Communion by degree, revisited

Given recent events, I thought it worthwhile to re-issue this three-year-old post and ask for opinions from thoughtful Catholics.

Everybody knows—OK, almost everybody who reads this blog—that the American bishops lack a unitary policy about giving the Eucharist to Catholics who reject and/or disobey the definitive teaching of the Church. For even better-known reasons, that fact always comes to the fore in a general election. Now that Senator Joe Biden, a Catholic who is as pro-abortion-rights as he is anti-men's-rights, has "ascended to Barack Obama's right hand," the issue has resurfaced. As always, John Allen has instructive things to say. But the recurrence of this familiar issue in the news cycle has prompted me to connect it with another, broader one that tends to interest readers of this blog even more.

Like so many other such issues, the one I have in mind is ecclesiological: just what does being "in communion" with the Catholic Church consist in? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions? How and when are they met? And how, short of juridical excommunication, does a Catholic get herself out of communion with the Church? I once thought that debating such questions was just an arcane theological exercise, the sort that occupies people who don't have to worry about mere temporalities such as earning a living or changing diapers. But in fact it is anything but. The questions that arise here affect us all on the personal, pastoral, and political levels, which are intertwined in many ways. The issue is also very much an apologetical one. Since I can't do everything in one post, I shall focus on the issue mainly from that angle.

One thing that I've consistently observed since Vatican II is that many people, Catholics as much as non-Catholics, have the impression the Church's teaching on membership in the Church is, or rather has become, incoherent. It is widely believed that the Church once taught that you had to be what we'd now call a "card-carrying Catholic" to be saved—and even for those people, the prospects were pretty dicey. Being such a Catholic entailed being "in communion with" the Church of Rome. But having been exposed to Vatican II and ecumenism, many people now believe that the Church no longer teaches that. The general impression seems to be that the Church now teaches that you can squeak into heaven, perhaps by way of purgatory, just by avoiding the grossest and blackest forms of wickedness and being vaguely contrite, in the end, about one's preferred forms of wickedness—or at least about those which one has managed to recognize as such. From this point of view it hardly matters what religion you profess, or even whether you profess any at all.

Of course the above is a caricature I've devised for expository clarity. But it is not a terribly unfair caricature of how many people see these things. It is actually a reasonable summation of what I've been hearing for decades. And how such people see these things is not only wrong but terribly unfair to the Catholic Church, whose teaching on this subject is profound, nuanced, and still developing. Explaining why will help illustrate what being "in communion" with, and thus a member of, the Church actually means—and why that is important.

It is true that the Catholic Church has taught, with her full authority, the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus: "outside the Church, there is no salvation" ('EENS' for short). For people who care about such facts, I don't even need to document that. It is also true that Vatican II did not repeat the words of EENS, at least as a pastoral matter. For what the Council did say, I always urge people to read the documents, especially Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio. But for now, here are the three most pertinent statements (emphases added):

Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [this sacred Council] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation (LG §13).

Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church of God there arose certain rifts,(19) which the Apostle strongly condemned.(20) But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions made their appearance and quite large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church-for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame. The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection. For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect (UR §3).

Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience (LG §16).

The key development of doctrine here is this: those who are, for whatever reason, not culpable for failing to become formally members of the Catholic Church, can still be saved by responding positively to that grace, won by and coming from Christ, which is given to humanity in and through the Church, i.e. the Catholic Church. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church's explanation of EENS helps to make that clear.) The people so described are thus in "imperfect" communion with the Church. Being "in communion with" the Catholic Church thus is, or often can be, a matter of degree—just as the journey of the "pilgrim Church" herself toward eschatological fullness is a matter of degree. And if you are objectively inculpable for that degree's not being full, then you're "in," at least to a degree that can enable your salvation.

That matters a lot for ordinary pastoral practice, evangelization, and missionary activity—for only God can really know who is culpable and who isn't. But the idea of imperfect communion remains very controversial in some quarters, probably because it is so widely misunderstood.

It is often taken to mean that EENS has been, at least from the standpoint of logic, repudiated by the Catholic Magisterium. Of course I have vigorously argued that EENS has not been thus repudiated. My first formal argument to that effect was made in a 2006 post at the now-defunct version of Pontifications, where it evoked a combox running to well over 300 entries, many of which were scholarly. That post is preserved as the first dogma-specific entry in my long essay Development and Negation. The point the naysayers couldn't (or, in some cases, wouldn't) see was itself simple: it is one thing to say that there's no salvation outside the Church; it's another to say what being inside the Church can consist in. The former claim remains the teaching of the Church, now expressed by LG's formulation that she is "necessary for salvation." But the latter claim is that being in the Church, or at least being related to her in a salvific way, is often a matter of degree. That is a real development of insight into the fixed content of the deposit of faith.

What most interests me at the moment, however, is not how non-Catholics can be in some degree of communion with the Church, but how Catholics themselves can fail to in full communion—and why that matters.

The Eucharist is, among many other things, an expression of the intimate unity between God and his people, between Christ and the Church. As such and perforce, it is also an expression of the full unity of faith and graced fellowship among those who share it. So even American Catholics are taught, rightly and in considerable detail, that if they have sinned seriously in this-or-that way, they would be profaning the Eucharist by receiving it. That is because it is held, on the basis of Scripture and Tradition, that those who have abandoned their baptismal vocation by falling into mortal sin are no longer in full communion with the Church, and thus would be lying to the Church, and well as dishonoring the Body and Blood of the Lord, by receiving it into their bodies. Those who receive "unworthily" thus receive "unto their own condemnation" (cf. 1 Cor 11: 23-30). If they are thus and culpably not in full communion with the Church, they can be saved only if they repent. So much used to be taken for granted by Catholics in general, and still is in some quarters. Most Catholics know that, if they have committed sins such as adultery or grand larceny, they need to do something to reconcile with God and the Church.

Now even Catholics who only formally cooperate with grave and intrinsic evils, such as abortion, are committing what is, objectively speaking, serious sin. Hence and in particular, Catholic politicians who support laws giving wide scope to the practice of abortion are doing grave wrong. But it does not necessarily follow that they are guilty of that sin, so that they profane the Eucharist if and when they receive it. That follows only when (a) they are aware of how the teaching of the Church applies in this case, or (b) if they are unaware, they are culpable for being unaware. And the same holds for Catholics in general about any sort of serious sin, especially that of heresy. This is where the problem of pro-abort Catholic pols really arises from.

On a whole host of issues, mainly those having to do with sexuality, marriage, and procreation, many American Catholics do not actually believe the definitive teaching of the Church. And so, of course, they feel no obligation to live by it. The Catholic politicians they help elect are, by and large, no exception. The practical question which thus arises for the Church's pastors, especially the bishops, is whether such people should be presumed culpable for that or not, and thus whether they should be denied the Eucharist or not. In most cases, bishops and priests presume that people are not culpable for their infidelity to Church teaching. They presume either that people are approaching the Eucharist in good conscience or that it is not the role of pastors to judge the consciences of communicants when they march up to receive. And in the case of many ordinary Catholics, that presumption is correct. The depth of ignorance and deception among ordinary Catholics, which reached new lows in the decade or so after Vatican II, remains so great in many instances that such Catholics cannot be presumed culpable when, out of habit and sentiment, they receive the Eucharist. And so, even when such a Catholic is objectively culpable for not being in full communion with the Church, the appearance of full communion on their part is generally kept up.

Nevertheless, that poses a serious obstacle to evangelizing both ignorant Catholics and the culture at large. If, for what seem to be sound pastoral reasons, many Catholics who neither believe nor live by the moral teaching of the Church are receiving the Eucharist with apparent impunity, then how seriously are ordinary Catholics and the world at large to take such teaching? The general impression has become that such teaching is optional: a rather dismal section of the cafeteria line that one is free to bypass and that will, sooner or later, be tossed along with all the other food nobody buys. Thus the policy of keeping up appearances for the sake of pastoral economy has the effect of entrenching, on a wide scale, the very problem that occasioned the policy in the first place. And so, the preaching of the full Gospel has been largely buried under a collective rationalization. That, I am convinced, is the basis of most of the other problems in the American Catholic Church, including the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal that peaked five years ago. I blame the bishops for the fundamental problem as much as for its most egregious manifestation.

