Divine revelation as normative authority

Preface

The authority of the Magisterium has been an issue between and among Catholics and other Christians for centuries, but the discussion has fallen into complete chaos in the pontificate of Pope Francis. It seems to me that this results from a deep-seated crisis of faith resulting from the intersection of Catholicism with modernity: the more traditional are trying to assuage their fears with a mythical, triumphalistic account of the Church's identity throughout time, while the more progressive are looking for every opportunity to discard anything that would make Catholicism different from modernity. In both cases, the extremes are relying on the Magisterium to solve problems that the structure was never established or intended to solve. My goal in this article is to identify the function that the Magisterium is intended to perform and so to reduce that confusion. 

The motivation to write an extended explanation was consideration of why a particular argument, the new Eliakim typological argument for the papacy offered by Suan Sonna, seemed to have particular rhetorical force. A typological argument is based on a Biblical principle that certain Old Testament situations foreshadow a Christian fulfillment, most commonly as a sign of Christ Himself. Another very common typological example is the Ark of the Covenant, which held the words that God wrote on the tables of the Ten Commandments, foreshadowing the Blessed Virgin Mary, who bore the living Word of God in her body. In the case of Eliakim, he wore the key to the house on his shoulder as a sign of his authority, which Sonna offers as a forerunner of the bestowal of the keys of authority on Peter.

I won't weigh in on the merits of the typological argument, because I've found that how persuasive the argument turns on one's approach to typology and Scriptural interpretation generally. That's not to say that Suan's historical argument for what a first century Jew would have in mind when reading about the keys given to Peter in Matthew 16 is a bad one. On the other hand, there seems to be a legitimate argument that typological arguments are only truly persuasive when there is a genuine antitype fulfilling the type presented in Scripture, which is the case specifically for Christ, as opposed to the more general class of typological arguments in which a model is formally followed in some way but not strictly fulfilled, as with Moses and Jeremiah. (That argument, specifically based one of Suan's sources, is outlined in the early part of this video.) As a strictly theological question, the argument's success as a typological argument seems to be highly dependent on how one weighs evidence in Scriptural interpretation, which depends a great deal upon one's intuitive sense of religious authority.

Instead, what I think makes this argument so successful is that it works on the level of intuition even apart from the argument itself. Specifically, it relies on a far broader intuition, one which is implicitly denied in the context of sola Scriptura -- that some person is given responsibility to govern anything important. With respect to government in the political sense, the principle is so intuitive that one takes it for granted as obvious. In fact, it is so obvious that we have to seriously question what normative authority even means without it. Even apart from the typological argument, the fact that Scripture uses this completely mundane example of a steward being placed in charge of a household deeply undermines the authority principle of sola Scriptura. The work this assumption does, at an unconscious level, may even be more powerful as an apologetic against Protestants than the direct typological argument. People have an expectation here that goes beyond what would be established by the typological argument. That is the effect that I want to bring out more explicitly.

Table of Contents

Preface

I. What is normative authority?

II. Normative authority and divine revelation

III. Faith as a normative commitment

IV. Modernism and skepticism of normative authority

V. Adjudicating religious claims of divine authority

VI. Normative authority and the Old Testament

VII. Infallibility in the context of divine revelation

VIII. Normative authority and Magisterial error

IX. The substance of divine commands

X. The subject matter of divine commands

XI. Hard cases involving the distinction between simple belief and commanded belief

XII. The "infallibility" of Scripture

XIII. Modern scientific methodology in theology

XIV. The anti-modernist problem

XV. Anti-modernism and radical traditionalism

XVI. Anglo-Catholic historicism and fundamentalism

Conclusion

I.What is normative authority?

The simplest form of normative authority is command -- X is commanding me to do Y. I gave the straightforward example of a political government; essentially every citizen understands that there is a law (Y) and that one is supposed to follow it. One also realizes that there is a government (X) -- authority figures -- with authority to issue law in some respect, and there is some ultimate reason (U) for this authority. Among the legitimate reasons we might consider are consent of the governed or (at least historically) the divine appointment of monarchs; among the illegitimate are dictatorial force, terror, or criminal organization. But at the end of the day, to the extent one concedes the legitimate authority of X to command, that is what gives the Y its moral force. Indeed, such normative authority, the authority of command, is the only true meaning of authority. We refer to other things as "authorities," such as texts, but that is a metaphorical use of the term, since they have no power to command. Properly speaking, a law Y is only a normative authority when serving its correlative function with government X established by authority U. 

What is less apparent is that U simply is not functioning as a normative authority without an X commanding Y. We can take the completely mundane example of the Articles of Confederation. If you read the Articles of Confederation, they say that they are the law for the United States of America, including each of the thirteen original states. But they clearly aren't the law, because the United States of America that includes those same thirteen states has a government, and the law for that federal government is the Constitution. This illustrates that the law has no capability to establish its authority by its own text without the claim of authority being viciously circular; it devolves to the claim that I am being commanded being proved by the assertion that I am being commanded, as opposed to any evidence that I am being commanded. Unless a law and government are both established by the same ultimate authority, the authority simply has not provided a normative command at all in any objective sense. There must be a law testifying to the existence of government and a government testifying to the existence of law, both under a common authority.

The reason that this is the case is that the law cannot function as a command otherwise. If there is no government with authority to execute the law, then the law is not a command but merely advice. From a normative perspective, it is treated like suggestions, proverbs, admonitions, or other forms of general guidance. As with the case of the Articles of Confederation, one might learn something from the document, but it lacks the force of law. In the context of Scripture, this interpretation would characterize the entire body of Scripture as wisdom literature and mundane history, which is precisely how liberal Christianity views Scripture. The characteristic feature of advice is that one may take it or leave it based on one's individual experience, meaning that the applicability of advice is left to private judgment as opposed to being bound to the public judgment of the law. What separates liberal Christianity from orthodox Christianity is that orthodox Christians view Scripture as a law, not a suggestion. In the context of divine revelation, public revelation requires public judgment.

This does not mean that all Christians coherently view Scripture as a law. With respect to normative authority, law (rules) and government (authority figures) are like the chassis and the engine of a car. They function in different ways, but a chassis without an engine cannot perform its function in the car, and an engine without a chassis likewise goes nowhere. Sola Scriptura as proclaimed by Protestants is the equivalent of saying that the engine is so powerful that it can work without the chassis -- a nonsensical claim. No engine, however good it may be, can serve a function it cannot possibly have been designed to do. Again, this principle is so simple that even young children can take it for granted. Rules come with authority figures; that principle is ingrained in every aspect of life starting with living in a family. There is no commandment without someone commanding. That applies to religion as much as anything else.

But if God is the ultimate authority, can't He just take out the middle man? Certainly, He is capable of doing that. God could directly and verbally communicate with you in your language to direct you exactly what to do. But while we might accept some sense of divine guidance, I don't believe that the vast majority of human beings have had a veridical experience like that, and even those who may have, have likely done so in a very limited sense. In a recent debate, Gavin Ortlund suggested that one need not be infallible to recognize the infallibility of the message from the burning bush, and I agree that one can discern miracles through ordinary reason. I would also wager than neither Dr. Ortlund nor I have ever had a burning bush tell us the canon of Scripture, meaning that his assertion concerning the authority of Scripture is completely unsupported by that justification. So often when people say "God is commanding me to do Y," they do not actually mean it in the definitive sense of normative authority. They mean something else, a much vaguer sense of God "telling them what to do," and what they mean is not reasonably adequate to support monotheistic religious devotion, a subset of religious devotion generally.

II. Normative authority and divine revelation

The concept of monotheistic religious devotion rests on the idea of divine revelation, which is the assertion that (1) there is one personal God (the One God) who created the universe and (2) that the One God has taken action to reveal Himself to us. This is the motive for the resulting religious devotion to God. The connection with normative authority is that (2) is vastly more likely to be done by divine command than by direct divine communication. This is because the matter of divine revelation is likely to include things that are either difficult or impossible to know in the absence of divine revelation, consistent with Scripture's description as a "conviction of things not seen" (Hebr. 11:1). It will, of course, likely also include things that are knowable with more or less difficulty, but that is incidental. This is why we do not have a presumption that Scripture, for example, is intended to be a science textbook. There is also no reason for God to "hide the ball" in any act of divine revelation, so we would assume that (2) is primarily to convey content about God's relationship to us that would not be known or knowable otherwise. If God reveals Himself, it should be apparent.

The idea of faith encompasses this notion that we are asked by God to believe what we are incapable of knowing. That means that the act of faith falls under the rubric of normative authority, in that it takes the form "God is commanding me to believe X." But this needs to be the strict sense of "God is commanding me to believe X," that is, the sense of normative authority as opposed to the more vague notions of "God is directing me to believe X" that I mentioned before. That normative authority would then be a proper basis for religious devotion, viz., that devout actions are those that God has commanded to do in this way. And in the monotheistic religions, this would not be just any being that might be considered "divine" in some sense, but the singular Creator of everything that exists with all of the characteristics entailed by that description.

It is apparent, then, why the vague sense of "God is telling me X" or "God is communicating X to me" is thoroughly inadequate. Telling, or communication generally, turns on common experience, and the entire point of divine revelation is that it pertains to matters that we have no way of apprehending through direct experience. That is why miracles, which are events that are logically possible but extraordinarily unlikely to be experienced under ordinary circumstances, are used as signs of divine intervention. But for that same reason, the miracle is necessarily inchoate in terms of epistemic content; it is a miracle precisely because it defies explanation in terms of what we know in our experience. (That does not mean it is physically inexplicable, only that the event is so wildly improbable of a physical interaction that the coincidence is practically impossible in ordinary experience, like a broken egg reassembling itself due to random quantum fluctuations.)

The reason that people have this vague sense of God telling them things like a trusted friend is because it is very difficult to avoid anthropomorphizing God. Our friends routinely tell us things that we don't know, and we often trust what they say. We listen to experts about topics on which we have not done primary research, and indeed, most of our knowledge about everything we know comes secondhand. But what we don't realize is that this is just another ordinary example of using our knowledge and experience to draw conclusions, evaluate credibility, ascertain probabilities, and the like. But God according to divinity isn't a man. Divine communication of specific messages is even rarer than miracles as a whole, and based on our ordinary experience, God's sending specific messages to people is vastly more likely to be a sign of insanity than a veridical experience.

That is why an anthropomorphic account of divine revelation by analogy to trust in one's fellow human beings, which I will call the intellectual model of divine revelation, is thoroughly inadequate. The argument is "if I can trust my fellow human beings, then all the more can I trust the Creator of all things, Who is Truth itself." But the mode of our trust for human beings is built heavily on our own experience with other human beings, and the divine mode of communication is far outside of our own experience, covering a subject matter that in some cases goes beyond our possible experience. Hearsay in this context, even from a trusted source, would be difficult or impossible to judge reliably; it would be blind faith. One might argue that Scripture tells us to view God as Father, God the Son as our brother, and God the Holy Spirit as an internal witness, so that we ought to relate to Him as a human friend or family member (a conclusion that would not follow in any case), but even that relies on a viciously circular appeal to the normative authority of Scripture. In other words, the assertion that we would trust God in the manner of trusting other men and that He would communicate to us anthropomorphically in the manner that our friends might tell us something is itself inadequately grounded. As I noted previously, it would devolve to God as an adviser with each person determining the meaning of that advice, which is difficult to reconcile with the concept of divinely revealed truth.

With respect to that idea of divinely revealed truth, the intellectual model of divine revelation creates a massive problem in terms of religious claims generally. In the first place, propositions are either true or false; there are no degrees of truth in that sense. The need to devolve onto trust in authorities is itself an imperfection that gives rise to uncertainty, which in turn produces the doubt that Cartesian certainty is supposed to solve. But once we start going down the road of intellectual certainty through our ordinary ways of acquiring knowledge, it's thoroughly impractical to think that almost anyone can comprehensively survey even the secondary literature, much less the primary literature, in even one topic in one particular subset of one discipline concerning religious topics. Notably, the idea that there could be any sort of collective determinations by the church becomes impossible. To think that this could even be a possible way of adjudicating religious claims is frankly preposterous; this sort of "Magisterium of academia" is as likely to resolve religious claims as it is to resolve any other subject of academic discussion. There is rarely enough evidence in any of these fields to go beyond tentative theories, and it is entirely possible for the consensus to change drastically based on new work or new discoveries in the field, so we do not have adequate basis for trust in a large number of conclusions, leaving aside the fact that scholarship continues to develop in all of these areas. Using the model of trust that we give to epistemic "authorities," which are only authorities in the metaphorical sense and not the proper one, is hopelessly provisional in this context, despite having the question of God as a central concern of human existence. This intellectual model of divine revelation can never be effective at clearly proclaiming what God wishes to reveal; indeed, it is so ineffective that we can reasonably conclude that God simply would have no reason to do this. By contrast, identifying the government and being obedient to the commands of the government is something that one can reasonably do in principle even with extremely limited knowledge.

III. Faith as a normative commitment

Thus, there is perfectly natural epistemic model that fits with our experience: normative authority. That is, if God is commanding belief in the ordinary way that sovereign authorities direct all sorts of other activities, then all of the problems associated with trying to map divine revelation to what God is "telling" us are removed. In a normative model, we don't need to have a comprehensive knowledge of what the law and government are commanding us to do in order to obey them. Likewise, if the model of divine revelation is normative rather than communicative, we don't need to have a comprehensive knowledge of the content of divine revelation in order to revere and obey it as revelation. It is extraordinarily unlikely, for example, that any one person is aware of every single law or regulation that governs various activities in a particular state, but one needs only be aware that there is a government and that there are laws in order to reasonably follow one's duty as a citizen.

This conforms well to human nature; the human being, as a rational animal, is also a social animal. Law and government come naturally to us as social animals. There can, of course, be wrongs in our social governance, just as there can be wrongs in our personal conduct. But the structure itself comes naturally to us. The idea is that God's normative command condescends to what is natural to us, in a way that other forms of communication, God "telling" us X in a general way, would be unsuitable due to the vast ontological gap between God's thoughts and ours. Of course, God could condescend to communicate verbally to every single human being in a clear and understandable way in native language, but the exercise of normative authority is far better suited to the nature of humanity as social animals that He created. By contrast, the Magisterium of academia is clearly not suited to divine revelation.

In addition, normative authority is more fitting to the use of miracles as a sign of divine power and intervention. Because miracles are necessarily beyond understanding and experience in certain ways, the significance of a miracle as a communicative act is always going to be limited except as an indicator of God's presence. If we have a recounting of someone's prophetic experience, how would we know whether we have correctly understood when there is an account of God communicating? (Was this audible? an internal sense that words in one's mind came from God? a direct infusion of knowledge into one's mind? temporary possession of the spirit to write words? Were all of these experiences identical?) But if it is simply a sign that this person has a certain office in the context of a government that God has established, a mark of office, then the normative significance of the words that person delivers would then fit into the context of the overall law and government that God has established by His miraculous intervention.

In this situation, faith acts as a rule, a canon, a law of belief. This is why Scripture is rightly called a canon; that term refers to the correlative function Scripture serves with government (the Magisterium). As with any normative authority, what the normative authority commands cannot be contrary to reason, which would in turn be contrary to human nature. But if it were counterfactually to be the case that it did, then that would show that the person was wrong about the normative authority; it would not rebut the expectation that normative authority would be the means of divine revelation. In other words, faith doesn't compete with reason, nor does it substitute for reason, but it is a distinct cognitive function governed by normative authority.

The idea of faith in terms of submission to normative authority is compatible with what I consider to be the better translation of the New Testament term pistis, which is not "faith" but "allegiance." I have written previously about understanding justification as legal citizenship in the Kingdom of God, and there is a subsequent work by the Protestant scholar Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone, that is entirely compatible with this idea of Christian faith as submission to the authority of Jesus as King. It is fitting that the mode of divine revelation would be suitable to producing this saving disposition in the mystical Body of Christ. Where I disagree with Bates herein is that I have no idea how it is even possible for the ultimate authority -- Christ the King -- to act as a normative authority without a government.

Similarly, viewing faith as a normative commitment makes more sense of levels of authority. If divine revelation were simply a matter of conveying true information, then levels of authority make no sense, since propositions are either true or false under the law of non-contradiction. There is no such thing as half a principle. Even those who accept an intellectual model of divine revelation may nonetheless inconsistently assert such levels of authority, which would include the Protestant assertion that Scripture serves as the norma normans non normata, the norm that norms but is not normed, and the only infallible regula fidei, the rule of faith. In the intellectual model, such assertions are incoherent, since even if Scripture only asserts what is true, any true propositions conveyed by Scripture are no more or less true than those conveyed by any other written account -- a calculus textbook, a news report, or a birth certificate. On the other hand, as a rule of belief in the context of a normative authority, the concept of levels of authority makes sense, just as it would in mundane law. For example, we can distinguish between the holding and obiter dicta in judicial decisions, between statutory and common law, between law and administrative regulations, between advisory opinions and binding administrative decisions, and many other degrees of relative formal authority, which determine for the normative authority which authoritative principle applies in particular cases. So distinctions such as these, which are completely natural if divine revelation is viewed as normative authority with formal rules to resolve the application of principles, make no sense at all when divine revelation is viewed as a communication from a fellow human being. This hierarchy also makes sense when we speak of relative commitments, such as our allegiance to God having higher priority than our allegiance to earthly sovereigns. (Note that such structures of authority are exponentially more complex than, for example, Boolean logic based solely on whether propositions are true or false.)

