Assorted thoughts on authority in Catholicism addressed to a Protestant

Below is a message I wrote to myself that I had intended to send to a Protestant friend but ultimately did not. I thought it worth posting insofar as it sketched out some of my thoughts surrounding the importance of apostolic succession and a visible church:

I hope you agree that the differences between Catholic and Protestant ways of thinking about the Holy Spirit and the church, while very different on the surface, are actually the result of very subtle differences in our otherwise similar background assumptions. For example, we agree that the Holy Spirit never leaves the church, but we work out the implications differently. In fact, a sub-distinction that we seem to disagree on is how we distinguish between the “visible” and “invisible” church. Surely there are criteria that we use to decide who does and does not count as a member of the “invisible” church, but how do we arrive at that criteria? How do we resolve the dispute between our two sets of criteria?

The philosophical justification that I have for apostolic succession, which I reasoned my way to years ago, is different from the Scriptural argument I would make, which is less a “deductive” case than it is a “testimonial” case, i.e., Scripture testifies to the establishment of the practice of apostolic succession, that the leadership of the church would appoint their successors in a clear and orderly way. This practice continued all the way to the time of the Reformation, where it seems to me that Protestants then broke with this process and began appointing their own leaders (or self-appointing themselves, in some cases). And, of course, to this day most Protestant leaders do make sure to appoint successors so there is a clear transfer of authority.

Even Protestants view schism as a bad thing. If a Presbyterian (e.g.) church started teaching novelty, I think the session of elders would try to discipline it. If that church defected from the denomination so it could teach and preach as it thought was right, I think most members of the denomination would see it as a real tragedy. Moreover, I think many Presbyterians would say that the simple fact that that church broke away from the pack is alone proof of its error. We can imagine other similar kinds of examples for other denominations. Contemplating scenarios like this brings me to a few observations.

First, it shows that one of the things that really matters for the legitimacy of a social group is continuity. Seeing that there is a clear succession or transfer of power shows that what came before is not being replaced by some novelty. When there is a break in that succession, it raises questions of legitimacy. America is not protected by the Holy Spirit, but even in our country we would think it was bad if Trump just declared himself president, or someone declared themselves governor or whatever. Who actually has the authority to be in charge? How do they get that authority?

That leads to the issue of the legitimacy of authority. You and I would agree that elders have authority over the church. But what gives them that authority? Protestantism is (I believe) ultimately a kind of liberalism: elders get their authority from the consent of the governed. Because I choose to be a member of this church, I therefore consent to be governed by this or that elder. If I have issues with the church, ultimately I am free to leave and consent to be governed by a different elder. The authority of some elder is not objective; that is, their authority over you is not independent of your own personal choice. This is why you are not disobeying God if you leave church/denomination A and instead become a member of church/denomination B.

In Catholicism, priests and bishops have authority because it has been objectively handed to them from someone who has that authority legitimately and can legitimately pass it on. Thus there is a train of succession that begins with Christ himself appointing the first apostles, who in turn passed their authority on to their successors. The nature of the authority structure is therefore objective and not subjective because whether the priest/bishop has authority does not depend on whether you choose to recognize or submit to it. It is a matter of fact that he has that little piece of authority in the kingdom of God on earth, a fact which is susceptible to objective verification by examining the process whereby he came to receive that authority. The authority of the priests and bishops is objective.

I think the Protestant response might be to wonder why this authority matters so much. Why can’t a believer decide to do these things on his own, or start his own church? Here I think its important to explicate my earlier comment that Protestantism is a kind of Ur-liberalism. Where Protestantism seems to differ most from Catholicism is insofar as at grants certain premises of the modern world which the Catholic church rejects. I think it is a more modern/”enlightenment”/liberal idea that all men are free and equal, which in turn creates antagonism toward social structures that restrict one’s freedom to pursue what he thinks is right.

Put differently, the issue Protestants seem to have is not that Catholics say succession is one important aspect of the legitimacy of the church (since Protestants by their behavior implicitly agree with this). Instead, I think what Protestants object to is the idea that a believer cannot go start a church or a Bible study or evangelize or whatever without the proper permission, or that he must stop if the church authorities tell him to. I think Protestants interpret “we must obey God rather than men” in a more black-and-white way than do Catholics. If your bishop says you have to stop teaching because you are teaching error, but you believe you are right, then to a Protestant that doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t there be a marketplace of ideas?

One of the issues this touches on then is what unity looks like. Protestants make the visible/invisible distinction, which to a certain extent is legitimate. But a church that is institutional unified is more unified than a church that lacks institutional unity but has it “in spirit.” You have even agreed with me that, ideally, the church would just be one big denomination.

Advertisement

Against libertarianism and self-ownership

Libertarians often reduce libertarianism to the principle of self-ownership: if you start from the principle that you own yourself, then the rest follows.

Now, in many ways I am sympathetic to libertarianism. For example, libertarians tend to understand the principle of subsidiarity quite well, which is the principle that problems should always be solved by those closest to the problem, and that those further away should only intervene if it’s absolutely necessary. In fact, I think you can capture a good deal of libertarian thought if you value subsidiarity, think monopolies are bad, and believe that most evils can be mitigated but not eliminated.

However, libertarianism is just a form of classical liberalism, which I think, despite its many advantages, is ultimately erroneous; I believe that liberalism encourages the erosion of culture and a sense of entitlement.

Now, libertarians are in many ways simply practicing a more restrained and realistic version of this cultural erosion and entitlement mentality. But things like communism, feminism, wokeness, etc are just unrestrained versions of the same underlying idea–at least, in my opinion. I think the principle of self-ownership is one area this plays out.

We can begin by thinking about how libertarians think about ownership. Here is an article on John Locke’s justification of private property. The idea is that we acquire ownership over property when we “mix” things with our own labor. So if there is a tree out there in the “commons” (in the space of resources that belongs to everyone), and we chop it down and bring it home, it is rightfully ours because the tree has become “mixed” with our labor.

There is an intuitive sense to this: we feel that it is right for a person to receive the natural consequences of their actions: good results for good actions, evil results for evil actions. If you work, you eat. If you steal, you get punished. So, if you do the work to get that tree, then that tree is yours.

This clearly leads to a free-market mentality, and in particular against a socialist society, since under socialism there would be a mismatch between what you do and what you receive. In fact, the entire point of a socialist system seems to be to disrupt natural consequence in such a way that everyone receives the same outcomes regardless of their choices, and hence socialism is an inherently unjust system.

In other words, justice means giving a man what he is owed, and “what is owed” involves a kind of calculation of the correspondence of an act and a consequence. But a socialist system does the opposite, where the same consequence is guaranteed to all regardless of their actions. This means that socialism actually frustrates our ability to render justice, because it makes it difficult to render to another the appropriate consequence for their actions.

This kind of contrast, between a collectivist society that is ordered to injustice on one hand versus an individualist society that is ordered to justice on the other, seems to me typical of the debate between socialists and libertarians, and libertarians like the idea of self-ownership because it is a way to avoid (among other things) the collectivist errors of socialism.

However, if we grant that “mixing” our labor with something gives us a right of ownership over it, then we have a problem when it comes to the concept of self-ownership because we do not create ourselves. If ownership over a thing comes, at least in part, from the “mixing” of that thing with our labor, then it seems obvious that by the time we are adults and are capable of self-ownership, we are already the products of someone else’s labor: our parents mix themselves to create us, and they mix us with their labor as they teach us, discipline us, and provide for us.

We are a product not only of our parent’s labor. We are born into a society that has been created by (“mixed” with) the labor of many other people, some living and some dead. Our society, with its culture, its norms, its laws, and so on, forms us and shapes us. We become the product of our parents and our broader society, all mixed together. Finally, there is God, who presides over all things and orders all things to himself, and to whom we owe our very existence, moment to moment.

