The super-duper-uper Magisterial authority (aka Part 3)

First came this post and its combox.
Next came this post and its combox.
Then Paul Hoffer wrote up a lengthy reply, found here.  Unfortunately, as we'll see, he has left most of my argument untouched.  His reply consists mostly of responses of the equivalent strength of "Nuh uh!" and self-repetition in the face of substantive rebuttal.
The way I wrote it is addressed to Paul.

You say:
I disagree with Rhology’s question begging statement that the Catholic Magisterium as an interpreter is useless because magisterial statements in turn need an interpreter in order for one to understand them

It's not question-begging.  It's my contention.



unlike the Scriptures, one can consult the Magisterial interpreter and seek clarification of the decision or interpretation.

A point which I addressed clearly in my ROUND 2 post, in at least two ways.  So far you're just ignoring my points, rather than interacting with them.
Namely, 1) the infinite regress (which tries and fails to solve the "problem" of human fallibility) and 2) the fact that the Magisterium virtually never actually does any clearing up of controversies when it easily could do so.



While more questions may have arose about the Church’s understanding of Christ’s nature, the Church was able to respond to them

Now that begs the question, that you can identify "The Church" and that "The Church" that you identify was in the right to do these things. 
Don't go off on a rabbit trail and ask me whether I disagree with those councils' which have been later identified as Big-E Ecumenical Big-C Councils statements w.r.t. Christology; the point is that the later church identifies as "The Church" those people who actually won the struggle.  The winners wrote the history books in a very real sense here.  This is simply pointing to the position with which you agree today and saying "See?  The Magisterium spoke!"  There'd be no way to falsify the statement "The Magisterium spoke." 



one does not have to decide all over again each time they are read what the Scriptures mean as the Church has already done that for them

1) But does one have to decide all over again each time Magisterial proclamations are read what they mean, as the Church has already done that for them? 
2) How can one judge whether the Church spoke correctly in a given case? 
3) How do you know when The Church spoke?  Do you have a list of those infallible proclamations?  If not, doesn't that leave open the very real possibility that you are ascribing authority and infallibility where none exists, and leaves you open to the problem of individual fallibility and error?  And doesn't that mean that "just ask your priest or bishop" would be a completely useless answer?
If so, where is it and does it include itself in the list?

B/c you have no good answers to these questions, what this means for you is that your house is built on sand. Your Magisterium is a paper tiger, a golden gun that's never fired.


Disagreements between adherents who hold different views becomes the means by which doctrines are tested and determined leading to a shared understanding of the what the Church holds thereby leading to greater unity in faith. This is an advantage that those who claim to practice sola scriptura could never have.

Such fideist claims fall apart under scrutiny.


If attorneys were bound by some notion of sola scriptura, we would have to start over and decide what constituted the elements of contract

A statement that makes me think you don't even understand Sola Scriptura.  This is a strawman.  I'd've hoped that you, as an attorney, would put more effort into properly representing your opposition. What was it you said earlier?
“If the facts are against you, argue the law; if the law is against you, argue the facts; if both are against you, abuse opposing counsel.”



we Catholics do not have to re-decide all of the old questions again

How about solving some of the ones that have remained all this time?  I listed quite a few in my ROUND 2 post.  Why don't you go ahead and show us where the Magisterium has cleared all of those up?



I must say though that the James White allusion ("Give me Romans 8 anytime over the code of Canon Law") you use is a bit vague.

I'm a bit of a fanboy, and he has said that numerous times during his Dividing Line webcast, just FYI.  But he first said it in a debate, yes.



as a Catholic I too would say give me Romans 8 over the Code of Canon Law since Romans 8 is part of the Word of God and the Code of Canon Law

Um, except you just finished telling us we need the Magisterium to understand Romans 8 and clear up disagreements about it, whereas the Code of Canon Law comes from The Church, that body that can clear that stuff up for us!  Why move the goalposts now?



Or are you perhaps working off James White’s reputation to lend your argument an air of Protestant magisterial authority?

If the facts are against you, argue the law; if the law is against you, argue the facts; if both are against you, abuse opposing counsel.



Why does one need recourse to a super to the nth power authority in order to make a decision IN RESPONSE TO A DISPUTE?

