You are coming up against the common problem encountered when the authority argument is pressed to its last frontier. Namely, given that the fallible individual must ultimately be the one to make the authority choice, it would seem that whatever authority is embraced will necessarily be tainted with the corruption of the choice-maker’s fallibility. The solution to this dilemma is to recognize the role and necessity of supernatural faith at this juncture. Imagine that you are transported back to first century Palestine, and are standing before Jesus of Nazareth who has been performing miracles and teaching as if he speaks with the authority of God. He confronts you with a question “who do you say that I am?” What are the dynamics here? You have before you three factors:
1.) An apparently flesh and blood man claiming to speak with the authority of God
2.) Some amazing verifiable historical activities which are said to support this claim
3.) Yourself – a fallible human being who is being asked to answer the question
1.) Notice that without ,1 there is no pressing decision that you need to make, because there would be no one claiming to speak with divine authority. If Jesus were to claim only to speak with common, human, fallible authority; you would have no reason to pay more attention to his interpretation of the Law and the Prophets than your own since he sports no claim to formal temple academic training. Even if he had such training, without his explicit (and shocking) claim to divine authority, he would only present another educated opinion, and surely there will be equally educated opinions which disagree with his exposition. The long and short of it is that, without 1, there is simply no DIVINE (as opposed to fallible) access to the content of revelation worth paying much attention to. There is only fallible theological opinion. If you are going – even in theory – to have non-fallible access to a divine revelation; at the very minimum, you at least need something or someone making a claim to speak with divine (that is non-fallible) authority. Hence, the surprise of the people (and the anger of his religious opponents) who recognize that; “he teaches as one with authority”, and NOT as the Scribes and Pharisees.
2.) If you have 1, but not 2, then you have nothing but a raw, unsubstantiated authority claim. Anyone can make such a claim, Jim Jones to David Koresh. Sure, one could go ahead and embrace such an authority claim (and unfortunately many have throughout history); but it is unreasonable to do so. On the other hand, notice – and this is crucial – that the miracles that Jesus of Nazareth performs, even if you encounter him risen from the dead; do not PROVE that he speaks with divine authority. That a lame man walks, or a blind man sees, or a man known to be dead rises from the grave, are surely extraordinary events; but they do not necessitate the conclusion that the one who effects such events speaks for God. What such events do is lend credence to the antecedent or consequent authority claim of Jesus of Nazareth. So, you have an authority claim from Jesus of Nazareth (“I speak for God) and a set of events which Jesus (or his followers) put forward as evidence that his claim is true. YOU are invited to connect the two in an act of faith – a reasonable act of faith – because it is clearly reasonable (but not necessary) to believe that the events do, in fact, verify the authority claim being made. Still, you must BELIEVE or make an “assent of faith” – you do not get the luxury of a proof. Besides, if you think real hard about it; what would it really take to constitute an absolute “proof” of a supernatural authority claim?.
3.) Now in light of the above, consider 3. You are NOT being asked in this scenario to go figure out theology or the de fide content of revelation. You are being asked to accept the authority claim of Jesus of Nazareth who claims to speak the divine truth. You are being given the two things necessary to put you in a position to make this life altering decision; namely the divine authority claim itself, and a set of evidence given in support of that claim. Still, you are not being given incontrovertible evidence, only probable evidence. If it were otherwise your salvation would not be based on any faith or trust at all. If his claim were supported by undeniable proofs, you would be forced – intellectually – to accept those claims. What does Jesus ask of you? He asks for your faith. He does not ask for an irrational, fideistic faith; since he provides evidences (motives of credibility) for his claim. Still, all the evidence in front of you might admit of an alternate interpretation. Many of Jesus contemporaries, who have experienced everything as you have, WILL reject the evidence as supportive of the claim. Nothing forces your intellect to make the connection between the events and the claim. Still, he asks if you will be a believer or an unbeliever. If you make an act of faith (in reality you will do so with the assistance of divine grace); then you embrace WHATSOEVER Jesus tells you. He will hand on to you the de fide content of divine revelation – you will not need to construct it whole-cloth. If you refuse to believe, you turn your back on the only possible, non-fallible, access to the content of divine revelation on the market since most do not make an divine authority claim (the temple academics) and those that do (such as an occasional Jewish zealot), offer no motives of credibility which might lend any credence to their claim. You must either go away empty handed so far as any hope of “getting at” divine revelation is concerned, or else embrace Jesus because he “has the words of eternal life”.
