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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
THE PICKLE OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT
By Mark P. Shea
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This Rock
Volume 5, Number 11
 November 1994 
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MY pal (we'll call him "Hal") is
nothing if not a Christian of deep convictions. Hal believes the Bible
is the sole source of revelation. He thinks the Spirit guides each
believer to discover truth for himself (so who needs the Church to
tell us what to believe?).
He believes that Jesus is his Savior because "though he is God,
he had a sinful human nature like mine and so was able to be truly
human, only he never obeyed that nature." He believes Mormons
are heretics for adding to Scripture and are therefore "accursed"
according to Galatians 1:8 ("But even if we or an angel from
heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you,
let him eternally condemned!"). And he has two very strong and
very contradictory opinions of my Catholic faith.
His first strong opinion is that the Church is weak and syncretistic
because lay Catholics like me don't join him in declaring Mormons
accursed. After all, Hal observed, Mormonism differs significantly
from orthodox Christianity in two crucial areas: its understanding
of the Person of Christ and of his saving action. Being a good Christian
of deep convictions, he strenuously reminded me that these cannot
be compromised. So he reasoned that my failure to "take a stand
for the gospel" must be due to spineless Catholic wishy-washiness.
I agree with Hal that the Person and work of Christ cannot be compromised.
But here is the irony. As a Catholic I would say that there are other
things that cannot be compromised either. Thus I am willing to acknowledge
that Mormons are not preaching the gospel as it is handed down from
the apostles. I am quite willing to say that insofar as Mormon teaching
diverges from the Catholic depositum fidei it is false. But
I am also just as ready and willing to say the same of Protestant
doctrines such as re-baptism or the notion that the Eucharist is a
mere symbol.
But I am not willing, because Scripture and Tradition forbid it, to
seize apostolic power and to start declaring that Hal or Donny Osmond
are inescapably accursed for holding these false ideas. The apostles
appointed bishops, not me, for that purpose. The bishops, in the Second
Vatican Council, stress not that the glass of the separated brother
is half empty, but that it is half full. Indeed, they even take a
similar approach to non-Christians, whether Hindu, Jew, or Muslim,
and emphasize, where possible, commonality instead of laying into
them with a cudgel of curses. Therefore, I do likewise. It would be
ironic if I refused to obey my shepherds and set out to declare curses.
In so doing I would be acting exactly like the Mormons, who falsely
claim apostolic authority. So in the end, whether or not it seems
weak or syncretistic, I hold to the Church's sense of balance. But,
asked Hal, don't I believe in the curse Paul spoke with apostolic
authority against the false gospel pushers? I replied that I did.
I simply didn't feel competent to know whom to apply those curses
to. I hesitated for Hal's sake. Here's why.
In the history of Christendom there have been lots of curses uttered.
Some of them, such as Paul's curse on the Judaizers, have been uttered
by people with the authority to do so. Or consider the apostle John.
He declared that anyone who denied that Jesus has come in the flesh
is Antichrist (1John 4:2-3). In short, he uttered a curse. Phrases
such as "in the flesh" are troublesome verbiage that must
be defined and clarified. For instance, when it occurred to people
to speculate wildly on what was meant that Jesus came "in the
flesh," it was necessary for the bishops in union with Peter
to go through a tortuous process of hammering out what is and is not
the traditional gospel.
Among the things hammered out in the councils of the first five centuries
were the doctrines of the Trinity, which concerns the Mormons since
they are polytheists, and the hypostatic union, which concerns Hal.
The reason this concerns Hal is that the dogma of the hypostatic union
teaches that Jesus, by virtue of the union of his divine and human
natures in one Person, is absolutely without sin, including a sinful
nature.
Worse still, via an irritatingly well-reasoned trail of logic, the
Church, in a dogma recognized as valid in both East and West, holds
that to deny the hypostatic union (by, say, teaching that Jesus has
a sinful nature) is ultimately to deny the Incarnation itself and
therefore to fall under the curse John utters against those who deny
that Jesus has come in the flesh.
Hal knew as well as I that he was not "accursed" for holding
his theory about Jesus having a sinful nature. He was simply a "non-denom"
kind of guy doing the best he could to understand the gospel in his
ignorance of historic orthodoxy. To earn an apostolic curse requires
full knowledge and willed consent to defy truth. Thus, John's curse,
like Paul's, is directed to those who knowingly pervert the truth.
