The theory of Sola Scriptura is, of course, the assertion that one should base all Christian teaching (everything pertaining to faith and morals) on Scripture alone. This doctrine was created and defined as a deliberate reaction against and rejection of historic Christian teaching.
From the earliest days of the history of the Church, Christians have held that Theology must be formulated in accordance with three principles – Apostolic Scripture, Apostolic Tradition and Apostolic Magisterium (doctrinal authority) of the Church. The first two of these provided the data necessary for conducting theological investigations, while the third served to authoritatively formulate the correct interpretation of the data presented by the two material sources. Thus Scripture and Tradition served as the material principles of theology, while the Magisterium, by allowing us to know with certainty the correct meaning of this material, served as a formal principle of theology.
Because the Protestant Reformers wished to hold teachings which were completely foreign to historic Christian theology, they had to reject the historic Christian method for formulating theology, and so they could not continue accepting the three principles of Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium. They had to reject the teachings of the Magisterium because the Magisterium did not agree with them, and in the same way they had to reject Tradition as a source, because it did not agree with them either. So they were left with the position of trying to formulate theology in terms of a single principle – Scripture – and thus the doctrine of Sola Scriptura was born.
All of this is admitted, with varying qualifiers, by Protestant historians, since it is simply a historical fact that the doctrine of Sola Scriptura appeared in history after the original teachings of the Reformers. The Reformers proposed these teachings to the Church and, when the Magisterium refused to change its position and reaffirmed the historic Christian teachings on these matters, the Reformers were forced to eliminate the Magisterium and History (Tradition) from their theological method.
If the Magisterium, contrary to its mission and indefectibility, had changed its position and rejected the historic Christian teachings in favor of the new Protestant teachings, then hypothetically, the Magisterium would not have needed to be rejected.
A version of Sola Scriptura could have appeared, in which only Apostolic Tradition is eliminated.
Sola Scriptura could have meant that one should base one’s theology on the material presented in the Scriptures alone; but as interpreted by the living Christian Magisterium.
However, the Magisterium did not yield to the new Protestant doctrines because of its indefectibility in its mission of maintaining the historic Christian teachings, and so such a version of Sola Scriptura never appeared.
The Magisterium, together with Apostolic Tradition, had to go and be excluded from the Protestant theological method.
So if someone today were to propose a model for theology consisting of “Scripture alone, but as interpreted by a Magisterium”, it would be rejected immediately and outright by the Protestant community (except perhaps by a few small, radical sects) who would take such a proposal as a doctrine that is not Sola Scriptura at all.
The term “alone” in “Scripture alone” must be taken not only to exclude other material principles of theology (such as Tradition) but also other formal principles of theology (such as the Magisterium).
But if one has to break away from the historic Christian principles of formulating the matter of theology into distinctive and concrete doctrines, then what should one use in their place? How is one going to formulate doctrines if what has historically been the formal principle has been rejected? What formal principle would you propose in its place?
This was the question that Catholics put to Luther and the other Protestants, who answered that, in the absence of some group of Christians who were divinely commissioned with the task of formulating the material of theology, the individual himself must be divinely commissioned with this task. Thus the doctrine of an absolute right to private judgment – to decide for oneself what is the correct interpretation of Scripture – was created. Christians, of course, have always been taught a right to have our own judgment – that every individual has the right to think about and interpret the Scriptures for himself (this is why the Scriptures have always been read aloud at Mass, so that even the illiterate could hear them and think about their meaning). The exercise of private judgment was concrete and robust and was to be promoted by every possible means, so long as it was not used to reject those doctrines that had been determined by the Teachers whom Christ chose (the Magisterium) to represent the authentic teachings of the Bible.
Thus Christians have historically been taught a right to private judgment, but not an absolute right that overthrows the doctrinal authority which Christ himself established in his Church by giving it official teachers, as the New Testament itself declares (Ephesians 4:11-12). In any area in which the doctrinal authority of the Church of Christ had not given a definitive pronouncement (which was and is in most areas), private judgment is permitted. It was only when a doctrine which had already been established as truth, such as the Trinity, the full Divinity and humanity of Christ, the atoning death and resurrection of Christ, the efficacy of the sacraments, etc. – that private judgment was limited. In order to discard the teachings of the Magisterium, the Reformers had to overcome this limitation, so they laid hold of an unconditional and absolute right to private judgment, according to which the individual had the right to disagree and publicly teach the contrary to even those doctrines which the doctrinal authorities established by Christ had already declared to be truth.
This was necessary as an answer to the Catholic question, “Who are you to abolish a historic Christian teaching which has already been settled by the Magisterium? You are not even a member of that body, much less the whole of it, and such doctrines could never change to begin with.”
In response to this question, the Reformers were forced to answer, “We do not need to be the whole of the Magisterium, or even individual members of it, because every Christian has the right –and the capacity– to settle each and every doctrine for himself and is not bound in conscience to accept the resolutions of teachers whom, we admit, Christ established that his Church should have (Ephesians 4:11-12).”
Thus the doctrine of private judgment became a necessary component of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. The Scriptures themselves would be the only material principle for theology, and the judgment of the individual would be the only formal principle, since no other source could ultimately and authoritatively tell the believer what the correct interpretation of the Scriptures was. Any theory which mentioned that there would be a magisterial group of Christians who were to interpret the Scriptures for the individual would receive vigorous opposition.
P R I V A T E – J U D G M E N T – I N – P R A C T I C E
This is strange because, in many ways, this is exactly how the doctrine is applied in Protestant Churches. Even though every member of the congregation has the theoretical right to interpret the Scriptures for himself, the vast majority of them do not.
There may be, in every congregation, a number of people who have active theological inclinations who do serious biblical study, but the average person simply listens to the exposition given of the Scriptures in the Sunday sermon or in the weekly Bible studies and accepts them. The pastor or the Bible study leader sets forth his own point of view regarding the Scriptures, and he is not rigorously questioned by the average listener. The average person normally does not try to obtain commentaries from opposing points of view, and compare them with the pastor’s points of view, and then make a rigorous analysis of the arguments on both sides.
T H E – F I R S T – R E A S O N – W H Y – P R I V A T E – J U D G M E N T – I S – N O T – U S E D – I N – P R A C T I C E
This is so even in denominations that try to encourage the development of theological reasoning in their members, such as the conservative Presbyterian tradition of which I was a part. I was in a much richer theological environment than any other I had previously been in, where there was a larger proportion of people in the congregation who were theologically alert, yet almost all of them were Church officers of one kind or another (pastors, elders, deacons, youth ministers), and not even all the officers were theologically inclined. Looking back at the situation, I realize that I was the only person in the congregation who was not a Church officer and who devoted myself to serious theological study.
And this is the same in every congregation of Christendom. There is no “Church of Theologians” anywhere, and if there were, it should be disbanded immediately so that the theological talent it contains could be scattered to other theologically underprivileged groups.
The fact that the average Christian simply is not inclined toward theology is something that was obvious even in my highly pro-intellectual denomination. It is a basic reality of church life, and nothing in the history of the world has been able to change it. My Presbyterian pastor once told me privately, and with regret, “People are sheep. That is why the Bible depicts them as such, and that is why it is so important that they have a good shepherd.”
This imperative need to be guided by a pastor is the “bitter reality” (from the Protestant point of view) that is “swept under the rug” with the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Those who hold leadership in each and every Protestant Church know that the average member is not going, no matter what they do, to become an advanced theologian, much less a fully mature interpreter of the Scriptures, yet they continue to make a great show of the idea that you can interpret the Bible for yourself and that the Scriptures should always be your first and last resort, whatever anyone says being merely a secondary factor, a suggested interpretation for you to take into account as you evaluate the Scriptures for yourself.
