Technically speaking, it is impossible to replicate every detail of a historical event because there's too much raw data. What was the temperature, humidity, dew-point, elevation, wind speed and direction, intensity of light, pollen count, &c.?
Since our only access to the first-order level is via the second-order level, any attempt at a literary harmonization is bound to be conjectural and inconclusive.
But such an exercise is, in any event, irrelevant to the inerrancy of the record, for what makes it true is not its formal, literary consistency, but its factual, historical consistency.
Inerrancy is perfectly compatible with selective reporting, topical sequencing, paraphrastic citation, round numbers, variant names, and literary dependence.
The charge of inconsistency also assumes that you know a contradiction when you see one. Yet when you study a writing from the past, you need to know something about the conventions and compositional methods of that time and place, viz., idioms, round numbers, hyperbole, editorial asides, paraphrastic citations, narrative compression, thematic sequencing, calendrical variants,, audience adaptation, eye-level descriptions, &c. We can’t just jump from the 21C to the 1C or the 2nd Millennium BC—using our own literary models as the assumed standard of comparison.
The best way of recovering the reportorial techniques of the Bible is to study the way in which the same writer records the same event:
(a) Oath of Abraham's servant (Gen 24:3-8; par. 37-41).
(b) Prayer of Abraham's servant (Gen 24:12-24; par. 42-49).
(c) Pharaoh's dream (Gen 41:1-7,18-24)
(d) Résumé of the wilderness wandering (Num 33:1-49; Deut 8-10:11; 29:1-8).
(e) Decree of Cyrus (Ezra 1:1-4; par. 6:1-5).
(f) Resurrection/Ascension (Lk 23:13-53; par. Acts 1:1-11).
(g) Conversion of Paul (Acts 9:1-30; par. 22:3-21; par. 26:4-20).
(h) Conversion of Cornelius (Acts 10; par. 11:1-18; par. 15:7-9).
If we study our parallel accounts with a modicum of critical sympathy, we can see that the historians of Scripture were dutifully pedantic in all they say and summarize. They stick with a rigid outline, sometimes saying more, sometimes less, but pedantically faithful to the sense and substance of the speeches and events—with precious little stylistic variance. The whole thing has the formulaic quality of a well-rehearsed memory, using much the same words in much the same place, over and over again—like a workhorse doing the rounds. What comes across is the incurious absence of imagination, the utter lack of originality, the stubborn stenographic tenacity, the dull disinclination to break with routine. The Bible writers are only too happy to repeat themselves. They would be perfect in the witness box, ideal as court reporters—dreadful as screenwriters, aweful as novelists. This must all be terribly disappointing to the critic who had hoped to find in Scripture a creative license untrammeled by the facts.
Another popular target of the charge are the Passion and Easter narratives. But this objection overlooks the technical challenge of presenting simultaneous events in a sequential narrative. In the Passion and Easter narratives you have a number of different people in different places doing things at more or less the same time. Yet a narrative is a linear medium, and so it is not possible, as a practical matter, to position all these players in their real time relations.
This is a choice that every historian must face. Does his block his material by time or space? Usually, a historian jumps back and forth, tracing out the timeline of one place for a little ways, then going back and tracing out another, then returning to pick up where he left off. He can either be continuous in time or space: if he’s continuous in time, he’s discontinuous in space and vice versa. To equate a narrative sequence with a historical sequence confuses a medium of communication with a series of events. In reporting parallel action, some dislocation is inevitable—for the presentation must be broken down into separate scenes. To treat this as a contradiction commits a category mistake. The blunders belong to the critic and not the Evangelist.
Most of the other discrepancies in Scripture involve names and numbers. I suspect that most all of these attributable to transcriptional errors. Numbers are especially susceptible to miscopying. In addition, written Hebrew, with its unpointed script, invites the interchange or transposition (metathesis) of consonants. Imagine how much damage a dyslexic scribe might do! And once a mistake is made, a later scribe may further compound the error by emending the text. Let us also recall that a scribe might have to copy a faded MS in bad lighting—this was pre-Edison, remember!. And this was, as well, in the days before corrective lenses! Textual criticism has also shown that the differences between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles are largely owing to a variant Vorlage.
A final area in which the inerrancy of Scripture is often impugned is the phenomenon of "failed" prophecy. Here the critic points to a prophecy in which the prediction was falsified by non-fulfillment.
What this characterization fails to take into account is the conditional nature of most Biblical prophecy. The classic text is Jer 18:7:10. Take careful notice of the sweeping terms of the text: it is sweeping in time ("if at any time"), space ("any nation or kingdom"), and scope--whether salvation or judgment ("to uproot/tear down," "to plant/build up").
In other words, the presumption is not that all prophecy is unconditional unless otherwise stated, but that all prophecy is conditional unless otherwise stated. If sinners will repent of their sin, then God will "repent" of his threatened judgment. And if sinners will defy their God, then God will withhold his promissory blessing.
Friday, April 23, 2004
I'm glad you asked-3
3. Coherence of Theism:
i) Trinity
It is commonplace for unbelievers to attack the Trinity as incoherent. And even many believers treat the Trinity as a grand a paradox. And perhaps that is so. But remember that the Bible never presents the Trinity as a paradox. Paradox does not figure in the revealed datum or orthodox definition of the Trinity. Although the Trinity is an object of faith, believing it to be a paradox is not an object of faith and dogma.
Rather, that is a subjective impression on the part of some readers. And their impression is formed on the basis of preconceptions that they bring to the teaching of Scripture. They come to the Biblical witness with a preconception of the one-over-many relation. And the paradox is generated by a particular preconception. It is often rather simplistic, and takes the form of one or another of two opposing level-confusions.
On the one hand, it may operate with an overly abstract model of the one-over-many by reducing numbered objects (1x; 3y) or numerical relations (1x=3y) to sheer numbers (1=3). But the Trinitarian "equation" doesn’t operate at that level of generality. "One God in three persons" is not reducible to "the number one equals the number three." Rather, the relation is more like saying that A and B are the same with respect to C.
On the other hand, it may operate with an overly-concrete model of the one-over-many relation by reducing numbered objects to concrete particulars. We use numbers to count discrete units. One unit of x doesn’t equal three units of x. And this is true enough when dealing with spatially discrete objects, like a loaf of bread. But the members of the Trinity have no physical boundaries. They cannot be divided and subdivided into parts less than the whole.
In addition, it is a mistake to press adjectives like "same" and "different" into relations of strict identity and absolute alterity. We use these words more loosely. Am I the same man I was ten years ago? In some respects, yes; in others—no. But it is possible for two objects to sustain a point-by-point correspondence without reducing one to the other. For example, a symmetry sustains an internal one-over-many relation. Of particular interest are enatiomorphic symmetries, such as we find in tessellation, strict counterpoint and crystallography. This type of symmetry sets up a relation that is both equipollent and irreducible. Although A sustains a closed, one-one correspondence to B, A is not reducible to B. One-to-one is not the same thing as one-of-one.
ii) Divine Attributes
Unbelievers not only allege that the Trinity is incoherent, but that the divine attributes are incoherent, either in isolation or conjunction. They’ll parade paradoxes of omnipotence. They’ll say that omniscience is incompatible with an aspatiotemporal mode of existence. Or they’ll say that benevolence and omnipotence are incompatible with evil.
(a) Omniscience
Before we delve into divine omniscience, it is useful to begin with a definition. The Christian is not interested in defending some abstract attribute or definition, but only in defending the revealed perfections of God in Scripture. As a working definition, I would submit that for God to know everything is for God to know everything that is true, and to believe no falsehoods. The ontological identity of God and truth is a fixture of Johannine theology.
For example, it is sometimes said that God cannot be omniscient because he cannot know what it feels like to taste an ice cream cone or break out in a cold sweat. But bare sensation has no truth-value. To be hot or cold or feel fearful is without truth-value. It is either true or false to predicate fear of something, to say that something is fearful or induces fear in the subject, but fear itself is neither true nor false, and so is not a proper object of knowledge.
Another objection to divine omniscience is that God cannot know what a free agent will do. If we define freedom in libertarian terms, then I would concede the point. But, from a Reformed standpoint, this objection does not pose an impediment to God's knowledge seeing as a Calvinist would deny that sort of freedom to finite agents.
Still another objection is that if God exists outside of time and space, then there are things a spatiotemporal agent can know to which God is not privy. How can God know the color red? How can God know what time it is?
Now these objections rest on some unexamined assumptions. Take a red apple. When I perceive a red apple, do I perceive the red property as it inheres in the apple, or do I perceive the red property-instance in my mind? The apple is a material object, but is my mental impression a material object? The apple occupies space, but my mental image does not. So the way in which I sense a red apple is indirect and immaterial. Although there is a physical and external object, as well as a physical process by which that stimulus is presented to the mind, the universal is not necessarily, or of itself, a physical object, but rather, a symbol or simulation or optical illusion. The process is roughly as follows: sensible>sensation>perception>conception.
Now, if even in the case of sensory processing, the immediate object of knowledge is a concept of the object, then I don't see why, in the case of God, a sensible object cannot be an object of knowledge. There are differences, to be sure. God knows the object without recourse to any sensory input. Indeed, the object only exists in time and space because God instantiated the object according to his prior concept.
Now, not everyone would agree with this epistemology. But, if so, the issue is not distinctive to religious epistemology, but turns on your general theory of knowledge. And it is incumbent on a critic of omniscience to make a separate case for his epistemic assumptions before he is in any position to launch an attack on omniscience from that front.
With regard to time, it is felt that a timeless God doesn't know what time it is. He may know the sequence, but cannot know how far we are into the sequence of unfolding events. However, this way of framing the question conceals a certain bias. For by casting the question in terms of now and then, past, present and future, we already assume the A-theory of time. So before we can adequately discuss God's relation to time, we need to settle on a theory of time. Once again, this debate goes all the way back to Classical Greek philosophy and the Pre-Socratics (e.g., Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, Parmenides, Heraclitus).
Is time like an ever-rolling stream? That's the popular, common-sense view. But what is commonsensical can turn nonsensical in a flash as soon as we ask a few simple questions. Remember Augustine's famous digression on the subject of time in the Confessions? If you don't ask, I know; if you ask, I don't know. What is the present? Is it only a common surface between an unreal past and unrealized future? A wall without depth or duration? That’s the A-theory.
Or is time more like a motion picture? We talk of timeframes, as if time were a series of snapshots on a strip of film. Is the timeline a sequence without succession? Is the passage of time an illusion, like flickering images on a silver screen? Is all of time already in the can? Is all the footage on the reel—from the opening shot to the closing shot? That’s the B-theory. (For an exposition of the B-theory, cf. D. Mellor, Real Time II [Routledge, 1998]; R. Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions [Oxford, 2003].)
We seem to be faced with a paradox. If tense is real, then that seems to render time illusory by reducing the momentary present to a vanishing borderline between what was and what will be—in which case nothing ever is, but only was or will be. But if time is real, then that seems to render tense illusory, for a future moment or past instant is just as real as the present—but within its own timeframe.
Unless you subscribe to naïve realism, every side must admit an element of illusion into its theory of perception. Just as we don't directly perceive space, we don't directly perceive time. Our sense of time's "passage" is partly inferred from space (i.e., locomotion). But whether the movement is actual or only apparent, like a motion picture or stroboscopic effect, is not a direct datum of experience. And even the awareness of our own "successive" mental states owes more to memory and anticipation than a direct deliverance or immediate presentation of time and tense—like the difference between direct perception or introspection and visual persistence. We enjoy immediate access to our own mental states, but not to the passage of time, for even on the A-theory, consciousness is bounded by the specious present. (Clifford Williams has argued that the phenomenology of time is the same on either the A- or B-theories. Cf. "A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time," RIP Journal of Philosophy 73/285:379-393.)
Now, if we assume the B-theory of time, then knowing the sequence is all there is to know, for time and tense are a given totality. So, on such a view, asking if God knows the time is misplaced.
But which theory is true? It is arguable that the Biblical doctrine of creation throws some weight behind the B-theory. For Gen 1 tells us that the timeline began with God's creative fiat, in which case the Creator falls outside the timeline. And if that is so, then creation is a temporal effect of a timeless act. And in that event, the effect is fully enfolded and unfolded in this singular and indivisible fiat—like a short story or novel or reel of film. The writer or filmmaker exists outside the timeline of the writing or film footage, and the writing or film is finished from first to last.
Incidentally, this is the best way of construing the relation between divine immanence and transcendence. God is "present" or "active" within the world, not by acting in or on the world, but by enacting the world. He not only sets the ball in motion but brings everything into being.
More generally, the Bible has some things to say about the priority of the eternal to the temporal (Ps 90:2,4; 102:25-27; 1 Cor 2:7; 2 Tim 1:9; Tit 1:2; Jas 1:17; Jude 25). It may be objected that words like "before" imply an antemundane timeline. But this overlooks the fact that such words are literally spatial-markers, and only applied to the divisions of time by figurative extension. We're back on the river. The future lies ahead, the past lies behind, and I paddle my way through time, like a rowboat or riverboat on the current of the stream. But this is poetry and picture-language. The "passage" of time treats the viewer as a fixed point in relation to a moving field, but A-theory presentism denies this privileged status to the viewer.
It seems to me that although spatial indexicals are literal, temporal indexicals are figurative. This is not to say that we cannot paraphrase certain temporal relations in nonspatial terms, but when pressed to further define our terms, we fall back on the spatialization of time. We conceptualize temporal indexicals on analogy with spatial indexicals--which are literal (when applied to physical objects).
If so, then temporal relations are not, as humans conceive them to be, an immediate object of knowledge. All we know is the temporal experience--reconceptualized in the spatial metaphor. Hence, temporal relations are objects of direct belief, but not of direct knowledge.
So, at that level, there is nothing for God to know, because there is nothing for the human subject to know. Rather, God knows what we believe--about our temporal location.
Assuming that space and time are different--as, indeed, I believe them to be--temporal indexicals are, in principle, susceptible to a reductive explanation--to a literal object of knowledge, stripped of the spatialization.
And, at that level, God would know more about temporal indexicals than we do inasmuch as he would know what they actually stand for. But their primitive identity is inaccessible to us.
The fact that we apply a spatial grid to our common conception of time raises the question of what would be left of the sequence were we to strip away this picturesque metaphor. Is last month really more distant in time than last week? Or am I allowing myself to be bewitched by a spatial simile? The real sequence would be teleological rather than strictly linear or causal—more akin to a storybook sequence or film footage.
It is often said that our concept of eternity is privative and negative. But I would turn this around. If time and space are limits, then eternity implies an indivisible, unsurpassable plenity of being. To say that God preexisted the world literally means that there is never a time when God did not exist, for time was given in creation, and God subsists apart from the world.
The notion of a negation carries an unduly prejudicial connotation. Even a photographic negative, although lacking the depth, color, scale and orientation of the original, is descriptive of the original; while the developed footage, although a double negation, being at two removes from the original, is even more descriptive of the original.
In this general connection, I'd develop my distinction between a thought and a thought-process. A thought-process is a concrete property-instance of an abstract property. This follows from the fact that the same thought can be multiply-instantiated in more than one subject at more than one time. You and I can share the same thought. I can entertain the same thought at different times. So a thought is an abstract object or property.
A thought can either be exemplified or unexemplified. Unexemplified thoughts are divine thoughts, human thoughts are exemplified thoughts. (The latter could be extended to angels.) Thought is atemporal, whereas a thought-process is temporal.
Thought is ontologically and noetically prior to a thought process. My finite, human thoughts are property-instances of God's thoughts. Whatever I think I think because God instantiated that thought in my mind.
Indexicals are a subset of thoughts in general. They are beliefs about my relative position in time and space.
I believe that it is now 3:38 PM because God instantiated that thought in my mind. Hence, I cannot know and/or believe any indexical information that God doesn't already know inasmuch as God is the source of my indexical beliefs or propositional attitudes in the first place.
(b) Omnipotence
In fielding the paradoxes of omnipotence it is, again, important to keep in mind that what we’re concerned with defending is not some test-tube definition, cooked up in a philosophy lab, but the revealed attributes of God.
The textbook case is the stone paradox, viz., "Can God make a rock so big that he can’t lift it?" But it is hard to know how seriously to take this question. For it conjures up the anthropomorphic image of a sweaty, muscle-bound Atlas having to huff and puff and heave a boulder uphill. Since this is not the Biblical view of God, the question is as silly as it is irrelevant—on par with asking if God can turn green with envy. To the extent that the question can even be retranslated into a coherent proposition, the answer is that God doesn’t make things happen by acting on a medium, but by enacting a medium. And it is not God, but the finite medium, which is subject to spatiotemporal limits.
A further problem with the question is that it conceals a contradiction. The basic form of the question is: Can God do something God can’t to? If God is omnipotent, then is he able to do something he is unable to do? Stripped down to the bare essentials, the question does not amount to a coherent proposition. And as such, it poses a pseudo-task. All we have here is a verbal trick: If God can do anything, then he can even do something he can’t do; but, if not, then he can’t to everything. This is just a game with words, pushing words around—like moving blocks on a scrabble board. But words are not the same as concepts.
iii) Incarnation
It is often alleged that the Incarnation is incoherent. How is a divine mode of subsistence compatible with a human mode of subsistence? How can Christ be mortal and immortal, omniscient and ignorant, omnipotent and impotent, &c.?
Before we broach this question, we need to lay down a few markers. If the critic is alleging a contradiction, then the critic shoulders the burden of proof. In addition, most harmonizations will be underdetermined by Scripture inasmuch as the Bible does not spell out the nature of the relation. It says that Christ enjoys a full complement of divine and human attributes, but does not reveal a detailed model of how they interface. Hence, the main thing is to avoid reductive harmonies (e.g., the docetic, Kenotic, Arian, Apollonarian, Nestorian, Monophysite, & monothelite heresies). The same holds true of the Trinity.
The Bible employs a literary metaphor to depict God’s economic relations (Gen 1:3; Pss 33:6; 139:16; Rev 13:8; 17:8). And a divine Incarnation would be a special case and limiting case of God’s economic relations. Indeed, the Logos—yet another literary metaphor—is an economic title for the Incarnate Son (Jn 1:1-4).
So let us explore the explanatory power of this metaphor. It is often said that all creative writing is autobiographical inasmuch as the author projects something of himself into the characters. And there are cases in which the author writes himself into his own story as the main character, and tells the story from the first person point of view. Dante is a classic case in point.
Now, the writer exists outside his storybook world, outside its spatiotemporal framework. He has his own set of attributes, his own mode of subsistence. Likewise, his literary alter-ego has all the attributes proper to a storybook character situated in a storybook world. And yet there’s a sense in which the author reincarnates himself in his autobiographical character. This figure has the same mental traits and character traits as the author, the same memories, the same know-how. The author can even vest his literary alter-ego with the power to rewrite the story from within.
This is a metaphor, but more than a metaphor. For just as a storybook character was once a figment of the writer’s imagination, we were fictions in the mind of God. And just as a creative writer objectifies his idea in time and space, our Creator objectified his idea in time and space.
There is, of course, a point at which the analogy would seem to break down. For the storybook character is unreal. He is not alive. He knows nothing, feels nothing. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the dream of artificial intelligence were to come true. Suppose that a writer could, in fact, invest his characters with consciousness—like the old myth of Pygmalion. And even if this is humanly unattainable, the analogy holds at the divine level, for God does invest his imaginary characters with consciousness.