It can be argued that, given the sorry lack of adult catechesis, there is no practical alternative to the present policy of keeping up the appearance of full communion in the case of Catholics who are objectively not in full communion. That's what many bishops do argue, and the argument is cogent. One cannot just pick out, and pick on, the ordinary Catholics who are implicated in this mess. Most of them are not morally responsible for it, nor is it their role to clean it up. But one can and ought to pick out and pick on erring Catholics who have the education to know better and the power to affect a great many lives by their actions. I mean, of course, the Nancy Pelosis and the Joe Bidens. Archbishop Chaput has had some especially trenchant things to say about such people. If they have excuses, they shouldn't be left with them. Too much is at stake.

But there is a still-more fundamental problem here. Having acknowledged and taken into account the reality of imperfect communion for many non-Catholics, Rome must do the same for many Catholics, if only for self-consistency's sake. If she does so, as she has done for decades, she only reinforces the Church's internal problem for the reason I've already stated. If she does not, she becomes pastorally inconsistent: ecumenism will apply only to those who were never formally Catholic, so that we'll end up with a much smaller, if purer, Church. The Pope seems headed, slowly, in the latter direction. How he and his successors will carry on with it remains, however, an open question. In the meantime, the American bishops continue to disagree about how to handle the Pelosis and the Bidens. Maybe that's inevitable.

Either way, they should be more concerned with the formation of ordinary Catholic adults. Almost a decade ago, the USCCB produced a bracing document which points the way. Little has been done to implement it. I'm waiting with my resumé in hand.

Evolutionary theology

Yes, it feels like a so-bad-it's-good Chuck Norris movie. At the climax of yet another such flick, the words of the steely-eyed hero played by Chuck resounded in the villain’s head: “It’s time…to die.” The poor fellow promptly turned around to see Chuck fire a live RPG into him. In tackling the subject to which my title alludes, I feel like that villain. I can sense some combat-hardened defender of orthodoxy behind me, ready to fire his overkill and watch me blow up. The time has come to address the subject; indeed, that time is overdue in the Church. But at least I’m not the villain of the piece, and the conversation will continue regardless.

I do, after all, have a legion of well-intentioned company. A few weeks ago, as my radio droned over my chores, I heard Barbara Bradley Hagerty conducting an NPR piece that their webmaster entitles “Evangelicals Question the Existence of Adam and Eve.” At first, I rolled my mind’s eyes: Since when is it news that not all evangelicals, never mind other sorts of Christian, are fundamentalists?  Of course it’s possible for a faithful Christian to doubt that the first several chapters of Genesis are literal history. E.g., the chronological order of creation described in the first chapter does not square with that of the second—a fact that surely cannot have escaped the notice of whoever first put these stories together in a single written text. And many scholars, including one Joseph Ratzinger, have pointed out the similarities between Genesis and Babylonian myth. As a Catholic, I tend to think of the first eleven chapters of Genesis as myths and legends given a distinctive theological interpretation in their divinely inspired, written form. What’s important is not that they be history as the modern mind understands that genre, but that their theological interpretation be—well, divinely revealed truth. That, to be sure, must bear some relationship to what literally happened in the past. But it’s not clear exactly what that is, and it’s doubtful that we can ever get clear enough about it to satisfy intellectual curiosity. I’m far from alone in that attitude, not only among Catholics but among Christians generally.

But despite my inclination to let the matter rest there, other Catholics won’t. I’ve noticed over the years that whenever the question of humanity’s origins comes up, many thoughtful Catholics will take the evolution of the body for granted (as did Pope John Paul II), but all will zero in on the question of monogenism.

Last week, e.g., science writer John Farrell observed on his blog at Forbes.com:

The question arises: Can theology adapt to the findings of science? Can the strict monogenism of the human race as traditionally understood by Christians, be modified to the scientific consensus that the human species originated in a small population, not a single couple? In famous cases, of course, such as the trial of Galileo, and acceptance of the reality of heliocentrism, the answer is yes, though it took the Catholic Church a long time to officially come around. But as Coyne points out, the erosion of the idea that the human race descended from a single couple is something that is much more necessary to the theology of salvation in Christian tradition than is the issue of, say, whether God really made the sun stand still for Joshua and the Israelites. Christians have for centuries adapted to a more allegorical interpretation of many books in the Old Testament. But not the Book of Genesis and its account of the Fall and Expulsion from Eden.

The question at issue here is really dual: Did the human race today descend from a single couple? And: Is an affirmative answer to that question necessary for preserving Catholic soteriology? From a scientific standpoint, the first question seems to be settled in the negative. Many faithful Catholics think the second is settled in the affirmative. So, to that extent, we have a conflict. Farrell worries that the Catholic Church has not tried to resolve the conflict. He’s right to worry, for the conflict is a serious test of faith for many educated Catholics.

At the magisterial level, the only explicit treatment of the matter we find is Pope Pius XII’s  1950 encyclical Humani Generis. Here’s the passage Farrell quotes, like many others before him:

For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

That came partly in response to the speculations of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who indeed had little compunction about coloring outside the lines of orthodoxy. The Vatican, needless to say, was not pleased. Even today, most champions of orthodoxy believe that Pius XII settled the matter in favor of monogenism, “science” be damned. But I’m not so sure about that.

Since I’m not a scientist, and my academic credentials are not in theology, I’m not the one to solve the problem. But I suggest that, to make progress, we should first ask whether the conflict is real or apparent, temporary or permanent. For answers, there are three basic options:

1. The conflict is real and permanent: the “surrender” option.
2. The conflict is real but temporary: the “truce” option.
3. The conflict is only apparent: the “creative” option.

WWhich option is the faithful Catholic to take?  Clearly not (1). Since the Church has long insisted that “reason” and “faith” complement rather than contradict each other, surrendering the confirmed results of natural science to theological dogma on this point is not an option. So the debate among thoughtful Catholics is really about whether to embrace (2) or (3). Do we settle for a temporary truce, waiting science out a while longer? Or do we take the present results of science for granted as a point of departure for some creative theological re-thinking?

It’s tempting to go for (2). Science does develop and change, after all. Prima facie, waiting science out still seems to be the Vatican’s preferred route. Largely for that reason, it is the preferred route of orthodoxy’s champions. But after six decades of scientific progress since Humani Generis, continued silence on their part is a theological and apologetical embarrassment. What, then, can be done with the creative option while remaining within the bounds of orthodoxy?

As a philosopher, my instinct is to look for the logical wiggle-room. And in Pius XII’s words, that’s what we find. To be sure, it is irreformable dogma that an individual couple committed the first sin and transmitted the resulting loss of grace to their descendants as “original” sin. With the usual two exceptions understood, those descendants are all of us. But a conflict with current science arises only if we assume that the “generation” by which original sin is transmitted logically entails that a first couple, Adam and Eve, were the first humans in a purely natural sense, i.e. the genetic sense. Nothing in magisterial documents requires adopting that assumption. So it is no more theologically irreformable than scientifically defensible. We may and should dispense with it.

Why not hold instead that Adam and Eve—whoever they really were, and wherever they really lived—were the first humans in a supernatural sense? As a couple, they were the first people to be called and elevated by grace to a state of fellowship with God meant to culminate in a greater union with him. That doesn’t entail that they were genetically the first humans. It entails only that they were the first humans God gave a destiny beyond Nature. So when they sinned and lost his grace, they largely reverted to Nature, which is the state all of us since then find ourselves in until we are somehow incorporated into Christ.

Of course such a proposal raises many questions. There are always questions, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But centuries ago, the Church slowly came to see that affirming biblical inerrancy did not entail rejecting heliocentrism. It is not unreasonable to imagine her coming to see that affirming monogenism need not entail rejecting evolutionary biology.

OK, time to duck the RPGs….

The argument from desire

As I waded this morning through my overwhelming social-network streams—all of which now integrate into my single Google+ stream—I managed to notice somebody quoting C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." Both in context and in general, that is the nucleus of an argument for the existence of God. Seeing a token of it revived my memory of having found the argument persuasive when I read the book in my teens. I still believe the argument has potential: more than even theists generally acknowledge.

Of course modern and post-modern Western minds scoff.  The only difference between the modern and post-modern minds is that the latter is more consistently cynical, and even that difference does not obtain here. And for good reason: If only for maturation's sake, we are taught not to assume that desiring X is evidence that X exists to satisfy the desire. I desire freedom from death, or failing that, freedom from the natural consequences of sexual license; yet as they're fond of saying in the South, that ain't gonna happen. (The South has some wonderful sayings, such as "Y'cain't win fer losin'...") I desire that the tree in my yard grow money, but that ain't gonna happen either—and if it did, the government and my ex would find a way to get most of it anyhow. We all know that we can and why we should outgrow desires we know cannot be satisfied.