B/c of the problem you've been trying to solve yourself!  I've already dealt with this, like I mentioned above.  When are you going to take the next step and actually deal with my response?



And if the parties to the dispute both come into the dispute with an “obedience in faith,” that is an attitude of assent to the teachings of the Church, the parties to the dispute will submit to the decision by the Magisterium rather than breaking off to form their own Church or advocate disobedience to the teachings of the Church.

A historically ignorant statement.  This is faithful adherence to Sola Ecclesia! 
"Don't listen; it's the Kool-Aid talking."



we need only one Magisterial authority.

And when ppl disagree about the meaning and application of its proclamations, what then? 
I mean, since ppl's disagreement about the Scr's meaning and application means we need an infallible interpreting authority, let's be consistent, shall we?  Which means you haven't dealt with my points at all. 



Rhology’s smug argument suffers from more question begging as to whether the above referenced scripture passages actually need to be “infallibly” interpreted in order to be understood.

Oh, OK.  Then I'll just say the same thing about any passage YOU bring up and claim that it's unclear.  Unless you're less concerned about consistency than about defending Mother Rome.
For example, you'd said earlier in our interaction the following:
Where the perspecuity of Scriptures falls by the wayside is when there are disputes between Christians as the Scriptures can not arbitrate the dispute. Two people can have sincere differences over the regenerative properties of baptism, paedo-baptism, etc. How does reliance on Scripture help when both parties rely upon them?

Paul Hoffer's smug argument suffers from more question-begging as to whether the above referenced Scripture passages actually need to be “infallibly” interpreted in order to be understood.


No, it is Rhology that introduced the idea that a teaching authority is to be measured by the laity’s response and obedience to it as demonstrated above.

No no no no!  YOU introduced the idea!  You did!  It's in your first comments!  I just quoted you. Here it is again.
Where the perspecuity of Scriptures falls by the wayside is when there are disputes between Christians as the Scriptures can not arbitrate the dispute. Two people can have sincere differences over the regenerative properties of baptism, paedo-baptism, etc. How does reliance on Scripture help when both parties rely upon them?

You still haven't grasped my argument, and it's getting sad.  Do you need to talk over the phone or something, so I can explain it to you?  Maybe this is why you claim (when convenient) the Scriptures aren't perspicuous - you can't even understand my internal critique of your own position, and it's your position.


And since the Church has steadfastly taught since apostolic times that abortion is inherently immoral, evil, and sinful,

And since you can take any two Roman Catholics and ask them about abortion and get 2 different answers... let me virtually-quote Paul again: 
Where the perspicuity of Magisterial proclamations fall by the wayside is when there are disputes between RCs as the Mag proclamations can not arbitrate the dispute. Two people can have sincere differences over the whether it's OK to dismember babies.  How does reliance on the Magisterium help when both parties rely upon them?
If Paul responds, "But it's not true that BOTH are relying on them!", he needs to tell us why that same answer is not available to me as well w.r.t. the Scripture.  I won't hold my breath.


PH had said:
Unlike Protestantism which bolds that each person is his own magisterial authority

I'd responded: How do strawmen help the Roman cause?  Is it Mag teaching that strawmen are the best strategy?  Is that in Lumen Gentium too?

PH never answers but instead quotes some fallible individual who happens to go to his church, saying:  When we speak of private judgment, then, let us be quite clear as to what we mean; it has its uses and it has its abuses. Private judgment, in the sense of compiling a creed for yourself out of the Bible, of accepting this doctrine and rejecting that, of judging what should be and what should not be an integral part of the truth revealed by God -- this, of course, is entirely forbidden, for it is directly contrary to the method of arriving at the truth instituted by Our Lord Jesus Christ.

1) Luke 12:57“And why do you not even on your own initiative judge what is right?"
Matthew 22: 29But Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God."
Mark 12:26“But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses"
Luke 6:3And Jesus answering them said, “Have you not even read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him"
Mark 12:10“Have you not even read this Scripture: ‘THE STONE WHICH THE BUILDERS REJECTED, THIS BECAME THE CHIEF CORNER stone; 11THIS CAME ABOUT FROM THE LORD, AND IT IS MARVELOUS IN OUR EYES’?”
Matthew 19:4And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE"

Hmm, isn't that crazy?  Jesus actually pushed people back to the Scripture to correct when 2 people disagreed! 