4. Freudian Faith
Freud and Feuerbach attributed faith in God to a mental projection of our inner feelings. By way of reply:
i) This analysis is a half-truth. The Bible treats idolatry as a mental projection. The fallen imagination is an idol-making factory. Because the sinner is apprehensive about the judgment of God, he substitutes surrogate gods whom he can buy off by human sacrifice and other petty bribes.
ii) This analysis can backfire by explaining unbelief as well as belief. Perhaps the atheist is projecting his negative father-fixation. Indeed, a good many infidels fit this psychological profile.
iii) This analysis is too indiscriminate. On the one hand, it assigns faith to a variety of different and divergent motives. Faith is the result of hope or fear or guilt or pride or vengeance, &c. On the other hand, believers come from a broad range of social backgrounds. Believers represent a wide variety of temperamental types, with varying intellectual aptitudes. Some believers were raised in the faith while others came to the faith from an irreligious upbringing. Some switch from one church to another. Some drifted from the faith and returned while others leave and never look back. Some family members remain in the faith while others turn from the faith. Some lose their faith in college while others find their faith in college. Some lose their faith after a personal tragedy while others find their faith after a personal tragedy. Converts give different reasons for their pilgrimage. When a theory is so flexible that it can accommodate contrary lines of evidence, it amounts to a disguised description under the guise of an efficient explanation.
iv) Projective theories have an armchair quality to them. They don’t seem to be based on a wide sampling of case-studies or personal acquaintance with Christians from various walks of life. How many churches did Freud attend? How many devout believers did he know? How many did he interview? How many did he observe up close over the course of a lifetime—from the sandbox and the lecture hall to the dinner table and the deathbed?
i) Trinity
It is commonplace for unbelievers to attack the Trinity as incoherent. And even many believers treat the Trinity as a grand a paradox. And perhaps that is so. But remember that the Bible never presents the Trinity as a paradox. Paradox does not figure in the revealed datum or orthodox definition of the Trinity. Although the Trinity is an object of faith, believing it to be a paradox is not an object of faith and dogma.
Rather, that is a subjective impression on the part of some readers. And their impression is formed on the basis of preconceptions that they bring to the teaching of Scripture. They come to the Biblical witness with a preconception of the one-over-many relation. And the paradox is generated by a particular preconception. It is often rather simplistic, and takes the form of one or another of two opposing level-confusions.
On the one hand, it may operate with an overly abstract model of the one-over-many by reducing numbered objects (1x; 3y) or numerical relations (1x=3y) to sheer numbers (1=3). But the Trinitarian "equation" doesn’t operate at that level of generality. "One God in three persons" is not reducible to "the number one equals the number three." Rather, the relation is more like saying that A and B are the same with respect to C.
On the other hand, it may operate with an overly-concrete model of the one-over-many relation by reducing numbered objects to concrete particulars. We use numbers to count discrete units. One unit of x doesn’t equal three units of x. And this is true enough when dealing with spatially discrete objects, like a loaf of bread. But the members of the Trinity have no physical boundaries. They cannot be divided and subdivided into parts less than the whole.
In addition, it is a mistake to press adjectives like "same" and "different" into relations of strict identity and absolute alterity. We use these words more loosely. Am I the same man I was ten years ago? In some respects, yes; in others—no. But it is possible for two objects to sustain a point-by-point correspondence without reducing one to the other. For example, a symmetry sustains an internal one-over-many relation. Of particular interest are enatiomorphic symmetries, such as we find in tessellation, strict counterpoint and crystallography. This type of symmetry sets up a relation that is both equipollent and irreducible. Although A sustains a closed, one-one correspondence to B, A is not reducible to B. One-to-one is not the same thing as one-of-one.
ii) Divine Attributes
Unbelievers not only allege that the Trinity is incoherent, but that the divine attributes are incoherent, either in isolation or conjunction. They’ll parade paradoxes of omnipotence. They’ll say that omniscience is incompatible with an aspatiotemporal mode of existence. Or they’ll say that benevolence and omnipotence are incompatible with evil.
(a) Omniscience
Before we delve into divine omniscience, it is useful to begin with a definition. The Christian is not interested in defending some abstract attribute or definition, but only in defending the revealed perfections of God in Scripture. As a working definition, I would submit that for God to know everything is for God to know everything that is true, and to believe no falsehoods. The ontological identity of God and truth is a fixture of Johannine theology.
For example, it is sometimes said that God cannot be omniscient because he cannot know what it feels like to taste an ice cream cone or break out in a cold sweat. But bare sensation has no truth-value. To be hot or cold or feel fearful is without truth-value. It is either true or false to predicate fear of something, to say that something is fearful or induces fear in the subject, but fear itself is neither true nor false, and so is not a proper object of knowledge.
Another objection to divine omniscience is that God cannot know what a free agent will do. If we define freedom in libertarian terms, then I would concede the point. But, from a Reformed standpoint, this objection does not pose an impediment to God's knowledge seeing as a Calvinist would deny that sort of freedom to finite agents.
Still another objection is that if God exists outside of time and space, then there are things a spatiotemporal agent can know to which God is not privy. How can God know the color red? How can God know what time it is?
Now these objections rest on some unexamined assumptions. Take a red apple. When I perceive a red apple, do I perceive the red property as it inheres in the apple, or do I perceive the red property-instance in my mind? The apple is a material object, but is my mental impression a material object? The apple occupies space, but my mental image does not. So the way in which I sense a red apple is indirect and immaterial. Although there is a physical and external object, as well as a physical process by which that stimulus is presented to the mind, the universal is not necessarily, or of itself, a physical object, but rather, a symbol or simulation or optical illusion. The process is roughly as follows: sensible>sensation>perception>conception.
Now, if even in the case of sensory processing, the immediate object of knowledge is a concept of the object, then I don't see why, in the case of God, a sensible object cannot be an object of knowledge. There are differences, to be sure. God knows the object without recourse to any sensory input. Indeed, the object only exists in time and space because God instantiated the object according to his prior concept.
Now, not everyone would agree with this epistemology. But, if so, the issue is not distinctive to religious epistemology, but turns on your general theory of knowledge. And it is incumbent on a critic of omniscience to make a separate case for his epistemic assumptions before he is in any position to launch an attack on omniscience from that front.
With regard to time, it is felt that a timeless God doesn't know what time it is. He may know the sequence, but cannot know how far we are into the sequence of unfolding events. However, this way of framing the question conceals a certain bias. For by casting the question in terms of now and then, past, present and future, we already assume the A-theory of time. So before we can adequately discuss God's relation to time, we need to settle on a theory of time. Once again, this debate goes all the way back to Classical Greek philosophy and the Pre-Socratics (e.g., Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, Parmenides, Heraclitus).
Is time like an ever-rolling stream? That's the popular, common-sense view. But what is commonsensical can turn nonsensical in a flash as soon as we ask a few simple questions. Remember Augustine's famous digression on the subject of time in the Confessions? If you don't ask, I know; if you ask, I don't know. What is the present? Is it only a common surface between an unreal past and unrealized future? A wall without depth or duration? That’s the A-theory.
Or is time more like a motion picture? We talk of timeframes, as if time were a series of snapshots on a strip of film. Is the timeline a sequence without succession? Is the passage of time an illusion, like flickering images on a silver screen? Is all of time already in the can? Is all the footage on the reel—from the opening shot to the closing shot? That’s the B-theory. (For an exposition of the B-theory, cf. D. Mellor, Real Time II [Routledge, 1998]; R. Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions [Oxford, 2003].)
We seem to be faced with a paradox. If tense is real, then that seems to render time illusory by reducing the momentary present to a vanishing borderline between what was and what will be—in which case nothing ever is, but only was or will be. But if time is real, then that seems to render tense illusory, for a future moment or past instant is just as real as the present—but within its own timeframe.
Unless you subscribe to naïve realism, every side must admit an element of illusion into its theory of perception. Just as we don't directly perceive space, we don't directly perceive time. Our sense of time's "passage" is partly inferred from space (i.e., locomotion). But whether the movement is actual or only apparent, like a motion picture or stroboscopic effect, is not a direct datum of experience. And even the awareness of our own "successive" mental states owes more to memory and anticipation than a direct deliverance or immediate presentation of time and tense—like the difference between direct perception or introspection and visual persistence. We enjoy immediate access to our own mental states, but not to the passage of time, for even on the A-theory, consciousness is bounded by the specious present. (Clifford Williams has argued that the phenomenology of time is the same on either the A- or B-theories. Cf. "A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time," RIP Journal of Philosophy 73/285:379-393.)
Now, if we assume the B-theory of time, then knowing the sequence is all there is to know, for time and tense are a given totality. So, on such a view, asking if God knows the time is misplaced.
But which theory is true? It is arguable that the Biblical doctrine of creation throws some weight behind the B-theory. For Gen 1 tells us that the timeline began with God's creative fiat, in which case the Creator falls outside the timeline. And if that is so, then creation is a temporal effect of a timeless act. And in that event, the effect is fully enfolded and unfolded in this singular and indivisible fiat—like a short story or novel or reel of film. The writer or filmmaker exists outside the timeline of the writing or film footage, and the writing or film is finished from first to last.
Incidentally, this is the best way of construing the relation between divine immanence and transcendence. God is "present" or "active" within the world, not by acting in or on the world, but by enacting the world. He not only sets the ball in motion but brings everything into being.
More generally, the Bible has some things to say about the priority of the eternal to the temporal (Ps 90:2,4; 102:25-27; 1 Cor 2:7; 2 Tim 1:9; Tit 1:2; Jas 1:17; Jude 25). It may be objected that words like "before" imply an antemundane timeline. But this overlooks the fact that such words are literally spatial-markers, and only applied to the divisions of time by figurative extension. We're back on the river. The future lies ahead, the past lies behind, and I paddle my way through time, like a rowboat or riverboat on the current of the stream. But this is poetry and picture-language. The "passage" of time treats the viewer as a fixed point in relation to a moving field, but A-theory presentism denies this privileged status to the viewer.
It seems to me that although spatial indexicals are literal, temporal indexicals are figurative. This is not to say that we cannot paraphrase certain temporal relations in nonspatial terms, but when pressed to further define our terms, we fall back on the spatialization of time. We conceptualize temporal indexicals on analogy with spatial indexicals--which are literal (when applied to physical objects).
If so, then temporal relations are not, as humans conceive them to be, an immediate object of knowledge. All we know is the temporal experience--reconceptualized in the spatial metaphor. Hence, temporal relations are objects of direct belief, but not of direct knowledge.
So, at that level, there is nothing for God to know, because there is nothing for the human subject to know. Rather, God knows what we believe--about our temporal location.
Assuming that space and time are different--as, indeed, I believe them to be--temporal indexicals are, in principle, susceptible to a reductive explanation--to a literal object of knowledge, stripped of the spatialization.
And, at that level, God would know more about temporal indexicals than we do inasmuch as he would know what they actually stand for. But their primitive identity is inaccessible to us.
The fact that we apply a spatial grid to our common conception of time raises the question of what would be left of the sequence were we to strip away this picturesque metaphor. Is last month really more distant in time than last week? Or am I allowing myself to be bewitched by a spatial simile? The real sequence would be teleological rather than strictly linear or causal—more akin to a storybook sequence or film footage.
It is often said that our concept of eternity is privative and negative. But I would turn this around. If time and space are limits, then eternity implies an indivisible, unsurpassable plenity of being. To say that God preexisted the world literally means that there is never a time when God did not exist, for time was given in creation, and God subsists apart from the world.
The notion of a negation carries an unduly prejudicial connotation. Even a photographic negative, although lacking the depth, color, scale and orientation of the original, is descriptive of the original; while the developed footage, although a double negation, being at two removes from the original, is even more descriptive of the original.
In this general connection, I'd develop my distinction between a thought and a thought-process. A thought-process is a concrete property-instance of an abstract property. This follows from the fact that the same thought can be multiply-instantiated in more than one subject at more than one time. You and I can share the same thought. I can entertain the same thought at different times. So a thought is an abstract object or property.
A thought can either be exemplified or unexemplified. Unexemplified thoughts are divine thoughts, human thoughts are exemplified thoughts. (The latter could be extended to angels.) Thought is atemporal, whereas a thought-process is temporal.
Thought is ontologically and noetically prior to a thought process. My finite, human thoughts are property-instances of God's thoughts. Whatever I think I think because God instantiated that thought in my mind.
Indexicals are a subset of thoughts in general. They are beliefs about my relative position in time and space.
I believe that it is now 3:38 PM because God instantiated that thought in my mind. Hence, I cannot know and/or believe any indexical information that God doesn't already know inasmuch as God is the source of my indexical beliefs or propositional attitudes in the first place.
(b) Omnipotence
In fielding the paradoxes of omnipotence it is, again, important to keep in mind that what we’re concerned with defending is not some test-tube definition, cooked up in a philosophy lab, but the revealed attributes of God.
The textbook case is the stone paradox, viz., "Can God make a rock so big that he can’t lift it?" But it is hard to know how seriously to take this question. For it conjures up the anthropomorphic image of a sweaty, muscle-bound Atlas having to huff and puff and heave a boulder uphill. Since this is not the Biblical view of God, the question is as silly as it is irrelevant—on par with asking if God can turn green with envy. To the extent that the question can even be retranslated into a coherent proposition, the answer is that God doesn’t make things happen by acting on a medium, but by enacting a medium. And it is not God, but the finite medium, which is subject to spatiotemporal limits.
A further problem with the question is that it conceals a contradiction. The basic form of the question is: Can God do something God can’t to? If God is omnipotent, then is he able to do something he is unable to do? Stripped down to the bare essentials, the question does not amount to a coherent proposition. And as such, it poses a pseudo-task. All we have here is a verbal trick: If God can do anything, then he can even do something he can’t do; but, if not, then he can’t to everything. This is just a game with words, pushing words around—like moving blocks on a scrabble board. But words are not the same as concepts.
iii) Incarnation
It is often alleged that the Incarnation is incoherent. How is a divine mode of subsistence compatible with a human mode of subsistence? How can Christ be mortal and immortal, omniscient and ignorant, omnipotent and impotent, &c.?
Before we broach this question, we need to lay down a few markers. If the critic is alleging a contradiction, then the critic shoulders the burden of proof. In addition, most harmonizations will be underdetermined by Scripture inasmuch as the Bible does not spell out the nature of the relation. It says that Christ enjoys a full complement of divine and human attributes, but does not reveal a detailed model of how they interface. Hence, the main thing is to avoid reductive harmonies (e.g., the docetic, Kenotic, Arian, Apollonarian, Nestorian, Monophysite, & monothelite heresies). The same holds true of the Trinity.
The Bible employs a literary metaphor to depict God’s economic relations (Gen 1:3; Pss 33:6; 139:16; Rev 13:8; 17:8). And a divine Incarnation would be a special case and limiting case of God’s economic relations. Indeed, the Logos—yet another literary metaphor—is an economic title for the Incarnate Son (Jn 1:1-4).
So let us explore the explanatory power of this metaphor. It is often said that all creative writing is autobiographical inasmuch as the author projects something of himself into the characters. And there are cases in which the author writes himself into his own story as the main character, and tells the story from the first person point of view. Dante is a classic case in point.
Now, the writer exists outside his storybook world, outside its spatiotemporal framework. He has his own set of attributes, his own mode of subsistence. Likewise, his literary alter-ego has all the attributes proper to a storybook character situated in a storybook world. And yet there’s a sense in which the author reincarnates himself in his autobiographical character. This figure has the same mental traits and character traits as the author, the same memories, the same know-how. The author can even vest his literary alter-ego with the power to rewrite the story from within.
This is a metaphor, but more than a metaphor. For just as a storybook character was once a figment of the writer’s imagination, we were fictions in the mind of God. And just as a creative writer objectifies his idea in time and space, our Creator objectified his idea in time and space.
There is, of course, a point at which the analogy would seem to break down. For the storybook character is unreal. He is not alive. He knows nothing, feels nothing. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the dream of artificial intelligence were to come true. Suppose that a writer could, in fact, invest his characters with consciousness—like the old myth of Pygmalion. And even if this is humanly unattainable, the analogy holds at the divine level, for God does invest his imaginary characters with consciousness.
4. Freudian Faith
Freud and Feuerbach attributed faith in God to a mental projection of our inner feelings. By way of reply:
i) This analysis is a half-truth. The Bible treats idolatry as a mental projection. The fallen imagination is an idol-making factory. Because the sinner is apprehensive about the judgment of God, he substitutes surrogate gods whom he can buy off by human sacrifice and other petty bribes.
ii) This analysis can backfire by explaining unbelief as well as belief. Perhaps the atheist is projecting his negative father-fixation. Indeed, a good many infidels fit this psychological profile.
iii) This analysis is too indiscriminate. On the one hand, it assigns faith to a variety of different and divergent motives. Faith is the result of hope or fear or guilt or pride or vengeance, &c. On the other hand, believers come from a broad range of social backgrounds. Believers represent a wide variety of temperamental types, with varying intellectual aptitudes. Some believers were raised in the faith while others came to the faith from an irreligious upbringing. Some switch from one church to another. Some drifted from the faith and returned while others leave and never look back. Some family members remain in the faith while others turn from the faith. Some lose their faith in college while others find their faith in college. Some lose their faith after a personal tragedy while others find their faith after a personal tragedy. Converts give different reasons for their pilgrimage. When a theory is so flexible that it can accommodate contrary lines of evidence, it amounts to a disguised description under the guise of an efficient explanation.
iv) Projective theories have an armchair quality to them. They don’t seem to be based on a wide sampling of case-studies or personal acquaintance with Christians from various walks of life. How many churches did Freud attend? How many devout believers did he know? How many did he interview? How many did he observe up close over the course of a lifetime—from the sandbox and the lecture hall to the dinner table and the deathbed?
I'm glad you asked-2
I. Epistemology
1. God-Talk
Both inside and outside the Church there is often felt to be a peculiar difficulty with religious language. This apparent problem has both an epistemic and ontological dimension. At the epistemic level, it is felt that if our knowledge derives from experience in general, and sensory perception in particular, and if God is not a sensible object, then whatever we may say or think or believe about God is a figurative extension of mundane concepts.
At the ontological level, it is felt that if God is in a class by himself and apart from the creative order, then all our statements about God are vitiated by a systematic equivocation inasmuch as there is no longer any common ground between the human subject and divine object of knowledge.
What are we to say to these considerations? Regarding the epistemic issue, the first thing to be said is that this assumes a particular theory of knowledge. So if this is a problem, it is not a problem peculiar to religious epistemology, but goes back to the ancient debates between empiricism and rationalism, nominalism and realism. If you are a Thomist, then this is a problem generated by your chosen theory of knowledge. But if, say, you are an Augustinian, then you don't believe that all knowledge derives from the senses. Abstract objects are objects of knowledge without being perceived by the senses—at least on an Augustinian theory of knowledge.
This does not, therefore, constitute a direct objection to God-talk. If such an objection is to be raised, it necessitates a preliminary and independent argument for radical empiricism. And this debate has been going on for 2500 years. So it seems unlikely that the critic of God-talk will be successful in mounting a compelling case on epistemic grounds alone.
In addition, a good case can be made for the view that human discourse is pervasively and incurably metaphorical. (Cf. G. Lakoff & M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [Chicago, 2003].) So even if God-talk were figurative, that would not be distinctive to religious discourse, but would, rather, apply with equal force to ordinary language—as well as scientific nomenclature, which is refined from concrete usage.