Particularly in the Christian context, the concept of normative authority also makes more sense of the deposit of faith, what is left behind following the formal closure of public revelation. If we viewed the deposit of faith as epistemic content, then the content of that revelation must have been absolutely clear and unambiguous in order for it to be closed; that is, it means that there can be no further communication of information and, critically, no new epistemic authorities. It makes no sense to say that we have discovered or developed the content of divine revelation in the intellectual model at all, since the message from God has been epistemically closed by definition. But if we view faith as lawlike, then it is perfectly normal to say that there is a body of rules, normative guiding principles, that were permanently established by divine authority at the founding of the Kingdom of God, complete with the correlative structures of government X (the Magisterium) and law Y (Scripture and Tradition). This would be analogous to the founding of a secular country. There can be developments consistent with the application of those principles that do not essentially change that normative authority. A normative authority can develop by application to concrete scenarios that were not contemplated before; the epistemic content of a message, which is fixed when it is sent, cannot.

It also establishes continuity of authority as a fundamental sign that corruption has not taken place, so that the normative authority remains what it was since it was established by God through its miraculous institution. In particular, in order to establish a subsequent governmental authority, there would also have to be a subsequent divine intervention to establish a new normative authority. In that respect, government serves a uniquely synchronic function in the diachronic existence of the authority by speaking to the existence of that authority in the present moment. It is the government that provides the reason for saying that the normative authority continues to exist today, just as the existence of a government in continuity supports the existence of any polity's perduring the present.

Along those lines, the normative authority model of divine revelation also provides a coherent account of Christian history and specifically the development of doctrine. In the first place, there have been successive divine interventions to establish the divine authority of Israel and then the Catholic Church by the once-for-all event of the Incarnation. Within the normative authority thereby established, epistemic concerns about the content of the normative principles and even the nature of the authority itself are not existential crises in terms of continuity. The principles themselves are designed to be adapted to different circumstances. Just as the United States government survived the Civil War in continuity with its founding, so the Catholic Church, for example, survived the Great Western Schism through the episcopate. And the Catholic Church has likewise survived numerous similar conflicts -- Gnosticism, Arianism, Nestorianism, Monotheletism, and the Reformation -- to remain in continuity of authority with the original law and government.

This establishes the compatibility of faith as an intellectual habit with our normal rational processes. Just as our reason tells us that it is sensible to obey the laws and government of our communities, our reason tells us that it is sensible to obey the laws and government of God. Replacing this approach with the intellectual method of divine revelation was a result of the move to modernist epistemology. And just as conspiracy theories can engender an unhealthy skepticism concerning government (not that all such skepticism is unhealthy!), so can bad ideas concerning God or religion produce unhealthy skepticism. I turn now to how the Early Modern Age has driven this development.

IV. Modernism and skepticism of normative authority

I've traced the history of modernism in a previous post, but there are some significant points relative to religious epistemology. The term "modernism" is unfortunately used rather haphazardly in Catholic circles, so I want to offer my own definition. I mean specifically the result of Ockham's nominalist definition of reason, so that intelligibility is no longer an intrinsic property of entities of concrete entities observed by the senses (i.e., the nature), leaving the divine will itself as the only plausible explanation of existence, resulting in super-voluntarism. There are two major efforts to try to save Ockham's account of reason: the Cartesian approach and the Kantian approach. The Cartesian approach accepts Ockham's doubt about reason from particulars, but then tries to locate within reason itself truths that are not subject to this doubt. After Hume took Ockham's skepticism even farther to include these basic principles of reason, Kant accepted the separation between the concrete particulars (phenomena) and the principles of reason (noumena), but argued that there were still timeless truths known independently of the phenomenal. The common feature of all of these models is Ockham's original denial that the intellect obtains knowledge of reality from the natures of the things observed. 

In the end, Descartes and Kant agreed with Ockham in concluding that the intellect must have mental principles extrinsic to observed reality that impose meaning on what is observed for us to be able to gain knowledge from observation; they only disagreed with him as to whether there were any such principles outside of the omnipotent and mysterious will of God. This was completely at odds with the philosophia perennis that maintained that intelligibility coincided with nature. The Cartesian and Kantian solutions do not work because they cannot possibly work. At any rate, this pathological skepticism about reason, whether one bites the bullet and accepts it (as Ockham and Hume did for religion and irreligion, respectively) or substitutes a pseudo-rational understanding of knowledge (as Descartes and Kant did), cannot help but undermine this notion of normative authority as a feature of human nature. And without a robust concept of human nature, there is habitual resistance to this concept of being normatively told what to believe, especially when the mind's ability to discern truth must remain inviolate from all experience of phenomena. But while nominalists like Ockham and al-Ghazali (and Protestants) were more blatant about the fideistic assertion of their religious views, Cartesian and Kantian modernists are simply fideists by another name, taking on faith that God has implanted truths in our minds that we can use to evaluate our experience. In either case, their modernist account of reason leaves them with no alternatives but skepticism or fideism; they have no alternative to the intellectual model of divine revelation. Another way to think about this is that modernism leaves reason unable to find a mean between the intellectual vices of skepticism and gullibility.

The error of skepticism is exactly why it is characteristic of modernity that religion is treated as a matter of private taste: because it couldn't be otherwise. It is no coincidence that "heresy" is simply a word that means "choice," because the essence of religious error is that religious truth is simply a matter of personal choice. On the modern view, unless one can know something with certainty in the Cartesian sense (which is impossible in principle), it is nothing more than a personal choice about how one lives life with respect to events, which may include the witness of Jesus, a position that seems to have been endorsed more or less explicitly by Protestant theologian Dr. Steven Nemes. Where I would disagree with Dr. Nemes is that this would mean that Jesus's life would not even count as divine revelation in the first place if it were true, because divine revelation is in principle impossible in the intellectual model except for the case God literally speaking verbally to every individual in that person's own language in a manner than ensures comprehension of the subject matter. Without that, even such a "Christianity" would devolve to a matter of individual taste. This tendency of modernity is also consistent with the fact that there are increasingly atheistic practitioners of religion, even within Catholicism and Judaism. It is not a question of divine revelation at all, but of the personal choice to live one's life in a certain ritualistic way that one considers "good."

The opposite error of gullibility leads to fundamentalism in religion and concomitant conspiracy theories in history. At that point, one has not engaged one's intellect adequately in assessing whether there is sufficient evidence supporting one's conclusion. In the context of divine revelation, this would mean not having an adequate basis for submitting to the authority of the sources of divine revelation, and this inadequate historical theory then supports wildly implausible and triumphalistic historiography. These sorts of triumphalist theories are ubiquitous among Christians who have had their intellectual upbringing in the modern and postmodern period, even back as early as Descartes and Pascal. In my view, this is the central internal struggle within Christianity: whether we will accept fundamentalism or whether we will instead insist on the dual intellectual pillars of faith and reason.

If we have a sound understanding of human nature and reason in the first place, it is not only plausible but expected that God would have chosen to operate as a normative authority in way that sovereigns do in our ordinary experience. This is not to say that we ought to anthropomorphize God's motives to align with those of an earthly sovereign; we would also know from natural reason that God creates and rules out of love and good will as opposed to selfish motives. But the idea that God would rule us (and thereby communicate with us) in a manner suitable to human nature should not be surprising, albeit with some differences appropriate to the relation in question. For example, one would generally consider it a sign of bad government when one is told what to believe, since fellow human beings should normally be given information and allowed to make judgments on their own according to reason. This aspect of modern skepticism can be normal and even healthy, consistent with our experience. But in the case of God, apart from God commanding that we believe something, there is often no way that we would be able to know it. So while normative authority as a means of divine revelation is not identical in every way to the mundane exercise of sovereignty, in that governments generally ought not command people what to believe, they remain quite similar.

V. Adjudicating religious claims of divine authority

One clear reason for accepting the concept of normative authority for divine revelation is that it is not a particularly difficult epistemic judgment to make with a high level of certainty. Governments are, in the ordinary course of things, very easy for people to identify. There are, from time to time and especially at points of transition, questions about who exactly has authority in certain situations. But if we discard the radical skepticism about knowledge characteristic of modernity, knowing the identity of the government does not appear to be an inordinate epistemic lift. In modern society, there are literally billions of people who know what government is in control over them, although in many cases they would question whether it should be. That information is in the class of facts like knowing my legal name, my Social Security number, the members of my family, and numerous other things that we accept beyond any reasonable doubt in ordinary experience. We could be mistaken about these facts, but it would require truly extraordinary evidence that is completely unexpected. (And even if it were to happen, it might be immaterial to one's legal situation. For example, one might learn that one's father is not one's natural father, but that would not negate the fact that one was raised by someone else and owed that person the same allegiance that would have normally been given to one's natural father.) 

If we understand faith and divine revelation as lawlike instead of a process of intellectual discovery, which makes faith essentially normative and moral although compatible with what we discover rationally, then we have a much more reasonable epistemic task in ascertaining what counts as divine revelation. That allows a form of rational inquiry pertaining to divine revelation. This rational inquiry would take the following path:

Q1. Does existence itself require God to exist?

Q2. If the answer to Q1 is yes, what would we expect divine revelation to look like?

Q3. Has there been a divine revelation that would meet the requirements answering Q2?

Q1 resolves fundamental issues pertaining to monotheism. If we believe that natural reason demands an affirmative answer to Q1, then we can rule out all atheist and polytheistic religions that do not involve a personal, singular Creator of the universe out of hand. This is also useful for understanding the level at which we can interact with members of other religions in a reasonable way, because there is room to achieve a gradual level of understanding based on natural reason. Of course, as mentioned, the entire use of natural reason has been impaired by nominalism in the West, so there may need to be considerable remediation even to reach the point of meaningful dialogue.

In Q2, we move from demonstration to what the Schoolmen called "fittingness." If we know what we know about God and human nature at some level from natural reason, then we can use what we know to inform our judgments about suitability. For example, it is logically possible that God created the entire universe one nanosecond ago, having implanted you with all of the memories that would be consistent with your having experienced all that you experienced in your life. But that is not the sort of thing that a God who was both capable of creating everything out of love and good will and in fact created rational beings to know Him would do, because it would work a massive deception on them. This is why we believe the past is the past, for example, and that God will not annihilate and remake creation. There's no Bayesian argument for that sort of thing, since it is completely outside of our experience. Nor is there any way that we can demonstrate it by logical necessity, because there's no necessity that God created anything in the first place. But it is a conclusion that we can draw with certainty from what we see.

Similarly, we know that God reveals Himself to further the innate purpose of rational beings to relate to Him, for which He has created them. That is why I said earlier that God does not "hide the ball" in revelation. This was the fundamental error of the first major Christian heresy, Gnosticism, which asserted "secret knowledge" that only spiritual adepts could access, in the manner of mystery religions. Ironically, this is based on the same formal confusion of faith with an intellectual process that we see today, but rather than exalting natural reason beyond its capacity, the Gnostics denied it completely. But the "trusted friend" model of divine revelation, relying on the internal witness of the Holy Spirit (itself circularly confirmed by the normative authority of Scripture), is actually no more fitting or plausible. By contrast, the model of normative authority would be the natural way, consistent with human reason, to engender trust, reliance, and obedience in certain principles across a wide society, exactly as it does with respect to social order.

If we arrive at the conclusion that revelation is far more likely to be through normative authority than the intellectual "trusted friend" model, then the third question is a probabilistic investigation on whether the One God has ever established anything that looks like this. There are not an inordinate number of such authority claims among even monotheistic religions, but importantly, there are some religions that don't even make a claim to be a normative authority established by the One God. Among the Eastern religions that are not atheistic or polytheistic and adhere to some general belief in (impersonal) Oneness or in Western mystery religions (Neoplatonism and the like), the religious leaders, such as the Dalai Lama, Confucius, or even the Buddha himself do not claim religious authority in the sense of command. In a collective sense, they deny that there has been an event of divine revelation as it has been defined here in terms of establishing normative authority. So even though they accept that certain mystics may have had religious enlightenment or awareness as an experience that may be shared by the spiritually adept, they would not qualify as having normative authority. 

Among the religions dominant in the West, Islam and Protestantism both claim that a text of revelation itself is the authority without any correlative human authority. As I pointed out in my post Calvinism: A Dead End Theory, they have a common metaphysical basis for doing so in the similar philosophical paradigms of William of Ockham and al-Ghazali, nominalistic views that lead to a corrosion of the link between reason and theology. It is only natural that the resulting skepticism would result in a fideistic response, like the assertion of the authority of a text itself. It is also characteristic of the nominalism of this view that the metaphorical description of sacred texts as "authorities" is taken as a literal description of reality, as if this were descriptive of an ontological property. Again, if we understand divine revelation in the context of divine authority, this is an obvious error in terms of objective properties. Consequently, these accounts of religion can be ruled out as (philosophically) modernist errors. 

As far as I can tell, if we take divine revelation as normative authority and miraculous signs as the evidence that an event of divine revelation took place, the only religions that could likely remain viable as candidates for events of divine revelation under such an analysis are Judaism and Christianity, and I have alluded to the fact that there is a plausible understanding for the continuity of the authority with Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, one could very strongly argue that the internal rules of the normative authority established within Judaism, specifically the Messianic prophecies, set the stage for the event of succession that took place. This fundamental realization -- i.e., that what makes the religious claims of Christianity so powerful is that they are based on divine revelation as normative authority -- then points to what makes arguments concerning authority like Suan's so effective. All I have done is to make that implicit, intuitive appeal to this common, everyday experience explicit.

VI. Normative authority and the Old Testament

If we then consider faith from the perspective of normative authority, then on the first level, the fact that Israel included a normative authority structure of law and government would itself be evidence that divine revelation operates according to normative authority rather than an intellectual model. If we think that Israel is a factually viable candidate for divine revelation based on the accounts of unusual wonders and signs, then historical evidence as to how that revelation was structured -- the intellectual model as compared to the normative model -- can then be considered confirmatory of our expectation in Q2 over what mode revelation should take. In other words, even apart from the fittingness argument for the mode of divine revelation to be a normative authority, the fact that the nation of Israel created by God had a government with positions like Eliakim's militates in favor of our fittingness argument concerning the mode of revelation being sound. This is why Suan's argument concerning Eliakim plays on an unstated but correct intuition, even if the Eliakim argument wasn't made explicitly in the early Church.

But we can make an even stronger argument. If we take Scripture as a rule of faith, Scripture itself teaches that divine revelation is by means of divine authority. This is because of a typological argument that no one, not even anyone in the Protestant camp, disputes: that Israel is a type of the Church. So not only is it fitting that divine revelation be by normative authority and not only does one of the most viable historical candidates for a divine revelatory event include normative authority but also the Christian claims of divine revelation explicitly support continuity of authority between Israel and the Church. 

What is often missed, however, is that connecting Israel to the Church is completely unnecessary and even undesirable for an intellectual model of divine revelation.  On the intellectual side, the early Church had absolutely no qualms about "plundering the Egyptians" (Ex. 12:36) for their philosophical knowledge. If Scripture were simply a matter of true content, then the Christians could just as easily take it from the Jewish hierarchy of the time as Israel did from Egypt. It was understood that God could deposit all manner of good things, including knowledge, with evil rulers in His providential governance of the world. If divine revelation were a matter of intellectual content, then it would have been easy to  condemn the Jewish rulers in exactly the same way, as betrayers of their forefathers who had no authentic authority except by divine tolerance. But early Christians (and even Scripture) did not do that. On the contrary, they explicitly made claims to continuity of authority and priesthood, and the earliest Christian liturgies show a great deal of deference to Jewish religious norms. This is exactly what we would expect if faith is viewed as lawlike and continuity of authority with the previous revelation is essential to the Christian claims.

Notably, once we accept that this typological argument concerning Israel is setting a framework for divine revelation as normative authority, the New Eliakim typological argument becomes much more powerful. The importance of the principles by which the normative authority operates and exactly what function the various offices serve increases significantly, and evidence collected along those lines is both more relevant and more persuasive as an indication of how the current normative authority should operate. This also fits with arguments about continuity of authority with the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees, which Suan has also offered. That is not to say that such arguments will be dispositive against people who already accept the notion of divine revelation as normative authority, such as the Eastern Orthodox churches, but the importance of the argument to those discussions becomes much more prominent.