2) Unless Paul can produce an infallible list of Magisterial proclamations, he exercises private judgment in figuring what things the Church says that are infallible things to be obeyed and what things the Church says that are fallible and non-binding.  Paul seems not to have yet wrestled with this problem, and I've given him several chances now over the course of this interaction.

3) He never apologises for the strawman or withdraws it.  Doesn't encourage me to take his point very seriously, since he seems to be talking to someone else.


When opinion, or private judgment, or to borrow Rhology’s term “logical argumentation,” becomes the measure of truth it is only a matter of time before all doctrinal issues become irrelevant due to the utter subjectivity of one’s own opinion.

How does this address the rebuttal I've already laid out?  It doesn't.


I even read an article where a bi-sexual woman who was promoted to the status of “bishop” in the Protestant Episcopal Church proclaim that abortion is sacramental! Where is Protestant unity on these matters or is redefining what constitutes sin a non-essential matter?

1) Ah, the tried-and-true method of lumping me in with flaming liberals!  Maybe Paul would like to be held responsible for everything Mel Gibson does.  After all, he's "Catholic".  He says so!  Just ask him!
2) Again, such fideist claims fall apart under scrutiny.


As I stated in the FIRST ROUND above, Jesus Christ is the measure of truth since He is the one Way, the Truth and Life, not logical argumentation.

Gosh, I wonder if anyone reading this will stop to wonder whether, when I say "logical argumentation", I mean it in the naturalistic materialist sense, or whether I mean it in the presuppositional Reformed sense, wherein one applies logical and contextual hermeneutics to the final standard of truth - God's Word?  Hmmm... I guess I could go back to my blog and delete all the references to "but, believing in Jesus is more probably true than not b/c the Earth's axis is tilted just right!" 
Oh wait, I don't say that kind of thing.  Never mind.  Then maybe Paul could actually do me the service of remembering to whom he's talking.



After all, I can point to some 252 dogmas that have been infallibly defined by my Magisterium.

That sounds like a fallible list to me.  Where is Paul's imprimatur? 
See, that's the thing - to Paul, apparently, the "authority and infallibility of the Magisterium" is a tool to be pulled out of the shed when convenient, say like a screwdriver, but when he needs to cut through a board, he hides his saw behind his back and tries to convince us all he's actually using the screwdriver. Then he shows us the cut board - "See?" 
Buy into the sleight-of-hand at your own peril.

On trusting your own eyes and your own mind, vs believing what the Roman church tells you to believe

Because of work and family constraints, I haven't been able to participate in some of the comments that have come up below. But something has come up which I think illustrates a key, foundational difference, and it is something that needs to be emphasized.


In the Paul Hoffer thread, I asked: How much better would it be for you to work for clarity in these matters? Doesn't your Catholicism bind you to honesty? Or does it rather bind you to blind partisanship?

Truth Unites … and Divides responded: That such questions are reasonable makes it suitable to assume the latter.

And the truth is, the whole Catholic theological structure is set up to perpetuate "the latter":

With regard to the Catholic Church, [the leading assumption] is a blatant form of revisionism. This is evidenced by Pius IX’s method articulated in his Letter, “Gravissimas inter,” to the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, Dec. 11, 1862, reiterated in Pius XII’s statement in Humani Generis, “theologians must always return to the sources of divine revelation: for it belongs to them to point out how the doctrine of the living Teaching Authority is to be found either explicitly or implicitly in the Scriptures and in Tradition.”

This is further explained in a variety of sources. One Roman Catholic theologian wrote, “We think first of developed forms for which we need to find historical justification. The developed forms come first and the historical justification comes second.” (“Ways of Validating Ministry,” Kilian McDonnell, Journal of Ecumenical Studies (7), pg. 213, cited in Carlos Alfredo Steger, “Apostolic Succession in the Writings of Yves Congar and Oscar Cullmann, pg. 322.) ...