But can we or should we outgrow what the Germans call sehnsucht?  I mean what Lewis meant:

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.

We've all experienced that. But most of us can't name the desire itself, still less its object; and as we age, most of us tend to forget it. We assume it's the fantasy of children and poets, and fear that dwelling on it would inhibit the "real" business of life. Indeed, as Lewis taught us, even the experience of it cannot be summoned up by wishing or seeking. And so it would seem that sehnsucht tells us nothing about any "beyond." For many of those capable of even discussing the matter, sehnsucht is just part of our makeup, full stop. Perhaps it's our brain chemistry. As such, it may have "adaptive" value, by virtue of causing some people to believe that all the pain and suffering of life is worthwhile in terms of a beautiful Reality beyond what the world has to offer. Such a belief motivates many to carry on and stay relatively sane. But sehnsucht is not, really, evidence of any such Reality. Or is it?

Like Lewis, I think it is. I have always thought so. In general, natural, inescapable desires for good things can and should be satisfied. We have natural, inescapable desires for food, sleep, sex, play, knowledge, beauty, and many other generic goods. It is natural for us to love—even to love specific people, such as our children. Under certain conditions, all the aforementioned goods are available; under certain conditions, we should seek and attain them; when we do, we enjoy them. Why should that natural, inescapable desire called sehnsucht be any different? Is there any reason to believe that "reality" ultimately frustrates that longing, that what's longed for cannot be named because it does not exist? Of course it's logically possible that sehnsucht is futile at the end of the day, or of life; but what's actually the case is only a small subset of what's logically possible, and much more interesting.

One can rule out such an "argument from desire" by stipulating that only what can be known scientifically can be known at all, and thus can be safely said to exist at all. But scientism would have us believe, like Bertrand Russell, that we are evolutionary experiments doomed to frustration and oblivion. To my mind, and that of most of the human race, nihilism is unreasonable as well as boring. Trust your sehnsucht instead. It's the reasonable thing to do.

Organizing apologetics

Perhaps I'm weird, but I must admit that, even when I was alienated from the Catholic Church in youth, I never had any principled difficulty with the faith/reason relation. I always took for granted that the two are compatible, even before I learned that the Church teaches as much. Of course, and like most other thoughtful people, I did have difficulties with certain specific issues. But the Catholic Church has shown, at least to me, that she has means to address such issues reasonably without compromising what she says is de fide.

As we all know, though, more than half the Christian world disagrees. I say "more than half" because, even though about half of all Christians were baptized in the Catholic Church, many educated Catholics reject what I've just said the Church has shown me. The two most common objections to Catholicism one hears from educated Christians, including some who are nominally Catholic, are: (1) Distinctively Catholic doctrines are not rationally necessitated by the early sources, and so shouldn't be thought to belong to divine revelation as distinct from human tradition, and (2) The course of Catholic doctrinal development yields internal inconsistency at the highest level, so that the Church's claim to infallibility--even under limited conditions--is not credible. It might be useful to others for me to state here, in baldest outline, what I offer as answers to such objections. Such a way of organizing the arguments, if sound and taken to heart, would save a lot of people a lot of wheel-spinning.

(1) misconceives the nature of divine revelation and the assent of faith thereto. Divine revelation does not consist primarily in a set of propositions to be inferred from writings and other evidence from the past. Such things, to be sure, are indispensable for preserving the Church's collective memory of what's been handed on by the Spirit through Sacred Tradition. Yet at bottom, what's handed on is the reality of the decisive encounter between God and man in Christ Jesus. Forms of words, archeological evidence, comparative religion, and so on merely help express that. Now if Christianity is true, then by God's design, the ongoing encounter between God and man takes place through something called "the Church" even though, as is the case with many who hear the call to faith in Christ, it needn't start in the Church. Yet without being in any way limited to the authority of the Church, said encounter always and necessarily depends on a visible, clearly identifiable ecclesial authority which exercises God's own authority as revealer and sanctifier. For without such an authority, the content and power of divine revelation would end up appearing only as a matter of opinion. That, for us, would be no revelation at all, and assent to it, such as it is, would be no faith at all. Despite how different they are in many respects, Aquinas and Newman made essentially that argument. Following them, it's one that I've long made myself.

What about (2)? As an argument, it begs the question either at the outset or in the end. In some formulations it premises, as the only reasonable ones to adopt, interpretations of Catholic doctrine that yield contradictions. But if the Magisterium's claims for itself are true, said premise is false. There must be other reasonable interpretations of Catholic doctrine that are collectively self-consistent, and those turn out to be just the ones the Magisterium itself, the author of the doctrines in dispute, has come to adopt. Given as much, the objector needs to show that interpretations yielding contradictions are ones that the Magisterium itself once adopted, and did so in such a way that its own criteria for infallibility were thereby satisfied. But those who press (2) usually don't try to show that. When they do, they end up begging the question all over again—by assuming a way of applying the criteria for infallibility that the Magisterium itself would reject.

Now it should go without saying, but often needs to be said, that successfully rebutting (1) and (2) does not prove Catholicism to be true. Indeed, given the Catholic understanding of how reason and faith are interrelated, nothing could "prove" Catholicism to be true. Faith is a divine gift that can only be accepted freely. If there were compelling arguments for Catholicism, then those who recognize as much would be compelled to believe, which is not faith. The role of reason in coming to faith is to show that faith is fully compatible with reason, not that reasoning compels it. That, of course, does not rule out the possibility that there are compelling arguments against Catholicism. But it is precisely the task of apologetics to show that there are no such arguments. In this post I've sketched two examples of how to carry out that task. I've elaborated those examples elsewhere, especially on this blog.

Is there development of doctrine in the New Testament?

To some theologians--mostly modern biblical theologians--the answer is obviously yes. See, e.g., the late Raymond E. Brown's Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, a fairly middle-of-the-road view of the matter by a pre-eminent Catholic scholar. To others, the answer is equally obviously no. In their view, the New Testament records divine revelation, so that even if revelation itself was progressive during the time recorded in the NT, the very category of development of doctrine is simply inapplicable to the Bible. Rather than rehash that impasse, though, I'd suggest this: assuming that the Bible records, in written form, the unfolding of the definitive events of divine revelation to humanity, the pattern of that unfolding tells us a lot about how we, as church and as individuals, come to understand it more fully over time. And the means by which the Church comes to state her understanding achieved over time just is development of doctrine.

I should think such a principle underlies the ubiquitous and salutary use of Scripture to gain insight into what God does within our own lives as Christians. But on a more abstract level, we can see the same principle at work in doctrine. Consider the following passage from a long essay that I don't agree with on every point, but certainly agree with on the present point:

A good example of the Church’s authority, and of Tradition in action helping to develop a doctrine not formally presented in the Scriptures of the time, is the Council of Jerusalem, and the debate over whether believers needed to be circumcised. Acts 15 describes how the leadership of the Church, the apostles and elders, met in Jerusalem to discuss whether the flood of gentile converts to the Church needed to be circumcised. If the decision was to be based on the plain text of Scripture, they would have unrolled their Scriptures and seen that God gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision as an “everlasting covenant” (Gen 17:7, 10). They would have seen that circumcision, the sign of the covenant, applied not just to Abraham’s descendants but to those who were “not of your offspring” (Gen 17:12), those who wished to join the covenant by conversion (Ex 12:48). They would have seen that all the Patriarchs were circumcised, that Moses was circumcised and the covenant renewed and reinforced in the Law (Lev 12:3), and that all the prophets, all the apostles, and Jesus himself were circumcised (Luke 2:21). They would also have recalled that Jesus said not one jot or tittle of the Law would pass away (Matt 5:18).

In spite of all this, the Council declares that Gentile converts did not have to be circumcised. The unwritten apostolic Tradition (paradosis, in Greek) plays a big part in determining how the Scriptural information is interpreted. There was the paradosis of Jesus’ command to preach the Gospel to all nations (Matt 28:19), the paradosis of Peter’s revelation from the Holy Spirit not to call unclean what God has made clean (Acts 10:15), the experience of Paul and Barnabas in their work with the Gentiles (Acts 15:12), and of Philip with the Samaritans (Acts 8:5-6) and with the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:28-38). Peter stands up at the Council and appeals to the apostolic authority delegated to him by Christ and tells how God showed his acceptance of the Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit and purifying their hearts by faith. It’s not until the end of the Council that James quotes from Scripture (Acts 15:16-18, cf Amos 9:11-12). Scripture is seen to agree with the Church’s authoritative judgement (“with this the words of the prophets agree”, Acts 15:15), but is not necessarily used to determine the Church’s judgement.

