Roman Catholics and Private Judgment

22. How may it be shown that the Romanist theory, as well as the Protestant, necessarily throws upon the people the obligation of private judgment?

Is there a God? Has he revealed himself? Has he established a church? Is that church an infallible teacher? Is private judgment a blind leader? Which of all pretended churches is the true one? Every one of these questions evidently must be settled in the Private judgment of the inquirer, before he can, rationally or irrationally, give up his private judgment to the direction of the self–asserting church. Thus of necessity Romanists appeal to the Scriptures to prove that the Scriptures cannot be understood, and address arguments to the private judgment of men to prove that private judgment is incompetent; thus basing an argument upon that which it is the object of the argument to prove is baseless.

Hodge, A.A., Outlines of Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1972 reprint), p. 91.

The Mustard Tree as an Image of the Church

There’s been a little dustup of comments on the Bryan Cross thread entitled “Ecclesial Consumerism”.

Bryan is one of those individuals that Matthew wrote about in his previous post. “A sensational conversion to Catholicism provides a kind of celebrity, authority and prominence unavailable to those who quietly and obscurely serve the Lord in a Protestant church.” Then of course, there are the gullible ones who will follow him.

Bryan puts up a couple of flamboyant photographs and elaborately explicates a phenomenon of his own creation. “In our contemporary culture, church-shopping has become entirely normal and even expected….[A person] weighs all the various factors and tries to decide which church best matches what he (and his family) are looking for in a church. He might even make lists of all that he is looking for in a church, and see which church comes closest to meeting all the criteria. This phenomenon is called ‘ecclesial consumerism.’”

Nobody else talks about “Ecclesial consumerism.” Only Bryan talks about “ecclesial consumerism.” Bryan is one of those individuals in search of “the correctly marketable term,” a new phrase he can coin and throw out there to “the academy,” which will have his name attached to it, and for which people will fawn over him. He used to throw out the word “monocausalism” and try to sell that concept, as a bad thing, until I pointed out to him that he’s simply trying to re-define the word “sola” as a bad thing. He has ranted and raved about the “invisible church”. Then there was “ecclesial deism”, which he used until someone pointed out that it was not that; then he picked up “ecclesial docetism.” Here’s another one: Branches or Schisms. Maybe, someday, Bryan can be known, like Bultmann, for having discerned “the separation of the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith.”

He misunderstands what the Kingdom of God is. Just as we can know the Character of God, we can know what the one true church is going to be like, because the Scriptures told us a lot about it.

Then Jesus asked, “What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches.” (Luke 13:18-19)

One of the two images here is the Mustard tree, indigenous to Palestine, that Jesus was talking about.

A.A. Hodge wrote about this as well:

AA Hodge on “What is the Church?” (From “Evangelical Theology” pgs 174-177)

What is the Church? There is one thing certain about it: the Church has a great many attributes, but that which is absolutely essential is its absolute unity. There is no doubt if there be but one God, there is but one Church; if there be but one Christ, there is but one Church; if there be but one Holy Ghost, there is but one Church. This is absolutely settled—there is but one Church. We have heard about the visible and invisible Church, as if there were two churches. There cannot be two churches, one that is visible and another that is invisible. There is but one Church, and that Church is visible or invisible just according to the eye that is looking, just according to the point of view taken….

There have been two distinct conceptions of the Church: one is the theory that the Church consists of an organized society which God has constituted, that identity consists in its external form as well as in its spirit, and that its life depends upon the continuity of officers from generation to generation. This is held by a great many able men, men of intellect, and by many respectable, level-headed Christians as well.

I hold this to be simply impossible. The marks of the Church are catholicity, apostolicity, infallibility, and purity. Now, apply that to any corporation—to the Church in Jerusalem or to the Church in Antioch; to the Congregational Church, to the Presbyterian, or to the Prelatical Churches. I do not care as to the form; but there never did exist, and there does not now exist, any organized society upon the face of the earth of which these qualities could be predicated. Not one of these societies has apostolicity—that is, precisely the apostolic form as well as the apostolic spirit; not one of these societies has had an absolute organic continuity, or has, without modification, preserved it. Societies, like the Church of Rome, which are most conspicuous in claiming these marks for themselves, are most conspicuously unworthy of them, because there is no comparison between their ritual of service, their organization, and the apostolic Church with which they claim to be identified.

The only possible definition of a Church is that it consists of what is termed “the body of Christ”—that is, human souls regenerated by the presence and power of the Holy Ghost, kept in immediate union with Christ. Of this you can predicate apostostolicity, catholicity, and the sanctifying power and perpetual presence of the Holy Ghost, which belongs to the Church of Christ. This is the true Church, which exists through all the successive generations of men, which is united to Christ, and which shares in the benefits of his redemption through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. This great body is one because the Holy Ghost dwells in it and makes it one. This Church is apostolical, because it is unchanging as to apostolic doctrine; it is catholic, because it contains in one body all of God’s people in all worlds and in all time; it unites all from the creation of the world to the coming of Christ, and all from the coming of Christ to the end of the world in one body—absolutely one, both visible and invisible.…

Now, as to the unity of this Church I have something to say. A great many are agitated at present with regard to Church unity and its manifestations, and I think there is a great deal of confusion of thought as to the original conception of the Church itself. If the Church be an external society, then all deviation from that society is of the nature of schism; but if the Church be in its essence a great spiritual body, constituted by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost through all the ages and nations, uniting all to Christ, and if its external organization is only accidental and temporary, and subject to change and variation, then deviation of organization, unless touched by the spirit of schism, is not detrimental to the Church. I do believe that God’s purpose, on the contrary, has been to differentiate his Church without end. You know that the very highest form of beauty of which you can conceive, the very highest form of order, is multiplicity in unity, and unity in multiplicity; the higher the order of unity, the greater must be the multiplicity.

