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Joe Heschmeyer examines Protestant critiques of papal authority and the problem of personal interpretation.
Transcription:
Joe’:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to explore the personal interpretation of scripture problem. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m going to give a version of this Catholic argument, give what I think is a pretty smart Protestant objection to it, and then explain why that Protestant objection is actually missing and important distinction, a distinction that many of us miss Catholic, Protestant, whatever, about the two types of faith that we’re required to have biblically. So tune in because there’s a couple things we’re going to cover and hopefully it’ll all come together in the end. We’ll see. First, what is the personal interpretation of scripture problem? If you’ve been involved in any kind of Catholic Protestant dialogue or argument or anything like this, there’s a chance that you’ve seen Catholics point out like, Hey, that’s just your personal interpretation of scripture.
You’ve got 2000 years of Christians who read the New Testament as saying baptism actually saves you. And then 500 years ago, some Protestants came along and said, no, actually it’s just a symbol. And the Catholic objection is that’s just your personal interpretation of scripture. Now maybe that argument means something to you. Maybe that argument sounds vacuous, but I want to unpack it. And to do that, I want to start with pointing out a certain tendency I see among some Protestants to identify certain problems and overlook other ones. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. JC Ryle is who I want to look to. He’s a pretty famous 19th century evangelical Anglican. If evangelical Anglican means something to you, great. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it. He’s in the Church of England, but he’s on the more low churchy Protestant side rather than the high churchy smells and bells side.
That’s it in a nutshell. And he warns against anything like infallibility. He doesn’t seem to have a very good understanding of what papal infallibility is. He seems to think it’s just the idea that Pope can never sin. That’s not what papal infallibility is. And so he looks at Galatians two where St. Peter sends and is called out for it by St. Paul. And so Ri says from this, well, who does not see when he reads the history of the Church of Christ repeated proofs that the best of men can air? Okay, so I want to stop right there because this is something that can be surprising to a lot of Catholics when they read Protestant authors that Protestants tend to have a really complicated relationship with earlier Christians. Certainly they have a complicated relationship with the earliest Christians, the early church fathers, but they also tend to have a really strangely complicated relationship even with the Protestant reformers that they think the reformers were wrong and maybe even heretically wrong on a lot of theological issues because their own form of Christianity in many cases is very new.
It’s very recent and it affirms things that had been denied for a very long time and it denies things that had been affirmed for a very long time. And so it leaves people in a very strange place of to say, all these people before me had gotten these major things wrong. So even though I want to look up to them and admire them, maybe draw from their wisdom and their inspiration, I can’t just follow them because we have such radically different forms of Christianity. And so Ry puts it like this, the early fathers, he means here, the earliest Christians, the early fathers were zealous according to their knowledge and ready to die for Christ, but many of them advocated ritualism and nearly all sow the seeds of many superstitions. And look, we wouldn’t call it ritualism and superstitions, but what he’s identifying is really true.
The early church fathers, the people dying for Christ, people who give us a New Testament are super Catholic. And so if you’re someone who’s really not Catholic, you’re going to have a complicated relationship. You want to admire everything they’ve done for us, but you can’t get on the same boat theologically. You regard them as heretics, they would’ve regarded you as a heretic. That’s going to create a problem, but it’s also a problem when you get to the reformers. So Royal puts it like this. He says, the reformers were honored instruments in the hand of God for reviving the cause of truth on earth, yet hardly one of them can be named who do not make some great mistake. And so he gives all kinds of types of mistakes. So this includes theological ones. He says Luther held tightly to the doctrine of consubstantiation, but he also includes things that he just uses like personal failings.
Millan was often Tim and undecided Calvin permitted CTAs to be burnt. Those are not equal size personal failings. We get the idea. Cranmer recanted and fell away for a time from his first faith that’s actually understating things. Cranmer was kind of all over the place in terms of what he publicly professed as a faith based on who the king was at the time. Jewel subscribed to Roman Catholic church doctrines for fear of death. Hooper disturbed the Church of England by demanding the need to wear ceremonial vestments when ministering the Puritans in later times denounced Christian liberty and freedoms as doctrines from the pit of hell. Wesley’s John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and Top Lady in one of his peers at the time, who was a hardcore Calvinist last century abused each other in most shameful language. Wesley was pretty clear. He didn’t even consider Calvinists like top lady Christians.
Irving in our own day gave way to the delusion of speaking in unknown tongues. So you can see he has these people that he wants to admire, and yet he thinks they all get some major things wrong, including many times major theological doctrines wrong. And so there’s two ways you can go with that. One way is to say, huh, I have a form of Christianity that increasingly looks idiosyncratic just to me and my immediate peers. That’s a problem that doesn’t look like the faith Jesus founded. But the other way you could go is the way that Ryle goes and say, well, this shows that you can’t trust people. He puts it like this. He says, we all naturally love to have a pope of our own. We are far too ready to think that because some great minister or some learned man says a thing or because our own minister whom we love says a thing, then it must be right without examining whether it is in scripture or not.