Thus, it seems that as adults, we cannot say that we simply own ourselves outright. Rather, it seems that we are in fact owned by many different people, primarily our parents, and then also our society, and then God. Since we are “owned” in this way by others, especially those who came before us, and especially God, they have claim over us which restricts us from being fully autonomous creatures.

This process seems to continue throughout our lives in such a way that we can never really “pay back” the debt, as it were, of the labor which continually makes us, since our parents continue to help us throughout our lives, and our society still functions in certain ways to provide for us. While we do become positive contributors, we are never wholly “free” because we continue to be “mixed” with the activity of others throughout our lives.

Two thoughts here. First, it seems natural to me to enjoy this state of affairs, since it provides us with a sense of belonging and a sense of being loved. On the other hand, all forms of liberalism seem in some way or other seems to militate against this state of affairs, seeing the demands placed on us by others and by society as infringements of our rights and as contrary to self-determination; liberalism tends to obscure the fact that these demands are really duties which accrue to us by virtue of being formed by others, which we should see as a “debt of love” and should want to pay back.

Second, this does not mean you do not own yourself in any possible sense. You make your own choices, especially as you become an adult, and these choices form you and shape you in the most direct way possible. You do become “mixed” with yourself, in a way, such that you become the product of your own choices. But my point is that while you do own yourself to some extent, your parents and society also have competing claims of ownership on you.

The extent you which you are a “free man,” socially speaking, is the extent to which you are able, whether by skill or circumstance, to shape yourself more than anyone else. Some will be more free than others. Again, the point is not you have no self-ownership, but rather that your ownership over yourself is not complete, and that some people own themselves more or less than others; it is natural for some people to stand in a kind of “social debt” because of the extent to which they are dependent upon others.

To return to our first example, you own the tree because you cut it down and brought it back. The important thing to understand is that there are many ways in which we are that tree. We owe our existence and our shape to the work of others, even though we become capable of shaping ourselves.

When we begin thinking in this way, by realizing our dependency on others and how much we owe to others, and especially to those who came before us, our focus shifts from ourselves and our own rights to others and how we can begin to repay others.

Moreover, we see that this perspective is connected with justice, because our ability to see how others have shaped us will affect what we think we owe them. For example, we owe our parents honor as a matter of justice. Recognizing how much we are the product of their labor will change what we think we owe them. But thinking of ourselves as being completely self-owned will put a kind of “downward pressure” on our capacity to recognize the honor that we owe our parents.

I think in this way, by emphasizing self-ownership, libertarianism and liberalism generally actually foster an entitlement attitude and a kind of militancy against recognizing our dependency on the past that characterizes our political situation today.

Joseph Ratzinger (who became pope Benedict XVI), in a set of homilies on Creation, said: “The decisive option underlying all the thought of Karl Marx is ultimately a protest against the dependence that creation signifies: the hatred of life as we encounter it. And it is this fundamental attitude that, at all times, is the strongest fuel of Marxist thought and Marxist praxis.”

Libertarians want to claim that we own ourselves, but in fact it seems that self-ownership leads to a hatred of our state of dependence on others. We feel that we ought to be free but instead are trapped in a system of obligations to others, and this will feel imposed on us as if it were contrary to justice.

Rebutting | Scripture Alone by Michael Kruger

I’ve been on a sola scriptura kick lately. After my conversion last summer (2021), I’ve been trying to put this issue to rest. I think I have finally developed the ability to reliably see the errors of arguments defending sola scriptura and wanted to test myself out. I wanted to give myself some easy examples to practice with, to see if I could disassemble them, as it were. So, I looked around for some entry-level arguments, like “pop apologetics” level stuff.

Today I want to look at one I found on the Ligonier (R.C. Sproul’s) website called “Scripture Alone” by Michael Kruger, accessed 9/6/2022.

The first few paragraphs simply outline the need to have some kind of authoritative source of belief, saying things like “there is only one thing that can legitimately function as the supreme standard: God’s Word”. I jumped over this stuff mostly because I knew it was all stuff I already agreed with. There are a few things I could pick at, but it’s mostly fine, and it’s not the main error I see in this article.

The last few paragraphs offer helpful caveats to ensure that readers take away a reasonable, moderate understanding of sola scriptura in order to avoid excesses. As with the introductory paragraphs, there are things here I could quibble with, but again, it’s not the main issue with the article.

The forth paragraph is where it really begins: “But if God’s Word is the ultimate standard for all of life, the next question is critical: Where do we go to get God’s Word?” This is, I think, the correct question to ask, and it is here in these few middle paragraphs that I see the main problem.

There are basically two issues in this argument, and they are common to arguments for sola scriptura.

The first issue has to do with precise nature of papal and magisterial teachings. The article mischaracterizes papal infallibility, saying, “[the pope’s] official pronouncements (ex cathedra) were regarded as the very words of God Himself.” Now, ex cathedra statements are indeed considered to be infallible, but they are not considered to be the “very words of God Himself.” This conflates “infallibility” with the concept of “inspiration”. The pope and the church are guarded by the Spirit from erring in making official pronouncements, but this is not the same as saying that these pronouncements are authored by God himself.

Consider these remarks from the New Advent article on infallibility (emphasis added):

Inspiration signifies a special positive Divine influence and assistance by reason of which the human agent is not merely preserved from liability to error but is so guided and controlled that what he says or writes is truly the word of God, that God Himself is the principal author of the inspired utterance; but infallibility merely implies exemption from liability to error. God is not the author of a merely infallible, as He is of an inspired, utterance; the former remains a merely human document.

This distinction is important because, like the author of this article, and like myself years ago, Protestants typically do not understand what the magisterium, the pope, and divine tradition actually are or how they work. Hence, these things get collapsed into the same category of “authority,” and it is incorrectly believed that they all function in the same way.

Protestants tend to have, in my opinion anyway, a simplistic understanding of authority: “if it’s not God’s word, then it’s man’s word; and man’s word is fallible, but God’s word is infallible.” This seems like the theological high ground to take, but what about the statement “Jesus is God”? Since it is not found word-for-word in the Bible, it is not inspired. But is it infallible? It seems like it would have to be, since that statement, properly understood, cannot be wrong.

The point to take here is that Protestants argue that since Scripture is the only inspired document or statement possessed by the church, therefore it is the only infallible source of doctrine. But if you grant that something can be infallible without being inspired, then it is possible for there to be infallible sources of doctrine that are not directly inspired.

Another way to put this is that Protestants deny certain things the church says are infallible, such as creeds, councils, and papal declarations. And they deny that these things are infallible because they have human authors rather than divine authors. So, for Protestants, only what is inspired can be infallible because only God himself is infallible.

But Catholics believe that certain aspects of church teaching are infallible, not because the human agents are infallible, but because the Holy Spirit is infallible. While the Holy Spirit did not inspire the creeds or conciliar documents in the way he inspired Scripture, he did protect the human agents from affirming error.

Second, this article argues for Scripture alone on the basis that public revelation ceased with the Apostles (emphasis added):

While acknowledging that God had delivered His Word to His people in a variety of ways before Christ (Heb. 1:1), they argued that we should no longer expect ongoing revelation now that God has spoken finally in His Son (v. 2). Scripture is clear that the Apostolic office was designed to perform a onetime, redemptive-historical task: to lay the foundation of the church (Eph. 2:20). The foundation-laying activity of the Apostles primarily consisted of giving the church a deposit of authoritative teaching testifying to and applying the great redemptive work of Christ. Thus, the New Testament writings, which are the permanent embodiment of this Apostolic teaching, should be seen as the final installment of God’s revelation to His people. These writings, together with the Old Testament, are the only ones that are rightly considered the Word of God.

I think this article is arguing implicitly that since we should no longer expect new revelation, and since the pope and the magisterium are forms of new revelation, therefore those two sources of authority fall and we are left with Scripture alone. But since Catholics do not believe that the pope or the magisterium gives new revelation, these arguments are simply red herrings.

