“If you can speak infallibly, why would you ever choose to speak fallibly?”
Sola Scriptura Doesn’t Work
As The Middle Ages were coming to a close, the contradictions inherent in The Church became harder to ignore. Indeed, personally, I define The Middle Ages or “The Medieval Period” as that part of history wherein the Church, broadly, could still be believed.
In many ways, it was a very beautiful time.
You see, for The Medieval person, God was real. No question about it. God was real and you knew his name and he even had a local representative right down the road whom you could call on to answer any pressing moral or existential concerns. This God had given you a role in life, a purpose, and if you followed that purpose well, be it as a farmer or a ruler or a knight, you would be rewarded. “Finding yourself” or “discovering God’s plan” for your life wasn’t necessary, and neither was it necessary to fuss about the details of Human origins or the ultimate fate of the cosmos. All that had already been decided. The arc of history was known. Each man and woman in Medieval England or Germany or France believed, with a high degree of assurance, that they could more or less trace their parental lineages back to Adam and that, in the fullness of time, Christ would return, resurrect the righteous dead, and put an end to all suffering. “Progress” was impossible. It wasn’t even really conceivable. The World, Life, was figured out. They were just waiting on the eschaton.
When the Church could be believed life was smaller.
The universe was smaller.
Back then, everything was much more manageable.
Existence had a definite start and a definite end, and the purpose of any given life was fairly clear. Contrasted with our day, in which we believe we live in an infinitely expanding Void of eternal blackness controlled mostly by random chance…
and medieval life feels quite cozy. Quite small.
By 1517 though, when Luther unrolled his ninety-five theses, all that had begun to seem more or less untenable.
As causes of The Reformation, historians will cite all sorts of things. The printing press. Church corruption. Political turmoil. Socioeconomic factors. To be sure all of these things played a role, certainly. But less remarked upon, and in my opinion far more important, were two simple facts. One, Church doctrine had evolved to the point that things were getting self-contradictory. And two, Christopher Columbus had sailed his boat.
The Church made big claims you see. About the nature of this world and the nature of the world to come. But, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and by 1501 Amerigo Vespucci had realized that what Columbus had found was a whole new continent, perhaps two, and not simply a far-flung string of islands out in the Atlantic. How would it be if, today, say, in November 2024, the Government announced that we’d discovered a new land mass the size of Australia in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? How shocking. How implausible. And yet by 1517 that is exactly what the world was waking up too. Convinced as they had been, in all good faith, that they knew more or less everything there was to know, the size and scope of their ignorance was now readily apparent and inescapable. They had been ignorant, not just about the nature of half the world, but about its very existence. Suddenly people were forced to ask themselves how, if The Church new so little about this world… they could really be trusted for guidance about the next.
And that’s a good question.
Meanwhile, if the discovery of the new world provided an evidential counterfactual against The Church, then it’s dogmatic claims about itself had become a philosophical equivalent. As Luther took great pains to point out, many of The Church’s positions had grown and developed into a place where they’d simply ceased making any logical sense. He asked, very adroitly, why, if The Church possessed an infinite reserve of Grace earned by the merits of Jesus, Mary, and the saints that it could pull from at will (i.e., indulgences), was such Grace not dispensed for free. You know, instead of having people need to work or pay for it. Should The Pope not, each morning, simply get up and dispense that Grace upon the whole world as a kindness and a mercy? Or, if The Church has the power to bind and loose sins, then why, to make it easier for men to go to heaven, would they not simply make more sins “loose”? Why make it a mortal sin to miss mass, or to not do penance, or, for that matter, to commit adultery? Barring that, why not simply perform blanket absolutions upon the whole world every day, instead of requiring people to jump through the hoop of formal confession?
More good questions.
Even today, Catholic apologists struggle to answer these objections, mostly because there is no answer. The Church does, still today, claim both an infinite store of Grace that it can hand out whenever it wants and the power to forgive sins at will, without going through the normal means of confession and penance. In my own memory, the 2018 false incoming missile alarms stands as a living testament to the latter, when the priest, sensing a moment of impending doom, simply waved his hands over the congregation and pronounced everyone’s sins forgiven. In times of emergency this is considered valid, so that the faithful will not die with unpardoned sins. But, if true, then there is no logical reason why this simply can’t be done all the time, for everybody, The Pope at the Vatican rising each day and pardoning the souls of the whole world from their sins with an incantation and a wave of his hand. The only reason they don’t do this is, as Luther noted, because handing out Grace for nothing would disrupt the business model of The Church, which is built around the constant re-upping of Grace on the part of the believer, and therefore necessitates constant Church involvement. Simply put, The Church operates as a Grace factory, with each parish being a sacrament delivery station, and no organization long survives if it simply gives its product away for free.