And look, I’ll grant sometimes that can be a problem that you can just blindly go along with what some theologian says, internet personality says whatever the case is. But it strikes me that he is misreading, or I guess I’d say it strikes me that he is ignoring a much bigger problem than the small problem he’s focused on. And I’ll explain that in a second here, but notice that he’s saying, okay, the problem is we want a pope and the solution is we need to just examine whether we think what our preferred pope is saying is in scripture or not. This leads him to a diagnosis that strikes me as 180 degrees wrong. He says this, most men dislike the trouble of thinking for themselves. They like following a leader. They’re like sheep. When one goes over the hill, all the rest follow here at Antioch.
Even Barnabas was carried away. We can all fancy that good man saying an old apostle like Peter, surely cannot be wrong following him. I cannot air. Okay, now why do I say this Seems to me to be 180 degrees misdiagnosing the spiritual condition of Christians, at least in the West. Well, namely this, we’re radically individualistic by nature. Our culture is radically individualistic and has been since at least the enlightenment. This isn’t something new to 2024. This is true in his days. Well, although I think it’s becoming more and more pronounced as time goes on, men don’t dislike the trouble of thinking for themselves. They dislike the trouble of obeying. The problem isn’t that we are like sheep. The problem is that Christ calls us to be like sheep and we’re not like sheep. We want to be the shepherds. We want to be the Pope.
We want to be the President. We want to be Christ. We want to run the show. We don’t want to follow somebody else. We might like the idea of somebody else calling all the shots, but as soon as we see them doing something that isn’t what we would personally do, that following thing goes right out the door. So it strikes me that royal’s solution to this problem is just leaning into our spiritual problem rather than correcting it. There’s a reason Hebrews 1317 has to tell us to obey our leaders and listen to them because we don’t naturally want to do that. But Riley is like, Hey, don’t be so obedient. Don’t be so willing to follow other people. Barnabas should have been more skeptical of the apostles. That’s how he is reading the situation. Even though you’ll look in vain for a passage in the New Testament that says, be more skeptical of the apostles, trust your leadership less.
You’re not going to find that passage because that’s not the primary advice we need to be hearing. And so the result isn’t, oh look, because I’m so distrustful of my leaders and my church and those who’ve gone before me and the early Christians, now I’m just perfectly following scripture. No, no, no. The problem isn’t that I’ve gotten rid of all those false popes. The problem is that the ultimate false pope is every individual, like each man a pope. That’s the problem. This is a personal interpretation problem in a nutshell, and I think one of the finest ways this was presented, it’s not called that, but one of the finest ways the personal interpretation problem was presented was by a Protestant author by the name of Keith Matheson in a book called The Shape of Soul of Scriptura, a book with which I profoundly disagree, but I think this passage was fantastic.
Matheson says, the problem is that there are different interpretations of scripture. So let’s just pause there because Ri seems not even to be attuned to that problem. Ryle is thinking that, oh, well all these other people failed. They just needed to read scripture more. But when Luther is believing in concept substantiation, it’s not because he’s ignoring scripture. He very famously, when he’s arguing with Ulrich’s wingy points, Jesus says, this is my body. And Luther’s entire argument, which is in Luther’s small catechism is, is means is this is my body, means this is my body. The problem isn’t that he is not reading scripture. The problem is that he interprets Jesus to mean this is literally his body and Zwingli says it represents his body. If you’re on Zwingli’s side of that argument as rile is, you can hardly say the problem is that Luther isn’t reading scripture or that Catholics aren’t reading scripture because the plain surface level reading of scripture is on the Catholic and the Lutheran side, not on the zw side.
So Matheson’s point is a good one. The problem isn’t that one side of these disputes is reading scripture. The other one just says, ignore scripture, follow me instead. No, the problem is that both sides are reading scripture but interpreting it differently. So he says, the problem is that there are different interpretations of scripture and Christians are told that these can be resolved by a simple appeal to scripture, but is it possible to resolve the problem of different interpretations of scripture by an appeal to another interpretation of scripture? And the answer should be obvious. No. Imagine tomorrow some new form of Christians come up and their whole thing is, Hey, Jesus says if your hand caused you to sin, cut it off. And so we mutilate hands, that’s our whole shtick, and you say, Hey guys, I’m pretty sure that was hyperbolic, figurative kind of language.