The Catholic position is that the Apostles handed down a teaching, both in the Scriptures and in what they taught by preaching, and that this teaching is preserved in the church by the Holy Spirit. So we do not dispute that the “foundation-laying activity of the Apostles primarily consisted of giving the church a deposit of authoritative teaching”. The dispute is over why Protestants claim that Scripture alone is that foundation, to the exclusion of any other source.

The author thus begs the question: he shows revelation has ceased, but then asserts that only Scripture remains. He refers to the New Testament as “the permanent embodiment of this Apostolic teaching,” and says the Old and New Testaments are “the only ones that are rightly considered the Word of God” (emphasis added). But nothing in what he has said up to this point implies that the Scriptures and only the Scriptures are the repository of God’s word.

In other words, the article argues that since there is no new revelation, then the magisterium and the pope are in principle invalid. This leaves Scripture, and so we should use Scripture alone simply because there is nothing else. But the closing of revelation is not relevant to the role of the magisterium and the pope because they do not give new revelation; hence this argument is a non-sequitur.

To summarize:

This article makes a standard defense of sola scriptura: only the Bible is infallible because it is the word of God. Councils and popes are merely men, and men can be wrong. Therefore, the highest authority is the Bible, because it alone is infallible, being authored by God himself, whereas everything else is fallible, being authored by fallible men.

Catholics agree more or less with this, but simply add that the promise of the Holy Spirit is such that the church can teach and decide infallibly (it can never be wrong) even if it is not inspired like Scripture. Therefore, it is not the case that “the Bible is the only infallible authority”.

Second, the article argues that new revelation has ceased with the creation of the New Testament, which eliminates the magisterium and the pope as possible sources of teaching, leaving only the Bible.

However, Catholics do not believe that the church receives new revelation from God; in fact, it teaches that it must protect what it received from the Apostles and cannot change it. Rather, the church merely teaches infallibly the word of God as the Apostles gave it. Since the magisterium and the pope do not give any new revelation, the cessation of revelation does not eliminate the magisterium and the papacy.

Hidden assumptions in sola scriptura

I’ve been writing lately on the issue of sola scriptura. I became Catholic last summer (2021) for many reasons, one of which was a kind of relativism and skepticism that began to take hold of me as I learned more and more about different doctrinal controversies. In the way a secular person might become skeptical because of the many different religions all claiming to be the true religion, I became skeptical regarding various Protestant denominations. If the way out of secular skepticism/relativism is recognizing the need for divine revelation, then the way out of denominational skepticism/relativism for me was concrete, institutional church that was guided by the Holy Spirit.

Recently, I watched a video on YouTube recently discussing the Assumption of Mary. This is a Catholic dogma that Mary was bodily taken into heaven after her death. It is a lay Catholic apologist (Trent Horn) reviewing an argument by a Protestant who is arguing that the Assumption is not an apostolic teaching because the Assumption is contraindicated by the earliest evidence.

The video is worth watching. It is a little upsetting as a Catholic to have someone make a more or less plausible case that a distinctly Catholic doctrine is an “accretion” and therefore not really part of divine revelation.

But Trent Horn pointed out that the same can be said of the canon of the New Testament. There were, after all, books that were rejected as Scripture by churches early on (2 Peter, Revelation), and there were books that were accepted as Scripture by some churches that were ultimately left out of the canon (1 Clement). And even though the canon had basically settled down by the 4th century, the church did not dogmatically define it until the Council of Trent in the 16th century.

The Assumption would be like one of these disputed books of the canon. There were disputes in the early church about it, and many churches had likely never even received this teaching in the same way that many early churches had never received copies of certain Scriptures. But it was eventually universally received, and then much much later dogmatically defined.

When I was a Protestant, I would think about the process of how the canon was formed and what my grounds were for accepting it. It was difficult not to propose that the Holy Spirit must have guided the church in some way or other to make sure the correct books were chosen; the widespread recognition of the canon must be seen as an act of God’s providence if we are to have any confidence in reliability of the canon.

This would be true not only for the canon, but also for the doctrine of the Trinity and other core doctrines. If the Holy Spirit would providentially lead the church to recognize and accept certain books as divinely inspired, it seems like it would also be able to lead the church to recognize and accept certain theological truths as having a divine origin as well; that is, generally speaking, the Holy Spirit would lead the church to recognize which things are matters of divine revelation. And of course, Scripture teaches this in John 10:27, 14:26, and 16:13.

Once I began thinking in these terms, I was put on the defensive. It seemed to me that if the Holy Spirit was indeed leading the church to the truth, then suddenly the burden of proof was on me to justify breaking with the church as a Protestant. And it seemed to me that any version of Protestantism ultimately entailed the idea that the Holy Spirit had allowed the church to embrace error. If that could happen in the medieval church, it could have happened in the early church, and hence it could have happened with the canon.

Thus, attempting to justify the canon as a Protestant lead me to Catholicism.

What’s more, the position I came to is, I think, the general Protestant position regarding the reliability of the canon. One comment on the above video said that God’s word is “self-authenticating”. I recall reading arguments like this, the idea being that you can know what Scripture is because God’s word bears certain marks of divine authorship which are recognizable to those who know and love God. “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.”

But if this is true, why would it only apply to written words? Why could it not also apply to divine revelation that was not written as Scripture? Couldn’t the Assumption be scrutinized for these marks of divine authorship? This is why I think that sola scriptura is effective as a giant finger pointing at the Bible rather than as a claim that God’s word will only ever be preserved in written form.

Some of the stickiness of this issue turns on the ambiguity around “word of God” versus “inspired.” If you wrote down or spoke the story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and you did so without error, would your words be inspired? I think we would agree that they would not be considered inspired in the sense that those words did not come from direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But would the words be considered “the word of God”? This is a much more difficult question. It seems to me, anyway, that the answer is “yes,” insofar as you are simply repeating to others God’s own words.

In this situation, you have the word of God existing formally, in the concepts that are relayed, but not materially, in the sense that the actual words and sentences you spoke did not directly emanate from the Holy Spirit. But Scripture is both the word of God formally and materially, both in the concepts it teaches and in the specific words and sentences that comprise it.

Divine Tradition contains God’s word in this formal way without containing it materially. So even if we don’t have statements which themselves were created by direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we still have the concepts (or “forms”).

So now the question is, shouldn’t we believe everything formally revealed by God, even if not all of it was revealed materially?

The issue here, which I discussed some in my previous post, is not simply that Protestants don’t regard this formal-but-not-material word of God to actually be the word of God. The issue is when Protestants reject any such thing in principle. Sola scriptura means that only Scripture and nothing else contains divine revelation for us today. It is precisely because it is formal-but-not-material that it is rejected. And it is just this principle that is not taught in Scripture and which is unjustifiable.

It has thus become very clear to me how much the argument for sola scriptura is simply a result of this unwarranted leap. One example is this article by John MacArthur, which says that sola scriptura means that “everything necessary, everything binding on our consciences, and everything God requires of us is given to us in Scripture.” It then gives 2 Peter 1:3 as a citation: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence”

This is a very good example of the kind of “leap” I am talking about. You have one verse over there saying Scripture is the inspired word of God, another one over there saying God “granted to us all things,” and then you just combine that with the leap that God chose to preserve his revelation was through Scripture alone, and then boom, that verse becomes “Scripture has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” in the mind of the Protestant.

Now it’s not like this is a totally unreasonable idea. God could have done it this way. The problem is that you cannot on one hand reject the Assumption as revelation on the grounds that it is not taught in Scripture, and then turn around and teach “Scripture Alone,” which by the same exact measure is also not taught in Scripture.

I think the best you can argue is that the many references to Scripture in Scripture have a sort of normative effect; they teach you by example, not necessarily by explicit command. But if this is the case, then the Jerusalem council in Acts 15, the first church council, can also be argued to have such a normative effect, establishing through Scripture that such councils are the means through which the Holy Spirit works to resolve disputes in the church. This normative effect also applies to apostolic succession.

