There are many other things which most justly keep me in her [the Catholic Church’s] bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep, down to the present episcopate. And so, lastly, does the name itself of Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained.
—St Augustine of Hippo, Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus 4.5
As fallible human beings, it really is not possible for us to have infallible certainty of anything aside from our own existence. Thus, unlike what some Catholic apologists may argue, we don’t need infallible authorities to tell us that something is infallible in order for us to believe that it is actually infallible. We clearly don’t. For example, as a Christian I believe that the fact that Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead is an infallibly revealed doctrine that must be believed under pain of mortal sin. However, I didn’t come to believe this because some infallible authority told me to, since any such infallible authority would itself depend on the historicity of the Resurrection, and so the logic would become circular. Instead, I used my own fallible reasoning skills to historically investigate the evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection, and I’ve concluded that the “Resurrection hypothesis” is the most reasonable, and so I believe it. For all practical purposes, you could consider this the “epistemological foundation” of my Christian faith.
Now at this point, the only “infallible authority” I’ve come to accept is Jesus Christ, the God-man, whose teachings I believe are more or less accurately reported in the four Gospels and other early Christian literature (note: this does not make those sources infallible, just generally reliable). From here I can look at our Lord’s teaching on the Old Testament (OT), which has been documented very well by John Wenham, and conclude that, whatever books these are, they must be infallible since Jesus said they were. I can then use historical-critical methods to figure out what the OT canon was at the time of Jesus, and then use more historical inquiry to reconstruct the original text of those books, and now I have my first fully-written infallible authority, all through historical investigation alone. So far so good, no need to invoke an infallible Tradition (I actually don’t think this logic fully works out, but for the sake of argument I won’t lean into that). However, I believe this changes when it comes to the NT.
We have the infallible sanction of Jesus Christ to tell us that the books of the OT, as they existed in His day, are completely without error. However, as explored above, we have no such divine sanction for the books of the NT that we possess today. To be sure, we can affirm that the NT contains infallible teachings, insofar as it accurately records the teachings of the historical Jesus, but using historical investigation alone we cannot push it further than this. We cannot create an equality of authority between the OT and NT without adding some kind of divine sanction to our historic NT canon.
This is where it becomes necessary to consider the specific gifts that Jesus gave to His apostles and the Church. Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, Jesus never taught that all of the writings of His apostles would be infallibly binding on the consciences of men. Jesus did say that the apostles were His appointed witnesses (Acts 1:8), and spoke with divine authority (Lk 10:16), however the most we can conclude from this is that they could authoritatively pass along the teachings of the historical Jesus. If this is all we have, then passages like 1 Corinthians 7:12 where St. Paul makes it clear that he’s giving his own teaching and not the Lord’s, would be excluded from infallibility. And indeed, any NT passage that isn’t directly based on an historical Jesus saying would also be fallible. Clearly, historic Protestantism and Catholicism/Orthodoxy cannot tolerate this, and so this is where we have to get into some of the more debated promises that Jesus made:
Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 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. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
John 16:7-15
Jesus taught that it was necessary for Him to ascend into Heaven so that, once seated at the right hand of His Father, He could send the Holy Spirit to His followers so they could be guided into all truth. Clearly, the fulfillment of this passage happened on the Day of Pentecost when the Spirit descended on the Church gathered in Jerusalem (Acts 2:4). Importantly, after being filled with the Holy Spirit in accordance with Jesus’ promise, the apostle Peter declared that Joel 2:28-32 was now fulfilled. Since Jesus taught that the Spirit would declare truth to the apostles, and this was spoken immediately after that promise was fulfilled, we can be sure that this Scripture’s fulfillment is infallibly certain.