Fast forward to 2010
1.) The Catholic Church claims t be the extension of the flesh and blood body of Christ across space and time; continuing to speak with divine authority. No Protestant denomination or non-denomination (that I know of) even attempts to make this claim. Hence, from the start you are explicitly limited, within Protestantism, to fallible interpretations of the Old and New Testaments (compare to Law and the Prophets). The very best you might hope for is a highly educated, probabilistic interpretation of the same (akin temple academics of Jesus day). But alas, even these theologians will hold different educated opinions, will they not? Thus in principle, you can never hope to have a divinely authoritative teaching – given the Protestant theological framework. The Catholic Church should her claims be true (just like Jesus of Nazareth should his claims be true) could, in principle, provide a non-fallible access to the de fide content of divine revelation. Hence the surprise of the people (and the anger of her religious opponents) who recognize that she teaches as “one with authority” and not like the modern biblical scholars and theologians.
2.) But are the Catholic Church’s claims true? Again there are evidences, but they are not demonstrative. There is a large body of evidence which the Church puts forward in support of her unique claims. For instance, there is the fact of continuous, documented, ecclesial succession via ordination across the centuries. Does this fact prove that there was a divine charism of Christ’s teaching authority transferred at each ordination? No, but without this historical fact; the Catholic claim would be entirely unsupportable. With this historical fact, the claim is plausible. The Catholic Church, with the pope at her head, has survived external assault and internal corruption for 2000 years. Her dogmatic teachings are internally consistent – at least they CAN be construed in a consistent way; as, in fact, the Church construes them. She has been full of saints and sinners, revolution and reform, miracles and malice. 2000 years after being launched upon the waters of history by her founder; she remains, in 2010, spread out across the globe claiming to offer a perfect sacrifice from East to West. Most strikingly and confrontationally; like Jesus of Nazareth, she remains a stumbling block because she continues to stand among the human race boldly claiming to speak with the authority of God. I am reminded of the bishop (I think he was a bishop) held captive by Napoleon. When Napoleon informed him that he intended to destroy the Catholic Church; the bishop replied something along the lines: “what makes you think you will succeed where so many bishops have failed”? So – does the history, the expansion, the longevity, the consistency, the production of saints, the herculean acts of charity, the staying power in the face of external and internal conflict PROVE that the Catholic Church was founded by Christ as his body in space in time and endowed with His divine authority? No it does not. It is it unreasonable to accept her authority claim given these facts? No it is not. So where does that leave one? In the same position one would have been in the first century when faced with the extraordinary claims and acts of Jesus of Nazareth.
3.) You are faced with a question: “who do you say the Church is”? If you answer “the heir and body of Christ – speaking with the mind of Christ”; you have made an act of faith (by the assistance of grace). She will hand on to you the de fide content of revelation – you will not need to construct it whole-cloth. If you refuse to believe, you turn your back on the only possible non-fallible access to the content of divine revelation on the market because most do not make a divine authority claim (Protestantism); and those that do (such as David Koresh) offer no motives of credibility which might lend any credence to their claim. You must go away empty handed so far as any hope of “getting at” divine revelation is concerned; or else embrace the Church, since she “has the words of eternal life”.
So, my bottom line is this. If you have carefully followed the authority argument all the way through the “tu quoque” objection; and pushed up against the problem of your own individual fallibility with reference to the choice one must make with regard to authority; then you have come to the cliff’s edge of human reason. You have two choices. You must, either turn back and accept the pragmatic fact of doctrinal relativism with the consequence that knowledge of human destiny is hopelessly shrouded in theological opinion; or else you must step out onto the bridge that is the Catholic Faith. I do not say make a “leap of faith”, but rather a step; for there are very good reasons to believe that the bridge will support you. Still, if you wish to transcend the world of theological subjectivity and reach the homeland of orthodoxy; you must take the step and cast yourself upon the Catholic Church as countless others have done before you. It seems to me that this situation has not changed since the days that Christ walked the earth.
The only theoretical way out of this problem, on Protestant principles, is to embrace Calvin’s initial theory that the Holy Spirit immediately, and existentially, confirms BOTH the divine authorship of the Protestant canon AND the divine interpretation of the same – for each and every believer individually. But if you have come to see the obvious theological anarchy which visibly undermines this early Calvin assertion; then you will inevitably come to accept Keith Mathison’s dictum that: “All appeals to Scripture are appeals to interpretations of Scripture.” From there, the authority argument works its way, inexorably, to the frontier between reason and faith in the way I have just described.