How to solve?
Luther’s idea was that The Bible, scripture, ought be used as a check. A stopgap. Contra what many of his haters today seem to think, Luther’s basic premise was that anything The Church claimed, any doctrine or power or principle, ought be measured against the testimony of The Bible, to see if it were true. In this way, he reasoned, all the “mission creep” and contradictory “doctrinal development” that had plagued The Church for eons could be halted, leaving them simply with the pure, unadulterated faith of The Apostles, as it had been practiced in the first century A.D. Up to that point, you understand, the situation had been exactly the reverse, and indeed, in Catholic circles today, still is. For the Catholic position is that it is The Church which has authority over the Bible, not the other way around, as Christ founded a Church, not a book, and vested authority in The Apostles, not in pages. The Bible is important for Catholics, of course, but ultimately just an artifact. It is God’s word… in the past. The Church is the Body of Christ, alive here, today, able to speak God’s word to the present and, possibly, to the future.
But can Truth change?
Luther was incensed. How could the Faith look so different in his day, 1500 years on from Jesus, and still be the same thing? When asked for alms by the sick and disabled in The Bible, Peter famously replied “silver and gold I have not, but what I do have I will give unto you”, and he healed the blind and the infirm of their diseases. By Luther’s day the situation seemed exactly reversed and Saint Peter’s successor, The Pope, now sat on a throne of silver in a building made of gold… and the man seemed strangely lacking in miraculous power. “Silver and gold I have in abundance,” said The Church, “and to receive grace, you must give me more.”
It was a tangle. A Gordian Knot of confusion. Sola Scripture (relying on solely scripture as the backbone of doctrine) seems to have been Luther’s genuine attempt at Reform, as in Reformation. Regardless of what it turned into, at the start, Luther seemed genuinely to be trying to save the Chruch from its own philosophical overreach, thinking to make guardrails out of Bible verses to ensure it didn’t come untethered from its roots. It was a noble effort, albeit a misguided one that led Luther into a certain kind of madness. Ultimately, The Reformation signaled an eternal break within The Western Church that has still not been healed and sent Europe spiraling into a century or more of war.
…
Why?
Well, because Sola Scriptura is impossible. It does not work. It is a man attempting to saw off the branch which he is sitting on. Catholics are correct to say that The Church came before the Bible, at least before the latter parts of it, and that it was The Church who decided what should and should not be included within its pages. In the first and second centuries there were dozens of Gospels, hundreds of claimed apostolic letters, thousands of claimed visions and prophecies and words from angels. It was The Church who ultimately waded through all those reams and reams of material and decided what counted as scripture and what didn’t. The Church who decided which of the many gospels were “true” and worthy of inclusion, and which weren’t. In that sense then it can be truly said that The Church has authority over The Bible because it authored it… or, you know, at least edited it all together. To spin that on its head and try to use the Bible as the measuring rod over and against The Church is a form of cannibalism. It is self-referential. The snake eating its own tail or the Excel spreadsheet trying to call itself. It would be like saying, “Tolkien can’t X because X is not included in The Lord or The Rings.” It’s nonsense.
Pious nonsense. But still nonsense.
Moreover, and perhaps even more problematically, in addition to being the authority which decided what was in The Bible, The Church had also always functioned as the Bible’s primary interpreter. It is, after all, a big book, and with a book so large one can easily pretend that it says almost anything. A little viewing some parts as allegory here, others as literal there, making this bit central to your worldview today and making that other bit a periphery note tomorrow…. you can twist The Bible into saying anything you want.
People have.
People do.
Satan quotes scripture for his own purposes.
The great strength of Catholicism, then and now, is that it provides an overarching hierarchy which can decide, by fiat, what the proper interpretations of scripture are. It is able to say to some things, “Yes, that is a good reading.” and, to others, “No, that is heretical.” That hierarchy is the buffer against the infinite multiplication of interpretation which has given rise to all of Protestantism’s many sects and divisions. A dam holding back the flood waters of the “personal revelations” of every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Joseph Smith.