What’s significant about this is the content of Joel’s prophecy. As Seraphim Hamilton argues, Joel’s prophecy that the Lord would “pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Joel 2:28), was based on Moses’ prophetic wish “that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them” (Num 11:29). Since a characteristic of being a prophet under the old covenant was the ability to infallibly know divine truth (Amos 3:7), and since Jesus also tied the reception of the Spirit to being guided into “all truth,” the most straightforward interpretation of our Lord’s pentecostal promise is that His people, corporately, are guided by the Holy Spirit into believing and proclaiming the truth. This doesn’t mean that everyone who receives the Spirit will speak the truth at all times, as we know from that even the apostles erred occasionally, however it does mean that we now have divine sanction to infallibly trust the teachings of the Spirit-guided Church.
The first clear example of this can be seen in the Apostolic Synod of Acts 15. At this Synod, all of the Lord’s core apostles were present, as well as many others whom we know received the Spirit of Truth. They ruled that Gentile Christians are not bound to keep all the precepts of the Mosaic Law and said that this “seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). Since Jesus infallibly promised that the Spirit would guide His followers into all truth, and since they all gathered together and unanimously agreed on the matter of Gentile inclusion, they essentially “forced God’s hand.” If God promised to guide His people into all truth, and they all proclaimed something as true, then God was “forced” to protect that teaching from error. Thus, we must hold the decision of the Apostolic Synod to be infallible lest we call Christ’s promise into question.
This creates a principle that allows us to be infallibly certain of the historic NT canon. Namely, if it can be shown that the historic Church of Jesus Christ, i.e. those to whom the Spirit of Truth is passed on through the the ages, unanimously accepted something as true, then we can interpret that as being divinely sanctioned by the Holy Spirit. This is the very line of reasoning St. Paul used in 1 Corinthians 11:16 to justify his teaching on head coverings. Enter, the homologoumena.
As any good Protestant will tell you, the homologoumena are those books of the NT canon that have never been disputed in all of Church history, among which are the four Gospels, Acts, the Pauline Epistles, 1 Peter, and 1 John. Every canonical list of the NT we can gather (from those Christians who did not explicitly contradict the historic teachings of Jesus Christ) includes these books. Thus, since Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would guide His Church into all truth, if we presuppose the infallibility of Christ, we should be able to have absolute certainty that these books are truly infallible apostolic writings, and not merely reliable yet fallible.
Allow me to illustrate the significance of this with a hypothetical scenario. Suppose we returned to the apparent tension between Acts 15:29 and 1 Corinthians 8:4-13, and we exegetically demonstrated, beyond all reasonable doubt, that there is a genuine and irreconcilable contradiction between these two texts. Given the promises of Jesus Christ, and the historical witness of His Church, if we could demonstrate that Acts and one of Paul’s Epistles were in conflict, this wouldn’t give us the freedom to discard one or the other, rather it would falsify the Christian religion entirely. Because Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would guide His people into all truth, and a sign of this promise being “activated” is when God’s people all agree on something through the ages, then if one of these “consensuses” were shown to be false, we would have to consider Jesus Christ a false prophet.
On the other hand, notice that, if these are not the promises that Jesus made, if Christ did not actually promise that His Spirit would protect His people from error, then a conflict between Paul and Acts wouldn’t be problematic at all. If we found errors in Paul, we would have the epistemic option to just consider him a false teacher who is only good for his historical witness to early Christianity. However, if you concede this even as a possibility, that it is possible that Paul’s Epistles are not actually part of the NT canon, and that it is possible that his entire theological project was heretical, then you’re admitting the possibility that the true faith of Jesus Christ was visibly corrupted from day one. This means that, from the beginning, rather than being a light to the nations, the Christian Church may have been just another source of vile falsehood that kept the Gentile world in darkness; another false religion among the many that already existed. Make no mistake, you don’t have to believe that this actually happened for my point here to still be forceful, all you have to believe is that this could have happened because the promises of Jesus didn’t exclude it as a possibility.