In this way private interpretation is maintained only hypothetically, a dream for some idealized Christian world, but not something practiced in this world. Sola Scriptura ends up meaning that the average Christian has the right to interpret the Bible for himself, but this is a right very rarely exercised consistently.
T H E – S E C O N D – R E A S O N – W H Y – P R I V A T E – J U D G M E N T – I S – N O T – U S E D – I N – P R A C T I C E
When this right is exercised consistently, when the individual really gives the teachings of his pastor and of his denomination a rigorous analysis, it is very likely that he will realize that his previous theological apathy is not the only barrier to being able to exercise the absolute right to private judgment. There is a second barrier, because if he comes to the conclusion that the pastor or the denomination is simply wrong about something he considers important, then the individual is almost always confronted with two options: keep his mouth shut about it and not go around trying to defend his private interpretation in the congregation (this would produce a leadership crisis and disturb the tranquility of the sheep) or simply leave the congregation and go off with his private interpretation somewhere else.
Any layman who tries to remain in a congregation and defends a different position on some matter that the pastor or the denomination considers important is going to receive pressure – first subtle and then not subtle – to keep quiet or to leave, and if he does neither of these things then the individual is finally expelled from the ecclesial body.
And, of course, this is entirely necessary. Every group holds together by having certain fundamental principles on which they agree, which form the basis of their union, and if someone insists on denying one of these basic axioms that are shared and that hold the group together, then he must be expelled or the entire group runs the risk of dissolving – a phenomenon quite familiar given the multitude of divisions in the Protestant world.
(Something that always surprises Protestants [especially in the U.S., where Catholics are a minority] when they begin to attend Catholic parishes is how large the average parish is – which is usually made up of several thousand people. The reason is that parishes do not divide like Protestant Churches, so it is only necessary to have a sufficient number of them to cover the pastoral needs of the local Catholic community; the number of parishes multiplies only for this reason and not because of doctrinal divisions.)
The hypocrisy is not the expulsion of dissenters, but rather the fact that the promise to allow one’s own judgment is not fulfilled – to promote it with a continuous rhetorical drumbeat on the subject and encouraging the faithful to criticize and condemn other denominations that do not preach this principle, when in reality the promise is: “You have the absolute right to interpret the Scriptures for yourself, but we are going to throw you out if you do not agree with us on something we consider important.”
“Wait just a moment,” one might say. “Isn’t the accusation of hypocrisy a bit strong? After all, if a person comes to conclusions opposed to those of the group he is in, he can always go join another group with points of view that agree with his own.”
T H E – D I L E M M A – O F – T H E – D I S S E N T I N G – P R O T E S T A N T
But the person who has exercised his right to private judgment can respond, “But I do not want to depart from this group of people whom I have come to know and love over the years, among whom I was raised, chose my wife, married, had my children, and planned to be buried, and among whom I have all my friends. The personal cost to me and my family if we depart is quite great.
“Besides, precisely because I love these people is why I want them to have the truth, and I believe that in this important matter they are being seriously misled. And even if I decide to depart and go somewhere else, there may not be any group of people who share my beliefs. Suppose I have decided that speaking in tongues is for today, that Calvinism is true, that children should not be baptized, and that the sacrament of baptism regenerates.
Where am I going to go? There are not many Charismatic Calvinist Baptist Churches that teach sacramental regeneration. Each of those doctrines is one of the principal teachings of different Protestant denominations, but no denomination holds all my beliefs on these clearly important matters. And even if there were a church that taught all these doctrines, there certainly is not one in my city.
“Should I start my own church? Nooo, that would be pastorally irresponsible in the extreme. I am just a layman who has exercised his absolute right to private judgment. I am not a biblical scholar; I am not a trained preacher; I am not a pastoral counselor; I have no knowledge of church administration and finance. I would be a real disaster as a church planter.
“So the suggestion to ‘go somewhere else where people believe like you’ is really a hollow promise for me, and my options are still ‘Be quiet and do not publicly exercise your absolute right to private judgment’ or ‘Be a stranger to us and to any other congregation you might want to join.’ So it is hypocritical to tell me that I have this absolute right that I ought to appreciate, treasure and defend – but which I am going to be forbidden to use here in my own community.
“Moreover, you should not speak of other communities which believe different things as if this were a normal or desirable thing – a perfectly acceptable ‘play value’ for the exercise of private judgment. There can only be one single set of true doctrines, and Jesus wants us to have them and follow them. The existence of multiple sets of Christian teachings that are contradictory and competing with one another is a tragedy, the fulfillment of Paul’s prophecy: ‘For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears’ (2 Timothy 4:3). That is exactly what you are encouraging me to do – go and find teachers who agree with your own desires. You are advising me to fulfill Paul’s prophecy about the departure from the true doctrines of Christ!.
“You must never speak of going to join a group that teaches different doctrines as if it were a matter of indifference and say, ‘Well, if you do not like this one, go and try that other one’! The teachings of Christ are not a matter of indifference! If you believe that you have them, then you must do everything possible to ‘re-educate’ me and, if you have to throw me out of the congregation, you must not encourage me to think that going to another denomination to accept its doctrines – which you claim are false – is a matter of indifference. You are looking for an easy way out of a difficult pastoral situation! You are trying to get rid of this dilemma by directing me to go to another church!.”
T H E – D I L E M M A – O F – T H E – P R O T E S T A N T – P A S T O R
For my part, I would advise the person to approach the leaders of his church as gently in heart as he can, no matter how badly he has been mistreated in being prevented from using an absolute right which he is forbidden to exercise in practice, even though he is right in what he said. For, although his pastors are steeped in hypocrisy, it is mostly an unconscious hypocrisy.
They must preach the absolute right to private judgment in order to guarantee their own right to interpret and expound the Scriptures in public. They have no other basis for doing this. If they concluded that the average person does not have the absolute right to interpret the Scriptures for himself, then how would they know whether they themselves have this absolute right? They could not know. They would be forced to join a church whose leaders have been entrusted with the task of interpreting the Scriptures, they would have to abandon their own positions of authority, and become part of the flock. The pastors would have to become sheep.
The doctrine of private judgment is thus what justifies their own positions of authority, which means that they need to maintain and develop this doctrine in theory. At the same time, they recognize that they must protect their group from dividing due to dissent, and so they must forbid in practice the free and public exercise of this absolute right within their group. They are between a rock and a hard place. They must teach the existence of this right in order to justify their own leadership of the group, yet they cannot allow others to publicly exercise this right within the group or else it would divide. They have to allow only themselves the free exercise of a right which they teach that all Christians have innately.
Instead of facing this horrible reality, which when looked in the face is a grotesque hypocrisy, they avert their eyes from it and simply never think about it. So it is an unconscious hypocrisy, at least for the most part. They can spend all their time expounding the doctrine of private judgment, knowing that only occasionally will someone in the congregation cause an uproar by stubbornly clinging to his right to exercise private judgment. The more normal and common problem is actually the opposite – getting people to analyze the Scriptures and doctrines, and to get them to do this, the preaching of the doctrine of private judgment does in fact help, because if God has entrusted them with the task of interpreting the Scriptures for themselves, then they certainly need to be exhorted to fulfill this task.
Thus, preaching the doctrine of private judgment has a constructive role in Protestant churches, since it will get the sheep to devote at least some time to the Scriptures and theology, and only occasionally will a sheep try to exercise his right to private judgment in a consistent and public way and try to usurp the role of the pastor. And, of course, those people are simply theologically presumptuous to begin with, right? Otherwise they would not have been so troublesome and would have kept quiet or left quietly instead of disturbing the tranquility of the flock under the pastor.