VII. Infallibility in the context of divine revelation

One might note that in this entire discussion of normative authority, I have not said one word about infallibility. That is because the concept is a red herring thrown out in order to drag the discussion into the intellectual model of divine revelation. In the intellectual model, infallibility would have a completely different meaning that has little to do with how the term is used in the context of normative authority (there is a connection between the two, but they do not serve the same function). Yet even Catholics, from the Counter-Reformation to the manualists to the anti-modernists to contemporary apologists, often find themselves wrestling with this tar baby of epistemic certainty. Part of the problem is that very few Catholics have explicitly worked on developing a postmodern (or better yet, ultramodern) epistemology -- e.g. St. John Henry Newman, John Deely, Jacques Maritain, James Ross, Xavier Zubiri -- in a way that can keep them out of this modern quagmire concerning certainty. Although those who make epistemic arguments based on infallibility think they are defending the Catholic faith, they are making use of a modernist epistemology to do it, which undermines their own claims.

According to the Cartesian program, the inquiry starts with this radical doubt in epistemology and then proceeds to try to find certainty in things that we can't doubt, which in turn leads inescapably to the radical skepticism of Hume and Kant. But what the Reformers had originally asserted anticipated the only real answer to this radical doubt: a sheer act of will to give "trust," fiducia, in something in which one rationally had no basis for certainty. By no coincidence, this is exactly the same solution adopted in Islam after the doubts created by al-Ghazali's work The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The assertion of sacred texts as "infallible" is the attempt to use fideism to fill the hole of radical doubt created by nominalism. This is precisely why many modern Christians, and especially Protestants, are in a constant state of panic about "postmodernism," because reader-directed interpretation directly conflicts with the false certainty being asserted by this fideistic belief. But as I pointed out in my article on presuppositionalism, it is the Cartesian doubt in the first place that plummets the theologian into a death spiral to fideism. The radical doubt never goes away; one's reason simply crashes into the ground of fideism more or less quickly.

Note that, if the doubt about knowledge is granted in the first place, even Catholicism would need to rely on irrational fideism to resolve this radical doubt. Once you grant the doubt, there is no solution, because you've started from a metaphysically defective epistemology. Every single argument of the form "if there is no Magisterium, you cannot know X" (often in reply to an equally specious question to the Catholic of the form "how do you know X?") fails, exactly because truth is truth regardless of its mode. Within the paradigm, this only leads to endless circular questions about how one knows what counts as divine revelation (e.g., "how do you know the canon of Scripture?"). The problem is the modernist intellectual model itself: if divine revelation is such that you can know the content by reason independently, there's technically no function for the Magisterium or any binding authority at all. At the end of the day, then, if one's model of divine revelation is intellectual, there is no way to coherently affirm any binding authority at all; it devolves to a question of what flavor of fideism one chooses to feed one's doubts. So if the Catholic concedes the modernist epistemology, as he must do implicitly to appeal to skepticism concerning the content of revelation, he has already yielded any principled basis for affirming divine revelation.

In the internal context of normative authority, by contrast, infallibility has a very specific meaning: it refers to a rule that cannot be defeated by application of any other rule. There is a helpful maxim from jurisprudence to distinguish between infallibility in the formal sense and infallibility in the epistemic sense: "The Supreme Court is not final because it is infallible; rather, it is infallible because it is final." One can think of it as a formal terminus for the application of rules, a "final word" on an issue. If we are speaking specifically of divine revelation, there is necessarily a certain relation between the two senses of infallibility, simply because if God intends to use the normative authority to command us to believe proposition P, then there is the additional requirement that P must be true. Faith cannot conflict with reason, after all. But that is a conclusion concerning the mode of divine revelation, not the basis for the conclusion. 

In that regard, one way to think about infallibility in the context of normative authority is that there cannot be formal error within a divine normative authority; all binding rules must be capable of resolution without contradiction. This is similar to the internal consistency requirement of a mathematical system. If there were ever a binding determination that contradicted another binding determination without an applicable meta-rule for resolving the contradiction, that would falsify the system. But given the additional requirements that all beliefs commanded must also be true in a time-independent sense, this means that certain binding beliefs are not subject to revision; they are irreformable. The better English word for this sense is "irrevocable" -- once a rule has definitively entered the formal body of rules, it can never be removed.

As with mathematical consistency, formal consistency is an incredibly technical question of a massive body of normative rules, so that even identifying what the exact proposition P being proposed as an infallible rule for belief in what way is not a trivial exercise. On the contrary, even in pure mathematics and logic, demonstrating formal consistency exhaustively, especially in anomalous cases, can be the work of years or decades for mathematicians. If the goal for invoking infallibility were perfect epistemic certainty, which it would be in the intellectual model, then the fact that there are any epistemically hard cases like these is fatal. One would never be able to decide the question, any more than one can resolve the most technical questions in mathematics. But if the goal is instead to provide a formal structure of law and government to resolve difficult applications of principles in a definitive way, then meta-rules like infallibility are simply elements of the structure that enable the practical use of the authority, as is the case with jurisprudence. As as with the dictum of St. John Henry Newman's that "no doctrine is defined until it is violated," until the principles need to be applied in certain cases, there may have been no reason to resolve an application in a definitive way, much less to demonstrate formal consistency exhaustively.

But what does it mean to say that the application has been resolved "in a definitive way?" It means that the formal resolution itself has definitively become part of the body of rules that will in the future be brought to bear on any application of the principles. It doesn't mean that the rule has been defined in such a way that it conveys epistemic certainty of its content, although the overwhelming majority of normative rules may be just as clear in their application as that. This notion of definitive teaching essentially means that there is a meta-rule for the government to provide for supplemental formal rules in order to facilitate the application of principles to new sets of circumstances and real situations, and a definitive rule is one of the new rules that must thereafter be taken into account in one's application of the rules. In practice, the definitive ruling might not even resolve the immediate problem, or the new rule itself might trigger an even bigger controversy, but regardless, it has definitively entered the body of correlative rules that the government administers.

Take the Council of Nicaea, as described here by the late Pope Benedict XVI:

The important Council of Nicea - which for us really is the foundation of our faith, in fact, we confess the faith formulated at Nicea - did not lead to a situation of reconciliation and unity as Constantine, who organized this great Council, had hoped. It was followed instead by a truly chaotic situation of in-fighting. In his book on the Holy Spirit, St Basil compares the situation of the Church subsequent to the Council of Nicea to a naval battle at night in which no one recognizes the other but everyone fights everyone else. It really was a situation of total chaos: thus, St Basil painted in strong colours the drama of the post-conciliar period, the aftermath of Nicea. Fifty years later, for the First Council of Constantinople, the Emperor invited St Gregory of Nazianzus to take part in the Council. St Gregory answered: "No. I will not come because I know these things, I know that all Councils produce nothing but confusion and fighting so I shall not be coming". And he did not go.

It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of what I mean when I say that resolving issues "in a definitive way" implies nothing like epistemic certainty. When the Holy Father himself, the closest person we have to a living embodiment of the normative authority of the Catholic Church, quotes a Doctor of the Church for the proposition that the exercise of the highest conceivable level of Magisterial authority produced nothing but "a truly chaotic situation of in-fighting," it is difficult to conclude that the function of his office is to provide certain knowledge to everyone. If we were to cling to an intellectual understanding of divine revelation, then giving any kind of authority for Nicaea would be a patent absurdity. At best, Nicaea happened to accidentally be right. We would affirm it by sheer coincidence of having happened on a useful formula for the teaching of Scripture despite the people there having essentially bumbled into it (or having been duped into it by St. Alexander's clerk, St. Athanasius the Great, who was a deacon at the time). Unfortunately, it is no coincidence that this is exactly the concept of conciliar authority held by Protestants. But that understanding certainly wouldn't explain why the subsequently victorious Pro-Nicene Fathers, who number among them some of the greatest names in Christian history, would have appealed repeatedly to the authority of this council (including St. Gregory himself, despite his clear misgivings about its practical utility). Much as with the typological argument based on Israel, the argument only makes sense if they also saw divine revelation in terms of normative authority, so that the denial of authority was itself a denial of divine revelation in addition to the heretical proposition.

So what is the point of such Magisterial teaching at all, if the epistemic resolution of an issue can be so remote that it takes fifty years from the teaching for the matter to become settled? After all, if it were actually important to have the matter resolved, then why is there a controversy in the first place? This analysis runs squarely into a common (and even sound) atheist objection against the intellectual model of divine revelation: why didn't God just make this whole thing easier? As we mentioned God could have spoken to each of us directly and plainly in our our native languages to say exactly what it was He wants us to know, and I raised a fittingness argument concerning human nature in response to that. Can we make a similar argument for why Nicaea produced "nothing but confusion and fighting?" (The mass-schism in the Church following Chalcedon would be another example.)

Appealing once again to the social aspect of human nature, we must now consider that a God who creates out of love and good will does so for the purpose that we will love Him. So not only does the mode of divine revelation operate in our social aspect, but it does so in a way that necessarily depends on the exercise of charity. These epistemic crises, as with all of the things we ordinary men suffer and as exemplified most supremely by the patience of the martyrs, are extraordinary opportunities for charity and heroic virtue. As with any argument from fittingness, we can never say what God's reasons actually are, but we can certainly say that this is a plausible reason for suffering and evil generally and for this phenomenon in particular. And within that fittingness argument, the central role of the Petrine ministry becomes clearly paramount, as St. Peter's threefold denial of the Lord was reversed by his threefold affirmation that he would love the flock (Jn. 21:15-19), which is tied explicitly in that passage to the patience of martyrdom. The epistemic clarity is not at the propositional level, bur rather that there is a manifest and public society of the people of God that embodies divine revelation in its life and activity. And as has always been the case for the people of God in all ages, there are things through which we will have to suffer (including massive dissent in some ages), and this is meant by God for our good.

On the other hand, without divine revelation in the form of a normative authority and a proximate means of faith, we have no basis for hope in the intellectual model of divine revelation that God had provided us any reliable guide us through these situations. If every epistemic crisis were a potential defeater to religious faith, then there would be no religious faith among students of history, just as if every Constitutional crisis were a defeater to the legal system, we could only expect anarchy.  Our hope still needs to be reasonable, of course, and we likewise have to a reasonable basis to think that trials of the system can be overcome. Viewing faith as a normative model provides us with a basis in reason for concluding that there has been an act of divine revelation while simultaneously preventing that basis from being disrupted by normal human limitations. 

But when we speak of human limitations, don't those human limitations include error? Isn't one of the possibilities we should consider that the government can just get things wrong? This issue pertains to the intersection between two senses of infallibility: the internal sense that is discussed above (formal consistency, which I will call formal infallibility) and the external sense of correspondence to reality (which I will call substantive infallibility). What that means is that this question sits at the intersection of faith, which is lawlike in terms of being morally binding, and reason. The latter sense of infallibility, substantive infallibility, is what fideism uses to fill the hole created by Cartesian doubt, and that is the approach that we want to avoid. What I am offering is an alternative explanation of this relationship that does not substitute the correct function of infallibility in faith for knowledge obtained by reason.

VIII. Normative authority and Magisterial error

I mentioned previously that one advantage of normative authority is that it allows for varying levels of submission in a way that the truth of principles and propositions does not. Truth or falsity is binary, and it doesn't matter at all what the source of the true proposition is. Certainly, with respect to truth itself, "a cat can look on a king," as the saying goes. But as I pointed out previously, with respect to matters of divine revelation, there is no way to validly appeal to the authority of divine revelation without first establishing it as a normative authority of law and government. So unlike the case of truth as to general propositions that might be determined in some other way, with respect to divinely revealed truth, there is no coherent way to contradict the Magisterial authority without making the authority of the Magisterium qua Magisterium self-defeating by internal formal error. If one finds a formal error (an internal inconsistency) in the Magisterium, then one does not actually accept the authority of the Magisterium, since one believes the truth of a proposition that is a defeater for that authority. With respect to external errors, i.e., substantive infallibility, the question is what sorts of errors would be authority-defeating for the normative authority claims of the Magisterium.

To go back to the analogy to secular government, the courts, or any other form of government, might err according to some external philosophical or moral standard or perhaps even according to their own internal standards, so as to be incompatible with the truth (however this might objectively by determined). But in the case of divine revelation, if it were the case that the putatively-divine normative authority were to command to believe P that is false, then that would defeat the claim that the normative authority was the means of divine revelation. Even so, just as it would take an overwhelmingly clear case for such an objective violation in order to defeat the legitimacy of something like the United States government, so such an alleged "error" would have to be extraordinarily clear to the point of obviousness to defeat the legitimacy of a divine normative authority that had been established by adequate motives of credibility.

As an example to how implausible such challenges of legitimacy can be, there is a "sovereign individual" movement in the United States with adherents who claim, for example, that the United States federal government is in fact a corporation to which citizens owe no allegiance as a sovereign and that American citizens have no obligation to pay federal income taxes. The latter assertion is primarily based on an alleged technical failure in ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment that authorizes collection of an income tax. Even if we left aside all of the formal problems in that legal argument (and if you are willing to rely on me as a "trusted friend" in the epistemic sense, I can assure you that there are many), the most persuasive evidence is simply the couple of hundred million people who would most assuredly not be paying taxes to, or generally obeying, a government that they thought lacked legitimacy as such. The idea that some formal anomaly on some specific issue within the system is a sufficient basis for rejecting governmental authority is universally rejected. Rather, there is more likely a resolution of the anomaly with further investigation, so we should put it into the category of "apparent difficulties" in the same way that we do with matters that appear to create problems for belief in God.

We can therefore realize that, even in a case where there is infallibility from the perspective of normative authority, there are some sorts of errors that don't pertain to the legitimacy of an office or the government itself and some that do. The latter errors are corrigible within the system, such as technical errors of form that can be overridden by an overarching formal principle, but the ones that conflict with a formally infallible rule cannot be. As one example, there are requirements of canon law that are dispensable by a bishop for the spiritual benefit of members of his flock, and there are general interpretive principles, such as "the supreme law is the salvation of souls," "laws which establish a penalty, restrict the free exercise of rights, or contain an exception from the law are subject to strict interpretation," or "laws, even invalidating and incapacitating ones, do not oblige when there is a doubt of law" that do not necessarily create a formal inconsistency. But where there is a substantive error in a rule that is infallible in the formal sense, that would be fatal, since it would create a formal inconsistency that defeats the authority of the Magisterium. Again, we should not set a low bar here; it is an extraordinarily high bar, akin to what is required to conclude that the government of the United States is not, in fact, the government of the United States, despite its widespread public acceptance.

The object of the Magisterium is revealed truth, which in the context of normative authority we understand to mean "God commands all Christians to believe proposition P." To the extent infallibility would be relevant at all to the function of the Magisterium, it would be with respect to teachings of this form. It is fundamental to the Magisterium in its governmental role to exercise binding authority in this area, whether by acts of interpretation, ratification, or definition. This understanding can also clarify the usage of ubiquitous phrase "faith and morals" in the Magisterial context. This does not mean that the Magisterium has any special brilliance or insight in matters of philosophy or natural law pertaining to morality, although there may be a degree of deference owed to their determinations as a prudential matter. Instead, teaching qua Magisterium pertains to divinely commanded beliefs for the entire Church -- "God commands us to believe X" (the mode of faith) or "God commands X with respect to moral conduct" (the mode of morality), both of which are moral demands on our will by God. The direct contradiction of these divine commands is referred to as heresy. 

When speaking of Magisterial error, then, it suffices to say that the Magisterium cannot through its official actions maintain as divinely commanded that which is not divinely commanded or to deny what is divinely commanded, i.e., to teach heresy. We have said before that one of the Magisterial acts is to introduce rules into the formal body of law; this is a definitive act, when the Magisterium exercise its governmental authority to issue such a ruling, which again may be by way of interpretation, ratification, or definition. Substantive infallibility applies to these exercises of authority; this is a class of errors that cannot be made on pain of defeating the authority of the Magisterium.

Recall that part of the problem is that divine commands are essentially not observable by any mundane process. We might be able to ascertain that some miraculous event took place, such as the Resurrection, but that is not itself sufficient to establish the formal content of commands. It does not even give the witnesses of such accounts, much less subsequent writings of (or about) such people, any morally binding authority. Even in the paradigmatic case of the Ten Commandments, which are described as having literally been written by the finger of God on stone tablets, we don't have those tablets. Rather, establishing the formal content of such divine commands requires law and government, the same as it does with any binding laws. This is why substantive infallibility must be intimately related with the role of the Magisterium as government. If the essential authority of the government to say what is a divine command fails, then the very act of divine revelation has failed.