To see why, imagine for a moment that you did actually believe that this happened. After wrestling with the tensions between Paul and the rest of the NT, you concluded that Paul was a false teacher and early Christianity underwent a kind of “great apostasy” by using him to reject Torah observance. Now imagine that, after coming to these beliefs, you were debating an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi about the Messianic claims of Jesus. You go back and forth over various “Messianic prophecies,” however the Rabbi keeps coming back the same argument: Jesus cannot possibly be the Messiah because, according to the OT, the Messiah would usher in an age when the Gentile nations would embrace the Law of the Lord with joy (Isa 2:1-4, 32:15-18, 60:15-18; Zeph 3:9; Hosea 2:20-22; Amos 9:13-15; Micah 4:1-4; Zech 8:23, 14:9; Jer 31:33-34), yet you believe that after Messiah came, those who followed Him preached a message of falsehood that has actually made the Gentiles more hostile to accepting God’s Law, since they now (falsely) believe that they already have it! How would you respond?
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything you would be able to say that would convince any reasonable person that Jesus is still the Messiah. If Jesus truly fulfilled these Messianic prophecies, then at the very least this would seem to require that the Gentile nations who embraced His message actually knew what the true faith was. And so, if it can be historically demonstrated that Gentile Christians throughout all ages have believed St. Paul’s writings to be the infallible Gospel of Jesus Christ, then Jesus’ Messianic claims utterly depend on this belief being true. As such, you cannot admit even the possibility of Paul’s writings being uncanonical without thereby calling Jesus’ authority into question. And this is the central reason why, in my mind, Christians must believe in the infallibility of Tradition: given the promises that the OT and Jesus Himself made to God’s new covenant people, the Church has the ability to bind herself to a certain belief to such an extent that, were it shown to be incorrect, it would call the very authority of Christ into question. Aside from the NT canon, I think no better illustration of this exists than the historic doctrine of the Trinity.
While it was intensely debated for centuries after the Council of Nicaea I, it remains an historical fact that the Trinitarian dogma has come to define Christianity for the majority of its history. To this day the Nicene Creed is treated with reverence by almost all denominations of Christianity, especially those that survived antiquity (Catholics, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Assyrians), and most Christians have the general intuition that an attack on the Creed is an attack on the orthodox faith. This being the case, consider yet another hypothetical scenario. Suppose it could be exegetically demonstrated, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the NT does not actually teach the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, the NT teaches that the Father alone is God, and the Son is merely an exalted creature whom we venerate. If this were true, could it still be plausible to believe in Christianity at all? Could it be that, for millennia, the visible Christian Church has actually been guilty of rank idolatry and polytheism? I think any Christian would intuitively answer with an emphatic, no! If Jesus promised that He would guide His people into all truth (Jn 16:13), that the gates of Hell would never prevail against His Church (Matt 16:18), and that He would be with us until the end of time (Matt 28:20), who would ever take His Messianic claims seriously if the vast majority of His followers throughout history were apostate idolaters?
Although he is a Universalist heretic himself (who ought to heed his own message), these words that Fr. Aidan Kimel wrote against the Unitarian heretic Dale Tuggy ring truer for me today than when I first read them several years ago:
If the Church got the dogma of the Trinity wrong in the fourth century, then at that moment it ceased to be the community of the gospel. There’s no way for us to go back now and recover the gospel, if there ever was a gospel; there’s no way for us to go back and retrieve God’s original self-revelation, if there ever was an original self-revelation. Such is the consequence of irreversible dogma. The community appointed by God to receive, pass on, and interpret by the Spirit his self-revelation in Christ has, according to Tuggy’s account, been replaced by heretics and idolaters. The unitarian Christian faithful and their congregations perished ages ago. All that is left of their ancient religion are lifeless texts and artifacts. We can no more replicate the faith that gave them meaning than we can replicate the faith of the Gnostics. It would all be play-acting, like trying to recreate Druidic religion by dancing around the pillars of Stonehenge on Samhain.