Our knowledge of the sensible world is analogical, for the human mind does not enjoy direct access to the sensible world. Sense-data are a highly processed form of information that has undergone repeated encoding in order to reach our consciousness.
So, if anything, the venerable via negativa has the relation exactly backwards. The natural world is a material manifestation, in finite form, of God’s impalpable attributes (cf. Ps 19:1-7; Acts 14:17; Rom 1:18ff.; Eph 3:9-10). Metaphor is deeply embedded in human language inasmuch as nature is figural of God. So God-talk is the only kind of talk there is. Strictly speaking, God is the only object of literal predication whereas all mundane phenomena, as property-instances of divine properties, are objects of analogical predication. As one theologian has put it, "all virtues pertain first to God, then to the creature: God possesses these virtues 'in essence,' the creature 'through participation'…He allows us to speak of him in creaturely language because he himself has manifested his virtues and revealed them to us through the creature," H. Bavinck, The Doctrine of God (Banner of Trust, 1979), 94-95.
But even if we waive the epistemic objection, it may be felt that the ontological issue is, in any event, more fundamental. The real nub of the problem, it would be said, lies with the ontological wall separating subject and object. If God is wholly sui generis, then what is our shared frame of reference for knowing or saying anything about him? Aren't we reduced, not only to analogy, but the utter negation of our mental and mundane categories?
One of the problems with this objection is it equivocates over the conditions of equivocation. What, exactly, is the relevant point of similarity to form a sound analogy? A fork and fingers can both be used to consume food, yet they don't have a lot in common in terms of their constitution or configuration. The same thing could be said about doing math in your head, counting on your fingers, using an abacus or a computer. The same thing could also be said about telling time by a sundial, hourglass, atomic clock, analogue or digital watch. So the ontological objection has pretty fuzzy boundaries.
And this points up another issue. It is a category mistake to equate analogy and metaphor. All metaphors are analogies, but all analogies are not metaphors. Forks and fingers are analogous, but their relation is not figurative. Even if God were only known by his effects, an effect need not resemble its cause. What a Turner painting resembles is not the painter, but a Venetian sunset. Yet a Turner painting reveals a great deal about the painter.
A deeper issue is the relation between divine and mundane properties. According to the Augustinian tradition, to which Calvinism is heir, God is not merely the Maker of the world, but the exemplar of the world. On this view, time and space are limits which instance the illimitable being of God. Finite reason and natural design instance infinite reason. Natural examples of the one-over-many instance the supernatural symmetry of God's Trinitarian being. So such a position posits an internal relation between our knowledge of God and our knowledge of the world. (Cf. Calvin, Inst. 1.1.1-2.)
Let us apply these considerations to a couple of classic attacks on religious epistemology. Kant erected a phenomenal/noumenal wall and proceeded to put God on the noumenal side of the barrier. But Kant confounds a general theory of knowledge with a special theory of perception. Even if there were a radical hiatus between appearance and reality, that would be irrelevant to the status of God as an object of knowledge, for God is not a sensible object to begin with— just as you can know what the number five is without having a mental picture of the number five. Numbers are not that sort of object. You know by knowing the definition. An internal tension lies in the fact that Kantian epistemology must initially assume an objective standpoint in order to draw the phenomenal/noumenal hiatus that, in turn, denies such a standpoint.
Again, even if you bought into Kantian assumptions, the narrative history of God’s creative, redemptive and retributive deeds tracks at the phenomenal rather than noumenal level. The Exodus, Crucifixion, Resurrection and great assize are public, sensible events; their historicity and significance doesn’t turn on the topology of space, hyperfine structure of matter, Copernican Revolution, ontological status of phenomenal qualia or suchlike. You don’t need to be a direct realist to fully affirm whatever the Bible says about God, man and history.
Turning to Hume, his basic objection is that if we only know God by his effects, then we must proportion cause and effect and not overdraw the evidence. He also assumes that an argument from design is an argument from analogy, which is, in turn, an argument from experience.
But it is hard to take this objection seriously. A poet is greater than the poem, a painter than the painting. The Last Supper does not exhaust the imagination of Da Vinci. For one thing, the creative act is as much an act of omission as commission, of choosing what to put in and what to leave out, of not doing as well as doing. The range of possible variations is, in principle, nothing short of infinite.
Hume’s objection is directed against a Paley-style watchmaker argument. In Paley’s classic illustration, "In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for all I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever. But suppose I found a watch on the ground. I should hardly think of the answer I gave before."
Now Hume would say that this inference is fallacious because it is an argument from analogy, and the analogy derives from our prior knowledge of man-made artifacts. But is that a fair criticism?
To begin with, Paley’s distinction between a rock and a watch is somewhat artificial, for the same object can be both a natural object and a human artifact. A rock can be turned into a timepiece. For example, a rock, with suitable markings, can be converted into a starchart. Let’s rewrite Paley’s illustration with this in mind, "In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone. The stone bare a pitted surface. I made a rubbing and took it home. Although the distribution pattern was apparently random, and I couldn’t tell if the indentations were man-made or owing to erosion, yet I found, on further comparison, that they charted the first magnitude stars of the northern hemisphere."
Now we would all attribute this correspondence to design, even though the markings were indistinguishable from the effects of natural weathering. And yet this is not an argument from analogy or experience. The evidence of design is not inferred from other rocks, or the tooling, or the position of the stars or pattern of dots, both of which are asymmetrical, but in their studied relation.
But if Hume has misrepresented the teleological argument, then that invalidates his efforts to discredit the argument by invoking invidious analogies and disanalogies, as well as appealing to the limits of induction. It should be further noted that Christian apologetics was never prized on general revelation alone, but on the coordination of general and special revelation—like the aforesaid match between the stars and the starchart.
Hume, however, has a fallback, for he parades a whole host of fantastic variations on the faith: "Why not become a perfect anthropomorphite? Why not assert the Deity or Deities to be corporeal, and to have eyes, a nose, mouth, ears, &c.?…this world, for ought [we] know…was only the first rude essay of some infant Deity…[or else] the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated Deity," Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, N. Smith, ed., (Bobbs-Merrill, 1979), 168-69.
Yes, and for ought we know, lab rats are really hyperintelligent pandimensional beings who use the mousy disguise as a front to experiment on human beings—a la the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
As Hume would have it, unless a Christian chases down every decoy, he's failed to rout out the competition. But one of the problems with this stalling tactic is that it cuts both ways. It cuts against Hume as well as a Christian. For every belief held by Hume, a Christian could just as well propose a host of hypothetical alternatives. It keeps you from checkmating me and vice versa. The price for never losing is never winning. But if there’s no closing move, why bother with the opening gambit?
A believer is under no obligation to run down every rabbit trail and bag every hypothetical hare. Why rebut objections that the unbeliever doesn’t believe in himself, but only trots out to delay defeat? There is, as William James would say, a distinction between bare possibilities and live possibilities. In honest dialogue, both sides should confine themselves to what they really believe or believe to be realistic options.
2. Divine Silence
The objection here is that if God existed, he would make his existence more evident so that everyone would believe in him. This objection has been kicking around for some time, but there is now a burgeoning literature on the subject. By way of reply:
i) At one level, this is an argument from experience. It amounts to saying that many folks are unbelievers because they have had no experience of God’s presence. But this argument cuts both ways. What about all the folks who believe in God because they have felt the grace of God in their lives?
Now, the argument from religious experience has been widely criticized by unbelieving philosophers. But by the same token, believing philosophers could attack the argument from religious inexperience or irreligious experience. So this whole line of objection seems at least to be a wash.
Moreover, experience and inexperience do not enjoy epistemic parity. Experience is a positive form of evidence whereas inexperience is neutral on the existence of the object in question.
This objection also makes certain assumptions about what it would mean for God to be evident. Is the unbeliever saying that if there were a God, he should be as evident to me as a tree I see outside my kitchen window?
On this assumption, to be evident is to be evident to the senses. And it is true that, as a rule, God is inevident in that respect—leaving theophanies to one side. But is that a reasonable criterion? If God were a sensible object, then perhaps he ought to be evident to the senses. But seeing as that is not the doctrine of God, it is hardly inconsistent with the existence of God that he should be inevident to the senses.
Let us take a different comparison. How do I know that you are a person? Your body is evident to the senses, yet personality and corporeality are rather different things, for a corpse is not a person. What makes you a person—call it what you will, your mind, soul, consciousness—is inevident to the senses. So my knowledge of other persons is indirect, being mediated by words and gestures, sign language and facial expressions. Person-to-person communication may be at several removes from the immediacy of the personal subject—by books and letters, phone calls and email, art and music. If the existence of God is inevident in this intermediate sense, then that is not distinctive to God as an object of knowledge, but is a general feature of our knowledge of other persons.
The Bible itself speaks of a hidden aspect of God (Deut 29:29, especially in relation to sin, to life-crises, and unanswered prayer (Job 13:24; Ps 10:1,11; 13:1; 27:9; 30:7; 44:24; 55:1; 88:14; 89:46; 102:2; 104:29; 143:7; Isa 45:15; 58:7). So one reason the Bible gives for the apparent absence of God in our experience is that God withdraws his presence as a chastisement or judgment on sin.
The objection assumes that if there were a God, he would be generally evident. But the Bible regards that as a false expectation. For one consequence of the Fall is the general silence of God.
Now an unbeliever may object that this reply is question-begging. If we already knew that God were real, then this explanation would have its proper place; but when the very question of his existence is at issue, it is tendentious to offer a religious explanation.
But whether or not that is a valid criticism depends on both the nature of the initial objection and the purpose of the explanation. If the initial objection is that the inevidence of God is inconsistent with the existence of God, then it is valid to point out that the alleged inconsistency rests on a tendentious assumption. So the critic needs to justify his assumption. Again, the purpose of the explanation is not to offer positive evidence for the existence of God, or warrant our faith in God, but merely to counter the claim of an inconsistent relation between the existence and evidence of God.
The Bible would attribute unbelief, not to inevidence, but ill-will. The reprobate and unregenerate fear the judgment of God, and therefore suppress and supplant their knowledge of God.
An unbeliever would, of course, regard this claim as question-begging. Again, though, it is a valid reply to the charge of inconsistency. Moreover, it is a commonplace of the human experience that men will often resist an unwelcome truth. This applies in many walks of life. So it is not as though the Christian apologist were trumping up a special condition to justify his faith. And it must be said that the way in which many unbelievers have tried to squelch Christian expression and dissent confirms the charge.
In addition, the allegation of a Deus absconditus is, itself, a question-begging assumption, for many Christians would say that God has, in fact, left his fingerprints all over the natural world. And that is more than bare assertion, for Christian philosophers and theologians have turned this raw data into a broad range of theistic arguments. To be sure, the cogency of the theistic proofs is a bone of contention, both inside and outside the church. But the immediate point is that, in the face of philosophical theology and apologetics, the thesis of a Deus absconditus cannot be posited as an unquestioned datum—on which to hoist further conclusions.
What is more, God has broken his silence in the canon of Scripture. For the Christian, the allegation of divine silence is question-begging because it disregards the witness of Scripture. To be sure, this appeal assumes the revelatory status of Scripture, but Christians have advanced various arguments for that proposition as well. So the allegation of a hidden God must come to terms with Scripture and arguments for its inspiration.
It may be objected that God has not made himself known to everyone in his word, for his word is not accessible to everyone. And that's the sticking point: a benevolent and omnipotent God would want everyone to believe in him, and given that everyone does not believe in him, such a God does not exist.
Not only can this argument be stated in hypothetical terms, but the atheist can cite Arminian prooftexts to bolster his premise, viz., God loves the "world" and wants "everyone" to be saved.
This argument has some force against Arminian theology. An Arminian would parry the argument by appeal to freewill. But that suffers from a couple of problems. To begin with, it exposes a tension in Arminian theology: which is greater—the love of God or the freedom of man? In addition, there is no apparent infringement on freewill for God to make the Gospel more widely known. That would not remove freedom of choice, but enrich freedom of choice by enriching freedom of opportunity.
However, not being an Arminian, I'll leave that defense to the Arminian. I, as a Calvinist, would simply deny that God wants everyone to be saved. And this is not an ad hoc reply to the objection, for Reformed theology antedates this objection and has evolved independently of this objection.
I would say that God wants the elect to believe in him, and he fulfills his desire with respect to the elect. The love of God is like marital love (Isa 54:4-8; Eph 5:32): it is deep rather than wide, discriminate rather than indiscriminate.
If the objection is stated in hypothetical terms, then the burden is on the atheist rather than the Calvinist to prove the premise.
If the objection is stated in Scriptural terms, then the burden is to establish the internal coherence, but not the truth, of the Biblical data. For the charge is that the real world situation is inconsistent with the situation implicit in Scripture. In reply to the second version of the argument, I'll offer a few replies:
1. In both Johannine and Pauline usage, "cosmos" often carries a pejorative and partitive connotation (e.g. Jn 1:10; 14:17,22; 15:19; 17:14,16,25; 18:36; 1 Jn 2:16-17; 4:5; 5:19; 1 Cor 1:20f., 27; 2:12; 3:19; Gal 6:14; Col 2:20). The "world" is not a neutral synonym for "everyone." Rather, the "cosmos" personifies the fallen world order, in opposition to God. And it extends beyond fallen men to take in fallen angels—who were never the object of the atonement.
In addition, the world of unbelief is set over against the believer. One of the distinguishing marks of a believer is that he is not a worldling.
Therefore, the Arminian appeal disregards the semantic ambiguities and nuances in Johannine and Pauline usage.
2. A universal qualifier ("all," "every") denotes the members of a given class of individuals. But it doesn't specify the class in question. That must be supplied by context. "All" denotes all "that" belong to the class in question, but it doesn't identify "who" or "what" is covered by the quantifier. The referent remains to be filled in. In context, is it referring to Jews, to backsliders, to Jews and Gentiles? Is it comparing and contrasting one class with another.
3. We must also make allowance for synonymous parallelism, which is a feature of OT rhetoric (e.g., the Psalter, Proverbs), and carries over into NT usage. But to press a verbal symmetry into semantic identity suffers from a wooden handling of the conventions of a literary device.
1. God-Talk
Both inside and outside the Church there is often felt to be a peculiar difficulty with religious language. This apparent problem has both an epistemic and ontological dimension. At the epistemic level, it is felt that if our knowledge derives from experience in general, and sensory perception in particular, and if God is not a sensible object, then whatever we may say or think or believe about God is a figurative extension of mundane concepts.
At the ontological level, it is felt that if God is in a class by himself and apart from the creative order, then all our statements about God are vitiated by a systematic equivocation inasmuch as there is no longer any common ground between the human subject and divine object of knowledge.
What are we to say to these considerations? Regarding the epistemic issue, the first thing to be said is that this assumes a particular theory of knowledge. So if this is a problem, it is not a problem peculiar to religious epistemology, but goes back to the ancient debates between empiricism and rationalism, nominalism and realism. If you are a Thomist, then this is a problem generated by your chosen theory of knowledge. But if, say, you are an Augustinian, then you don't believe that all knowledge derives from the senses. Abstract objects are objects of knowledge without being perceived by the senses—at least on an Augustinian theory of knowledge.
This does not, therefore, constitute a direct objection to God-talk. If such an objection is to be raised, it necessitates a preliminary and independent argument for radical empiricism. And this debate has been going on for 2500 years. So it seems unlikely that the critic of God-talk will be successful in mounting a compelling case on epistemic grounds alone.
In addition, a good case can be made for the view that human discourse is pervasively and incurably metaphorical. (Cf. G. Lakoff & M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [Chicago, 2003].) So even if God-talk were figurative, that would not be distinctive to religious discourse, but would, rather, apply with equal force to ordinary language—as well as scientific nomenclature, which is refined from concrete usage.
Our knowledge of the sensible world is analogical, for the human mind does not enjoy direct access to the sensible world. Sense-data are a highly processed form of information that has undergone repeated encoding in order to reach our consciousness.
So, if anything, the venerable via negativa has the relation exactly backwards. The natural world is a material manifestation, in finite form, of God’s impalpable attributes (cf. Ps 19:1-7; Acts 14:17; Rom 1:18ff.; Eph 3:9-10). Metaphor is deeply embedded in human language inasmuch as nature is figural of God. So God-talk is the only kind of talk there is. Strictly speaking, God is the only object of literal predication whereas all mundane phenomena, as property-instances of divine properties, are objects of analogical predication. As one theologian has put it, "all virtues pertain first to God, then to the creature: God possesses these virtues 'in essence,' the creature 'through participation'…He allows us to speak of him in creaturely language because he himself has manifested his virtues and revealed them to us through the creature," H. Bavinck, The Doctrine of God (Banner of Trust, 1979), 94-95.
But even if we waive the epistemic objection, it may be felt that the ontological issue is, in any event, more fundamental. The real nub of the problem, it would be said, lies with the ontological wall separating subject and object. If God is wholly sui generis, then what is our shared frame of reference for knowing or saying anything about him? Aren't we reduced, not only to analogy, but the utter negation of our mental and mundane categories?
One of the problems with this objection is it equivocates over the conditions of equivocation. What, exactly, is the relevant point of similarity to form a sound analogy? A fork and fingers can both be used to consume food, yet they don't have a lot in common in terms of their constitution or configuration. The same thing could be said about doing math in your head, counting on your fingers, using an abacus or a computer. The same thing could also be said about telling time by a sundial, hourglass, atomic clock, analogue or digital watch. So the ontological objection has pretty fuzzy boundaries.
And this points up another issue. It is a category mistake to equate analogy and metaphor. All metaphors are analogies, but all analogies are not metaphors. Forks and fingers are analogous, but their relation is not figurative. Even if God were only known by his effects, an effect need not resemble its cause. What a Turner painting resembles is not the painter, but a Venetian sunset. Yet a Turner painting reveals a great deal about the painter.
A deeper issue is the relation between divine and mundane properties. According to the Augustinian tradition, to which Calvinism is heir, God is not merely the Maker of the world, but the exemplar of the world. On this view, time and space are limits which instance the illimitable being of God. Finite reason and natural design instance infinite reason. Natural examples of the one-over-many instance the supernatural symmetry of God's Trinitarian being. So such a position posits an internal relation between our knowledge of God and our knowledge of the world. (Cf. Calvin, Inst. 1.1.1-2.)
Let us apply these considerations to a couple of classic attacks on religious epistemology. Kant erected a phenomenal/noumenal wall and proceeded to put God on the noumenal side of the barrier. But Kant confounds a general theory of knowledge with a special theory of perception. Even if there were a radical hiatus between appearance and reality, that would be irrelevant to the status of God as an object of knowledge, for God is not a sensible object to begin with— just as you can know what the number five is without having a mental picture of the number five. Numbers are not that sort of object. You know by knowing the definition. An internal tension lies in the fact that Kantian epistemology must initially assume an objective standpoint in order to draw the phenomenal/noumenal hiatus that, in turn, denies such a standpoint.
Again, even if you bought into Kantian assumptions, the narrative history of God’s creative, redemptive and retributive deeds tracks at the phenomenal rather than noumenal level. The Exodus, Crucifixion, Resurrection and great assize are public, sensible events; their historicity and significance doesn’t turn on the topology of space, hyperfine structure of matter, Copernican Revolution, ontological status of phenomenal qualia or suchlike. You don’t need to be a direct realist to fully affirm whatever the Bible says about God, man and history.
Turning to Hume, his basic objection is that if we only know God by his effects, then we must proportion cause and effect and not overdraw the evidence. He also assumes that an argument from design is an argument from analogy, which is, in turn, an argument from experience.
