Do Catholics practice sola ecclesia? White vs. Matatics (1997), part 5.

Note: This is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a series on Dr.* James White’s 1997 debate with Ger­ry Matat­ics on sola scrip­tura. You can find Part 1 here and fol­low the links for­ward.

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he short answer to the ques­tion is: No. The Church is bound to the Scrip­tures and to the deposit of faith and its own judg­ments in the exer­cise of its teach­ing author­i­ty; it must elu­ci­date Scrip­ture and the deposit of faith and apply them to new ques­tions; no more. That is what Catholic apol­o­gists mean when they say that the Church is the ser­vant of the Scrip­tures and the ser­vant of the deposit of faith.

Now. Protes­tants think in the par­a­digm of sola; so upon learn­ing that Catholics reject sola scrip­tura, they con­clude that there must be some dif­fer­ent noun Catholics give exclu­siv­i­ty to. Well, gee, it must be the Church! Thus the myth of sola eccle­sia is born. But no. Catholics real­ly are a both-and peo­ple. I know this mind­set is for­eign to Protes­tants, who built a Ref­or­ma­tion on five solas. Protes­tants have to say “x or y”; they can’t con­ceive of “x and y.”

Catholics do have a very high doc­trine of the Church; that is not in doubt. Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aed­i­fi­cabo Eccle­si­am meam, et por­tae inferi non prae­vale­bunt adver­sus eam (Matt. 16:18; Vul­gate). There is no cor­re­spond­ing text of Scrip­ture in which Christ says that he is going to write his book, and the gates of hell won’t pre­vail against the book. When Christ ascend­ed, he left us with a Church, not a book.

More­over, Christ left us a teach­ing Church. “All [author­i­ty] is giv­en unto me in heav­en and in earth,” he says. “Go ye there­fore, and teach all nations. … And lo I am with you always” (Matt. 28:18–20). Christ promis­es to be with the Church in per­pe­tu­ity; its author­i­ty comes from Christ him­self, who says noth­ing about the author­i­ty end­ing once a par­tic­u­lar set of writ­ings is com­plete. That’s not in the Bible.

In Luke 10:16, Christ says to the apos­tles, “Who­ev­er hears you hears me.” In his debate with Ger­ry Matat­ics, Dr.* White says that the Scrip­tures alone are God speak­ing to us. But in this pas­sage, Christ says that who­ev­er hears the apos­tles—as peo­ple, not a writ­ten text—hears Christ him­self.

Dr.* White may object at this point: “But Alt! Luke 10:16 is refer­ring to a spe­cif­ic instance dur­ing the min­istry of Christ. That’s a time of enscrip­tura­tion! That’s the extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tion! There is noth­ing in Luke 10:16 about this dec­la­ra­tion hav­ing per­pe­tu­ity for all time through apos­tolic suc­ces­sion.”

Okay, okay. Let’s not jump ahead. (Anx­ious types like to do that.) Defense against coun­ter­ar­gu­ment can be saved for anoth­er post. The point here is only that the Church has always under­stood Luke 10:16 this way. Here are three key texts to doc­u­ment this:

• The Fourth Coun­cil of Con­stan­tino­ple (860–870 A.D.): “We believe that the say­ing of the Lord that Christ addressed to his holy apos­tles and dis­ci­ples, Who­ev­er receives you receives me, and who­ev­er despis­es you despis­es me, was also addressed to all who were like­wise made supreme pon­tif­fs and chief pas­tors in suc­ces­sion to them in the Catholic Church.”
• Pope Pius XII’s encycli­cal Humani Gener­is 20: “Nor must it be thought that what is expound­ed in Encycli­cal Let­ters does not of itself demand con­sent, since in writ­ing such Let­ters the Popes do not exer­cise the supreme pow­er of their Teach­ing Author­i­ty. For these mat­ters are taught with the ordi­nary teach­ing author­i­ty, of which it is true to say: ‘He who heareth you, heareth me.’ ”
• Lumen Gen­tium 20: “[T]he Sacred Coun­cil teach­es that bish­ops by divine insti­tu­tion have suc­ceed­ed to the place of the apos­tles, as shep­herds of the Church, and he who hears them, hears Christ, and he who rejects them, rejects Christ and Him who sent Christ.”

I know of no text of the New Tes­ta­ment which speaks of sim­i­lar, still less high­er, author­i­ty resid­ing in a col­lec­tion of books to be com­plet­ed some time in the first cen­tu­ry. This does not mean that the Bible does­n’t have that author­i­ty. It only means that the Bible does­n’t tell us about it. But it does tell us lots of things about the author­i­ty of the Church. (As do the Church Fathers.)

•••

But does that amount to sola eccle­sia? Dr.* White thinks it does. Here he is in his debate with Ger­ry Matat­ics; this comes around 24:25:

Rome claims that she is, in fact, the ulti­mate infal­li­ble author­i­ty. … Rome claims that she has ulti­mate author­i­ty to define the con­tent of scrip­ture; that is, to deter­mine the canon of scrip­ture. … She like­wise claims the ulti­mate and infal­li­ble author­i­ty to deter­mine the mean­ing and inter­pre­ta­tion of Scrip­ture as well. Like­wise, she claims ulti­mate infal­li­ble author­i­ty to deter­mine the extent of tra­di­tion (what­ev­er that is). … And, of course, she claims the ulti­mate author­i­ty to deter­mine what tra­di­tion does and does not teach. Hence, while she claims to be the ser­vant of the Scrip­tures and tra­di­tion, in real­i­ty she is the mas­ter deter­min­ing what Scrip­ture is and what it means, what tra­di­tion is and what it means. If you define those two sources, and you claim to be the only one who knows what those two sources say, you can not be log­i­cal­ly sub­servient to those two sources.

