A reader with the vehemently iatric name of Doc Rampage writes:
“The Catholic view of the Church as a monolithic organization seems to make it very difficult to make them understand that Protestants do not even view our disagreement about a battle for supremacy the way that Catholics do…”
My comment:
This was not the view of Luther and Zwingli and other early reformers. Their desire was not to set up a second Church to oppose the first, nor to split Christendom in half, it was to reform the Church and correct her abuses. The desire to have each king his own national church, as England, came later. The idea of abolishing Church authority altogether is an entirely modern idea, dating from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
In any case, no one who takes Sola Scriptura seriously should look to any writings outside the books of the Old Testament or the New (a set of writings we Catholics wrote, compiled and authorized and sanctified for your use in our Ecumenical councils attended by our Priests, Bishops, Archbishops, and Legates from Metropolitans or from the Pope) to support the idea of the Church as a non-unified or lose alliance of individually self-sovereign believers. The doctrine of Sola Scriptura would logically imply that the idea of a non-monolithic Church, being extra-Biblical, is non-Christian.
In other words, the institution you have defined as monolithic ergo unchristian is the only institution from which comes the book you use as the sole source and tutor and guide to correct doctrine — and that book defines the institution in monolithic metaphors, one flock, one rock, one body with Christ as the head, one church against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail.
Back when I was an atheist, and I had no stake in the game and dog in that fight, I overheard a debate between Catholic and Protestant where the Protestant claimed that the Bible as edited by Martin Luther authoritatively and sufficiently taught the Christian faith.
The Catholic claim was that
(1) Christians believe the Bible not merely to be literature, liturgy, prophecy, philosophy, history or hortatory, but in addition to be authoritative, that is, the commands of a father and a lord, a supernatural authority. Christians believe the Bible to be the Word of God, not the scribbling of men.
(2) If the Bible is the Word of God, each man himself cannot decide for himself what passages or books in the Old Testament and the New to believe and which not to believe, because the nature of any authoritative statement is that it is authoritative, that is, issued by a true authority and not by a pretender. A soldier listening to commands does not get to decide which parts to obey and which to disobey. Contrariwise, if a man gets to decide which parts to obey and which to disobey, then what he is hearing is a plea or a request or a suggestion, it is not commands. Hence, no authority rests on the consent of the individual under authority for its authorization.
(At least, not after he is placed under authority. You might volunteer to join the army, or volunteer to sign a contract, but once you are bound, you cannot rightfully disobey the authority or your own will, or else it is no authority at all and never was.)
(3) In general, no authority rests on itself for its own authority. In particular, there is neither scriptural authority for Sola Scriptura nor for the canon of the Bible. (Let us say there is no unambiguous scriptural authority.)
Hence, if the Bible is authoritative, and authoritative documents by their nature cannot attest to their own authority, and authoritative documents by their nature do not rest for their authority on the consent of the reader, but on the imprimatur of the author or issuer, then the authority of the Bible, its very right to command our respect and obedience, rests on the authority of whoever issued it. This leads to the next point
(4) The Christian Bible has no authority, and no attestation of sacral nature, outside the Church. (Here we mean the original Church, before the Catholic-Orthodox split, and before the Nestorians and Copts broke away.)
Hence, logically, if the Church has the authority to write and define the Bible, she also has the authority to interpret and comment on it, and to denounce misreadings as heresy, and to teach on other matters beyond the Bible, for the same reason that a lecturer has the authority both to write and compile and read and interpret his lecture notes, and also to speak extemporaneously.
Like I said, at that time, I had no dog in that fight. To me, it was like listening to two believers in Santa Claus argue about whether his sleigh is pulled by Eight Tiny Reindeer or, including Rudolph, Nine.
Nonetheless, according to their logic of what I then took to be a make-believe world, the Protestant lost the argument and soundly. Read the remainder of this entry »