This is so everywhere. Go to the ocean: every drop of water is the repetition of every other drop, and there is union simply without diversity. Go to the desert of Sahara, and every grain of sand is the duplicate of every other grain of sand; but there is no unity, no life. You could not make a great cathedral by piling up simple identical rhomboids or cubes of stone. It is because you differentiate, and make every stone of a different form in order to perform a different function, and then build them up out of this multitudinous origination into the continuity and unity of the one plan or architectural idea, that you have your cathedral. You could not make a great piece of music simply by multiplying the same tone or sound. In order to obtain the harmony of a great orchestra, you get together a large number of musical instruments, or you have a great number of human voices in a choir, and you combine them; then you have an infinite variety of quality and infinite variety of tone. You combine them in the absolute unit of the one great musical idea which you seek to express.

But if this is true of such things, it is more true of Christ’s Church. If God had followed our idea, how simple a thing it would have been to make a united Church descending from Adam and Eve! We might think that was all that could be done, and there would be then no stones of stumbling. You could then watch this Church, and it would go on indefinitely and without limit.

Now, what has God been doing? He has broken humanity up into infinite varieties. This has been his method. He has been driving it into every clime. He has been driving it into every age through the succession of centuries. He has been moulding human nature under every variety of influences through all time, until he has got men in every age, every tribe, every tongue, every nation, every colour, every fashion—in order to do what? Simply to build up a variety, to build up the rich, inexhaustible variety which constitutes the beauty in unity of this great infinite Church of the first-born, whose final dwelling-place is to be in heaven.

What is "the Church"? Who really understands what "the Church" is?

The Nature and Character of God and “Apostolic Succession”

God the Father passed His authority on to Jesus (cf. Matthew 28:18), Who passed it on to the apostles (cf. Luke 10:16 and Matthew 28:19), who passed it on to their successors.

That’s the shorthand view that a fairly knowledgeable (and formerly Reformed) Roman Catholic cited to me on a discussion board. But is the God of the universe, the “Covenant Lord,” our “jealous God” One who would wind up giving “His” authority to someone like Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI?

Calvin famously began his work, Institutes of the Christian Religion , with these words:

Nearly all the wisdom we posses, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves (1.1.1). … It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and the descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself. For we always seem to ourselves righteous and upright and wise and holy—this pride is innate in all of us—unless by clear proofs we stand convinced of our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity. Moreover, we are not thus convinced if we look merely to ourselves and not also to the Lord, who is the sole standard by which this judgment must be measured … So it happens in estimating our spiritual goods. As long as we do not look beyond the earth, being quite content with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue, we flatter ourselves most sweetly, and fancy ourselves all but demigods … As a consequence, we must infer that man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty (1.1.2).

Just as a personal note, I have handwritten in the margin of my copy of Institutes, “This is the main problem I see with the RCC.” The Roman Catholic Church does not truly consider its own state in comparison with God’s majesty. Oh, to be sure, they say plenty of good things about God.

Others have written about Aquinas and his “Platonism/Plotininianism/Dionysianism (the notion that there is a sort of chain of being in the universe on which God is at the top and we at the bottom and we climb it by grace and cooperation with grace).” Without going too deeply into this topic, we see that our old friend Pseudo-Dionysius (and his NeoPlatonism) made it into Aquinas’s theology in a big way. Pseudo-Dionysius is one of those works of fiction that was viewed as authentic during the Medieval era, and which subsequently was adopted virtually wholesale into Roman dogma. And there was no shortage of popes who waxed at length about how wonderfully close to God that they were.

More properly, the Reformers, following a Scriptural investigation of God, came to understand the absolute gulf between God and man.

Just to illustrate this, let’s look at a simple mental exercise. On one side of an equation, you have one. On the other side, you have infinity.

One / Infinity

That’s a pretty big gulf.

Then consider how you might, on the numerical side, come closer to “infinity”.

One / Infinity
Two / Infinity
Three / Infinity
Ten / Infinity
One Hundred / Infinity
One Thousand / Infinity
One Million / Infinity

In this “great chain of ratios,” do you ever, on the left hand side, come closer to reaching the limits of the right hand side? No, you can’t. This is a “category” error. And so is the “great chain of being” theology that posits God not as “wholly other,” but merely at the top of some kind of “great chain of being”.

The Roman Catholic Faith, with its emphasis on “the Church” as “the Ongoing Incarnation of Christ,” has succumbed to the error of those who tried to build the Tower of Babel. They said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:2-4). What a tragedy.

Here’s a selection from the works of A.A. Hodge that I have, for years, used as my personal signature on discussion boards:

And the sphere of a creature's knowledge, be it that of an infant, or of a man, or of a philosopher, or of a prophet, or of saint or archangel in heaven, will float as a point of light athwart the bosom of that God who is the infinite Abyss for ever; From A.A. Hodge, Evangelical Theology, God-His Nature And Relation to the Universe, pg 16.

In the first place in the Roman Catholic chain of succession, a misunderstanding of God and His nature are fundamental to its whole system of authority.