This is why Protestant pastors feel comfortable preaching the doctrine of one’s own judgment – and even publicly and proudly criticize forcefully those churches that do not preach it – and very rarely or never seriously analyze the contradiction between the theory of this doctrine and whether it is actually possible to implement it in practice. Their hypocrisy is unconscious, making it forgivable, because it is not open, nor deliberate, nor malicious.
T H E – F I R S T – R E A S O N – F O R – T H E – P R O T E S T A N T – M A G I S T E R I A
And so the Protestant churches carry on, teaching their members that they have the absolute right to interpret the Scriptures for themselves, yet continuing to function as if there were a special class of people within them – a Magisterium – who have really been entrusted with the task of interpreting the Scriptures for and to the people. And, in order for the group to survive, the interpretations of this Magisterium have the force of law, so that those who enter into open and public dissent can be expelled to maintain the health of the body.
The typical Protestant church, in this way, reinvents the Catholic system that it consciously despises. It does so out of necessity, since there is no way to maintain an organized and healthy group that works in harmony without having someone with the authority to determine what the group is going to do and who expels those who do not cooperate. You cannot have a class of students, a group of workers, a social club, or a nation without someone who has some kind of authority, and you certainly cannot have a church without authority either. Someone in any group must be able to say, “This is what the group is going to do” and “If you do not do it and you are going to constantly oppose it publicly, then you cannot be part of the group. You must leave the class, the work group, the social club, society, or church.”
Since the New Testament clearly indicates that Jesus wanted us to organize churches – the arguments of the non-denominational “House Church” movement are not valid – He clearly indicated that someone within these churches was to have some kind of authority.
T H E – S E C O N D – R E A S O N – F O R – T H E – P R O T E S T A N T – M A G I S T E R I A
In this way we read in the New Testament of evangelists or overseers (bishops), presbyters or elders (priests) and deacons. We read of how the deacons must assist the higher leaders and relieve them of tasks which would take them away from the Word of God and prayer (Acts 6:2-4). We read of how the presbyters (priests) must labor in teaching and administration (1 Timothy 5:17b). We read of how the evangelists/bishops (cf. 2 Timothy 5:4) must appoint (1 Timothy 5:22, Titus 1:5) and discipline the presbyters, rewarding those who “rule well” (1 Timothy 5:17a) and openly rebuking those who persist in sin (1 Timothy 5:20). And, most importantly, we read the direction to laymen to “Obey your prelates, and be subject to them” (Hebrews 13:17a) because they “are over you in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 5:12).
In this way Jesus provided for the needs of his Church, he gave shepherds to his flock. “And he gave some apostles, and some prophets, and other some evangelists, and other some pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, … that henceforth we be no more children tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine …” (Ephesians 4:11-14).
For the needs of the Church, because the people would have been carried about by every wind of doctrine, unsure of what to believe and often falling into error, God provided teachers. The average individual is not supposed to do everything alone. He is supposed to have a teacher. When we see God fully in the kingdom, then the promise will be fulfilled that “they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying: Know the Lord: for all shall know me from the least of them even to the greatest, saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 31:34).
The promise of the New Covenant still has to be fulfilled, but for now Christ appointed that there should be “some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers,” and the expressed purpose of this is that “we be no more … carried about with every wind of doctrine.”
Christ has thus established a Magisterium – a doctrinal authority – in his Church, as even Protestants acknowledge, since they do have pastors and teachers whom they proclaim to have been called by God to fulfill these roles.
This is the second reason why the hypocrisy that derives from the doctrine of private judgment is unconscious. These Protestant leaders read the Bible. They all know and are aware of these verses. It is clear to them as it is to everyone else that God wanted there to be teachers in his Church, people who would teach in the name of God and who were called by God to do this. So they know, because the Bible says so, that there would have to be people in their positions; they simply never think about the implications of that and fail to notice the cognitive dissonance that this generates with the doctrine of private judgment.
T H E – I N E F F I C I E N C Y – O F – T H E – P R O T E S T A N T – M A G I S T E R I A
Christ clearly wanted there to be a doctrinal authority, an operational Magisterium in the Christian community, and both communities (Catholic and Protestant) have them. The difference is that Catholics openly acknowledge that the doctrinal authority is an entity, while Protestants tend to downplay and minimize it because of the doctrine of private judgment.
This situation of ignoring a function that one must perform leads to bad consequences, just as the inattentive exercise of authority does, and as a result the Protestant community suffers.
Since the Catholic Church is open regarding the role of doctrinal authority in the Christian community, it has had the opportunity to analyze the matter more, and it has a much better understanding of it, and therefore administers the role much better. The Catholic Magisterium, because it realizes that its decisions are authoritative and bind the consciences of believers so that they are not carried about by doctrines, is very cautious and careful when it speaks (even when they are not infallible resolutions). It uses very precise language and makes very careful and narrow pronouncements on any matter.
In contrast, since they are exercising magisterial authority in a significantly unconscious and unreflective way, the Magisteria in Protestant churches tend to measure themselves much less in their pronouncements, and the pastors in Protestant churches often teach with a broad brush, without careful reflection and without specifying important qualifiers, and they tell their people that they must believe as revealed by God some interpretation which merely seemed like a good idea to the pastor.
P R O T E S T A N T – M A G I S T E R I A – O U T – O F – C O N T R O L
This is especially problematic in less intellectual denominations where pastors do not receive academic training that teaches them the importance of nuances and qualifiers in their teachings. For example, the individual under whose ministry I was first introduced to the Christian world often spoke of how he had grown up in an Assembly of God Church, which was one of the twelve in that town which had split off from a root Assembly of God church that was the original one in that town. The divisions had been over insignificant reasons that were presented as important doctrinal divisions. One division was caused when people began to teach that it was a sin to drink coffee. Another was caused when a teaching appeared saying that one should not wear a necktie. A third division came about over a disagreement about whether or not to use cuffs on trousers. In fact, the father of this individual was the pastor of the “tieless” Assembly of God Church in that town.
All of this is something that the Magisterium of the Catholic Church would not tolerate, yet the Magisteria of these Pentecostal churches not only tolerate these senseless matters, but they become reasons for their churches to divide, and since the people stubbornly cling to their right to interpret the oracles of God, the very members of the congregation are the cause of these divisions. Based on their absolute right to private judgment, together with the conception that one can always pull up stakes and start one’s own church, an original and unified congregation was divided into thirteen competing ecclesial bodies that try to steal sheep from one another.
Now, most Protestant Magisteria would not tolerate the kind of things that happened there, but they do tolerate other things that they should not, and they even divide their churches over things that they themselves acknowledge are not matters of doctrine. Sometimes a church divides over disagreements about whether a new building should be constructed, or over reasons of managing the money for the building, or over the location of the new building, or over the architecture of the building, or over the color of the carpet, or over discussions about whether the church is focusing on the correct socio-economic group in the community. Sometimes a popular youth pastor or even the choir director has an altercation with the principal pastor, and separates from the church and goes elsewhere, and takes half the congregation with him (in fact that happened when the choir director left what had been the largest Protestant church in the town I am from, a Baptist church that had several thousand members).
