To Give a Defense
Over on Failablogue today (he calls it Triablogue, for optimistic reasons known to him alone), the polemical rogue Mr. John Bugay informs us, with his customary mad zeal, that “God is not some kind of loon.” Yes. Well, it’s good to know we can agree with him on that. Who among us says that God is? It’s odd we should need to be told this; 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 go and read the article yourself. You may if you choose. It might be your share in the sufferings of Christ. Perhaps you also wear sackcloth, or flagellate yourself on Good Friday, or sleep on the stone cold floor; I can’t speak for your penances. Maybe you put shards of glass in your shoes. If that is the case, you may find the post here. 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 all that He has revealed to us.
Yes. That is a more or less self-evident premise. God is not the author of confusion (1 Cor. 14:33). We know this. But then 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 and the Bible alone) 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, you see. 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
Now before we go disputing with Mr. Bugay how self-evident the Bible is (does he wrest with 2 Pet. 3:16?), let me back up here and point out the context in which this discussion has come up. Way back on June 7, 2009, Bryan Cross at Called to Communion posted a remarkably long article (it was more than 14,000 words) entitled “Christ Founded a Visible Church.” And because Christ founded a Church, and because the Church is visible, He therefore gave it teaching authority to maintain the unity of the faith. That is a key argument of Catholicism; as Mr. 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, is that the unity of the faith is maintained, not through any teaching church, still less one that we can see (the true church is invisible and scattered around in a surfeit of “local bodies”) but through Scripture alone. And this claim the polemical rogue asks us to accept. He’s mad. 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, just like a bolt from Zeus. They’re clear enough.
Mr. Cross’s article, long to the point of epic saga, nevertheless gave rise to nearly 300 comments that total over 63,000 words. (I sat here and counted.) And those comments continue still, to this 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. During the exchange, 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. One has to interpret a text, even a divine one; 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. Now in case you’re wondering too, Mr. Bugay expatiates upon the curious analogy. “Math,” he tells us,
has rules, [Does it? I am standing here beside myself.] and … 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. [The condescension drips from this unctuous man like wet butter.] With a bit more work, you’ll find out that 9×9=81, and with not too much more difficulty you can go to a smart guy and understand that a2 x b2 = c2, [Be patient, dear reader, we’re nearly through.] and someone may even be able to figure out the square root of a number like 5,237.
Well, okay. We all know Mr. Bugay should quit while he’s behind. Like π, √ 5237 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. It happens to the worst of us. 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 the polemical rogue is trying to be simple, elegant, and logical. It’s possible to think the best of him. No, really; it is. I swear. But he begs a question, namely, this: How is it, then, that there are so many competing interpretations of Scripture? They can’t all be right, can they? A is not non-A. 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 lost 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 a blog, or YouTube, or Facebook, or Twitter, or BSNBC, perhaps not even on Failablogue itself, would anyone, ever, say anything so appallingly stupid. That polemical rogue would be laughed off the very surface of the earth. 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.) How very embarrassing. 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 of Faith:
The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is [Wait for it.] 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 itself 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. Watch this, now:
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. Just a guess. 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 after all. 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: DOES x EXPLAIN y, OR DOES y EXPLAIN x?
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, and the others). 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 to be giving us a genius and elegant solution, much like the polemical rogue Mr. Bugay and all his analogies; 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 altogether. 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. Johnny! someone has some splainin to do! 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. Witness Mr. Bugay.
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, for certain, if all we have is 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 and thus perchance mistaken? 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. Watch the solution he gives.
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? Therefore, 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 it all in future posts, Lord willing and the crick don’t rise, as they say. 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. Thus God, knowing our fallibility, knowing 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.
We are the loons. That is why—and I’m talking directly to Mr. John Bugay here, the ex-Catholic and polemical rogue—we keep rebelling and running away. But the good news is that we can always come back.
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