But it is hard to take this objection seriously. A poet is greater than the poem, a painter than the painting. The Last Supper does not exhaust the imagination of Da Vinci. For one thing, the creative act is as much an act of omission as commission, of choosing what to put in and what to leave out, of not doing as well as doing. The range of possible variations is, in principle, nothing short of infinite.
Hume’s objection is directed against a Paley-style watchmaker argument. In Paley’s classic illustration, "In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for all I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever. But suppose I found a watch on the ground. I should hardly think of the answer I gave before."
Now Hume would say that this inference is fallacious because it is an argument from analogy, and the analogy derives from our prior knowledge of man-made artifacts. But is that a fair criticism?
To begin with, Paley’s distinction between a rock and a watch is somewhat artificial, for the same object can be both a natural object and a human artifact. A rock can be turned into a timepiece. For example, a rock, with suitable markings, can be converted into a starchart. Let’s rewrite Paley’s illustration with this in mind, "In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone. The stone bare a pitted surface. I made a rubbing and took it home. Although the distribution pattern was apparently random, and I couldn’t tell if the indentations were man-made or owing to erosion, yet I found, on further comparison, that they charted the first magnitude stars of the northern hemisphere."
Now we would all attribute this correspondence to design, even though the markings were indistinguishable from the effects of natural weathering. And yet this is not an argument from analogy or experience. The evidence of design is not inferred from other rocks, or the tooling, or the position of the stars or pattern of dots, both of which are asymmetrical, but in their studied relation.
But if Hume has misrepresented the teleological argument, then that invalidates his efforts to discredit the argument by invoking invidious analogies and disanalogies, as well as appealing to the limits of induction. It should be further noted that Christian apologetics was never prized on general revelation alone, but on the coordination of general and special revelation—like the aforesaid match between the stars and the starchart.
Hume, however, has a fallback, for he parades a whole host of fantastic variations on the faith: "Why not become a perfect anthropomorphite? Why not assert the Deity or Deities to be corporeal, and to have eyes, a nose, mouth, ears, &c.?…this world, for ought [we] know…was only the first rude essay of some infant Deity…[or else] the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated Deity," Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, N. Smith, ed., (Bobbs-Merrill, 1979), 168-69.
Yes, and for ought we know, lab rats are really hyperintelligent pandimensional beings who use the mousy disguise as a front to experiment on human beings—a la the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
As Hume would have it, unless a Christian chases down every decoy, he's failed to rout out the competition. But one of the problems with this stalling tactic is that it cuts both ways. It cuts against Hume as well as a Christian. For every belief held by Hume, a Christian could just as well propose a host of hypothetical alternatives. It keeps you from checkmating me and vice versa. The price for never losing is never winning. But if there’s no closing move, why bother with the opening gambit?
A believer is under no obligation to run down every rabbit trail and bag every hypothetical hare. Why rebut objections that the unbeliever doesn’t believe in himself, but only trots out to delay defeat? There is, as William James would say, a distinction between bare possibilities and live possibilities. In honest dialogue, both sides should confine themselves to what they really believe or believe to be realistic options.
2. Divine Silence
The objection here is that if God existed, he would make his existence more evident so that everyone would believe in him. This objection has been kicking around for some time, but there is now a burgeoning literature on the subject. By way of reply:
i) At one level, this is an argument from experience. It amounts to saying that many folks are unbelievers because they have had no experience of God’s presence. But this argument cuts both ways. What about all the folks who believe in God because they have felt the grace of God in their lives?
Now, the argument from religious experience has been widely criticized by unbelieving philosophers. But by the same token, believing philosophers could attack the argument from religious inexperience or irreligious experience. So this whole line of objection seems at least to be a wash.
Moreover, experience and inexperience do not enjoy epistemic parity. Experience is a positive form of evidence whereas inexperience is neutral on the existence of the object in question.
This objection also makes certain assumptions about what it would mean for God to be evident. Is the unbeliever saying that if there were a God, he should be as evident to me as a tree I see outside my kitchen window?
On this assumption, to be evident is to be evident to the senses. And it is true that, as a rule, God is inevident in that respect—leaving theophanies to one side. But is that a reasonable criterion? If God were a sensible object, then perhaps he ought to be evident to the senses. But seeing as that is not the doctrine of God, it is hardly inconsistent with the existence of God that he should be inevident to the senses.
Let us take a different comparison. How do I know that you are a person? Your body is evident to the senses, yet personality and corporeality are rather different things, for a corpse is not a person. What makes you a person—call it what you will, your mind, soul, consciousness—is inevident to the senses. So my knowledge of other persons is indirect, being mediated by words and gestures, sign language and facial expressions. Person-to-person communication may be at several removes from the immediacy of the personal subject—by books and letters, phone calls and email, art and music. If the existence of God is inevident in this intermediate sense, then that is not distinctive to God as an object of knowledge, but is a general feature of our knowledge of other persons.
The Bible itself speaks of a hidden aspect of God (Deut 29:29, especially in relation to sin, to life-crises, and unanswered prayer (Job 13:24; Ps 10:1,11; 13:1; 27:9; 30:7; 44:24; 55:1; 88:14; 89:46; 102:2; 104:29; 143:7; Isa 45:15; 58:7). So one reason the Bible gives for the apparent absence of God in our experience is that God withdraws his presence as a chastisement or judgment on sin.
The objection assumes that if there were a God, he would be generally evident. But the Bible regards that as a false expectation. For one consequence of the Fall is the general silence of God.
Now an unbeliever may object that this reply is question-begging. If we already knew that God were real, then this explanation would have its proper place; but when the very question of his existence is at issue, it is tendentious to offer a religious explanation.
But whether or not that is a valid criticism depends on both the nature of the initial objection and the purpose of the explanation. If the initial objection is that the inevidence of God is inconsistent with the existence of God, then it is valid to point out that the alleged inconsistency rests on a tendentious assumption. So the critic needs to justify his assumption. Again, the purpose of the explanation is not to offer positive evidence for the existence of God, or warrant our faith in God, but merely to counter the claim of an inconsistent relation between the existence and evidence of God.
The Bible would attribute unbelief, not to inevidence, but ill-will. The reprobate and unregenerate fear the judgment of God, and therefore suppress and supplant their knowledge of God.
An unbeliever would, of course, regard this claim as question-begging. Again, though, it is a valid reply to the charge of inconsistency. Moreover, it is a commonplace of the human experience that men will often resist an unwelcome truth. This applies in many walks of life. So it is not as though the Christian apologist were trumping up a special condition to justify his faith. And it must be said that the way in which many unbelievers have tried to squelch Christian expression and dissent confirms the charge.
In addition, the allegation of a Deus absconditus is, itself, a question-begging assumption, for many Christians would say that God has, in fact, left his fingerprints all over the natural world. And that is more than bare assertion, for Christian philosophers and theologians have turned this raw data into a broad range of theistic arguments. To be sure, the cogency of the theistic proofs is a bone of contention, both inside and outside the church. But the immediate point is that, in the face of philosophical theology and apologetics, the thesis of a Deus absconditus cannot be posited as an unquestioned datum—on which to hoist further conclusions.
What is more, God has broken his silence in the canon of Scripture. For the Christian, the allegation of divine silence is question-begging because it disregards the witness of Scripture. To be sure, this appeal assumes the revelatory status of Scripture, but Christians have advanced various arguments for that proposition as well. So the allegation of a hidden God must come to terms with Scripture and arguments for its inspiration.
It may be objected that God has not made himself known to everyone in his word, for his word is not accessible to everyone. And that's the sticking point: a benevolent and omnipotent God would want everyone to believe in him, and given that everyone does not believe in him, such a God does not exist.
Not only can this argument be stated in hypothetical terms, but the atheist can cite Arminian prooftexts to bolster his premise, viz., God loves the "world" and wants "everyone" to be saved.
This argument has some force against Arminian theology. An Arminian would parry the argument by appeal to freewill. But that suffers from a couple of problems. To begin with, it exposes a tension in Arminian theology: which is greater—the love of God or the freedom of man? In addition, there is no apparent infringement on freewill for God to make the Gospel more widely known. That would not remove freedom of choice, but enrich freedom of choice by enriching freedom of opportunity.
However, not being an Arminian, I'll leave that defense to the Arminian. I, as a Calvinist, would simply deny that God wants everyone to be saved. And this is not an ad hoc reply to the objection, for Reformed theology antedates this objection and has evolved independently of this objection.
I would say that God wants the elect to believe in him, and he fulfills his desire with respect to the elect. The love of God is like marital love (Isa 54:4-8; Eph 5:32): it is deep rather than wide, discriminate rather than indiscriminate.
If the objection is stated in hypothetical terms, then the burden is on the atheist rather than the Calvinist to prove the premise.
If the objection is stated in Scriptural terms, then the burden is to establish the internal coherence, but not the truth, of the Biblical data. For the charge is that the real world situation is inconsistent with the situation implicit in Scripture. In reply to the second version of the argument, I'll offer a few replies:
1. In both Johannine and Pauline usage, "cosmos" often carries a pejorative and partitive connotation (e.g. Jn 1:10; 14:17,22; 15:19; 17:14,16,25; 18:36; 1 Jn 2:16-17; 4:5; 5:19; 1 Cor 1:20f., 27; 2:12; 3:19; Gal 6:14; Col 2:20). The "world" is not a neutral synonym for "everyone." Rather, the "cosmos" personifies the fallen world order, in opposition to God. And it extends beyond fallen men to take in fallen angels—who were never the object of the atonement.
In addition, the world of unbelief is set over against the believer. One of the distinguishing marks of a believer is that he is not a worldling.
Therefore, the Arminian appeal disregards the semantic ambiguities and nuances in Johannine and Pauline usage.
2. A universal qualifier ("all," "every") denotes the members of a given class of individuals. But it doesn't specify the class in question. That must be supplied by context. "All" denotes all "that" belong to the class in question, but it doesn't identify "who" or "what" is covered by the quantifier. The referent remains to be filled in. In context, is it referring to Jews, to backsliders, to Jews and Gentiles? Is it comparing and contrasting one class with another.
3. We must also make allowance for synonymous parallelism, which is a feature of OT rhetoric (e.g., the Psalter, Proverbs), and carries over into NT usage. But to press a verbal symmetry into semantic identity suffers from a wooden handling of the conventions of a literary device.
I'm glad you asked-1
Unbelievers have raised a number of objections to the Christian faith—objections ranging from epistemology and Bible criticism to science and ethics. In the following series of installments I'll reply to these objections.
Contents
1. Epistemology:
(i) God-Talk
(ii) Divine Silence
(iii) Coherence of Theism:
(a) Divine Attributes
(b) Trinity
(c) Incarnation
(iv) Freudian faith
2. Bible Criticism:
(i) Miracles
(ii) Mythology
(iii) Contradictions
3. Science:
(i) Creation
(ii) Flood
(iii) Physicalism
4. Ethics:
(i) Problem of Evil
(ii) Hell
(iii) Holy War
(iv) Slavery
(v) Imprecatory Psalms
(vi) Original Sin
(vii) Predestination
(viii) Euthyphro Dilemma
(ix) Crimes of Christianity
(x) Christian Chauvinism
Contents
1. Epistemology:
(i) God-Talk
(ii) Divine Silence
(iii) Coherence of Theism:
(a) Divine Attributes
(b) Trinity
(c) Incarnation
(iv) Freudian faith
2. Bible Criticism:
(i) Miracles
(ii) Mythology
(iii) Contradictions
3. Science:
(i) Creation
(ii) Flood
(iii) Physicalism
4. Ethics:
(i) Problem of Evil
(ii) Hell
(iii) Holy War
(iv) Slavery
(v) Imprecatory Psalms
(vi) Original Sin
(vii) Predestination
(viii) Euthyphro Dilemma
(ix) Crimes of Christianity
(x) Christian Chauvinism
Less Levity Tonight: 9/11
Levity, a film I mentioned a few days ago, was a bit of a disappointment. It had promising prospects but a lackluster finish. It's worth seeing though because of several memorable characters and quotes.
Tonight I watched a documentary called 9/11. Other than Band of Brothers, this is perhaps the most powerful film I've seen in years. I'll let you read the particulars in the link above. It was very interesting to watch the horror of terrorism from the perspective of more than two years later. Does anyone deny that people like this wouldn't rejoice if another 9/11 slaughter would occur. America was attacked before we attacked Iraq. I am constantly amazed that many people don't think that we are at war, or that this war is unjustified, or that their is no relationship between Islamo-fascist butchers in Fallujah and those that murdered thousands in NY and DC. Watching this documentary, which did not say a word about the terrorists, nevertheless was a brutal reminder of what is at stake in Iraq, Afghanistan and globally as the U.S. and it's true allies confront Islamic terror. I strongly urge you to watch it if you haven't seen it, not only to honor the fallen but to remember the injustice and dwell on the lingering possibility of more acts of murderous cowardice. Apparently the 9/11 commission is more interested in political posturing and scapegoating than really trying to prevent another attack. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Tonight I watched a documentary called 9/11. Other than Band of Brothers, this is perhaps the most powerful film I've seen in years. I'll let you read the particulars in the link above. It was very interesting to watch the horror of terrorism from the perspective of more than two years later. Does anyone deny that people like this wouldn't rejoice if another 9/11 slaughter would occur. America was attacked before we attacked Iraq. I am constantly amazed that many people don't think that we are at war, or that this war is unjustified, or that their is no relationship between Islamo-fascist butchers in Fallujah and those that murdered thousands in NY and DC. Watching this documentary, which did not say a word about the terrorists, nevertheless was a brutal reminder of what is at stake in Iraq, Afghanistan and globally as the U.S. and it's true allies confront Islamic terror. I strongly urge you to watch it if you haven't seen it, not only to honor the fallen but to remember the injustice and dwell on the lingering possibility of more acts of murderous cowardice. Apparently the 9/11 commission is more interested in political posturing and scapegoating than really trying to prevent another attack. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Ten objections to sola scriptura-2
5. Scripture itself appeals to tradition:
Protestants are guilty of applying a double standard when they accept Scriptural appeals to tradition (e.g. Acts 7:38,53; Gal 3:19; 2 Thes 2:15; Heb 2:2; 11:34ff.) while rejecting Patristic appeals to tradition. Or so goes the argument. By way or reply:
(i) Since the sacred authors are inspired, their appeal to tradition automatically validates the tradition in question. But it hardly validates every tradition to which they do "not" appeal. Even the Roman Catholic is far from equalizing every tradition as normative. He is quite selective about which traditions he privileges.
Since the Fathers are uninspired, the parallel between canonically sanctioned tradition and extra-canonically sanctioned tradition falls apart at the critical point of comparison.
(ii) The role of angels in the giving of the law isn’t even dependent on tradition extra-canonical tradition. Rather, it goes back to the angel of the Lord and the Lord’s angelic retinue (cf. Exod 3:2; 23:20-23; 33:18-23; Deut 33:2; Ps 68:17; Isa 63:9; Mt 10:14; Jn 13:20; Acts 7:35).
(iii) This objection trades on an equivocation of terms. The Protestant never denied the principle of apostolic tradition or oral instruction. It’s just that oral transmission suffers from a high decay rate. Word-of-mouth may be adequate when it comes straight from the mouth of an Apostle to the ear of a contemporary. But there’s a categorical difference between the viva voce of the Apostles and a "process of living Tradition" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶83.). Oral tradition is no substitute for a permanent record. It was never intended to supply a common norm for future reference. That’s precisely why revelation was committed to writing (cf. Exod 17:14; Deut 31:9,13,26; Ps 102:18; Isa 30:8). Human memory is too untrustworthy to rely on oral transmission over the long haul. The rediscovery of the written law code (2 Kgs 22:8ff. 2 Chron 34:14ff.) powerfully illustrates the inadequacies of unaided memory in keeping a people from apostasy—a point made by R. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (Eerdmans, 1986), 66. To take another example, (a) Papias was, according to Irenaeus, a younger contemporary of the Apostle John. He made an earnest effort to collect the agrapha of Christ. Yet despite his proximity to primitive recollection, his gleanings are remarkably meager, and have an unmistakably derivative flavor. Owing to the short shelf-life of oral tradition, as well as the incentive to fabricate tradition (e.g. the NT apocrypha), no formal authority attaches to mere tradition, although some of it may afford probative evidence for past practice.
(iv)Moreover, Sacred Tradition, as currently redefined, is not the same as an oral mode of transmission. It ceases to be a conservative force and becomes a revisionary dynamic. Again, Jesus warns us against the dangers of man-made tradition, and judges that tradition by the standard of Scripture (Mt 7:7-8,13). But when human tradition comes to be identified with a divine teaching office, it is then impervious to the correction of Scripture, and we’re right back to the situation that summoned forth our Lord’s reproof.
(v) Sometimes a Catholic apologist will caricature sola scriptura as implying that Apostolic tradition was valid right up until the moment the ink dried on Rev 22:21, at which point it instantly ceased to be authoritative. Of course the oral teaching of the Apostles was normative for those who got it straight from the horse’s mouth or their associates. The real issue concerns the preservation and verification of authentic tradition for later generations.
(vi) Furthermore, Catholic apologists play a bait-and-switch scam. For they lure the Protestant by appealing to examples where the Bible refers to an oral source, and then shift to a lax principle of dogmatic development in order to justify the Assumption of Mary or the treasury of merit. Now in the nature of the case, the present derives from the past. Hence it is always possible to plot a historical trajectory from any past belief to a present-day belief. But this either proves too much or too little inasmuch as a Protestant apologist could deploy the very same theological method to validate his own tradition.
6. Where does Scripture teach sola scriptura?
Catholic apologists might object that I’ve been assuming the principle all along without bothering to establish it in the first place. Where does Scripture teach sola scriptura? Where does it rule out sacred tradition? Let’s consider some half dozen replies.
(I) Even on its own terms, the Roman Church has failed to offer a coherent alternative inasmuch as the concept of tradition has become a plaything in the hands of the Magisterium. What is meant by sacred tradition? Is it oral tradition? Early tradition? The consent of the Fathers? The consent of the Doctors? The consent of the faithful? The charism of the Magisterium? The concept has mutated from being a body of unwritten instructions that Christ committed to the Apostles to a "process of living Tradition." This is not a natural evolutionary continuum, but rather a revolutionary break with the original point.
Just consider the historical revisionism of Ratzinger: "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... ’Tradition’ was identified with what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner,
the patrologist from Würzburg...had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the fifth century; 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 handling down of fixed formulas and texts...But if you conceive of ‘tradition’ as a living process whereby the Holy Spirit introduces us to the fullness of truth and teaches us how to understand what previously we could still not grasp (cf. Jn 16:12-13), then subsequent ‘remembering’ (cf. Jn 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it had not caught sight of previously and yet w as handed down in the original Word," Milestones (Ignatius, 1998), 58-59. Aside from reversing the traditional basis of Catholic apologetics, hindsight presupposes a sighting; absent historical documentation, there is nothing to remember and reflect on.
Such a ductile definition, which resembles the house that Jack built, may save appearances, but the reluctance to stake out a firm position means that your position never takes the shape of an identifiable alternative. And so it doesn’t challenge people to believe otherwise.