You’re not actually supposed to do that. And then the solution is, okay, let’s all pull out our Bibles and see what Jesus says. And then they open it up and they read, and Jesus says, if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. And they say, ah, I guess we were right, because I don’t see any italics as say figurative or hyperbolic, so it must be literal. The point there is it’s not that they believe in scripture and you don’t or vice versa. The idea is you both want to do what Jesus is calling you to, but one of you thinks it’s a literal calling and one of you thinks it’s hyperbolic. And so the question isn’t do we want to follow Jesus? The question isn’t do we want to listen to scripture? The question is what does Jesus mean? What do the scriptures mean?
That is a question of interpretation, and so matheson is right. You can’t settle that by simply saying, what does scripture say? Because the question is what does scripture mean as he puts it? The problem that adherence of solo scripture haven’t noticed is that any appeal to scripture is an appeal to an interpretation of scripture. Now he’s got this whole thing about how he thinks Sola s scriptura in its original Protestant form can avoid this while in this more advanced evangelical forms, it falls into this trap. I think he’s wrong there, but we’ll all leave it aside because the point he’s making here is right, any appeal to scripture is an appeal to an interpretation of scripture. Therefore, the only question is whose interpretation the difference between you and the imaginary group that I made up? Isn’t that one of you is reading scripture and the other one’s not?
It’s whose interpretation is right here. That’s the whole question. That’s it. That’s it. The entire question, and that is frequently the entire question in Christian theology. And as Madison points out when we’re facing conflicting interpretation of the scripture like that, we can’t just put a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve our differences of opinion as if it were a Ouija board. It’s not just, okay, we’re all going to put our hands in the Bible and move ’em around and what letters does it end up on? It doesn’t work like that. In order for scripture to serve as an authority at all, it must be read exegeted and interpreted by somebody. That’s his argument. I think that is a fantastic argument in favor of the need for a trustworthy church. You and I can’t be our own popes. We should know we are obviously not infallible.
We can obviously misread the scripture and it is not clear to us when we’ve misread it because think about it this way, your confidence about a particular passage of scripture that you’re reading it right is just no predictor of your accuracy. What I mean by that is there are plenty of people and you can look around the internet and look at them yourself who are extremely confident that they’re interpreting the Bible correctly. While you and I can sit back and say, oh, they’ve completely misread that their confidence doesn’t mean they’re right, and so we should recognize that if that’s true of them, that might also be true of us, that if I’m very confident that I’m interpreting such and such passage of the Bible correctly, my confidence is no guarantee that I’m not the one who’s just confidently wrong. And so as a result, I cannot just place my trust in my own private reading of scripture, but also none of these different forms of Protestantism claim to have anything like infallibility, and so I can’t place it in any of those either.
So all of that is a pretty strong argument it seems to me against Protestantism in favor of something like the Catholic church. So that’s the argument in a nutshell. That’s part one. Part two, the Protestant response to that and the Protestant response is how are Catholics and Orthodox and cops any different? Don’t you guys all end up in the same problem? And for this, I want to turn to a book called The Shape of Solo Scriptura by Keith Matheson. That is the exact same book I was just quoting from because he has this argument that no, you can’t trust that your church got it right because you can’t even trust that it is the true church founded by Christ and he’s going to make the argument that ultimately it comes down to private individual judgment for every one of us, and here’s how he makes the argument, and he says, A person could assert that only one branch is a true visible church.
That is the answer of Rome orthodoxy in some Protestant communions. Now for some reason, even though he’s perfectly comfortable calling the Eastern Orthodox orthodoxy, he can’t bring himself to just say Roman Catholic church. He has to just say Rome. It’s an obnoxious sort of knee-jerk pejorative, but if anything from the Catholic side, it kind of, I don’t know. There’s something kind of heartening about it. I’ll say this, and I know this is a digression. Atheists will sometimes say like, oh, there’s a thousand different gods out there. How do I know which one’s real? And the very clever Christian answer I’ve heard is, what’s the one you hate? Well, likewise, if it’s, oh, there’s these different groups claiming to be the true church, how do I know which one it is? It’s like the one you can’t even call by its name, the one you can’t even call the Roman Catholic Church even while you’re fine saying orthodoxy, that kind of knee jerk antipathy is sometimes a good spiritual sign like, oh, you’re pushing against something.
Okay, so when he says Rome, just understand he doesn’t mean the city of Rome. He doesn’t mean the Roman Empire. He means the Roman Catholic Church, which is really just called the Catholic Church. Calling it Roman Catholic was a concession to Anglicans. Either way, this is the answer of Rome orthodoxy in some Protestant communities that there’s one true church, but on what basis can one make that claim? Here’s his argument. One could argue that his branch is the one true branch because it is closest to the teaching of scripture of Protestant nomination or to the father’s Roman orthodoxy. Now, that’s not a good understanding of either the Catholic or Orthodox claim, but in any case, but his argument is this, but according to whose interpretation of the scripture or the fathers, is this one branch closest to the teaching of scripture or the fathers?
