One of the things I have always found frustrating in discussions with Roman Catholics is that the conversation almost immediately gets shoved into the same old hallway.
Where is sola Scriptura in the Bible? Who gave you the canon? Who has the authority to interpret Scripture? If Protestants interpret the Bible for themselves, doesn’t every Protestant become his own pope?
Those are legitimate questions. I do not mind them. In fact, I think Protestants sometimes answer them far too quickly.
But I want to come through another door.
For the sake of argument, I am willing to grant quite a bit.
(I’m a giver.)
Grant apostolic succession. Grant bishops. Grant councils. Grant an authoritative teaching office in the Church. Grant that Christ did not intend Christianity to consist of millions of isolated individuals sitting alone with their Bibles reinventing Christianity every morning.
Fine.
My question is much more basic:
What exactly does infallibility add to this?
Because the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the Catholic doctrine of infallibility is being asked to carry an epistemological weight that it cannot possibly bear.
Here are ten questions that are not often asked. But since I have already granted so much, here we go—straight into the fourth quarter.
1. What Exactly Is Being Passed Down?
Start with apostolic succession.
A bishop ordains another bishop, who ordains another bishop, and this succession continues through the centuries.
Fine. I can understand the succession of an office. I can even understand the transmission of ecclesiastical authority.
But what else is being transmitted?
There is not some theological database downloaded from one bishop into the next. Nobody lays hands on the new bishop and suddenly he possesses two thousand years of perfectly preserved apostolic information.
So what exactly accompanies the office?
Eventually Roman Catholicism needs more than authority. It needs a supernatural protection from error under certain circumstances. Somewhere along the line, the succession of office must also include a charism whereby the Church can make statements that cannot possibly be wrong.
That is an enormous claim.
And I want to know where that part of apostolic succession comes from.
It is one thing to say, “The apostles appointed leaders, and those leaders appointed other leaders.”
It is another thing entirely to say, “And attached to this succession is a divinely guaranteed ability to make irreformable theological judgments.”
Those are not the same claim.
2. At Some Point, Does This Not Become Prophetic?
Catholics do not normally want to call this prophecy. I understand why.
They distinguish inspiration from infallibility. They distinguish new revelation from the Church’s authoritative interpretation of revelation already given.
Fine. Let’s give that a go.
First, I am not sure those distinctions solve the practical problem.
If a pope or council can speak concerning God and doctrine in such a way that the conclusion cannot be false, then functionally we are getting awfully close to prophetic authority.
You are speaking for God with divine protection from error.
Call it whatever you want.
And prophecy did not always consist of revealing information nobody had ever heard before. Much of the New Testament is inspired interpretation of previous revelation. Romans spends enormous amounts of time interpreting Abraham. Hebrews interprets the Old Testament priesthood, sacrifices, covenant, tabernacle, and promises.
Interpretation can itself carry prophetic authority.
So if the Church possesses something comparable—not inspiration, perhaps, but an ability to pronounce a theological conclusion that God himself guarantees cannot be false—I want to know how that authority was authenticated.
The Old Testament gives tests for prophets. A prophet cannot simply walk into town saying, “Trust me. God protects me from error.”
That claim needs divine authentication.
Why would an infallible teaching office require less?
3. Who Tells Us When Infallibility Has Happened?
Then we have another problem. Suppose I grant the charism. How does it work? When does it activate? What conditions have to be present? Which statements qualify? When exactly is the pope speaking ex cathedra? What happens when an older statement and a newer one appear to be pulling in different directions?
You immediately need another layer of interpretation merely to identify the supposedly infallible material.
And then I have to ask the question that keeps bothering me:
Who infallibly told us how infallibility works?
If fallible Christians determined the conditions under which an infallible statement occurs, then our knowledge that the statement is infallible is itself fallible.
If the infallible Church gave us the infallible rules for recognizing its own infallibility, then the system begins feeding itself.
The Church is infallible because the Church has authoritatively told us when the Church is infallible.
I am not saying circularity automatically makes a worldview false. Every ultimate authority eventually encounters some form of self-reference.
I am saying this matters enormously when the system is being sold as the answer to my pitiful Protestant uncertainty.
4. What Makes a Council the Kind of Council That Cannot Be Wrong?
This deserves a question of its own.
Catholicism recognizes twenty-one ecumenical councils. Okay. Granted.
But how did we get that list?
The history of the early councils is messy. Councils competed with councils. Bishops gathered, voted, condemned one another, restored one another, appealed to emperors, reversed earlier decisions, and argued over which gathering actually represented the faith of the Church.