Two final thoughts.

First, it is important to emphasize that this is not a zero-sum game. These are not arguments against Scripture. It’s not “Scripture or Tradition”, and you have to choose only one. It’s an agreement that Scripture is the word of God and is authoritative, but also an argument that we should acknowledge that if not everything taught by Jesus and the Apostles was written down, then perhaps some of those “extra teachings” are still preserved for us today. And if that’s the case, those teachings would demand belief.

Second, none of the arguments I’m making is to say that therefore there must be popes, councils, divine tradition, and so on. Rather, my argument is simply to point out the opposite: the truly principled Protestant must be open to the possibility of the word of God being preserved through means other than Scripture. Again, it is not to deny the importance of Scripture, but rather to point out that the exclusive claim that revelation is preserved only in Scripture is unwarranted and goes beyond what is clearly stated in Scripture.

Sola scriptura as a first principle

I have been writing lately about sola scriptura, which is a Protestant “first principle” for Christian doctrine. This is something I struggled with greatly for some time, before ultimately becoming Catholic in the summer of 2021. I was obsessed with the topic my last year in college; it was clear to me (so I thought) that Catholics were wrong, but I had a very hard time articulating why they were wrong.

Their arguments against sola scriptura always seemed to be technically correct but to miss the point. The goal for me then was to try and articulate the deeper meaning of sola scriptura in such a way as to avoid what I felt were technically correct but superficial objections made by Catholics. There were many such arguments, but it seemed that the principle one was that sola scriptura is simply not taught in Scripture.

One of the ongoing difficulties in this discussion is the way in which Protestants defend sola scriptura merely by arguing that Scripture is the inspired word of God. As a Protestant, I thought it was too hasty to simply say that Scripture did not teach sola scriptura, since Scripture clearly claimed to be the inspired word of God, and that Scripture was therefore the highest source of doctrine insofar as it was from God.

Everything turns, however, on the crucial question of the word “only”. What reason did we have to say that Scripture was the only place where God’s word is preserved for us? Generally, Protestants agree that during the time of the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles, the word of God would be spoken as well as written. Scripture speaks sometimes of angels delivering the word of God to someone, as in the case of the Annunciation, and occasionally a voice from heaven is heard, as in the case of Jesus’s baptism or his Transfiguration.

This means that, to one extent or another, at all times up until the death of the last apostle, Protestants would agree that the word of God existed both in spoken and written form. It was not the mode of communication that mattered, written vs. spoken, but rather it was the source, i.e., God. So the question seems to be, why would this arrangement of spoken and written modes stop?

As a Protestant, I would have said two things. First, revelation has stopped: the faith “was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). We appeal just to the Scriptures because nothing new is being added. Now, Catholics agree here, since the Church is not claiming to be issuing new revelation from God. Protestants may disagree, of course, but as far as the theoretical debate goes, Catholics are not attempting to argue that revelation continues to this day through the Church.

Second, I had a sense that there was what I called a “pattern of inscripturation.” It seemed like the arc of history in Scripture shows that Scripture gets expanded as God reveals things. This pattern has a kind of normative effective: it implicitly tells you about the way things are supposed to go simply by example. Yes, there may be periods of new revelation, but you always have the written records of revelation from previous generations to help you. Over time, new revelation would get formalized and end up in Scripture, with God providentially guiding that process.

The consequence of these two ideas is that since revelation gets providentially recorded as Scripture, and God is no longer giving new revelation, therefore there is no longer any other source of revelation for us to consider because God has directed it all to be recorded in one way or another in Scripture. New revelation has ceased, and all existing revelation that God wants saved for posterity has “settled” into Scripture.

I thought at the time, and honestly still do think, that this is a pretty good argument. The main issue with it, I think, is that you have to actually draw out and assert the conclusion that Scripture is intended by God to be the sole mode of communicating his word to us once prophets and apostles cease. And while the normative force of the “pattern of inscripturation” is in my opinion strong, it is still not explicitly stated in Scripture itself. This means that while one can derive support for sola scriptura from Scripture, it is not, technically speaking, explicitly taught.

I think it is in this narrower sense that Catholics can say that the Bible does not teach sola scriptura; that is, the Bible does not explicitly teach it by way of direct, divine command. This is not to say that there are no good Biblical arguments in its favor; but the point Catholics make is that this arrangement is somewhat self-refuting: you cannot say that fundamental dogmas of the faith must come from “Scripture alone” if that restriction itself is not also laid out in Scripture. As Catholics observe, making such a restriction ironically goes beyond what Scripture teaches.

A somewhat important aside here is that part of the rationale for sola scriptura is that it allows Protestants to fight the various accretions that they allege were added by Catholics; that is to say, Catholics are accused of having added to the word of God by going beyond Scripture. But I think that whatever logic allows you to make this accusation would allow you to make it against Protestants as well with respect to sola scriptura. Protestants add to God’s commands by restricting the scope of God’s word for today to Scripture alone.

In fact, it seems like the better articulations of the doctrine, the ones that steer clear of obvious difficulties, end up being something more like prima scriptura. In these cases, the definition usually focuses on the fact Scripture functions as a final or ultimate authority, not the exclusion of all other sources, but simply as the most authoritative. But even these more subtle definitions still beg the question: yes we should allow God’s word to be the final or ultimate authority, but why limit it to Scripture to the exclusion of all other sources? And more to the point, does Scripture itself justify this exclusion?

So the real question ends up being not whether we should privilege the word of God above all other sources of knowledge, or whether Scripture in particular should considered the word of God, but whether Christians in the post-apostolic age should limit the scope of things considered to be the word of God to Scripture alone.

Here, in the same way that atheists say they don’t need to defend their atheism because they merely “lack a belief” in God, Protestants want to argue that they merely “lack a belief” in other modes preserving the word of God. In both cases, it depends entirely on what you are trying to say. Atheists cannot argue that belief in God is silly and irrational (hence, God does not exist) while also arguing that they merely lack a belief in God.

Similarly, Protestants cannot argue against the Catholic church on the principle that Scripture alone contains the word of God if they merely “lack belief” that God’s word is preserved through Tradition. This is how I have heard James White, a Reformed Baptist apologist, defend sola scriptura. He does not describe it as “lacking a belief,” but he argues that Scripture is the word of God, and what else is there? Again, you cannot defend the claim that we should follow Scripture alone merely by demonstrating that Scripture is the word of God. This is begging the question.

Of course, Catholic apologists do need to demonstrate that God’s word exists in Tradition as well as in Scripture. Part of what helped me become Catholic was seeing historical precedent for things like the papacy and Marian veneration, which in turn led me to think that perhaps these doctrines were truly of apostolic origin. But in a way, that is not necessarily the point. Protestants do not say that they hold that Scripture is God’s word but happen to believe that there just are no other places where his word may be found. Rather, they argue that in principle one must look only to Scripture to find his word.

I think a more honest and reasonable approach for Protestants would be to say that they are open to God’s word in general and simply need it to be demonstrated to them that some other source is in fact of divine origin. This is actually the position I landed on many years back, long before I even began to be open to Catholicism.

Because Protestantism requires this kind of negative commitment to a definition of God’s word that excludes all sources besides Scripture, sola scriptura is really more of a kind of dogmatic first principle of Protestant theology, along with the canon of Scripture. In other words, you must accept sola scriptura and the canon as articles of faith prior to engaging in theology. But this is really no different from the Catholic approach, which is to assert that one must begin with a different set of dogmas, namely, that Jesus and the apostles delivered the word of God to the church and that the Holy Spirit preserves it through the generations.

An even stickier question is, How do we defend these first principles? To me, for a variety of reasons, it seems that the Catholic first principles are both more true and better supported Biblically. These considerations usually fall under the concept of “motives of credibility”, and they are outside the scope of this post, and so that it is where our questions must end for now.

