Clearly correcting Catholic confusion

If scripture teaches us how to think, as well as what to think, then it should shape our minds to better judge its own place in the hierarchy of knowing — and the place of imposters.

One of the members of our True Magic Signal group has found himself struggling to master the debate around Roman Catholicism. This post is my attempt to trace out the fundamental patterns of thought required to rightly judge these issues, in order to help him and anyone like him.

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All debate with Roman Catholics will always, inevitably, without fail come back to the question of epistemic authority:–

Who is authorized to determine true doctrine from false?

Roman Catholics want to say that the final authority for judging doctrine lies with Rome over any individual.

But this is itself a doctrine (let’s call it the doctrine of the Magisterium).

Thus, if it is possible for you as an individual to judge the doctrine of the Magisterium, then you as an individual are necessarily the final authority over Rome for judging doctrine.

Catholics are therefore caught on the horns of a dilemma:

1. If individuals do not have final authority to judge doctrine, then we would be contradicting ourselves to conclude that the Magisterium is true, since we would be assuming authority we cannot have;

2. If individuals do have final authority to judge doctrine, then we would be contradicting ourselves to conclude that the Magisterium is true, since that entails we do not have such authority.

Given this central issue, I suggest a 2-step approach to dealing with Catholics. Anything other than this approach inevitably devolves into multiplying words about mere distractions.

Step 1: Exposing the pretense of Catholic superiority

The default polemical method of a Catholic is to put Protestants on the back foot by:

1. Accusing us of making ourselves the “final authority” for interpreting scripture, which supposedly leads to infinite disputes that cannot be adjudicated as there is no higher authority;

2. Pretending that the Magisterium solves this supposed problem.

Without first exposing this for the absolute sham that it is, there is no way to seek any agreement on anything with a Catholic. By debating you in the first place, he is tacitly conceding and assuming the very thing he is trying to deny and ridicule: that individuals actually can reason together to interpret scripture and judge doctrine. If he didn’t believe this, he wouldn’t be trying to debate you. So when he asks…

Who gave you the final authority to figure out what God means when he says something?

The answer is simple: The same person who gave you that authority: God.

To deny this authority is really to deny that we have the personal responsibility to hear God and receive his instruction. It is a denial that we are made in God’s image: that we are given the authority to direct our own actions, and to be responsible for doing so — including whether to hear God’s word and keep faith with him, or not. Every man, by nature, is the final authority on interpreting the facts available to him and discerning truth and error — including the facts of scripture. This is what self-rule is, which is the very thing God gave Adam.

There is no point starting with anything other than this. If you can’t agree that you are both in exactly the same boat in terms of private judgment (and have just come to differing conclusions about Roman Catholic doctrine) then you can’t agree to anything. You will never be able to go to scripture together and investigate what it says in order to be instructed by God, because the Catholic has no ability to receive its instruction unless he gives up the pretense that private judgment is illegitimate. If, whatever scripture says, it can never show that RCC doctrine is false, then what is the point of debating what scripture says?

To bring it back to where we started, if the Catholic cannot agree with you that individuals are authorized to determine true doctrine from false…then what is the point of you two, as individuals, trying to determine true doctrine from false?

Step 2: Pressing the reality of Protestant superiority

Once you have established that we all actually believe in the validity of private judgment, something else becomes clear:

You are both fallible interpreters of (allegedly) infallible sources.

Catholics and Protestants both appeal to an infallible source of truth: Catholics appeal to the Magisterium; Protestants appeal to scripture.

Catholics will try to say we need the Magisterium to prevent error in our fallible private interpretation. But this logic leads inevitably to an infinite regress: If an infallible source requires an infallible interpreter, then the infallible interpreter itself becomes an infallible source, which in turn requires a new infallible interpreter, forever and ever.

Put another way: Infallible interpreters simply do not prevent private error. They cannot eliminate the distinction between the truth, and your interpretation of the truth. Your Catholic is just as likely to misunderstand the Magisterium as you are to misunderstand scripture. Indeed, rather than preventing this, the Magisterium actually compounds the problem: the Roman Catholic system of bulls and encyclicals is vastly more complicated and difficult to understand than scripture is. So the Catholic is more likely to become confused by Roman Catholicism + scripture than you are to become confused by scripture alone. If the Catholic is able to understand the infallible Magisterium, then mutatis mutandis the Protestant is able to understand the infallible scriptures — so what need is there of a Magisterium? It adds nothing but confusion.

