A Universal Apology Point Four: ON SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY
ON SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY
I am recounting in chronological order the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is.
Since the time, back when I was an atheist, when I first came across the controversy over Church authority to define canon, I have since only heard two additional arguments which support the Protestant side. Both arguments claim an independent, self-defining or self-authorizing authority for scripture.
One was from a Protestant theologian who is so wise and learned, and so clear and logical in his thinking that I tremble to disagree with him. He made this statement: “It is wrong to say that the Church formed the canon of scripture; the scripture formed the Church!”
The nakedness of the paradox, which I assume is offered more for the cleverness of its word play than as a sober argument, defeats its point. The scripture simply did not fall out of the sky on golden tablets written in Reformed Egyptian and clonk a man named Peter on the head, at which point he declared himself Pope, went to Rome, and was martyred for his faith in a man he had never met. Peter wrote the epistle of Peter.
And if the scriptures did indeed form the Church, then by that same logic, they formed a hierarchical church with apostolic succession, bishops and archbishops, Eucharist and sacrament, reverence for Mary and adoration of Saints and all the other characteristics that the Coptics, Nestorians, Greek and Russian Orthodox share in common with Rome.
If the scriptures formed the Church, the scriptures could not form a Church that contains defects which lasted 1600 years, and then suddenly declare the head of the Church to be the King of England when His Majesty needs a divorce.
In other words, this argument was that the scriptures have an authority independent of the men who wrote them, and of their disciples who preserved, collected, protected, and sanctified them.
How the book could be sacred and infallible but the men who wrote and canonized the book could be not only fallible, but scoundrels bent on corrupting the book and its message is an impossible paradox. Any argument for the independent, non-clerical, and non-apostolic authority of scripture fails.
The other additional argument was from a crackpot whom to quote is to refute. He said that Catholics did not write the New Testament, or in other words, that Peter, Paul, John and all the others were not Catholics.
Now, at the time, four centuries before the break between the Monophysites and the Melkites, and a thousand years, before the schism between the Byzantines and the Romans, the Catholics and the Christians were one and the same. The two words were interchangeable. In other words, the crackpots argument was that the immediate disciples and followers of Christ were somehow, at the same sense and the same time, Protestant and non-Christian.
The question then is at what point they became Catholics, and stopped being Jews. Even a casual inspection of the Acts of the Apostles shows that the Catholics had been baptizing people without reference to Jewish authority, and defying the Jewish authority, ever since Pentecost, and that Saul of Tarsis was persecuting them. They were an identifiable separate group at that time.
In other words, again, the claim is that Peter was the first Pope, but was not Catholic. The Catholics cannot claim the leaders and founders of the Catholic Church wrote the New Testament, or perhaps Catholics cannot claim that these men lead or founded the Church or any Church. Or they were not members of the Church they founded because they were not baptized. Or the Early Church was different in some fundamental way from the Church later called Catholic. Or something. I am reminded of how pro-abortionists claim that unborn humans are not human on the grounds that membership is the species is optional.
I can only assume the crackpot meant that the organizational structure of the Church did not exist in the earliest days. If so, one wonders into what communion or community the men baptized at Pentacost were baptized into. Nor can it be claimed that the apostles and disciples never had a leader or never were supposed to have a leader, because the apostles were arguing about it even before Jesus died, and Protestants as well as every other denomination has a leader of some sort, even if they reject an Episcopal hierarchy as a form of leadership.
Whatever did or did not exist in the first months after Pentacost, since the epistles, the Acts of the Apostles and the Revelation of Saint John already make reference to a Church containing certain uniquely non-Protestant features, such as deacons and bishops, as do the writings of the Antenicene Fathers, and since all this dates from before the New Testament writings were canonized, then the Early Church whatever its nature cannot be said to be Protestant, or anything like it.
Logically, Protestantism cannot be authoritative if Catholicism authoritative is not because Protestants take their basic teachings about the life and death of Christ, the nature of the Incarnation and the Trinity and so on, on the authority of the Catholic Church and from nowhere else.
Such was my first introduction to the Catholic position from back when I was an atheist. To be sure, I thought both Catholic and Protestant were wrong, but I additionally thought the Protestant claim to be self-refuting.
After my conversion, I engaged in a search and a meditation for over two years before deciding which denomination to join. But this article has grown too long: my report on my later and more Christian thoughts will have to wait for another day.
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.