When I was in one of the early phases of the investigation that would eventually lead me to the Catholic Church, the full import of Jesus’ commands about the unity of the Church struck me for the first time, and I began to agonize about the state of the denomination I was in, which was the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). The sister denomination of the PCA is called the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), and the two subscribe to the same edition of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which means that they had the same standard of teaching, yet they remained separate. The PCA thought the OPC was too strict; the OPC thought the PCA was too progressive. The PCA thought the OPC was too bureaucratic, forming committees for every little thing; the OPC thought the PCA was too lax in church governance. Yet, despite the fact that the two churches had the same doctrinal beliefs, differing only in matters of style, administration, and emphasis, they were making no motion and even resisted motions that might culminate in their union. I asked myself, “How can we, in these two denominations that have the same standards of teaching, claim that we are following the teachings of Jesus on the unity of the Church if we cannot even unite ourselves?”
Those two denominations were willing to remain separate, in flagrant violation of the teachings of Jesus on the visible unity of the Church, for reasons that were no longer doctrinal, but that had to do with style, administration, and emphasis. The reason, of course, was the mindset of “If you do not like it, start your own church” which in this context would be the mindset of “If it is inconvenient to unite, stay separate.” This is the dislocation effect of what was originally a principle that advocated dividing the church over doctrinal matters. Now it had deteriorated and rotted until it became a willingness to separate for non-doctrinal reasons, and a corresponding unwillingness to unite if it is inconvenient because of non-doctrinal matters.
T H E – R O O T – O F – T H E – P R O B L E M
For too long the Protestant world had advocated a principle that suggested that the solution to bad teaching was schism, and now it has mutated into a form that suggests that the solution to administrative problems, political disagreements, and inconvenience is schism too. As I meditated on it, it became more and more obvious to me that such situations governing decisions about whether or not Christians should affiliate must never be permitted. I concluded that Christ’s solution to bad teaching was not schism, but good teaching.
However, because the practice of entering into schism had become so pandemic in Protestant circles, it had generated a great number of competing Magisteria which are totally out of control and are willing to divide churches over insignificant doctrinal reasons (as with the Assembly of God churches I mentioned) or over projects and reasons of personality (as with the Baptist church I mentioned) or to oppose even attempting to obey the teachings of Christ on the unity of the Church because of the inconvenience it represents (as with the Presbyterian churches I mentioned).
Each group has its own Magisterium – its own doctrinal authority – but because they are based on the doctrine of private judgment, they encourage divisions and end up operating in a capricious and careless manner, blatantly ignoring the teachings of Christ and in fact encouraging believers to be carried about by every wind of doctrine. They are the ones who create the winds of teaching. Through their teachings, publications, and advertising mechanisms they have, in effect, aimed their great mechanical snowblowers at the Christian world, trying to sweep as many as possible into their own sphere of influence. By generating the winds of doctrine they are acting against the very purpose for which Christ established a Magisterium in the first place, which was to prevent doctrinal confusion and give ordinary people security in their beliefs.
I have therefore been forced to conclude that the principle of private judgment – an inherent and indispensable part of Protestantism – leads inevitably to the formation of multiple competing Magisteria, which makes obsolete the purpose of having Magisteria in the first place. Since “God is not the God of dissension, but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33), He cannot be the author of the doctrinal chaos in the Protestant world, and since this chaos is rooted in the very essence of Protestantism itself, because of the principle of private judgment, God cannot be the author of Protestantism.
He did not found his Church on principles guaranteed, by their very nature, to bring chaos and confusion. Instead, He “gave some apostles, and some prophets, and other some evangelists, and other some pastors and doctors … that henceforth we be no more children tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” He established a Magisterium precisely to prevent the doctrinal confusion caused by a multitude of people setting forth their private judgments in public.
T H E – A U T H O R I T Y – O F – T H E – M A G I S T E R I U M – A N D – P R I V A T E – J U D G M E N T
Since the Magisterium is an essential component of the Church and authorized by God, it must have a corresponding authority and must be able to restrict private judgment so that it does not go beyond certain limits. Private judgment without limits is precisely the problem which God established the Magisterium to cure. There is simply no way to harmonize the existence of a divinely authorized Magisterium and an absolute right to private judgment.
There can be and there is a harmony between the Magisterium and a limited right to private judgment, and this is what we find in the Catholic Church. Lay individuals and theologians can exercise their private judgment in reading the Scriptures all they want, so long as they do not transgress what the Magisterium has already conclusively resolved. There is free domain for private judgment and opinion within the limits of established Christian teaching. It is the crossing of these limits which the Magisterium was established to prevent.
This is the way in which the intellect of the individual is harmonized with the doctrinal authority of Christ, exercised through his Church. God gave each individual a rational soul which, if not impeded, will allow him to learn, understand, and know the Scriptures and teachings of Christ. This exercise of private interpretation must be encouraged and developed. People have received a faculty from God, and they must be encouraged to fulfill the responsibility that this faculty carries.
But people have not been given the faculty or the responsibility to construct Christian theology from the foundations by themselves. The average Christian does not have the responsibility to do this, nor the ability to do it. Not even the bishops who constitute the Magisterium have the responsibility or the ability to do this as individuals. Not even the Pope himself has this responsibility or ability, since he himself has to abide by all the previous decisions of the Magisterium. No individual, from the day that public or universal (catholic) revelation ceased, has had the right or the responsibility to decide the entire Christian faith by himself, not even the organs of the Magisterium that God created.
T H E – D E V E L O P M E N T – O F – C H R I S T I A N – D O C T R I N E
So it is not the case that the Magisterium can simply decide what it wants people to teach and force them to believe that. The Magisterium itself has to abide by the infallible teachings previously defined and, although it can delve more deeply into the matter and add more clarity to it, it cannot deny what has already been infallibly established (consequently, it never has). Thus, under the exercise of divinely assigned doctrinal authority, Christian theology grows organically, not mutagenically. More depth, clarity, and context is added to what has already been established, but what has been established remains established, as was God’s intention from the beginning.
There is no place in the divine plan for Christian theology to be discarded and reconstructed from the foundations. That is what generates the winds of doctrine that the Magisterium must combat. It is the task of the Magisterium to see that Christian theology grows in a stable, orderly, and organic way.
There can be no periods of “rebooting” of Christian theology. If there were, if the theology of the Church could degenerate in such a way that it periodically had to be discarded and reconstituted from below, then the Church would not be “the pillar and ground of the truth,” as the New Testament declares (1 Timothy 3:15), and the Magisterium could not fulfill its function of preventing the faithful from being carried about by every wind of doctrine. Believers could not be sure that they are not living in one of the theologically corrupt times before the “reboot”; nor could they have any sense of doctrinal security during the “reboot,” when theology is being hastily reformulated; nor could they have any security after the “reboot,” since they could not know whether the theology – especially the theology in their denominations – has been reformulated in the correct way.
The idea of giving periodic “reboots” to Christian theology, instead of slow and organic developments toward greater clarity and depth, robs the average believer, who is not a theologian, of having the assurance that his church is imparting to him the real teachings of Christ, thereby making him vulnerable to competing teachings, and thus preventing the teachers whom God has assigned from being able to fulfill their mission of anchoring the average believer so that he is not carried about by winds of contrary doctrinal assertions.
In fact, the attempts at “rebooting” in the past have been what has caused these winds. By discarding and reformulating historic Christian theology, people do not come to the same conclusions regarding what is to be reformed. In this way, the Reformation produced countless new sects – Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, among others.
And, of course, when people do not agree on doctrines, some of them are going to be wrong, and they are going to teach heresies. When people try to “reboot” the system, heresy and schism are the inevitable consequences, in the same way that system error and corrupt files are the result of rebooting a computer while its software is running. The program of the Christian Church must be allowed to run to the end. Only in this way can the accuracy of the results be guaranteed.