He curses those who foment rebellion, not well-meaning people in Asia
Minor (or Utah) who ignorantly believe them. With these latter folks,
both apostles labor in love.
So, I argued, I think we lay people should do the same. Otherwise,
while Hal was busy casting stones at Mormons for messing with the
Trinity, I would be obliged to cast stones at him for messing with
the Incarnation, for there is a certain inconsistency in destroying
the Catholic altar, ignoring the Catholic priesthood, abandoning Catholic
sacraments, repudiating Catholic Tradition, as Hal's branch of Protestantism
has done, and then seizing on the Catholic Bible as the source of
all truth. The only thing stranger (after making all these radical
alterations and edits to the ancient faith) is to declare Mormons
accursed simply because it occurred to them to make a few more alterations
and edits. So I asked Hal why, given that he accepted the central
Protestant principle of private judgment of revelation, he believed
the Mormons were so peculiarly wicked.
This attempt at ocular log removal was not well received. Hal voiced
his other, flatly contradictory complaint against the Church, that
it is, not weak and syncretistic, but triumphalist and judgmental.
He retorted, "It must be nice to be a member of the only church
that is right about every doctrine in the history of the world!"
I answered that this was precisely what I used to say when I was a
non-Christian arguing with the truth claims of Christianity. "The
way, the truth, and the life indeed! What hubris!" I once muttered.
Yet if Christianity really is revealed, really is God's word to us
and not our words about God, then it really is true and has a claim
to complete and willing submission. Similarly, the Church teaches
that, unlike the various Christianities that have broken from communion
with it, it preserves the fullness of faith, not by its own goodness
but by the sovereign preserving work of the Spirit sent to guide the
Church into all truth. That's hubris only if it's false. If it's true,
it's a demonstration of humility and a confession of dependence on
grace since it makes the whole Church one vast charity case.
Thus, what Hal would say to an atheist or a Mormon is what I say to
him: The Incarnation and its corollary, the gift of revealed truth,
are just that--gifts--not something the Catholic communion
has because it is the Master Race. Jesus promised he would lead the
Church (often by the nose) into all truth, not that the Church by
its smarts would figure it all out because Catholics are intrinsically
superior. Indeed, the very reason the Church needs the gift of infallibility
is because we're such a lot of dunderheads. It is always and only
God who is right. As Pope John Paul II says, truth possesses the Church;
the Church does not possess truth.
What then? Am I saying that because the Church has been granted the
fullness of the faith that Protestants are no different from Mormons?
No. Mormons differ from classic Protestantism by trying to be fundamentally
innovative. The Reformers and the various sects and subsects since
the Reformation have had one basic assumption at work that Mormonism
conspicuously lacks: They have been trying to conserve or return to
"the faith once given."
Mormonism, in contrast, proudly asserts that it is adding something
new that no one had ever heard of before. In so doing it puts itself
at odds with the orthodox vision of a Church as merely holding fast
to a closed deposit of faith (2 John 9, Jude3). For Catholicism
the belief is that the faith, like a baby becoming a man, has gotten
taller and stouter, but has retained the same number of arms, legs,
and
Similarly, it was the wish of classical Protestantism, however badly
it failed and injured the baby by its radical surgery, to restore
the pristine purity of the baby, not to transmogrify it into a new
organism no one had ever heard of before. The Mormons say God is still
supplying new revelations; he is multiplying the number of noses on
the baby's face.
Though there is a real difference between Mormons and Protestants,
that difference is, I fear, largely a matter of luck and custom, not
of Protestant principle. In making private judgment the final arbiter
of what constitutes the "essentials" in the heart of what
is a conservative, apostolic, and hierarchical Tradition, Protestantism
has founded itself on a contradiction. Until fairly recently this
contradiction could be overlooked in everyday life since, happily,
mainstream Protestants retained big chunks of the "essentials"
in their belief and practice by a sort of cultural consensus. Now
that consensus is disintegrating, and the genie the Reformers let
out of the bottle cannot be put back in.