…
And it would be great if it worked.
The Magisterium Doesn’t Work Either
In point of fact, in both practice and on paper, The Church has offered approximately zero dogmatic interpretations of any scripture whatsoever. A handful of verses here and there, maybe, have received a partial canonical explanation but, on the whole, despite the same scripture readings being held at every mass all around the world, what you’re going to be told they mean depends entirely on the personal interpretations of your local priest. I have been to conservative parishes where the priest roared fire and brimstone about abortion and homosexuals. Liberal ones where the priest assured us sexual mores were a thing of the past. I have heard a reading from Genesis followed with a homily about how we are, of course, a reasonable people that believes in evolution. Another, at another parish, followed by a dogged insistence that God created the universe in six twenty-four-hour days. If you want to be a hippy-dippy liberal Catholic, there is no shortage of priests and bishops and YouTube videos to encourage you on your way. If you want, instead, to take the Trad route and self-flagellate while groveling on your knees to some shrine so a monk can tell you you’re going to Hell… you can find ample support for that too. There are devotionals and radio programs for Catholics trying to get in tune with Eastern Spirituality and Yoga. Websites and groups for people who like to blend Catholicism with Marx. There is fascist Catholicism, with no shortage of the faithful in love with Franco. And, if you’d like to try pagan adjacent Catholicism and worship idols, oh… there are so many places in Mexico for you to go and worship an image of Death wrapped in a shawl.
There’s a Catholicism for everybody.
Truly, they mean it when they say that Catholic means “Universal.”
Importantly, most of these various “sects” within Catholicism will tell you with great gusto that they’re the ones doing it right and that the other folks are heretical. Marxist Catholics want to excommunicate everyone in Opus Dei. Opus Dei hates everyone in the clown masses. The clown mass people think the folks worshiping Death are creepy. The folks worshiping Death think the Catholics asking the Dalai Lama for advice are gay. Mind you, each sect can (and will if you ask) back up their position by citing all sorts of traditions or Church documents or by pointing to something that Aquinas said. As it turns out, if The Church produces enough paper over the centuries, then eventually you’re left with a compendium of doctrine large enough that it has the same Interpretation issue you were trying to get away from with The Bible. A giant book that can be interpreted however you want.
Ah.
Now we really have a mess. The Interpreter must itself be interpreted. But how? And by whom?
Glad you asked.
Sensing this problem, in the 1860s The Church held what has come to be known as “The First Vatican Council”, or, more succinctly, just “Vatican I.” Now, of course, I think The Church has seldom called any council to address only one issue, and many things, like the impending doom of The Papal States and the complete destruction of The Church as a military and political power, pressed the council to meet and make plans. All that said though, one of the issues at play was that, as the world was becoming more interconnected, the extreme variance in what “Catholicism” meant to people and cultures around the world was starting to become an issue. The Church realized that, in order to keep theological unity going into the 20th century, they would have to figure out a way of settling internal disputes on doctrinal and ecclesial matters. The powers of Interpretation that the Church had always been presumed to possess needed to be streamlined and made clearer and stronger. Vatican I “discovered”, by looking into its past and writing a lot of big philosophical words, that The Church had always had the ability to speak infallibly on matters of faith and morals… it just had frequently lacked the will to do so with sufficient clarity. To rectify this then, at Vatican I this power of The Church was formally declared to be vested in the position of The Pope.
…
See that problem over there?
Solved.
The Church interprets the Faith and the Bible. Great. But, as we’ve seen, who then interprets The Church? Answer: The Pope.
The Pope interprets the church.
Vatican I declared that The Pope, by virtue of the authority passed down to him by his predecessor Saint Peter, who received it from Jesus, could speak ex cathedra, meaning “from the chair,” i.e., from the metaphorical seat or position of Saint Peter. Whenever The Pope did so, his words were infallible.
And that was that.
There was never a doctrinal dispute in the Catholic Church ever again.
The end.
…
Wait. No. That’s in Fantasy Land. Sorry.
In the real world we quickly ran into another problem:
Who interprets The Pope?
Well, as it happens, dudes on podcasts.
Pope Splaining
The problem of “Authority” never stops actually. We’re just…
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