Mr. John Bugay, defending the perspicuity of Scripture, cries: “God is not some kind of loon!”

ver at Pseudo­logue today, anti-Catholic polemi­cist Mr. John Bugay informs us, with his cus­tom­ary mad zeal, that “God is not some kind of loon!” I’m pleased to report we can agree with him on that. Who among us says God is? Is Mr. Bugay swat­ting the air against imag­i­nary flies again? Does he suf­fer floaters? These are real ques­tions, I am afraid.

Now, I would not rec­om­mend, dear read­er, that you read the arti­cle your­self. You may if you choose. Maybe you con­sid­er it your share in the suf­fer­ings of Christ. Maybe you also wear sack­cloth, or fla­gel­late your­self on Good Fri­day, or sleep on a cold stone floor; I can’t speak for your penances. Maybe you put shards of glass in your shoes. But part of being a blog­ger is that I do such painful things so you won’t have to. It’s not easy. You must remem­ber me in your prayers. In any case, the point of the article—which I read with sober and caf­feinat­ed attention—is that God (not being a loon) would want us to under­stand every last thing He has revealed to us.

Indeed that is a more or less self-evi­dent premise. God is not the author of con­fu­sion; we know this. But now the polem­i­cal rogue, as is his wont, wan­ders off and gets lost down tan­gled paths of non sequitur. God, says Mr. Bugay, gave His Word—by which he means the Bible, the whole Bible, and noth­ing but the Bible—enough per­spicu­ity that we should not have to pace about and scratch our heads and page through com­men­taries and lex­i­cons and miss our din­ner to find out what John 6:55 means. If God had done oth­er­wise, He would be “some kind of loon.” And the polem­i­cal rogue says here that God is not “some kind of loon.” Christ spoke plain­ly in all that he said; he con­fused no one. The Bible is a self-evi­dent text. It is clear as water brooks after which the hart pan­teth, as well-marked as road signs to the City of God.

Mr. Bugay’s unending agon with Called to Communion.

But before we go dis­put­ing with Mr. Bugay how self-evi­dent the Bible is, let me back up a pace and point out the con­text in which this dis­cus­sion has come up. As long ago as June 7, 2009, Dr. Bryan Cross at Called to Com­mu­nion post­ed a remark­ably long arti­cle (it was more than 14,000 words) enti­tled “Christ Found­ed a Vis­i­ble Church.” Which indeed he did. And because He did, He there­fore gave it teach­ing author­i­ty to main­tain the uni­ty of the faith. That is a key argu­ment of Catholi­cism; as Dr. Cross puts it, quot­ing John 16:13 and 1 Tim. 3:15: “Christ has promised that the Holy Spir­it will guide the Catholic Church into all truth. … The Catholic Church is the pil­lar and ground of truth.”

The Reformed claim, by contrast—for the ex-Catholic Mr. Bugay is now Reformed: into what, no one asks—is that the uni­ty of the faith is main­tained, not through any teach­ing church, still less one that we can see (the true church, they tell us, is invis­i­ble and scat­tered around in a sur­feit of “local bod­ies”) but through Scrip­ture alone. Chris­tians, Mr. Bugay would have us believe, do not need a vis­i­ble Church as a teach­ing author­i­ty, because they have the Scrip­tures and the Scrip­tures come direct to us from God, like a bolt from Zeus. They’re clear enough. God is not some kind of loon.

Dr. Cross’s arti­cle, long to the point of epic saga, nev­er­the­less gave rise to near­ly 300 com­ments that total over 63,000 words. (For indeed I sat here and count­ed.) And those com­ments have gone on until this wery day, a full three and one half years lat­er. No one agrees to dis­agree at that site, ever; and they will go on argu­ing past the escha­ton. Just yes­ter­day Mr. Bugay tried to engage in still more com­box polemics, this time with Dr. Michael Lic­cione. Dr. Lic­cione said that, in the absence of an infal­li­ble Church author­i­ty, giv­en by God him­self, no one has a way to dis­tin­guish between divine rev­e­la­tion and “human the­o­log­i­cal opin­ion” about what the Bible means. A text, even a divine one, must be inter­pret­ed; the inter­pre­ta­tion is not just there, coter­mi­nous with the text. “None of us,” Dr. Lic­cione said, “can answer the ques­tion just by offer­ing our own favored inter­pre­ta­tion of select­ed bib­li­cal texts.” One exe­ge­sis tugs at war with the oth­er. Which is true? Or are both false? And how would we know? If Mr. Bugay denies infal­li­bil­i­ty to all human beings with­out excep­tion, to the end of all waters and back, then he has no prin­ci­ple left by which to right­ly divide rev­e­la­tion from opin­ion, truth from con­jec­ture.