All that is accomplished is reinventing the errors of the past that the program had already eliminated. Thus, today we see heresies such as Gnosticism, Arianism, Sabellianism, and polytheism reappearing in the guise of New Age Christianity, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Oneness Pentecostals, and the Mormons, all of which began as attempts to discard historic Christian teachings and “reboot” the system.
T H E – O R I G I N A L – S I N – O F – P R O T E S T A N T I S M
Protestantism itself, of course, began as an attempt at theological “rebooting,” and by incorporating into itself the principle of absolute private judgment, it infected itself with the oldest heresy of all, which began in the Garden of Eden, with which humanity was originally tempted – the principle that the individual should ultimately be the one to decide for himself what is right and what is not, instead of trusting God to provide this according to His plans.
In his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II writes:
“We read in the Book of Genesis: ‘The Lord God gave man this command: You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die’ (Gen 2:16-17). With this imagery, Revelation teaches that the power to decide what is good and what is evil does not belong to man, but to God alone. Man is certainly free, inasmuch as he can understand and accept God’s commands. And he possesses an extremely far-reaching freedom, since he can eat ‘of every tree of the garden’. But his freedom is not unlimited: it must halt before the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’, for it is called to accept the moral law given by God. In fact, human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfilment precisely in the acceptance of that law. God, who alone is good, knows perfectly what is good for man, and by virtue of his very love proposes this good to man in the commandments. God’s law does not reduce, much less do away with human freedom; rather, it protects and promotes that freedom. In contrast, however, some present-day cultural tendencies have given rise to several currents of thought in ethics which centre upon an alleged conflict between freedom and law” (Veritatis Splendor 35). God gave Adam and Eve rational intellects which He expected them to use in seeking the truth, but He did not entrust them with the task of ultimately deciding what is right and what is wrong for themselves. He himself was to tell them what is right and what is wrong, and they were then to use their intellects within these limits to apply God’s teachings. However, they decided that they wanted to be like God and have absolute authority over what they were to believe and do, and this is what destroyed them and condemned billions of human beings to hell. It was the stubborn assertion of one’s intellectual deciding faculties in the face of God that caused the whole human race to fall; it was the aspiration to an unlimited right to private judgment, to simply look at the evidence and decide for oneself.
This is the temptation of every rebellious human intellect, to prefer one’s own judgments and interpretations to those whom God authorized. St. John Henry Newman writes eloquently about this in the “General Answer to Mr. Kingsley” at the end of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and he explains the means that God has established to combat this original sin: “Starting then with the being of a God…I look out of myself into the world of men, and there I see a sight which fills me with unspeakable distress…The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet’s scroll, full of ‘lamentations, and mourning, and woe.’ “To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts…the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, ‘having no hope and without God in the world’—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal… “What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence. …And so I argue about the world;—if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God. “And now, supposing it were the blessed and loving will of the Creator to interfere in this anarchical condition of things, what are we to suppose would be the methods which might be necessarily or naturally used in his purpose of mercy? … I am…asking what must be the face-to-face antagonist, by which to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries…. I am not speaking here of right reason, but of reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen man…
“Supposing the command of God to be, that the Church should be that antagonist [and] considering the exceeding proclivity of the human mind to scepticism and infidelity, the experience of ages has shown us that the Bible does not answer a purpose for which it was never intended. It may be accidentally the means of the conversion of individuals; but a book, after all, cannot make a stand against the wild living intellect of man, and in this day it begins to testify, as regards its own structure and contents, to the power of that universal solvent [of the sceptical intellect], which is so successfully acting upon religious establishments. “Supposing then it to be the Will of the Creator to interfere in human affairs, and to make provisions for retaining in the world a knowledge of Himself, so definite and distinct as to be proof against the energy of human scepticism, in such a case—I am far from saying that there was no other way,—but there is nothing to surprise the mind, if He should think fit to introduce a power into the world, invested with the prerogative of infallibility in religious matters. Such a provision would be a direct, immediate, active, and prompt means of withstanding the difficulty; it would be an instrument suited to the need; and, when I find that this is the very claim of the Catholic Church, not only do I feel no difficulty in admitting the idea, but there is a fitness in it which recommends it to my mind. And thus I am brought to speak of the Church’s infallibility, as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought, which of course in itself is one of the greatest of our natural gifts, and to rescue it from its own suicidal excesses … “First, the initial doctrine of the infallible teacher must be an emphatic protest against the existing state of mankind. Man had rebelled against his Maker. It was this that caused the divine interposition [to begin with]: and the first act of the divinely accredited messenger must be to proclaim it. The Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest. She must have no terms with it; if she would be true to her Master, she must ban and anathematize it.” (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1900 Longmans edition, 240-246)
T H E – F I R S T – E X P L O S I O N – O F – D E N O M I N A T I O N S
Unfortunately, what Protestantism has done is to exalt and treat as something sacred the rebellious and dissenting private judgment, considering it a dogma of faith, and the consequences of this have become manifest. It does not work! The World Christian Encyclopedia (Oxford University Press, 1983) estimates that there are more than 20,000 denominations in existence, and the overwhelming majority of them – all but a handful of them – have been created in the last 500 years and are Protestant denominations. That is the fruit of the doctrine of private judgment.
We can see, from our vantage point 500 years after the Reformation, the devastating consequences of this doctrine, how it acts as a hammer to pound and shatter the churches, making them smaller and smaller as time goes by. However, the people of that time should have been able to foresee these consequences, and in fact they did. The Catholics of that period openly predicted the chaos that has now blossomed in the Christian world, and the Reformers themselves saw what would happen. The Reformers therefore took measures to mitigate this situation and slow down the number of denominations that were being created.
A – M I T I G A T I N G – F A C T O R: – T H E – I N C O N S I S T E N C Y – O F – T H E – R E F O R M E R S
They only resorted to the doctrine of private judgment because all of Christian history was against them, and so they had to find a way to set aside all of Christian history to leave only their own biblical interpretations. Immediately afterward they forbade their followers from exercising the same private judgment that they insisted should apply to themselves.
Typically, when they were starting out and were in precarious political positions, they preached the free exercise of private judgment and its corollary, tolerance of the public exercise of others’ private judgment. However, once their own positions were consolidated and they saw the chaos to which the public exercise of private judgment led, they retracted this principle and tried to dominate it. The historian Will Durant writes:
“It is instructive to observe how Luther changed his position from tolerance to dogma as his power and certainty grew. Among [the 95 Theses was the proposition] that ‘to burn heretics is against the will of the Holy Spirit.’ In the Open Letter to the Christian Nobility (1520) Luther ordained ‘every man a priest,’ with the right to interpret the Bible according to his private judgment and individual light; and he added, ‘We ought to overcome heretics with books, not with fire.’ … [But] Luther was never to grow old. Already in 1522 he was outdoing the popes in ‘popery.’ ‘I do not admit,’ he writes, ‘that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels. He who does not receive my doctrine cannot be saved’”(Durant, The Story of Civilization, volume 6 [“The Reformation”], 420-2). Thus in 1529, Luther wrote:
“No one is to be compelled to profess the faith, but no one is to be permitted to injure it. Let our adversaries state their objections and listen to our replies. If in this way they are converted, well and good; if not, let them hold their tongues and believe what they please…. To avoid trouble we should not, if possible, suffer contrary teaching in the same state. Even unbelievers should be compelled to obey the Ten Commandments, attend church, and outwardly conform” (Letter of August 26, 1529 to Jos. Metsch).