The point of all this is that the Council of Jerusalem, just like the Catholic Church, views Scripture in the context of the Church’s Tradition and magisterial, apostolic authority. All of the Church’s doctrinal developments proceed in a similar fashion. Each development has a basis in Scripture, either explicit, or in implicit, “mustard seed” form, and the connection of the text to the doctrine is most clearly seen when the Bible is read in the light of the apostolic Tradition.

What's significant here is that one could not have deduced, just by formal logic, the decision of the Apostles from the sources available to them. They used both biblia and paradosis: both what they knew as "Scripture" at that time and what they knew as "tradition," i.e. what else was "handed down" to them at the time from the Lord. Given that combination, their decision was reasonable. But even granted as much, it was not rationally necessitated even by the combination of sources available to them. If it had been, there would have been no dispute requiring a "council." The decision was one to which they were led by the Spirit: "It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us..." Yet the influence of the Holy Spirit did not violate reason; for given what the Apostles took as the sources of divine revelation, pre-eminently Jesus Christ himself, they interpreted biblia and paradosis in a way that harmonized an apparent conflict between them.

That, I should think, is the model of how doctrinal disputes can and ought to be resolved even today. Of course, appealing to that model is not, by itself, going to solve the fundamental disagreement between Catholics and magisterial Protestants about the nature and locus of ecclesial authority. But I think the model itself is one piece of the truth about how we come to understand divine revelation over the centuries. I think so because, as I argued in my hoary doctoral thesis, the primary sense of 'mystery' is the notion that certain realities can be intelligibly explained without being necessitated by what must be cited to explain them.

Bad arguments against the Magisterium: Part III A

In a previous post entitled Bad Arguments against the Magisterium, Part III, I mostly introduced and quoted Prof. Bryan Cross' article The Tu Quoque. What is "the tu quoque" here? It's an argument that's become very popular among Protestants of all stripes who argue online against Catholicism, and Bryan sums it up crisply, as well as doing a good job of rebutting it. It's the argument that Catholicism, with its reliance on ecclesial infallibility for distinguishing between what's de fide and what's tentative opinion, leaves the Catholic in no better a position to make such a distinction than the Protestant does without claiming ecclesial infallibility; therefore, there's no "need" for the rather arrogant claim that the Church is preserved from error by the Spirit when teaching with her full authority. And as the comboxes at various blogs indicate, the critics aren't convinced by Bryan's rebuttal. So, I propose here to narrow down the issue for general consideration. I hope that such a contribution can minimize the wheel-spinning and isolate the issue most worth debating.

As I survey the stories told by by various intellectual converts, either to Catholicism or to this-or-that version of Protestantism, I am struck by a common theme: Intelligent, well-informed people can study the same historical and theological sources, and be motivated to do so by the same troubling questions, and yet come to mutually incompatible conclusions about how to interpret the data so as to answer the questions. The question then arises: how is one to tell the difference between conclusions that are only personal opinions, and conclusions that actually express the assent of faith as distinct from opinion? My argument for years has been that, if the Protestant hermeneutical paradigm were correct, then one would have no principled way to tell the difference, whereas if the Catholic HP is correct, one does have such a way. And I take it as self-evident that such is a reason to prefer the Catholic HP. For if one cannot come up with a principled way to tell the difference, then one cannot explain how the assent of faith is different from that of human opinion; and if one cannot do that, then one cannot say how what one is assenting to is the deposit of faith itself, as distinct from a set of human opinions about how to interpret the alleged "sources"--i.e., Scripture, Tradition, and history.

But how do I make that argument? This is the place to sum up, both for intrinsic clarity and for further refinement in light of criticism, what I've been trying to do for all these years.

First, what is the difference between what I call the Protestant "hermeneutical paradigm" and the Catholic? The difference lies not in the starting point, the terminus a quo, of the inquiry into which version of Christianity to adopt; the difference does not even lie in the intellectual methods one uses to conduct the inquiry. The difference lies in the terminus ad quem, the conclusion: the sort of assent rendered by the inquirer who ends up becoming Catholic, and the sort of assent rendered by the inquirer who ends up becoming Protestant (or changing his allegiance from one brand of Protestantism to another).

The Catholic assents to the claim made by a visible body, physically and historically continuous with the apostolic church, that she is preserved by the Holy Spirit from teaching with her full authority what is false. On this HP, the difference between what's de fide and what isn't is to be determined by the criteria the Church employs to distinguish between what's taught with her full authority and what isn't. Thus, if a given proposition P is taught with the Church's full authority, then P is de fide, and the assent one renders to it is the assent of faith as distinct from opinion. But the Protestant assents to no claim of ecclesial infallibility, for no Protestant church makes such a claim. Despite all the various and sometimes radical differences between Protestant traditions and denominations, that much at least is essential to the Protestant HP. Thus for the Protestant as such, whatever collectivity is supposed to count as "the Church"--which is by no means always clear--could always be wrong in the doctrinal conclusions she draws from the pertinent sources. What follows from the difference between these two types of assent is this: in the final analysis, the Catholic treats the Church as the measure of his orthodoxy; whereas the Protestant treats his own judgment as the measure of his church's orthodoxy.

Now if one holds that both "the Church" and the individual are always fallible, and thus could always be wrong, then the assent one renders to doctrinal statements is always tentative and subject to substantive revision. Statements assented to only tentatively, left subject to substantive revision, cannot be clearly distinguished from human opinions--at least in theology, as distinct from, say, mathematics or natural science. Accordingly, on the Protestant HP, the assent of faith cannot be clearly distinguished from that of opinion. And if that's so, then we don't know when what we're assenting to is a true expression of divine revelation, as opposed to a merely human way of interpreting the sources. This was essentially Newman's point a century-and-a-half ago, when he argued: "No revelation is given, unless there be some authority to decide what is given."

To that extent at least, the Catholic makes a claim to objectivity that the Protestant does not and cannot. The question then becomes: Why is not the pivotal claim made within the Catholic HP just as much an "opinion" as any made within the Protestant HP--whether we're talking Reformed, Lutheran, or free-church Protestantism?  After all, the scholarly inquirer who ends up becoming Catholic follows pretty much the same methods of inquiry as the one who ends up becoming Protestant. So why pretend that their respective modes of assent at the conclusion of such inquiry are any different? Isn't the truth of Catholicism every bit as much a matter of opinion as that of some-or-other version of Protestantism?

Well, from within the Protestant HP, the only possible answer to that question is "yes." If no particular doctrinal confession is divinely preserved from error, then all such confessions are on a roughly equal epistemological footing, None can present themselves as anything more than tentative and debatable opinions, even granted that some such opinions are more plausible than others from a scholarly point of view. That is why those still in the grip of the Protestant HP cannot help making, and believing, the tu quoque argument. Yet, from with the Catholic HP, there is the very difference I've described, and the difference cannot be fairly dismissed merely by asserting the inevitability of the Protestant HP, as if that HP were self-evident. So the question at hand morphs into another: what grounds are there for preferring one HP to the other?

That is an inescapably philosophical question. I believe it's best answered by comparing assent to religious doctrines with assent to those scientific generalizations which we call "laws of nature."

As an exercise of human reason which does not require any alleged divine revelation for its premises, natural science formulates hypotheses and theories, tests them, and comes to tentative conclusions about which of them are true. Judging from its success in prediction and technological development, we are justified in claiming that science comes up with statements which there is no rationally plausible alternative to affirming. Thus, e.g., no sane person doubts either the fact of gravity or the utility of what are experimentally confirmed as the "laws" of gravity. Of course such "laws" always remain subject to refinement and recontextualizing based on further research whose outcome, as the history of science shows, cannot be clearly predicted. Scientific "laws" are not inerrant and scientists are not infallible, for no mere exercise of human reason is preserved from error by God or anybody else. But granted as much, it is safe to say that the scientific enterprise, as that has come to be understood in modern times, discovers objective truths it would be unreasonable to deny.