Why are there 33,000 different maths?

But Mr. Bugay, who on top of being polem­i­cal is also inven­tive, thinks he has a way out of this quandary. He finds it in an appeal to math. I kid you not, dear read­er; he will quar­rel by num­bers. “Math,” he tells us pompous­ly, “has rules.”

[A]nd … if you make up your mind that you are going to be as hon­est as pos­si­ble in your under­stand­ing of math, it won’t take you long to under­stand that 2+2=4. With a bit more work, you’ll find out that 9x9=81 [zzzzzz], and with not too much more dif­fi­cul­ty you can go to a smart guy and under­stand that a^2 x b^2 = c^2. [A]nd some­one may even be able to fig­ure out the square root of a num­ber like 5,237.

What this proves is that the polem­i­cal rogue should quit while he’s behind. Like π, √5,237 stretch­es out to infin­i­ty. Poor Mr. Bugay did not stop from his vagabond wan­der­ings long enough to con­sid­er this and he got throt­tled by an irra­tional num­ber. How­beit, the point of the anal­o­gy (which is an uncom­mon­ly strange one, even for him) is that “under­stand­ing God’s rev­e­la­tion to us is not too dif­fer­ent from under­stand­ing math.” In the same way that God cre­at­ed the rules of math and gave us all the intel­lec­tu­al capac­i­ty to pre­hend them, “God is not going to make crea­tures that can’t hear and under­stand him.” The mean­ing of Eph. 2:8 is as clear as the sum of two and eight. So rather than address the prob­lem, Mr. Bugay’s genius solu­tion is to deny it.

Now, per­haps Mr. Bugay is try­ing to be sim­ple, ele­gant, and log­i­cal. It’s pos­si­ble to think well of him. But he begs a ques­tion, name­ly, this: How is it that there are so many com­pet­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of Scrip­ture? They can’t all be right. Any­one who has tak­en the time to observe such things knows that math­e­mati­cians don’t run around like the­olo­gians (or dumb apol­o­gists), dis­put­ing the prod­uct of five and four. Every­one agrees the answer is twen­ty; there aren’t cranks putting up videos on YouTube, or writ­ing blog arti­cles, insist­ing that it is some oth­er num­ber. But Eph. 2:8 caus­es argu­ments. Why?

Here is why poor Mr. Bugay’s anal­o­gy is false: Math is a sci­ence and exe­ge­sis is not. Imag­ine some­one say­ing: “You know, my dear boy, the mean­ing of Ham­let is as plain as the Pythagore­an the­o­rem!” Not even on YouTube or Face­book or Twit­ter, and not on any blog, per­haps not even on Pseudo­logue itself, would any­one, ever, say any­thing so appalling­ly stu­pid. Mr. Bugay’s des­per­ate anal­o­gy is belied by all the count­less sects of Protes­tantism, each with its own inter­pre­ta­tion of its own proof texts. When was the last time a Calvin­ist agreed with an Armin­ian about John 3:16? Can Mr. Bugay tell us? Math­e­mati­cians have not pro­duced 33,000 dif­fer­ent schools of mul­ti­pli­ca­tion the­o­ry; they could­n’t. I could not think of a more fatu­ous anal­o­gy, if I tried, to defend sola scrip­tura in the face of all this scan­dalous divi­sion among Chris­tians who say they’re just going by what the Bible says. If “God is not going to make crea­tures that can’t hear and under­stand him,” how did all this come to be? The polem­i­cal rogue does not say here; no Protes­tant has. (Name him, if I be wrong.) Isn’t this a con­cern, after 500 years of just fol­low­ing the Bible?

