Pete's Blog

Peter Kreeft, Catholic convert, formerly a reformed Protestant, is an apologist. He has a strong voice within the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore, Protestants might also be aware of him, since he was the scholar interviewed for the first objection that Lee Strobel deals with in his book The Case for Faith.

I was reading Dr. Kreeft's testimony of his conversion to Roman Catholicism from Protestantism today, when I came across the argument that follows:

I was impressed by the argument that "the Church wrote the Bible:" Christianity was preached by the Church before the New Testament was written—that is simply a historical fact. It is also a fact that the apostles wrote the New Testament and the Church canonized it, deciding which books were divinely inspired. I knew, from logic and common sense, that a cause can never be less than its effect. You can't give what you don't have. If the Church has no divine inspiration and no infallibility, no divine authority, then neither can the New Testament.

What Kreeft, and Catholics in general, are arguing is that it is logical to conclude that the Church must be infallible. This comes in contrast to Protestants arguing that the Bible is the only infallible authority given to man (the doctrine of Sola Scriptura which was fought for intensely in the Reformation). For easier examination of the argument, and to see where Protestants take issue with it, let me restate Kreeft's argument in a syllogism,

1. The apostles (who were part of the Church) wrote the NT and the Church canonized the infallible Bible;
   
2. A cause (i.e., the Church) is never less than the effect (i.e., the Bible);
   
3. Therefore, the Church is infallible.
   

It is with the first premise that the protestant would take issue. The apostles did scribe the Bible and express it in their own words, but the thoughts were God's. He wrote the Bible. First Peter 1:21 reads, "no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." God wrote infallible books using fallible men. But it was the Spirit who overcame their fallibility, "as they were carried along," so that the books are infallible. So the syllogism reasons that since God is the cause of the Bible, and the Bible is infallible, we infer that God is infallible. We already knew that.

I suspect that Kreeft would admit that the argument more rests on the canon than on the Church writing the Bible. He knows that God wrote the Bible. Catholics like to argue that since Protestants have no infallible authority from which to state the canon (which, up to this point, I agree with), we have no Bible at all. They insist that to have a Bible, the canon must be infallible. Protestants take issue with this, saying that we have a fallible canon of infallible books. God in no revelatory way decisively stated which books were to be in the canon. So, we must discern which books of the early Church belong there. Since man is fallible, that canon is fallible. So, applying Kreeft's argument, in observing that the Church caused the canon, which is fallible, we infer that the Church is at least fallible (which is not news).

The point is to say that you need to presuppose that the canon is infallible for the argument to work. The only reason the Catholic Church knows the canon is infallible is because on the Church's infallible authority it was stated so in 1546. It's a circular argument. Protestant ecclesiology (doctrine of the Church) is not hindered by this argument because it does not use the Protestant doctrine of the Bible.

I'm eventually going to write a post on cause and effect, but when I saw this argument, I couldn't resist commenting on it.

Labels: Long, Miscellaneous