Now what about religious doctrines allegedly expressing realities specially revealed by a God assumed to be, himself, infallible? Are they like scientific laws, in that there is no rational basis for denying them even though they are never infallibly set forth? Clearly not. Whether we're talking Catholicism, Protestantism, or any other "revealed" religion, human reason alone cannot come up with a rationally compelling case for accepting them--granted, as I grant, that human reason in the form of "apologetics" can defend assent to some of them as rationally plausible. If human reason could come up with a rationally compelling case for any tenet of faith, then the tenet would be one of reason, not of faith. So the main basis for accepting this-or-that version of revealed religion is not anything we can discover by a purely rational methodology. That basis must be freely chosen trust in some authority, or ensemble of authorities, that such-and-such doctrinal statements are true expressions of divine revelation. To be sure, the case for putting trust in some such authorities would be the basis for depicting assent to its doctrinal statements as reasonable. But 'reasonable' cannot be equated with 'compelled by considerations of reason alone'.

Now here's the problem: If one's HP rules out one's being able to distinguish, in a principled way, statements that are de fide from statements that only express human interpretations of what are taken as the relevant sources, then one rules out being able to identify any alleged religious authority as having any greater authority than that of tentative human opinion. Thus the authority, if any, is not the sort of authority that's needed and sought. And that holds as much for Scripture as for anything called "the Church." For unless one knows by what authority a certain collection of writings is to be understood as the "inerrant" Word of God, as distinct from merely a record of what various people thought, said, and did about God, then affirming scriptural inerrancy can only appear as just one opinion among others. This is why many Protestants deny scriptural inerrancy, and why those who affirm it disagree radically among themselves about which doctrinal statements can legitimately be derived from Scripture. On the Protestant HP, in which the individual is the ultimate judge of the orthodoxy of "the Church," there is no way in principle to distinguish a set of doctrines that bears the stamp of divine authority from a set which this-or-that individual happens to believe, on the basis of his own inquiries, bears such a stamp.

Now I've seen many Protestants grant as much. In effect, that's exactly what any Protestant grants just by making the tu quoque argument. For anybody who grants that, however, religion just reduces to a matter of opinion. I don't think I need belabor why at this point. In my experience, the difference between a conservative Protestant and a liberal Protestant is that the latter recognizes and embraces that consequence, whereas the former either fails to recognize it or, if he does, is unhappy with it. For anybody who thinks that divine revelation ought to be identified and understood by means that transcend human opinion, that is a reason to prefer the Catholic HP.

Bad arguments against the Magisterium: Part III

Before I suspended this blog last August, I posted the first two parts of this series, whose purpose was of course to rebut the arguments being cited. At the end of Part II, I issued no promise to do further installments, because I wasn't sure which of the many fallacies out there would interest my readers. But now I've found one: the ol' tu quoque (Latin for 'you too').

I often comment over at Called to Communion, a website managed by former Reformed guys, mostly philosophers and ex-clerics, who seek to present Catholic truth in a way that they hope would be persuasive to some of their erstwhile co-religionists. The project is impressive. Some of the longer articles are of peer-review quality and are developing what is, in effect, a Catholic ecclesiology framed to address directly the issues of most concern to "confessional" Protestants. Other articles are more polemical, usually rebutting some Protestant objection that was, or has become, standard. I once thought I'd heard them all in my time, but I soon learned at C2C that I haven't. The most interesting I've heard lately is framed, for purposes of rebuttal, by Bryan Cross in his article The Tu Quoque.

To present the issue fairly, I must quote the first three paragraphs of his post in full, but without the footnotes you can track at C2C:

In various places I have argued previously that without apostolic succession, creeds and confessions have no actual authority. They have no actual authority apart from apostolic succession because without apostolic succession the only available basis for a creed or confession’s authority is the individual’s agreement with the interpretation of Scripture found in that creed or confession. Each person picks the confession of faith that most closely represents his own interpretation of Scripture. If his interpretation of Scripture happens to change, he is not bound by his prior choice of confession; rather, he simply picks a different confession that more closely matches his present interpretation. I have described this as painting one’s magisterial target around one’s interpretive arrow, i.e. the practice of choosing and grounding magisterial authority based on its agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture.

But an important principle regarding authority is this: “When I submit only when I agree, the one to whom I submit is me.” In other words, agreement with oneself cannot be the basis for authority over oneself. Therefore a creed or confession’s agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture cannot be the basis for its authority. And this is why without apostolic succession, creeds or confessions have no actual authority. That is a simple overview of the authority argument.

The primary objection to this argument is the tu quoque [lit. you too] objection, namely, that the person who becomes Catholic upon determining that the Catholic Church is the Church that Christ founded is doing so because the Catholic Church most closely conforms to his own interpretation of Scripture, history and tradition. In other words, in choosing to become Catholic, he has simply chosen the ‘denomination’ that best conforms to his own interpretation of Scripture, tradition and history. Hence if Protestant confessions have no authority over the individual Protestant because Protestants select them on the basis of their conformity to their own interpretation of Scripture, then neither does the Catholic Church have any authority over the person who becomes Catholic, because Catholics select the Catholic Church on the basis of its agreement with their own interpretation of Scripture, history, and tradition. But if choosing the Catholic Church on the basis of one’s own interpretation of Scripture, history, and tradition does not undermine the authority of the Catholic Church, then neither does choosing a Protestant confession on the basis of one’s own interpretation of Scripture undermine that Protestant confession’s authority. In other words, just as the person becoming Catholic claims to have discovered that those in the magisterium of the Catholic Church are the successors of the Apostles, and thereby bearing divine authority, so the person adopting a Protestant confession believes he has discovered that this particular confession is in agreement with Scripture, and thus that this confession derives its authority from Scripture. But if picking a confession on the basis of its agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture entails that this confession has no authority over oneself, then picking the Catholic Church on the basis of its agreement with one’s own interpretation of history, tradition and Scripture entails that the Catholic Church has no authority over oneself. In short, the conclusion of the tu quoque objection is that either the Catholic Church likewise has no authority, or the Protestant confessions can truly have authority.

Bryan's formulation is fair, at least judging by how I've seen the objection pressed by Protestant apologists at various blogs and websites, including some Reformed commenters at C2C itself. It counts as an argument against the Magisterium because, if sound, it shows that assenting to the Magisterium's claim to infallibility is epistemically no different from subscribing to some Protestant confession.

Of course the objection is unsound, and Bryan's post goes on to do a good job of showing why. So his rebuttal is what I offer you as the remainder of this post.

The concept of "evidence" for divine miracles

Over at What's Wrong with the World, Lydia McGrew announces:

For a limited time only (get yours while supplies last) a draft is available on my personal web site of "History and Theism: Epistemology, Miracles, and the God Who Speaks." This article will eventually appear in a forthcoming Routledge Companion to Theism, edited by Charles Taliaferro and Victoria Harrison. The contributors' articles are due by November of this year, but the release date has not been specified, as far as I know.

I urge my philosophically educated readers to download and read this fine draft for themselves, while they can, before the final product is "entombed" (Lydia's word) in an academic anthology that only the better university libraries can afford. Perhaps my reflections on her thoughts will encourage such readers to do that.

What interests me about Lydia's paper is that it addresses a nest of issues that are practically important and that I've discussed before on blogs, here and there, with Lydia herself and with philosophy professor Scott Carson—who has his own blog too, though it's lain fallow for a while. I have good reason to consider both people friends: they have been immensely kind and generous to me in private correspondence even though, for annoyingly contingent reasons, I have never met either of them in person. Perhaps that's one way the Lord is being merciful to them. In any case, I have disagreed with them both on this topic before. (To be fair, I generally share Scott's skepticism about the value, either scientific or philosophical, of intelligent-design theory, even though Lydia does not.) But the three of us each disagree with one other about the extent to which miracles can be rationally identified as such. My last response to Scott on that issue is here; my discussions with Lydia on related issues are scattered throughout the comboxes at W4 and hence are not worth hunting down. I'm intrigued by the extent to which classical-theist philosophers who are also tradition-minded Christians manage to disagree so strongly with one another about this nest of issues.