On the normative authority model, the divine protection against such errors comes in two forms: the gift of infallibility and the indefectibility of the Church. The gift of infallibility applies to definitive acts of the Magisterium introducing authoritative decisions into the overall body of divinely-commanded rules; it prevents errors concerning divine commands being made binding on the faithful through Magisterial act, whether the extraordinary or ordinary-and-universal Magisterium. Note that not all definitive acts will be definitional acts that introduce new formulations of formal rules; they may simply ratify the existence of a formal rule within the deposit of faith. So this applies to definitive acts whether definitional or non-definitional. Indefectibility applies to non-definitive or merely authentic exercises of the Magisterium (the Magisterial scholar Johann Baptist Cardinal Franzelin, SJ, refers to this as "infallible security"). Because these teachings apply to the entire Church, it likewise protects against non-definitive acts only at the universal level (viz., when the Magisterium is acting in a capacity to bind all Christians).  Probably the clearest example of such indefectibility would be the lex orandi, the rules of liturgical practice in the Church, wherein no exercise of universal Magisterial authority can bind the Church to worship in error concerning what God commands. With that background, we can now turn to the question of the substance of divine commands.

IX. The substance of divine commands

So what constitutes such a divine command? If we believe that the deposit of faith consists of God's commands for belief (with the paradigmatic case being the Ten Commandments), then it is reasonable to believe that the core examples are principles that are universal, timeless, and exceptionless, that is, they must be offered as universal, objective truths about God and humanity. That is definitely the case with negative moral commandments, as affirmed by the teaching of St. John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor, along with as eternal truths such as "God is a Trinity" as well as certain eternal or timebound truths pertaining to divine grace such as the Incarnation or the matter and form of the Sacraments. When these are offered universally and officially by the Magisterium as formally revealed objects for belief, they could not even possibly be false on pain of negating the authority of the Magisterium.

Substantively, such divine commands would fall under either the primary or secondary object of infallibility. The primary object of infallibility deals with what is formally revealed in the sources of divine revelation, but this really means what is formally revealed in itself, viz., what was intended to be conveyed as such by the authors of divine revelation as contrasted with how clearly it may be understood by the interpreter. In that respect, the sources of divine revelation are various forms of human communication by means of signs, and what I mean by "formally revealed in itself" relates to the metaphysical nature of signs themselves. Signs involve a triadic relation between the sign itself, the object (where the sign points), and an interpretant (the animal for which the sign is functioning as a sign). The formal revelation is when that sign relation is correctly established for the interpretant between the sign and its object, which may nonetheless be misinterpreted, where "correctly" in this context is understood in the context of what God is commanding. Signs that convey authoritative commands to the interpretant are what we mean by laws, and the correlative authority figures enforcing the laws are what we mean by government. What this really means is that the object of substantive infallibility falls logically out of viewing divine revelation in terms of normative authority.

Along those lines, the closure of revelation means that there is a class of signs that have God as an author, which was fixed with the death of the last Apostle to which no new signs can be added. There are no longer any acts of divine revelation. This does not mean that there are no new signs with divine authority; that is what every Magisterial act is. It does not mean there are no new laws; that is what every Magisterial definition is. Included within the deposit of faith was the establishment of the lasting government for the Kingdom in addition to the revelation of divine commands. What the closure of divine revelation means is that (1) all of the signs in the class of divinely authored signs are definitively in the body of rules that must be taken into account by the normative authority and (2) all claims that any new rules can enter into the body of rules by this mechanism (direct divine authorship) apart from the acts of the Magisterium are false. New rules enter by way of the Magisterium that God established or not at all, and the Magisterium is a correlative government with the laws (divine commands) that were completed at the same time it was established. In short, the closure of revelation should not be understood intellectually, which ultimately ends up making no sense, but rather normatively.

The quintessential function for the exercise of Magisterial authority is identifying application of those principles to individual cases (the judicial function) on questions like "Does the universal prohibition on idolatry apply to the use of icons in worship?" Because those applications depend on concrete situations, it is rarely the case that the principle is going to be known in such definite terms from revelation that it is completely self-applying, so this will often involve analysis of the underlying principle. For example, the prohibition on idolatry pertains to the principle of giving due honor to God, so the application in question is whether the practice does or does not give due honor to God, which is in turn based on principles of natural theology and the relationship between God and man.

This all works very well with respect to divine commands within the core of universal, timeless, and exceptionless principles. Principles and applications of principles to concrete circumstances with additional formal clarity is just the normal operation of law and government. It is very easy to understand faith as lawlike in this context because eternal truths are lawlike in their formal structure. This formal similarity is exactly why we talk about "natural law" in philosophy or "laws of nature" in science. But all of that simplicity vanishes when we are talking about commanded beliefs in some or another factual circumstance. What does it even mean for God to command belief in events like Jesus's birth from a virgin mother or His descending into Hell and rising again on the third day? 

In terms of those commanded beliefs in facts, making such determinations relies on the underlying principle of unity behind all of revelation is the unity of revelation given by the Holy Spirit as First Truth. Likewise, as St. Thomas teaches, faith is articulated, but every article of faith fits together into a whole. This is why denial of even one article of faith qua article of faith is denial of the entire faith; it is the rejection of the normative authority of the entire body. So just as the Magisterium is competent to resolve the application of divinely commanded principles to specific situations, it must likewise be competent in its function to definitively identify assertions of fact that are divinely commanded beliefs so as to form an article of the body of divine revelation. This is the means by which the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption/Dormition were defined as divinely commanded beliefs based on the interconnection of numerous other formally revealed beliefs. This was, therefore, within the correspondence between signs and their objects intentionally conveyed by the divine author in the acts of divine revelation, but that correspondence was only made clear and binding qua command through the Magisterial act.   

This extension of substantive infallibility not only to principles but to facts leads naturally to the secondary object of infallibility, those propositions "so closely connected with revelation that the Church needs to be able to speak definitively about it in order to be able to defend or explain some revealed truth." Probably the clearest case here are the dogmatic facts concerning matters such as the apostolic succession, the authoritative statements of ecumenical councils, the contents of revelation and Tradition, the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, and the peaceful and universal acceptance of the Pope. These are fundamental issues pertaining to the authority of the Magisterium qua government, which cannot be "doubtful" except in situations where there is manifest doubt about who the government is and whether they have received that authority in the first place (e.g., the Great Western Schism, in which the same cardinals who elected the Pope then claimed that they had not actually elected a Pope). These are essential for the reasons I have raised from the beginning -- divine revelation as normative authority would cease to function if there were no government. Similar are theological conclusions when the denial would entail denial of a divine command. The Magisterium exercises its authority concerning divine commands when it rules on these matters.

Lastly, based on the principle concerning lex orandi outlined above and the indefectibility of the Church, the secondary object of infallibility would also include Magisterial acts concerning universal worship. This includes canonization of saints, formation of religious orders, liturgical rites, and canonization of Scripture, as well as numerous matters concerning administration of the Sacraments. In all of these matters, it is impossible for the Magisterium to err concerning what is divinely commanded on pain of defeating the authority of the Magisterium. Where I would sharply disagree from certain interpreters, such as Fr. Walter Burghardt, is that the rationale based on normative authority demands that this protection must be purely negative. What this means is that indefectibility cannot add anything formal to the body of rules in the way that definitive acts can. For example, the adoption of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption into worship in subsequent centuries could never in and of itself justify a belief as being divinely commanded; indefectibility would only show that no divine command was thereby contradicted. Fr. Burghardt is correct in saying that the Magisterium is the living embodiment of Tradition, in the sense that I outlined above of the government being a necessary element for the normative authority of divine revelation to be maintained. But this is a far cry from being able to equate the synchronic and diachronic aspects of Magisterial authority, which is exactly why Pio Nono's brash declaration "I am Tradition!" seems so inapt. 

When divine revelation is viewed in terms of normative authority, then, both the distinction between the primary and secondary objects of infallibility and the protections of infallibility and indefectibility naturally fall out of the requirements for the government not to fail in being the government of divine revelation. This approach has likewise drawn a natural distinction between divine revelation, the divine commands themselves as the object of Catholic faith, and ecclesiastical faith, that which is necessary for the normative authority for the faith to be binding. The only theoretical assumption that I needed to make in the normative model was the assumption that the government of divine revelation will not fail. That in turn is simply the obverse of the closure of the act of divine revelation. When there is no more revelation to be had, the government and the law are the only means by which the divine commands can be sustained -- in other words, the normative authority. This is the fundamental discontinuity between the incomplete revelation of the Old Testament, which looked forward to the Messiah and which was open to further divine intervention, and the New Testament, in which the revelation is complete. Infallibility is not strictly necessary when God Himself will further supplement the commands He delivered as new situations arise, when He Himself continues to act as King for the Kingdom via special divine intervention. But this is not the case in the Church Age. In the normative authority model, once revelation has closed, the failure of the government would be a failure of divine revelation itself.

X. The subject matter of divine commands

Since the foregoing analysis has been entirely based on the normative authority, it depends on divine revelation being in the form of commands (generally, "God commands all Christians to believe proposition P"), which is likewise where the Magisterium exercises doctrinal teaching authority and would need to be infallible. When the Magisterium exercises its authority, however legitimate, in any other way, then there is no need for the Magisterium to be infallible. Its function as government within the normative authority does not require infallibility, the strict inability to err, in those cases. Now we must consider where to draw the line demarcating divine commands from other kinds of teaching.

If we understand divine revelation as a set of signs conveying commands, a body of law, then one of the first principles will be that the commands are public and universal. That is, they are not delivered to particular people, even though they may only apply to particular people, but to the polity as a whole qua law. So at least with respect to the constraints on infallibility mentioned above, infallibility would only need to apply to authoritative acts capable of binding the entire Church. Bishops acting alone (as opposed to collectively, even when dispersed) would never need to be infallible, for example.

Since the deposit of faith is closed, the signs and their relations to objects in the sources of divine revelation are likewise fixed, but the intended meaning of those signs for interpretants may be clear or not. While it is possible for those signs to refer to future events via prophecy, such as the destruction of the Temple or the Last Judgment, it will ordinarily be the case that divine commands will refer either to timeless truths or to events that took place before revelation. Thus, the interpretation and application of divine commands to later facts will not itself be a divine command, although the principles educed in such an application might be. Examples of Magisterial acts that would not qualify as divine commands on this basis would include condemnation or exoneration of particular persons; judgments concerning present facts or conditions; philosophical, historical, or scientific reasoning; or suppression of discussion. For example, if a heretic is condemned by the Magisterium, the Magisterium could in principle be completely wrong about whether that person believes the condemned belief or whether that person intended to teach the condemned belief in a particular document, although the condemnation of the false belief itself is infallible. One clear historical example is when Pope Zozimus first exonerated and then condemned Pelagius, which exoneration was, according to St. Augustine, due to the Pope's having been misled by Pelagius about the substance of Pelagius's teaching.

One potentially counterintuitive consequence of restricting the subject matter to divine commands is that only the bare fact that a command was given by God in divine revelation might be protected from error, since this is the only subject matter over which Magisterial doctrinal authority is properly invoked. In the formal sense, all of the remaining explanation is obiter dicta, other things said that may be informative but do not pertain to the rule itself. An analogous situation in American jurisprudence is the "case or controversy" requirement in Article III, section 2, of the Constitution. The judicial branch's authority only extends to subject matter that involves a case or a controversy. That means that only the part of the judicial decision that is necessary to reach the resolution in the case, the court's holding, is binding; the obiter dicta concerning the underlying reasoning is not binding except in the indirect sense that it may inform the interpretation of the holding in case of ambiguity.  Analogously, for the Magisterium, the subject matter consists of the divine commands in revelation, and the authoritative doctrine is only what pertains to those matters.

For purposes of assessing divine commands, then, there are going to end up being numerous formal recitations that do nothing more substantive than to alert that the Magisterial authority is being invoked. These formal recitations say in one way or another that what is being taught is part of the revealed signs, the divinely commanded beliefs, that constitute the deposit of faith. They are not historical assertions in themselves; they are assertions of the objective content of divine revelation that has been preserved through the time of the presentation. In effect, they claim the authority of the Magisterium as the living government of the divine normative authority. Note that a number of invocations of papal authority in the East, which are sometimes relegated to the category of "Byzantine flattery," are better understood as formal recitations to invoke the papal authority, not literal historical assertions. Especially with respect to these kinds of statements, one failure of the intellectual model of divine revelation as compared to the normative authority model is that it renders statements such as the following historically absurd, since the doctrines in question definitely developed later. For example:

• This is the faith of the Apostles, this is the faith of the orthodox, this is the faith which hath made firm the whole world. Believing in one God, to be celebrated in Trinity, we salute the honourable images ! Those who do not so hold, let them be anathema. (Iconodulia, Seventh Ecumenical Council)

• And indeed, illustrious documents of venerable antiquity, of both the Eastern and the Western Church, very forcibly testify that this doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the most Blessed Virgin, which was daily more and more splendidly explained, stated and confirmed by the highest authority, teaching, zeal, knowledge, and wisdom of the Church, and which was disseminated among all peoples and nations of the Catholic world in a marvelous manner — this doctrine always existed in the Church as a doctrine that has been received from our ancestors, and that has been stamped with the character of revealed doctrine. For the Church of Christ, watchful guardian that she is, and defender of the dogmas deposited with her, never changes anything, never diminishes anything, never adds anything to them; but with all diligence she treats the ancient documents faithfully and wisely; if they really are of ancient origin and if the faith of the Fathers has transmitted them, she strives to investigate and explain them in such a way that the ancient dogmas of heavenly doctrine will be made evident and clear, but will retain their full, integral, and proper nature, and will grown only within their own genus — that is, within the same dogma, in the same sense and the same meaning. (Immaculate Conception, Ineffabilis Deus)


• Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the christian faith, to the glory of God our savior, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion and for the salvation of the christian people, with the approval of the Sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable. (Papal infallibility, Pastor Aeternus)

Interpreted as literal historical claims, these statements are frankly ridiculous; they would barely pass the straight face test. But the failure to explain these kinds of statements in any sensible way only illustrates how weak the intellectual model of divine revelation is as an explanatory paradigm compared to the normative authority model. In the normative authority model, the rules of interpretation built into the model for discerning divine commands provide principles for determining what is and isn't binding in such formal recitations, just as they do in jurisprudence for judicial authority. This provides a much more plausible explanation for why, for example, an ecumenical council can confidently invoke the most solemn language concerning papal infallibility, plainly recognizing the office, while at the same time condemning a prior occupant of that office. This can be contrasted with the intellectual model, which atomizes every single separate Magisterial act into a separate historical claim that must be examined on its historical merits for verification. On this account, every such particular instance is thrown onto a scale of evidence that reason is supposed to somehow read. This is not a coincidence; Ockham himself, the first modernist, was likewise the first to apply this radically different notion of divine revelation to papal infallibility.

As recounted nicely in this article by John Kilcullen, which critiques the famous views of Brian Tierney that Ockham invented papal infallibility, the so-called "papal infallibility" that Ockham offers as against Pope John XXII is actually based on the view that "any doctrine anyone attempts to define as Catholic truth must be true, or that person ceases to be a Catholic and thereby loses any office he may have had in the Church." In other words, he is claiming that by attempting to deny a true teaching by the previous Pope Nicholas III, Pope John XXII has lost his office for denying the Catholic faith, not appealing to any particular role of infallibility. Rather than appealing to infallibility associated with the office, the Franciscan opponents of Pope John separated the keys of papal authority into separate keys of (1) power (discipline) and (2) "knowledge, in faith and morals." On this view, what distinguished the Pope was not infallibility ex officio but rather that he was given access to more knowledge as head of the episcopal college and therefore was in the best position to be able to make true statements concerning the body of knowledge that Ockham considered to be the faith. In terms of infallibility, again in true nominalist fashion, Ockham held that the only protection was that not every single individual in the entire Church could fall away, meaning that there was no essential principle of infallible authority in the Church as a whole, only the individual beliefs of individual persons. Pope John wrote Quia Quorundam to reject this view and to reaffirm papal authority, and it is hardly a coincidence that this canonist Pope clarified papal authority in a way that fit perfectly with the normative authority model.

What this incident illustrates, though, is not just that Ockham's view explicitly deployed the modernist intellectual model of divine revelation that is more or less still widely in use today. What it illustrates is that, to the extent the normative authority model was in use, it was implicit and often not clearly distinguished from a more general account of truth. Conscious reflection about exactly how divine revelation was binding more naturally arose with the questions of modernity. While epistemology was not an unknown field even to Greek and patristic philosophy, the metaphysics of signs (and its connection to language and logic generally) was only given a detailed treatment in the Baroque scholastic period after Ockham's ideas had already exploded into the Reformation, and that explanation was not made a central part of theological method. What I am maintaining is that the normative authority model is a superior explanation of the historical data, especially the repeated use of a distinction between the individual and the individual's acts in office, than the intellectual model. The anachronistic reading of Ockham's model into the ancient past, most especially during the Reformation, has led to vast confusion that the normative authority model resolves simply and naturally.