So what exactly makes one council a council that God has touched, blessed, and protected from error, while another gathering of bishops is simply wrong?
Number of bishops? Representation? Papal approval? Reception by the Church? Orthodoxy according to previous doctrine? Adherence to the Vincentian Canon—“always, everywhere, and by all”? Some combination of these?
Whatever the answer is, I still have to identify those criteria and apply them historically.
And again the same question comes back: How do I know, without already assuming the Catholic system, which council possesses this extraordinary divine protection?
Apostolic succession by itself does not solve this. Bishops with apostolic succession have disagreed with other bishops with apostolic succession.
So somewhere we need another criterion for knowing when the successors of the apostles have crossed the line from “authoritative bishops deliberating” to “God will not permit this conclusion to be false.”
I want to know where that line came from.
5. If Infallibility Is So Necessary, Why Is It Used So Rarely?
This may be one of the strangest things to me. I have repeatedly heard Catholic apologists argue that Christianity needs an infallible teaching authority.
Without it, doctrinal chaos. Without it, endless interpretation. Without it, no final court of appeal.
Okay. Then where has it been?
For something supposedly indispensable to the Christian faith, the strongest form of infallibility gets used remarkably little. Even with twenty-one ecumenical councils spread over almost two thousand years, nobody simply hands you the complete transcripts and says, “Every sentence here is infallible.”
Far from it. You have to distinguish dogmatic definitions from disciplinary decisions, theological explanations, historical judgments, procedural statements, and everything else surrounding the council.
Then there is papal infallibility. Ask Catholics how many times a pope has unquestionably exercised it and you will usually get an extraordinarily small number.
And that makes me ask a very practical question: If the Church absolutely requires infallibility to survive, how did it manage to spend most of its history barely using it?
Apparently ordinary authority does an awful lot of work.
6. And When It Is Used—Mary?
Then it gets stranger.
The clearest examples Catholics ordinarily give for papal infallibility concern Mary: the Immaculate Conception and the bodily Assumption.
Mary.
I do not mean that disrespectfully. I believe Mary is blessed among women and one of the great figures in redemptive history. But think about this.
You have this extraordinary supernatural gift whereby God prevents the supreme teaching authority of the Church from making an error. And what are some of its clearest exercises?
Mary’s conception and the circumstances surrounding the end of her earthly life.
Meanwhile, Christians have fought for centuries over predestination. Does God look down the corridors of time and elect people because he foresees their faith, or does his election bring about their faith?
Silence.
Six literal creation days? An ancient earth? Some other interpretation? No infallible settlement.
The precise nature of hell? No final answer eliminating the dispute.
Continuation of miraculous gifts? No definitive answer ending that argument.
Major questions of biblical interpretation continue to be debated among Catholics themselves.
I realize the Catholic answer is going to be that the Church does not define things according to what Michael Patton happens to think is interesting or important. Fair enough. But that misses my question.
If infallibility is necessary because Christians need final answers, its actual deployment—a great word, by the way, now that my sons are in the Air Force—seems bizarrely disconnected from the questions for which final answers would be most useful.
7. Okay, Now How Do I Access It?
This may be the biggest issue for me.
Suppose I convert to Roman Catholicism tomorrow. I now possess an infallible Church.
Wonderful.
I have a theological question Monday morning. Where do I go?
My priest is not infallible. My bishop is not infallible. My favorite Catholic theologian (Trent Horn) is not infallible. A cardinal is not infallible. I cannot call the pope.
And even if the pope happened to answer my FaceTime call while eating breakfast and gave me his opinion, his answer would not suddenly become an ex cathedra definition.
So where exactly is this infallibility that I supposedly needed so badly?
Practically speaking, I have documents. Lots and lots of documents.
Council documents. Papal documents. Catechisms. Canon law. Scripture. Creeds. The Fathers. Theologians explaining the theologians who explained the councils that interpreted the Scriptures.
Then I have to read them and interpret them.
Fallibly.
8. Has Catholicism Actually Escaped the Private-Interpretation Problem?
This is where the standard criticism of Protestantism begins to lose some of its force for me. The Protestant has an infallible Bible and interprets it fallibly.
Agreed. Welcome to being human.
But what does the Catholic have? He has an infallible Bible, plus councils, plus papal statements, plus magisterial documents, all of which must be weighed according to different levels of authority. And then he interprets them fallibly.