Along these lines, you may find this short essay on “Faith and Private Judgment” by Cardinal John Henry Newman very helpful:
Pax et Bonum,
Ray
also quote below is at comment 72
here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/01/holy-church-finding-jesus-as-a-reverted-catholic-a-testimonial-response-to-chris-castaldo/#comment-47012
''Even when I didn’t consider myself Catholic, the question of the precise relationship between such realities as forgiveness, justification, repentance, and regeneration, while important, always struck me as secondary to the primary question: What is the Church Christ founded, and how is she to be recognized as such?
The Protestant answer struck me soon enough as getting the matter backwards. Thus one first determines by exegeting Scripture, and perhaps using other source material from the early Church, what “the Gospel” is, then one defines ‘the Church’ as the collection of people who accept it and at least attempt to live by it. But that assumes that divine revelation can be properly identified and interpreted without recourse to ecclesial authority. So it’s up to the individual, using whatever spiritual and scholarly resources he can muster, to determine what Christian orthodoxy is, and on that basis pick a church he finds orthodox. I have never understood how that is supposed to avoid reducing religion to a matter of opinion. It renders the assent of faith, as distinct from that of opinion, impossible. By so doing, it lands the believer in fideism, rationalism, or some ad hoc combination of the two.
Casey Chalk is right to have concluded his post as he did. One must first determine which visible church, if any, was founded by Christ and still teaches with his authority. If one rejects that question, or decides it has no clear answer, then the Christian religion becomes for oneself simply a matter of opinion. And such “faith” is no faith at all.''
how choose a church?
That Church that Christ founded did not cease to exist between the first century and the sixteenth. Nowhere, in those sixteen centuries, did the Church ever say anything equivalent to or entailing that the Church is the group of persons “that best conforms to Scripture.” Every heretical group on the planet, during those sixteen centuries, would have been delighted if the Church had ever made such a claim, because they could have then justified their own existence by claiming that they were the ones who best conformed to Scripture, and thus that they were the Church. The ‘apostolicity’ of the Church was always understood by that Church of the first sixteen centuries as requiring a succession of authority from the Apostles, not merely a claim to have the doctrine of the Apostles (since any heretical group could make such a claim).
The Church Christ founded, and which existed continually during those sixteen centuries, never said anything like the Church is the group of persons that “that best conforms to Scripture” or that ‘apostolicity’ reduces to agreement with the Apostles’ doctrine. That fourth mark of the Church (i.e. apostolicity) was always understood as essentially successional, that the doctrine of the Apostles was always to be found with those having the succession from the Apostles. She always said what Tertullian said at the end of the second century:
“Our appeal [in debating with the heretics], therefore, must not be made to the Scriptures; nor must controversy be admitted on points in which victory will either be impossible, or uncertain, or not certain enough. For a resort to the Scriptures would but result in placing both parties on equal footing, whereas the natural order of procedure requires one question to be asked first, which is the only one now that should be discussed: “With whom lies that very faith to which the Scriptures belong? From what and through whom, and when, and to whom, has been handed down that rule by which men become Christians? (Liber de praescriptione haereticorum, 19)
Who has the right and authority to say what Scripture means? Those from whom it was handed down, i.e. the Apostles, and the successors of the Apostles, and the particular Churches governed by the successors of the Apostles. The Scriptures belong to the Church, and are rightly known in and through the Church, not through the private interpretation of every Joe Blow who thinks he knows better than the Church what the Scriptures mean.
“But which is more difficult to believe, and which is a better answer: that the authority of the Church was non-existent for 1500 years (and that the whole Church got it wrong about its authority), or as the early Church believed and universally practiced throughout the whole world wherever Christianity went, that the Apostles handed down their authority to successors as testified to repeatedly by the early Church Fathers?”
| — | bryan cross here at comment 93 |
No, I think we can be sure that in Christ’s system of adjudicating disputes in Matthew 18, a dispute between two local church pastors can be appealed to the next higher authority, and the next, and end ultimately with a final arbiter where “the buck stops.” That way, there’s One Church we can “take it to.”