Now that Luther’s position had been secured, he could examine the anarchy caused by the principle he had used to rise to power – the public exercise of private judgment – and he was put in the same position as a modern Protestant pastor, who needs to preach private judgment to validate his own teachings, yet needs to forbid the public exercise of private judgment to block the forces of chaos and hold his group together. Durant writes:
“Luther now agreed with the Catholic Church that ‘Christians require certainty, definite dogmas, and a sure Word of God which they can trust to live and die by.’ As the Church in the first centuries of Christianity, divided and weakened by the growing multiplicity of fierce sects, had felt compelled to define its creed and expel all dissenters, so now Luther, disheartened by the variety of conflicting sects that had sprung from the seed of private judgment, changed his position step by step from tolerance to dogmatism. ‘All men now presume to criticize the Gospel,’ complained Luther; ‘almost every old doting fool or prating sophist must, forsooth, be a doctor in divinity.’ Feeling himself assailed by Catholic taunts that he had let loose an uncontrollable anarchy of creeds and morals, he concluded, with the Church, that social order requires that there be a close to all debate, some recognized authority to serve as ‘an anchor of faith.’ … Sebastian Franck thought there was more freedom of speech and belief among the Turks than in the Lutheran states, and Leo Jud, the Zwinglian, joined Carlstadt in calling Luther another pope” (ibid., 423).
Luther also wrote:
“Heretics are to be condemned unheard”
But we all know that Luther was a man of strong temperament. Surely this was the cause of his attitude and made him unique among the Reformers in his inconsistency regarding private judgment, right?
“Other reformers equaled or surpassed Luther in the persecution of heresy. Bucer of Strasbourg urged the civil authorities in Protestant states to extirpate all who professed a ‘false’ religion; such men, he said, are worse than murderers; even their wives and children and cattle should be destroyed. The comparatively gentle Melanchthon [Luther’s follower] agreed to preside over the secular inquisition that suppressed the Anabaptists in Germany with imprisonment and death. ‘Why should we pity such men more than God does?’ he asked… He suggested that the rejection of infant baptism, or of original sin, or of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, should be punished with capital penalties. He insisted on the death penalty for a sectary who held that pagans could be saved, or for another who doubted that belief in Christ as Redeemer could change a natural sinner into a just man. He applauded … the execution of Servetus at the stake. He asked the state to compel all the people to attend Protestant religious services regularly. He demanded the suppression of all books that opposed or obstructed Lutheran teachings; so the writings of Zwingli and his followers were formally placed on the index of forbidden books at Wittenberg” (ibid., 423-4).
Yes, but we are talking about the Lutheran stream of the Reformation. Surely the detached and intellectual Calvinists were better.
“The new clergy… under Calvin became more powerful than any priesthood that had existed since ancient Israel. The royal law of a Christian state, said Calvin, must be the Bible; the clergy are the interpreters of that law; civil governments are subject to that law, and must enforce it as interpreted…
“No one was to be excused from Protestant religious services on the plea of holding a different or private creed; Calvin was as thorough as any pope in rejecting individualism of belief; this great legislator of Protestantism completely repudiated that principle of private judgment with which the new religion had begun. He had seen the fragmentation of the Reformation into hundreds of sects, and foresaw more; in Geneva he was resolved to have none. There a body of learned clergymen formulated an authoritative creed; those Genevans who could not accept it would have to seek another habitat. Persistent absence from Protestant services, or continued rejection of the Eucharist, was a punishable offense. Heresy again constituted an insult to God and a treason to the state, and was punishable with death… Between 1542 and 1564, fifty-eight persons were executed [in the city of Geneva] [including the famous physician Michael Servetus, whose execution at the stake was ordered by Calvin himself], seventy-six others were banished, for violating the new code. Here, as everywhere, witchcraft was a capital crime; in one year, under the advice of Calvin’s Consistory, fourteen alleged witches were sent to the stake on the charge that they had persuaded Satan to afflict Geneva with the plague” (ibid., 472-3)
Thus the Reformers were no more consistent in their application of Sola Scriptura than the modern pastors. The leader, the head, gets to use his private judgment in an unrestricted way – in fact he has a more unrestricted private judgment than that of the Catholic Magisterium, which is limited by previous doctrinal teachings – but no one else does. In this way, in a certain area where a Reformer had religious control through an alliance with the state, only the beliefs of that Reformer were permitted. In areas controlled by the Lutherans, people were not allowed to teach doctrines contrary to Lutheranism. In Geneva, which was controlled by the Calvinists, it was a civil crime punishable by banishment to be in public disagreement with Calvin. When the Anabaptists took control of the city of Munster, all the residents were forced to submit to being re-baptized at the hands of the Anabaptists, and whoever opposed it was expelled from the city in the middle of the German winter. And in England it was required by law to attend the Church of England or pay fines if they did not, not to mention, of course, the hundreds of Catholic martyrs whom the Protestant rulers executed in England, Wales, and Ireland.
The Reformers not only applied these measures to the Catholics from whom they had separated, but they also applied them among themselves, as the histories of the “Non-conformist” religious movements in England show us. These eventually became the Congregationalists, the Plymouth Brethren, Baptists, and Puritans. Let us recall how the Puritan Pilgrims fled from England to the U.S. because of religious persecution. The Catholics were not persecuting anyone in England at that time; they were the ones most persecuted in England. The Puritans came to America to flee Protestant religious persecution. And the Puritans only found themselves forced to do this after their plans to take political-religious control in England were frustrated.
In his work on ecclesiastical political organization, the English doctor of divinity Richard Hooker produced a remarkably perceptive portrait of the Puritan movement and its relation to private judgment, which is summarized here by the political historian Eric Voegelin:
“If a movement, like the Puritan, relies on the authority of a literary source [such as the Bible], the leaders would then have to manufacture ‘the very notions and individual opinions of men’ in such a way that the followers automatically associate the passage of Scripture and the terms with their doctrine, no matter how ill-founded that association may be, and with similar automatism they will be blind to the content of the Scripture that is incompatible with their doctrine. Then follows the decisive step in consolidating … ‘the persuasion of credulous men, capable of such pleasing errors, that it is the special illumination of the Holy Spirit, whereby they discern those things in the word which others reading yet discern them not.’ They will qualify themselves as the elect; and this qualification produces ‘high terms of separation between them and the rest of the world’; so that, as a consequence, mankind will be divided into ‘brethren’ and ‘worldlings’…
“Once a social environment of this type is organized, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to break it up through persuasion. ‘If any man of contrary opinion open his mouth to persuade them, they close up their ears, his reasons they weigh not, all is answered with rehearsal of the words of John: ‘We are of God; he that knoweth God heareth us’: as for the rest, ye are of the world: for this world’s pomp and vanity it is that ye speak, and the world, whose ye are, heareth you.’ They are impervious to argument and have their answers well drilled in. Suggest to them that they are unable to judge such a matter, and they will answer you, ‘God hath chosen the simple.’ Convince them plainly that what they are saying is nonsense, and you will hear ‘The very Apostle of Christ was reproached as mad.’ Try to give them the mildest warning of discipline, and they will rail about ‘the cruelty of blood-thirsty men’ and make themselves the victims of being ‘innocently persecuted for the truth.’ In short: their attitude is psychologically iron-clad and is unreachable by argument” (Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics [Chicago: University of Chicago, 1952], 135-137, citing Richard Hooker, Works, ed. Keble (7th ed.; Oxford, 1888) I:145-155).