(ii) It is instructive to observe how even Leo XIII must fall back on the Protestant rule of faith in order to establish the Magisterium:
Since the divine and infallible Magisterium of the Church rests also on the authority of Holy Scripture, the first thing to be done is to vindicate the trustworthiness of the sacred records at least as human documents, from which can be clearly proved, as from primitive and authentic testimony, the Divinity and the mission of Christ our Lord, the institution of a hierarchical Church and the primacy of Peter and his successors," The Papal Encyclicals (Perian 1990), 2:333b.
(iii) The principle of sola scriptura is implicit in the finality of the canon. There is always more that could be said. Scripture itself concedes this possibility (cf. Jn 20:30-31; 21:25; Eph 6:21-22; Col 4:7-9; Heb 9:5b). In that respect there is never any absolutely natural cut-off point. But for that selfsame reason, a somewhat arbitrary line has to be drawn, for a complete record would be completely unmanageable. To admit an element of arbitrariness here is not to say that it’s unreasonable or unnecessary. The point is not to say everything, but to say enough.
Scripture is the necessary and sufficient source of saving knowledge (2 Tim 3:15-17). Not only is further information gratuitous, but Paul expressly warns the Church not to go beyond what is written—employing a stock citation formula for Scripture (1 Cor 4:6). This is, of course, pegged to progressive revelation, but the canon is closed.
The very fact that, unlike some other religions and cults, Christianity does not have an open canon implies that ongoing revelation or its functional equivalent (the Magisterium) is both unnecessary and presumptuous. God himself drew the boundaries by withholding further revelation.
(iv) It should go without saying that sola scriptura is mainly a norm for the readers of Scripture and not the writers of Scripture. An inspired author doesn’t have to appeal to Scripture in order to advance a claim since his own words enjoy canonical authority. This is where Scripture comes from. He is making up inspired Scripture as he goes along. Again, it is obviously anachronistic to expect that a NT writer would make systematic appeal to the NT. When, therefore, it is asked, Where does Scripture teach sola scriptura?—we have to keep these elementary distinctions in mind. What is remarkable is how often the sacred authors do invoke prior revelation, even though they could speak on their own authority. In so doing they are conditioning the reader to honor the principle of sola Scriptura.
(v) Loyalty to God’s revealed will, and not tradition, is always made the acid test of religious fidelity in sacred history. As John Frame has remarked, after copious citation, "The whole OT history is a history of obedience and disobedience: obedience and disobedience to what? To God’s commands; and after Exod 20, to God’s written word!" ("Scripture Speaks for Itself," God’s Inerrant Word, J.W. Montgomery, ed. [Bethany, 1974], 199). Some of its contents originally took the form of oral address, but that doesn’t amount to oral tradition since the practice was to immediately commit such disclosures to writing (e.g. Exod 17:14; 24:3-4; Deut 33:9,22,24-28; Josh 24:26; 1 Sam 20:25; Rev 1:11,19; 21:5).
(vi) Since so much of Christian doctrine consists in truths that are far removed from us in time and space—from events in the distant past or future, the invisible present (E.g. spiritual warfare; the intermediate state), and God’s delitescent decree, to the afterlife and age to come—our only access to such information is via a public revelation. So the principle of sola scriptura is also rooted in the principle of a revealed religion.
(vii) The burden of proof doesn’t rest on the Protestant. All the major branches of Christendom—Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant—at least pay lip-service to the supreme authority of Scripture. And they all formally deny the continuance of revelation—at least of the canonical variety. That being the case, the Protestant doesn’t even have to show where Scripture itself expressly or implicitly rules out such a role for sacred tradition. It is sufficient for him to show that, as a matter of inevitable practice, this appeal interferes with the authority and authentic interpretation of Scripture. It subordinates the voice of Scripture to the voice of tradition.
One should add that the antiquity of tradition is no evidence of apostolicity, for orthodoxy and heresy coexisted in the apostolic churches. The bulk of the NT correspondence was addressed to doctrinal and disciplinary crises that arose in Apostolic sees. So even if we could trace a tradition all the way back to Apostolic times, or to an Apostolic See, no less, that wouldn’t be the same as tracing it back to Apostolic teaching, for as soon as an Apostle was away from one church to minister to another, error could quickly flare up in his absence. This lies on the face of many NT letters. So it is quite blind to contend that the antiquity of tradition carries any presumption in favor of its apostolic pedigree. By that measure, Simon Magus was a greater champion of orthodoxy than Athanasius!
7. Scripture is insufficient to address many topical issues:
Sola scriptura is obviously not a sufficient rule of faith since we are constantly confronted with many moral issues not addressed in Holy Writ, such as those raised by bioethics. Or so goes the argument. By way of reply:
(i) The ethical instruction of Scripture is based on general norms, case studies and priority structures. The answers are not all preformulated. Rather, the Bible supplies us with sufficient criteria to acquit our obligations.
(ii) The Protestant position is that Scripture is sufficient to instruct us in our du-ties before God and man. The fact that there are questions not answered by Scripture does not imply that sola scriptura is inadequate, but only that we're in a condition of diminished responsibility on questions outside the purview of Scripture. Our responsibility is limited to what God holds us responsible for.
(iii) As I've said before, a high doctrine of Scripture goes hand-in-hand with a high doctrine of providence. I can do God’s will without necessarily knowing his will. God doesn’t dump the Bible in our lap and then retire to Mt. Olympus.
(iii) The Catholic Church doesn’t offer any alternative. While a popular apologist may make grandiose claims for his Church and hold the Protestants to inhuman standards of confidence, the senior policy-makers at the Vatican are more chaste and chastened in their ambitions. Consider Cardinal Ratzinger’s humble admission:
We are in fact constantly confronted with problems where it isn’t possible to find the right answer in a short time. Above all in the case of problems having to do with ethics, particularly medical ethics...We finally had to say, after very long studies, "Answer that for now on the local level; we aren’t far enough along to have full certainty about that."
Again, in the area of medical ethics, new possibilities, and with them new borderline situations, are constantly arising where it is not immediately evident how to apply principles. We can’t simply conjure up certitude...There needn’t always be universal answers. We also have to realize our limits and forgo answers where they aren’t possible...it simply is not the case that we want to go around giving answers in every situation..." (J. Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth [Ignatius, 1996], 100-101).
One has only to consider the rival schools of casuistry that arose in the history of Catholic discussion (e.g. probabilism, probabiliorism, equiprobabilism) to recognize that the Magisterium does not serve up ready-made answers on a wide range of pressing problems in moral theology. So the romantic notion, so popular in Catholic apologetics, that the Roman church is a rock of moral assurance in an otherwise uncertain world is simply out of step with own tradition. The extraordinary Magisterium is extremely selective about its moral pronouncements, and even then it contents itself with general norms, while leaving the concrete application to fallible judgment.
8. Tradition is prior to the canonization of Scripture:
Not only did Christians have to rely on oral tradition before the NT was written, but for a long time afterwards inasmuch as it took centuries before the NT canon was finalized. Or so goes the argument. By way of reply:
(i) As we know from such well-traveled Christians as Apollos, Paul, Philip, Priscilla and Aquilla, the early church enjoyed an extensive communications network. So there’s no reason to suppose that the NT literature either could not or did not circulate widely and rapidly. (Cf. R. Bauckham [ed.], The Gospels for All Christians [Eerdmans 1998]).
Indeed, our Patristic and MS tradition—which is both chronologically primitive and geographically diverse—testifies to just such a circulation. And for the generation right after the Apostles, a reliable source of oral tradition was also available from insiders likeTimothy, Titus and the Ephesian elders—to name some of the few we know about. By the time the second generation died off the dissemination of the NT would have been quite widespread.
(ii) It’s an elementary mistake to confuse the time-frame for distributing the NT books with the time-frame for their initial reception and acceptance. Any standard work on the NT canon will document an early and diverse representation for most of the NT books.
9. Any defense of Scripture is necessarily extraneous to Scripture itself:
Any criteria the Protestant uses to define and defend sola scriptura are necessarily man-made, and therefore the whole exercise is self-defeating inasmuch as it violates the very principle it is advancing. Or so goes the argument. By way of reply:
(i) The Bible is a self-contained revelation. So the Protestant is simply starting with what God has given us. God chose to commit certain revelations to writing. God chose to preserve certain written revelations. It is God who set these concrete boundaries. The Bible is tangible and accessible whereas tradition is an abstract construct. It requires an external standard to isolate and identify "Sacred Tradition" and extract it from the swamp of raw materials and rival traditions. And it takes still another standard to apply the external standard to the interpretation of Sacred Tradition. If you deny the self-evidentiary character of Scripture, then you’re left with a vicious critical regress. But the definition of sola scriptura is secondary insofar as it presupposes the public, existential event of Scripture. The definition doesn’t constitute the fact. It is God who has drawn these lines in history.
(ii) In fairness, this reply depends on the identity of the canon. That demands a separate argument, to be made on a separate occasion. But even on this level, it should be kept in mind that Rome did not have an official canon before Trent, and only defined the Catholic canon in reaction to the Protestant canon. This was not a settled question in Catholic dogma, but merely reopened an old debate between the Church Fathers (e.g., Jerome v. Augustine), such that Rome could not invoke the universal consent of the Fathers. The Protestant canon is prior to the Catholic canon.
10. Church history shows that Scripture is not a sufficient rule of faith:
History proves that sola scriptura is not a sufficient rule of faith. On the one hand, Protestants disagree with each other over the meaning of Scripture. On the other hand, Catholics disagree with Protestants over the meaning of Scripture. Or so goes the argument. By way of reply:
(i) What we should ask ourselves at the outset is, What purpose is served by a rule of faith? What is it supposed to do? A rule of faith isn’t a substitute for sanctification or church discipline. A rule of faith is not a trouble-shooting device for every ill afflicting the Church. The fact that Christians may misapply the rule of faith no more invalidates that rule than blaming the multiplication tables if a crook uses a calculator to cheat on his taxes. And the further fact that the reprobate twist the Scriptures to their own destruction is a sign of poetic irony and divine justice. I’m no less answerable to God if I twist the Scripture than if submit to them.
No rule of faith can guarantee compliance. And the history of the Magisterium certainly doesn’t present an exception to this. The Roman church never relied on its own rule of faith ensure doctrinal conformity. To the contrary, it is notorious for its apparatus of enforced conformity (e.g. interdict; ex communication; the Index; the Inquisition). And even its most Draconian measures failed to secure uniform acquiescence.
God sent prophets to testify against Israel. Yet that didn’t keep the nation from falling away. So did the prophets fail? And if God commissioned them, does this implicate a failure on the part of God himself? But we know that national apostasy was instrumental in God’s redemptive plan by throwing emphasis on the necessity of a Savior to come.
(ii) Catholics keep judging sola scriptura by some utopian ideal. But I’m in no position to say what represents an idea state of affairs since that requires a retrospective standpoint. I would have to be able to see the present in the light of the future fulfillment of God’s design for history. The Fall, the Flood, the Egyptian bondage, the Babylonian Exile, and Good Friday didn’t look like an idea state of affairs at the time, but each event had a role in God’s redemptive purpose for the world.
Catholics approach this issue as if we were debating a hypothetical question, viz. What are the respective advantages or disadvantages of sola scriptura over against a Magisterium? But the real question comes down to an a posteriori and not an a priori question, viz. What rule of faith has God, in fact, imposed on his Church? That is the question. It is not an abstract conjecture or comparative judgment.
(iii) The Catholic objection proves too much. For if sola scriptura were such an inadequate rule of faith, then the alternative is certainly not to be found in the direction of interposing multiplied layers of bureaucracy and tradition between the individual believer and the will of God. That would render God’s will less accessible to the believer, and not more so. Rather, if we accept the premise of the objection, that would be an argument for daily private revelation. But the very existence of Scripture as a public revelation stands against that presumption. So there isn’t any objection to sola scriptura that couldn’t be turned against the Magisterium. The presence of a Magisterium hasn’t prevented internal dissension in the Catholic Church or massive defection (e.g. the Great Schism; the Reformation).
Protestants are guilty of applying a double standard when they accept Scriptural appeals to tradition (e.g. Acts 7:38,53; Gal 3:19; 2 Thes 2:15; Heb 2:2; 11:34ff.) while rejecting Patristic appeals to tradition. Or so goes the argument. By way or reply:
(i) Since the sacred authors are inspired, their appeal to tradition automatically validates the tradition in question. But it hardly validates every tradition to which they do "not" appeal. Even the Roman Catholic is far from equalizing every tradition as normative. He is quite selective about which traditions he privileges.
Since the Fathers are uninspired, the parallel between canonically sanctioned tradition and extra-canonically sanctioned tradition falls apart at the critical point of comparison.
(ii) The role of angels in the giving of the law isn’t even dependent on tradition extra-canonical tradition. Rather, it goes back to the angel of the Lord and the Lord’s angelic retinue (cf. Exod 3:2; 23:20-23; 33:18-23; Deut 33:2; Ps 68:17; Isa 63:9; Mt 10:14; Jn 13:20; Acts 7:35).
(iii) This objection trades on an equivocation of terms. The Protestant never denied the principle of apostolic tradition or oral instruction. It’s just that oral transmission suffers from a high decay rate. Word-of-mouth may be adequate when it comes straight from the mouth of an Apostle to the ear of a contemporary. But there’s a categorical difference between the viva voce of the Apostles and a "process of living Tradition" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶83.). Oral tradition is no substitute for a permanent record. It was never intended to supply a common norm for future reference. That’s precisely why revelation was committed to writing (cf. Exod 17:14; Deut 31:9,13,26; Ps 102:18; Isa 30:8). Human memory is too untrustworthy to rely on oral transmission over the long haul. The rediscovery of the written law code (2 Kgs 22:8ff. 2 Chron 34:14ff.) powerfully illustrates the inadequacies of unaided memory in keeping a people from apostasy—a point made by R. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (Eerdmans, 1986), 66. To take another example, (a) Papias was, according to Irenaeus, a younger contemporary of the Apostle John. He made an earnest effort to collect the agrapha of Christ. Yet despite his proximity to primitive recollection, his gleanings are remarkably meager, and have an unmistakably derivative flavor. Owing to the short shelf-life of oral tradition, as well as the incentive to fabricate tradition (e.g. the NT apocrypha), no formal authority attaches to mere tradition, although some of it may afford probative evidence for past practice.
(iv)Moreover, Sacred Tradition, as currently redefined, is not the same as an oral mode of transmission. It ceases to be a conservative force and becomes a revisionary dynamic. Again, Jesus warns us against the dangers of man-made tradition, and judges that tradition by the standard of Scripture (Mt 7:7-8,13). But when human tradition comes to be identified with a divine teaching office, it is then impervious to the correction of Scripture, and we’re right back to the situation that summoned forth our Lord’s reproof.
(v) Sometimes a Catholic apologist will caricature sola scriptura as implying that Apostolic tradition was valid right up until the moment the ink dried on Rev 22:21, at which point it instantly ceased to be authoritative. Of course the oral teaching of the Apostles was normative for those who got it straight from the horse’s mouth or their associates. The real issue concerns the preservation and verification of authentic tradition for later generations.
(vi) Furthermore, Catholic apologists play a bait-and-switch scam. For they lure the Protestant by appealing to examples where the Bible refers to an oral source, and then shift to a lax principle of dogmatic development in order to justify the Assumption of Mary or the treasury of merit. Now in the nature of the case, the present derives from the past. Hence it is always possible to plot a historical trajectory from any past belief to a present-day belief. But this either proves too much or too little inasmuch as a Protestant apologist could deploy the very same theological method to validate his own tradition.
6. Where does Scripture teach sola scriptura?
Catholic apologists might object that I’ve been assuming the principle all along without bothering to establish it in the first place. Where does Scripture teach sola scriptura? Where does it rule out sacred tradition? Let’s consider some half dozen replies.
(I) Even on its own terms, the Roman Church has failed to offer a coherent alternative inasmuch as the concept of tradition has become a plaything in the hands of the Magisterium. What is meant by sacred tradition? Is it oral tradition? Early tradition? The consent of the Fathers? The consent of the Doctors? The consent of the faithful? The charism of the Magisterium? The concept has mutated from being a body of unwritten instructions that Christ committed to the Apostles to a "process of living Tradition." This is not a natural evolutionary continuum, but rather a revolutionary break with the original point.
Just consider the historical revisionism of Ratzinger: "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... ’Tradition’ was identified with what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner,
the patrologist from Würzburg...had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the fifth century; 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 handling down of fixed formulas and texts...But if you conceive of ‘tradition’ as a living process whereby the Holy Spirit introduces us to the fullness of truth and teaches us how to understand what previously we could still not grasp (cf. Jn 16:12-13), then subsequent ‘remembering’ (cf. Jn 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it had not caught sight of previously and yet w as handed down in the original Word," Milestones (Ignatius, 1998), 58-59. Aside from reversing the traditional basis of Catholic apologetics, hindsight presupposes a sighting; absent historical documentation, there is nothing to remember and reflect on.
Such a ductile definition, which resembles the house that Jack built, may save appearances, but the reluctance to stake out a firm position means that your position never takes the shape of an identifiable alternative. And so it doesn’t challenge people to believe otherwise.
(ii) It is instructive to observe how even Leo XIII must fall back on the Protestant rule of faith in order to establish the Magisterium:
Since the divine and infallible Magisterium of the Church rests also on the authority of Holy Scripture, the first thing to be done is to vindicate the trustworthiness of the sacred records at least as human documents, from which can be clearly proved, as from primitive and authentic testimony, the Divinity and the mission of Christ our Lord, the institution of a hierarchical Church and the primacy of Peter and his successors," The Papal Encyclicals (Perian 1990), 2:333b.
(iii) The principle of sola scriptura is implicit in the finality of the canon. There is always more that could be said. Scripture itself concedes this possibility (cf. Jn 20:30-31; 21:25; Eph 6:21-22; Col 4:7-9; Heb 9:5b). In that respect there is never any absolutely natural cut-off point. But for that selfsame reason, a somewhat arbitrary line has to be drawn, for a complete record would be completely unmanageable. To admit an element of arbitrariness here is not to say that it’s unreasonable or unnecessary. The point is not to say everything, but to say enough.
Scripture is the necessary and sufficient source of saving knowledge (2 Tim 3:15-17). Not only is further information gratuitous, but Paul expressly warns the Church not to go beyond what is written—employing a stock citation formula for Scripture (1 Cor 4:6). This is, of course, pegged to progressive revelation, but the canon is closed.
The very fact that, unlike some other religions and cults, Christianity does not have an open canon implies that ongoing revelation or its functional equivalent (the Magisterium) is both unnecessary and presumptuous. God himself drew the boundaries by withholding further revelation.
(iv) It should go without saying that sola scriptura is mainly a norm for the readers of Scripture and not the writers of Scripture. An inspired author doesn’t have to appeal to Scripture in order to advance a claim since his own words enjoy canonical authority. This is where Scripture comes from. He is making up inspired Scripture as he goes along. Again, it is obviously anachronistic to expect that a NT writer would make systematic appeal to the NT. When, therefore, it is asked, Where does Scripture teach sola scriptura?—we have to keep these elementary distinctions in mind. What is remarkable is how often the sacred authors do invoke prior revelation, even though they could speak on their own authority. In so doing they are conditioning the reader to honor the principle of sola Scriptura.
(v) Loyalty to God’s revealed will, and not tradition, is always made the acid test of religious fidelity in sacred history. As John Frame has remarked, after copious citation, "The whole OT history is a history of obedience and disobedience: obedience and disobedience to what? To God’s commands; and after Exod 20, to God’s written word!" ("Scripture Speaks for Itself," God’s Inerrant Word, J.W. Montgomery, ed. [Bethany, 1974], 199). Some of its contents originally took the form of oral address, but that doesn’t amount to oral tradition since the practice was to immediately commit such disclosures to writing (e.g. Exod 17:14; 24:3-4; Deut 33:9,22,24-28; Josh 24:26; 1 Sam 20:25; Rev 1:11,19; 21:5).