This really says it all. If the very Church that has supposedly preserved God’s infallible Word could fall into such grievous error so as to not even know the God whom she serves, who could ever take seriously the claims of a Man who said He is with her until the end? Who could take seriously the Man who said that this community would fulfill the Messianic prophecies about God’s people being a light to the nations? I certainly couldn’t, and for this reason I believe that the Council of Nicaea is not simply inerrant, but rather infallible. It’s not just that this Council happens to align with biblical truth the same way any writing with orthodox content does, rather the Christian Church has so bound herself to this Council that, were it shown to be false, it would nullify the very promises of Jesus Christ Himself. Thus, since Jesus is truly who He claims to be, the orthodoxy of the Nicene dogma must be acknowledged as the result of a divine promise to protect the Church from error, and not merely an historical accident.
Unfortunately, the moment a Protestant accepts this reality is the moment he must cease being a Protestant. Once you open the floodgates of divine Tradition, there’s no going back. If the Church can infallibly bind herself to the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, then she can also infallibly bind herself to other teachings such as the invocation of Saints, icon veneration, prayers for the dead, devotion to the Virgin Mary, baptismal regeneration, apostolic succession, the sacrament of confession, and every other doctrine that the Protestant Reformers abhorred, yet the historic Church upheld with joy. Even if there are aspects of the Tradition that make us uncomfortable (whether personally or intellectually), once the infallibility of the Church is conceded, our comfort must not get in the way of our humble submission to the historic guidance of the Holy Spirit. This also means that, if you do manage to find a genuine contradiction in the Tradition, sadly there’s no Sola Scriptura to fall back on. Such a contradiction would not simply disprove the authority of Tradition while retaining the authority of Scripture, it would not do anything to address the arguments made in this article, rather all it would do is bring down the Christian religion as a whole.
At the end of the day, this is why I cannot (consistently) be both a Christian and a Protestant. In my mind, the historic Christian religion is all or nothing, and no project of “reconstruction” could ever bring back the true faith if it was lost. Unlike the Protestant paradigm, I don’t believe it’s possible at any point in history for the visible Christian faith to be radically different from the “true” Christian faith that was once delivered to the Saints. If it were true that the apostles preached a Gospel that was significantly at odds with every form of Christianity that has existed since their time, I just don’t know how I could remain a Christian in good conscience. If that is not a criteria of falsification, I don’t know what is. Thus, I must conclude that not only is such a scenario not true, but it’s also not possible. If Christianity is the truth, it’s not possible that no post-apostolic version of it has ever been correct, and if it’s not possible today, then it wasn’t possible in the 16th century, or the 8th century, or the 4th century. And the logical consequence of this is that, by divine promise, the historic Church must have proclaimed the true faith, making Tradition a truly infallible source of divine revelation. I think this line of thinking was summarized well by Erick Ybarra who writes:
In theory, the next 600 years of Protestant thinking might yield something drastically different than what either the Reformers or contemporary Protestant thought has [ever] developed [in its entire history]. This kind of potency is cooked into [their] interpretative paradigm. In contrast to this, Catholicism and Orthodoxy do not believe the Church can undergo that kind of revolution without completely manifesting the failure of Christ’s missional project in being the Light of the World through His Church until the end of time.
The Dogmatization of the Bodily Assumption of Mary and the Appeal to History.
Over the past year or so I have been taking Protestant claims more seriously into consideration when thinking about my own ecclesial status, however, every time I seriously thought about becoming Protestant, this really was one of my main hang-ups. According to the Protestant paradigm, it is, at least in principle, possible that every form of Christianity that exists today, and that has existed for the past 1,000 years or so, is totally heretical. Obviously, I wouldn’t actually believe that that was true, as I think traditional orthodox doctrines really can be defended on biblical grounds, however, I would be forced to admit it as a possibility. And that just does not sit well with me at all. As I said before, I personally cannot imagine a world in which Jesus is actually the Messiah and His historic Church has been in rank idolatry for most of its history. And so, if I believe that this is not even a possibility, then the logical consequence of this is that the historic Christian Tradition must, by divine promise, be a truthful witness to orthodox doctrine. In other words, Tradition must be infallible.