Aiden Nichols, “The Shape of Catholic Theology” (253) notes that for the last several hundred years, according to these popes, “the theologian’s highest task lies in proving the present teachings of the magisterium from the evidence of the ancient sources.” One internet writer called this method “Dogma Appreciation 101” (related in a discussion of his studies in a Catholic seminary.) Nichols calls this, “the so-called regressive method,” and notes that Walter Kasper (now a Cardinal) has traced the origins of this method to the 18th century.

One can't stress this enough. For those of you who interact with Roman Catholics at any level, and you can't seem to understand why they see things as they do, you can know that, at its heart, there is a difference in the way that they look at things, and this difference has its roots deep in history, and it comes from the highest levels.

The earliest church did not make its decisions this way.

Earlier, Paul Hoffer had said: If one is going to assent to being a Catholic, then one must assent to its teachings or else one should not call oneself a Catholic.

This is my understanding of the way it works, and this is why I ultimately rejected the whole thing.

[The way in which one assents to its teachings leaves quite a bit of room for disunity, as is shown in the Alexander Greco thread below. It is said that "unity in the faith" is the kind of unity that Christ desires. Protestants would say that we have unity in Christ -- unity in the Gospel ("Christ died for sinners" -- and as we turn to him in faith and repentance -- yes, we are drawn to do so by grace -- we receive the new birth, adoption, union with Christ. This is the unity for which Christ prayed in John 17. This is His prayer, answered.)]

To accept unity around the pope is to have to accept a whole lot of things that were created by and are sustained by a false system. The distinctively Roman Catholic doctrines themselves have become a false system. If you recall, God's primary complaint against Israel is that they were whoring after false gods. They were seeking a kind of "fullness of the faith" that God simply did not provide.

PH: However, once one accepts by a reasoned faith the truth of the teachings of the Church, then there is no room for doubting the validity of them for doubt is the opposite of faith. Thus, "the Church as a living, dominically instituted authority that is divinely preserved from error under certain conditions” is a item of faith which allows no doubt.

Consider the doctrines it "proposes for faith, which allow no doubt" -- the Assumption of Mary, papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception of Mary. As I looked into these, they were so far-fetched and so "without basis in history" that I took them as clear evidence that the Roman church "could not be what it said it was."

PH: Interjecting the notion of Catholic theologians tends to obfuscate issues as the extent of a theologian' authority depends on their relationship to the Magisterium. Even Pope Benedict takes pains to distinguish between what his personal views as a theologian and his pronouncements in his capacity as pope.

It is true: there is a distinction between what a theologian says (it has no "binding" force") and what "the Church" pronounces as "dogma."

But there are two things to note on this:

1. I brought up "theologians" because this is what this pope actually said.

And 2., this is how the process actually works: it is not the job of the theologians to understand what the true meaning of the Scriptures was, not to understand what the earlier doctrines and theologians were saying. It is actually their job to begin with current "Catholic teaching" and, precisely as these popes articulated, "to point out how the doctrine of the living Teaching Authority is to be found either explicitly or implicitly in the Scriptures and in Tradition.” Again, one writer, who went through this process in a Seminary, called this "Dogma Appreciation 101".

The Roman Catholic process is not one of finding truth. It is one of defending itself, by "picking and choosing" -- things out of context if necessary -- bits and pieces that it thinks support its doctrines in history.

This is one reason for the existence of the the contorted view that some things are "implicitly found" in Scripture. To counter this, the Protestants (following Irenaeus and others) say, "Scripture interprets Scripture".

Here's an example of that: the Catholic Church posits a statement like this:

And indeed it was wholly fitting that so wonderful a mother should be ever resplendent with the glory of most sublime holiness and so completely free from all taint of original sin that she would triumph utterly over the ancient serpent.

Now, is it better to believe what the Scriptures (as a whole) say about Mary? Or should we go with "the Church's" take on this? This is not rocket science.

[For some background, see first of all, Turretinfan's article on "fittingness" as a kind of standard by which "fittingness" counts as part of this "elevation to divine revelation". See also his article on some of the early sources of Marian dogma.]