XI. Hard cases involving the distinction between simple belief and commanded belief

As I mentioned before, the paradigmatic case for divine commands as subject matter is when the matter involves universal, timeless, and exceptionless principles. When those are being taught, it is usually relatively straightforward to identify the divine command involved. But even this is not absolutely clear. Especially with respect to moral principles, the fact that a moral principle is identified does not mean that the moral principle has been commanded by God; it might instead be something that is derived from the nature of man rather than divinely commanded. The matter might be clearer for principles of faith, which tend to be more squarely in the subject matter of divine revelation, but that principle may itself involve the intersection or formal interrelationship of multiple principles, which may often be the case when dealing with historical events. But while making this distinction between what is divinely commanded and merely asserted is a complicated task, because the normative authority model is itself a more effective explanatory paradigm, the task is not impossible.

The key difference between the normative authority model and the intellectual model in this context is that universal belief does not imply universal doctrine, the latter of which requires the belief to be divinely commanded. This is, it seems to me, a point of confusion when evaluating unanimous consent of the Fathers or universal consent of the Church. In this context, it is often argued that things that were widely believed must be part of the content of revelation, which seems to lead to many absurdities, or that we are taking historical surveys of what the Fathers or other early Christians believed to identify the intellectual content of the faith. The normative authority model says to the contrary that, if there was never any act of universal consent by worship or authoritative consensus, then universal belief does not imply that this was universal doctrine, in terms of belief commanded by God. The inverse is likewise true; the absence of historical practice or belief does not mean that there was no divine command in terms of a sign objectively authored by God in revelation for this purpose. Rather, it would mean only that the signification of the divine command or its application was not perceived or fully understood, which is actually an extremely common occurrence in any body of laws. What distinguishes these cases, then, is whether there is divine authority behind the command, which in turn makes use of the foregoing explanation concerning the subject matter of divine commands. This resulting distinction between simple belief and commanded belief (i.e., doctrine) is not only a necessary part of the normative authority model but also a tool for cutting through confusion on these points.

Probably the clearest example of such a belief that ends up not being in the secondary object of infallibility and not divinely commanded is young Earth creationism (YEC). The unanimous understanding of the Fathers was that Genesis formally revealed YEC, the special creation of Adam from the soil, and the special creation of Eve from Adam's side as an actual historical event. The consensus to that effect would probably have been even greater than the consensus behind the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation. If we were to apply the intellectual model and to survey what the Fathers believed about the content of divine revelation, this is most assuredly what the message of divine revelation "means" to the Fathers. Yet even if we replace the days of the creation account with successive "ages" as opposed to twenty-four hour days, YEC is surely an impossible belief if we accept common scientific principles about physical effects. (Even monogenism is at best challenging given what we know of the genetic diversity of present-day humanity.) But the point is that belief is not necessarily commanded belief, which is a belief that is binding.

And this very distinction appears to be utilized in the Catholic teaching on monogenism in Humani Generis:

36. For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith. Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.

37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

The commanded belief is therefore original sin, that there is "a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own." This is a belief proposed authoritatively and infallibly by the Council of Trent's decree on original sin, among other sources. But this statement is likewise a concession that the underlying opinions are not necessary commanded beliefs, only that the underlying opinions must be formed consistently with this conclusion and not as if the Church has nothing to say on the matter. So the conclusion about what opinions the faithful can embrace here and the associated limitation of discussion is not binding doctrine; it is prudential, and it could even be wrong. What is articulated in the last sentence, which Pope Pius XII in his assessment of the conditions at the time could not see as being consistent with the opinions then being offered by Catholics, reaffirms the dogmatic teaching and restricts as a disciplinary matter the liberty of Catholics at the time to discuss the subject. But many Catholics have since given justifications and reasons for how this might be conceivable, which is why that this opinion is now permissible, even though it was precluded before. In any case, this is an example of how we can distinguish beliefs that are divinely commanded from prudential guidance that might be binding only as discipline (as in this case) or perhaps simply offered as advice. 

The Galileo case is similar; it was a purely prudential judgment on a matter that had never been divinely commanded as something that must be believed, and it was an erroneous judgment. The Galileo case highlights that the Magisterium can seriously and grievously err in matters of command that do not involve commanded beliefs, the specific area where infallibility and indefectibility would prevent error. Another way to think about this is that the Magisterium can err in practice but not in principle. If the Magisterium ever commanded an error in belief, that would mean that the formal structure had an internal contradiction that would be in principle incorrigible, which falsifies the claim that the normative authority is the means of divine revelation. But as long as we carefully draw these distinctions between the official authority of the Magisterium qua government for the deposit of faith (divine commands) as contrasted with other functions the Magisterium may perform (e.g., pastoral, prudential, political, advisory, disciplinary), the normative model provides an extraordinarily powerful framework for discerning the content of the faith.

In summary, what we can see is that viewing divine revelation as normative authority, the government for divinely commanded belief, has provided a functional definition of the primary and secondary objects of infallibility. This in turn provides a framework for what counts as a Magisterial act concerning divine revelation in terms of binding teaching in matters of faith and morals. With respect to divine commands, whether those fall in the primary or secondary object of infallibility, these are authorized by God as the ultimate authority behind the normative authority and cannot err in any authoritative universal (ordinary, extraordinary, or even merely authentic) mode. Such Magisterial acts pertain directly to the divinely authorized role of the Magisterium as guardian of the deposit of faith and government of the Kingdom of God. Magisterial acts outside of this capacity but still within the lawful authority of the office are subject to due respect for the office but do not bind the conscience to belief as matters of doctrine. Lastly, consensus of belief does not, in and of itself, make that belief binding on the conscience as a divine command.

XII. The "infallibility" of Scripture

We have spent a great deal of time on the Magisterium as government; we must now address what it means for Scripture to function as law in the normative authority model. In particular, among the various works that are considered to be within the canon of Scripture, almost none of them are written in the form of laws. Indeed, that is probably the most obvious prima facie objection to the normative authority model: the Magisterium may be a government, but it's not at all clear that Scripture is a body of laws. But it would be a grave error to resort to the intellectual model, with its numerous deficiencies, on that basis. In fact, the way in which Scripture functions can easily be explained when Scripture is specifically viewed as a law of belief, that is, a rule of faith. The only way that term can be explained meaningfully is within the normative authority model.

What distinguishes Scripture in this regard is normative force, and that is what the normative authority model uniquely provides. The only way that Scripture can have the normative force of the ultimate authority (God in this case) is by functioning as a law correlatively with a government, that is, by functioning as part of a normative authority. The normative force of Scripture in this context is not limited to what is explicitly formulated as law, but any subject matter where Scripture functions correlatively with government as a normative authority. Furthermore, the best analogy for Scripture would be to a constitution or charter in that Scripture, inter alia, outlines the fundamental principles by which the government and the polity operate.

In the normative authority model, the purpose of the deposit of faith is revelation in the form of divine commands, as opposed to the intellectual "message from a trusted friend" model. To the extent that Scripture is not itself a command, then the structure of the normative authority would need to be such that the non-command portions of Scripture can nonetheless be revelatory as commands. And this is exactly how Scripture is situated in the normative authority. The correlative ratification of Scripture by the Magisterium makes Scripture itself binding in a certain way, which effectively serves as a divine command to apply certain rules in order to discern how it is binding. Specifically, this takes the following form: God commands all Christians to believe that what the Magisterium ratifies as Scripture is both divinely and humanly authored. This was a necessary step for continuity of authority with Israel, which recognized Old Testament documents as law, and it was also the means of further formalizing the Magisterial role as government for divine revelation, just as a written constitution formalizes the political tradition of a nascent polity. And without this ratification, Scripture would be unable to exercise any normative force. Likewise, when we speak of private interpretation, we mean exactly 

To understand this, we can consider an analogy between the founding of the Church as a polity and the founding of America as a polity. In America, from the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the Founding Fathers were developing the principles by which the polity would be subsequently governed in continuity with the British common law system from which the new republic emerged. A similar process took place with the Apostles, the Founding Fathers of the Church, who established certain principles such as continuity with the normative authority of Israel. And just as the foundational activities of the American Founding Fathers were ultimately formalized in the Constitution and ratified by the subsequent government, so the foundational activities of the Apostles were formalized in the New Testament and ratified by the Magisterium.

As the belief in the divine and human authorship of Scripture is itself divinely commanded and not something that can be observed by any mundane method of inquiry, we can expect its interpretation to likewise be a subject of Magisterial authority. The central issue has been how divine and human authorship interact, which primarily results in the doctrine of inerrancy, the principle that divine and human authorship cannot conflict. This is not the same thing as saying that we act as if God Himself were in the human author's position, so that the author must be treated as omniscient or otherwise not subject to human limitations, as we might have with a doctrine of verbal inspiration (God's dictation of Scripture). Rather, this means that God and the human author do not have conflicting intentions in producing the sign in question, even though those intentions may be different. The intention of the human author in crafting the sign is called the literal meaning of Scripture. One critical feature of the normative authority model is that it opens up the meaningful possibility of a divinely commanded meaning that is different from the literal meaning; the intellectual model essentially has to force all of that meaning into the literal meaning, since it has no other mechanism by which divine revelation operates. 

We might then consider inerrancy a kind of substantive infallibility for the authors, analogous to the sort of substantive infallibility required for the Magisterium. But the more meaningful sense in the context of Scripture is the internal (formal) sense. If infallibility in the context of normative authority refers to the fact that a rule cannot be defeated or overturned, then Scripture could be considered an infallible rule, in the sense that what is commanded by Scripture explicitly or implicitly cannot be overruled by anything taught elsewhere. But recall that infallibility in this sense relates to how the rule operates within the normative authority, and the rule does not operate outside of the context of the normative authority. When speaking of the "infallibility" of rules themselves, because they are not self-executing, "infallible" is generally not used, since fallibility tends to connote agency. But as long as "infallible" is not used to turn the metaphorical authority of Scripture into the action of an authority figure, it would not be wrong to call Scripture "infallible." Still, when referring to the hierarchy of rules (as opposed to people), it is more common to talk in terms of levels like "highest" and "supreme." This fits within a normative hierarchy of authority, such as the theological notes -- de fide definita, sententia fidei proxima, and the like. What would never make sense is to posit a hierarchy between the law and the government, since they perform distinct functions. While it's true that the government is "under the law" rather than "above the law," this refers to the fact that government always depends on the law as its correlative function, just as law depends on government.

In terms of conflicts between law and government, there is, of course, a long tradition of per impossibile reasoning to illustrate the supremacy of certain rules in the hierarchy of normative authority. Famously, St. Paul gave one such hyperbolic treatment in Gal. 1:8: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed." This is an appeal to maintain the faith, and it could hardly be construed as a claim that St. Paul himself would preach falsely in his office or that a divine messenger from God would say otherwise. Rather, it appeals precisely to the degree of faith in the revelation that has been given, the firm confidence it will never be contradicted. A similar statement was made by Cardinal Torquemada: "Were the pope to command anything against Holy Scripture, or the articles of faith, or the truth of the Sacraments, or the commands of the natural or divine law, he ought not to be obeyed, but in such commands is to be ignored." As a purely imaginary hypothetical case, it serves the same purpose as thought experiments about what would happen if a spaceship traversed the event horizon of a black hole. It allows the relevant principles to be extrapolated beyond what is really possible in order to better understand how they can be applied in real conditions.

Making the mistake of taking those sorts of purely hypothetical cases as real possibilities naturally resulted in the Ockhamist notion of infallibility. First, nominalism confuses what is conceivable in the mind (intentional being) with what exists in reality (mind-independent being), making it difficult if not impossible to rigorously distinguish imagination from reality. Then, by atomizing the faith into a set of intellectual beliefs in the minds of individual people, the hypothetical case of a single faithful Christian in the entire world becomes the definition of infallibility. Lastly, because there is no metaphysical principle underlying divine activity other than sheer divine will, this faith is understood as blind obedience to the divine will. But if we instead accept a robust concept of what a normative authority is and how it functions, the understanding of faith in terms of divine commands will preclude these hypothetical scenarios, such as heretical teaching by the Magisterium.

The erroneous assertion that one or the other aspect of the normative authority can ever conflict within their respective modes of operation results from this erroneous nominalist version of abstraction. The functions of Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium can be abstracted from one another in our thinking, but there cannot be a real division between them, as they are not mere concepts that we impose on reality.  Just as when we consider abstract concepts as something real apart from their instantiation, so one can reify Scripture, Tradition, or the Magisterium into an idea that somehow exists apart from how it is concretely instantiated (and specifically, the current Magisterium on Earth at the present time). If, per impossibile, the Magisterium were to operate in its teaching role in a way that contradicted dogma, that would be a defeater for the entire model of divine revelation on which one necessarily relies as the proximate means of faith. We can speak about such things as matters of imagination in thought experiments, just like we can discuss the golden mountain or unicorns or traversing the event horizon of a black hole, but it is a delusion to think that imaginary situations can obtain in reality.

Assuming that we don't take this metaphor of Scripture as an authority literally, then Scripture can be described as "infallible" in the sense that it functions as a rule within the overall normative authority. Thus, when there is a formal command in Scripture, including a formal command to believe something on God's authority, then that will be a supreme rule. But Scripture cannot be self-executing (or even self-identifying), meaning that the ratification of Scripture by the government is an essential element of its function, so that it is never possible for the government in its official function to contradict the law. This is why it is a canon; it is an official government record of acts that the Apostles promulgated in their offices. That status can't come from the text itself, because texts aren't self-authorizing or self-ratifying as normative authority. Only the fact that there is still a government existing today that maintains these as its own official acts allows them to function with normative authority.

Just as there is no way to identify what the law for a polity is without ratification by a government, so there is no way to know what is included in Scripture (or "inspired" writings) or even what its properties are without the correlative function of the Magisterium. It is impossible to observe or discern the inspiration of Scripture by any mundane science; it is not even discernible as a miracle, such as might have been the case with the miraculous inscription of the Ten Commandments. There is some guidance on how to determine whether someone legitimately had the office of prophet, an ad hoc office in Israel created from time to time by special divine intervention, in Deut. 18:20-22, for example. But the prophet was not the only office with divine authority, and Scripture wasn't limited to the prophets. Nor was it clear that what was recorded in the books named for the prophets would have the authority of the men themselves. Absent the authoritative ratifying/record-keeping function of the government, there is literally no way to derive the binding authority (normative force) of any document, nor is there any possible way to identify it from any other human science.

Confusing the content of Scripture with our ability to know that it is inspired often leads to the infallibility of Scripture (in the normative sense) being confused with inerrancy, especially among those who have fallen into the trap of the intellectual model of divine revelation. But as we have seen previously, the inerrancy of Scripture is only a derivative property the infallibility of the normative authority in its function as guardian of divine commands. It is infallibility of the normative authority as a whole that gives Scripture its normative force as an object of faith.

St. Augustine writing against the Manichaeans gives an excellent example of how to reason from normative authority to the authority of Scripture based on its function.

If you say, Do not believe the Catholics: you cannot fairly use the gospel in bringing me to faith in Manichæus; for it was at the command of the Catholics that I believed the gospel;— Again, if you say, You were right in believing the Catholics when they praised the gospel, but wrong in believing their vituperation of Manichæus: do you think me such a fool as to believe or not to believe as you like or dislike, without any reason? It is therefore fairer and safer by far for me, having in one instance put faith in the Catholics, not to go over to you, till, instead of bidding me believe, you make me understand something in the clearest and most open manner. To convince me, then, you must put aside the gospel. If you keep to the gospel, I will keep to those who commanded me to believe the gospel; and, in obedience to them, I will not believe you at all. But if haply you should succeed in finding in the gospel an incontrovertible testimony to the apostleship of Manichæus, you will weaken my regard for the authority of the Catholics who bid me not to believe you; and the effect of that will be, that I shall no longer be able to believe the gospel either, for it was through the Catholics that I got my faith in it; and so, whatever you bring from the gospel will no longer have any weight with me. Wherefore, if no clear proof of the apostleship of Manichæus is found in the gospel, I will believe the Catholics rather than you. But if you read thence some passage clearly in favor of Manichæus, I will believe neither them nor you: not them, for they lied to me about you; nor you, for you quote to me that Scripture which I had believed on the authority of those liars. But far be it that I should not believe the gospel; for believing it, I find no way of believing you too. 

There could not be a clearer expression of divine revelation as normative authority than Augustine's claim that "it was at the command of the Catholics that I believed the Gospel." Note that he does not say "at the command of God" even though he assuredly believes that the commandments of faith are divinely revealed; instead, he says he believes at the command of the Catholics. This is exactly the right disposition for apologetics, in that one should be defending (by giving reasons for) the faith itself, not the particular article being discussed. That points out the issue that I raised earlier: when one believes that normative authority is the means of divine revelation, then a defeater for the government is a defeater of one's reasons for faith. If one is wrong about the government, then one is wrong about the entire faith and divine revelation itself, not some particular belief. This might not necessarily destroy the virtue of faith itself, as apostasy would, but it can render faith irrational and fideistic in a way that can ultimately weaken the habit to nothing.