Like I said, years ago I came to the conclusion that the only reasonable definition of sola scriptura was to say that we should always follow the word of God, that Scripture is the word of God, and that Catholics had the burden of proof to show that they had preserved additional teaching from Jesus and the apostles. I think that burden of proof can be met, but I ultimately do not think Protestants can meet the burden of proof for adding the word “alone” to “Scripture alone”.

Scripture bearing witness to the papacy

I was received into the Catholic church in June of 2021. I had been a Protestant my whole life, and a more or less devout one since my early teenage years, at one point even believing that the Catholic church was a cult. I’ve told little parts of my story here and there in previous posts, mostly focusing on sola scriptura. There were other hang-ups I had to overcome, mostly the Catholic distinctives like the veneration of saints, Mary’s role in salvation, the papacy, and a few other things.

The papacy for me is difficult. On the one hand, it is very obvious: despite Peter’s demonstrated inconstancy (succumbing to fear when walking on water with Jesus, denying Jesus three times, withdrawing from the Gentiles in the presence of the Judiaizers), Jesus named him “Rock”. He is clearly the foremost or “first” apostle. And, with the keys to the kingdom, Jesus was very clearly leaving Peter in command until he returned. That the office should remain occupied is simply a consequence of apostolic succession, something which I’ll defend some other time.

On the other hand, papal infallibility seems really odd. In fact it seems like a really important detail, and the fact that it’s not really addressed in Scripture bothers me. Similarly, the fact that the Roman bishop is his successor seems kind of random. Again, if Peter went to Rome and named a successor there, why wouldn’t this be covered in the book of Acts?

These kind of doubts can be troubling. Things just don’t seem to “line up” the way you would expect them too, and it creates a gnawing feeling. It makes you uneasy. But, the obvious counter-thought is, not everyone agrees that they ought to “line up” the way you think they should, so maybe it’s you that’s wrong. But the counter-counter-thought is, at some point it does have to make sense to you, because if it doesn’t, then your faith is just a sheer act of the will, which makes you a fundamentalist, and who wants that?

I think my doubt reveals the kind of expectation I have of Scripture: how I expect it to operate, what it should contain, and so on. To me the papacy is this really odd, unique doctrine, so if the Bible is going to say anything, you’d expect at least something in there about it.

However, in a world in which nobody ever expected Scripture to be the sole repository of doctrine, the fact that Peter becoming the bishop of Rome did not get recorded in Scripture would not be that significant.

In other words, the fact that distinctive Catholic doctrines are not taught explicitly in Scripture should really only bug you if you think that there was an intentional effort on the part of the first Christians to get everything written down and that these writings would be considered Scriptures.

In many ways, this expectation is similar to the skeptic who thinks that if Jesus really rose from the dead, we would find far more mention of it in ancient or contemporary sources. Why wouldn’t ancient historians all be writing about this?

But this is to project our own concerns onto the minds of others and assume that they would have cared about the same things we would have cared about. In all likelihood, most ancient historians, to the extent that they even heard about the Resurrection, probably dismissed it as yet another religious movement. Nothing out of the ordinary here; such figures come and go, always sparking a following and then burning out.

Similarly, the papacy looms large in the Protestant imagination, but early Christians may not have given it a lot of thought, especially if they were worrying about other things, such as the divinity of Christ or whether Gentiles needed to be circumcised to become Christians.

Sola scriptura is a kind of presumption about how Scripture is intended to function. When it comes to the papacy, this presumption functions by saying that since Scripture does not formally and explicitly deal with it, it is therefore not “taught” by Scripture, and hence is anywhere from false to simply a non-binding tradition.

A different way to look at it is to see the Scriptures as an inspired and infallible witness, rather than as a book of first principles. Scripture witnesses to the establishment of Peter as the rock, the authority of the Apostles to bind and loose and forgive sins, the establishment of the church, the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the Apostles and the church, the first church council ruling on matters of faith and morals, and apostolic succession.

All of these things are clearly attested to in Scripture, and they serve as the core principles for how the Catholic church understands itself. Furthermore, these are clear passages, many involving Jesus’s own words. That is to say, these are not principles inferred from multiple chapters in the writings on Paul, as is the case with Reformed theories on justification. The above principles are based on clear, simple teachings of Scripture.

As a Protestant, you want to see that long treatise or something in a pastoral letter from Paul explaining the papacy. You want to see Scripture directly prescribe the papacy. But instead, what I think we get is the fact of the papacy, here in the real world, and in Scripture we see Peter being established as the rock and treated as the primary apostle. As witnesses, these passages of Scripture function more like a hand pointing to an object, saying, “That thing, there.”

This is not, I think, going to be convincing to most Protestants, but I largely think that it’s because Protestants are over-thinking it, causing them to artificially raise the burden of proof.

For example, many progressive Christians argue that there is no prohibition against monogamous, chaste same-sex relationships in Scripture. This is technically correct, but it’s an overly narrow interpretation of Scripture, and narrow in a way that causes you to miss the obvious implications of every other Biblical teaching on gay sex. Narrowing the question that far is kind of like clipping out of bounds in a video game; the question becomes so “thin” that it just slips through the text unimpeded.

The key teachings on the papacy and the church aren’t going to immediately get you to papal infallibility. The plausibility of the doctrine can be made easier when we remember that human beings have taught infallibly before, i.e., when they wrote Scripture (which includes Peter). Of course, this isn’t enough to get you all the way there, but it at least removes some of the doubts.

Creation vs Providence: were the 6 days of creation “ordinary”?

I was re-reading an old post I wrote that first discussed some reservations I have about a 6-day reading of Genesis 1, but which went on to describe my own standard of evidence regarding how to prove evolution. In that post, I pointed out that there is a background assumption in the debate over 6-day creationism regarding the function of time:

“I think there is some unexamined assumption here that you could start a timer on day 1 and when the sun is created you’d be at 36+ hours. But would that clock even work correctly if everything is still being made? I don’t know; nobody knows.”

However, as I have learned more about this issue, I have come across a distinction in the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation that actually answers this question. The distinction is between the period of creation and the period of providence. Here’s an article from the Kolbe Center on the topic.

The basic idea is that the current period we live in now is the period of providence, which is God’s rule over the world as it exists in its finished, created state. But prior to this, God was creating the world. And since the world was being created by God, its behavior had not yet been set in motion. This means all the natural laws and processes that evolutionary theory uses to infer the material causes of creation were not actually operational at the time of creation. There are two implications here.

First, theistic evolution collapses this distinction. According to that theory, God’s ordinary providence over the world through billions of years was also his creative work. Theistic evolution says that God created the world through his ordinary providence. There seem to be some implications that can be derived from such a collapse, but I haven’t really explored them yet.

Second, the idea that we can examine how the world was formed by extrapolating God’s current providence back into the past is a false assumption, because at a certain point you will hit a “wall” in time beyond which the current rules no longer apply. Or, more to my point, you will hit a “wall” where time is not yet a thing. This is what I want to think about in this post.

Consider that old-earth creationists and theistic evolutionists say that 6-day creationism makes God look like a liar, because he made a world that appears old but told us that it’s young. This concern touches on the creation-providence distinction: the world only appears old to us if we make the assumption that everything has always been operating as it is now.

For example, the distant starlight problem is considered an issue for 6-day creationists: if the stars are millions or even billions of light-years away, how can we see their light if the world is only ~6000 years old? But this question assumes that God created the stars and “turned them on” like light bulbs, and then millions and billions of years passed until the light finally got to earth.

However, given that the period of creation is different from the period of providence, God could have created the universe in an initial state, such that the light of the stars was already reaching earth when the period of providence began. It would be like creating a garden hose already filled with water so that when you turn on the spigot, water starts flowing immediately. This would make sense if God’s purpose in creating the heavenly bodies was both to give light and to mark “signs and seasons,” thus serving as a giant clock or calendar.