I’ll just say here, the Catholic argument isn’t we are the one true church because we’ve done the best of holding onto the teachings that Jesus gave 2000 years ago or that we’ve done the best job of holding onto what the early Christians believed. No, the argument that we have as Catholics is Jesus literally founded our church is 2000 years old. Leaving aside the fact that we’ve faithfully preserved that which is also true, we’re also just that church in terms of identity. If I said, well, how do I know which church is the United States of America? Are you going to tell me it’s yours because you most preserve the ideals of American liberty? It’s like, no, no, we’re just telling you it’s ours because George Washington and the founders and all that did their thing in 1776 and 1789, it literally historically is that institution. It is historically literally that body, whether you think it deviated from the teachings over time or not is a second question as a mere question of identity.
If I say where did the Roman Catholic Church come from? Well, it came from the first century with Jesus establishing the church on Peter. That’s the actual Catholic claim, not that we are the true church because we’re the closest to what the early church fathers had to say on a certain subject. That’s misunderstanding the idea, but I just mentioned that as kind of an aside because he’s still going to, I think you can tweak his argument to make it still sort of work to say, well, you still have to make some kind of interpretation. I still have to read history or theology or whatever it is to say that thing I just said. Someone else could read history and say, no, maybe Constantine invented the Catholic church. Maybe Pope Francis invented the Catholic church. Somebody else did it somewhere along the line. So that’s one argument he thinks is false.
Second, he said a person, and this is kind of an answer to, so you say, okay, whose interpretation of scripture or the fathers has this one branch being the closest? You could say it’s your own interpretation, but he says, then you’re trapped in radical subjectivity. The person would have to say that Rome is the true branch or orthodox or Protestant nomination because it comes closest to his interpretation of what the scriptures or the fathers teach. Now, again, I think that’s not true because that’s not the actual Catholic claim, but you can at least see that objection and you’ll find plenty of Protestants making this objection. Oh, you’re also guilty of personal interpretation. You say, I should listen to 2000 years of history, but how do I know 2000 years of history say so? Oh, you’re telling me that your reading of history, you’re still using your reason, you’re still using your personal interpretation. Oh, you should say I should listen to the Catholic church. Well, your personal interpretation tells you Jesus founded it on Peter, so there’s an element of personal interpretation that’s the kind of counter.
Then it says, well, okay, instead of appealing to your own individual interpretation, you could say that the Catholic church is a true church because it says so, but then you’re caught in an untenable circular argument. Rome would be the one true church because Roman adhere to the teaching of scripture and tradition as interpreted by Rome orthodoxy be the one true church because orthodoxy appeals to, excuse me, adheres to scripture and tradition as interpreted by orthodoxy, et cetera. So he’s saying if you’re going to say the Catholic church is one true church or the Orthodox church is one true church or whatever, you’re either going to have to say because it agrees with my personal reading of scripture, tradition, history, whatever, and therefore it all comes back to my personal private judgment or because the church says so and then it’s just circular.
He says this question begging, circularity is vicious. You seem to be caught in a logical problem either way. Now, fascinatingly, it would seem like this is going to plague every Protestant denomination just as much, but mathes in sees a way out. He argues this. He says, the remaining choice is to assert that the one invisible church is found scattered throughout numerous visible fragments or branches. This would allow an appeal to the corporate witness of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit bears a remarkably unanimous witness to the common confession of faith that has been handed down over the centuries. Now, before I get into his argument that we’re in the same position, I want to just call a flag on that play and I want to appeal to Flannery O’Connor because Flannery O’Connor makes the point I think pretty eloquently that what Matheson has just described is incoherent and impossible, and she does it in a letter to Dr.
T rpi from 1959. It’s not even one of her public thing. It is in her collection of letters that was published after her death, and she says, PVI is a Protestant. She says to him, we mean entirely different things when we each say that we believe the church is divine. You mean the invisible church with many somehow related to, excuse me, with somehow related to many forms, whereas I mean one and only one visible church. That’s the whole problem that math sin has identified. O’Connor agrees and she says, it is not logical to the Catholic to believe that Christ teaches through many visible forms, all teaching contrary doctrine, this idea of that there are fragments, the Holy Spirit is leading in seemingly opposite directions, doesn’t make any sense, and the idea that, oh, well the Holy Spirit’s got this remarkable unanimity in the common confession as laning our counterpoints out.
That’s just factually not true. You speak of the well-known facts of Christ’s life, but these facts are hotly contested, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the very divinity of Christ for us, the one visible church pronounces on these matters infallibly and we receive for doctrine whether subjectively it fits in with our surmises or not. We believe that Christ left the church to speak for him, that it speaks with his voice, that he is the head and we are the members if Christ actually teaches through many forms. Then for 15th centuries he taught that the Eucharist was his actual body and blood, and thereafter he taught part of his people that it was only a symbol the Catholic can’t live with its contradiction. I think that’s a really good answer to what Matheson has laid out there that his view of trying to resolve this true church problem.