(Otherwise, the verse would have read, “Take it to your local church; and if you can’t get agreement there, leave that church and join another with doctrines more to your liking.”)
Another reason we can be sure of this is because Matthew 18 clearly presupposes that the decisions being made in these judgments will sometimes include binding decisions about doctrine, and these binding decisions will somehow be made infallibly correctly: What is bound on earth is bound in Heaven (and Heaven never makes incorrect bindings, nor does Heaven disagree with itself).
Imagine a situation where two Christian women attend two local churches. One is contemplating having an abortion. The other exhorts her not to do it; but the first woman says she thinks it isn’t wrong. The second woman brings another woman or two along to talk to her a second time; still, she doesn’t budge. So, the second woman is now supposed to “bring the matter to the Church.”
We can clearly envision a situation in which the first woman’s local church pastor and elders agree with her that the unborn are not people and that abortion is not a sin, but the second woman’s local church pastor and elders hold that the unborn are people and that abortion is murder. What then would be the outcome, if Matthew 18 were discussing only the local church? “The Church” (understood purely in a Congregational sense) would have “bound” and “loosed” abortion simultaneously, meaning that Heaven both agreed and disagreed with it!
In your second paragraph, you say,
You seem to have an implicit assumption that everyone needs to agree with Rome. And this leads you to conclude anyone not in communion with Rome is therefore in schism.
Well, yes: That does indeed seem to be the Scriptural model, after all.
When Korah disagrees with Moses about centralized authority roles in the People of God, it is decidedly not okay for him to march off and start a new People of God on the opposite street corner.
When 10 tribes of Israel got fed up with the Son (technically, the spoiled-brat grandson) of David, they split the kingdom. God even allowed it, and did not forget them, and blessed them for a time. But I ask you: Did God’s promise of an eternal kingdom come through Samaria, or Jerusalem? Did the scepter depart from Judah and go to the Northern Kingdom? Or were there two “scepters?” When it was time to restore the people to the land, who got restored, and who was scattered?
God provides a locus of unity for His people. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. So where is the locus of unity for the Kingdom, today?
Jesus, of course! …but He is in Heaven, at the right hand of the Father. The flock need a shepherd they can see. Did Jesus give no thought to that?
Of course He did. He did what the Davidic Kings always did: He had stewards in every place in the Kingdom, with specific territories or zones of authority. And when the king was away, the chief steward (who had a robe and throne of office, and who held the Keys of the House of David) was the person who kept the kingdom unified until the king returned. The “Al Bayith” had various functions: He was “like a father to those in Jerusalem”; he could “bind and loose” with stewardly authority on behalf of the king like the other stewards (but as chief steward, he could loose what others bound and bind what others loosed; and what he bound, none could loose, and what he loosed, none could bind).
That office was the locus of unity when the king was absent, under the sons of David. Is Jesus the rightful heir, the “Son of David,” or not?
He is. So the matter becomes simple: We look for Christ’s stewards, and let them adjudicate disputes; and if there is ever a dispute that the stewards themselves disagree about, then the chief steward will resolve it. Once that happens, he who rejects the authority of the chief steward is rejecting the authority of the King. If a large group does so, it becomes a rebel province separating from the Kingdom.
To determine to whom Jesus granted the office of chief steward, we need only ask: To whom did Jesus give the Keys of the House of David? (But of course, the Old Covenant type is the Davidic Kingdom; the New Covenant fulfillment is the Kingdom of Heaven. So whereas a Davidic king might assign his chief steward “the keys of the kingdom of David,” Jesus will naturally assign His chief steward “the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.”)
Protestant scholars generally agree with Catholic scholars about Matthew 16: Jesus here makes Peter the chief steward. Isaiah 22 is the background in the Old Covenant for this conferral of authority in the New.
Now the stewardly offices could increase or decrease in number as the kingdom grew; but when one steward died, a successor was always chosen for his office. We see a successor chosen for the office of Judas Iscariot in Acts 1, so we know that this stewardly succession was not merely an Old Testament practice, but continues in the New.
Does it not follow that Peter, as Al Bayith, would have successors also? Does it not follow that when following the Matthew 18 process, if stewards disagree the best practice is to appeal the matter to the chief steward who can bind what others loose, and loose what others bind, and thereby settle the matter for the whole Kingdom? “Roma locuta, causa finita est.”
It’s all deeply Scriptural, and it makes church discipline according to the Matthew 18 model possible.