(vi) Since so much of Christian doctrine consists in truths that are far removed from us in time and space—from events in the distant past or future, the invisible present (E.g. spiritual warfare; the intermediate state), and God’s delitescent decree, to the afterlife and age to come—our only access to such information is via a public revelation. So the principle of sola scriptura is also rooted in the principle of a revealed religion.
(vii) The burden of proof doesn’t rest on the Protestant. All the major branches of Christendom—Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant—at least pay lip-service to the supreme authority of Scripture. And they all formally deny the continuance of revelation—at least of the canonical variety. That being the case, the Protestant doesn’t even have to show where Scripture itself expressly or implicitly rules out such a role for sacred tradition. It is sufficient for him to show that, as a matter of inevitable practice, this appeal interferes with the authority and authentic interpretation of Scripture. It subordinates the voice of Scripture to the voice of tradition.
One should add that the antiquity of tradition is no evidence of apostolicity, for orthodoxy and heresy coexisted in the apostolic churches. The bulk of the NT correspondence was addressed to doctrinal and disciplinary crises that arose in Apostolic sees. So even if we could trace a tradition all the way back to Apostolic times, or to an Apostolic See, no less, that wouldn’t be the same as tracing it back to Apostolic teaching, for as soon as an Apostle was away from one church to minister to another, error could quickly flare up in his absence. This lies on the face of many NT letters. So it is quite blind to contend that the antiquity of tradition carries any presumption in favor of its apostolic pedigree. By that measure, Simon Magus was a greater champion of orthodoxy than Athanasius!
7. Scripture is insufficient to address many topical issues:
Sola scriptura is obviously not a sufficient rule of faith since we are constantly confronted with many moral issues not addressed in Holy Writ, such as those raised by bioethics. Or so goes the argument. By way of reply:
(i) The ethical instruction of Scripture is based on general norms, case studies and priority structures. The answers are not all preformulated. Rather, the Bible supplies us with sufficient criteria to acquit our obligations.
(ii) The Protestant position is that Scripture is sufficient to instruct us in our du-ties before God and man. The fact that there are questions not answered by Scripture does not imply that sola scriptura is inadequate, but only that we're in a condition of diminished responsibility on questions outside the purview of Scripture. Our responsibility is limited to what God holds us responsible for.
(iii) As I've said before, a high doctrine of Scripture goes hand-in-hand with a high doctrine of providence. I can do God’s will without necessarily knowing his will. God doesn’t dump the Bible in our lap and then retire to Mt. Olympus.
(iii) The Catholic Church doesn’t offer any alternative. While a popular apologist may make grandiose claims for his Church and hold the Protestants to inhuman standards of confidence, the senior policy-makers at the Vatican are more chaste and chastened in their ambitions. Consider Cardinal Ratzinger’s humble admission:
We are in fact constantly confronted with problems where it isn’t possible to find the right answer in a short time. Above all in the case of problems having to do with ethics, particularly medical ethics...We finally had to say, after very long studies, "Answer that for now on the local level; we aren’t far enough along to have full certainty about that."
Again, in the area of medical ethics, new possibilities, and with them new borderline situations, are constantly arising where it is not immediately evident how to apply principles. We can’t simply conjure up certitude...There needn’t always be universal answers. We also have to realize our limits and forgo answers where they aren’t possible...it simply is not the case that we want to go around giving answers in every situation..." (J. Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth [Ignatius, 1996], 100-101).
One has only to consider the rival schools of casuistry that arose in the history of Catholic discussion (e.g. probabilism, probabiliorism, equiprobabilism) to recognize that the Magisterium does not serve up ready-made answers on a wide range of pressing problems in moral theology. So the romantic notion, so popular in Catholic apologetics, that the Roman church is a rock of moral assurance in an otherwise uncertain world is simply out of step with own tradition. The extraordinary Magisterium is extremely selective about its moral pronouncements, and even then it contents itself with general norms, while leaving the concrete application to fallible judgment.
8. Tradition is prior to the canonization of Scripture:
Not only did Christians have to rely on oral tradition before the NT was written, but for a long time afterwards inasmuch as it took centuries before the NT canon was finalized. Or so goes the argument. By way of reply:
(i) As we know from such well-traveled Christians as Apollos, Paul, Philip, Priscilla and Aquilla, the early church enjoyed an extensive communications network. So there’s no reason to suppose that the NT literature either could not or did not circulate widely and rapidly. (Cf. R. Bauckham [ed.], The Gospels for All Christians [Eerdmans 1998]).
Indeed, our Patristic and MS tradition—which is both chronologically primitive and geographically diverse—testifies to just such a circulation. And for the generation right after the Apostles, a reliable source of oral tradition was also available from insiders likeTimothy, Titus and the Ephesian elders—to name some of the few we know about. By the time the second generation died off the dissemination of the NT would have been quite widespread.
(ii) It’s an elementary mistake to confuse the time-frame for distributing the NT books with the time-frame for their initial reception and acceptance. Any standard work on the NT canon will document an early and diverse representation for most of the NT books.
9. Any defense of Scripture is necessarily extraneous to Scripture itself:
Any criteria the Protestant uses to define and defend sola scriptura are necessarily man-made, and therefore the whole exercise is self-defeating inasmuch as it violates the very principle it is advancing. Or so goes the argument. By way of reply:
(i) The Bible is a self-contained revelation. So the Protestant is simply starting with what God has given us. God chose to commit certain revelations to writing. God chose to preserve certain written revelations. It is God who set these concrete boundaries. The Bible is tangible and accessible whereas tradition is an abstract construct. It requires an external standard to isolate and identify "Sacred Tradition" and extract it from the swamp of raw materials and rival traditions. And it takes still another standard to apply the external standard to the interpretation of Sacred Tradition. If you deny the self-evidentiary character of Scripture, then you’re left with a vicious critical regress. But the definition of sola scriptura is secondary insofar as it presupposes the public, existential event of Scripture. The definition doesn’t constitute the fact. It is God who has drawn these lines in history.
(ii) In fairness, this reply depends on the identity of the canon. That demands a separate argument, to be made on a separate occasion. But even on this level, it should be kept in mind that Rome did not have an official canon before Trent, and only defined the Catholic canon in reaction to the Protestant canon. This was not a settled question in Catholic dogma, but merely reopened an old debate between the Church Fathers (e.g., Jerome v. Augustine), such that Rome could not invoke the universal consent of the Fathers. The Protestant canon is prior to the Catholic canon.
10. Church history shows that Scripture is not a sufficient rule of faith:
History proves that sola scriptura is not a sufficient rule of faith. On the one hand, Protestants disagree with each other over the meaning of Scripture. On the other hand, Catholics disagree with Protestants over the meaning of Scripture. Or so goes the argument. By way of reply:
(i) What we should ask ourselves at the outset is, What purpose is served by a rule of faith? What is it supposed to do? A rule of faith isn’t a substitute for sanctification or church discipline. A rule of faith is not a trouble-shooting device for every ill afflicting the Church. The fact that Christians may misapply the rule of faith no more invalidates that rule than blaming the multiplication tables if a crook uses a calculator to cheat on his taxes. And the further fact that the reprobate twist the Scriptures to their own destruction is a sign of poetic irony and divine justice. I’m no less answerable to God if I twist the Scripture than if submit to them.
No rule of faith can guarantee compliance. And the history of the Magisterium certainly doesn’t present an exception to this. The Roman church never relied on its own rule of faith ensure doctrinal conformity. To the contrary, it is notorious for its apparatus of enforced conformity (e.g. interdict; ex communication; the Index; the Inquisition). And even its most Draconian measures failed to secure uniform acquiescence.
God sent prophets to testify against Israel. Yet that didn’t keep the nation from falling away. So did the prophets fail? And if God commissioned them, does this implicate a failure on the part of God himself? But we know that national apostasy was instrumental in God’s redemptive plan by throwing emphasis on the necessity of a Savior to come.
(ii) Catholics keep judging sola scriptura by some utopian ideal. But I’m in no position to say what represents an idea state of affairs since that requires a retrospective standpoint. I would have to be able to see the present in the light of the future fulfillment of God’s design for history. The Fall, the Flood, the Egyptian bondage, the Babylonian Exile, and Good Friday didn’t look like an idea state of affairs at the time, but each event had a role in God’s redemptive purpose for the world.
Catholics approach this issue as if we were debating a hypothetical question, viz. What are the respective advantages or disadvantages of sola scriptura over against a Magisterium? But the real question comes down to an a posteriori and not an a priori question, viz. What rule of faith has God, in fact, imposed on his Church? That is the question. It is not an abstract conjecture or comparative judgment.
(iii) The Catholic objection proves too much. For if sola scriptura were such an inadequate rule of faith, then the alternative is certainly not to be found in the direction of interposing multiplied layers of bureaucracy and tradition between the individual believer and the will of God. That would render God’s will less accessible to the believer, and not more so. Rather, if we accept the premise of the objection, that would be an argument for daily private revelation. But the very existence of Scripture as a public revelation stands against that presumption. So there isn’t any objection to sola scriptura that couldn’t be turned against the Magisterium. The presence of a Magisterium hasn’t prevented internal dissension in the Catholic Church or massive defection (e.g. the Great Schism; the Reformation).
Ten objections to sola scriptura-1
Over the years, Catholic apologetics has raised a number of objections to sola Scriptura. Let's run through the major objections and rebut them one by one.
1. It’s a recipe for chaos:
Catholic apologists often point to the proliferation of Protestant denominations as proof that the right of private judgment is infeasible (cf. Vatican I, preamble). This objection rests on two or three related assumptions: (i) this is an intolerable state of affairs which God would not allow to go unchecked; (ii) God has made provision for some instrumentality that would guard against such disunity, and (iii) the Roman Church does not suffer from this internal strife since it is the repository of this unifying instrumentality. That is perhaps the major objection to the right of private judgment, and therefore calls for the most detailed reply:
(a) The Catholic apologist is taking his own denomination as the standard of comparison, and then pointing as accusing finger at the "schismatics." While this is a natural starting-point for him, it assumes the very claim at issue. I, as a Protestant, do not regard the Roman Church as the yardstick. Otherwise I would be Catholic! Rather, I regard the Roman Church as just one more denomination, and hardly the best.
(b) God put up with a wide diversity of sects and schools of thought in 1C Judaism. We read of Pharisees, Sadducees, Samaritans, Essenes, Zealots, Therapeutae, Jewish Gnostics, Jewish Platonists, Qumranic separatists, as well as the Rabbinical parties of Hillel and Shamai. Doubtless there were many additional groups that our partial and partisan sources have failed to preserve for posterity. Yet God never saw fit to install an infallible Jewish Magisterium in order to prevent this plurality of viewpoints. So the objection is based on nothing more than a seat-of-the-pants hunch about what God is prepared to permit. It doesn’t appeal to any of God’s revealed purposes—the disclosure of his decretive or preceptive will in Scripture. It doesn’t bother to anticipate any concrete counter-examples. Far from there being a presumption in favor of the Catholic claim, the precedent of God’s former dealings with his people goes against that expectation. If we find all this diversity and dissension under the OT dispensation, why assume that the NT economy must operate according to a contrary set of priorities? Wouldn’t the Catholic rationale apply with equal force to OT church? If Christians require the services of a living Magisterium, wouldn’t the Old Covenant community be under the same necessity? Yet it’s clear from the Gospels that none of the rival parties spoke for God in any definitive sense. The priesthood was the only faction with any institutional standing under the Mosaic Covenant, and its members were frequently and fundamentally mistaken in their construal of its ethical obligations, such as the matter of putting to death their prophesied Messiah. So much for a divine teaching office to ensure unity and fidelity.
One of the problems with these utopian scenarios is that they’re premature, reflected a realized eschatology. Utopia awaits heaven and the final state. So much of Catholic apologetics has this armchair quality to it. It makes such large assumptions about what God would never allow to happen. Get up of your chair and take a look out the window! When I observe at the world around me I see that God allows quite a lot. If you want to know what God would allow, you should start with what he has allowed. We can only anticipate the future on the basis of what God has said and done in the past.
As a rule, you can’t disprove a position just because you don’t like the consequences. I’m struck by how many otherwise intelligent, educated people take this solipsistic approach to truth-claims. Most people don’t like cancer, but that doesn’t make it go away. Rather, our attitude should be to study what God has said and done, and then find the wisdom in it. A "dire" consequence may disclose a deeper wisdom in God’s plan for the world.
(c) By excommunicating dissident members, an organization can enforce as much internal unity as it pleases since—by definition—the only people left are likeminded types. So the Catholic appeal is circular. The Magisterium has not succeeded in preventing internal dissension. But its solution has been to externalize some of its internal dissension by exiling certain factions while defining other schools of thought as falling within the bounds of Catholic tradition—even though there’s no real harmony between the respective parties (e.g. Thomists and Molinists), not to mention varieties within a given school. (E.g. versions of Thomism: traditional [Bañez, Scheeben]; transcendental [Marechal, Rahner]; existential [Maritain, Gilson, Rahner], analytical [Geach, Kenny).] So the unity of faith maintained by the Magisterium is a diplomatic and definitional fiction.
I am not denying the right of a denomination to set doctrinal standards and enforce them. But when the Roman Church draws invidious comparisons between its superior unity and the "scandal" or "tragedy" of Protestant sectarianism, this is an illusion fostered by the way in which the Roman Church has chosen to draw the boundaries in the first place. By setting itself up as the point of reference, by glossing over internal divisions and by classifying anything that falls outside its chosen touchstone as beyond the pale it can—no doubt— present an impressively self-serving contrast. By casting the terms of the debate it has rigged the outcome in its favor. It is only because the Catholic apologist is conditioned by this provincial mindset that he finds such an appeal persuasive.
(d) Furthermore, Paul indicates that God deliberately allows for a competition of viewpoints so that the position he himself approves of will emerge by process of comparison and contrast (1 Cor 11:19). One of the unintended services rendered by infidels is in forcing believers to become more thoughtful about their faith. If Voltaire didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him! So the true Church refines its theological understanding by having to fend off infidels from within and without.
(e) I don’t regard the "scandal" of denominationalism as all that scandalous. Granted that all Christians belong to the same family, but in the interests of domestic tranquility many parents have found it necessary to put the boys in separate bedrooms. I’m not endorsing all these denominations. I’d prefer to see everyone in the Calvinist camp. But even Christians who share an identical creed may have differing priorities when it comes to the work and worship of the Church. If all the Reformed bodies were to merge, the style, staffing, message, administration, fellowship and outreach would remain much the same at the level of the local church. They’d just take down the sign outside and put up a new one.
(f) It’s my impression that denominationalism owes less to the Reformation than to nationalism and liberalism. There were many nominal Christians as well as closet heretics, atheists and dissenters in the Medieval Church, but when the Church still enjoyed a measure of temporal power and could enforce the party line on pain of torture, death, dispossession or exile, there was naturally an impressive show of outward conformity. But with the rise of nation-states, monarchs resented a rival power-center meddling in their internal affairs. So this nostalgia for the golden age of undivided Christendom— which Luther supposedly wrecked—rests on an ironically profane foundation.
I don’t see that the Roman Church’s rate of retention or recruitment during the modern era is markedly superior to that of the Protestant "sects." Once it lost its power to coerce dissidents into submission, the Magisterium found that it was limited to the same sanction as its Protestant counterparts— excommunication. (This was also the primary sanction for the OT Church—to be "cut off" from the covenant community.) No more than the Protestant branches does it enjoy absolute sway over its membership. It can’t prevent members from breaking away and forming their own churches. And to a great extent it staves off further schism in its ranks by exceedingly indulgent terms of membership. It opposes abortion but never excommunicates Catholic politicians who are complicit in our public policy. It opposes divorce, yet annulments are freely granted to the rich and famous. It opposes homosexuality but then opposes those who oppose homosexual "rights" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶2357-2358). It opposes the death penalty, but has never excommunicated a Mafia Don.
Given a choice I much prefer a plethora of smaller denominations, some good and some bad, to one big bad church. At least with the Protestant tradition you have an avenue of escape. Far better that than a system that generates the Catholic sex scandal. Once you're committed to your church as the one and only true church, you'll put up with anything, however horrendous. And that is the history of Roman Catholicism.
(g) Likewise, many new denominations are formed as a result of the liberalization of preexisting denominations. Liberals rarely if ever form their own denomination. How could they? Barren theology begets no life. Rather, their modus operandi is to infiltrate and infect a preexisting church and thereby drive out the true believers. Were it not for liberal parasitism, there would be far fewer breakaway denominations.
But that doesn’t represent a novel disagreement. It is only because the faithful continue to believe what they have always believed that they find it necessary to split with a preexisting denomination which has been overrun by a liberal faction that no longer believes the same thing. Schism is as much a mark of doctrinal continuity as it is of superficial disunity. They leave a church because it first left them. Anyone who knows his church history will instantly recognize how true that is.
(h) If denominationalism is such a problem, then the Roman Church is a very large part of the problem since—from my standpoint—it’s just one more denomination. The very phenomenon of the Protestant split to which Catholic apologist points only proves that a Magisterium was unable to prevent dissention and schism. The relation between Catholic and Protestant is often represented as analogous to the relation between the trunk and its branches. But both Catholicism and Protestantism represent offshoots of the Latin Church. Trent is not just a linear continuation of the Medieval Church. The Western Church before Trent was more pluralistic in doctrine than the Roman Church between Trent and Vatican I. For example, the Augustinian tradition, though always a minority report, had enjoyed an honored and distinguished representation in the Medieval Church. Luther himself, as we all know, had belonged to a religious order based on that tradition. But in censuring the Protestants, Trent dismantled some cornerstones of Augustinian soteriology (e.g. total depravity, the efficacy and particularism of grace).
(i) There are Protestant denominations (Lutheran and Reformed) that have retained a far more substantive degree of continuity with Reformation theology in its classic creedal expositions (e.g. The Westminster Confession of Faith; The Three Forms of Unity; The Book of Concord) than Vatican II and post-Vatican II theology can honestly claim in relation to Trent. So it’s very misleading to say that Protestants have gone every which way while Rome has stayed the course. Certainly we see many modern Protestant denominations that are unrecognizable in relation to the theology of the Protestant Reformers. But, of course, one could say the same thing about many Catholic scholars and theologians in relation to Trent. The difference is that Catholics who still believe in Trent are excommunicated (e.g. Lefevbre) whereas there is a continuous tradition of unreconstructed Reformed and Lutheran theology extending from the Reformation down to the present day.
(j) So the right of private judgment did not set a domino effect into motion. And it doesn’t mean that everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Rather, it was set over against blind faith in a self-appointed authority. The principle at stake was that only God’s word enjoys dogmatic authority, and the sense of Scripture has to be established by verifiable methods. It doesn’t cut it to say that Mother Church knows best. Instead, a Bible scholar or theologian should be willing and able to take a layman through the process of reasoning by which he arrived at his interpretation so that the layman can follow the argument and see the conclusion for himself. Invoking sacred tradition is no substitute for responsible exegesis. The right of private judgment is the very opposite of individual autonomy—it’s all about accountability. To be sure, this principle can be abused by the willful. But abusing God’s word carries its own inevitable penalty.