From a scientific perspective, this may seem absurd. But that’s only because the method of science presupposes from the outset that this kind of divine intervention cannot or does not happen, or at the least that such intervention should not be sought as an explanation, and that ordinary, material process are better explanations than supernatural ones. But such ordinary, material processes did not even fully exist prior to the period of providence.

Consider also that big bang cosmology says that in the first few nanoseconds after the big bang, the rules of physics were not yet in place. In other words, there was time at the beginning of the universe when the ordinary rules and motions of the world were not yet functioning. This is a “scientific” version of the creation/providence distinction, and it rests on the common-sense idea that you cannot invoke nature as an explanation for how nature was created.

The distinction is helpful because it reminds us that we cannot invoke a thing as the cause its own beginning. You cannot appeal to how nature works to explain how nature came into being. Even the big bang story requires a certain natural order to be in place prior to the big bang such that, when it “bangs,” everything will operate in a certain way that will lead to the world we see today.

Were the 6 days of creation “ordinary” days?

I remember reading Anselm’s “Why God became Man,” he discusses the question of whether God created a “perfect number” of angels during creation. Why he is concerned with this question I am not entirely sure, and my own general speculation is outside the scope here. But he says this, emphasis added: “But if the whole creation took place at once, and those days in which Moses appears to describe a successive creation are not to be understood like such days as ours, I cannot see how angels could have been created perfect in number.”

Anselm wrote around 1000 A.D., 850-ish years before Darwin, so his thought that the days of creation might not be “like such days as ours” would be free of any motivation to harmonize Scripture with “atheist science.”

This is not really an open door to allow us to suggest that the days were really billions of years long. Rather, I think instead it is a testimony to the creation-providence distinction: whether the days lasted 24 hours or billions of years misses the point: time is an aspect of creation, and it would not be entirely appropriate to attribute to these days a “length” in the same way we would today.

Notice also that Anselm wondered whether the creation of the world might have happened “at once” rather than in six steps, which I understand was also St. Augustine’s view (albeit a minority view). It is my understanding that the pre-modern Christians, for philosophical reasons, felt that it made more sense for God to create everything all at once, in a single instant, than for him to do it in multiple steps.

The point here, again, is not that it could have been an instant, 6 days, or 14 billions years. The point is that when we are thinking about God creating everything, he is also creating time, and so all talk of “how long” it took God to make everything is going to be somewhat misleading.

I say “somewhat” only in the sense that saying that “God is angry” can be misleading if it makes us think that God experiences emotions in the same exact way that we do. Instead, Catholic thought says that we speak of God “analogically” rather than “univocally”. I wrote about this concept here and here. The point is that, since God is completely transcendent from the created order, in our current state we can only comprehend God and his ways by means of figures and images.

With respect to creation, and in light of the creation-providence distinction, I think this applies to the days of creation as well. What kind of days could they be, if creation itself was not finished until the seventh day? I think that the typical 6-day creationist view which insists on ordinary, 24-hour solar days is therefore probably mistaken. It implies that time was functioning “normally” from the very beginning.

6-day creationists often wonder (aloud) whether the laws of nature have always been the same; maybe the distant starlight problem can be solved by saying that the speed of light is not constant, but that it has been slowing down (exponentially, I suppose). This seems to me analogous to the idea with the big bang I mentioned earlier, that the laws of nature weren’t “there” until after a few nanoseconds after the beginning.

It may technically solve certain problems to say that light is slowing over time, and in fact this at least seems to have been empirically verified. But I think this is trying to fight science with science, which always makes the solution to some difficulty entirely reliant on no future science ever overturning that solution. Rather, it seems better to me to simply point out that whether we are talking about the flow of time, or the speed of light, or the laws of nature in general, we should insist that there was a “time” when things were not as they are now, the “time” when all things were being made and set in their place.

The creation-providence distinction helps us to understand and accept that our knowledge of origins is always going to be muddied, since we are always going to project our experience of the current order of things back onto a time when that order was not actually operational. This can help us both diagnose evolutionary claims while also correcting 6-day creationist views when they make some of the same mistaken assumptions.

Sola Scriptura and the Constitution

Sola scriptura is an odd duck. In many ways, it’s hard for me to figure out precisely where I disagree with it. A simple, positive statement of it (“Scripture is the ultimate authority on matters of faith”) is not all that objectionable at first glance. Rather, what I have done is notice how sola scriptura functions in actual practice, or how Protestants do theology in actual practice, and see how that practice does not ultimately work.

I think it tends not to work, not because Scripture is a bad ultimate authority. In fact, I think what has sustained Protestantism for so long is that, if you are going to make the mistakes that sola scriptura makes, then you are doing your best if you make them while trying earnestly to read and believe Scripture. I think in the end, you could call sola scriptura a kind of pious naivete: it’s not wrong in affirming the high place of Scripture as God’s Word, but it goes wrong in failing to acknowledge all the other pieces to the puzzle.

For example, a Protestant may say that councils can err. But how are we to judge that the council erred? Surely the Protestant is not so foolish as to believe that his own personal opinion on some doctrinal matter is more reliable than the opinion of so many others; if the putatively erring council is early enough in history, is the Protestant putting himself up against those who could read the original Greek and who were much closer to the time of the Apostles?

No. Most Protestants aren’t this foolish. But what you will find is that Protestants make their judgments by reading many books, such as the kind written by scholars for a lay audience. Or, he will listen to lectures from theology professors or knowledgeable pastors. His own reading of Scripture, guided by commentaries or carried out in private, also informs his judgment. Finally, the concrete relationships among other Christians helps him to talk through and hammer out the details among various competing doctrinal options. Perhaps the support of an older, more respected Christian on some doctrinal opinion weighs heavily in it’s favor.

There are a lot of other things that could happen, but I think this is a good sample of them. And notice what is common to all of them: they all involve the attempt to attain to doctrinal clarity (the resolution of ambiguities) by working with other Christians. Each of these examples is an example of Scripture being understood, not by a lone individual, but by a person in the context of the church, surrounded by other members of the body of Christ.

It seems impossible for this to be otherwise. We wouldn’t even have Scripture if it weren’t for the Christians of previous generations preserving it. We wouldn’t have translations of it were it not for Christians learning the various necessary languages and doing the work. Perhaps most importantly, most people in history could not read, so they relied on others to read and explain Scripture to them. Protestants do indeed make Scripture the highest authority, but they do so in a way that contextualizes Scripture inside the body of the Church.

Seen in this way, Scripture functions less like a deracinated manual for human life, beaming down from heaven “complete with maps” as N.T. Wright jokes. Instead, I think it makes sense to think of the Scriptures as analogous to the U.S. Constitution. What I want to do is write out some various observations about the Constitution functions as a kind of parable for the function of the Scriptures in the Church.

The Constitution is to the U.S. political body what the Scriptures are to the Church. It is the “main” document that explains what the country is supposed to be like, how it is to function, and so on. This analogy is somewhat inexact, because the Constitution establishes the union of the states whereas Scripture is a divine witness to the founding of the Church. But I think the basic idea is there.

Now it is obvious that in order for the Constitution to “work”, it’s not really enough to just hand everyone a copy and expect them to do what it says. Even if we assume everyone in the country is willing to do what it says in some general sense (we are already in very hypothetical territory here), there will be areas here and there that individuals may struggle to accept some particular idea (such as the 2nd amendment).

Furthermore, people disagree amongst themselves as to what the Constitution might mean or how it might apply in some circumstance. Yes, the broad outlines or general principles may be clear, but how they ought to be applied in a concrete way in some specific situation is not clear. This is the job of the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court. In others, in order for the Constitution to have any real binding authority, it needs to be enforced by some authority.