This is not to say that I disagree with the main thrust of Lydia's article. I think she does a good job of showing, pace many liberal Protestants and Catholics, that once can reasonably identify some event as a miraculous revelation of God's nature and purposes without being fideistic, unhistorical, or anti-scientific. In my opinion, of course, neither historical nor scientific methods of investigation can ever suffice to demonstrate that some observed or observable event is a miraculous revelation. But in some cases at least, such methods can make it reasonable to believe that certain reports are in fact reports of miraculous events revelatory of God and his purposes. On this question, I stand midway between fideists and rationalists, which seems to satisfy neither Scott nor Lydia.

The most intriguing part of Lydia's paper consists in her reply to philosopher of science Elliot Sober, who argued that theists who want to present certain events are miraculous in the relevant sense face a dilemma. Although Sober's argument is directed explicitly only against intelligent-design theory, his argument can be generalized to miracles.

Sober presents his opponents, tacitly, with a dilemma--either the theistic hypothesis is completely uninformative about the evidence (and therefore cannot be the best explanation of the evidence) or it is ad hoc.

"The problem" [says Sober] "is that the design hypothesis confers a probability on the observation only when it is supplemented with further assumptions about what the designer’s goals and abilities would be if he existed....There are as many likelihoods as there are suppositions concerning the goals and abilities of the putative designer. Which of these, or which class of these, should we take seriously?"

"It is no good answering this question by assuming that the eye was built by an intelligent designer and then inferring that the designer must have wanted to give the eye features F1 ... Fn and must have had the ability to do so since, after all, these are the features we observe. For one thing, this pattern of argument is question-begging. One needs independent evidence as to what the designer’s plans and abilities would be if he existed...."

"This objection to the design argument is...continuous with the precepts of “negative theology,” which holds that God is so different from us and the world we already know about that it is impossible for us to have much of a grasp of what his characteristics are....We are invited...to imagine a designer who is radically different from the human craftsmen we know about. But if this designer is so different, why are we so sure that this being would build the vertebrate eye in the form in which we find it?" (Sober 2007, pp. 10-11)

Just before this passage, Sober merely says that we need to have “an argument that shows that this probability [that design gives to the observation] is indeed higher than the probability that Chance confers on the observation.” But elsewhere, his demands are less modest.

Sober’s approach involves making a clear separation between a “main hypothesis”--for example, that God exists--and “auxiliary assumptions,” which he says in theistic design inferences must be assumptions about what God’s goals and abilities would be if he existed. (Sober focuses most on the problem of knowing God’s goals, since he acknowledges [2007, p. 13] that the God of traditional theism is usually assumed to be omnipotent.) Repeatedly, Sober claims that one must have independent, solid support for these auxiliaries. Just a few pages after the more modest characterization of his requirement, he ups the ante, implying that we must be able to “justify [auxiliary assumptions] independently” (Sober 2007, p. 13). Elsewhere he endorses as normal scientific practice the use of auxiliary assumptions that scientists “already have good reason to think are true” (Sober 1999, p. 54). He also characterizes his position as “the demand that one have independent reason to think that one’s auxiliary assumptions are true” (Sober 1999, p. 57), he says that “testing the design hypothesis requires that we have information about the goals and abilities the designer would have, if he existed” (Sober 1999, p. 54), and, in his most recent work on the subject, he states that one hypothesis can be tested against another only if there exist true auxiliary assumptions which we are “now justified in believing” (Sober 2008, p. 152). These are very strong requirements for independently justified information about the Divine mind.

And Lydia goes on to show, convincingly, that Sober's requirements are unreasonably strong, so that the dilemma he poses is an artificial one which the theist need not take seriously.

So far, so good. But my question for Lydia has always been the same, and remains so here: granted that one can show it reasonable to believe in miracles, at least in the relevant sense, we should we regard some of the arguments for miracles as strong enough to make it unreasonable to deny one or more of them?

Lydia seems to think they should be, at least if her comments in the combox to her announcement are any indication.  But I have never found that convincing, at least as a general proposition, as distinct from a proposition about special experiences available only to very few people, such as Saul on the road to Damascus. Certainly, she and her husband Tim have gone to great lengths to show, using sophisticated probability theory, that the case for the Resurrection is very strong. And I have long granted that, if what they treat as their historical dataset should be treated as, itself, veridical, their inductive case for the Resurrection is powerful enough to make it unreasonable to deny the Resurrection. But that of course is a big 'if'. For the conceptions of scientific and historical methodology to which their opponents severally adhere would not justify taking the data as veridical to the degree the McGrews do. It is reasonable, of course, to reject such conceptions; but it is by no means evidently unreasonable to accept them. What goes for the central miracle of the Resurrection goes a fortiori for other reported miracles taken to confirm specifically Christian faith.

Why can't God do his best?

The notion that this is the best of all possible worlds (BAPW) is like a pesky kid brother who thinks he belongs with your crowd: one of those aggravating philosophical conceits that just won't go away. Those who have studied some philosophy know that the phrase comes from Leibniz, a 17th-century Renaissance man as distinguished in mathematics and diplomacy as in philosophy. But the notion itself, in this-or-that form, is far older. Literati will readily recall Alexander Pope's line "Whatever is, is right," which may have been a bit tongue-in-cheek, but certainly manifests an attitude at least as old as the Stoics. It's the mirror opposite of the equally old notion that things could have been better if only God, or whatever errant demiurge made this mess, had known or cared more. If things are as good as they can possibly be, then neither God nor anything else can be blamed for reality's less attractive features. Unfortunately—not just for Leibniz, but for all who favor his brand of theodicy—there can be no such thing as BAPW.

One way it's been argued that ours is the best possible world is to argue that it is the only possible world. That there is only one possible world, i.e. the actual world, is the thesis I have called monomodalism. It means that nothing at all could be, or could ever have been, otherwise. There is only one real "modality," that of necessity. Of course, if monomodalism is true, then freedom of choice is an illusion. At most, freedom of choice could mean the absence of coercion by other people; but it could not mean that the past and the laws of nature ever permit us to choose other than as we do. In fact, if monomodalism were true, not even the laws of nature could have been otherwise. But natural science affords no evidence of that, and there is no other uncontroversial reason to believe it. Monomodalism, when it turns up in philosophy, is generally a logical excrescence of other pet theses, whose credibility is severely compromised just on that account. The best example of such a system of thought is Spinoza's, which gets a great deal of mileage from stipulative definitions of such terms as substance, mode, attribute, and cause. Einstein admired Spinoza, and he hasn't been the only one. But Einstein still believed in the freedom of the will, and most people who deny they do don't really mean it. If they did, who would be left to blame for anything?

Even so, another, more common reason for thinking ours is the best possible world is that it is created by the best possible being, i.e. God. Now of course it is misleading to talk about God in that way, as if he were just the best and most powerful being there is, rummaging through his immeasurably large file of world-possibilities to select the best one for actualizing. It is better to say, with Aquinas, that God is Being and that "beings" are mere derivatives, existing by a kind of participation in Being. Influenced by the Neoplatonists, especially the Christian Pseudo-Dionysius (5th-6th century AD), some theologians even go so far as to insist that God is "beyond being," so that nothing meaningful can be said about what God is in se. That, it seems to me, makes nonsense of a lot of what such theologians do go on to say about God, but that is a separate topic. The instinct behind their apophatic stricture is sound enough: it just won't do to talk about God as if God were a much bigger, better version of ourselves or any other beings in the world. But fans of the BAPW thesis don't have to talk in that way. They can, and often do, argue that a perfectly good creator can do nothing other than create BAPW. For a perfectly good creator, after all, would be less than perfectly good if he didn't create BAPW.

Over at Prosblogion, Mike Almeida has a nice answer to that. I quote only the formal part of the argument, which is a reductio ad absurdum:

1. Necessarily, a perfect being actualizes the best possible world. Assume for Reductio
2. W is the best possible world. Assumption
3. A perfect being exists. Assumption
4. W includes a great deal of natural and moral value. From def. of ‘best world’
5. W is the only possible world. From 1,2,3
6. Everything possible is actual in W. From 5
7. W is a fatalistic world. From 6
8. No moral agent is libertarian or compatibilist free in fatalistic worlds. Fact
9. No moral agent is free in W. From 7, 8
10. There is no moral value in W. From 9
11. W is not the best possible world. From 10, 4. Contradiction 11,2
∴ 12. It is not necessary that a perfect being actualizes the best possible world. From 11,2

The key move in that argument is that, if there were a BAPW, then monomodalism would be true, and hence there would be no freedom. Lacking freedom, BAPW would lack "moral value" and hence not be BAPW.

