Sola Ecclesia: a Rejoinder to Philip Blosser by Steve Hays

Sola Ecclesia: A Rejoinder to Philip Blosser By Steve Hays Late last year, I wrote a response to an attack on sola Scriptura by Philip Blosser. In early January, he wrote a reply. 1 Due to other demands on my time, I haven’t had the time to respond until now. So let’s run through his reply, hitting the highlights. I’ll quote myself in red. I’ll quote him in blue. The color-coded quotes are for context. If you’d rather cut to the chase, the new stuff is in black print. The other reason I did not respond to Mathison was that I had lost some of my initial interest in these sorts of arguments. It often happens, I think, that arguments of this kind serve a purpose on the journey of those en route to the Catholic Church, but subsequent to their conversion these concerns are supplanted by others as they become habituated to their new environs within the Church. Up to a point, this makes perfect sense. But, by the same token, it also makes perfect sense for Blosser to take stock of his original reasons for converting to Catholicism in light of his subsequent experience. He knows more about it now than he did then. So the original reasons we had for a decision we made may not be the same reasons we have 10 or 20 years later. Before plunging into the thick of things, I’d simply note that, as is so often the case, Blosser is a layman who comes to the defense of the Magisterium. The question this always raises is that if a layman can make a case for the Magisterium, who needs the Magisterium? How is this not like arguing that defending the Bible makes the Bible superfluous? They are not parallel. To the contrary, the analogy breaks down at the critical point of comparison. Catholicism denies the right of private judgment while Evangelicalism affirms it. Therefore, if a Protestant defends the Bible, then this is consistent with his assumptions—but if a Catholic layman defends the Magisterium, then that is inconsistent with his assumptions. No sorting needed. The Reformation was not a tragic necessity, but a simple necessity. 1 http://catholictradition.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html#11681194269012 7319 This overlooks an important distinction between (1) reform and (2) schism. The Church has always needed reform: witness the reforms of Gregory I or the Cluny Reforms. The Church has always suffered schims -- the hiving off of the Gnostics from the Church of Ephesus to start their own thing (cf. First Epistle of John on those whom the Apostle calls "antichrists), the Arians in the third century, the Cathars much later, the Photian schism, and protestant schims still later, etc. The first is necessary housekeeping; the second is tragic loss. No, this overlooks important distinctions between (a) heresy, (b) irreformability, and (c) denominations. i) The Catholic church teaches false doctrine. ii) In addition, the Catholic church is irreformable due to its pretensions of indefectibility. iii) What Blosser is pleased to call “the Church” is simply his church, the Church of Rome. His church is simply a local church which, over time, became a denomination with delusions of grandeur. The church of Rome is not the universal church. The 1C church of Rome was simply one local church among many. And it was not even the most important local church. That distinction obviously went to the church of Jerusalem. Indeed, the 1C church of Rome wasn’t even one church, but a collection of semiautonomous house-churches. 2 The church of Rome gradually achieved its historical dominance for purely political reasons, due, on the one hand, to the fall of Jerusalem, and, on the other, to its strategic location in the capital of the western Roman Empire. Since I feel no such sense of urgency, I’m happy to remain silent about its “tragic” dimension. I find it sad -- even scandalous -- that you express no sense of “tragedy” over the broken Body of Christ. The Body of Christ (i.e. the Church) was never broken. What we’re talking about are faithful Christians who broke with a corrupt and irreformable denomination During the Counter-Reformation, the Vatican did attempt to destabilize Protestant regimes. 2 Cf. J. Fitzmyer, Romans (Doubleday 1993), 733-44; P. Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus (Fortress 2003). It seems to me there's more than enough political machinations to go around the whole table. I agree. My comments were simply in response to the way in which Blosser imputes a conspiratorial mentality to Protestants. It is almost as difficult for the Protestant to fathom the Catholic notion that the all- too-human Church of history could have anything like a divine nature or a real divine authority, as it is for an agnostic to fathom that the all-too-human Jesus could also be God Incarnate . It’s difficult for a suspicious Evangelical like me to draw a parallel between the Borgia Papacy and the hypostatic union, or a pedophile priest and the inspiration of Scripture. This is certainly a leap for the most grotesque caricature of Catholicism imaginable: What about Pope John Paul II? What about Pope Benedict XVI? What about the countless good and holy popes in Catholic history? How about Mother Teresa of Calcutta? St. Francis Assisi? St. Francis Xavier? St. Ignatius of Loyola? St. Columba, who converted your European forefathers? What about Johan von Staupitz, Luther's confessor, who referred him to the Gospel of grace in Romans? Several issues: i) It is not a “grotesque caricature” of Catholicism for me to bring up the Borgia papacy or the priestly sex scandal. These are facts—facts which figure in the overall identity of the Catholic church. Blosser is the one who attempted to mount an argument from analogy. So let’s be very clear on some of the historical data which we need to plug into the Catholic analogue, and then judge the analogy accordingly. ii) Now, Blosser’s point may be that it’s lopsided to judge an organization only by its worst examples rather than its best. Up to a point, there’s some merit to that objection. However, it’s equally lopsided to judge an organization only by its best examples rather than its worst. iii) And let’s us also remember that the Catholic Church has raised by bar by making very lofty claims for itself. Suffice it here to observe that if ever there was a safe truth, it is this: no higher view of Scripture and its authority exists in all of Protestantism than that which is to be found in the Catholic Church. I see. Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer have a higher view of Scripture than Gleason Archer or John Warwick Montgomery. Whatever. This confuses Church teaching with private opinion. i) This is a standard escape clause which is used by the Catholic apologist. But it comes at a cost. In insulates the Magisterium from accountability at the price of insulating men like Brown or Fitzmyer from accountability to the Magisterium. Let’s remember that Brown and Fitzmyer were both appointed by the Pope to the Pontifical Biblical Commission. In addition, they submit their publications to the Censor Deputatus. So we’re not dealing here with rogue agents like Hans Küng or Dominic Crossan. ii) To see what’s wrong with this insulating strategy, suppose we draw a Protestant parallel. Let’s say a Protestant denomination establishes a seminary. This is where prospective ordinands in said denomination must receive their theological training. And let us further suppose that, over time, the seminary goes liberal. Indeed, this is a real life scenario. It’s played out on more than one occasion. Now then, suppose, at this point, that various students and alumni point to the seminary as evidence that the denomination is moving to the left. And suppose that the denominational leadership responds by saying that their complaint fails to distinguish between the official position of the denomination and the private opinion of the seminary professors. Is that a satisfactory reply? To the contrary, the contrast between the officially conservative position of the denomination and the de facto liberalism of the seminary is precisely the source of the problem. As long as the seminary is affiliated with the denomination, then, unless the seminary is answerable to the denomination, and unless the denomination intervenes to take disciplinary action and corrective measures when there is a widening gap between official teaching and informal teaching, then it is entirely appropriate to judge the theology of the denomination by how much it tolerates from those under its titular or nominal authority. Likewise with your subsequent conflation of Vatican II documents with the positions of Grillmeier and Küng…But this ignores the specific difference accorded the status of private opinion (what a theologian may opine) and Church teaching (what is de fide , binding upon the faithful because of its divinely delegated authority and indefectable truth). You can find a writer on theological issues who is happens to be Catholic who may say just about anything. But this has no authority in itself. Neither can the decrees of councils in the Apostolic tradition be simply reduced to arbitrary human constructs (cf. Acts 15:28). i) I don’t know if Blosser suffers from reading incomprehension, but intentionally or not, he misrepresented the explicit context in which I cited Grillmeier and Küng. I did not cite them as theological authorities, but as historical witnesses to the behind-the-scenes proceedings of Vatican II.

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