Of course, the Supreme Court will at times misapply the Constitution, since they are just human beings, and the Constitution, though a work of genius, is still a human document and will contain errors and inconsistencies of various kinds. If the U.S. were a supernatural rather than merely natural body, given promises by God to be protected from error, we would be permitted to expect a greater level of confidence in the Supreme Court and the Constitution (hint hint).

Whether something is “Constitutional” is a constant question among those who want our country to be faithful to its founding principles. However, in modern politics, there is a dispute about what exactly it means for something to be “Constitutional” (laying aside for now the obvious fact that many people are engaged in transparently motivated reasoning). We can identify to strains of thought.

One strain of thought takes a “narrow” approach, in that they see the words of the Constitution as a material out of which they can build a legal interpretation. So long as their interpretation is constrained by the available material, it is justifiable. Left unexamined is typically a set of prior beliefs that are more often than not the primary cause of their interpretation and which serve to inform their reading of the Constitution more than they would like to admit. These are the “living document” progressive or liberal types.

The other strain of thought has a “broader” approach, which sees the Constitution as emerging in a certain historical and social context, and it sees the Constitution as emerging from a particular worldview, a particular way of thinking about politics, rights, government, and so on. In this view, the Constitution is meant to point us to that worldview. These are the conservatives.

Disputes around the Constitutionality of certain ideas, or even of certain political “projects” (e.g. Socialism), can and are fought by arguing about the meaning of various passages of the Constitution. Words are parsed, precedent is appealed to, what does and does not make sense in our current context is appealed to, and whether or not something just “seems right” hold some weight.

And yet, much of this debate can often be short-circuited by simply reading from and learning about what it was the Founding Fathers thought about politics. Reading Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison, or the Federalist (or anti-Federalist) papers are the way for us to become familiar with what it was that the authors of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote it. These documents, of course, are not the Constitution and therefore cannot be ultimately binding. They are not the final authority. However, these documents are authoritative in that they can help us understand what it was that the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created the Constitution.

I think the basic idea here is clear. I think it would be wrong to say that the U.S. has a “three-legged stool” of truth: Constitution, Supreme Court, and legal precedent, and that these separate things together form the complete source of truth. Rather, while these three things are all authoritative, it is the manner in which they combine and function together that actually creates the kind of binding authority necessary for the functioning of the country.

Similarly, I am not sure that the Catholic model is really a three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium as if these were three separate things that the Catholic has to consider in order to figure out the truth. Rather, these three things work together in a certain way in order to guide Christians; these things become the means of the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Church.

Like I said above, most Protestants understand that interpreting Scripture does not happen in a vacuum; the Catholic model, I think, simply draws out the implications of this reality and sees in it the work of the Holy Spirit.

Classical Gas

Liberalism treats society like a gas, where the individuals are the molecules of the gas, colliding and moving around according to scientific laws. This is true of classical liberals (free to speak and worship as I want) and libertarians (free to use my property as I want) as much as social liberals (free to have sex with whomever I want)

The organic society, as propounded by natural law thinking, treats society like an organism, made up of parts but with a unifying principle (a soul), an individual character, and those parts function in relationship with each other, and these relationships create attachments.

Liberalism is problematic because its basic principle is to weaken the (natural) attachments between people so that they can move around freely, again like molecules of gas. Liberalism keeps people free by keeping them weakly attached to each other. The only real necessary attachment is to the state, because it is the state that makes this “freedom” possible.

Attachments in liberalism are a problem to be solved, or a threat to be moderated against. Natural attachments become pathologized: love for one’s own people becomes “racism” or “nationalism” instead of “inclusivity”; family formation and the concomitant gender roles becomes “sexism” and “patriarchy” instead of “equality”; prioritizing the needs of your family and community over vague, abstract duties to “society” become “self-interest” or “isolationism” instead of “social responsibility”.

The attachments of the organic society tend to create roles for people, which means that by virtue of being deeply attached to others, we have obligations (or, at the very least, we feel deeply that we have such obligations). These obligations may come into conflict with our own personal goals. We aren’t free to do whatever we want because our obligations to our community have to come first. Promoting the freedom to self-determine our own “lifestyle” or goals in life serves to weaken our attachments because it implicitly encourages us to neglect or downplay our obligations to our community.

The organic society, by contrast, fosters those attachments and wants to make them strong. The organic society is not a gas but an organism, a living thing that grows and is either strengthened or weakened by the quality of the attachment of its parts. The parts therefore find themselves to be participating in an order whose source is beyond them, and which is essentially “imposed” on them by their mere presence in the whole.

A cell in the stomach has to function as a stomach cell; it doesn’t really matter if it wants to or not. Stomach cells that try to move about freely in the body are not helping the body. If a doctor finds stomach cells in your liver, the next thing he will tell you is that you probably have cancer. The various parts of the body moving about freely and acting according to their own wishes creates disorder.

The more the attachments between the parts are weakened or broken, the sicker the body gets, until the parts are so loosely attached that the body simply dissolves. What liberalism does is attempt the cure the patient of cancer by encouraging more cells to move about the body freely. When this has made the patient incurably sick, liberalism begins to wonder if assisted suicide is such a bad thing.

Sola Scriptura as Skepticism

I was a Protestant for 34 years before becoming Catholic. But for many years prior, I had doubts that would prove to play a large role in leading me into the Catholic church. I was probably in my early twenties when I became frustrated with the glib or dismissive attitudes some Christians would have regarding the relationship of their beliefs to Scripture. “Sure, sure, that might make sense, but if we just believe the Bible, then we see that [insert doctrine under dispute] is true.”

This kind of approach was always extremely annoying to me because of how obviously circular it is. The oversimplified version of the argument seems to be, “We know Scripture teaches X because of all these passages that teach it, and we know that alternative explanations of those passages are wrong because Scripture does not teach those things, but teaches X.”

Many times this kind of pseudo-thinking is deployed, it is in the context of a debate over what exactly it is that Scripture is saying. Arguments from church history, the insights of theologians, philosophy, and experience are all brought to bear to make a case for or against some interpretation of Scripture. To merely appeal back to Scripture to resolve the dispute is like saying that we don’t need to listen to the defense attorney because the defendant is obviously guilty.

I came to realize that many doctrinal disputes among Protestants are really just closeted philosophy debates. Since you can’t really use philosophy when doing theology in Protestantism, typically those philosophical ideas work their way into the debate unseen and in the clothing of some Biblical proof-text. If you don’t do it that way, you leave yourself open to the accusation of appealing to something outside of Scripture.

Sometimes this happens in very explicit ways: I was reading a YouTube comment where a (presumably) Protestant person wrong a long list of Catholic doctrines which are “not found anywhere in Scripture.” The fact that, for example, St. John Chrysostom (4th century) pretty clearly believed that “on this rock” in Matthew 16:18 was a reference to the papacy¹, at least in general terms, can ultimately be dismissed because the papacy is not spelled out systematically elsewhere in Scripture.

But sometimes it happens in more subtle ways. If you argue with a Protestant, they will say something like, “At the end of the day, you have to show this in Scripture, and if it’s not in Scripture, then you can’t treat it like dogma.” This is a more cautious and realistic form of sola scriptura, in which Scripture is not the sole source of doctrine but is rather the final authority, the judge between disputants.

What I have come to recognize about even this more cautious version of sola scriptura is that it functions as a kind of skeptical defense. It doesn’t matter if the argument is sound and well-supported by a variety of evidence; I am within my rights to refuse to believe it if it cannot be sufficiently demonstrated from scriptural sources alone. In this way, the Protestant is a lot like the atheist or skeptic, who is content to dismiss a wide variety of reasonable arguments by saying that they aren’t “scientific.”

Some atheist skeptics are clearly unreasonable. Of course you cannot prove that God exists “scientifically” because “science” deals with a limited range of subject matter. It is simply not suited for investigating (among other things) the question of God’s existence. But for the naive and unreasonable skeptic, this simply confirms that they are within their rights to deny this existence of God in spite of good arguments and evidence.