Now, this alone does not prove the invalidity of the Magisterium; but it does show where the burden of proof lies: on the Catholic who seems to be multiplying entities without necessity. But how shall he try to meet that burden of proof, if not by resorting to scripture? This puts him in a bind, because if scripture is our final resort — even to prove the Magisterium — then he is tacitly confessing the Reformed doctrine of Sola Scriptura and the superfluity of the Magisterium…in order to prove the falsehood of Sola Scriptura and the necessity of the Magisterium!

Again, his entire project is self-refuting.

Either Rome is the whole church, or it’s just another denomination

At this point the Catholic will tend to say that you’re looking at this all wrong: the issue is really about the Church, not the individual. Christ promised to lead his Church into all truth (John 16:13), and since Protestantism is divided by all kinds of doctrinal disagreements, that Church must be the Roman Catholic one: the only one that is unified.

Aside from the fact that he has now shifted the goalposts and not dealt with the original problem, this is also comically question-begging. Even ignoring Eastern Orthodoxy, which makes the same claim in competition to Rome, the Catholic is presupposing that Protestants are not part of the Church; i.e., that we are not members of Christ’s body. And he is assuming that all the stories Rome tells about its unbroken lineage back to the apostles are true. But these are the very claims in dispute! Pretending that your tendentious conclusion is actually your argument is the fallacy of assuming the consequent.

If, in fact, Protestants are part of the Church, and the apostles would not have recognized the papacy, then Roman Catholicism is just another (very aberrant) denomination. It has no special status above any other denomination in the great Church of Christ — let alone an exclusive claim to being the Church of Christ.

Indeed, it is easy to see how the Reformation — and perhaps even the Great Schism — could have been fulfillments of John 16:13: the Spirit leading his Church into all truth by leading the faithful out of the errors of Catholicism (cf. Revelation 18:4). I am not arguing for this presently; only pointing out that it is at least as plausible an assumption as the Catholic’s assumption about Rome being the One True Church™. So we once more come back to the necessity of being able to interpret scripture for ourselves, to discover what John 16:13 means and how it has been fulfilled.

In other words, we are back to Sola Scriptura.

How did the Church manage for thousands of years B.C. without a Magisterium?

A final point to press is that the Catholic position is self-refuting in terms of the continuity of the Church itself. If it were true that a Magisterium is required to interpret scripture, and private judgment is insufficient or invalid, then this has always been true. But God manifestly did not provide a Magisterium to his people during the Old Covenant age.

So the Catholic is again on the horns of a dilemma:

1. Either: before Christ, God’s people did not know what the scriptures were (they only had a “fallible collection of infallible books”) or what they meant (they had to rely on their private judgment);

2. Or: before Christ, God’s people did know what the scriptures were and what they meant, without the need of a Magisterium.

The first horn is an incredible pill to swallow, and is manifestly contradicted by the witness of the New Testament. For instance, Paul could hardly say that Timothy knew the holy scriptures from infancy (2 Timothy 3:15) if no one knew what the holy scriptures were.

The second horn pulls the rug from under the Catholic’s feet, since if a Magisterium was not required then, what need is there of one now?

The Catholic could try to weasel off these horns by saying that God did institute a Magisterium under the Old Covenant, but it became corrupt. For instance, he might appeal to Moses’ seat (Matthew 23:2) as the precursor to the seat of Peter, the Holy See. But this opens him up to an obvious riposte, because the very “Old Covenant Magisterium” he is appealing to is the same one that Jesus says makes void the word of God by their tradition: the identical accusation that Protestants level against the Roman Catholic Magisterium. If indeed a magisterium can go so corrupt as to even crucify the Lord of glory, then again the question becomes: of what value is it? Certainly it does not have the power to preserve against error that the Catholic claims it does!

But more importantly, once again we are having to resort to our own private investigation of scripture to judge the claims being made.

In other words, we keep ending up presupposing the truth of Sola Scriptura, even as we dispute it.