Before we get into how effectively he counters the Catholic or Orthodox position, just notice that his answer, his solution to it is nonsensical. It is contradictory. You’d have to say the Holy Spirit is leading people into opposite errors so that he’s not leading them into truth. He’s leading them into falsehood because it can’t both be right saying two contradictory things affirming two contradictory creeds. As Flannery O’Connor says, she says, I’ve seen it said that the Catholic is more interested in truth than the Protestant and goodness, but I don’t think too much of the formula except that it suggests a partial truth. The Catholic finds it easier to understand the Atheist than the Protestant, but easier to love the Protestant than the atheist, and then she concludes. You can know where I stand, what I believe because I’m a practicing Catholic, but I can’t know what you believe unless I ask.
So I think that’s a good objection and I think that this is an objection I see constantly reaffirmed. I have that line often in the back of my head because when I talk about Protestants on a certain issue, invariably there’ll be some Protestants in the comments that were like, well, my particular form of Protestantism isn’t just like that, and it’s like, yeah, I try to make those nuances and caveats, but you should probably recognize that’s a problem that Protestantism is so individualized that at a certain level it just means whatever you want it to mean. That’s not a problem for Catholics, that’s a problem for Protestants, that there isn’t a common faith that we can just identify and say all Protestants believe X without having a bunch of people jump in and accuse us of Straumann. That’s not a problem for Catholics because you can do that for Catholic.
I mean you can say, here’s the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist, and someone says, I don’t happen to believe that. And then you say, okay, well you don’t believe what the Catholic Church beliefs, it’s not a matter of a poll, it’s not a matter of opinion. The church speaks with an authority that doesn’t rely upon my consent in Protestantism. There is no equivalent kind of authority structure, and so we find ourselves in the situation that Flannery O’Connor describes where a good number of Christians have affirmed what appears to be a vision of the Holy Spirit leading a bunch of Christians into chaos and confusion and contradictory creeds. That’s a problem. Okay? So that’s why I don’t think Matheson solves the problem he lays out, but it hasn’t answered his actual problem. Are Catholics and Orthodox equally guilty of this that we just have our own private interpretation?
I want to turn to Brian Cross who objects to Matheson’s Framing. This is from now very old. I’m very old. This is a very old blog post from 2009. He puts the objection like this. He says, according to the objection. Now to be clear, Dr. Cross doesn’t agree with the objection. He’s just explaining where people like Matheson are coming from. According to the objection, the individual who becomes Catholic must start in the same epistemic position as the person who becomes Protestant. Okay? Following that, in choosing to become Catholic, he simply chosen the denomination that best conforms to his own interpretation of scripture. He places himself under the authority of the Catholic bishops in the same way that a Lutheran places himself under the authority of a Lutheran pastor or that a Baptist places himself under the authority of a Baptist pastor that a Presbyterian places himself under the authority of a Presbyterian pastor.
But that’s the objection. Hence, if the person who becomes Protestant retains final interpretive authority, then so does the person who becomes Catholic. That’s the argument, and you may notice Flannery O’Connor had already denied that. She said, we don’t just follow the Catholic church when it agrees with our conclusions, but according to this, well, the only reason you’re following the Catholic church at all is because some set of intellectual conclusions led you to believe the Catholic church is who you should be following whatever that looked like, whether you thought it agreed with scripture, the church fathers or history or whatever, you had some kind of intellectual convictions that led you to becoming Catholic, and therefore the argument goes, you are still retaining final interpretive authority. So you’re not any different than the Protestants I’ve been talking about throughout this episode. I want to answer that argument, but before I do that, I want to just highlight that that argument should sound fishy to you, and the reason I think it should sound fish to you, it’s just stop for a moment.
Don’t think in terms of Catholic, Protestant at all, but just think about the structure of the argument and imagine you’re going back to the Sermon on the Mount and you’ve got Jesus teaching and he says something like You’ve heard it said, and I for an eye, a tooth for a truth, but I say to you to turn the other cheek. Now imagine two people listening to him and the first one says to the other one, okay, Jesus is wrong about the need to turn the other cheek because the Torah clearly says an eye for an eye. Just let scripture speak for itself. And the second listener is like, wait a second. We should trust Jesus’s teaching instead of our own personal interpretations of the Torah. But now imagine that first one comes back and says, look, you’re using your personal interpretation by believing that Jesus is a messiah.