(k) Theologians like Brunner have contributed to the confusion by pretending that it was inconsistent of Protestants to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the papacy—only to turn around and elevate the Bible to the role of a "paper pope." This little jingle is very quotable, but it distorts the motives of the Protestant Reformers. Luther and Calvin were concerned with fidelity, not freedom. They were fighting for the freedom to serve God according to his Word. The magisterial Reformation (as opposed to the Radical Reformation) was never an attack on external authority, per se. Rather, it was an issue of submission to a properly constituted authority—God speaking in his word.
Related to Brunner’s charge is the accusation that conservative Protestants are guilty of "bibliolatry." This is a clever attempt to put conservatives on the defensive. But it’s a self-defeating allegation. Idolatry is a Biblical category, and therefore presupposes Biblical authority and Scriptural definition. So it is nonsensical to claim that allegiance to Scripture conflicts with Scripture. Bible-believing Christians simply pattern their attitude towards Scripture on the attitude modeled by Christ and his Apostles (Cf. B.B. Warfield, Revelation & Inspiration [Baker 2003], Works, vol. 1.) When, conversely, the liberal denies the absolute authority of Scripture, he is absolutizing his own powers of judgment. As such, he’s guilty of auto-idolatry.
(l) Every denomination doesn’t represent a different interpretation of Scripture. And every difference doesn’t represent a disagreement. Many of the different denominations are due to different nationalities. When they all troop over to America it presents quite a spectacle of diversity, but they didn’t all arise due to differences of interpretation.
And as I've argued elsewhere, the superficially vast range of doctrinal and denominational diversity is reducible to how you answer four basic questions: (i) Is the Bible the only rule of faith? (ii) Does man have freewill? (iii) How is the OT fulfilled in the NT? (iv) Are the sacraments a means of grace?
(m) Moreover, these don’t all present a contrast to Catholicism. There are charismatic Catholics. There are Arminian elements in Catholic theology. There are Anglican and Lutheran elements in Catholic theology. There are liberal elements in Catholic theology. So some of these interpretations agree with Catholicism rather than representing schismatic aberrations. Of course, I might view these points of commonality as common errors. But the Roman Church can’t stigmatize them save on pain of self-incrimination.
Quantity makes quality possible. Out of the diversity of denominations it is possible to find a number of good churches. Better to have a lot of lifeboats, some of which are seaworthy, and others leaky and listing, than to be trapped aboard a burning and sinking ship.
(n) Appeal is sometimes made to Jn 10:16 and 17:20-21. But the unity envisioned here is ethnic and diachronic rather than institutional and synchronic, as the Gentiles are inducted into the covenant community (cf. 10:16a) and the faith is passed on from one generation to the next (17:20).
(o) The right of private judgment has undoubted generated a great diversity of theological opinion, which is—in turn—reflected in a diversity of denominations. But we’ve always had this. It’s easy to forget about Donatists and Montanists, Novatianists and Waldensians, to name a few pre-Reformation movements, because they were on the losing side of the debate and tended to dissipate over time. So it’s not as if sola scriptura in-traduced a radically destabilizing dynamic into an otherwise cohesive church.
Remember, too, that in Reformed theology, all this diversity is a providential diversity. Catholic apologists have traditionally treated the Reformation as if it were a runaway train. But in the plan of God, everything that happens is either good in itself or a means to an ulterior good. There is wheat among the tares. The field exists for the sake of the wheat, not the tares. But in this dispensation you cannot weed out all the tares without uprooting the wheat in the process (cf. Mt 13:24-30). We don’t judge the condition of the field by the presence or even prevalence of the tares. What matters is the state of the wheat.
(p) Related to (o), critics of the Reformation often appeal to the Vincentian canon as some sort of living ideal which the Reformation violated. This appeal assumes a continuity and commonality of belief throughout the history of the Church, up until the Reformation. But isn’t that an illusion? What was the express creed of your average medieval peasant? Or, for that matter, of the village priest? It is natural to form our impression of the Middle Ages from Medieval writers. But that is hardly representative of popular belief. At a time when illiteracy and folk religion were the rule, it isn’t very authentic or meaningful to speak of a core creed shared by the masses. An Athanasius or Aquinas, A Kempis or Dante by no means stands for a popular consensus. Such an identification leaves the laity entirely out of view, and a large chunk of the lower clergy as well. If anything, it was the Reformation, with its emphasis on Bible literacy, which brought the masses on board. There can be no majority report when the majority is too illiterate and ignorant to exercise explicit faith.
2. It presumes the right of private judgment:
A Catholic apologist might object that my whole critique represents a tendentious exercise in the right of private judgment, assuming one of the principal points dividing Catholic and Protestant. When we quote Scripture against the Roman Church we’re taking for granted our competence to interpret Scripture aright quite apart from the Magisterium. But Rome denies that very premise. It must be established before it can be utilized. By way of reply:
(i) Even if this represented a genuine problem, and even if there were such a thing as the Magisterium, appealing to that office only relocates the original problem, for unless the laity are competent to interpret magisterial teachings, they cannot comply with them. Whatever complications are involved in exegetical and systematic theology are dwarfed by the scope of canon law. To plow through the Fathers, Doctors, Councils and Popes, reading them against a historical backdrop (minutes, correspondence, &c.), producing critical editions (textual criticism), collating the material and sifting it all according to degrees of normativity—is quite beyond the resources of a full time research scholar or professional theologian—much less a busy bishop or his parish priest. Even if the Pope were ordinarily immunized from doctrinal error in his public teaching, that instruction must still be popularized at the seminary and parish level. So it still amounts to a trickle down process, with the mass inculcation and application delegated to an army of fallible foot-soldiers. Again, Catholic scholars write commentaries too. They bring to this task the same set of fallible faculties as their Protestant counterparts. They have to exercise private judgment. While their publications must pass muster with an official censor, that, too is a form of fallible peer review. The same applies to Catholic theologians. The exercise is especially lame when the censor is not in the same intellectual league as the scholar or theologian under review.
(ii) The right of private judgment wasn’t some apologetic ruse invented by the Protestant Reformers. The Bible is a public revelation, addressed to the common people (e.g. Exod 24:7; Deut 31:11; Neh 8:3; Jer 36:6; Lk 4:16; Acts 13:15; 15:21; Col 4:16; 1 Thes 5:27; 1 Tim 4:13; Rev 1:3-4), and adapted to popular understanding (2 Cor 1:13; Eph 3:4). The OT prophets make direct appeal to the Mosaic Covenant when addressing their remarks to the congregation of Israel. Christ and the Apostles so the same. All this assumes that the rank-and-file are able to follow an exegetical argument. Indeed, they are held no less accountable for misunderstanding the message! Christ often pulled rank on the religious leaders as he addressed the masses and called on them to judge the doctrine of the religious establishment by straightforward appeal to Scripture. The same practice operates in the Book of Acts. As a review of Luke-Acts also makes plain, religious instruction in the synagogue followed a fairly informal arrangement. There was no elaborate command-structure corresponding to the Catholic hierarchy. And that’s because the Mosaic code itself did not deem it necessary to make any such provision, even though it can get very detailed when it needs to be.
(iii) For that matter, even councils like Trent, Vatican I & Vatican II cite Scriptural prooftexts in support of their dogmas. Isn’t this an appeal to the reader? To a reader who is not a member of the Magisterium—since these documents are generated by the Magisterium and addressed to the church at large? Doesn’t such an appeal assume that the reader is able to connect the content of the prooftext with the content of the dogma? The same applies to papal pronouncements like "Munificentissimus Deus." And doesn’t that comparison invite the possibility of falsification? Unless these prooftexts do, in fact, implicate the dogmas to which they’re assigned, their citation is duplicitous.
(iv) One of the standing ironies in Catholic apologetics is the spectacle of ordinary priests and laymen in lay organizations churning out books by and for laymen, sternly admonishing the laity that laymen are incompetent to speak with authority on matters of faith and morals. Here we have priests and laymen who—by definition—fall outside the ranks of the Magisterium, making a case on behalf of the Magisterium. Isn’t this a self-refuting exercise? Shouldn’t the hierarchy be left to speak for itself? The irony is never more acute than when a renegade Protestant tries to justify his defection. Shouldn’t he refer all inquiries to his bishop? Shouldn’t he let Mother Church do all the talking and speak on his behalf, rather than vice versa? While he now claims to be a Catholic, he still acts like a Protestant! A Catholic apologist never makes a more compelling case for the Protestant rule of faith than when he takes it upon himself to pen a popular apologetic against our rule of faith!
The lay apologist is having to exercise the right of private judgment in the very act of denying it. How does his position differ in practice from the practice of the Protestant apologist? Why can’t the Pope fight his own battles? Why did the bishops at Vatican II require the services of the periti?
(v) If the Bible can’t be interpreted without benefit of a living teaching office, why bother with a "dead" book at all? What function does the Bible perform if you have a hotline to God via the living voice of Mother Church?
(vi) Rome herself recognizes the validity of the Orthodox communion. No less a spokesman than Cardinal Ratzinger grants that while "the West may point to the absence of the office of Peter in the East—it must, nevertheless, admit that, in the Eastern Church, the form and content of the Church of the Fathers is present in unbroken continuity" (Principles of Catholic Theology [Ignatius, 1987], 196). That being so, a papal Magisterium is superfluous to the preservation of faith and morals.
(vii) Karl Rahner freely concedes the right of private judgment in submitting to the Church in the first place:
...We may not of course obscure the obvious fact that the free acceptance of the church and its authority is itself once again an act of freedom and decision for which every Christian including a Catholic Christian has to take responsibility in the loneliness of his own conscience. Nor can he depend on the authority of the church as such at this point in the history of his freedom. Moreover, the fact that the authority of the church does become effective for an individual Christian always remains based upon this "lonely" decision. There is no essential difference on this point between a Catholic Christian and an Evangelical Christian who recognizes any authoritative instance at all, for example, Holy Scripture, as coming "from without" and hence binding, Foundations of Christian Faith, (Seabury 1990), 346.
3. The Church is prior to the NT and gave us the canon:
Sola Scriptura is obviously backwards since the Church preexisted the NT and indeed gave us the NT. Why, Paul himself even refers to the Church as the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Tim 3:15). Or so goes the argument.
This popular objection betrays the absence of any historical consciousness. It begins with the Church as a finished product, instead of considering the formative phases of the Church and canon alike. So the objection is equivocal:
(i) While the NT Church preexisted the NT canon, it didn’t preexist the word of God, for the NT Church was constituted by apostolic preaching. So both in terms of historical and causal priority, the Word preceded the Church. The only difference is a merely modal rather than substantive distinction between the spoken and written word.
(ii) Of course, it is a non-sequitur to assert that priority in time implies priority in rank. Moses lived before the advent of Christ, but that doesn’t make Moses superior to Christ.
(iii) It fails to distinguish between the individual origin of the canon and its final formation. In terms of their origin, the books of the NT were enjoined on the NT churches. When James or John, Peter or Paul wrote a gospel, epistle or apocalypse, this was sent to a local church or directed to the church at large and circulated widely (Gal 1:2; Col 4:16; Jas 1:1; 1 Pet 1:1). The church was obliged to submit to the authority of this document. It didn’t issue from the Church but was issued to the Church. The Church was the addressee. The NT documents are the work of inspired individuals. They are not conciliar documents. The Church has a role in the general dissemination of the NT, but that is not at all the same thing as a productive role. Without the Post Office I might not get my mail, but that doesn’t make the Post Office prior to the mail it delivers—not in any relevant or important sense of priority.
When copies of various NT writings were made and distributed, this marked out an informal stage of canonization. But the collective authority of the canon presupposes its distributive authority: there would be no motive for compiling the NT documents absent prior recognition of their normative status. So the principle of canonicity is not a gradual process. Rather, that principle is there at the outset and drives the process.
(iv) The passage in 1 Tim 3:15 probably has the local rather than the universal church in view. As patrologist J.N.D. Kelly has pointed out,
"As in 3:5, there is no definite article before "church," and this suggests that Paul is thinking primarily of the particular local community...What Paul is saying is that it is the function and responsibility of each congregation to support, bolster up, and thus safeguard the true teaching by its continuous witness. We should note (a) that "buttress" is probably a more accurate rendering of the Greek endraiwma
(nowhere else found) than "foundation" or "ground" (AV), and (b) that the local church is described as "a pillar," etc., not "the pillar," etc., because there are many local churches throughout the world performing this role (A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles [Baker, 1986], 87-88).
There is, of course, a part/whole relation between the local and the universal church, so that ultimately we’re talking about a single entity. But one can’t equate Paul’s reference to a local church situation with a centralized and pyramidal agency where truth is vested in a top-down teaching office. Rather, this passage has in view the informal witness of the local church membership. Paul is talking about "a" church as "a" pillar of truth.
(v) Before the NT canon you had the NT church, but before the NT church you had the OT canon. And the Mosaic canon constituted the covenant community. It supplied the charter documents. It preceded and created the priesthood and high holy days, rites, rituals and canon law.
4. The case for Scripture is not self-contained:
Sola scriptura isn’t feasible since many extraneous conditions must be met for Scripture to be God's word or to be perceived as such by us. The Bible must be interpreted, which introduces an outside agent is into the process. You can’t break into the circle of sola scriptura without breaking out of it. Or so goes the argument.
Before proceeding with a reply, we need to define our terms. Sola scriptura doesn’t mean that Scripture is the only source of knowledge. What it does mean, at least as I’m using the expression, is that Scripture is the only source of dogma, and the only source of saving knowledge, as well as the supreme source and standard of human knowledge generally—regardless of its subject-matter. It also follows from this that there can be no higher authority or equipollent authority to authorize the authority of Scripture.
Now it’s true that in order for Scripture to function as the rule of faith, a number of extraneous conditions must be met. But the fact that the reader stands outside Scripture, and must be brought into the interpretive loop, does not compromise the hegemony of Scripture, for this principle was never designed to operate in a vacuum, but presupposes a larger theological framework. The Catholic satisfies this condition with a high doctrine of the church. But the Calvinist satisfies this condition with a high doctrine of providence. The Catholic has a low doctrine of Scripture because he has a low doctrine of providence. So he must compensate with a high doctrine of the church. But the Calvinist can maintain a high doctrine of Scripture because he has a high doctrine of providence. The God of revelation is also the God of providence. The God who inspires the prophets is also in charge of the interpretive process. This doesn't mean that the reader is rendered infallible. But both true and false interpretations are under God's control and subservient to his designs. If individuals or multitudes stray into heresy and apostasy, that is not a historical accident but the outworking of reprobation.
1. It’s a recipe for chaos:
Catholic apologists often point to the proliferation of Protestant denominations as proof that the right of private judgment is infeasible (cf. Vatican I, preamble). This objection rests on two or three related assumptions: (i) this is an intolerable state of affairs which God would not allow to go unchecked; (ii) God has made provision for some instrumentality that would guard against such disunity, and (iii) the Roman Church does not suffer from this internal strife since it is the repository of this unifying instrumentality. That is perhaps the major objection to the right of private judgment, and therefore calls for the most detailed reply:
(a) The Catholic apologist is taking his own denomination as the standard of comparison, and then pointing as accusing finger at the "schismatics." While this is a natural starting-point for him, it assumes the very claim at issue. I, as a Protestant, do not regard the Roman Church as the yardstick. Otherwise I would be Catholic! Rather, I regard the Roman Church as just one more denomination, and hardly the best.
(b) God put up with a wide diversity of sects and schools of thought in 1C Judaism. We read of Pharisees, Sadducees, Samaritans, Essenes, Zealots, Therapeutae, Jewish Gnostics, Jewish Platonists, Qumranic separatists, as well as the Rabbinical parties of Hillel and Shamai. Doubtless there were many additional groups that our partial and partisan sources have failed to preserve for posterity. Yet God never saw fit to install an infallible Jewish Magisterium in order to prevent this plurality of viewpoints. So the objection is based on nothing more than a seat-of-the-pants hunch about what God is prepared to permit. It doesn’t appeal to any of God’s revealed purposes—the disclosure of his decretive or preceptive will in Scripture. It doesn’t bother to anticipate any concrete counter-examples. Far from there being a presumption in favor of the Catholic claim, the precedent of God’s former dealings with his people goes against that expectation. If we find all this diversity and dissension under the OT dispensation, why assume that the NT economy must operate according to a contrary set of priorities? Wouldn’t the Catholic rationale apply with equal force to OT church? If Christians require the services of a living Magisterium, wouldn’t the Old Covenant community be under the same necessity? Yet it’s clear from the Gospels that none of the rival parties spoke for God in any definitive sense. The priesthood was the only faction with any institutional standing under the Mosaic Covenant, and its members were frequently and fundamentally mistaken in their construal of its ethical obligations, such as the matter of putting to death their prophesied Messiah. So much for a divine teaching office to ensure unity and fidelity.
One of the problems with these utopian scenarios is that they’re premature, reflected a realized eschatology. Utopia awaits heaven and the final state. So much of Catholic apologetics has this armchair quality to it. It makes such large assumptions about what God would never allow to happen. Get up of your chair and take a look out the window! When I observe at the world around me I see that God allows quite a lot. If you want to know what God would allow, you should start with what he has allowed. We can only anticipate the future on the basis of what God has said and done in the past.
As a rule, you can’t disprove a position just because you don’t like the consequences. I’m struck by how many otherwise intelligent, educated people take this solipsistic approach to truth-claims. Most people don’t like cancer, but that doesn’t make it go away. Rather, our attitude should be to study what God has said and done, and then find the wisdom in it. A "dire" consequence may disclose a deeper wisdom in God’s plan for the world.
(c) By excommunicating dissident members, an organization can enforce as much internal unity as it pleases since—by definition—the only people left are likeminded types. So the Catholic appeal is circular. The Magisterium has not succeeded in preventing internal dissension. But its solution has been to externalize some of its internal dissension by exiling certain factions while defining other schools of thought as falling within the bounds of Catholic tradition—even though there’s no real harmony between the respective parties (e.g. Thomists and Molinists), not to mention varieties within a given school. (E.g. versions of Thomism: traditional [Bañez, Scheeben]; transcendental [Marechal, Rahner]; existential [Maritain, Gilson, Rahner], analytical [Geach, Kenny).] So the unity of faith maintained by the Magisterium is a diplomatic and definitional fiction.
I am not denying the right of a denomination to set doctrinal standards and enforce them. But when the Roman Church draws invidious comparisons between its superior unity and the "scandal" or "tragedy" of Protestant sectarianism, this is an illusion fostered by the way in which the Roman Church has chosen to draw the boundaries in the first place. By setting itself up as the point of reference, by glossing over internal divisions and by classifying anything that falls outside its chosen touchstone as beyond the pale it can—no doubt— present an impressively self-serving contrast. By casting the terms of the debate it has rigged the outcome in its favor. It is only because the Catholic apologist is conditioned by this provincial mindset that he finds such an appeal persuasive.
(d) Furthermore, Paul indicates that God deliberately allows for a competition of viewpoints so that the position he himself approves of will emerge by process of comparison and contrast (1 Cor 11:19). One of the unintended services rendered by infidels is in forcing believers to become more thoughtful about their faith. If Voltaire didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him! So the true Church refines its theological understanding by having to fend off infidels from within and without.
