Anarchy and Absolutism
Part of an ongoing conversation. The topic under discussion is whether the laity is morally obligated to follow the authority of the clergy in matters where the clergyman exceeds his authority.
A reader named David Gudeman replies that this answer will not serve, since it is the authority itself who defines what is within or without its authorization.
Mr. Gudeman propounds the following paradox:
We assume that there exists a spiritual authority. Either
1. There are officers of that authority charged with interpreting the authority, who we are obligated to trust and obey (with respect to that authority) in virtue of their office
or
2. We are to interpret the authority ourselves, relying our own judgment as to whether we are following it or not.If 1 is true, then you are obligated to trust and follow the leaders of the Catholic Church, even when in your judgment, they are not faithful to the spiritual authority.
If 2 is true, then your criticism of Protestantism collapses.
Andrew Brew, and others, including me, reject the question as being based on a false dichotomy. 1 and 2 are not exhaustive and mutually exclusive.
It is like saying that either a court of law has the authority to rule on the question of its own jurisdiction, or it does not. False. A court of law can rule on the question of what falls within its authority in certain cases, but there are other cases where it cannot.
Like any other question of Catholic life, the question of the scope of authority of the Church has been debated both by laity and clergy, and certain questions have been settled authoritatively and others have not.
Some fall in to areas where the authority of the Church is authoritative taught to have jurisdiction. Others do not.
Mr. Gudeman makes an odd assertion in reply:
“There is no middle ground. There wasn’t any middle ground in my original formulation, but to avoid bickering over it, I reformulated it to explicitly have the form of “P or not P”. The middle is excluded by the Law of the Excluded Middle.
“You, Bellomy, and Mr. Wright have all chosen the second branch of the dilemma (not P) while apparently thinking that you have eliminated the dilemma, but you have all stated that it is acceptable to use your own judgment to overrule the authorities of your church, thereby denying that that the Church leadership has absolute spiritual authority.”
Except that neither my answer, nor Bellomy’s, nor Brew’s involve a claim of absolute spiritual authority. Nor does the Roman Catholic Church, nor any mainstream denomination of any kind, claim absolute spiritual authority.
The Law of the Excluded Middle only applies to true dichotomies: “A or not A”. It does not apply to cases of “A or B” where C and D are also options. In the current case, “Absolute Authority or No Authority” is not exhaustive.
Nor does any faithful Catholic claim to have the ability to overrule the authority of the Church in any way.
I do not need to qualify the statement. Saying that the Church has “authority” is the same as saying she has “authority in the scope where acts are authorized, but not beyond” because that is what the word means.
If an officer of the Church, acting under the color of an authority, says or does something his office does not authorize, then he has exceeded his authority, and no one is bound to obey him in that matter.
The example used was teaching Marxism from the chair (ex cathedra). No pastor is authorized to do so.
It does not change the question to say that the unjust officer, in addition to doing what the Church does not authorize, moreover makes a false claim that she does. That merely means he is exceeding his authority in two respects rather than one.
Likewise, if a pastor claims that he met with himself in a synod of one and rewrote the catechism in his own mind, and voted himself Pope and declared himself a saint, and canonized himself, and crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor, and therefore gains the authority to rewrite Church teachings to include Marxism, that claim likewise is outside his scope of duties.
Such antics does not abrogate his authority in any other matter, nor does it give the laity a veto over his authority that is exercised within his authorization. If the heretical pastor blessed a baptism or a wedding, or heard confession, the baptism and the wedding and the absolution would all be valid.
Likewise if he then from the chair preached that “gay marriage” was contrary to Church teaching. No matter what our objections to the sanity of our hypothetical Holy Roman Emperor priest, the faithful Catholic who really wanted to believe “gay marriage” was licit would not be in the right if he defied the lunatic priest on that point.
This is no different from when a police officer stops a citizen. The citizen must obey him, even if the officer tells him to kneel or go prone, because this is within the scope of the police officer’s authorization.
Were the officer to tell him to do an unlawful act, such as to pay him a bribe, the officer’s authority ends, and obedience is not required.
“You are consequently barred from criticizing Protestants on the mere basis that they have done this very thing. You can still criticize their specific reasons for doing so, but to maintain logical consistency you must avoid the presumption (which I have seen many times on this forum) that the mere act of rejecting the leadership of the Catholic Church is, all by itself wrong.”
Absurd. You tempt me to uproars of laughter, sir.
You are indulging in the informal logical fallacy of ambiguity. Calling two different things by one name does not make those two things the same.
Luther was within his rights to nail his theses to the doors of the Wittenberg Church, and to argue his points.
He was no longer in his rights after the Council of Trent to teach those points officially declared to be anathema.
A Lutheran who wishes to argue that the Council of Trent was itself illicit, but that earlier councils, such as Nicaea and Ephesus, were licit, is not making the argument that General Church councils have no spiritual authority.
A Christian who argues that the Christian Church in any capacity has ever had the authority to settle doubtful questions, including the question of what to include in the canon of scripture, is propounding a paradox that fails on other grounds.
In any case, Luther’s argument (as best I understand it from my Lutheran upbringing) was not that the Church has no spiritual authority, but, rather, that such authority as she possessed has been abused. I invite a Lutheran or a scholar of Lutheranism to correct me on this point if I am mistaken.
Simply because Luther accused the Church of exceeding her teaching authority, and we faithful Catholics believe Luther’s accusation no more sound than the similar arguments by Arius, or Pelagius, or Mohammed, or Simon the Magician, this does not mean, in law or in logic, that the Church is unable in a hypothetical situation to exceed her authority.
It is quite easy to imagine cases where she could: to preach any heresy would do exactly that.
Nor does any logic require that if a heretic’s obstinate defiance of Church teaching is unlawful, so too is that of a faithful Catholic in the hypothetical case of the Church teaching a heresy.
Nor does any logic require that the private opinion of a prestigious Church official or scholar or priest on matters outside the scope of his duty to pass along Church teaching intact be necessarily given more respect that one normally gives any other son of Adam.
Luther was, and all Catholics still are, perfectly free to adopt or reject any political or scientific theory which does not run counter to a specific dogmatic teaching, or to speculate on any religious matters where the Church has not made a ruling.
If, in your hypothetical, the Pope or any other bishop started teaching a political or scientific theory as if it were part of the Deposit of the Faith, this would be an abuse of the teaching authority of the Church, and would not be authorized, any more than the cop asking for a bribe is authorized.
Riddle me this: if a citizen is allowed under the law to disobey a cop asking for a bribe, is a bank robber thereby also allowed under the law to resist arrest if caught during a bank robbery?
Suppose the cop yanked out a copy of the US Constitution from his back pocket, and there, written in Crayola crayon, were words purporting to be an amendment authorizing cops to demand bribes during a routine stop. Would the fact that the authority was claiming to have the authority to revise the scope of his authority change the answer?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