It is also worth nothing that Augustine argues differently in polemics against Christian heretics who accept the apostolic succession, such as Arians, Donatists, and Pelagians. There is a reasonable basis for that rhetorical move -- it's shifted the debate from proving the existence of a normative authority to an internal debate about the parameters of the normative authority. At that point, it becomes another debate about any doctrinal matter within the Church. When taking a polemical stance against such error, it always makes sense to start as much as possible from what is common rather than what is disputed, at least to the extent that one can. 

One such confrontation is summarized well in an article by Protestant scholar D.H. Williams. Against the Arian heretic Maximinus, Augustine rejects as question-begging the assertion of conciliar authority, because that is (among other things) the basis of the dispute. But he does still rely on the pro-Nicene principle that unity of operation shows unity of nature ("The power is equal, the substance is one, the divinity is the same"). According to Williams, in the Maximinus post-debate debrief (a truly ancient Catholic tradition that endures to the present day), "Augustine complains that endless recitation of scriptural testimonies was a waste of time, since it was not the point." Even though he was willing to concede the internal dispute concerning the authority of councils particularly, he nonetheless fell back to the normative authority as a necessity for the authority of Scripture. Williams summarizes this as follows:

Augustine asserts the necessity of consulting "the rule of faith" when interpreting scripture. While the principle is roughly the same as what Tertullian or Irenaeus had in mind [i.e., a "more or less fluid summary of the essential doctrines of Christianity which ... functioned as the standard or " canon" for orthodoxy], the "rule" for Augustine means the same as the authority found in the church. Not that the Bible is subservient to the wishes of an episcopal hierarchy, as Free church proponents would have it, but scripture cannot be faithfully understood apart from the way Nicene theology had come to be received in orthodox churches. The hermeneutic of the church's " faith" guides the exposition and reception of scripture.

Williams admirably presents Augustine's position here but ultimately misses the forest for the trees. Dutifully deploying the intellectual model characteristic of Protestantism, Williams sees the rule of faith as an interpretive rule rather than a normative rule. But the simpler explanation is that Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Augustine all saw the rule of faith as normative. And if they accepted it as normative, as a law of faith, then given everything that we know about normative authorities, it does not function without an associated government, which was the apostolic succession. In other words, what Williams says is entirely consistent with the normative authority model, even though he is writing from the perspective of the intellectual model. As such, it ends up serving as an excellent illustration of how Scripture serves as a rule in the context of a normative authority, not "subservient to the wishes of an episcopal hierarchy" but nonetheless incapable of functioning normatively without it.

As an instructive example of the difference between the models, I will address the position of Protestant scholar Gavin Ortlund in his debate with Trent Horn that I referenced earlier. I select this example not only because it is typical of Protestant scholars such as Williams but also because it will illustrate how my position would have replied differently than Horn did. This is not to suggest that Horn's responses were deficient, especially since his stated purpose in debates is to argue in a way that blunts the rhetorical force so that people will not be discouraged from a full-blown inquiry. Rather, I am pointing out that those responses did not address the matters of fundamental theology that I am presenting here.

In that debate, Ortlund was arguing for the thesis that "Scripture is the only infallible rule for the Church." He defined "rule" as "a standard that governs the Church's faith and practice," and "infallible" means "incapable of error." He distinguished the concept of "infallibility" from the concept of "authority" and pointed out that there could be real authorities that are not infallible authorities. Lastly, he pointed out that "Scripture" does not include only explicitly taught doctrines but good and necessary consequences thereof and that sola Scriptura itself is a "prolegomenal matter," that is, a philosophical premise that is taken as part of theological method. But it is that philosophical premise where Ortlund has made the same fatal error as Williams: he has assumed the intellectual "trusted friend" model of divine revelation, turning a normative rule into an interpretive rule, thus making Scripture not a rule (in the sense of binding law) at all but rather a fideistic axiom. Otherwise, what he means by "infallible" in this context is simply "accurately describing reality," and in that sense, any truth that is written down in a clear way would be equally infallible. 

To establish his thesis, Ortlund first points out that it is not at all unusual for there to be a supreme set of texts with subsequent authoritative bodies subordinate to that text. Says Ortlund, "it's not a bizarre idea to suppose that a religion's founding texts will have unrivaled, unparalled authority." Quite right; this is true not only of religions but of many secular polities, including the United States. And in that respect, Ortlund has said more than he knows, for the very hierarchy between authorities that he uses only makes sense in the context of normative authority. With respect to truth or accuracy, the law of non-contradiction permits only two states: true and false. On the other hand, there is no supreme law outside of the context of a normative authority of correlative law and government.

Ortlund attempts to justify Scripture as an infallible rule by appeal to its nature and function. With respect to the nature, Ortlund points out the Scripture is the "inspired Word of God" or the "speech of God" to justify infallibility, which is nothing but an assertion of the intellectual "trusted message" model. He appeals to Catholic doctrine as showing agreement with the unique ontological nature, especially given that we agree that revelation is closed, but then argues that those who accept other infallible authorities (Catholic and Orthodox) are separating authority from inspiration. But this actually fatally cuts against his own position. On the intellectual model, there is no coherent way to distinguish any grade of truth, so the fact that a true statement is the "speech of God" or not is irrelevant to infallibility (truth). True is true no matter the mode. But on the normative authority model, it makes sense to distinguish between kinds and levels of authority. And in that model, if revelation is closed (that is, the class of signs delivering the content of revelation is closed), that means there will be no more public revelatory acts, meaning that the polity founded at that time must endure to avoid the failure of divine revelation. In short, by appealing to the closure of revelation, Ortlund has actually established the ongoing need for an infallible Magisterium!

This actually provides a neat rebuttal for Ortlund's second premise: the function of Scripture. To illustrate what he believes the function of Scripture to be, Ortlund cites the examples of "testing," but the testing he describes is simply each individual's application of the intellectual model on the nominalist doctrine-by-doctrine basis. This is both fideistic, in that it irrationally uses the "speech of God" label to set rational axioms, and anarchic, because each individual judges the matter for himself without any divine authority capable of rendering judgment. For Scripture to function normatively, God would have to establish a government capable of divinely authorized testing. If that is the case, then the closure of revelation means that the perduring polity then created must be infallible, because God will no longer intervene to make a course correction. Therefore, what is tested following the revelation in Christ is whether there is a correlative law and government, not whether each and every doctrine can be shown by some specific intellectual test. The example of Jesus correcting the Pharisees on the "traditions of men" in Matthew 15, for example, is certainly no longer normative concerning the legitimate authority of the Magisterium (although there can be plenty of false "traditions of men" outside of that authority). On the contrary, Jesus has promised that this situation will not happen again with respect to the authoritative guardian of the deposit of faith. 

XIII. Modern scientific methodology in theology

I haven't made any explicit statement about methodology to this point, instead starting with an appeal to intuition and experience of normative authorities in our lives and proceeding to rely on that experience to establish the likelihood that God would have divinely revealed Himself in the same way. That started with a demonstration of the philosophical compatibility of this mode with the concept of faith in order to eliminate any problems in principle. Then it proceeded to a demonstration of the philosophical deficiency of alternative definitions of faith. We can think of those steps as the theoretical framework for the explanatory paradigm. The analysis then moved to applications of theory in the real world, first with respect to the question of multiple claims of divine revelation, then with respect to the case of Christian revelation itself, and finally using it to analyze the claims of (and answer objections to) the Catholic Church. I will note in passing that while I focused on the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, nothing that I said there would rule out other similar claims made by other churches within the apostolic succession, such as the Eastern Orthodox churches. It only serves to limit plausible Christian claims to those who claim continuity of authority in their government by lawful succession from the first century.

One might recognize this approach from what we call modern empirical science, and I would consider my project to be one of theology as modern science. What do I mean by that? Theology as science if the very first question addressed by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. Aquinas views theology as the science of the positively immaterial, the things that are by their very nature beyond human understanding, including God but also spiritual beings such as angels and demons, studied as such. This is contrasted with neutrally immaterial existence, the immaterial aspects of material beings, which are studied in metaphysics (we can know that God exists indirectly from metaphysics, but this does not let the intellect study God as such). Theology is a speculative science as opposed to a practical one; it is not a science of how to do things but rather deals with truths about the things that are. What makes theology different is that, because its subject matter is beyond human reason, we can only study these matters insofar as they are revealed. In that respect, theology is a science of divine revelation as such, and my modern scientific account is a theoretical explanation of divine revelation as such.

In that respect, this project is one of fundamental theology, "that branch of theology which establishes the fact that God has made a supernatural revelation and established the Church, founded by Christ, as its divinely authorized custodian and interpreter." As the scholar of fundamental theology Francisco Fiorenza recounts, "fundamental theology was developed as an independent theological discipline in reaction to the Enlightenment during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." So what does it mean that the discipline was developed in response to Enlightenment rationalism, and what does this have to do with theology as a modern science?

The underlying crisis of modernity was actually perceived much earlier, during the late scholastic era, and Melchior Cano's posthumous De Locis Theologicis (as reviewed in this article by Fr. Peter Totleben OP) was an early response to this crisis, identifying ten loci of sacred doctrine: "(1) the authority of Sacred Scripture; (2) the authority of the Traditions of Christ and the Apostles handed down orally; (3) the authority of the Catholic Church; (4) the authority of the Councils, particularly the general ones, in which the authority of the Catholic Church rests, (5) the authority of the Roman Church, which by divine privilege is called Apostolic; (6) the authority of the Fathers; (7) the authority of the scholastic theology and the canonists; (8) natural reason; (9) the authority of the philosophers and jurisconsults; and (10) the authority of human history." But at least in my opinion, Cano has fallen into the trap of the intellectual model of divine revelation, and this seems to be the underlying reason behind Fr. Totleben's observation: "The problem is that Cano thinks that faith is related to theology as understanding is related to science. Really, faith is related to theology as understanding is related to wisdom. With this view of theology as wisdom, it would have the ability to judge and penetrate into the principles held by faith." By taking the propositions of faith as scientific premises, he has fallen into the intellectual model of divine revelation, and his assertion of the authority of the Church is therefore Cartesian-avant-la-lettre, since it asserts the authority of the Church as an indubitable rationalistic axiom.

That essentially summarizes the problem that modernism created for Scholasticism. The scholastic model of rational discourse is based on syllogistic reasoning from the certainty of premises, which is what is meant by a science in the Arisotelian sense. Fr. Totleben notes of Cano's methodology that theology "gets its certitude from the certitude of its principles, which it holds by faith, and the validity of the reasoning process by which it reaches its conclusions. This means that for Cano, there is a clear distinction between faith and theology." The difficulty for certitude in this sense was identified (but not resolved) by Suárez's critique of Thomism, which was aptly summarized by Fordham professor José Pereira: "For Suárez the basic principles of Thomism are, at best, open to debate and are unnecessary to found a metaphysics, a fact that makes the system, when not fallacious, superfluous." But Cano, as with many Catholic writers who uncritically accepted his position (perhaps most famously Johann Baptist Cardinal Franzelin, SJ), has not seen the problem. 

The problem raised by modernism, especially Hume and Kant, is a real one; it fundamentally cuts against the certitude of Aristotelian science by making epistemology, the formal study of knowledge as intentional being, purely subjective. The response of modern science was to recognize that the overwhelming cases of certainty that we have in premises in ordinary experience is based on abduction, inference to the best explanation, and to apply that same approach to the entire body of knowledge in the sciences. This involves developing a formal explanatory paradigm and comparing it to mind-independent experience to see its suitability as an explanation, which is eminently suitable for determining the correspondence of signs (intentional being) to mind-independent being. But nothing prevents this from being done with the signs received in the sources of divine revelation! If we can achieve moral certainty that propositions are of faith (divinely commanded) by means of abduction, then it would be just as valid to then treat those propositions with the certitude of faith as it would to obtain moral certainty through discursive reasoning. But from a practical perspective, it avoids pointless disputes about the level of certainty attached to specific propositions by instead providing a formal approach for distinguishing what are and are not propositions of faith. More importantly, it avoids bootstrapping arguments for obtaining certainty in premises, whether based (questionably) on the motives of credibility or sheer Cartesian-style assertion of indubitability.

There are multiple ultramodern approaches to theology in the sense that I have described, referring to the fact that the approaches use the abductive approach to provide a theoretical basis for certainty concerning faith. I want to point out some specific examples in current apologetics, and I will first mention the empirical approach to divine revelation, which is studying the ways in which propositions have been considered divinely authoritative and binding within the Christian community and providing theoretical explanations of the same. This is analogous to the secular field of jurisprudence, the study of the authority of laws in a society. This is my own approach in this article, and among Catholic apologists, it is most characteristically employed by Michael Lofton at Reason & Theology, who specializes in the study of the Magisterium. Second, there is an epistemological approach to divine revelation, which provides philosophical justifications for discerning divinely revealed propositions contra modernist skepticism, especially around the problem of private interpretation (or private judgment in the intellectual sense). Following in the tradition of the pioneering work in St. John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent and Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge, this approach is characteristic of the Catholic website Called to Communion (especially Bryan Cross and Michael Liccione) and the modern Aristotelian approach of Edward Feser. On the Orthodox side, this methodology appears in the Energetic Procession website authored by Perry Robinson. Third, there are essentially apologetic approaches, which focus primarily on defeating objections arising from the modern sciences and pointing out findings in those sciences that are evidence of Church authority as distinguished from positively establishing the theoretical underpinning of religious authority. The goal in this third approach is not to theoretically justify the certainty of faith but rather to defeat objections that might otherwise oppose reason to faith. I would consider Dave Armstrong (whose work I wholeheartedly commend) to belong to this school, along with the Catholic Answers organization. What all of these approaches have in common is the use of abductive reasoning rather than syllogistic reasoning as the primary tool for establishing the certitude of (or defending the rationality of) faith.

I believe that this work is of the utmost importance for Catholic and Orthodox intellectuals, and I commend all of these people for doing it. (Regrettably, since Protestantism is modern in its essence by its commitment to sola Scriptura, I do not see a way forward there, although the charity and love for Christ among our Protestant brethren remains a blessing and grace.) What I do not believe that we can continue to do is to pretend that modernism, especially the implications of the modern scientific method for religious thought, can be ignored or denied. To do so is to consign Christianity not only to a fringe group of people within society but also to the fringes of human experience. If Christianity is to be a catholic religion, even if it is limited to a faithful remnant, this is not the way forward. We have already lost so many young people, and even if Catholic families can keep their children in the faith, this kind of holding action does nothing to evangelize the massive and growing population of "nones," those who profess no religious faith.

Yet this denial of the problem is the most prevalent response to modernism in terms of an utter failure to provide any kind of theoretical justification for the doctrine of divine revelation. The most glaring failures in the nineteenth century were Catholic anti-modernism, Anglo-Catholic historicism, and fundamentalism. What each had in common was the failure to explain divine revelation as such, resulting in the erroneous belief that sheer authority of the motives of credibility, including "mere Christianity," was a sufficient justification for the doctrine of divine revelation. Because there was no clear justification of authority in response to the modernist question concerning certainty, theological liberals (the "modernists" that Catholic anti-modernism had in mind) concluded, as per the intellectual model of divine revelation, that they had limited or no obligation to accept theological authority unless the historical sciences could conclusively demonstrate it. And one way or another, all of these nineteenth-century counter-approaches fell into the trap of asserting theological authority as an axiom against Cartesian doubt, which does not effective answer the modernist challenge. To put it another way, all of these approaches responded to the symptom of theological liberalism and not the underlying reason for it, and the cost was that it lost a generation or more of theologians of every Christian denomination to liberalism.

XIV. The anti-modernist problem

The main reason for the failure of these responses to modernism was an inability to justify the authority of tradition. To put it another way, the problem was blind faith in tradition, by which I mean faith without a justification for the certainty one placed in specific propositions held to be divinely revealed. This can be distinguished from implicit faith in tradition, which is just taking the authority of formal content from sources of divine revelation for granted without critically examining the basis for that reliance -- more or less the ubiquitous pre-modern approach. But once the epistemological issues raised by Ockham's nominalism are brought to a head in the theological context, especially by the Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura, it will no longer suffice to leave that question unanswered. Yet this is exactly what the failed approaches did.

For a characteristically clear and concise summary of the premodern view, I recommend Christian B. Wagner's YouTube series on development of doctrine at Scholastic Answers, especially part 2.2 on virtuality in doctrine, and also his publication of the relevant portions of the Gilby Summa. This summary brings special attention to the critique in Fr. Francisco Marin-Sola's The Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma of a transformistic understanding of doctrinal development based on the Scholastic model of discursive reasoning. The issue of doctrinal development was one of closure of revelation, by the Schoolmen's reasoning, only what was part of the deposit of faith could command the assent of faith, so that nothing could be added to this. But clearly, there were new formulations of doctrine that were articulated by the Magisterium and the ecumenical councils. So the question was whether any of these new formulations could be considered of the faith, whether propositions could become of the faith, and what new formulations would be considered NOT of the faith and therefore transformistic additions, which would be new revelation in violation of the principle of revelatory closure.