I think that pretty much hammers the last nail in the coffin of BAPW as a thesis. And that's important theologically inasmuch as, if there could be no BAPW, then God can't be blamed for failing to create it.

Why atheism can be respectable

First Things' web editor Joe Carter argues, pace David Hart, that we must "abandon the politically correct notion" that any form of "atheism is intellectually respectable." As St. Paul implies in Romans 1, atheism is a case of vincible ignorance. Even people who have never been vouchsafed special divine revelation have "no excuse" for failing to know God:

For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened. (20-22)

Carter's argument, then, is roughly as follows. If Christianity is true, then the Bible is divinely inspired, and whatever assertion is divinely inspired is true. So St. Paul is correct in arguing that those who do not believe in the God there is are "without excuse." Hence atheism is vincible ignorance. And vincible ignorance is not intellectually respectable.

To be fair, Hart does not argue that all forms of atheism are respectable. He is particularly, and justifiably, contemptuous of the "new atheism," which never rises to the elegance of a Hume, the nobility of a Voltaire, or the clear-eyed radicalism of a Nietzsche. But his book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, a tour-de-force by almost any standard, does not depend on disparaging the motives of atheists as such. I'm reading it now. What Hart recognizes, and Carter does not, is that atheism is sometimes motivated by moral passion. That passion can be immature and anthropomorphic, but by no means is it always base. And even when it is base, it often arises from unreflective outrage about real wrongs people do in the name of God. We cannot simply assume that atheism is motivated by a desire to escape divine judgment or indulge in base sexual passions. Paul may well have been right about many pagans of his time, but I don't think we need or should read him as condemning all atheism as a moral failing.

For one thing, doing that would lower theists to the level of the new atheists, who can see theism as motivated only by stupidity or ill will. It would also abandon the progress made by most of the Christian world, which no longer sees heresy as explicable only by stupidity or ill will. Even when such claims are true, it is unhelpful to make them.

When the sort of moral passion motivating atheism is immature, anthropomorphic, or base, the best response is usually the example of believers who love as they ought: love primarily for real people, and secondarily for all that is obviously true, good, and beautiful. Evaluating motives is rarely helpful in intellectual debate, and sometimes not even helpful in ordinary life. In politics and private life as well as religion, all sides tend to overindulge in Bulverism. The antidote is the sort of rationality that sustains itself by a love for truth that is greater than one's hatred of enemies. That allows for due objectivity about competing arguments. And in the case of atheism, such an intellectual task must take the form of studying and evaluating the arguments strictly on their merits. The new atheists usually don't come out of that looking good. But intellectually respectable atheism can.

As Thomas Aquinas recognized, the two most common objections to theism are (a) the explanatory superfluity of the supernatural, and (b) the problem of evil. Those objections are worth taking seriously on the merits. As I argued over a year ago, however, even they arise from what are, at bottom, moral objections. The best of the atheists are best engaged when theists recognize that and proceed accordingly. At bottom, the debate is about what humans ought to value, and in what configuration. In turn, a debate like that arises from competing claims about what humanity itself is. Ultimately, then, the best way to combat atheism is to act, not just argue, as though God reveals man to man.

The necessity of scandal

We need to meditate more on Matthew 18:7. To loosen you up for that, I start with a real-life story of the sort I love.

In 1801, Pope Pius VII sent his secretary of state, Cardinal Consalvi, to treat with Napoleon. That was a grave necessity at the time: Bonaparte boasted that he could destroy the Church, and threatened Consalvi with just that. Consalvi's reply is said to have been to this effect: "Excellency, you cannot succeed where many generations of bishops have failed." A concordat was signed not long afterwards.

I believe both the story and what Consalvi is said by that story to have said. Almost everybody over the age of majority knows what Consalvi meant. I won't belabor that. Why should I, or you? My own Catholic faith has never depended on my opinion of the clergy. In my observation, most are no better and holier, as human beings, than other Christians. Many would say that such a fact, if it is a fact, is quite an indictment. In my callow youth, that's what I said. But I no longer think it's true.

I now think that that very fact is just what one can expect if salvation is God's doing not man's, and if the Church, the Body of Christ, is truly of divine origin. "Many of the last shall be first, and many of the first shall be last." People are already way too inclined to think that God needs them, so that he owes them something if they meet his needs. We'd rather not believe that "all is grace," and that our highest calling, as co-workers in the Lord's vineyard, is to get ourselves out of the way. If the clergy have a special failing, it is forgetting that. But given their office, that failing is also quite understandable. It's "human, all too human."

I got to pondering all this after a couple of things I read last night. One was a report of the result of a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, released a few days ago, indicating that

Most churchgoing Catholics say their feelings about the Church are unaffected by the Vatican’s handling of recent child sex abuse reports. Among all Catholics, more have a favorable opinion of Pope Benedict XVI now than they did in March. They tend to believe the media reports are blown out of proportion and harder on the Church than others.

Well of course. Most "churchgoing Catholics" know quite well that the secular world hates the Church. That is why they make allowances for the feeding-frenzy factor so evident in the recent attempts to implicate the Pope in the sex-abuse-coverup scandal. I wrote about those attempts myself a few weeks ago, but this is not the place to rehash all that. I'd rather focus on something that most churchgoing Catholic grownups also know, and that is still more pertinent.

When I read Jonathan Deane's post over at Called to Communion entitled "Drawn Closer by Scandal," I was struck by his opening quotation from Flannery O'Connor:

My cousin’s husband who also teaches at Auburn came into the Church last week. He had been going to Mass with them but never showed any interest. We asked how he got interested and his answer was that the sermons were so horrible, he knew there must be something else there to make the people come…

From The Habit of Being, Collected Letters; to “A”, August 22, 1959.

That was on the eve of Vatican II: the eve of all the roiling changes, of the sexual revolution, and well before the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal. The same reaction as O'Connor's cousin's husband's is what got me through the cultural and spiritual wasteland of the post-Vatican-II Catholic Church in America: the intellectual vacuity, the painfully bad music, the liturgy alternating between the godawful and the plain silly, the horde of homosexual priests, the priests and nuns who weren't even Catholic, really...I could go on, but churchgoing Catholics who lived through that time know exactly what I'm talking about, even if they don't share the full range of my experience. I encountered much good as well as much bad. I learned that there was something in the Church that human sin and, worse, human fatuity could not destroy. That imperishable something was often obscured, mightily, of course; that is why so many Catholics had to leave the Church to develop a personal relationship with the Christ whose very body and blood were made present to them every Sunday. But that Body and Blood were and still are there every Sunday, indeed every day. And so is the Truth they are, because they are He who is Truth itself. I can't find that anywhere else but in the Orthodox Church—which, of course, has its own problems.

I recommend Jonathan's post in its entirety. It is that of a recent convert coming to grips with what ought to be obvious but which, like so much else in the world today, isn't obvious. It is necessary that there be scandals. That is not because we should do evil so that good may come, but because, being sinners, we are going to do great evil, and God permits it for the sake of respecting our freedom, but even more to make his power—i.e., his mercy as well as his justice—the more evident. We can learn to accept that, within the Church as well as out in the world, once we realize that the whole sorry and glorious panoply of human history is more about what he is about than about us.

Bad arguments against the Magisterium: Part II

In Part I of this series, I rebutted the argument that the Catholic Magisterium is "accountable" to nobody and nothing but itself. In this part, I shall rebut the argument that adherence to the Magisterium puts a Christian in no better a position to know the content of the deposit of faith than the major Christian alternatives

There are actually four main versions of that argument. The first runs roughly as follows:

Scripture and/or Tradition are fully public and materially contain the full content of the deposit of faith. The Magisterium claims to "infallibly" hand on and clarify the doctrinal content of those two "sources" of transmission of divine revelation. But whether infallible or not, the Magisterium only does the sort of thing that any Spirit-guided Christian could in principle do, given the publicity and material sufficiency of the sources. Therefore, such a magisterium is in principle dispensable.

The problem with that argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. To get it to follow, one needs at least the following, additional premise:

(i) Some methodology other than binding and (allegedly) infallible interpretation by ecclesiastical authority enables the Spirit-guided Christian, at least in principle, to attain sufficient knowledge of the deposit of faith from Scripture and/or Tradition.

Many people, mostly Protestants, believe (i) either because their personal religious experience leads them to believe they've attained such knowledge without the Church, or because they believe that otherwise there would be no way to assess the orthodoxy of any self-proclaimed magisterium, Catholic or otherwise. But the problem with (i) is that there is no good reason to believe it.