It truly would be "fitting" if Scripture actually saw it as "wholly fitting" that Mary should "be ever resplendent with the glory of most sublime holiness." But Scripture does not see Mary that way. Eric Svendsen, for example, did a thorough exegetical analysis of every single mention of Mary in the New Testament, and while Mary did end up appearing "with the disciples" in Acts 1, it was not because of some imagined "Immaculate Conception". It was because she went through the process that many of the other disciples went through, and she herself became a disciple. Eric concludes:

"Taken together, [Marian passages in the New Testament] portray Mary as someone who initially receives the word of God with great enthusiasm; who hen struggles to understand her true role vis-a-vis the conflict between her role as mother of Jesus (in which she exercises her will over him) and her new role as servant of Jesus (in which she humbly submits to his will); who at times gets it right, while other times not; who at times even opposes Jesus' mission and sides with those who deem Jesus "insane"; and who then finally becomes a full-fledged disciple."

Now, a "plain reading" of the Scriptures will not tell you that the writers of the New Testament, either implicitly or explicitly, thought that "it was fitting" that God should have protect Mary from sin via an "immaculate conception." An exegetical study like Eric's simply confirms, over and over again, that the impressions one receives about the person of Mary in the New Testament, from "a plain reading of Scripture," are indeed accurate impressions.

PH: What you of hit upon here is the the reason that it would be impossible for me to be a Protestant, because your use of private judgment factors in human doubt. If there is doubt, there is faithlessness. Period. What certainity/certitude of the truth does Protestantism have there is room to doubts the tenets for which an adherent to it holds?

This is a clear instance in which I would rather read God's word, and exercise "private judgment," and believe my own eyes, and trust in my the ability to understand that God gave to me, than what the Roman church tells me to believe. And if in this one instance, one sees reason to reject the Roman teaching, then one must reject all of the authority of the Roman church.

[Note: This post is about the specific differences in the ways that Catholics and Protestants accept sources of authority. It is not intended to bring up issues within Eric Svendsen's study, which is an honest and fair treatment of Mary in the New Testament. Any derogatory comments about him or his work will be immediately deleted.]

"Objection, Your [dis]Honor!"

I owe a few responses to Paul Hoffer -- he chimed in over at Called to Communion near the end of the thread.

Paul Hoffer in Comment 60: Hello all, since Mr. Bugay indicated in his comments to my article on his misuse of Rev. Lampe’s book that I should have directed my energies to interact with Chapter 41, I have had the opportunity to take up some time studying the thesis presented there.

This, by the way, fails to comply with the Called to Communion posting guidelines, which mandates that one address someone in the second person ("you") rather than in the third person voice.

PH: It seems to be founded on a notion that Rome’s titular churches (home-churches) were so fractionated that they could not have been overseen by a single bishop.

A mere "notion"?

Long before Lampe, there were scholars writing about the absence of a monarchical bishop in Rome. In the 40's and 50's, Oscar Cullmann ("advisor to three popes") was detailing significant shortcomings in the traditional Roman position; this was followed up by intensive studies by Daniel O'Connor ("Peter in Rome") Raymond Brown et. al ("Peter in the New Testament"), as well as others. Lampe's detailed work provided solid confirmation for what others had held based on things long understood in the history of that topic.

For example, Schaff has sections on "the Peter of History" and "The Peter of Fiction." Sorting out these two has been difficult, not least because "the Peter of Fiction" was a strong and mighty early pope. The reality of it is quite different, although Peter may in fact have died at Rome, it is highly questionable that he founded the church there, (it is certain that "Peter and Paul" did not "found" the church at Rome -- a testimony that is given by Irenaeus), it is highly questionable that he ever "commanded" anyone, given his role and status as one who traveled there as a missionary.

There are many other factors too that go into the "notion" that there was not a monarchical bishop at Rome. Ignatius, who was an aficionado of the word "bishop" does not seem to have been able to locate a bishop when he writes to Rome. True, this "could" have been an oversight, but for him to purposely have ignored such a person would have been a great affront.

In a completely separate piece of evidence, Hermas states clearly that the city was ruled by a plurality who "fought among themselves." You may want to say that "this doesn't explicitly deny" that there was a monarchical bishop. But both of these are far clearer statements than those upon which an early papacy has historically been founded; but even if there were a monarchical bishop in charge of Hermas's unruly bunch, that would speak volumes about the incompetence of such an individual's [lack of] leadership.

