A Dilemma for Protestants

Here’s an interesting dilemma for Protestants. We argue against the infallibility of the Pope on the basis that no man can perfectly hear God and infallibly declare doctrine. There’s also some confusion about the difference between infallibility on matters of doctrine and personal sinlessness but we won’t dig too much into that.

Now, at the same time, we affirm the infallibility of a book…a book written by humans that we know were not sinless, that we believe nevertheless were able to produce infallible teaching as they were guided and enabled by the Holy Spirit.

The difference in these two views is only by a matter of degrees. One accepts infallible teaching and doctrine directly from a man who occupies a specific office and believes that the Holy Spirit enables him to speak infallibly on matters of faith and practice. The other simply accepts the same thing from a variety of men in written form. And on top of that, the one that believes in the infallibility of the Pope when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and practice affirms that such teaching still must not contradict anything in the Bible.

So my question is, if you can accept by faith that imperfect men could be infallibly guided by the Holy Spirit to produce an infallible Bible, why is the notion that the Holy Spirit could infallibly guide a Pope in the same manner such a non-starter?

20,000 Popes vs. 1

One of my favorite reads in the blogosphere, Michael Spencer (aka The Internet Monk) posted this quote in a post about Catholicism:

"I would rather have 20,000 “little popes” with their Bibles, all believing they can err and be corrected by scripture, rather than one pope who cannot err or be corrected by scripture."

What I can't figure out is why this is better. How does this solve the problem? These 20,000 Protestant popes all believe they hold the correct view of Scripture already. They are mostly seeking to correct the other 19,999, not be corrected. This still leaves us with a conundrum, that thus far I'm unable to figure out, which is: whose interpretation of Scripture are we to follow?

I mean, I'm sure we all agree that Truth is knowable and that God intended for us to know what it was. So how does having 20,000 little popes help things? Perhaps a fellow Protestant could explain why this should be comforting to me.

Isn't it ironic...don'tcha think?

This won't be a terribly long entry, but I just wanted to comment on an interesting exchange I had on a message board with someone of a more Reformed background. As I'm working through all this stuff in my head, I'm engaging Catholics and Protestants in some debate over various differences in doctrine between the camps, playing a little Devil's Advocate to see if I can dig deeper than the stock apologetic responses each side tends to give.

So at one point in the discussion I ask how Reformed Guy knows that his interpretation of a particular passage is the correct one. His response was basically that the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses ask the same question and accuses me of saying that we can't know anything that Scripture says since almost every passage in the Bible has more than one interpretation. This is an obvious red herring because I'm not talking about cults that come up with novel interpretations of Scripture or completely new doctrines that can't be found in any writing of the earliest Christians. I'm talking about a passage that, for instance, Catholics take literally and Protestants interpret figuratively or vice versa. How do we know who is right?

Here's the ironic part. He goes on to criticize my appeal to early Christian writings as a typical Roman Catholic apologetic tactic then tosses out this little barb at the end:

"It is clear that the Catholic church says they do not teach or practice idolatry, but it is equally clear that they do in fact teach and practice idolatry. Of course in the post-evangelical mindset, we forget history and adopt a post-modern approach to defining what it means to be a Christian."

So help me out here: when interpreting Scripture we shouldn't appeal to the writings of the earliest Christians, many of whom were contemporaries or direct disciples of the Apostles to help us understand how to interpret difficult passages because "that's what Roman Catholics do", but at the same time our problem in not interpreting Scripture correctly and understading what it means to be a Christian stems from forgetting history? Which is it? Do I look to Christian history as a guide and context for understanding the Bible or not? Or is it that only history before 90 A.D. and after 1517 is legitimate to appeal to as a guide for interpretation?