Catholics disagree with each other about what councils mean. They disagree about what popes mean, how authoritative particular statements are, how Vatican II relates to earlier Catholic teaching, and what constitutes legitimate doctrinal development.
Some of the most fiercely contested theological arguments I have ever watched have been Catholics arguing with other Catholics about what Catholicism actually teaches.
That does not embarrass me. It is exactly what I expect finite people to do.
But then stop telling me that infallibility solved the Protestant problem.
It did not eliminate the interpretive problem.
It moved it and multiplied the documents.
9. Why Does Authority Require Infallibility?
This may be the assumption underneath everything that I simply cannot grant.
Why does authority require infallibility?
My pastor has authority in my life. He can be wrong. My parents had authority over me. They could be wrong. Government possesses legitimate authority, and it is wrong with astonishing regularity. A professor can have genuine authority to teach a subject without possessing divine immunity from error.
Authority and infallibility are not synonyms.
I am perfectly willing to submit myself to church authority while recognizing that the people exercising that authority remain finite and fallible. In fact, that is precisely why semper reformanda matters.
The Church is always reforming because the Church can be wrong. Not about everything. Not constantly. Not so radically that Christianity disappears every Tuesday afternoon.
But wrong.
And therefore we return again and again to that which God has revealed. We listen to the Fathers. We listen to councils. We listen to our pastors. We listen to the accumulated wisdom of two thousand years of Christianity.
We should be extraordinarily hesitant to depart from the historic consensus of the Church.
But none of that requires pretending that God has given us a theological machine whose gears can never slip.
10. Maybe God Never Promised Us This Kind of Certitude
And this is where I think the issue gets deeper than Catholicism versus Protestantism.
Maybe the problem is our demand for certainty. Not confidence. Certainty. The kind of epistemological security that says there must ultimately be some place where I can stand and know that error is impossible.
That has a strangely Cartesian endpoint to it.
I am not claiming Roman Catholic theology came from Descartes. Obviously much of it predates him. I am talking about the shape of the epistemological demand. Somewhere there must be a place where doubt stops because error has become impossible.
Why?
Who told us Christianity was going to give us that?
Maybe God gave us enough. Maybe he gave us revelation, Scripture, apostles, teachers, pastors, councils, tradition, reason, history, and the Holy Spirit—and still left some doors cracked open.
Maybe mystery is not a defect in the system. Maybe it is baked into the cake.
I believe the canon of Scripture is complete. But I cannot show you a verse where God says, “On this date the canon is now metaphysically closed and I shall never speak canonical revelation again.”
As a matter of providential history, revelation stopped.
Could God speak tomorrow if he wanted to? Of course he could. He is God.
I trust what he has done without demanding that he give me an infallible explanation for every unanswered question surrounding what he has done.
“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us…”
Deuteronomy 29:29
Maybe that is enough.
The Question I Cannot Get Away From
So my problem with Roman Catholic infallibility is not simply that I cannot find a prooftext for it.
My questions are these:
- What exactly is transmitted in apostolic succession?
- If the Church can speak without possibility of error, how is that different functionally from prophetic authority, and how is it authenticated?
- Who infallibly tells us when infallibility has actually been exercised?
- What makes one council a true ecumenical council protected from error while another gathering of bishops is not?
- If infallibility is indispensable, why is it used so rarely?
- Why are its clearest papal exercises concerned with relatively peripheral Marian doctrines while enormous disputes remain unresolved?
- How does an ordinary Christian actually access this infallibility when he needs an answer?
- If Catholics still have to interpret councils, popes, and magisterial documents fallibly, has the private-interpretation problem really been solved?
- Why must genuine ecclesial authority be infallible in the first place?
- Did God ever promise us the kind of theological certitude this entire structure seems designed to provide?
Perhaps Rome really does possess an infallible teaching charism.
But if the ordinary Christian still has to study, reason, trust authorities, weigh evidence, interpret texts, endure disagreement, and sometimes finally say, “I do not know,” then I begin to wonder whether the machine was built to solve a problem God never promised to solve.
Maybe we were supposed to trust him.
Maybe we were supposed to do the best we can with what he has revealed.
Maybe our conclusions can be genuinely authoritative without being infallible.
Maybe the secret things really do belong to the Lord, and maybe that is not always easy for us to live with.
Maybe there are some doors God intends to leave cracked open until we see him face-to-face.
Oh, one more. Put this one in your pipe:
Maybe even after we see him face-to-face, he will leave some things unresolved.
After all, such is the plight of being finite.
Such is the plight of not being omniscient.
