Consequences of the Primacy of Conscience

An interesting exchange between a Presbyterian and some Catholics occurred recently. A Catholic mentioned in passing that Protestants hold to the primacy of the individual conscience. The Presbyterian indignantly denied holding this view, and apparently did not think that it is affirmed by any Reformed doctrinal standard. Now this gentleman is generally well informed (based upon what I have seen), so I presume this was a simple case of having forgotten what his own standards say.

I suspect (but I do not know for a fact) that part of what motivated his strong objection to the claim is that he realizes the primacy of individual conscience reduces to “solo scriptura” immediately, and he claims to hold to “sola scriptura.” In the end, the two boil down to the same thing anyway, as was demonstrated here, but at least some Protestants (notably the Reformed) object to this (although in my opinion Bryan Cross and Neal Judisch’s argument remains unanswered so far).

Setting that aside for the moment, though, his challenge to demonstrate the claim from the Reformed standards was fairly quickly answered:

God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in any thing, contrary to His Word; or beside it, if matters of faith, or worship. So that, to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands, out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience: and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also. [source]

In short: according to the Westminster Confession, no man has any standing to require anyone to believe anything that isn’t taught in the Bible. Ah, but there is the rub: who is to say what is taught in the Bible? The same document also insists that

The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.

According to the WCF no ecclesial body has any standing to so declare what Scripture teaches as to require assent by anyone, because the supreme court for all “controversies of religion” has but one Judge, and that is God Himself. So it seems pretty clear that primacy of the individual conscience (when it comes to discerning what truth the Bible teaches) is the definitive teaching of the WCF: a man is answerable to God alone. The claim that primacy of individual conscience is a “Protestant dogma” is not a Catholic invention.

When I was in the PCA, the principle of the primacy of individual conscience was unquestionably enforced (so to speak). Subscription to the Confession was not required for membership in the denomination; it was only required of men who held office (and even they are not obliged to hold to every jot and tittle it contains). If one isn’t obliged to agree with the WCF at all for church membership, it is pretty clear that the denomination affirms primacy of individual conscience and does not seek to compel assent.

(On a related note, the PCA recently declined to make assent to the Apostle’s Creed a condition of membership).

More importantly, if a Protestant denies the primacy of individual conscience he is effectively undercutting the Reformers. Luther famously appealed to conscience over against the authority of the Church; for a Protestant to deny the legitimacy of such an appeal is to reduce Luther from a reformer to a revolutionary who refused to accept licit authority. It would be to deny what is actually the sine qua non of the Reformation.

A third consequence of this primacy of individual conscience is that it pretty well obliterates any distinction between “solo scriptura” and “sola scriptura.” For if no man and no ecclesial body has any authority to compel assent to some doctrine or other (as the WCF asserts), then any claim for the legitimacy of “subordinate and derivative” authority amounts to nothing but a fog machine.

Now it might be asserted that the WCF doesn’t preclude compelled assent in literally every case, but rather only in cases having to do with “doctrines and commandments of men” that contradict the Bible. But the assertion begs the question, because what is at issue in such situations is precisely what the Bible actually teaches. Suppose a PCA officer announces that he does not believe in predestination because he no longer believes that it is taught in the Bible. In his eyes, any attempt by his session to compel his assent to the doctrine of predestination would contradict what the WCF teaches about liberty of conscience.

The end result is an inescapable dilemma: either the Protestant must claim the primacy of individual conscience and that principle’s concomitant doctrinal and denominational chaos, or he must accept the right of ecclesial authority to declare the content of the Faith (which inescapably demolishes any pretended legitimacy of the Reformation). There aren’t any other alternatives.

The Noltie Conundrum

That is the name ascribed by Jason Kettinger to the problems for Protestantism presented in my article The Accidental Catholic at Called to Communion. You can find a direct link to the article here. Since I am drawing attention to the article again, and since others have made the mistake of supposing it relies upon Catholic presuppositions, I suppose that I should point out once again that I was a convinced Protestant at the time that I realized the problems I present in the article, and that I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in investigating the Catholic Church. The point is that the problems I identify are intrinsic to Protestantism and do not rely upon an external point of view.

Thanks to Jason for the cool name, even though I have since learned that St.Francis de Sales made essentially the same argument a long time ago. :-)

Spring cleaning

Last autumn I got a new LTE iPad, and it has become my primary machine: I do little or no work on any other computer I own. So it has only been in recent months that I have become a bit unhappy with the blog’s old theme. The fonts are gigantic, and the result was that the single column for the posts was so narrow as to be ridiculous. So today became the day that I finally got round to a little cleaning up. I hope this will work better, even if it is less colorful. I am still not quite happy. The fonts are still absurdly large, such that the sidebar is pushed to the bottom of the page even in landscape. That’s dumb. But at least it will be more readable on the iPad, I think, and anyone needing large print won’t have to make any adjustments! :-)

Pie for Dessert

Yesterday I offered sauce for the goose. Today we have pumpkin pie.

One of the most astonishing things that I learned when I first began to research the Catholic Church is how badly, how grossly, how absurdly her teachings were misunderstood and misrepresented by Protestant “experts”. It wasn’t just on one or two issues, but on a whole raft of them. I can absolutely confirm what Archbishop Sheen said:

There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.