Voegelin also notes the measures that this mindset must take to protect its interpretations:
“In order to make their biblical camouflage effective, the selections of Scripture, as well as the interpretations given to them, have to be standardized. Real freedom of interpretation of Scripture for everyone according to their preferences and degree of education would have resulted in a chaotic condition such as characterized the early days of the Reformation; moreover, if one interpretation were admitted to be as good as any other, there would be no argument against the tradition of the Church, which, after all, was based on an interpretation of Scripture, too. Out of this dilemma between chaos and tradition emerged the first device, that is, the systematic formulation of new doctrine in terms of Scripture, as provided by Calvin’s Institutes. A work of this kind would serve the double purpose of a guide to the correct reading of Scripture and of an authentic formulation of the truth that would make it unnecessary to resort to earlier literature… The man who can write such a [work], the man who can break with the intellectual tradition of mankind because he believes in the faith that a new truth and a new world begin with him, must be in a peculiar pneumopathological state. Hooker, who was supremely conscious of tradition, had a fine sensitivity for this unexpected development of thought. In his careful, subdued characterization of Calvin he begins with the sober statement: ‘His bringing up was in the study of the civil law’; then he says with some malice: ‘Divine knowledge he gathered, not by hearing or reading so much as by teaching others’; and he concludes with the devastating sentence: ‘For, though thousands were debtors to him, as touching knowledge in that kind; yet he [was debtor] to none but only to God, the author of that most blessed fountain, the Book of Life, and of the admirable dexterity of wit’ (Voegelin, 138-9, citing Hooker, 127ff).
“The second device for preventing embarrassing criticism is a necessary supplement to the first. … From contemporary experience with totalitarian movements it is well known that the [first] device is by no means foolproof, because one can recognize it [in] the voluntary censorship of the adherent; the faithful member of the movement will not touch literature that is apt to argue against, or show disrespect for, his cherished beliefs. Nevertheless, the number of the faithful may be small, and expansion and political success will be seriously hampered if the truth of the … movement is permanently exposed to the effective criticism of various groups. This disability can be reduced, and practically eliminated, by putting a taboo on the instruments of criticism; a person who uses the tabooed instruments will be socially boycotted and, if possible, exposed to political defamation. The taboo on the instruments of criticism was used, indeed, with stupendous effectiveness by [these] movements when they reached a certain political success. Concretely, at the birth of the Reformation, the taboo had to fall on classic philosophy and scholastic theology; and, since under these two heads came the greater and certainly the decisive part of Western culture, this culture was ruined to the extent to which the taboo became effective. In fact, the destruction was so thorough that Western society has never recovered from the blow” (Voegelin, 140-141).
Thus the Reformers were very aware that the universal solvent of private judgment could not be allowed out of the bottle, no matter how much they publicly preached that it was the right of every Christian to wield this absolute right. All that “Here I stand, the Word of God compels me, I can do no other” (Martin Luther) has to be interpreted more narrowly. “I cannot do them differently” really means “I cannot do it differently.” It did not mean that you could do something different if the word of God so compelled you. You had to do what I say, because I – the leader – was the one whom the Word of God has compelled, and so the whole era of Protestant religious laws of the Reformation, and the era of competing Protestant Magisteria, came and went.
T H E – S E C O N D – E X P L O S I O N – O F – D E N O M I N A T I O N S
Eventually, under the influence of non-denominational democracy as it was popularized by the United States experiment, the era of Protestant religious laws came to an end in the developed world, whether partially or totally, but this only intensified the competition and contest of the Protestant Magisteria. Now that the local Protestant church could not compel membership by force of law, the universal solvent of private judgment was free to be released again, and so all the established denominations disintegrated into smaller factions. The United States Civil War was a great boost in this regard, since it divided the denominations along Northern and Southern lines, which is why the Southern Baptists exist today, for example.
At the same time an immense array of totally new groups suddenly found themselves free to go “shopping.”
Have you ever wondered why the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Theosophists, the Spiritualists, the Christian Scientists, and the Seventh-day Adventists all started in the nineteenth century and in the U.S.? It was not because the people of the nineteenth century were crazier than those of other times; it was because the crazies and the charlatans now had the freedom to gather followers in the U.S.
These groups are simply survivors of an immense array of new movements that began back then, all of them splinters of Protestantism, where the doctrine of private judgment was preached as one of its supreme doctrines (the other being Sola Fide or “Faith Alone”).
For as long as the Protestants could keep the exercise of private judgment forbidden by law, while at the same time preaching it and “encouraging” it in their pulpits, they were able to keep things under control. But when there came a group of political revolutionaries idealistic enough to exalt and enthrone the principle of private judgment in the United States Constitution, who then had enough integrity to follow and fulfill this promise (something contrary to their convenience), Pandora’s box was opened, the cat was out of the bag, and now there was nothing that could stop the avalanche of new denominations.
Thus the vast majority of the new denominations that we have today are not only from the era of the Protestant Reformation, but from the time of the American Revolution, which exported its ideals to the whole world, even to countries governed by common law instead of constitutions.
A – M I T I G A T I N G – F A C T O R: – T H E – I N C O N S I S T E N C Y – O F – T H E – P A S T O R S
However, there is a mitigating factor that prevents there being an even faster explosion of competing points of view, which would cause the denominational structure to disintegrate totally. This mitigating factor, of which we have spoken previously, is the inconsistency of the local Protestant pastors regarding permitting the public exercise of private judgment.
They keep the exercise of private judgment for themselves, but since they forbid the public exercise in their congregations, they manage to keep the expression of opposing points of view under control, except for the occasional dissenter who provokes a “church split” or division of the church. If the public expression of alternative theologies by any or all of the members of the congregation were permitted, the group would dissolve totally into competing factions, instead of merely being periodically divided, with time to regroup and grow again after each division.
If every member of every Protestant congregation were allowed to express his theological speculations in public, with equal opportunity as the pastor, then the denominational structure would totally disintegrate in a short time and the different Protestant Magisteria would find themselves stripped of their flocks, lacking bodies of the faithful to anchor against the winds of competing doctrinal assertions, as the New Testament says the Magisterium should do.
In this way, it is the inconsistency of Protestant pastors in permitting the public expression of private judgment for themselves, while forbidding it to others, that allows the Protestant denominational system to maintain the structure that remains to it. The Protestant pastors who live today, during the second explosion of denominations, realize, although not in a fully elaborated way, that it is their inconsistency that allows the group to maintain its identity and to avoid the consequent total chaos.
In the same way, the Reformers who lived during the first explosion of denominations realized, in a more elaborated way, that it was their inconsistency that allowed their nations to retain their religious identities and to avoid the second explosion of denominations. When the national laws that maintained certain individual denominations were abolished and private judgment was allowed to be expressed not at a national level but preferably at a local level, then came the second explosion of denominations.
T H E – F I R S T – R U L E – F O R – T H E – I N T E R P R E T A T I O N – O F – T H E – B I B L E
Nevertheless, the fact that the doctrine of private judgment would result in chaos was perceived long before the Protestant Reformers. It was, in fact, perceived in the time of the apostles, when there was also an explosion of heresies.
The word “heresy” (Greek, hairesis) means “private opinion,” “preference,” or “what one has chosen as one’s own” and comes from the verb haireomai, which means “to take for oneself” or “to choose for oneself.” In the first century it already had a negative connotation of going one’s own way, in rebellion against the established teachings (it is used in Acts 24:14, where it is translated as “sect” in some translations of the Bible).
In the Christian context, a heresy – a Christian heresy – arises when a person professing to be a Christian has insisted on exercising private judgment in an absolute way and has preferred his own interpretation over the established teachings of the Church. That is the meaning of this term in Christian history, but this connection between private interpretation and heresy was correctly understood by the writers of the New Testament, as they struggled to establish a consistent set of teachings in a community of new believers who were not fully established in the faith and who often arrived at erroneous personal interpretations (the correction of these views was one of the key reasons why the epistles of the New Testament were written).