The only good reason to believe (i) would be to hit upon a methodology, ecclesiologically neutral in itself, which objectively suffices to render a particular hermeneutic of Scripture and/or Tradition doctrinally comprehensive and rationally compelling. But if nearly two millennia of exegesis and theology show anything at all, they show that there is no such methodology. Eastern Orthodoxy, for example, has never claimed there is such a methodology; it has always insisted, like Catholicism, that authentic interpretation of the sources can only be conducted in conformity with the mind of "the Church." And Protestants who claim there is such a methodology often disagree about which doctrinal results are thereby secured. That's why there are Protestant "denominations." Rather few of the Protestant participants in that debate can be charged with outright irrationality; with more or less plausibility, they just disagree among themselves as well as with Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Absent appeal to an infallible interpreter, that leaves the question who is right as a matter of opinion rather than of binding doctrine. But that does not suffice for identifying the entire content of the deposit of faith as an object of the assent, precisely, of faith in God the infallible Revealer. All it does is present Scripture (and a fortiori Tradition, of which Scripture is the uniquely normative written record) as raw material for the forming of more or less plausible opinions. Many such opinions are doubtless logically equivalent to doctrines that are of faith; but as opinions, they neither constitute nor express assent by faith.

That points up the fundamental difficulty with the argument in question: there is no ecclesiologically neutral methodology for determining who interprets Scripture correctly, and who thus knows their interpretations to be binding and irreformable for the whole Church's assent of faith as distinct from tentative opinions. Some Christians appeal to a "burning in the bosom" or to their holy people of choice to confirm their interpretations; but such inherently subjective arguments can yield nothing that is rationally compelling and authoritative for the Church as a whole, without an ad hoc and doctrinally front-loaded limitation on who counts as "the Church."

In view of such difficulties, some people argue against the Magisterium's claims in a narrower way. Thus:

The Magisterium enables Christians to know the full content of the deposit of faith as an object for the assent of faith only if the doctrines it presents as binding and irreformable can be demonstrated to belong to the apostolic faith. But the most distinctively Catholic doctrines, including the Magisterium's claims for itself, are precisely those which cannot be thus demonstrated. Therefore, the Magisterium does not help Christians know the full content of the deposit of faith as an object for the assent of faith.

The difficulty with that argument is that it begs the question at the outset. How? If the first sentence is true, then we can assess the Magisterium's claims for itself only if we can reliably know the content of the deposit of faith "given once for all to the holy ones" without recourse to the Magisterium's claims for itself. Hence, the Magisterium as it understands itself is justifiable only if superfluous for knowing the rest of the deposit of faith. But if the Magisterium is superfluous in that way, then its claim to be the sole "authentic" interpreter of the sources is false. An argument that begs the question at the outset need not be taken seriously as an argument.

That's probably why many non-Catholic Christians prefer a more philosophical approach. For purposes of a blog post, a good example is the argument made by a commentator over at Called to Communion:

What good Protestant theologians actually believe is that a sincere believer, aided by the Holy Spirit, who approaches the Scripture with humility in the context of a living community of faith and the Christian Tradition will be able to find great confidence about those truths necessary to salvation and to grow, however slowly and fallibly, closer to the truth on more doubtful matters. This fallibility is inherent to our situation as human beings and is in no way mitigated by your Catholic position since you have fallibly determined that organizational and doctrinal continuity with the Apostles is a guide to doctrinal reliability, and you have fallibly determined that the Church of Rome exhibits such continuity. Finally, you fallibly interpret the Roman Church’s doctrinal proclamations. Adding the infallibility of the Church generally or the Pope specifically will not get you into a significantly better epistemic state than the agreed upon doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture.

In other words: since the assent of faith is up to each individual, and each individual is fallible, then the assent of faith is itself fallible; and if so, then proposing some set of doctrines S with alleged infallibility gives people no more certainty of the truth of S than would holding S as a set of human opinions only.

John Henry Newman's well-known rejection of "private judgement" in religion is often criticized in such a manner. Thus if the assent of faith as an epistemic stance is fallible, given the fallibility of each of the assenters, then ultimately there is no reliable way to distinguish the objective content of the irreformable deposit of faith, as revealed by God, from fallible opinions, held collectively by members of "the Church," about the data handed down to us. If the purpose of the self-styled Magisterium is to afford us a reliable way to make that distinction, then the Magisterium is wasting its own and everybody else's time. For what it's after is something that cannot be had and therefore should not be sought.

Now if the Magisterium were offering its definitive judgments merely as products of academic research, or even of special religious experiences, that criticism would be perfectly justified. And such factors often play a important role in forming magisterial judgments, as well as an even more important role in defending them. Yet no matter how well they serve, they could not themselves be decisive without the Magisterium's claims for itself succumbing to the objection at hand. What's decisive among and for the Magisterium's claims is its claim that it is divinely authorized, to the same degree as the Apostles themselves, to teach doctrine which irreformably binds the whole Church and is, by that same divine authority, protected from teaching what is false when it does so. If that is true, then the inherent fallibility of believers who take the Magisterium at its word does not infect the truth of what they assent to when they make the assent of faith; it infects only their degree of understanding that truth. Assuming Christianity is true, the fact remains that no particular believer, not even the pope, can ever be absolutely certain that their own understanding of a particular doctrine is as free from error as the doctrine itself. Rather, and as a matter of fact, they trust implicitly that the doctrine is true and seek to conform their mind ever more closely with that of the Church, for which the Magisterium speaks, on the doctrine's subject matter. Of course, if the Magisterium's particular claims for itself are true, then "the Church" as a whole will enjoy, or in due course attain, as sound an understanding of the doctrine as the subject matter permits. But that doesn't guarantee that any believer in particular will do so. That is one reason why the Catholic Church tolerates a great deal of what is, objectively speaking, material heresy in her ranks. It is often humanly impossible to tell which errors are being made in good faith, by people who (mistakenly) believe they are conforming their minds to that of the Church, from those which arise from culpable refusal to so conform oneself. Although the content of the deposit of faith is not a journey, most of us know that the life of faith is very much a journey. Accordingly, the position of the believing, intelligent Catholic is rather similar to that which our CtoC commenter attributed to "good Protestant theologians." The only difference is that the Catholic acknowledges a living authority not merely for identifying the deposit of faith—for which inspired Scripture indubitably serves—but for definitively resolving, as they arise, certain questions that the sources either occasion or fail to address explicitly.

Nevertheless, the journey would be not just unavoidable, but irremediably deficient, if the fourth and final common argument against the Magisterium were sound. Thus:

The Magisterium claims to be the sole "authentic" interpreter of Scripture and Tradition, meaning that only its interpretations are divinely authorized for the assent and profession of the whole Church. But all language requires interpretation, especially when it's about such lofty subject matter; so, the Magisterium's interpretations, in the form of dogmas or other definitive teachings, themselves require interpretation by both individual believers equipped to conduct it and the Magisterium itself. But if that is the case, then given the subject matter, there's no reason to believe that magisterial judgments, offered as interpretations of the "sources," are any more perspicuous than what they interpret. That is why heresies are so frequent, even recurring in new forms, despite conciliar and papal definitions; and that's how the interpretation of certain doctrines, such as extra ecclesiam nulla salus, can changes over time. But if magisterial judgments set forth with alleged infallibility leave so much unclarity, then the Magisterium's claims for itself are idle.

Fortunately, that is the easiest argument to rebut. Magisterial judgments rarely answer all important questions about their subject matter, any more than Scripture does; they answer only the questions that are, or were, pressing in their historical context. Hence, such judgments are ordinarily not the last word for understanding what they're about; they are merely interpretive steps deemed necessary for dispelling particular misunderstandings. Ordinarily they do that job well, even though sometimes they do not, and can even raise serious questions of their own—as, I believe, was the case with the filioque, whose que admits of heterodox interpretations as well as an orthodox one. The point is this: even though the Church's collective meditation on the deposit of faith does not exhaust the cognitive content of the subject, and could never come close to doing so, the words in which magisterial judgments are framed are typically clear enough, in the broader context of Tradition and history, to exclude problematic interpretations as they arise. The Magisterium itself is on a faith journey of sorts, and the history of doctrine may be seen as that of an ongoing conversation about which direction the journey should take. But once a certain direction is taken definitively, interpretive clarity is thus gained to some degree.