It might have helped for Dr.* White to cite some sources on this. Where does “Rome” teach each of these things? I don’t deny that such texts exist, only that Dr.* White does­n’t tell us which ones he has in mind. If he had done so, we could lim­it our­selves to what the texts actu­al­ly say. After all, I cit­ed three texts on the Church’s exe­ge­sis of Luke 10:16. But per­ad­ven­ture Dr.* White’s time was lim­it­ed and he was too busy shov­el­ing in quo­ta­tions from the Fathers—Cyril, Theodor­et, Augus­tine, even Athanasius—that sup­pos­ed­ly teach sola scrip­tura. Let’s put that all to the side and and assume that Dr.* White is cor­rect about every­thing “Rome” “claims.”

What leaps off the page here, though I don’t know how obvi­ous it may be to Dr.* White, is that some­one has to tell us which texts belong in the canon of the Bible and which ones do not. The canon does not declare itself. No Protes­tant will tell you that the table of con­tents is infal­li­ble. The late Pres­by­ter­ian pas­tor and apol­o­gist R.C. Sproul said that the Bible is a “fal­li­ble list of infal­li­ble books.” That’s sheer wind. If the books are infal­li­ble, every last one, then the list could hard­ly be fal­li­ble unless it left some things out. I’m not aware that Dr. Sproul ever list­ed any titles he sus­pect­ed were miss­ing. But if God inspired those miss­ing texts, how is it God did not make them known to us? Or say the list, being fal­li­ble, includ­ed some wrong ones. You could hard­ly call them infal­li­ble. Nei­ther did Dr. Sproul, to my knowl­edge, name any we should throw into the fire. Luther did, but not Dr. Sproul.

Most Protes­tants don’t make claims so wild. Theirs are wilder. They will say some­thing like, “Well, the canon is self-evi­dent. The Church does not deter­mine the canon, it just ‘rec­og­nizes’ it.” But no. If that were so, why would Protes­tants and Catholics dis­agree about even entire books and frac­tions of oth­ers? Why would Luther spec­u­late that even some New Tes­ta­ment books, like James, may have con­tained errors? Why would there have been dif­fer­ent canon­i­cal lists in the ear­ly cen­turies? The answer is obvi­ous: Because the canon is not self-evi­dent. Some­one has to have the author­i­ty to deter­mine what belongs in the Bible, or we could not have a Bible. And we could not have Church uni­ty if every­one was walk­ing around with a dif­fer­ent canon.

“But Alt!” Dr.* White might say. “Rome also claims that she is the ulti­mate inter­preter of Scrip­ture.”

Right. So she is. But even Dr.* White notes that the Church has not giv­en us an infal­li­ble inter­pre­ta­tion of more than a hand­ful of vers­es. Matt. 16:18. Luke 10:16. Rev. 12:1. Luke 1:28. I’m nam­ing vers­es off the top of my head here. The Church is cit­ing an author­i­ty for doc­trine and cites Scrip­ture. The Church does not try to put our rea­son or exe­ge­sis in a straight-jack­et; she does try to set down broad para­me­ters to keep Catholics in check so we don’t wan­der off into schism. It hap­pens, of course, since we have free will; but the point of the infal­li­ble inter­preter is to keep us with­in the lanes. When you get onto a road with­out lanes, that’s when wrecks hap­pen.

Does that make the Church the mas­ter rather than the ser­vant? Let’s say that, if it did, we’d expect to see a cou­ple of things.

• We’d expect to find clear con­tra­dic­tions of Scrip­ture, not just an inter­pre­ta­tion that dif­fers from some­one else’s.

For exam­ple, you can’t say that the Church “con­tra­dicts” Romans 3:28 because it under­stands it dif­fer­ent­ly than Protes­tants do. It under­stands the verse to be refer­ring to works of the law specifically—the Mosa­ic covenant—and not good works broad­ly speak­ing, such as works of mer­cy. Paul wrote it specif­i­cal­ly with the debate over cir­cum­ci­sion in mind. his is a dif­fer­ence of exe­ge­sis.

But if you found the Church teach­ing that Christ did not rise from the dead—that was a mis­take that wan­dered in (or it’s just a metaphor­i­cal rising)—we might have some­thing to talk about. You could­n’t write that off as anoth­er pos­si­ble exe­ge­sis.

• We’d expect to find the Mag­is­teri­um con­tra­dict­ing itself in its bib­li­cal inter­pre­ta­tion

If Catholics woke up tomor­row morn­ing and Pope Fran­cis said, “We can no longer regard, as we once did, Paul’s let­ter to the Romans as canon­i­cal scrip­ture; new research has shown that this is a spu­ri­ous text from the ‘Pauline school,’ but not the work of Paul him­self”: then we’d have some­thing to talk about.

Or say twen­ty years from now, Pope Dubi­ous said, “It is an errant view that claims that kechar­it­o­mene is a ref­er­ence to Mary’s immac­u­late con­cep­tion, and there­fore we declare that Luke 1:28 is not to be inter­pret­ed in that sense, and any­one who inter­prets it thus, let him be anath­e­ma.” Then we’d have some­thing to talk about.

So it’s best, if Dr.* White thinks that the Catholic Church has actu­al­ly act­ed like the mas­ter rather than ser­vant of Scrip­ture, he give us exam­ples of how the Church has wan­dered from cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion. It’s not enough just to say “in the­o­ry this is sola eccle­sia.” He needs to demon­strate that it’s sola eccle­sia in prac­tice. And then we’ll have some­thing spe­cif­ic to dis­cuss. [Read part 6.]