The critical distinction between the schools here was the one Fr. Totleben pointed out with respect to Cano: what is the connection between the habit of faith and the habit of theology? As recounted by Wagner in his preface to the Gilby Summa excerpt, the Thomist position was that these two were related but not identical; faith operated by assent, while theology was coupled to discursive reasoning. The Scotists and nominalists considered the two to operate by the same principle, so that what demanded the assent of faith did so even before the person realized the logical implications (although he might be excused if the person did not realize those logical implications). The Thomist reply was exemplied by Bañez -- if the discursive reasoning had not been made binding by the Magisterium, then it might make one a bad philosopher, but not a heretic. But there was universal agreement at this point that only what was implicit and explicated by discursive reasoning in a specific sense could avoid being a transformistic addition that could not possibly be of the faith.

As Wagner recounts in his foreword to the Gilby Summa, the Thomist position was later examined by Fr. Marin-Sola as follows: the propositions of faith had to be connected to the original deposit by being formally implicit (that is, being distinct only by terminology, or nominally distinct), virtually implicit (distinguished only by explicative concepts, also known as virtual-inclusive), or simply virtual (a distinction with a foundation in the thing itself but only distinguished by explicative concepts not derived from causal effects, which would be instead be virtual-connective). In Fr. Marin-Sola's view, it was Suárez who had confused the issue by trying to find a middle ground between the Scotist and Thomist views on whether conclusions were of the faith before definition by the Magisterium, which was actually based on a distinction between the habits of faith and theology and NOT a difference between the schools on what was implicit in revelation. In this misunderstanding (later followed by Lugo), Suárez first collapsed the formal-implicit and virtual-inclusive into a single distinction (the formal confused) and then asserted that development could include the virtual-connective, which he called merely "virtual." The Thomist Salmantincenses, seeing the danger that Suárez had made a mistake that could open up new revelation, adopted a position that had until then only taken by Luis de Molina: that it was impossible for any subsequent theological conclusion to be of the faith, regardless of definition by the Magisterium. The concern that Fr. Marin-Sola identifies is that virtual-connective, because of its object in the physicocausal, cannot restrict itself to what is implicit in revelation but must instead join premises of insufficient certainty that come from outside it.

Generally, Fr. Marin-Sola would return to the approach of Cano, which is his view was that of St. Thomas, as the sound approach. But in his interaction with St. John Henry Newman on the illative sense, he does make one extremely important concession to another form of connection: the virtual-connatural. He argues that the sense of right order created by the life of grace in the soul and its relationship with the divine can correctly discern the order of truths in a way that prevents different or contrary concepts from being introduced. This makes sense in terms of the two forms of knowledge having a common object (God as First Truth), but the problem is that the object of theology is actually God as revealed in the sources of revelation, on pain of theology not being a science in the first place. This results in such knowledge being categorized as mystical or spiritual, which explains why neo-Thomists like Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange have such extraordinary mystical and devotional writings that seem somehow completely separate from the systematic theology. While the neo-Thomists fully accept the truth revealed in such experiences, they cannot accept that experience as scientific, on pain of (in their view) admitting it as new revelation.

With respect to this gap in the context of divine revelation, it pertains to how the formal motive (the formal object quo) of faith operates. In On Divine Revelation (I rely here on Matthew Minerd's translation of volume one, chapter 14), Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange appeals to the dogmatic consitution of Vatican I on the Catholic Faith concerning the trustworthiness of revelation (Chapter 4): "This faith, which is the beginning of human salvation, the Catholic Church professes to be a supernatural virtue, by means of which, with the grace of God inspiring and assisting us, we believe to be true what He has revealed, not because we perceive its intrinsic truth by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God himself, who makes the revelation and can neither deceive nor be deceived." Fr. Garrigou first notes the definition of authority in the context of teaching (trustworthiness and knowledge required for teaching) and then presents the Thomist reading: "Faith's formal object quo is the First Truth expressing itself (or the divine trustworthiness revealing), inasmuch as it connotes First Truth in the order of knowledge, that is, the infallible wisdom of God."

Fr. Garrigou's concern here is to avoid that the assent of faith (the formal motive) results from anything except God, including lesser reasoning. Hence, he says "Indeed (and this must be carefully noted), the assent of faith is not discursive but rather, is simple, being established solely on the testimony of him who speaks. Otherwise, it would no longer be the assent of faith. Nay, the supernatural certitude of faith would be formally resolved into the inferior certitude of discursive reason and would be in line with this lesser order, which would thereby serve as the basis of our certitude of faith." This is the same hard distinction between faith and theology that Cano asserted, and it is why Fr. Garrigou is then concerned to concerned to answer the question of whether relevation itself (God revelatory act) and the teaching of the Church are only necessary conditions for faith or pertain themselves to the formal motive of faith. In Fr. Garrigou's mind, the only way to avoid this is if the revelatory act causes the assent, analogous to the way that fire burns wood. On the question of whether God's inherent authority as First Truth (as contrasted with the specific revelatory act) is the formal motive of faith, Fr. Garrigou states "[i]f the motive were the authority of God, in first act, independent of active revelation, by virtue of this motive, our faith would be hypothetically infallible but not categorically so. We would always implicitly think: If this is in fact revealed by God, then it is infallibly true. The Thomists hold that nothing created can pertain to the formal motive of a theological virtues. However, active revelation guarantees that it is a question of an uncreated action of God who reveals."

The problem with Fr. Garrigou's account is that language itself is created, and this is why the model of discursive reasoning is vulnerable to nominalism, particularly in the relationship of faith to reason. Fr. Garrigou makes an excellent case for why faith needs to be supernatural both in what is believed and by which it is believed, but it doesn't follow that one has infallible certitude in specific propositions or beliefs. Fr. Garrigou concedes that the object of faith beyond natural reason is a mystery that is to some extent obscure in via, but he doesn't resolve exactly how the language of Scripture can determine the intellect to definite propositions, effectively saying that to make that process explicable would be to put it into the domain of reason and make the formal object of faith natural. But this doesn't follow, and to see why, we can turn to Fr. Garrigou's own citation of John (Poinsot) of St. Thomas. Poinsot was a semiotician before semiotics, so it is unsurprising that he was likewise the first to illuminate the path to connecting the motive of faith with propositional content. 

Responding to the question of how the created species (the sources of divine revelation) could nonetheless be guided by a supernatural formal object, Poinsot says:

This makes even more manifest the supernaturality of acts in the Beatific Vision which will proceed from supernatural principles as regards both the light [i.e., of glory] and the species [i.e., the divine essence seen in itself]. Nonetheless, to this point, the entire substance of the act of faith is supernatural because even though those species, of themselves, belong to the natural order, nonetheless they are coordinated and combined in order to form a judgment or propositions of faith. And this coordination is brought about by the supernatural light of faith. Thus, said representation is complex and is supernatural through the mode of a truth that is handed on [per modum veritatis traditae]. Hence, the light of prophecy and of faith do not only elevate the power to elicit the act of assent but also order the species to represent revealed truths in a complex manner [i.e., in enunciations formed by the second operation of the intellect].

I submit that this can still maintain the distinction that Fr. Garrigou maintains between natural faith (from God viewed as Author of creation) and supernatural faith (from God viewed as Author of grace and glory, which is a distinct object of science) without running into the problem of propositional knowledge. Namely, what is apprehended with the simple assent of faith is the divine authority of the sources, that is, the God who reveals and can neither deceive nor be deceived, so that what is perceived is the normative force of the sources of revelation. This perception is infallible with the assent of faith; it cannot possibly err. It also avoids Fr. Garrigou's relatively weak assertion that the authority of the Church is only a condition sine qua non for the formal motive of faith as opposed to have an essential relationship thereto by divine authority. With respect to the coordination, combination, and complex representation of the truth, including interpretation and other judgments, it would then be possible to be mistaken, especially on account of the obscurity of the object and the weakness of the intellect, but this would not mean that God had deceived but rather been misunderstood or misinterpreted. But one could nonetheless be morally certain of one's interpretation, as one is morally certain of essentially all interpretations through the process of abduction, especially when one accounts for the teaching of the Magisterium, the theologians, the Doctors of the Church, and other reliable guides. So this is no way leaves the wayfarer uncertain about how he might be saved, which is through adherence and obedience to the authoritative revelation of God in the Church, while still allowing for ignorance or misunderstanding in the content of the faith. Poinsot has therefore built us a bridge between Aristotelico-Thomism and modern science.

We can further explore this issue in another work that Wagner republished: The First Principles of Knowledge by Joseph Rickaby, SJ. Fr. Rickaby provides an excellent explanation in the first chapter of knowledge as sign, the signum a quo, which is the knowledge of the thing signified, and the signum ex quo or signa in quibus (formal sign), the "sign which first has to be known, that from it the mind may travel to the thing signified," which is the mental concept. But the account of how propositional knowledge is constructed from the signs is essentially an exercise in formal logic, and this is not enough. As a reductio ad absurdam of the modernist position, Fr. Rickaby rightly points out that the skeptics can't really believe that there is no such thing as knowledge. The knowledge reflected by the signum a quo and signum ex quo is real; the intellect does have a real relationship to mind-independent being in the triadic sign relation. But how the intellect coordinates that knowledge into complex representations is not trivial. Scholasticism historically took this propositional knowledge for granted based on the intellective act of judgment, but it is this problem that that needs answering if the challenge of modernity is going to be accepted. But if we admit this role of the intellect in forming complex representations while still accepting simple assent to the normative force of the sources of revelation, then we can use the modern scientific method of abduction in connection with formal (logical) consistency to produce moral certitude in formal content. Far from being incompatible with the scholastic method, it actually justifies that method as against skepticism.

Fr. Marin-Sola's recognition of the virtual-connatural along with Poinsot's explanation of complex representation can therefore be the key to unlocking an effective response to modernity, but the focus on the object has made it methodologically insufficient. Specifically, because the distinction was applied in a manner that took propositional truth for granted, the neo-Thomist explanation (following Cano) focuses primarily on the supernatural object of the science but not on the connection between faith and reason. This ends up being a weakness in the account, as it then becomes impossible to connect the mystical, spiritual experiences of holy men and women to the formal content of public revelation. And this is a general weakness of the scholastic account trying to place the level of certitude in the object, so that the level of certitude associated with the metaphysical and physical ends up being likewise distinguished by the object (leading to Fr. Marin Sola's distinction between the virtual-inclusive and virtual-connective). That is because the discussion has been limited to assent and certitude, as situated within the field of logic (systematic thought about thought itself) and specifically in formal logic rather than epistemology and semiotics, both of which deal with thought in its metaphysical sense as intentional being. We know from Gödel's work on formal incompleteness that no logic can prove itself true, only consistent with its axioms, and James Ross likewise explains (summarized nicely here by Edward Feser) that there is always an act of the intellect in formality (including language and logic). This means that the account of divine revelation based on propositional certitude is simply inadequate.

The problem (and a great tragedy in Catholic history) is that this inadequate explanation of the neo-Thomists became antimodern rather than ultramodern. What I mean by this is that even the assertion that revealed propositions lacked an articulated justification for certitude was itself viewed as modernist (or postmodern) skepticism. What was instead the case was that the Scholastic methodology did have a foundation in abductive reasoning, albeit one that was not articulated. This mistaken assertion was nevertheless used in the nineteenth century (and continues to be used by certain traditionalists today) to argue that anyone who engages in ultramodern philosophy, i.e., who concerns themselves with the justification of knowledge in view of the modern critique, must be among those who are condemned as modernists. The resultant chilling effect by encylicals like Pascendi Dominici Gregis on philosophers like Maurice Blondel, who were directly confronting questions of how faith was binding on the conscience, was unfortunately similar to the condemnation of Galileo in earlier times. (Note that I do not think that antimodernism itself condemned anything other than true modernist/postmodern skepticism, which actually did deny the possibility of knowledge, but the collateral effect was to stifle discourse that did not make such a denial. For an unfortunate contemporary example, see Fr. Chad Ripperger's inaccurate comments on Blondel and Vatican II here)

In any case, both the empirical and epistemological accounts that I cited above focus on this issue of normative force, which is to say how propositions become binding as divinely revealed. When the term private interpretation is used, it specifically refers to questioning the method for determining the normative force of the text in question. But there are still traditionalists who will cling to the mistaken notion that asking any questions along those lines is tantamount to postmodernism, which is essentially epistemic nihilism. Among them, regrettably is Wagner himself who, together with "The Other Paul" (a Protestant), made a critique of Bryan Cross's and Perry Robinson's philosophical work. Perry Robinson's response is more than adequate to rebut the charge that distinguishing normative force from truth or knowledge somehow entails an epistemic nihilism that would destroy our ability to read texts with certainty. It is very clear that Wagner mistakenly views this as an attack on the certitude we have concerning revelation. He appears completely oblivious to the revelant philosophy of language, and as careful as he is in his study of the Scholastics, he is sloppy in his analysis here. This is perhaps best exemplified in his query as to why Catholic apologists did not argue this was before the nineteenth century, which has a very obvious answer: the success of modern science and the development of philosophy of language was barely beginning by then. In response to Wagner's plea for more mentorship from older apologists and being one such apologist myself, I recommend that he read people's sources and thoroughly familiarize himself with the background of the arguments before going off half-cocked.

I do want to call out a couple of points about Paul's presentation that are telling. At one point, Paul inexplicably asserts that the principle of the meaning of the text is the text itself, which is literally the definition of postmodernism. He seems to have realized his mistake to some extent, because he later appends "and its author," but any postmodernist will say that the author is present only by the text. He should've known that was a mistake based on a source text he cited, Kevin Vanhoozer's Is There Meaning in This Text?, which actually rebuts the postmodern idea that there are no reliable means of reading texts outside of the text itself. I mention this because, according to the speech-act theory Vanhoozer uses in the book, normative force is the quintessential example of perlocutionary meaning, which cannot be found in the text itself. That is a particularly bad mistake for Paul, because normative force also comes up in Vanhoozer's dialogue with Catholic Matthew Levering in Was the Reformation a Mistake?, which considers the Scriptural authority of the Catholic position. As Vanhoozer correctly points out, "the real issue is not whether Roman Catholics use the Bible to do theology (they do) or accord it authority (they do), but rather whether they accord Scripture supreme authority in its own interpretation (they don't)." So I will first say that Paul has completely misunderstood his own source on a central point of the thesis, which is an interesting position in which someone arguing for the perspicuity of texts to find himself. I will then note that Vanhoozer's response actually runs straight into the point of this article: that normative force requires a government, meaning Levering has definitely gotten the better of this exchange.  

XV. Anti-modernism and radical traditionalism

In the radical traditionalist community, the antimodernist error (that is, assuming that any answer to the modernist critique is itself modernist) has metastasized into an attack on the Magisterium itself, condemning the Magisterium as modernist. From the perspective of normative authority, this is senseless and self-defeating. This is essentially trying to abstract Tradition as an authority apart from the correlative government in exactly the same way that sola Scriptura does with Scripture, thus adopting sola Traditione as an operating model. But like Scripture, Tradition has exactly as much normative force as the Magisterium ratifying it. Without that correlation, the authority of Tradition fails. I note that Cardinal Franzelin tries to come up with a justification in his Theses IV and V on divine tradition based on the authority of the Apostles as divine "legates," which is itself a position of authority taken from Roman government and fits naturally into the normative authority model. But just as we saw with certitude of propositions in Scholasticism, the normative authority model provides the justification that is lacking in Franzelin's account of tradition.

The most glaring example that I have seen of sola Traditione abstracted from the existing Magisterium is Fr. Chad Ripperger's The Binding Force of Tradition. Specifically, he cites the papal oath that includes the following text:

Accordingly, without exclusion, We subject to the severest excommunication anyone -- be it Ourselves or be it another -- who would dare to undertake anything new in contradiction to this constituted evangelic Tradition and the purity of the Orthodox Faith and the Christian Religion, or would seek to change anything by his opposing efforts, or would agree with those who undertake such a blasphemous venture. 

At this point, it should not need repeating that such recitations are not suggesting that Tradition is a separate authority operating above the Magisterium. Instead, this establishes that Tradition, like Scripture, is part of the correlative law with which the Magisterium serves as government. Yet Fr. Ripperger makes exactly the same error that Protestants make when asserting sola Scriptura as follows:

This text is a clear indication of how the Church understood the tradition even in connection to the members of the Magisterium. The Church used to require the pope to take the oath that he would give assent, both intellectually and morally, to the tradition in all respects as well as to venerate with "glowing affection" the tradition. In fact, the authority of the Magisterium by its very nature is ordered toward binding what it passes on, but it is also bound by what is passed to it.