(e) I don’t regard the "scandal" of denominationalism as all that scandalous. Granted that all Christians belong to the same family, but in the interests of domestic tranquility many parents have found it necessary to put the boys in separate bedrooms. I’m not endorsing all these denominations. I’d prefer to see everyone in the Calvinist camp. But even Christians who share an identical creed may have differing priorities when it comes to the work and worship of the Church. If all the Reformed bodies were to merge, the style, staffing, message, administration, fellowship and outreach would remain much the same at the level of the local church. They’d just take down the sign outside and put up a new one.
(f) It’s my impression that denominationalism owes less to the Reformation than to nationalism and liberalism. There were many nominal Christians as well as closet heretics, atheists and dissenters in the Medieval Church, but when the Church still enjoyed a measure of temporal power and could enforce the party line on pain of torture, death, dispossession or exile, there was naturally an impressive show of outward conformity. But with the rise of nation-states, monarchs resented a rival power-center meddling in their internal affairs. So this nostalgia for the golden age of undivided Christendom— which Luther supposedly wrecked—rests on an ironically profane foundation.
I don’t see that the Roman Church’s rate of retention or recruitment during the modern era is markedly superior to that of the Protestant "sects." Once it lost its power to coerce dissidents into submission, the Magisterium found that it was limited to the same sanction as its Protestant counterparts— excommunication. (This was also the primary sanction for the OT Church—to be "cut off" from the covenant community.) No more than the Protestant branches does it enjoy absolute sway over its membership. It can’t prevent members from breaking away and forming their own churches. And to a great extent it staves off further schism in its ranks by exceedingly indulgent terms of membership. It opposes abortion but never excommunicates Catholic politicians who are complicit in our public policy. It opposes divorce, yet annulments are freely granted to the rich and famous. It opposes homosexuality but then opposes those who oppose homosexual "rights" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶2357-2358). It opposes the death penalty, but has never excommunicated a Mafia Don.
Given a choice I much prefer a plethora of smaller denominations, some good and some bad, to one big bad church. At least with the Protestant tradition you have an avenue of escape. Far better that than a system that generates the Catholic sex scandal. Once you're committed to your church as the one and only true church, you'll put up with anything, however horrendous. And that is the history of Roman Catholicism.
(g) Likewise, many new denominations are formed as a result of the liberalization of preexisting denominations. Liberals rarely if ever form their own denomination. How could they? Barren theology begets no life. Rather, their modus operandi is to infiltrate and infect a preexisting church and thereby drive out the true believers. Were it not for liberal parasitism, there would be far fewer breakaway denominations.
But that doesn’t represent a novel disagreement. It is only because the faithful continue to believe what they have always believed that they find it necessary to split with a preexisting denomination which has been overrun by a liberal faction that no longer believes the same thing. Schism is as much a mark of doctrinal continuity as it is of superficial disunity. They leave a church because it first left them. Anyone who knows his church history will instantly recognize how true that is.
(h) If denominationalism is such a problem, then the Roman Church is a very large part of the problem since—from my standpoint—it’s just one more denomination. The very phenomenon of the Protestant split to which Catholic apologist points only proves that a Magisterium was unable to prevent dissention and schism. The relation between Catholic and Protestant is often represented as analogous to the relation between the trunk and its branches. But both Catholicism and Protestantism represent offshoots of the Latin Church. Trent is not just a linear continuation of the Medieval Church. The Western Church before Trent was more pluralistic in doctrine than the Roman Church between Trent and Vatican I. For example, the Augustinian tradition, though always a minority report, had enjoyed an honored and distinguished representation in the Medieval Church. Luther himself, as we all know, had belonged to a religious order based on that tradition. But in censuring the Protestants, Trent dismantled some cornerstones of Augustinian soteriology (e.g. total depravity, the efficacy and particularism of grace).
(i) There are Protestant denominations (Lutheran and Reformed) that have retained a far more substantive degree of continuity with Reformation theology in its classic creedal expositions (e.g. The Westminster Confession of Faith; The Three Forms of Unity; The Book of Concord) than Vatican II and post-Vatican II theology can honestly claim in relation to Trent. So it’s very misleading to say that Protestants have gone every which way while Rome has stayed the course. Certainly we see many modern Protestant denominations that are unrecognizable in relation to the theology of the Protestant Reformers. But, of course, one could say the same thing about many Catholic scholars and theologians in relation to Trent. The difference is that Catholics who still believe in Trent are excommunicated (e.g. Lefevbre) whereas there is a continuous tradition of unreconstructed Reformed and Lutheran theology extending from the Reformation down to the present day.
(j) So the right of private judgment did not set a domino effect into motion. And it doesn’t mean that everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Rather, it was set over against blind faith in a self-appointed authority. The principle at stake was that only God’s word enjoys dogmatic authority, and the sense of Scripture has to be established by verifiable methods. It doesn’t cut it to say that Mother Church knows best. Instead, a Bible scholar or theologian should be willing and able to take a layman through the process of reasoning by which he arrived at his interpretation so that the layman can follow the argument and see the conclusion for himself. Invoking sacred tradition is no substitute for responsible exegesis. The right of private judgment is the very opposite of individual autonomy—it’s all about accountability. To be sure, this principle can be abused by the willful. But abusing God’s word carries its own inevitable penalty.
(k) Theologians like Brunner have contributed to the confusion by pretending that it was inconsistent of Protestants to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the papacy—only to turn around and elevate the Bible to the role of a "paper pope." This little jingle is very quotable, but it distorts the motives of the Protestant Reformers. Luther and Calvin were concerned with fidelity, not freedom. They were fighting for the freedom to serve God according to his Word. The magisterial Reformation (as opposed to the Radical Reformation) was never an attack on external authority, per se. Rather, it was an issue of submission to a properly constituted authority—God speaking in his word.
Related to Brunner’s charge is the accusation that conservative Protestants are guilty of "bibliolatry." This is a clever attempt to put conservatives on the defensive. But it’s a self-defeating allegation. Idolatry is a Biblical category, and therefore presupposes Biblical authority and Scriptural definition. So it is nonsensical to claim that allegiance to Scripture conflicts with Scripture. Bible-believing Christians simply pattern their attitude towards Scripture on the attitude modeled by Christ and his Apostles (Cf. B.B. Warfield, Revelation & Inspiration [Baker 2003], Works, vol. 1.) When, conversely, the liberal denies the absolute authority of Scripture, he is absolutizing his own powers of judgment. As such, he’s guilty of auto-idolatry.
(l) Every denomination doesn’t represent a different interpretation of Scripture. And every difference doesn’t represent a disagreement. Many of the different denominations are due to different nationalities. When they all troop over to America it presents quite a spectacle of diversity, but they didn’t all arise due to differences of interpretation.
And as I've argued elsewhere, the superficially vast range of doctrinal and denominational diversity is reducible to how you answer four basic questions: (i) Is the Bible the only rule of faith? (ii) Does man have freewill? (iii) How is the OT fulfilled in the NT? (iv) Are the sacraments a means of grace?
(m) Moreover, these don’t all present a contrast to Catholicism. There are charismatic Catholics. There are Arminian elements in Catholic theology. There are Anglican and Lutheran elements in Catholic theology. There are liberal elements in Catholic theology. So some of these interpretations agree with Catholicism rather than representing schismatic aberrations. Of course, I might view these points of commonality as common errors. But the Roman Church can’t stigmatize them save on pain of self-incrimination.
Quantity makes quality possible. Out of the diversity of denominations it is possible to find a number of good churches. Better to have a lot of lifeboats, some of which are seaworthy, and others leaky and listing, than to be trapped aboard a burning and sinking ship.
(n) Appeal is sometimes made to Jn 10:16 and 17:20-21. But the unity envisioned here is ethnic and diachronic rather than institutional and synchronic, as the Gentiles are inducted into the covenant community (cf. 10:16a) and the faith is passed on from one generation to the next (17:20).
(o) The right of private judgment has undoubted generated a great diversity of theological opinion, which is—in turn—reflected in a diversity of denominations. But we’ve always had this. It’s easy to forget about Donatists and Montanists, Novatianists and Waldensians, to name a few pre-Reformation movements, because they were on the losing side of the debate and tended to dissipate over time. So it’s not as if sola scriptura in-traduced a radically destabilizing dynamic into an otherwise cohesive church.
Remember, too, that in Reformed theology, all this diversity is a providential diversity. Catholic apologists have traditionally treated the Reformation as if it were a runaway train. But in the plan of God, everything that happens is either good in itself or a means to an ulterior good. There is wheat among the tares. The field exists for the sake of the wheat, not the tares. But in this dispensation you cannot weed out all the tares without uprooting the wheat in the process (cf. Mt 13:24-30). We don’t judge the condition of the field by the presence or even prevalence of the tares. What matters is the state of the wheat.
(p) Related to (o), critics of the Reformation often appeal to the Vincentian canon as some sort of living ideal which the Reformation violated. This appeal assumes a continuity and commonality of belief throughout the history of the Church, up until the Reformation. But isn’t that an illusion? What was the express creed of your average medieval peasant? Or, for that matter, of the village priest? It is natural to form our impression of the Middle Ages from Medieval writers. But that is hardly representative of popular belief. At a time when illiteracy and folk religion were the rule, it isn’t very authentic or meaningful to speak of a core creed shared by the masses. An Athanasius or Aquinas, A Kempis or Dante by no means stands for a popular consensus. Such an identification leaves the laity entirely out of view, and a large chunk of the lower clergy as well. If anything, it was the Reformation, with its emphasis on Bible literacy, which brought the masses on board. There can be no majority report when the majority is too illiterate and ignorant to exercise explicit faith.
2. It presumes the right of private judgment:
A Catholic apologist might object that my whole critique represents a tendentious exercise in the right of private judgment, assuming one of the principal points dividing Catholic and Protestant. When we quote Scripture against the Roman Church we’re taking for granted our competence to interpret Scripture aright quite apart from the Magisterium. But Rome denies that very premise. It must be established before it can be utilized. By way of reply:
(i) Even if this represented a genuine problem, and even if there were such a thing as the Magisterium, appealing to that office only relocates the original problem, for unless the laity are competent to interpret magisterial teachings, they cannot comply with them. Whatever complications are involved in exegetical and systematic theology are dwarfed by the scope of canon law. To plow through the Fathers, Doctors, Councils and Popes, reading them against a historical backdrop (minutes, correspondence, &c.), producing critical editions (textual criticism), collating the material and sifting it all according to degrees of normativity—is quite beyond the resources of a full time research scholar or professional theologian—much less a busy bishop or his parish priest. Even if the Pope were ordinarily immunized from doctrinal error in his public teaching, that instruction must still be popularized at the seminary and parish level. So it still amounts to a trickle down process, with the mass inculcation and application delegated to an army of fallible foot-soldiers. Again, Catholic scholars write commentaries too. They bring to this task the same set of fallible faculties as their Protestant counterparts. They have to exercise private judgment. While their publications must pass muster with an official censor, that, too is a form of fallible peer review. The same applies to Catholic theologians. The exercise is especially lame when the censor is not in the same intellectual league as the scholar or theologian under review.
(ii) The right of private judgment wasn’t some apologetic ruse invented by the Protestant Reformers. The Bible is a public revelation, addressed to the common people (e.g. Exod 24:7; Deut 31:11; Neh 8:3; Jer 36:6; Lk 4:16; Acts 13:15; 15:21; Col 4:16; 1 Thes 5:27; 1 Tim 4:13; Rev 1:3-4), and adapted to popular understanding (2 Cor 1:13; Eph 3:4). The OT prophets make direct appeal to the Mosaic Covenant when addressing their remarks to the congregation of Israel. Christ and the Apostles so the same. All this assumes that the rank-and-file are able to follow an exegetical argument. Indeed, they are held no less accountable for misunderstanding the message! Christ often pulled rank on the religious leaders as he addressed the masses and called on them to judge the doctrine of the religious establishment by straightforward appeal to Scripture. The same practice operates in the Book of Acts. As a review of Luke-Acts also makes plain, religious instruction in the synagogue followed a fairly informal arrangement. There was no elaborate command-structure corresponding to the Catholic hierarchy. And that’s because the Mosaic code itself did not deem it necessary to make any such provision, even though it can get very detailed when it needs to be.
(iii) For that matter, even councils like Trent, Vatican I & Vatican II cite Scriptural prooftexts in support of their dogmas. Isn’t this an appeal to the reader? To a reader who is not a member of the Magisterium—since these documents are generated by the Magisterium and addressed to the church at large? Doesn’t such an appeal assume that the reader is able to connect the content of the prooftext with the content of the dogma? The same applies to papal pronouncements like "Munificentissimus Deus." And doesn’t that comparison invite the possibility of falsification? Unless these prooftexts do, in fact, implicate the dogmas to which they’re assigned, their citation is duplicitous.
(iv) One of the standing ironies in Catholic apologetics is the spectacle of ordinary priests and laymen in lay organizations churning out books by and for laymen, sternly admonishing the laity that laymen are incompetent to speak with authority on matters of faith and morals. Here we have priests and laymen who—by definition—fall outside the ranks of the Magisterium, making a case on behalf of the Magisterium. Isn’t this a self-refuting exercise? Shouldn’t the hierarchy be left to speak for itself? The irony is never more acute than when a renegade Protestant tries to justify his defection. Shouldn’t he refer all inquiries to his bishop? Shouldn’t he let Mother Church do all the talking and speak on his behalf, rather than vice versa? While he now claims to be a Catholic, he still acts like a Protestant! A Catholic apologist never makes a more compelling case for the Protestant rule of faith than when he takes it upon himself to pen a popular apologetic against our rule of faith!
The lay apologist is having to exercise the right of private judgment in the very act of denying it. How does his position differ in practice from the practice of the Protestant apologist? Why can’t the Pope fight his own battles? Why did the bishops at Vatican II require the services of the periti?
(v) If the Bible can’t be interpreted without benefit of a living teaching office, why bother with a "dead" book at all? What function does the Bible perform if you have a hotline to God via the living voice of Mother Church?
(vi) Rome herself recognizes the validity of the Orthodox communion. No less a spokesman than Cardinal Ratzinger grants that while "the West may point to the absence of the office of Peter in the East—it must, nevertheless, admit that, in the Eastern Church, the form and content of the Church of the Fathers is present in unbroken continuity" (Principles of Catholic Theology [Ignatius, 1987], 196). That being so, a papal Magisterium is superfluous to the preservation of faith and morals.
(vii) Karl Rahner freely concedes the right of private judgment in submitting to the Church in the first place:
...We may not of course obscure the obvious fact that the free acceptance of the church and its authority is itself once again an act of freedom and decision for which every Christian including a Catholic Christian has to take responsibility in the loneliness of his own conscience. Nor can he depend on the authority of the church as such at this point in the history of his freedom. Moreover, the fact that the authority of the church does become effective for an individual Christian always remains based upon this "lonely" decision. There is no essential difference on this point between a Catholic Christian and an Evangelical Christian who recognizes any authoritative instance at all, for example, Holy Scripture, as coming "from without" and hence binding, Foundations of Christian Faith, (Seabury 1990), 346.
3. The Church is prior to the NT and gave us the canon:
Sola Scriptura is obviously backwards since the Church preexisted the NT and indeed gave us the NT. Why, Paul himself even refers to the Church as the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Tim 3:15). Or so goes the argument.
This popular objection betrays the absence of any historical consciousness. It begins with the Church as a finished product, instead of considering the formative phases of the Church and canon alike. So the objection is equivocal:
(i) While the NT Church preexisted the NT canon, it didn’t preexist the word of God, for the NT Church was constituted by apostolic preaching. So both in terms of historical and causal priority, the Word preceded the Church. The only difference is a merely modal rather than substantive distinction between the spoken and written word.
(ii) Of course, it is a non-sequitur to assert that priority in time implies priority in rank. Moses lived before the advent of Christ, but that doesn’t make Moses superior to Christ.
(iii) It fails to distinguish between the individual origin of the canon and its final formation. In terms of their origin, the books of the NT were enjoined on the NT churches. When James or John, Peter or Paul wrote a gospel, epistle or apocalypse, this was sent to a local church or directed to the church at large and circulated widely (Gal 1:2; Col 4:16; Jas 1:1; 1 Pet 1:1). The church was obliged to submit to the authority of this document. It didn’t issue from the Church but was issued to the Church. The Church was the addressee. The NT documents are the work of inspired individuals. They are not conciliar documents. The Church has a role in the general dissemination of the NT, but that is not at all the same thing as a productive role. Without the Post Office I might not get my mail, but that doesn’t make the Post Office prior to the mail it delivers—not in any relevant or important sense of priority.
When copies of various NT writings were made and distributed, this marked out an informal stage of canonization. But the collective authority of the canon presupposes its distributive authority: there would be no motive for compiling the NT documents absent prior recognition of their normative status. So the principle of canonicity is not a gradual process. Rather, that principle is there at the outset and drives the process.
(iv) The passage in 1 Tim 3:15 probably has the local rather than the universal church in view. As patrologist J.N.D. Kelly has pointed out,
"As in 3:5, there is no definite article before "church," and this suggests that Paul is thinking primarily of the particular local community...What Paul is saying is that it is the function and responsibility of each congregation to support, bolster up, and thus safeguard the true teaching by its continuous witness. We should note (a) that "buttress" is probably a more accurate rendering of the Greek endraiwma
(nowhere else found) than "foundation" or "ground" (AV), and (b) that the local church is described as "a pillar," etc., not "the pillar," etc., because there are many local churches throughout the world performing this role (A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles [Baker, 1986], 87-88).
There is, of course, a part/whole relation between the local and the universal church, so that ultimately we’re talking about a single entity. But one can’t equate Paul’s reference to a local church situation with a centralized and pyramidal agency where truth is vested in a top-down teaching office. Rather, this passage has in view the informal witness of the local church membership. Paul is talking about "a" church as "a" pillar of truth.
(v) Before the NT canon you had the NT church, but before the NT church you had the OT canon. And the Mosaic canon constituted the covenant community. It supplied the charter documents. It preceded and created the priesthood and high holy days, rites, rituals and canon law.
4. The case for Scripture is not self-contained:
Sola scriptura isn’t feasible since many extraneous conditions must be met for Scripture to be God's word or to be perceived as such by us. The Bible must be interpreted, which introduces an outside agent is into the process. You can’t break into the circle of sola scriptura without breaking out of it. Or so goes the argument.
Before proceeding with a reply, we need to define our terms. Sola scriptura doesn’t mean that Scripture is the only source of knowledge. What it does mean, at least as I’m using the expression, is that Scripture is the only source of dogma, and the only source of saving knowledge, as well as the supreme source and standard of human knowledge generally—regardless of its subject-matter. It also follows from this that there can be no higher authority or equipollent authority to authorize the authority of Scripture.
Now it’s true that in order for Scripture to function as the rule of faith, a number of extraneous conditions must be met. But the fact that the reader stands outside Scripture, and must be brought into the interpretive loop, does not compromise the hegemony of Scripture, for this principle was never designed to operate in a vacuum, but presupposes a larger theological framework. The Catholic satisfies this condition with a high doctrine of the church. But the Calvinist satisfies this condition with a high doctrine of providence. The Catholic has a low doctrine of Scripture because he has a low doctrine of providence. So he must compensate with a high doctrine of the church. But the Calvinist can maintain a high doctrine of Scripture because he has a high doctrine of providence. The God of revelation is also the God of providence. The God who inspires the prophets is also in charge of the interpretive process. This doesn't mean that the reader is rendered infallible. But both true and false interpretations are under God's control and subservient to his designs. If individuals or multitudes stray into heresy and apostasy, that is not a historical accident but the outworking of reprobation.
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