Lampe's work provides confirmation for many, many points of fact that other researchers had strongly suspected. That is the value of his work.

Further to this, you risk here committing the word fallacy of semantic anachronism, that is, using a word in a later manner that was not intended by the New Testament writers. You must be aware that this happens all the time, for example, whenever Catholic writers see the word "episkopos" and related -- they think it means what "bishop" means to day -- and worse, when Catholics see "Peter" they reflect "pope" back on that. Two worse fallacies could not be envisioned in this type of study.

What safeguards have you taken to assure yourself (much less, our readers here!) that you are not committing these fallacies?

PH: Reviewing the data that he sifts through does not actually show that the Roman churches were fractionated and is based on a more modern-view of what a mono-episcopal bishop was supposed to be. As pointed out by David Albert Jones, a professor from Oxford and Oswald Sobrino, such an argument is based on several false assumptions and is a poor argument.

Your mention of names here does not show how the arguments actually shape up. It does not surprise me that partisan Catholics would put forward their own takes on these things. Bryan Cross (to his credit) tried to provide an analysis of Lampe's own analysis of Hegesippus's "list". Unfortunately, the tone of this, as I noted in that thread, was very much a tone that said, "these things as I've written them are not 100% excluded, and therefore, given that they support the Roman tradition they must not only be potentially true but actually true." It is wishful thinking of the highest order.

PH: As pointed out by David Albert Jones, a professor from Oxford …

You mean the bioethicist, who is not a historian?

PH: … and Oswald Sobrino, such an argument is based on several false assumptions and is a poor argument.

Who is this guy anyway?

PH: Adrian Fortesque, Henri Daniel-Rops, Prof. Edward Weltin, … seem to concur based on the preliminary researches that I have started …

How could they "concur"? Fortescue (whose work I have outlined here) pre-dated all of these studies. But I would encourage you to keep reading. It will give you a good idea of just how far away from the truth of history someone like a Fortescue could get.

Henri Daniel-Rops also pre-dated this work and therefore could not have interacted with it. It does not seem as if Weltin published in this area. You must be in some arcane sources.

As far as Bernard Green, OSB, it does seem as if he's addressing Lampe's work. But again, he does so from the position of a partisan, and his "objections" seem to be along the lines of those raised by Bryan Cross.

What is your intention in throwing out these names? Are you intending to show that there is some sort of great groundswell of scholarship that is addressing and defeating the body of scholarship that I've presented? If so, you are hardly making a dent. In reality, your citation of these individuals shows your desperation in this matter -- the distances you must travel to find someone who holds a contrary opinion.

PH: Note too that Mr. Bugay does not address the fact that Schatz, Sullivan, Eno or even Raymond Brown whose views tend to mirror in some respects Lampe’s views, do not argue (Schatz and Sullivan especially) that this argument negates the validity of apostolic succession or the basis for the papacy.

I'm trying to take one thing at a time; Perhaps you could tell me how this comment is not a deflection from the main subject?

Nevertheless, I want to make you happy. To be sure, Schatz and Eno pretty much exclusively dealt with the papacy. Sullivan talked about the transition [and it was not a close transition] of "apostles to bishops". He does not try to "negate the validity of apostolic succession" but rather he does clearly state at the end of the work that he (like Brown) believes that the lengthy "process" by which "bishops" succeeded the Apostles was directed by God and therefore was of "divine institution." To quote him (as I have done in various places, "Although development of church structure reflects sociological necessity, in the Christian self-understanding the Holy Spirit given by the risen Christ guides the church in such a way that allows basic structural development to be seen as embodying Jesus Christ's will for his church."

If you want to cite Raymond Brown -- he is even more detailed with respect to the New Testament:

A more traditional Catholic explanation of why individual Christians are not specifically designated as priests in the NT is that the apostles who presided at the Eucharist were priests in everything but name, for the name was too closely associated with the Jewish priests of the temple. But this explanation is based on a serious oversimplification about apostles in the NT, as we shall see in Chapter Two, and suffers from the added difficulty of unwarrantedly supposing that in NT times the Eucharist was thought of as a sacrifice and therefore associated with priesthood.