Therefore, it does not surprise us when we read the New Testament and find the principle of private interpretation connected to heresy and condemned. Writing about the value of the Word of God, St. Peter tells us:
“You do well to attend [to the prophetical word], as to a light that shineth in a dark place, … understanding this first, that no prophecy of scripture is made by private interpretation. For prophecy came not by the will of man at any time: but the holy men of God spoke, inspired by the Holy Ghost. But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there shall be among you lying teachers, who shall bring in sects of perdition [taking into account the ancient and correct meaning of the word ‘heresy’], and deny the Lord who bought them: bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their riotousnesses, through whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.” (2 Peter 1:19b-2:2)
Peter’s logic is clear: For the salvation of our souls we must pay attention to the word of God, but in doing this the first thing we must keep in mind is that no expression of the scriptures is a matter of private interpretation. Why? Because scripture did not originate from the private views of some individual but from the Holy Spirit. And we must be warned that not all who claim to speak for the Holy Spirit tell the truth. In the era of the Old Testament there were false prophets who deceived the people, and Peter tells us that, in the same way, in the era of the New Testament there will be false teachers who will circulate among the people and “secretly bring in destructive heresies.” Why secretly? Because these are wrapped in a robe of scripture verses, read according to the personal interpretation of the false teacher. It is the private interpretation of the false teacher that twists the scriptures and results in destructive heresies, but it is nonetheless a secret heresy, not open, because the heretic has them wrapped in a blanket of biblical verses.
Peter thus warns us that we must keep away from private interpretations. Instead, we must seek the public interpretation that Christ deposited in his Church. Only in this way can we avoid the errors of false teachers who circulate through the Christian community.
Peter is so concerned with this that he makes it the first rule of biblical interpretation, telling us that we must pay attention to the word of God, but that in doing this we must first know that no pronouncement of Scripture is to be exposed to private interpretation. The rejection of the private interpretations of individuals, as opposed to the teachers whom Christ chose for his church, is thus the first rule of biblical hermeneutics. We must lean on the Magisterium of Christ and not on our own judgments, because that is where the road to heresy lies, Peter tells us.
And Peter warns us of a time when the situation is going to be very bad in this regard, telling us that eventually “many shall follow their riotousnesses, through whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.” In these days when there are more than 20,000 Christian denominations and when the division in the Christian community has become an object of contempt and mockery among unbelievers (“So you are a Christian… Of which franchise?”), it can be safely said that the day of which Peter prophesied has come.
However, there are people who still cling to private interpretations, and some have even dared to eradicate this pronouncement of Peter from the Scriptures. The force of this pronouncement is so strong that some Protestant translations, such as the English NIV (New International Version), have tried to mask it by deviating from the literal translation of the text and inserting words into the verse which do not appear in the Greek.
Perhaps the most literal translation of the Greek is that we must pay attention to the prophetic word, “knowing this first, that the prophecies of Scripture are not of one’s own interpretation.” An acceptable translation would be “above all, you must understand that no prophecy is of one’s own interpretation,” but the Protestant translators of the NIV cannot deal with this, so they replace “one’s own” with “the prophet’s,” resulting in the “translation”: “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation.”
This, simply, is not what the Greek text says. The Greek says “one’s own” (idias) not “the prophet’s” (tou prophetou). By committing this error in translation, the NIV provides us with a wonderful illustration of how private interpretation can corrupt a biblical text. Here the translators have not only shown their willingness to impose a private interpretation of a text but they impose their private interpretation within the text, deviating from what the text says literally, and thus they bring a destructive heresy in the most secret form of all – where the heresy insinuates itself into the words of the translation itself, and so the faithful who read the passage do not have the opportunity to even compare the private interpretation with the true words of Scripture, because here the private interpretation has replaced the true words of the verse.
This is, in fact, a regular custom with paraphrase translations like the NIV, which also show their anti-Catholic bias by suppressing the word “tradition” (Greek paradosis) in passages such as 1 Corinthians 11:2, 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and 3:6, where it is used as traditions of God, in the good sense, as opposed to other places where the same word appears (i.e., paradosis), but referring to traditions of men (e.g. Matthew 15:2-6), in the negative sense. The Protestant translators of the NIV (and others) always want the word “tradition” to be used in the negative sense, and so in those verses they use the word “teaching” instead of “tradition.”
Thus once again they insert their private interpretation into the very words of the biblical text and, functioning in a magisterial capacity, deny the reader the possibility of comparing their interpretation of the text with what the text actually says.
If they were a Magisterium authorized by God to teach the people, this would not be a matter of concern, but the only authority the translators have is the supposed right to private judgment and their knowledge of Greek. This latter is also a force that inevitably leads to a pseudo-magisterial action on the part of some Christians, because no matter what is done, the great majority of Christians are simply never going to be fluent, much less experts, in the Greek of the New Testament, which means that the original text is going to be forever beyond their reach and will be pondered only by the translators.
This is not irrelevant. Sometimes evangelicals try to minimize the role of translation by saying that it does not affect any essential teaching of the Bible, but this is manifestly false, as the example we have cited shows, because this concerns the very rule of biblical interpretation – which is the first thing we must keep in mind when we read the prophetic word of God. What are the consequences of committing an error in this area? Peter tells us this a little later in this same epistle,
“…our most dear brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, hath written to you: as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction. You therefore, brethren, knowing these things before, take heed, lest being led aside by the error of the unwise, you fall from your own steadfastness.” (2 Peter 3:15b-17).
The price of error in how to read the Bible is one’s own destruction, and it is easy for the unlearned and unstable to do this with the Scriptures, because there are “things in them hard to be understood.” So we must once again beware of the false teachers, the unwise who come to us with unauthorized interpretations, and who can move us from our own steadfastness in the true teachings of Christ. The need for a Magisterium is the key.
At best, only a class of magisterial Christians can even attempt to apply the rule of private judgment and the theory of “the Bible alone” of which it is a part. But for the average Christian, who is not a member of the magisterial class of his denomination, nor one of the pastors or presbyters or biblical translators, the source of authoritative Christian teaching would have to be the Bible as interpreted by his Magisterium.
This is the way it is in all Protestant churches, just as it is in the case of the Catholic Church. The difference is that the Catholic Church is honest about the role of the Magisterium and does not try to conceal it by preaching the absolute right (and the corresponding enormous responsibility) of the individual Christian to be his own theologian and completely evaluate all matters for himself.
The fact that all the Protestant denominations have had, out of necessity, to reinvent the Catholic model in one way or another, wrapping it in a rhetoric which masks its true nature, shows that the doctrine of private judgment simply does not work. It cannot work even in theory given the culture and inclinations of the average Christian and the fact that denominations and pastors actively work to prohibit its absolute exercise; it has been shown that it did not work in history, by the explosion of denominations and sects when its implementation was attempted, and it is condemned in the very pages of the Scriptures. But since the teaching of an absolute right to private judgment is an essential component of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura (because if one looks to the Magisterium then one is not looking at the Scriptures alone), that means that the doctrine of Sola Scriptura itself does not work.
So let us rid ourselves of the false promise of Christianity that follows the statute “Only me and my Bible,” let us remove the crushing burden of telling every individual Christian, no matter how poor, unlearned, and illiterate, that he must be his own theologian and that his soul depends on this balance, let us remove the hypocrisy that Protestant pastors are forced to follow because of this doctrine by allowing for themselves a right that they forbid to the members in their congregations, and let us be honest, along with the Catholic Church, that:
Sola Scriptura, and the absolute right to private judgment which it requires, simply is NOT the plan of God.
Author: James Akin