As a corol­lary to Mr. Bugay’s math anal­o­gy for the per­spicu­ity of Scrip­ture are these words from the West­min­ster Con­fes­sion:

The infal­li­ble rule of inter­pre­ta­tion of Scrip­ture is [Here it comes.] the Scrip­ture itself [!]: and there­fore, when there is a ques­tion about the true and full sense of any Scrip­ture (which is not man­i­fold, but one)—[Real­ly?]—it must be searched and known by oth­er places that speak more clear­ly.

Scrip­ture inter­prets scrip­ture! The infal­li­ble text is its own infal­li­ble inter­preter! If you don’t under­stand this pas­sage, that pas­sage will clar­i­fy! And there’s only one inter­pre­ta­tion for any text! Shaz­a­am! An exeget­i­cal mir­a­cle! Again, it sounds so sim­ple, so ele­gant in the­o­ry. But what does it mean when put into prac­tice? To answer that ques­tion, we may com­pare two vers­es of Scrip­ture: Rom. 3:28 and James 2:24.

• Rom. 3:28: There­fore we con­clude that a man is jus­ti­fied by faith with­out the deeds of the law.
• James 2:24: Ye see then how that by works a man is jus­ti­fied, and not by faith only.

When set­ting these two pas­sages side by side, one nat­u­ral­ly won­ders where this “per­spicu­ity” is that Mr. Bugay, inven­tor of analo­gies, insists we will find in Scrip­ture. Are we saved by faith or by works? Or both? Paul and James might seem, take them on their face, to be con­tra­dict­ing each oth­er. And this question—how are we justified?—is, I would think, impor­tant. How did God allow this weird dis­crep­an­cy to sneak into the text on such a key point? Or maybe James is not meant to be in the Bible. Should we throw Jim­my in the stove? Mr. Luther thought so; he was a polem­i­cal rogue too. How would we know?

A riddle for Westminster mathematicians.

Well, how is one to get out of the dif­fi­cul­ty? Accord­ing to the WCF, if there’s a prob­lem with the inter­pre­ta­tion of any one verse, you must look for the solu­tion in some relat­ed but clear­er pas­sage. The only prob­lem with that is, which of these two verses—Rom. 3:28 or James 2:24—is the “prob­lem verse”? If you ask a Protes­tant, he might say James 2:24. If you ask a Catholic, he might say Rom. 3:28. So the Protes­tant ends up view­ing Paul as a cor­rec­tive to James (whom we should throw in the stove); and the Catholic ends up view­ing James as a cor­rec­tive to the mis­un­der­stand­ing of Paul (whose epis­tles we must keep, along with Tobit, Baruch, Wis­dom, Mac­cabees, and so on). Which of them is right?

So here’s the point. (I have had one this whole time.) It is one’s “inter­pre­tive par­a­digm” (I bor­row the phrase from Dr. Lic­cione) that deter­mines whether he’s going to view Romans as the prob­lem verse that James cor­rects, or vice ver­sa. You can only resolve the ques­tion by a sup­po­si­tion. And if all par­a­digms and sup­po­si­tions are fal­li­ble, then there’s no way to judge between them. Is the one divine rev­e­la­tion, or the oth­er? Or nei­ther?

So the WCF seems like Mr. Bugay to be giv­ing us a genius and ele­gant solu­tion, but all it does is prove the real­i­ty of the prob­lem it is try­ing to solve. Still unan­swered is the ques­tion that Dr. Lic­cione raised in the first place: If you assume, as a first prin­ci­ple, that all human beings—popes and bish­ops alike—are fal­li­ble, then you imme­di­ate­ly cut down the only branch upon which you can perch a dis­tinc­tion between God’s rev­e­la­tion and human opin­ion. If every­one is fal­li­ble, down to the last pope, then all we have are com­pet­ing opin­ions about the text of Scrip­ture and who­ev­er has enough lung pow­er or facil­i­ty with words to keep argu­ing after every­one else has dropped dead.