Because of the origins of Christianity in Judaism we would really have to suppose just the opposite: animal sacrifice would be thought of in terms of blood and there was no visible blood in the Eucharist. True, there are sacrificial overtones in the traditional eucharistic words of Jesus (the mention of the shedding of blood, the covenant motif, the "for you" theme), but this coloring was understandable because Jesus spoke these words before his bloody death. There is no proof that the Cristian communities who broke the eucharistic bread after the resurrection would have thought that they were offering sacrifice.

In these observations I am not questioning the legitimacy of the development in later theology whereby the Church came to understand the Eucharist as a sacrifice; indeed, a recent study by a Calvinist argues that there was real continuity in such a development and that it is loyal to the implication s of the NT. I am simply pointing out that such a theology was a post-NT development, and so we have no basis for assuming that early Christians would have considered as a priest the one who presided at the eucharistic meal. (Brown, "Priest and Bishop," New York: Paulist Press, 1970, pg 16.)

The fact is that the connection of "authority" of "priestly succession" going back to the New Testament is a false one, and Rome's recent bombast that "the communities of the Reformation" don't have this succession is just a non-starter for many Protestants who do know and understand the roots of this "development" and reject it.

The fact is that all of Rome's supposed foundational connections to authority -- priests, bishops, popes -- are later developments that can easily be rejected on the basis of the New Testament. Lord willing I will get around to putting all of these pieces together.

PH: The whole notion is fractionation is sort of making a mountain out of molehill as all it shows is that the Catholic Church back in the day practiced setting parishes up based on geographical boundaries which we still do today.

If the papacy is claiming that it has authority that it never had, then it is not a molehill, it is an important topic to investigate. Your statement here about "geographic boundaries" is another red herring that ignores the whole area of what authority actually meant in the earliest church. Nobody denies that there was a practice of setting up parishes based on geographic boundaries. In fact, if you had read more closely, you would understand that Lampe uses this very practice to establish the picture he draws of house churches, by tracing the titular parishes of the fifth century, for whom we have names and signatures.

All this shows is that, as a lawyer, you are skilled in the art of obfuscation -- you throw out a lot of highfalutin words that seem to have some meaning, but when investigated more thoroughly, there is much to be desired.

How much better would it be for you to work for clarity in these matters? Doesn't your Catholicism bind you to honesty? Or does it rather bind you to blind partisanship?

Paul Hoffer all over the map

Paul Hoffer has been doing yeoman's work in a recent thread about whether Mary sinned in "anxiously" looking for the boy Jesus in Jerusalem, in Luke 2.  He is an attorney, so we'd hope that he'd be versed in the art of consistent argumentation.  Unfortunately, if these comments are any indication, he's among the 99% of attorneys that give the other 1% a bad name...

Let's start, though, in the middle of Paul Hoffer's first comment to me, where he said something very interesting:

can you point me to the official binding Calvinist interpretative authority that interprets Scripture to mean what you think it does?

Unfortunately for PH, this question is meaningless and has been dealt with dozens of times on this blog alone.
So let's ask PH:  Can you point me to the official binding Magisterial interpretative authority that interprets Scripture to mean what you think it does? 
Let's see how many times he does so.  Or does he just give us a bunch of personal, private, fallible interpretations of biblical passages and "Magisterial documents", and does he ever give us an infallible means of knowing whether these "Magisterial" statements are infallible?  Let's find out.



Apologetics is the responsibility of all Christians.

How does he know that?  Did the Mag infallibly state such? If he appeals to a verse like 1 Peter 3:15, can he give an infallible Mag interp of it?
If not, how does he know any of this?



The Magisterium is only an office within the Church that has limited parameters and specific responsibilities.

How does he know that?  Did the Mag infallibly state such?
How does he know the Mag won't in the future correct him?



Or are there times when one only needs a mechanic or could roll up one’s sleeves and change the oil himself.

Bad analogy.  What I hear from RCs all the time is that I need infallibility to be sure of things theological, that as a fallible individual, I have no hope to escape the chaotic quagmire of Protestantism.  But when convenient, apparently PH doesn't (edit: toe) that line.


I certainly can repeat what the Magisterium does teach

How does PH know that?  Did the Mag infallibly state such?