What I mean is this. Yesterday it was a cultural given to both Luther
and Calvin that Scripture would be pre-eminent, the creeds and (early)
councils would be rock-bottom touchstones, that sacraments would continue
to exist of their own accord, God the Father would rule in heaven,
and all would be right with the world. Yet none of that is found in
a post-Protestant culture increasingly dominated by private judgment
(and by nothing else). Sooner or later it can and does occur to people
that if you can dispense with the authority of the Church to interpret
Scripture, you can, like Joseph Smith, dispense with authority of
the Church to write it. If the inner witness of the Spirit is sufficient
to know the mind of God apart from the witness of the Church, it is
sufficient to know it apart from Scripture. If the sacraments are
mere symbols like the bishop's miter, they are as disposable as the
bishop's miter. If they are only symbols and therefore don't matter,
because "only the spiritual matters" then the same can be
said of the whole physical creation by New Age mystics who would have
us escape this "prison of the body" and by technological
exploiters whose attitude to nature, including human nature, is, "There
it is, boys--take as much as you like! Only ignorant medieval
types attach superstitious `sacredness' to matter. It's ours to consume!"
(The latter rhetoric is alive and well among pro-abortion and fetal
harvesting propagandists.) And if matter doesn't matter, then the
Incarnation of the Word-made-matter doesn't matter. If the ancient
Catholic Tradition of Mother Mary is a cultural construct that free
men have outgrown, then the ancient Tradition of Father God can be
a cultural construct that free women can outgrow.
In which case, I fear, the Mormons will not be the last to begin making
real and radical additions and new "revelations." Consider
the blasphemies of the Re-Imaging Conference. This folderol was perpetrated
by folks from the "dissenting Catholic" and mainstream Protestant
fold. It's content? God as Earth Mother, no need for the "weirdness"
of the cross (as one of the conference participants referred to the
Passion of our Lord), free alteration of the gospel in order to recast
Christianity in the image and likeness of the latest neo-pagan trends.
Is all this a classical Protestant attempt to return to the purity
of the primitive gospel? No; like Mormonism, it constitutes a repudiation
and radical reworking of the historic essentials of the faith and
claims, in fact, to be a sort of new revelation. Not surprisingly,
such theology justifies itself as a triumph of private judgment by
"throwing off the shackles of patriarchy, sin, guilt, and white
male hegemony."
Consider also the novelty of the pro-abortion movement within Christian
circles. Such a departure cannot be squared with the unbroken testimony
of the Church. Such a movement claims, again as a triumph of private
judgment, to be privy to new revelation ("That was then; this
is now"). It is an almost archetypal picture of what happens
when the Great God Private Judgment, known in secular culture today
by the political misnomer "freedom of choice," is cut loose
from the moorings of apostolic teaching and made the be-all and end-all
in determining the voice of the Almighty (or the "Light of the
Christ Within," if one prefers pseudo-Christian-speak).
Of course, at this point the modern mind cries out, "Intellectual
slavery! Thought control!"--a charge amusing to a tradition
that has had to reassert the reality and dignity of human free will
against those, Protestant and secular, who flatly deny it. Such a
charge rests upon the false assumption that the Church tyrannically
opposes all acts of private judgment, which is nonsense. In reality,
of course, the Church has abundant room for creative thinkers. What
the Church opposes is the notion that individuals have the right to
define and declare the nature and content of a revelation which was
vouchsafed, not to them alone, but to the Church as a corporate whole,
under the guidance of the apostles and those whom the apostles appointed
as successors. Many Protestants, when they are arguing against the
Church, regard this notion of submission to an interpretive authority
as alien to freedom, yet they understand such submission perfectly
well when a secularist makes the same complaint against submission
to Christian Scripture.
"Doesn't it limit me to confine myself to the teachings of one
book?" asks the secularist. "On the contrary," says
the Protestant apologist, "Scripture speaks truth with authority,
not authoritarianism, and therefore is freeing, not constraining.
True freedom is found, not in thinking and doing whatever you like,
but in submitting yourself to the truth." Catholics agree with
this wholeheartedly. We hold, like our Protestant brothers and sisters,
that the act of submission to truth will not constrict and crush,
but will free and train us to walk in the glorious liberty of the
children of God. The only difference is that the authoritative bearer
of truth, say Catholics, is first the Church and, dependent on that
Church, the Bible which the Church produced. That is because, as Scripture
itself says, the Church is "the pillar and foundation of the
truth" (1 Tim. 3:15).