If all we were talk­ing about was some dis­put­ed text in Ham­let, none of this would mat­ter. Schol­ars can dis­agree until dooms­day about whether the Ghost is a spir­it of health or a gob­lin damned; it does not make a dif­fer­ence to any­one’s sal­va­tion. But the Bible is a dif­fer­ent kind of text. It is no answer to say (as Mr. Bugay might) that Shake­speare was an imper­fect author and so his text can be con­fus­ing; where­as, God is a per­fect author and can make his text plain. You would still be deny­ing the prob­lem. A plain text does not lead to 33,000 dif­fer­ent sects, or what­ev­er the num­ber is up to now. Sola scrip­tura has not saved us from divi­sion; if any­thing, it has caused it, there being no infal­li­ble author­i­ty, out­side the Bible, to keep exe­ge­sis in check. One can get lost in all those bram­bles down all those vagabond paths. The prob­lem is not with the author of Scrip­ture but with the inter­preter. We can not rea­son out the mean­ing; sin has cor­rupt­ed our rea­son.

So how, then, do we know for sure what God has meant to reveal to us? For there is an answer to the seem­ing dis­crep­an­cy between Rom. 3:28 and James 2:24; they are not con­tra­dic­to­ry. But where is that answer to be found if all we have are you and you and you under your own trees: you who think you inter­pret the word of God cor­rect­ly, even though you admit you are fal­li­ble. Who teach­es us right­ly; and how do we know? This mat­ters.

Christ splits the horns of a dilemma.

We find the answer in Christ’s promise to the dis­ci­ples in John 16:13.

When the Spir­it of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own author­i­ty, but what­ev­er he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

Rea­son alone is not enough. The author­i­ty of the apos­tles and their successors—that is, the author­i­ty of the Church—does not come of itself, from fal­li­ble men whose rea­son is cor­rupt­ed by sin. It comes instead from the infal­li­ble “Spir­it of truth.” The Holy Spir­it guides the Church, just as he guid­ed the authors of Scrip­ture. We have Christ’s words of assur­ance on this point; and Christ does not lie. But Christ did not give this charism to all men. Else, how could there be the­o­log­i­cal dis­agree­ment, or the count­less thou­sands and tens of thou­sands of Protes­tant sects? He must have been giv­ing the charism to some, but not to oth­ers.

Christ gives us lead­ers, but we are not all lead­ers. To ensure the uni­ty of the Church and the cer­tain­ty of divine rev­e­la­tion, he gives some of us the charism of infal­li­bil­i­ty. But we are not all infal­li­ble; there is no Pope John B. Though it be human nature to want to wan­der off and say, “The Scrip­tures are clear enough; I can make it through these wilds on my own,” that is the one thing we must not do. It is intel­lec­tu­al pride. Down that vagabond road lies schism with­out end.

There is more to say on this sub­ject; and I will come to all of it in future posts, Lord will­ing and the crick don’t rise. But for now I would con­clude with this thought. It seems to me that God knows very well the fal­li­ble nature of human beings. He knows very well that sin has taint­ed our rea­son. Before the fall, Adam could have known and under­stood per­fect­ly what the rev­e­la­tion of God was. But he lost his abil­i­ty to rea­son with­out error when he and Eve dis­obeyed God. Sin made him stu­pid. Our minds—even the minds of the smartest of us—are “straw,” lest it be for a spe­cial grace giv­en by God. But as the man­i­fest scan­dal of sect after Protes­tant sect illus­trates, God does not give that grace to every­one. He gives it to some but not oth­ers. God, know­ing our fal­li­bil­i­ty and our weak­ness, cre­at­ed a safe­guard: a sin­gle, uni­fied teach­ing author­i­ty that would guide Chris­tians into all truth and main­tain the uni­ty of the faith.

This does not mean (as some, attack­ing a straw man, always want to claim) that the Church must give us an infal­li­ble inter­pre­ta­tion of every last verse of Scrip­ture. We do not put exe­ge­sis in a straight-jack­et, with no place for human intel­lect and rea­son and inquiry to meet the text; rather, we set down broad lane mark­ers so that Chris­tians will not wan­der off into thick­ets of heresy and get stuck like a stub­born ram.

Mr. Bugay is right in his premise; God does not want mankind to be uncer­tain about the con­tent of his rev­e­la­tion. But he is wrong in how he applies it. It is for the sake of cer­tain­ty that God gave us, not sola scrip­tura, but the Church. That’s the safe­guard God set up. And he did so because he is not a loon.