It is that last phrase that asserts sola Traditione in like manner to sola Scriptura. The normative authority constituted by law (Scripture and Tradition) and government (the Magisterium) is one normative authority. One is not binding on the other; they are correlatively binding as performing their respective functions. This is not to suggest that the Magisterium ought to disregard Tradition, of course, but that they have a binding and authoritative role in the government of Tradition. God who reveals is not multiple objects of supernatural faith, but one object. Fr. Ripperger is basically acting as a Protestant here, just appealing to the authority of Tradition instead of Scripture to dissent, but both are incompatible with the authority of the God Who reveals as the supernatural object of faith. He has broken the Tradition into separate monuments, not seeing that the monuments themselves only function in the context of the normative authority that includes the Magisterium, just as the Protestants seem specific Scriptural passages or teaching abstracted from their context.

This same sort of error is pervasive in a piece by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, who applies his version of sola Traditione to the lex orandi of the Catholic Church. The lex orandi, of course, is no different than any other law in the Church; it functions within the existing government (the Magisterium) or not at all. Ironically, Kwasniewski has correctly pointed out that sola Scriptura, sola Traditione, and solo Magisterio would all be contrary to the reality of divine revelation, as each would involve a conflict in which one defeats the other. But he sees sola Traditione as only being in the Eastern Orthodox, ostensibly due to their lack of papal Magisterium, although he does concede that this is not as clear as the Protestant sola Scriptura. But Kwasniewski still sees Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium as checks on one another, which is impossible if they constitute a single normative authority. In their respective functions in divine revelation, they do not function alone but only correlatively.

Kwasniewski recognizes the problem but is thoroughly unsuccessful in dodging it in the following response:

Now, someone might object that the Traditionalist movement within the Catholic Church is a “sola Traditio” group because (according to the objector) it denies the authority of the Pope to do things the traditionalists happen to dislike.

But there is a different and better way to think about the origin of this moniker “traditionalist.” As many theologians maintain, the root meaning of Tradition is the sum total of that which God has handed down to us in divine revelation. The portion of it that was written down is called Scripture, and the rest is called unwritten or oral Tradition. Within this handed-down content is the power to interpret revelation, or the teaching authority of the Church, the Magisterium. That is, Scripture and the Magisterium are precontained in Tradition. The traditionalist, therefore, is the one who emphasizes the unbreakable unity of the three pillars in their fundamental source, and who therefore rejects any hypertrophic exaltation of Scripture (as per the Protestant temptation), Tradition in a reductive sense (as per the Orthodox temptation), or Magisterium (as per the temptation of “conservative” Catholics).

But this is not the case. The reason that Kwasniewski has erred is not that his position "denies the authority of the Pope to do things traditionalists happen to dislike" but denies that Tradition depends on the present Magisterium for its normative force. Were the Magisterium every to fail in its function with respect to the primary or secondary objects of infallibility, including the preservation of divine Tradition, then the very means by which Tradition maintains normative authority would be gone. Such failure is impossible on pain of negating divine revelation entirely. And it is not an epistemological question, i.e., a question of knowing the content of Scripture or Tradition or prior Magisterial pronouncements, but an ontological question of the Church's ability to function as the normative authority and object of faith. In fact, if the deposit of faith were to be broken up into this or that proposition which might conflict with such or another proposition, the authority of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium would all be atomized into nothingness. And this is precisely what happened with Ockham, for which he was condemned by Pope John XXII.

So how does the author of an 84-page article titled "William of Ockham and the Metaphysical Roots of Natural Law" blunder into Ockhamism? The only clue that I have been able to identify is that Dr. Kwasniewski at least seems to have a defective idea of exemplar causation and divine transcendence, so that he is essentially reading his own ideas of the human exemplar into God, effectively treating his creaturely concepts univocally with the divine ideas. This seems to be exactly what Dr. Kwasniewski has in mind when he says the following in footnote 38 in his article:

If exemplarism is explained solely in terms of an imitation of God's essence and not of his ideas, one cannot escape denying the positive perfection of creatures; what is stressed is that in imitating God, creatures fall short of his perfection. Of course, that is true. But they do live up to their own perfection, exemplified in their imitating God in this respect (their "own" idea). God wants them to be that way: imperfect in comparison to his unlimited being, but perfect in respect to their own. Deny the ideas, and you deny this perfection. (I am indebted to Prof. [Gregory] Doolan [author of Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes] for this insight.)

This understanding seems problematic even on its own explanation, but for our purposes, the problem is that it collapses the economy of grace into the natural. I will say that I question this account of the divine ideas and exemplars; I believe that St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure differ quite significantly on exemplar causality (practical knowledge for the former, Eternal Art for the latter). But to avoid that complication, let's just take the Seraphic Doctor's approach for the moment to demonstrate why Kwasniewski is wrong. (Given that Kwasniewski is also intimately familiar with the Byzantine rite, this mistake is all the more surprising.)

The reason for creation is not for us to be perfect in respect to our own natures, that is, to the exemplar idea in God, but to participate in the divine life. Kwasniewski suggests here that our perfection is our participation in the divine idea of humanity, but the way in which we are finite (that is the form that terminates our essence) is exactly the way that we are not supernatural. Grace assuredly builds on nature, but Kwasniewski's account essentially fails to distinguish between God as Author of nature and God as Author of grace, in exactly the way that Fr. Garrigou pointed out in his work on divine revelation. This results in Kwasniewski positing a naturalistic account of both the Magisterium and the liturgy, where they are reducible to their natural constituents, elements and acts without an overarching supernatural principle of unity (since the divine exemplar in God is not itself supernatural qua exemplar). Instead, Kwasniewski puts this supernatural principle into natural law. And this is precisely why he treats Magisterial pronouncements in Ockhamist fashion and why he cannot fathom that there is no paradigmatic liturgical form for humanity. The unifying principle that lies behind the contingency of these things seems to escape him entirely, just as it escaped Fr. Ripperger. This is the principle of unity, God as Author of grace, that keeps Magisterium, Scripture, and Tradition unified as a single supernatural object of faith.

What the normative authority model entails is that the Magisterium qua guardian of Tradition cannot fail to transmit the deposit of faith on pain of destroying the authority of divine revelation. This is not to say that there cannot be hypertrophy of the Magisterium in terms of doing more than the Magisterium is competent to do. As one example, the Magisterium has taken political power and offered opinions on scientific matters that are beyond its competence, although even in that case, the errors will only be in applications of principle and not the principles themselves (as in the unjust condemnation of Galileo). So the solo Magisterio phenomenon that Dr. Kwasniewski mentions is not a mere phantom or chimera; there are still those who believe that geocentrism or political integralism or the torture or burning of heretics (or the antimodernist error) are dogmas, despite every one of those "doctrines" having been instances of Magisterial hypertrophy in the area of prudential judgment. Again, what we should expect the Magisterium to do follows from the rational purpose of having a Magisterium in the first place, which is to serve as the correlative government with Scripture and Tradition. What we must never do is to accuse the Magisterium either of hypertrophy or failure in its proper function, which is supernatural and therefore pertains to infallibility and indefectibility.

To explain how this works, I turn to a frequently-cited source on Magisterial authority: John Joy's Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility. Joy's overall analysis is perceptive and thorough, and I completely agree with his analysis of the ordinary Magisterium; his threefold division of authority into extraordinary, ordinary and universal, and authentic; the exposition of the primary and secondary objects of infallibility; and his enumeration of the three conditions for ex cathedra papal teaching. But he stumbles on the subject of papal error (his article 2), and this is because he has lost sight of the supernatural principle behind the authority of the Magisterium. In that respect, he has focused exclusively on the gift of infallibility in its extraordinary form, which was the subject of Vatican I, but neither the gift of infallibility more broadly construed in the supernatural authority of the Magisterium nor the indefectibility of the Church as a whole.

Joy's error is actually one of basic logic. The logical fallacy he commits is affirming the inverse (denying the antecedent), which runs as follows. When P = an infallible mode applies to the teaching and Q = the teaching cannot possibly err, then clearly P implies Q. But denying P does not imply denying Q. In other words, the fact that teaching is not in an infallible mode proves nothing about whether the teaching can err. Joy makes this mistake explicitly when he says "if there are non-infallible expressions of the authentic magisterium, then it is possible for the authentic magisterium to teach error. For what is not infallible is fallible; and what was is fallible is able to fail." Later, he repeats it: "Let me insert a brief logic lesson for the 2+2 = 5 crowd. If it's not infallible, then it's fallible. And if it's fallible, then it could be in error. Deny that and you may as well walk right through the door marked 'Abandon Reason All Ye Who Enter Here.'" (There is a bit of unfortunate and unintentional comedy in presenting a logical fallacy as an essential truth of reason.)

To put it simply, "not infallible" does not imply "fallible"; it only means that that there is not a protection against fallibility, but there may be other reasons for not failing. For example, there may be no protection against math textbooks erring, so that they are not infallible by virtue of being a math textbook, but the skill of the authors and editors may preclude such errors from being a real possibility. Joy has simply missed this, and missing this causes him in turn to miss opportunities to be corrected.

Specifically, Joy glosses over a serious objection that would have caught his error out. In objection 7 to article 2 concerning the fallibility of authentic papal teaching, Joy says:

Furthermore, according to Cardinal Johann Baptist Franzelin, in addition to the gift of "infallible truth," which protects the ex cathedra definitions of the pope, there is also the gift of "infallible security," which guarantees that all authentic papal teaching, even if not infallibly true, is at least infallibly safe, so that it would always be safe for the faithful to embrace it and it could never be safe to reject it. Therefore, the authentic magisterium of the pope is at least practically infallible.

Joy's response is so inexplicable that it seems he must be "in the grip of a theory." His response says:

To the seventh it must be said that Cardinal Franzelin was concerned to emphasize the authority of the authentic papal magisterium against those who would consider themselves free to disregard everything except infallible teaching. But he failed to consider the possibility of authoritative papal teaching that would be in conflict with the previous teaching of the Church.

It is not an exaggeration to say that my jaw dropped when I came across this passage. Franzelin's statement is in Thesis XII, Scholion I, Principium VII of a detailed explanation of the passive infallibility of the Church, so to think that Franzelin was disregarding the role of the active infallibility of the Pope in this thesis defies belief. The reason was not that Franzelin failed to consider it, but he definitively ruled it out. As I have explained above, I do think that Franzelin's account suffers from certain weaknesses that the normative authority model fills in concerning propositional truth in revelation, which can be better understood by the formality of divine commands. But the authority of the Pope was definitely not one of those weaknesses!

What Fr. Ripperger, Kwasniewski, and Joy have all missed is what Cardinal Franzelin saw. The Magisterium, the faithful, Scripture, and Tradition all function within the context of a single supernatural authority, the God who reveals. For the Church to be misled by the exercise of that authority would be a failure, not of the Magisterium, but of the God who reveals. That is precisely the meaning of religious submission of the will and intellect: to firmly hold to this truth that the authentic Magisterium can neither deceive nor be deceived concerning the God who reveals. That is what it means to say that the Magisterium, as government of the divine commands and guardian of the deposit of faith, cannot fail.

But Joy's fallacious argument leads him astray on religious submission as well. Because Joy lumps all non-infallible teaching together as being potentially erroneous, he likewise lumps religious submission to non-infallible teaching together. In his chapter "Authentic Magisterium and Religious Submission," he quite rightly points out that, unlike the extraordinary and ordinary Magisterial acts, acts of the authentic Magisterium are definitely not infallible. Again, it doesn't follow that they are fallible, but it does say that they lack the special protection that guarantees they are infallible in and of themselves. Joy likewise correctly notes that there is a distinction made in Lumen Gentium between what the Church teaches (the extraordinary and ordinary Magisterium) and what the pope and bishops teach (the authentic Magisterium), the latter being non-infallible teachings owed religious submission of the intellect and will. And because of his fallacious argument that all such teachings are fallible, Joy maintains that religious submission of the will and intellect is always a matter of mere opinion, since it must include the possibility of error.

Once again, if Joy had not glossed over his own sources, he would have caught his mistake. Lumen Gentium says that the "religious submission of will and intellect must be shown in a special way to the authentic Magisterium of the Roman pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme Magisterium is acknowledged with reverence and that the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will." Joy is completely correct that the religious submission to any individual bishop is a matter of mere opinion one, although obviously one that must be considered with the utmost respect and care. That is because, bishops qua individual bishop lack universal jurisdiction and cannot implicate the passive infallibility of the Church as such. (Note that this applies equally well to the Pope acting as Bishop of Rome or Patriarch of the West or private theologian when he is not exercising his universal authority to bind, which would include things like papal homilies and press conferences under any normal circumstances.)

The clear difference is that the Pope can implicate the passive infallibility of the Church by his universal jurisdiction, and if he does, we have moved beyond the realm of mere opinion. At that point, the "special way" of showing religious submission becomes manifest, and we must also affirm that adherence is infallibly safe, which is to say that sincere adherence cannot entail denial or contradiction of any divine commands in the deposit of faith or any other kind of spiritual danger. So the "special way" of religious submission here is a prohibition on such assertions against authentic papal teaching (that is, teachings that bind the church but that are not definitive, such as matters of Church discipline). Anyone who makes such assertions, such as those made in this "fraternal correction," is then dissenting against the divine authority of the Pope, failing to offer the divinely commanded religious submission owed to his office.

An objection could be made here that there would end up being no practical difference between infallible and non-infallible papal teaching if religious submission is construed in this way. This is the frequently-leveled charge by radical traditionalists of hyperpapalism, which is treating all papal teaching as if it were infallible in the extraordinary mode. But this claim is specious. Infallible security only prevents claims of contradiction; it doesn't suggest that the teaching is irreformable (that is, irrevocable). The same is true of non-binding portions of definitive and infallible teaching, viz. those portions not binding as a divine command. The only difference is that the remedy in that case would be further clarification, not revocation. One might argue quite vehemently under such circumstances that the teaching should be revoked for any number of reasons that don't involve asserting that it contradicts the deposit of faith, including the prudential judgment that it weakens respect for, or creates confusion with respect to, the deposit of faith or actually leads people to heresy under the circumstances (as with Pope Honorius). What one cannot do is to say that the teaching, when interpreted with respect to the Pope's "manifest mind and will," contradicts the deposit of faith.

XVI. Anglo-Catholic historicism and fundamentalism

We have seen that radical traditionalism takes the antimodernist argument to sola Traditione as against the Magisterial authority. I will now briefly address two other significant failures to address modernism.

Going even further is the Anglo-Catholic view that denies the authority of the Magisterium entirely. In place of the authority of the Magisterium, the Anglo-Catholic view places authority in the historical consensus of belief. This results in the branch theory, in which the various branches of Christianity that agree on certain creedal essentials provide the material of Christian belief, and the historical consensus among those can result in a mere Christianity. As our historical understanding develops, this theory suggests that we can have a better and better understanding of our common faith and that we will ultimately coalesce around the true faith that was revealed in the first century.

Suffice it to say that there is no way to derive normative authority from historicism. First, there's no normative authority for the common creed that is supposed to indicate which branches of Christianity are legitimate, and even with respect to that creed, there are wild variations on how it is supposed to be interpreted among the putative branches. Second, as I pointed out previously, consensus of belief doesn't suffice to establish normative force for the belief; people may believe things that are not divinely commanded. Third, the subject matter of belief is not clear, so that there may be all sorts of beliefs on which there was consensus that have no relevance to divine revelation. Fourth, there is no way to identify what sources count as divine revelation. In short, as a means for ascertaining divine revelation, Anglo-Catholic historicism fails.

Fundamentalism essentially just asserts the creeds themselves as articles of faith without even the historical justification. As part of these assertions, they may assert the authority of Scripture, but again, leaving no real justification for their authority or the normative sense in the first place. This form of fundamentalism is simply fideism; they have yielded to the Cartesian doubt and stopped believing that they justify their position intellectually. Instead, they have resorted to sheer vehemence in belief as an argument.

In short, these approaches can be added to the list of failures in answering the modern critique of knowledge and providing adequate justification for faith and theology.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction, I believe that the normative authority model provides an intuitive understanding of divine revelation and that the implications of this model for faith and theology are useful for explaining the faith in a modern context. It facilitates fundamental theology and apologetics by providing a paradigm that is consistent with modern abductive methods in science and history, yet remaining consistent with the deposit of faith. Likewise, it provides a clearer framework for discussing the infallible teaching of the Church and the possibility for Magisterial error, which provides an alternative to the widespread dissent on both the liberal and conservative sides who do not appear inclined to be bound to anything that is not defined infallibly in the extraordinary mode.

In terms of how the model can be extended, it fits well with the overall concept of the Christian as citizen of the Kingdom of God, providing a natural explanation of the doctrine of justification as a legal declaration of citizenship and "faith" as allegiance of the Christian to Christ the King. I could see that avenue being fruitful, especially for ecumenical discussions and investigations into how the Church interacts with the modern secular state. Perhaps most importantly, in terms of situating the Church in modern society, it has the prospect of putting Catholic dialogue back on track after the derailment of antimodernism that had the unfortunate consequences of taking many Catholics out of the philosophical discussion for far too long. If this explanation helps even one Catholic to get engaged in the struggle against postmodern nihilism, the effort will have been worth it.

Holy Saturday, 2023