You’re using your interpretive ability to make sense of Jesus’s teaching. How do you know you’re even understanding him? Right? Aren’t we in the same boat? Now, logically you should be able to say, okay, the person following Jesus and the person not following Jesus are not equally in the same boat. There a person who says, I don’t need Jesus as a law giver or a teacher because I can just read the scriptures for myself and the person who says, I can understand things well enough to realize I do need a law giver and a teacher. Those are not the same, even though they’re both using their reason, one of them is using their reason to submit to an authority. Neither one is using their reason to explain they don’t need an authority. Those are not the same. So I’m just flagging that to say if the math is an objection, sounds fishy to you, it should because it it’s, and you’ll find variation.
I’ve seen variations even the past week or so of Protestants making this claim like, oh, you’re in the same position. Catholics can’t define which are essential and non-essential doctrines any more than Protestants can, et cetera, just nonsensical kind of positions that are missing and typically missing the exact same thing. So I’m finally going to get to the third and final part, which is what I think is the kicker. The solution here is delineating between the two biblical ways that scripture speaks of faith, and you need both. I like the way sin Augustine puts it in day turn ate, he says, but that which is believed is a different thing from the faith by which it is believed. So when we’re talking about faith in the Bible, we could mean the faith in which we believe this is what we might call the objective faith, or we could mean the faith by which we believe subjective or personal faith.
I have the gift of faith to believe in the faith that is his sense and classically following Augustine, this is divided in a very subtle Latin distinction, though you don’t need this, but if you want to subjective, faith is fe quo. The faith by which I believe objective faith is fe qua the faith in which I believe, and you will see scripture talk about both. I’ll give you a couple examples. First on subjective, faith, fetus quo, the faith by which I believe scripture speaks of this as a gift. St. Paul in Ephesians two says, by grace you’ve been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. So this saving faith is given by grace. It is a gift. In one Corinthians 13, he speaks of it along with hope and love as the three theological virtues, these gifts given by God.
In Matthews chapter six, Jesus talks about men of little faith. In Matthew 14, this is a really troubling one. St. Peter who had enough faith to walk on the water starts to doubt and sink, and Jesus grabs him and says, oh man of little faith. So notice you can have a little bit of personal faith or you can have a lot. For instance, the centurion, Jesus says to him in Matthew eight, truly I say to you, not even in Israel, have I found such faith? He’s not saying, oh, you have a different religion than the one I’ve been teaching. That would not be good. No, he’s praising the man for having a lot of faith. Likewise, he says to the woman in Matthew 15, A woman, great is your faith, be it done for you as you desire, and her daughter was healed. That’s for the Canaanite or sero nation woman, and so you can have a little faith or a lot of faith that’s on the level of personal faith and what’s more your faith can grow.
In Second Corinthians, St. Paul says that our hope is that as your faith increases, he wants your faith to grow on the object of faith like the content of revelation. You don’t want that to grow. That should stay the exact same size all the time because the whole point is it’s fixed and it’s revealed. It’s not like, oh, we just added in another book to the Bible. No, that kind of faith shouldn’t grow. Personal faith like my trust that should grow. So personal faith is much more like my trust, my belief In two Thessalonians chapter one, he also speaks. St. Paul also speaks of your faith growing abundantly and he thanks God for that. He doesn’t say, oh no, it’s getting too big. No. So subject of faith, what can we say about it? The first thing, and this is something I think Catholics maybe should do a better job of stressing is true, no pope, no creed, no counsel, no theologian, no saint whatever can ever replace the fact that you must have faith. It’s true. Christianity is not just a personal me and Jesus religion. It’s more complicated than that, but there’s always a personal dimension to it and there has to be. You have to have faith.
Additionally, subjective, faith is within you and it is a gift from God. It can grow, it can shrink. It can be larger and smaller. We can, and we should pray for greater faith and we see some examples of this in Mark chapter nine. The man says, I believe, help my unbelief, the apostles themselves in Luke 17 pray, increase our faith, personal faith can and should. That’s one dimension. On the other hand, there is also something fixed and objective and external to us objective faith. This is fetus Quay. This is the faith in which we believe and we see this referenced as well. So you heard in Ephesians, Sal St. Paul talks about the gift of faith by which we’re saved. He also speaks of the faith in which we believe. He says, there is one body in one spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one lord, one faith, one baptism.
So you’ll notice there it’s not something inside each one of us. It’s something held in common by the church. It is the faith of the church. It is something objective and external to me, and Jesus promises to the church that the Holy Spirit will guide you into all the truth. So notice what the church can do is come to increasing resolution about the faith that’s been given, but there’s not going to be an increasing content, and this is something that to their credit, some Protestants get right about Catholicism that the Catholic view is not that there’s going to be additional revelation, but rather there’ll be additional definition and resolution about what’s already been given. Here’s a good example from Southern Seminary of someone presenting the Catholic faith, even though he disagrees with it in a way that gets that distinction right?