To deny this need for submission to the Church is not to achieve freedom
but to destroy for ourselves the only pillar and foundation of the
truth Christ has given us. I am persuaded that Mormonism, Sweden borgianism,
Shirley MacLaine-ism, freedom-of-choice-ism, and all the other fragmented
isms and rhetoric of the Imperial Autonomous Self, whether
religious or secular, are nothing other than what happens when private
judgment is not subject to the apostolic authority of the Church to
bind and loose and declare what is and is not the content of the faith.
Only by submission to the pillar and foundation God has ordained can
we know the truth--and the truth shall make us free.
Which brings us back to the pickle my pal Hal faced. His Protestantism
must, like all Protestantism, deny that pillar and foundation in order
to exist. Yet it is impossible to see how he can simultaneously do
this and kvetch at Mormonism for exercising the same Protestant tenet
of private judgment with more vigor than he himself does. The crowning
irony is that the doctrine that teaches that public revelation closed
with the apostles is found nowhere in Scripture and is therefore itself
a mere Catholic Tradition which ought not to be binding on the faithful
by Protestant standards, according to which it is a topic open to
speculation, but one which no Christian has the right to use as grounds
for a heresy charge since Scripture, that "sole rule of faith,"
is silent on the matter.
And that's not all folks. Consider polygamy. The Mormon case for it
is rather strong, as the great Puritan John Milton would have agreed,
while the Protestant case against it, apart from acknowledging Catholic
Tradition as revelatory, is virtually invisible.
Or consider the canon of Scripture. It too is unsupported by appeal
to Scripture alone, a fact not lost on scholars such as those of the
Jesus Seminar, who lately have been asserting the need to delete and
add books in Scripture in order to please their Mighty Universal and
All-Knowing Brains.
Once assert the right of private judgment of revelation over the apostolic
power of the Church to define Christian belief and you are, in the
long run, giving carte blanche to Joseph Smith, the
Jesus Seminar, and Joe Blow to call whatever suits them "revelation."
In the absence of a clear scriptural witness, what right have sola
scriptura Protestants to say to the self-appointed apostle besides,
"Who are we to say that public revelation is over? That is a
mere doctrine of men, unsubstantiated by Scripture. Perhaps your revelation
is something new from the Lord."
What Hal will decide to do about this contradiction is more than I
can say. What I did, after considerable thought and prayer, was reunite
with and submit myself to the ancient, apostolic Church in conscious
union with Peter. The Catholic reply to all this tumult in Protestant
and secular culture is neither iron-fisted authoritarianism nor the
chaos of private judgment. The Church holds that, by the grace of
Christ, it is "through the Church the manifold wisdom of God
should be made known" (Eph. 3:10) since God the Incarnate Son
handed revelation on, not by writing a book, but by choosing human
beings called apostles to preserve his gospel. To these apostles he
granted nothing less than the power to teach authoritatively in his
name and assured them "He who listens to you listens to me"
(Luke 10:16). Part of this authoritative teaching is preserved in
Scripture, part of it is preserved by "word of mouth" (2
Thess. 2:15). All is conserved by the interpretive authority of the
bishops who were apostolically empowered to rebuke false teaching
(1 Tim. 1:3), to "guard the good deposit" that was entrusted
to them (2Tim. 1:14), and to appoint others to do the same (Titus
1:5) in an unbroken succession down to the present time. Thus it is
that God has not left us orphans. He has given us himself as our Father
and the Church as our Mother. He has given us not dictators, but truth.
He has made us free to know and do, not whatever we happen to like,
but what is true and right. He has called us to be not autonomous
gods, but children obedient to the teaching of our Father and Mother.
Trusting then in our Lord and in the pillar and foundation which he
established, I have found not the scattered stones of a building begun
yet never finished, but the house of the Lord, built upon the rock
who is Peter and made of living stones. It has endured 2,000 years,
the home of both freedom and sanity, wise judgment and deep mercy,
help of sinners and foe of sin. May Hal and all those who love truth
see how God has marvelously built a temple of truth and love in our
man-made wilderness of confusion. Though the storm rages and every
wind of doctrine blows against it, still that house will not fall.
Mark P. Shea freelances from Washington State.
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