‘But Catholics Contradict Themselves, Too’

Catholicism’s claim of having a historically continuous teaching authority going back to the apostles is an asset when it comes to explaining things like our knowledge of the canon of Scripture. But some Protestants say this teaching authority is actually a liability for Catholics, because it provides numerous opportunities to falsify Catholicism. Jerry Walls, for example, says Catholic belief about the papacy having an apostolic origin grievously contradicts the historical record. He writes,

Roman apologists are reminiscent of young-earth creationists who continue to assert that the earth is only 10,000 years old in the face of the massive scientific evidence that it is much older, evidence which is acknowledged by leading Christian physicists and cosmologists, as well as other scientists. Popular apologists who continue to assert traditional papal history in the face of the best scholarship of their own church are doing the same sort of thing (254).

Catholicism may seem to have excellent explanatory power, say these Protestants, but scholarship shows that Catholic teaching over the past 2,000 years contradicts itself or the historical record. And since the Church claims to have infallible teaching authority, it follows that Catholicism is false because infallible authorities can’t be in error or contradict themselves.

Fortunately, Catholics have ample resources when it comes to answering this kind of argument—because atheists have been lobbing similar objections at Christianity for centuries.

One common tactic among atheists is to say that the Bible can’t be an infallible source of revelation because it is riddled with contradictions, and so Christianity is false.

The Church teaches that, when it comes to Sacred Scripture, “everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit” (Dei Verbum 11). Notice that the word asserted is used instead of written. Just because something is written in Scripture, it doesn’t mean the Holy Spirit is asserting that word or sentence as a truth of divine revelation.

For example, in Genesis 1:6, God says, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” The word firmament comes from a Hebrew word that means “to be firmly hammered,” and this “firmament” was thought to be a solid dome that held up waters above the earth. This is scientifically incorrect, of course, but it doesn’t represent an error in Scripture because the author of Genesis wasn’t trying to assert a geographical or cosmological truth.

Instead, the first two chapters of Genesis assert theological truths about God creating the world from nothing and making man in his image (which is also an anthropological truth). The language used to express these truths can reflect a variety of styles and literary approaches, and the Church acknowledges this. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, said the “firmament” could refer to many kinds of celestial bodies and that “Moses was speaking to ignorant people, and that out of condescension to their weakness he put before them only such things as are apparent to sense” (Summa Theologiae1.68.3).

Most Protestants understand this, too. Jerry Walls, for example, says that Genesis does not teach a literal, six-day creation that occurred thousands of years ago because that interpretation contradicts “massive scientific evidence.” Instead of being in error, the Bible must be asserting some other truth about God creating the world. But then Walls claims that Catholicism must be in error because the First Vatican Council teaches something about the papacy that seems to contradict the historical record:

It was known in every age that the holy and most blessed Peter, prince and head of the apostles, the pillar of faith and the foundation of the Catholic Church, received the keys of the kingdom from our lord Jesus Christ, the Savior and redeemer of the human race, and that to this day and forever he lives and presides and exercises judgment in his successors the bishops of the holy Roman see, which he founded and consecrated with his blood (Pastor Aeternus 2).

This statement is false, say Walls and some other Protestant apologists, because early Christian witnesses disagree about the extent of the papal office. James White says, “Remember that Vatican I tells us that the Catholic Church has always [emphasis in the original] understood these passages, specifically Matthew 16 and John 21, in the way presented by Rome today. This is manifestly untrue” (119). Moreover, these critics point out that the early writings of the Apostolic Fathers don’t clearly articulate the grand claims of Vatican I in their description of the bishop of Rome.

But Protestants should give this statement in Vatican I the same flexibility they give to statements in Scripture that atheists claim are erroneous.

For example, Mark says John baptized “all the country of Judea, and all the people of Jerusalem” (1:5) even though John didn’t baptize every resident of Jerusalem. When Jesus said the mustard seed is “the smallest of all the seeds on earth” (Mark 4:31), he was wrong from a strictly agricultural perspective, since there are smaller seeds. But it is a small seed, probably one of the smallest that local farmers knew about in the area. That means Jesus used an illustration that accommodated their limited knowledge and did not assert an erroneous scientific truth.

Similarly, the statement from Vatican I that these facts about the papacy were “known in every age” should be interpreted to refer to the knowledge of the papacy having an apostolic origin. This quotation from Vatican I comes from a representative (called a legate) of Pope Celestine I named Philip, who uttered it at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The fathers of Vatican I considered it fitting to include Philip’s declaration in their decree defining papal infallibility, since it is a very early witness to the doctrine of the papacy, even if the statement is not a strictly literal description of the knowledge of the papacy among every author in Church history.

This truth about the papacy was known during the time of the Church Fathers, even if it was not explicitly described in the earliest Fathers. To give a similar example, Protestants might say that the doctrine of the Trinity was known “in every age of Church history” even though the term was not used until the end of the second century, and the doctrine was not clearly articulated until the beginning of the third century. (The term is first used in Theophilus of Antioch’s To Autolycus, Book II. An early defense and explanation can be found in Tertullian’s Against Praxeas.) Or they might say that true Christians “always understood and followed the Bible” even though the first unambiguous witness to the canon of Scripture comes from the fourth century.

We should also consider that, unlike Sacred Scripture (all assertions of which are inerrant), statements of Church teaching are guaranteed to be free from error only when they involve infallible declarations of Christian truth. This happens in the solemn definitions of an ecumenical council, or when the pope speaks ex cathedra. But the content of most magisterial statements in the Church’s history are not such infallible declarations.

This quotation from Vatican I about knowledge of Peter’s successors being known “in every age” is not an infallible teaching. The only decree from that council that is infallible is the part that defines the conditions under which the pope is infallible. It begins by saying, “We teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that . . .” The subsequent definition of papal infallibility does not make any historical claims about the papacy, and the prior language about the history of the papacy is not claimed to be inerrant (see Donum Veritatis 24). And if it is fair for Protestants to distinguish what is written in Scripture from what is infallibly asserted in Scripture, then it is also fair for Catholics to make a similar distinction in the Church’s magisterial teachings.