CLIP:
The Roman Catholic Church has developed some distinctive doctrines over the centuries. Many times the church was content to allow a variety of opinions, but over time the church declared certain specific doctrines to be necessary to be believed.
Joe’:
I mentioned that because I think it’s important to actually hear there are Protestants who get Catholics can and do have clearly defined essentials that the church does sometimes say this thing is no longer up for debate. That’s not adding to revelation. That’s just cutting off like, okay, you used to be able to hold this position or that one. Now we know that second one is heretical because we’ve seen it leads to bad places, so you have to only believe the first one. That is something the church has done throughout history and if you’re someone who has any kind of historical rooting, then you should know that we see this with Trinitarian theology, we see this with Christology, and so you should at least in principle agree with the fact the church can and does exercise this role. You see it in Acts 15, so this is something the church is doing, but it’s never adding.
It’s not saying we got some new revelation, there’s a new teaching. It’s actually restricting in a certain way by saying that thing you could believe yesterday that wasn’t officially taught but wasn’t condemned. We’re now telling you don’t believe that because that’s contrary to what we know to be true. Alright? That’s part of the level of objective faith. That’s not about how much you believe but in what you believe and as a result, we hear all of this talk of the faith and that can be a really helpful way of framing when we’re talking about objective faith. It’s not that the always means it’s going to be objective faith, but frequently objective. Faith is referred to not just as faith but the faith. So for instance, St. Paul and Philippians praise that they’ll stand firm in one spirit with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.
That’s again, obviously not talking about their personal experience of faith, but it’s something external and objective that they can all be in agreement on. Likewise, Jude in the third verse says, he finds it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. Now, that should immediately tell us personal faith is in each of us. It wasn’t once for all personal faith. My faith did not exist before me because it’s internal to me. It’s a gift from God to me. Your faith did not exist before you. It’s a gift from God to you. The faith in which you believed, if you believe properly has been around for 2000 years. That’s what Jude is telling us in verse three. This is a faith delivered once for all to the saints. One of the reasons that Catholics care about the fact that we can trace our views back all those thousands of years is because the idea of objective faith includes that it has this timeless quality.
If you’re believing something nobody believed before 200 or 500 years ago, that doesn’t sound like the faith delivered once for all to the saints. That sounds like you are placing your trust, your subjective faith is being placed in a false object, an object of faith that isn’t the faith described in scripture, and that’s an important distinction. You might believe very fervently. Your subjective faith may be cranked up to 11, but it’s being directed to the wrong object. You can imagine a more extreme case, and I’m not saying this is true of somebody who has a novel form of Christianity. You can imagine someone who really ardently followed a false Christ. They could have profound levels of belief, but their faith would be misdirected. So that misdirected zeal is something that we have to recognize. The whole reason there can be such a thing as misdirected zeal is zeal is talking about the personal subjective part.
Misdirected is talking about the external orientation to the objective part. I hope that’s clear. St. Paul talks about this quite a bit, but I want to focus specifically on the number of times he talks about it in his first letter to Timothy. This isn’t even all of them, but he goes back to the subject again and again and again with Timothy. He tells him in one Timothy four in verse six, if you put these instructions before the brethren, you’ll be a good minister of Christ. Jesus nourished on the words of the faith, eos and of the good doctrine which you have followed, and then in the next chapter he warns that anyone who doesn’t provide for his family doesn’t provide for his relatives, especially his own family has disowned the faith. And again, he’s using the kind of article and says he’s worse than nonbeliever.
He’s not saying he’s having a crisis of belief. He doesn’t have his faith. He’s saying his rejected the faith, this objective external thing, he’s no longer linked to that. And then a chapter later he talks about another way you can lose the faith, the love of money is the root of all evils. It’s through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierce their hearts with many pangs. And then later in the same chapter, he tells Timothy to guard what has been entrusted to him and to avoid godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge for by professing it. Some have missed the mark as regards the faith. That is I think really critical language because he’s saying there’s people who have false knowledge like false nos. The gnostics would be an obvious example of this, but any heretic is going to fall in this category.
They claim to have some knowledge, knowledge of scripture, knowledge of what Jesus actually meant, et cetera, et cetera. And so the problem isn’t that they’re not fervent enough, they may be incredibly fervent. The problem may be that they’re way too fervent because they’re missing the mark about the objective faith. That’s his point. He’s not saying these people running around with godless chatter aren’t enthusiastic enough. They’re clearly enthusiastic but in the wrong direction because they don’t have the right objective faith. So subjective faith that’s inside you. Objective faith. That’s a reminder that Christian faith cannot be purely subjective because that would ultimately be just relativistic. This is one of the problems with someone in a few weeks ago when I did the video on essential doctrines. One answer that some Christians come to is that the only essential doctrine is faith alone. And so as long as you have faith, anything else doesn’t rise to level of essential doctrine. And the problem with that is it leaves us in this really precarious position where you have faith, but faith in what? And so of all people, JC Ryle, the guy with whom I began this video identifies although not using those terms but identifies a form of this problem with misdirected zeal.