Most skeptics are not this dumb, because I think you actually have to choose to be that dumb, and most skeptics have enough intellectual integrity to avoid this mistake. But even still, many skeptical atheists would rather propose convoluted theories to explain away miracles like the Resurrection or answered prayer than simply accept that these things are possible and that believing in them is a reasonable thing to do.

There is an underlying attitude here, one that I am frequently guilty of myself: you engage in refuting or undermining every argument, waiting to find that one argument that you can’t refute, the one argument which coerces you into belief. But of course, this basically never happens, and this is what makes skeptics seem so unreasonable. Very rarely is it the case that the evidence for something is so powerful and overwhelming that it will forcibly open the mind of a determined skeptic.

This seems to be the case for the Protestants when arguing from Divine Tradition. We can find early Christian testimony for these beliefs, we can argue from Scripture that the Holy Spirit will lead us into the truth, we can show how these arguments do not contradict Scripture but in fact are in harmony with it, that they shine light on and open new avenues of appreciating other doctrines, and so on. But the Protestant is always in the position to reject all of this because a sufficiently direct case cannot be made from Scripture alone.

Sure, anybody can build a house with tools. You can use tools to build anything! You can cut and shape and hammer the wood into whatever shape you want, bending it to your will. But if you let wood just tell you want kind of house it wants to be, it’ll all just fit together naturally and then you’ll have the house that’s meant to be.

This is not to say there is no value in such skepticism. Obviously, one is within his rights in rejecting a belief for which he feels there is inadequate evidence or unsatisfactory argumentation. A Protestant is wise to want to ground his beliefs in Scripture, to reject ideas which contradict Scripture, and to value more strongly those doctrines that are explicitly laid out in Scripture.

In the same way that a Christian would tell a skeptic that reason alone is a good starting point, but that he must be open to reason taking him beyond what is narrowly marked by reason alone, so the Catholic tells the Protestant that Scripture is an excellent place to start, but he too must be open to Scripture taking him beyond what is market out in Scripture alone.

To be clear, I do not mean that anything that an ancient Christian said should be accepted on the basis of a plausible historical argument; I would agree that such an argument is merely historical and may not actually be a part of divine revelation. Rather, arguing from history, tradition, and reason is meant to point to the reality of Divine Tradition, i.e., the teachings of the Apostles which are part of the deposit of faith and are therefore part of the Word of God but for which were not recorded in Scripture.

In other words, I’m not arguing from history that some doctrine is likely inspired, given some argument. Rather, I’m using such an argument to justify faith in the authority of the church when it says that such doctrines are divinely revealed and therefore are part of the deposit of the Word of God.

Christians observe that those who argue that a belief must be demonstrated scientifically in order for that belief to be justified are using a self-refuting argument, since it is plain that the standard of scientific demonstration is itself a standard which in principle cannot be scientifically demonstrated.

In the same way, we can observe at least two ways in which sola scriptura is self-refuting:

1. Catholics never tire of pointing out that Scripture itself never claims to be sole repository or memory of divine revelation, nor does Scripture itself claim that all divinely revealed truth will eventually make its way into the canon in some form or other. The closest you are going to get are statements that Scripture is inspired and that therefore we should consider it authoritative.

We may believe that this is how God intended things to work based on some philosophical argument which does not contradict Scripture, and for which there is some Christian testimony in history. But it not directly taught in Scripture, and so therefore the sola scriptura adherent would be logically consistent if he wanted to throw out sola scriptura on the grounds that it is a “tradition of man,” a mere “interpretation,” believed by some but nowhere explicitly taught in Scripture itself.

2. In doing this, the Protestant is obviously engaging in a double-standard. How exactly does the Protestant come to believe in Christianity in general and in the inspiration of Scripture in particular if not by arguments, evidence, and the godly testimony of other Christians? Protestant evangelists and apologists make compelling arguments for the existence of God, the truth of Christianity, and, perhaps most importantly, the inspiration of Scripture itself. Why do these means of persuasion become invalid once one comes to belief in Scripture?

I think part of the underlying motivation of skepticism, the desire to be coerced into belief by irrefutable arguments, is the motivation to find certainty, to find something we can believe which is beyond doubt. Descartes famously argued that he knew he existed because, know matter how much he doubted anything, even if all his sensory experience was a hallucination created by a demon, he was still thinking. I think, therefore, I am.

What sometimes follows from this kind of skepticism is an attempt to ground knowledge on absolutely certain principles, to find something which cannot be doubted and which can hold back the skepticism from consuming everything. Since it seems like so many things can be thrown into doubt, and we can find reasons for doubting nearly everything (every argument has its rebuttal, and every rebuttal its counter-rebuttal), then in order to know anything at all with certainty, there must be some certain “bedrock” of knowledge on which we can rest everything else.

The Protestant, to a certain extent anyway, achieves this with sola scriptura. Scripture becomes a set of first principles that are completely certain, even if we doubt everything else. Sola scriptura functions to satisfy its own skepticism. If man’s reasoning is so flawed and imperfect, how am I to know anything? The answer is that Scripture can tell us what to know.

It is easy to see how this can lead to a kind of fundamentalism as a logical consequence: knowledge is unreliable, but faith is not. Therefore, instead of relying on arguments, you need to reach out in faith. But what exactly are you grabbing onto when you reach out? Only reason can tell you whether the thing you have grabbed is a suitable object of faith. It is easy to see why many people today think faith and reason are in conflict; in many ways, Protestants are unwittingly saying that it is.

What the Catholic says is that man’s reasoning, fallible and corrupted by sin as it is, is still ultimately sufficiently reliable for us to be able to have real knowledge. This must be true to some extent, since we need to be able to know what Scripture says by reading it and reasoning our way through various interpretations. And furthermore, our reason must be reliable enough for us to come to belief in the first place, unless we want to be Christians be sheer force of will (this is called fideism).

But more importantly, we would respond by wondering whether the original process of skepticism is not entirely misguided. The problem is that the skeptical approach shifts the burden of proof from the subject (the thinking person who is trying to know) to the object (the thing they are trying to know). Any thinking person knows that you can find reasons to doubt pretty much anything; but that’s a testimony to the creativity and flexibility of the human mind, not a testimony to its unreliability.

The Protestant tries to solve this by treating the Scriptures like a sacrament: you just need to read it in a posture of faith, and it will be efficacious simply by virtue of its own power. Over time, regular consumption of it will supernaturally weed out doctrinal error. Simply by showing up to Scripture in a spiritually open posture, the knowledge of the truth can be infused into us in the same way that the Catholic believes righteousness is infused into us through the sacraments.

But this clearly does not work, as shown by the many sincere, virtuous, Bible-believing Protestants who disagree amongst themselves over key doctrinal matters. Reading Scripture in a posture of faith does seem to bring us closer to God and therefore make us more disposed to know the truth, but it does not seem to resolve disputes over doctrine.

Often, skepticism (in its various forms) functions as an excuse for being unreasonable, or even for being antagonistic toward knowledge. It’s a way of making sure you never get duped or suckered or let down. I think for Protestants, sola scriptura functions as a way to avoid the problems caused by their skepticism toward the Church. Protestants don’t have any unifying principle beyond “we all agree not to be conned again by the Catholic church,” and this principle is exercised through the skepticism of sola scriptura.

---

¹“Do you see how He, His own self, leads Peter on to high thoughts of Him, and reveals Himself, and implies that He is Son of God by these two promises? For those things which are peculiar to God alone, (both to absolve sins, and to make the church incapable of overthrow in such assailing waves, and to exhibit a man that is a fisher more solid than any rock, while all the world is at war with him), these He promises Himself to give; as the Father, speaking to Jeremiah, said, He would make him as a brazen pillar, and as a wall; (Jeremiah 1:18) but him to one nation only, this man in every part of the world.” St. John Chrysostom’s commentary on Matthew