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Sunday, March 16, 2008

sola scriptura and authority

Halden posts a few comments on sola scriptura. The last bit is, I think, quite insightful.
If Scripture is as vulnerable as this account makes it out to be, how can we have certitude that our claims of faith are true and accurate? The simple answer is that we can’t. The quest for the kind of theory of authority that so many evangelicals seek through their tired, parenetic rhapsodies about Sola Scriptura (and, ironically enough, often end up thinking they’ll find in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy) is a Quixotic quest for a Holy Grail we shouldn’t even care to own. Faith is inherently risky and vulnerable or it is no faith worthy of the name of Jesus. A formalized book of allegedly inerrant truths or an allegedly infallible Magisterium both tend to function as an attempt to avoid having to make the distinctively foolish claims of faith. They embody the longings for security, control, and that great smarmy sense of just knowing you’re right that we all want so desperately. However, Jesus does not allow us such contrived (and fictional!) certitudes. He allows us only himself. And he stays beyond us, eluding our attempts to domesticate and control him and his Gospel. He as left his reliable witnesses, in whom we can have proper confidence. But to confuse the assurance of faith with the pathological need for epistemic certitude is to make a great theological mistake. I hope the evangelical church can learn to un-make this mistake.

2 comments:

  1. Amen...

    and, I'll have to start slipping the word "smarmy" into casual conversation..good stuff :)

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  2. Faith in a sense is "risky," but not a gamble like betting on how many fingers I have behind my back. Faith is reasonable and is based firmly on what we know, or it's not human faith, but unreasonable fideism or worse, superstition. [This doesn't mean that faith is contained by reason, merely that it cannot be against reason.]

    Indeed, we are presented with the figure of Jesus in the New Testament. But what does the NT witness about Jesus mean? The Arian heresy is but one example of the difficulty of interpreting the NT witness.

    Although some people may misuse the teachings of the Magisterium as some kind of false security blanket, they do so w/o the Church's blessing. The Magisterium of the Catholic Church merely aims to clarify what the witness of Scripture means. It doesn't propose to substitute for faith, but to help clarify (when necessary) what it is that is proposed for belief in the NT witness.

    The Magisterium is to safeguard the witness of the Apostles to Jesus so that we may have confidence that what was given by Jesus in the 1st century is what we receive today. This witness, which the Church endeavors to proclaim to every creature, is proposed for belief, that all might receive salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

    Confidence in the Magisterium is grounded by our faith in Jesus who guarenteed that the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church, which is the pillar and bulwark of the truth.

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