The average non-Catholic’s opinion of the Church is founded upon mistakes, hearsay, and old wives’ tales. I was simply astounded to learn the truth. And this is why I strongly suggest that Protestants get the facts straight from the horse’s mouth. This doesn’t mean that you have to agree with us, of course, but a decent regard for the truth ought to move you to shun all errors—even about things you do not like. And despite what you may have heard we do not worship Mary, we do not believe in salvation by works, and we love the Bible.

Reconciliation

Is it permissible to do evil when we think that good may be the result?
No.

To the eyes of faith no evil is graver than sin and nothing has worse
consequences for sinners themselves, for the Church, and for the whole
world. [CCC §1488]

But the fact that we may sin does not mean that we are without hope.

To return to communion with God after having lost it through sin is a
process born of the grace of God who is rich in mercy and solicitous for
the salvation of men. [ibid., §1489]

Sauce for the Goose

So I am feeling a tad vexed at the moment by the usual Protestant claim
that we Catholics believe in salvation by works, and I think it is time for a
little bit of that sauce for the goose.

To believe is to do something. To exercise faith in someone is to do
something. Therefore the Protestant belief in salvation by faith alone is a
belief in salvation by a human act. It is a salvation based upon works.

There. Not so fun when someone pulls that on you, is it? But you see, it
amounts to special pleading if you privilege the exercise of belief or of
faith in such a way as to remove it from the order of human action.

Now, I know that what I have just written is something of a caricature.
But I do it in order to make a point. Dear Protestant reader, I would ask you
to stop listening to theologians who never bother to read what we actually
believe. There are many Catholic resources available online for free where
you can read for yourself exactly what we believe and where you can ask
actual Catholics to explain things you do not understand. If you are not
willing to take so small a step as this in order to understand what you
intend to criticize, kindly refrain from criticism. Thank you!

Short Argument for the Visible Church

There are billboards in my area which quote a Bible verse that I think is not likely to have the meaning its purchasers intend. It is 2 Chronicles 7:14:

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

There are just all sorts of problems here for those who claim that Christ’s church on earth is invisible. In the first place, it clearly refers to the “elect,” because whom else would God call “my people who are called by my name”? But if these are the predestined, then basically the rest of the verse is superfluous: of course God’s people have humbled themselves; of course they are praying and seeking God’s face; of course they have turned from their wicked ways. So if any Protestant other than an Arminian says this today, he is talking theological nonsense on his own terms. but at the same time, we see that our land—this land, America—is badly in need of healing. What then? Are the elect—the only ones that some Protestants think can possibly be in view here—are they not praying? Nonsense. And yet our land is not healed. So either the passage has nothing to do with us, or something other than an invisible Church is in view.

Second, there is nothing of sola fide in this passage. Rather, God makes His mercy contingent upon human action.

Third and probably most obviously it is addressed to a visible People of God. There never was such a thing as an “invisible church” in Solomon’s day. This promise is addressed to Israel, a visible kingdom with visible subjects identifiable both by race and by a visible sign (circumcision). It makes no sense as a promise made to an invisible group who we are assured are certainly fulfilling the conditions of the promise God made.

Intellectual Modesty — an Example

Last year I wrote a brief article about intellectual modesty, and my point was that truths of faith are not necessarily subject to comprehension by human reason. Our intellectual powers cannot rise above nature to the supernatural.

Here is a personal example. The Catechism has this to say about the Eucharist:

The signs of bread and wine become, in a way surpassing understanding, the Body and Blood of Christ… [CCC §1333, emphasis added]

Transubstantiation surpasses my understanding. When I first read Aquinas on the subject I did not find his presentation to be comprehensible nor persuasive. But what occurred to me was that neither of those were necessary things. What I know to be a fact is that it is a truth of the Faith, and therefore I know that it is true whether I understand it or can explain it.

We must not presume to subject God’s truth to human judgment. He is infinite and perfect; we are the very opposite, being both limited and flawed. We are not the measure of all truth. We must be willing to say assent to what God says is true just because He says it is true. It will not do to reduce revelation to what our brains or imaginations can conceive of Scripture saying. That is rationalism disguised. This is why Bryan Cross has rightly described Protestantism as baptized humanism. For the Protestant, revelation can only be said to teach what he can himself believe it possible to be teaching. He thereby makes himself the measure of revelation’s content rather than being measured by it.

Pope Francis quote of the day

Ask Jesus what he wants from you and be brave! Be brave, ask Him!!!

[Text from the Vatican Radio website]

Presuppositional Dissonance

Presuppositonalists insist that the senses are not a reliable way to discover truth, and yet they trust them implicitly when it comes to dinnertime: they do not fear that the cheeseburger is actually a rattlesnake poised to strike. Furthermore they have to use their eyes or ears or hands in order to hear or read the Bible, and yet they are perfectly willing to trust their senses for this duty.

Presuppositionalists insist that man’s intellect cannot be trusted because of the effects of the Fall, and yet they must exercise their own intellects when performing exegesis of the Bible. And they are perfectly willing to trust their intellects when doing so.

Presuppositionalists may attempt to escape these dissonances by claiming that the Holy Spirit guides them, but they do not all agree among themselves about the truth. Furthermore this is really special pleading, because those who disagree with them concerning the reliability of the senses and of reason may make the same claim to have been guided by the Spirit.