Correspondence on the Church's Authority
The dark consequences of the Protestant theory on revelation
The following is an excerpt from a response to a friend of mine who is engaging with a Protestant coworker in good faith.
What is your ultimate authority of how you know something is true? Like what is your standard that you test or judge by?
I'm a little surprised that a Protestant is bringing this up as this is the most clear and obvious problem with Protestantism. In short, we know things to be true because reliable sources tell us so — exactly what [our priest] preached on this morning. If the Church really is a divine instrument instituted by God to make definitive, public verdicts on theological matters, then this is clearly our standard because it is "the Church of the living God, [which is the] the pillar and ground of the truth."
Why this is especially noteworthy:
Does he believe that God instituted a religion that does not have a living means of publicly, finally, and authoritatively settling fundamental theological matters? Given that he's a Protestant, it's almost certain that he believes this. This flies in the face of the constant practice in the Old Testament, the unanimous consensus of the early Church, and...
The very authority he cites — the Scriptures — is one of the public, final, and authoritative judgments made by the Church. If he rejects the Church's authority, there's no way he can explain why these books are in the Bible and why those are not, why he believes the Bible to be infallible, and why he believes them to have come from God. The only reason we know any of this is because the Church defined it as such. In short, we only have certainty about the authority of the Scriptures because of the authority of the Church. Much like the sola fide issue mentioned above, if the authority of the Church is refuted, all of the Scriptures go down with it.
If Protestantism is true:
Those living in the first 70 years after the ascension didn't have access to proper revelation as the documents of the new Testament hadn't even been written yet.
Those living in the first 350 years after the ascension didn't have access to proper revelation as the contents of the New Testament hadn't been defined.
Those living in the first 1,500 years after the ascension didn't have access to proper revelation as the Scriptures were not widely available due to the lack of technology to copy the Scriptures.
Those who are not intellectuals or, for three-quarters of the life of the Church, were not outrageously rich enough to possess a copy of the Scriptures didn't have access to proper revelation. God, in this view, established a religion that left the common peasant high, dry, and unable to turn to any final authority.
One struggles in vain to see how our Father would have instituted such anarchy.
Ad Jesum per Mariam,
Jacob
I think it is interesting that you say you have a friend.