CLIP:
It is possible to mean well and to have good intentions yet to make the most grievous mistakes in our actions. It is possible to fancy that we have scripture on our side and to support our conduct by scriptural quotations and yet commit serious errors. This clear as daylight from this, in other cases related to the Bible that it is not enough to be zealous and well-meaning every gray faults are frequently committed with good intentions from no quarter perhaps has the church received so much injury as from ignorant, but well-meaning men.
Joe’:
So I want to just second that and say subjective faith involves placing our personal trust that Jesus in his message are true, but objective faith includes the content of that message. This is why we care about doctrine. This is why we care about orthodoxy, why it’s not enough to just say you have zeal. Because if you have a misplaced zeal, you might be doing a tremendous amount of damage to Christianity while thinking you have scripture on your side. That’s something that Protestants and Catholics alike can say, yeah, we’ve seen this problem and it’s something we should watch out for. So where does that leave us and why do I think this answers matheson’s objection? Well, simply this personal faith is necessary. It’s aided, but what are sometimes called motives of credibility. These are the reasons why we believe and they could be good or bad reasons.
When you were a kid, it might’ve just been my parents tell me Christianity is true and my parents are never wrong. Well, it turns out that wasn’t as good of an argument as you maybe thought it was as a kid, but that was one of the reasons that was one of the motives of credibility. Ultimately, all of that can be fallible. You can have good or bad reasons for coming to faith and your reasons for continuing in faith may not be the same reasons you started in faith, we don’t claim any kind of infallibility around that dimension. In fact, it’s quite clear Jesus at the last supper prays for Peter that his faith may not fail. Well, if it weren’t possible for faith to fail, that such a prayer would be unnecessary. And so clearly at the personal level you can have fallibility. You can fail in this, you can lose the faith.
You can have good or bad reasons. And so on that point, on the nature of personal faith, Catholics, Orthodox Protestants, we are in a similar boat. We have to read the evidence and ascend to it as best we see fit, but herein lies the difference. Our personal subjective faith as Catholics is not in our own interpretive abilities. It is rather in something external and something objective that we believe Jesus is who he says, and we believe that Catholic church is who he says. And so however you get to that conclusion, you can say yes to that and you are not the Lord and master of interpretation at that point, right? As you’re wandering around, you don’t start by saying, there must be a Pope out there. I’m going to get under him. You start by finding out, oh, okay, there’s this guy, Jesus, what does he teach?
Is this true? He says he founded a church. Is that church still around? What does it look like? Those kind of questions. And so at that level, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, any kind of Enquirer is going to be in a similar situation. You don’t start off as a disciple. You start off as someone asking questions, and so the people, whether it’s the ones listening to Jesus, give the sermon on the Mount or whatever it is, they’re starting from that similar spot. It’s when you get to the point that you can say that, yes, that’s when there’s an act of actual obedience and an act of submission where you say, I trust that my reason that has gotten me here can see reasonably there’s something greater than reason here. I trust that my own interpretation of scripture, which has led me to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, and the Catholic church is who he says it is, has also led me to believe that I’m not meant to be in final command of interpretations of scripture.
There’s no contradiction there. The person who uses reason to get to faith, the person who uses personal reading of scripture to get to the authority of the Catholic church, those are logical sequences, and so just as an atheist can’t reasonably say, you used your reason to get to faith, therefore, you don’t need faith. Neither can a Protestant say to a Catholic or an Orthodox. You use your reading of scripture to get to the authority of the church. Therefore, you don’t need the authority of the church. It doesn’t follow. In either case, those are motives of credibility at the level of why I have the personal faith that I do, but the personal faith that I do is not in my own authority. The personal faith that I have is in the authority of Jesus Christ and his body of the church. So that’s why I think that the problem that I’ve been identifying at the beginning, this personal interpretation problem is a real one for Protestantism because there isn’t that point where there’s just an objective determination of the external faith.
I’m always having to decide as a Protestant, which doctrines I do and don’t believe in because I can’t trust any of the authorities for the reasons JC Riel says, that’s not a workable solution to the problem. That if there’s to be an objective faith that we can all stand one mind and one heart, shoulder to shoulder striving for, and one that’s 2000 years old, one that’s objective. That’s not going to be something like what Riel describes. That’s going to be something like what the Catholic Church describes. I hope that’s clear. I hope that’s helpful. I look forward to your engagement below and letting me know if I’ve missed some important kind of dimension to that question. So yeah, God bless you. I hope it’s a fruitful and edifying conversation. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless.