“Saint Thomas Aquinas was a man of the Church. When he searched through the writings of the Church Fathers, it was not to bolster his own theories or to advance his own ideas. He wanted instead to know what the Church believed and to teach it to the next generation. Because of this, he paid special attention to the councils of the Church, where the heart of Christian reflection is brought to fruition. As we begin our examination of the luminaries that guided this man of the Church, then, we turn to these councils and their teaching.
The first seven ecumenical councils were held in the Eastern, Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire from the fourth to the eighth centuries. These councils—Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople II and III, and Nicaea II—were especially concerned with teaching about Christ: He is one person who is fully God and fully man. His divinity and humanity remain distinct, but his personhood one. Unfortunately, because of a difference in culture and language, these councils were somewhat remote from the goings on in the West. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Latin theologians worked to conserve the teaching elaborated at the councils, but without direct access to the texts of the councils.
By the time St. Thomas came around, confusion had arisen regarding the personhood of Christ. The majority of theologians correctly taught that the Son of God assumed human nature, and was thus one person with two natures. There was never any merely human Jesus who was later assumed by God. Some theologians, however, “conceded the one person of Christ, but posited two hypostases or two supposits, saying that a certain man, composed of body and soul, from the beginning of his conception was assumed by the word of God” (ST III, q. 2, a. 6). This was called the Homo Assumptus theory. Although it was not popular, theologians who did not hold it generally thought it to be an acceptable Catholic position.
But Thomas did his homework. In the 1260s, while teaching at Orvieto near the Papal Court, he had the opportunity to study the texts of the early ecumenical councils. In these texts, he read about the error of Nestorius, who taught that Christ subsisted separately as human and divine. The Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned him, teaching that “If anyone does not confess that by God the Father the Word was united to the flesh according to subsistence, and that Christ is one with his flesh, namely the same God and man, let him be anathema.” The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 clarified that, “If anyone tries to introduce into the mystery of Christ two subsistences or two persons, let such be anathema” (cited in ST III, q. 2, a. 3). Nestorius’s teaching was excluded because it failed to safeguard the unity of Christ’s person.
Several years later, when Thomas took up the Homo Assumptus theory in the Summa Theologiae, he had these texts ready in mind. With the help of Boethius, a sixth-century Western Christian thinker, Thomas clarified that there can be no meaningful difference between the subsistence, hypostasis, supposit, and person. Thus, to say that there are two of any of these in Christ falls into the error of Nestorius condemned at Ephesus. Thomas was then able, unlike his contemporaries, to condemn the Homo Assumptus theory as heretical, because “it is the same to posit two hypostases or two supposits in Christ, as to posit two persons” (ST III, q. 2, a. 6). This theory was not just a bad theory. It was a condemned theory that no Catholic could hold.
Nestorianism has consequences. It would mean that Mary was the mother of Christ’s humanity, but not the Mother of God, and that the person who died on the cross was not the Son of God, but merely a man conjoined to Him. The heresy is dangerous, and that is why the early councils condemned it. The heresy could have seen a resurgence in the West if it were not for Thomas’s careful integration of sources both Eastern and Western. We who inherit Thomas’ teaching do well to attend both to his masterful synthesis and to his attention to the sources at the heart of the Church.”
-by Fr. Samuel Keyes, raised Baptist in Mississippi, Fr. Samuel Keyes became an Anglican/Episcopalian after college. He served parishes in Massachusetts and Alabama, and then Saint James School in Maryland, before being received into the Catholic Church in 2019 and ordained in 2020–21.
Fr. Keyes is currently a professor of theology at JPCatholic and parochial administrator of St. Augustine of Canterbury, an ordinariate community in San Diego County. He is married to Gretchen with five kids.
“Whether or not you noticed the collect for today’s Mass, let me point it out:
May your grace, O Lord, we pray, at all times go before us and follow after and make us always determined to carry out good works.
It’s a clear, pithy prayer that in a single sentence summarizes God’s saving economy: grace goes before our actions, assists our actions, and follows our actions. One wonders if a serious meditation on this collect—which has been part of the Roman Rite for very many centuries—would have prevented some conflict in the Reformation era among those fretting over the supposed opposition of “grace” and “works.” Those of us raised in certain quarters perk up our ears at any mention of “works” as being good. Yet the collect places all such works well within the sphere of God’s gracious providence. In the Divine Worship missal for the Anglican Ordinariate, we pray at every Mass that we should do “in all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.”
I point all this out, in part, because when I first glanced at the propers and readings for this Sunday, I was struck right away by the “good works” of the collect and the stories of grace and gratitude we hear in 2 Kings and Luke: the stories of Naaman (2 Kgs 5:14-17) and the ten lepers (Lk 17:11-19). It seemed interesting that the Church would simultaneously propose to us an implicit exhortation to good works and a reminder that in holy baptism—which is of course prefigured by Naaman’s ritual washing in the Jordan—we are washed clean and elevated to the life of grace by no merit of our own. But in the end, there is no real conflict between grace and good works, mainly because all good works are fundamentally graced: before, during, after. Part of God’s gift to us is the gift to do something with what we have been given and for this work to matter.
There are, at the same time, good and bad ways to respond to the gifts of grace. In both 2 Kings and Luke, the narrative gives special attention to the gratitude of the former lepers. The Samaritan leper in Luke, the one grateful man out of the ten, is a foreigner like Naaman the Syrian. So, a foreigner shows more gratitude than the people who claim this power as their birthright. Why is that?
There’s a very immediate connection we should make with the expansion of the covenant to the Gentiles through Christ. Naaman and the Samaritan are also both figures of Cornelius the centurion, who in Acts 10 receives—with awe and gratitude—the gifts of the Spirit in a way that is at first shocking and even confusing to the Jewish disciples. But we can also wonder if Jesus means to suggest here something of the default Jewish attitude towards divine grace. However final and permanent God’s promises were to the people of Israel, none of those promises translate grace into something owed. It seems almost as if the nine men in Luke think of their healing much in the way that so many modern Catholics think of the sacraments: obviously I deserve this; of course God is providing this for me; no need to make a big deal out of it.
Of course there is a real element of truth in that attitude: the sacraments are a given, in a certain sense. God has given them to us and he is not going to take them back. He is not going to send an angel from heaven and declare to the pope, “No more baptisms, we’re full up!” But their givenness, their enduring reality, does not mean that we should take them for granted any more than the people of Israel should have taken their ethnic heritage as a guarantee that they were full participants in God’s saving covenant.
That kind of entitlement really can become a “works righteousness,” wherein life becomes an accounting game I play with God. Let’s see: did first Friday devotions (check), said the rosary every day this week (check), asked for a number of Masses to be said (check) . . . so why hasn’t God given me what I want? Or, as someone asked me not that long ago, “Where did all those graces go?” And my response (internal, at least, because I’m not quite that mean) is: are we aiming for the beatific vision, or are we aiming to win some kind of cosmic video game?
There is the opposite approach, (maybe) less common among Catholics, but still a real danger, where we take for granted not the system of grace but the whole generic enterprise. This is antinomianism, the idea that what I do doesn’t matter in the least because God loves me, and He understands, and my heart is in the right place, etc.
I wonder if the principal remedy against these two opposing vices is the gratitude and thanksgiving that we see in the Samaritan and in Naaman. Because here’s the thing: on one level we might say that this healing is nothing extraordinary. It’s just what the Lord does; it’s in his nature, so to speak. But that is not the same thing as saying that I deserve it, or that I should act like it’s somehow par for the course.
It’s no coincidence that the central act of the Church for the last two millennia has been an act of thanksgiving, of Eucharist. We talk about this as the source and the summit, as the sacrament of sacraments, because it is the place where Christ Himself is present in His Church. But it is also where the Church does the thing that most characteristically makes her the Church: she gives thanks. She says, “Lord I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.”
Our calling as Christians, however else we might imagine it, is first to be grateful, to give thanks. The Lord has put away our sins, he has called us to his service, he has given us the power to follow him in this world. Thanks be to God. Everything else follows that.”
“When it comes to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (Latin, “scripture alone”), Catholics have some popular rejoinders. One of the most popular is captured in the phrase, “Where’s that in the Bible?”
The idea here is this: for a Protestant, Scripture alone serves as the infallible source for Christian belief (the doctrine of sola scriptura). Anything not found within the confines of the written word should not be accepted as Christian doctrine. But this principle is self-defeating: since the belief of sola scriptura itself is not found within the confines of the written word, a Protestant must not accept it as a Christian doctrine. To do so would be to violate the principle of sola scriptura.
So the self-defeating nature of the argument makes it a slam dunk, right? Not quite.
A Protestant could counter and say, “Wait a minute! The Bible doesn’t have to explicitly say, ‘The Bible alone is our infallible source for Christian, and we shouldn’t accept as Christian doctrine things that aren’t in the Bible.’ It can be inferred from what’s present in the text.”
Take, for example, St. Paul’s instruction for us to hold fast to the traditions handed down by both word and written epistle (2 Thess. 2:15). Protestant apologists Geisler and MacKenzie concede that the apostolic traditions spoken of by Paul were binding for the first-century Christians because the apostles were the only ones who had apostolic authority. But since they’re all dead, so they argue, the only apostolic authority we have is the inspired record of their teaching. From this, Geisler and MacKenzie infer that the oral tradition-Scripture paradigm changed when the last apostle died, thereby leaving only the inspired apostolic writings (i.e., Scripture) for us to use as our infallible guide for Christian belief and practice.
Furthermore, some might say the Catholic idea that these traditions are always binding is an inference that’s not supported by the text. There’s nothing in the text itself, it might be argued, that says Christians were always to depend on those oral traditions. Without such evidence, it would seem more reasonable to think we’re left with only the inspired apostolic writings to be our infallible guide.
How might we meet this Protestant rejoinders?
Let’s take the first target given to us by Geisler and MacKenzie. It is problematic on two fronts.
First, it’s unclear what the implication is. Does the claim that there is no more apostolic authority imply that no more revelation can be given, whether in oral or written form? If that’s the case, then we agree as Catholics. Sacred Tradition for Catholics does not entail the belief that public revelation was given after the time of the apostles. The Catholic Church teaches, along with Protestants, that public revelation ceased with the death of the last apostle.
Now, if the implication is that there is no more apostolic authority to preserve what the apostles taught, then we have a problem, since the Bible and extra-biblical Christian sources make it clear that one way the Holy Spirit preserved the apostolic traditions was by leading the apostles to appoint men to succeed them in their apostolic ministry, and they charged such men to preserve what the apostles had taught. For example, before his death, Paul made arrangements for the Apostolic Tradition to be passed on in the post-Apostolic Age. He tells Timothy: “What you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2).
We also have evidence from extra-biblical Christian sources that the apostles appointed men to succeed them for the sake of preserving what they taught. Clement of Rome’s first-century letter to the Corinthians (c. A.D. 70) is one example. He writes in chapter 44,
Our apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be strife on account of the office of the episcopate. For this reason, therefore, inasmuch as they had obtained a perfect foreknowledge of this, they appointed those [ministers] already mentioned [bishops—at chapter 42], and afterwards gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry.
Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop of the late second century, affirms that the apostolic traditions were preserved in this line of succession from the apostles. Here’s what he writes in his classic work Against Heresies:
It is within the power of all, therefore, in every church, who may wish to see the truth, to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world; and we are in a position to reckon up those who were by the apostles instituted bishops in the churches, and [to demonstrate] the succession of these men to our own times; those who neither taught nor knew of anything like what these [heretics] rave about (III:3:1).
For Irenaeus, the truth of Apostolic Tradition is preserved in the succession of bishops from the apostles. This is what we find in Scripture.
For these reasons, we can reject Geisler’s and MacKenzie’s justification for the claim that the oral tradition-Scripture paradigm shifted once the apostles died off. The apostolic authority didn’t die with the apostles. It continued in the men they chose to succeed them, called bishops.
What about the second target given above: that there’s nothing in Paul’s affirmation of first-century Christians depending on oral traditions to say they would always be dependent on it?
The problem here is that the logic would equally apply to the written traditions, since Paul speaks of the oral and written traditions together as that which the Thessalonians need to maintain and stand firm in. If a Protestant thinks the lack of an explicit exhortation to always stand firm in the oral traditions favors the oral tradition-Scripture paradigm shift, then he must be willing to say Christians don’t always have to depend on the written traditions (Scripture), since Paul says nothing in 2 Thessalonians 2:15 about Christians always depending on them. Perpetual dependence on the written traditions has to be inferred. And if we can do that, then we can reasonably make the same kind of inference for the oral traditions.
There’s one last thing to say in response to the overall Protestant rejoinder: if some sola scriptura Protestants are open to doctrines being validly implied but not explicitly stated in Scripture, then they’ve got to be at least open to accepting all kinds of Catholic doctrines (e.g., Mary’s bodily assumption, Mary’s immaculate conception). Or at least, when they challenge doctrines like the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception, they have to jettison arguments whose foundation is anything like “it’s not in the Bible.”
“We all know about the Protestant Reformation. But did you know that there were Protestants who came before the Protestants?
The proto-Protestants were heretics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries whose teachings and actions laid the groundwork for Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other sixteenth-century Reformers. They advocated the later bedrock Protestant principle of sola scriptura, or the belief that the only authoritative source of God’s divine revelation is Sacred Scripture. These proto-Protestants also called for the reform of Church abuses and advanced various heretical opinions in an effort to undermine the Church. The two main proto-Protestants were John Wycliffe (1324-1384) and Jan Hus (1369-1415).
John Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire, England and studied at Oxford, where he was recognized as a brilliant student. He became a professor of philosophy and theology at his alma mater. Wycliffe was a pure academic—an intellectual man who did not motivate or lead. He provided the ideas and let others perform the actions.
At Oxford, Wycliffe advocated several heretical teachings in lectures and books. In terms of fundamental Catholic doctrines, he attacked the eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation. In his book On the Eucharist, he denied the occurrence of transubstantiation and advocated that, instead, the bread and wine remain present after the prayer of consecration. He opined that the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is not a real flesh-and-blood presence, but is symbolic. Wycliffe also condemned the veneration of the saints, indulgences, and prayers for the dead.
Heresy is extremely difficult to eradicate, and despite the condemnation of the Church, it can persist and reappear in later centuries. In addition to the above, Wycliffe proved the resiliency of heresy by advocating Donatism, originally a fourth-century heresy that advocated that the validity of a sacrament relies on the worthiness of the minister. According to the Donatists—and to Wycliffe—bishops or priests in a state of mortal sin cannot effect the sacraments.
Wycliffe’s original contributions to heresy mostly involved erroneous teachings concerning the Church. He defined the Church as an “invisible transcendent society” that is neither hierarchically structured nor united to the bishop of Rome, but rather is present in all the people of Christ. Moreover, he attacked the papacy and referred to the pope as “the man of sin” and “Lucifer’s member.” Wycliffe believed that the state holds supremacy over the Church and advocated for the confiscation of Church property. He also taught that the Bible is the only authoritative source of God’s divine revelation (sola scriptura). Finally, he denied the existence of free will, opining that man is completely subject to the will of God. The Church did not ignore Wycliffe’s heretical teachings; the archbishop of Canterbury censured him in 1377.
Wycliffe gained popularity because he attacked ecclesiastical abuses and exploited latent nationalist anger at the papacy in the midst of its sojourn in Avignon. Groups of Wycliffe followers, known as the poor priests and later as Lollards, traveled throughout England preaching his heresy. Two of his followers undertook a new translation of Scripture into English, which the Church condemned—not because it was in the vernacular (multiple English editions of the Bible existed well before Wycliffe; see Where We Got the Bible by Henry Graham, chapter 11, “Vernacular Scriptures Before Wycliff”), but because the translation was rife with error.
Wycliffe’s sovereign, King Richard II of England, married Princess Anne of Bohemia in 1382. As a result of the union, cultural and educational exchanges occurred between the two nations. Bohemian students came to Oxford to study, where they encountered the teachings of John Wycliffe. They brought these heretical teachings to Prague, where the priest, teacher, and popular preacher Jan Hus embraced and expounded upon them. Like Wycliffe, Hus began preaching against corruption in the Church and ecclesial abuses.
There were significant problems in the Church in Bohemia at the time. Clerical immorality was rampant, and there was widespread resentment against the Church, which owned nearly fifty percent of all land in the kingdom. These issues along with the presence of a heavy anti-German nationalist sentiment (the kingdom was part of the German-based Holy Roman Empire) produced a rich environment for reformers and heretics.
Jan Hus studied philosophy and theology at the University of Prague, where he was appointed a professor in 1398. He rose through the university administration and became rector in 1402. He was a popular and commanding preacher. Adopting most of Wycliffe’s teachings, Hus challenged Catholic doctrine on papal authority, advocated sola scriptura, and denied Sacred Tradition as an element of the Deposit of Faith. He also condemned the veneration of the saints and the granting of indulgences. Like Wycliffe, he viewed the hierarchy of the Church as ministers of Satan and denied the universal jurisdiction and primacy of the pope. Hus believed that the Church was built on the personal faith of St. Peter and that Jesus did not institute the Petrine Office.
The University of Prague condemned Wycliffe’s teachings in 1403, but Hus continued to propagate them. The archbishop of Prague excommunicated him in 1410. Violence erupted in the city, and crowds burned copies of papal bulls. Hus was forced to flee the city in 1412 and stayed in the castle of a friend, where he wrote his heretical work Treatise on the Church.
Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther would bemoan the religious indifference wrought by the movement he began:
Who among us could have foreseen how much misery, corruption, scandal, blasphemy, ingratitude, and wickedness would have resulted from it? Only see how the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants are trampling religion underfoot! I have had no greater or severer subject of assault than my preaching, when the thought arose in me: thou art the sole author of this movement.
But as we can see, Luther was not the sole author of Protestantism, nor did the errors and distortions of the Protestant Reformation start with him or his contemporaries. They had the proto-Protestants to pave the way. There really is nothing new under the sun.”
“Remember the old saying “sticks and stone may break my bones, but names will never harm me”? Today, society is more forgiving of people who throw sticks and stones than those who dare to refer to a person using the proper pronoun. Today, names have become weaponized in the ongoing revolt against reality.
How is it that calling someone by his given name or referring to him in accord with his biology suddenly became such an egregious offense? The truth is that we are living at the illogical conclusion of an error that started a long time ago. All that was needed was for our Catholic cultural momentum to fade enough to let these old errors come to the fore.
One of these errors dates back to the Middle Ages, with an English Franciscan named William of Ockham (1285-1347), better known simply as Ockham, famous for the principle of “Ockham’s razor”. Ockham was asked by his superior to defend the case of the “poor Franciscans” before the papal court in Avignon, France. These Franciscans were called “poor” because they believed that Christ renounced all worldly goods—even his kingdom and worldly dominion—and that those who truly follow his gospel must do likewise. Pope John XXII countered that such was impossible because God saw material possessions as a good. Indeed, in the Old Testament, God legislated the proper use of property and possessions.
Ockham’s solution was that God could change His mind. He could have established material possessions as a good in the Old Testament and then later decreed that the same things are evil. What matters isn’t whether a thing is intrinsically good or evil. What truly matter is God’s will, which isn’t bound by anything—even God’s nature.
Ockham’s idea was later refined and transformed into a philosophical system known as nominalism. Nominalism gets its name from the Latin word for “name,” nomen. Ockham argued that only individuals exist and that we tend to group these individuals together under a name. For example, humanity doesn’t exist outside the mind. There are only similar individuals that our minds group together, and we put the label of “humanity” on them. In the Poverty Dispute, a nominalist would argue that God didn’t call material possessions good because they are by nature good; rather, “good” was just a name that God temporarily called certain things. Then, later on, he would call them the opposite. The nature or essence of a thing—its constitution and properties—doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what God calls it.
According to Ockham’s thinking, the Incarnation becomes a kind of fiction. God taking to Himself our human nature is arbitrary because “human nature” doesn’t exist outside our mind. It is only a name. He could have become “incarnate” in stone, or wood, or even as a different species. If God calls it sufficient to atone for the sins of whole world, it is.
Nominalism comes to us today through the mediation of Protestantism, whose most famous founder, Martin Luther, was a self-admitted nominalist. Although he didn’t sign on to everything proposed by this philosophy, his theology in the main reflects nominalistic thought.
For example, according to Luther, God makes us right with Himself through a purely external means—namely, God legally calls us righteous even though we remain sinners. We’re not really made holy from the inside by God’s grace, but merely declared saved from the outside. Since faith is a driver of culture, the nominalism that permeated Luther’s theology spread through the lands where Protestantism dominated, seeping into everyday culture and cleaving people’s conception of reality into the world of faith, the soul, and the interior versus that of works, the body, and the exterior. (Ed. in Catholicism, interior and exterior are united and each is necessary, undivided; and nature is real both in form and in function, the natural law).
This habit of viewing reality took root, and centuries later served as a foundation for the modern feminist movement and the Sexual Revolution to bring nominalism’s will over nature to bear on the question of man, woman, and sexual identity. In her 1949 work The Second Sex, feminist Simone de Beauvoir previewed what would unfold. De Beauvoir sought to liberate women from male servitude by separating women from womanhood. Put bluntly, women are free only to the extent that they become like a man. Since female biology is so intimately tied to nature, feminine liberation must come by breaking (sometimes violently) those things that tie women to pregnancy and childrearing through abortion and state-run childcare.
But can a woman really become like a man? Are the words “man” and “woman” just labels, as nominalism holds? Interestingly, de Beauvoir rejected this type of nominalist solution because “it is easy for antifeminists to show that women are not men” (The Second Sex, p. 24).
That was 1949. The birth control pill, introduced in 1960, began to blur those differences by effectively disconnecting—indeed, virtually erasing—the connection between the marital act and procreation. By the time of the Sexual Revolution, the nominalist solution began to appear more plausible.
In the popular mind, once one of the most obvious distinctive differences between men and women (procreation) was erased, the only differences that seemed to remain were a few physiological features and stereotypes. What, then, is a man or a woman? They are labels that societies places on individuals with similar stereotypical traits. Get rid of the stereotypes, and what’s left?
It is the individual’s will. The interior feeling and thoughts of a person’s soul tells him whether he is male, female, or some other species. The body or biology is arbitrary, since abstractions like male and female don’t exist outside the mind. It is something we apply to similar things.
In other words, society has become like the god of nominalism, where the will is not bound by nature.
The nominalist move comes at a cost, because the definition of a word is itself an abstraction. That’s how, when experts in the field of gender studies, sexual fluidity, and other related fields are asked to give a definition as simple as “what is a man?” or “what is a woman?” . . . they are reduced to silence.”
“Henry P. Stapp is a theoretical physicist at the University of California–Berkeley who worked with some of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He does not seek to prove that the soul exists, but he does say that the existence of the soul fits within the laws of physics.
It is not true to say belief in the soul is unscientific, according to Stapp. Here the word “soul” refers to a personality independent of the brain or the rest of the human body that can survive beyond death. In his paper, “Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory With Personality Survival,” he wrote: “Strong doubts about personality survival based solely on the belief that postmortem survival is incompatible with the laws of physics are unfounded.”
He works with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—more or less the interpretation used by some of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Even Bohr and Heisenberg had some disagreements on how quantum mechanics works, and understandings of the theory since that time have also been diverse. Stapp’s paper on the Copenhagen interpretation has been influential. It was written in the 1970s and Heisenberg wrote an appendix for it.
Stapp noted of his own concepts: “There has been no hint in my previous descriptions (or conception) of this orthodox quantum mechanics of any notion of personality survival.”
Why Quantum Theory Could Hint at Life After Death
Stapp explains that the founders of quantum theory required scientists to essentially cut the world into two parts. Above the cut, classical mathematics could describe the physical processes empirically experienced. Below the cut, quantum mathematics describes a realm “which does not entail complete physical determinism.”
Of this realm below the cut, Stapp wrote: “One generally finds that the evolved state of the system below the cut cannot be matched to any conceivable classical description of the properties visible to observers.”
So how do scientists observe the invisible? They choose particular properties of the quantum system and set up apparatus to view their effects on the physical processes “above the cut.”
The key is the experimenter’s choice. When working with the quantum system, the observer’s choice has been shown to physically impact what manifests and can be observed above the cut.
Stapp cited Bohr’s analogy for this interaction between a scientist and his experiment results: “[It’s like] a blind man with a cane: when the cane is held loosely, the boundary between the person and the external world is the divide between hand and cane; but when held tightly the cane becomes part of the probing self: the person feels that he himself extends to the tip of the cane.”
The physical and mental are connected in a dynamic way. In terms of the relationship between mind and brain, it seems the observer can hold in place a chosen brain activity that would otherwise be fleeting. This is a choice similar to the choice a scientist makes when deciding which properties of the quantum system to study.
The quantum explanation of how the mind and brain can be separate or different, yet connected by the laws of physics “is a welcome revelation,” wrote Stapp. “It solves a problem that has plagued both science and philosophy for centuries—the imagined science-mandated need either to equate mind with brain, or to make the brain dynamically independent of the mind.”
Stapp said it is not contrary to the laws of physics that the personality of a dead person may attach itself to a living person, as in the case of so-called spirit possession. It wouldn’t require any basic change in orthodox theory, though it would “require a relaxing of the idea that physical and mental events occur only when paired together.”
Classical physical theory can only evade the problem, and classical physicists can only work to discredit intuition as a product of human confusion, said Stapp. Science should instead, he said, recognize “the physical effects of consciousness as a physical problem that needs to be answered in dynamical terms.”
How This Understanding Affects the Moral Fabric of Society
Furthermore, it is imperative for maintaining human morality to consider people as more than just machines of flesh and blood.
In another paper, titled “Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics,” Stapp wrote: “It has become now widely appreciated that assimilation by the general public of this ‘scientific’ view, according to which each human being is basically a mechanical robot, is likely to have a significant and corrosive impact on the moral fabric of society.”
He wrote of the “growing tendency of people to exonerate themselves by arguing that it is not ‘I’ who is at fault, but some mechanical process within: ‘my genes made me do it’; or ‘my high blood-sugar content made me do it.’ Recall the infamous ‘Twinkie Defense’ that got Dan White off with five years for murdering San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.”
“When you hear the sentiment “thou shalt not be a white supremacist”—it’ll be dressed up a bit, but that’s the meaning—you can rest assured that the moral absolute being expressed here isn’t really about white supremacy. Sometimes it amounts to a form of relativism called global or total, which claims there is no truth. (You’ll find some prominent examples of “thou shalt not be a white supremacist at that link.) Other times, it stops just short of claiming that affirming objective truth is itself a marker of white supremacy—not quite, but it’s pretty close.
Consider, for example, how many cultural institutions recently have been making decisions solely on the basis of some minority status. For example, Joe Biden explicitly announced that he would replace outgoing Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer with “the first black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court.” The National Football League recently announced that all thirty-two teams in the league must hire an offensive coach who is “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority” for the 2022 season. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences requires racial quotas to be met for a film to qualify for the Oscar for Best Picture. An associate professor at NYU wants “a more racially balanced pattern of citation” in academic papers (and he’s not the only one), and the curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art lost his job for allowing art by white men in his galleries.
The implication in all the above examples is that if an ethnic or racial minority is not given priority in decision-making, then the decision-maker is privileging white people and thus is a white supremacist. This version of the modern absolute “thou shalt not be a white supremacist” might not be tantamount to total relativism. However, it sure is a sister of it.
Consider how truth in each of the above examples is strapped in the back seat of the car—or better yet, thrown in the trunk—and race is put in the driver seat. To value something primarily based on race implies that the truth of the thing’s value is not of the utmost importance. It’s a form of practical relativism: living as if there’s no truth, even though you might not verbally or intellectually affirm that there’s no truth.
Take President Biden’s SCOTUS choice, for example. For Biden, the truth of a person’s legal scholarship was not a primary concern. Rather, race (and the person’s sex) was most important. Even though he may affirm that there’s truth concerning the quality of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s legal scholarship, there may as well be no truth about it, since that wasn’t the primary criterion by which he made his decision, although it should have been.
The same line of reasoning applies to the other examples. The truth of a person’s offensive coaching skills is sidelined (pun intended) in the place of his ethnicity. The spotlight is turned away from the truth of a person’s acting skills in favor of his race. A person’s ethnicity is more fitting for an academic journal than the truth of his scholarship. The truth of the quality of art is replaced by the color of the artist’s skin.
These examples might not entail a total rejection of objective truth, but they do strongly imply that there might as well be no truth at all, since it’s not worth considering as a criterion for determining a course of action when it should have been.
Now, let’s clarify what we are not saying. We’re not saying white people should be given preference for the above roles. Nor are we saying non-white people should be excluded.
We’re also not saying that we should never preference a race for a film role. If you’re telling the story of the horrors of slavery of African-Americans in America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then it’s fitting to have African-Americans, or Africans, play the slaves, since they look most like the historical victims. To look elsewhere to fill these roles would be as unfitting as, say, having a white European male play Bruce Lee. Nor are we denying the fact that some institutions may be racially biased in their decision-making, or that some institutions may have inherited practices that have roots in racial prejudice.
What we are saying, however, is that the above attempts at racial equity show that the modern absolute “thou shalt not be a white supremacist” is not really concerned with truth absolutely, because it is not concerned with the truth about justice. Choosing to hire someone or accept some good based primarily on a person’s race is an injustice. It introduces a disorder between the distribution of a good and its proper cause.
St. Thomas Aquinas tackles this issue using the example of a professorship (Summa Theologiae II-II:63:1). He notes that “having sufficient knowledge” is the proper cause for being hired as a professor, not being named “Peter or Martin,” and not being rich or a relative. Hiring someone to a professorship based on these criteria would be an injustice, since the good of being a professor is not due to someone who has a particular name or how much wealth he has. The good of being a professor is due to having appropriate knowledge for such a position
Similarly, to distribute some good—whether it be a judgeship, a coaching position, an Oscar, a journalistic citation, or a coveted slot on the wall for art—based on race is an injustice. Race is not a proper cause of such goods. Such goods are due only to those whose skills are proportionate to the goods being distributed
Just imagine if President Biden had announced, “My nominee for the Supreme Court justice will be a white man.” Surely, the entire society would have been in an uproar (except for true misogynistic white supremacists). And everyone would be justified, because being a white man has nothing to do with being elected to hold a seat on the Supreme Court.
The same goes for the other examples listed above. Gary Garrels, the San Francisco curator who lost his job, is right: we can’t allow ourselves to fall into “reverse discrimination”—that’s to say, unjust discrimination.
The above decisions not only undermine the truth of justice with regard to distributing goods based on disproportionate causes, but also amount to an injustice particularly to non-white people. This method of selection basically says, “Non-white people are not able to be a proper cause of the distributed good in question.” How is that not racist?
In the end, the modern absolute “thou shalt not be a white supremacist” turns out to be the thing it claims to despise: white supremacy. And such absurdity is due to displacing truth from the driver’s seat when truth and truth alone should be determining the course of our actions.”
“What is truth? Pilate was not alone in dismissing this question as unanswerable and irrelevant for his purposes. Today, too, in political argument and in discussion of the foundations of law, it is generally experienced as disturbing. Yet if man lives without truth, life passes him by; ultimately he surrenders the field to whoever is the strongest.” —Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) from Faith and Politics
The anagram of “Quid est veritas?” is “Est vir qui adest” (“’It is the man’ before you.”).
“For many years, relativism was the craze in apologetic circles. It was a primary target for apologists because it was part of the modern cultural landscape. “You have your truth, I have mine” was the catchphrase.
Some have suggested that relativism is long gone. David Brooks, a political commentator, argued a few years back for The New York Times that although American college campuses used to be “awash in moral relativism” as late as the 1980s, it is not so anymore. Rather, Brooks argues, “college campuses are today awash in moral judgment” and are a hotbed for what some have termed the “shame culture”—a culture in which unmerciful moral crusades are initiated against those who violate the absolute moral values of inclusion and tolerance (oxymoron). You can’t shame people and be a moral relativist at the same time, so it’s said.
This idea that relativism is dead seems to have gained traction even among some Christians, non-Catholic and Catholic alike.
But I’m not sure this is entirely true.
It’s obvious that most people today affirm certain moral absolutes—“thou shalt not be a white supremacist,” “thou shalt not be intolerant,” “thou shalt not be a judgmental, hateful bigot,” etc. On the surface, people who say these things don’t seem to be relativists of any sort, whether intellectual or moral. But when examined more closely, such moral absolutes turn out to be code for some form of relativism.
Consider, for example, “thou shalt not be a white supremacist.” In 2017, the president of Pamona College (Claremont, California), David Oxtoby, wrote an email to the entire campus in response to protesters who had shut down a speech intended to be given by Black Lives Matter critic Heather Mac Donald. In the e-mail, Oxtoby expressed his disapproval of the shutdown, arguing that it conflicted with the mission of Pamona College, which is “the discovery of truth” and “the collaborative development of knowledge.”
A group of students responded to the e-mail with an open letter, claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth. . . is a myth and white supremacy.” The letter, written by three self-identified black students and signed by at least thirty others, further stated that “historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity . . . as a means of silencing oppressed peoples.” The implication of these statements seems to be that there is no such thing as objective truth, which is what philosophers call global or total relativism, the most universal relativism of all.
Other institutions express this idea, too. For example, in 2021, California’s Instructional Quality Commission proposed for a mathematics curriculum framework the use of a document entitled “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual gives a list of indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” one of which is a focus on “getting the right answer” and teaching math in a “linear fashion.” The manual goes on to state, “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” concluding that “upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’” Apparently, for this California Commission, the truth that two plus two doesn’t equal five is false, and to claim otherwise is white supremacy. This is global relativism at its height.
Another example is the Minnesota Department of Inclusion and Community Engagement. On its website, the department provides a “list of characteristics of white supremacy culture.” Like the California Commission, it lists “objectivity” as an indicator of white culture and defines it as “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective.” If there’s no such thing as being objective, then there doesn’t seem to be any room for objective truth.
Now, someone might say “objectivity” here doesn’t mean objective truth, but only freedom from biased or cultural influences. Perhaps. But the language of “objectivity” seems to be coming from the same echo chambers as the California Commission, which clearly identified “objectivity” as pertaining to right and wrong answers.
Moreover, the document says other things that suggest it’s denying objective truth. Just a few lines below, under the same heading “Objectivity,” it identifies “white culture” as “requiring people to think in a linear fashion and ignoring or invalidating those who think in other ways.”
Well, to think in a linear fashion is to argue for true conclusions based on true premises. If such thinking is white supremacy, and thus morally repugnant, then seeking to know objective truth is morally repugnant. It’s hard to see how seeking objective truth would be morally repugnant unless you’re denying the existence of objective truth.
But let’s grant for argument’s sake that by “objectivity,” all the document means is freedom from biased or cultural influences. What would be the implication? If the implication is that what we think is true is mere cultural conditioning, then it amounts to a form of cultural relativism. If the implication is that we can’t ever be objective enough to know what objective truth is, then it at least amounts to a form of skepticism, which makes objective truth irrelevant, since we can never know it. That’s not relativism, but it’s definitely a sister!
So much for “thou shalt not be a white supremacist.” What about “thou shalt not be intolerant”?
Suffice it to say here that what many people mean by tolerance is the acceptance of everyone’s beliefs as equal and valid. Let that one sink in for a moment! If all beliefs are equal and valid, can there be such a thing as absolute truth? Of course not! There can be no objective truth if all beliefs are just as good as another. Therefore, when decoded, “thou shalt not be intolerant” is nothing more than masked relativism, and its global form at that.
Now, if by “tolerance” someone simply means that we ought not to coerce people into believing what we believe, then we have no qualms. But most of those who tout this moral absolute don’t have this kind of tolerance in mind. It’s more of the egalitarian tolerance mentioned above.
This sort of decoding also applies to the modern absolute of “thou shalt not be a judgmental, hateful bigot.” But for our purposes here, such a moral absolute is code for we must accept everyone’s lifestyle choices, as if they’re all equal and valid—a similar line of reasoning to the tolerance absolute above, just restricted to moral choices.
Now, lifestyle choices can be equally permissible only if there is no objective truth about such choices. But if there’s no objective truth about lifestyle choices, then there’s no such thing as objective morality. That’s moral relativism. And if the charge is meant just to demand approval of certain sinful sexual behaviors, then that’s not moral relativism—it’s just special pleading, wrapped in a cloak of moral relativism.
So relativism might be dead for some who jump on the bandwagon of modern moral absolutism. But for many, relativism is still alive, coded within the language of modern moral absolutes. We just need to decode such absolutes and expose them for the relativism they are.'”
“Two terms that often appear in Protestant discussions of faith and works are legalism and antinomianism. The first is giving law too much emphasis, and the second is giving law too little emphasis.
The law in question is God’s law, and in the Bible, the most famous expression of God’s law, was given through Moses. It contains the Ten Commandments, as well as all the other regulations that were part of the Mosaic covenant.
This expression of God’s law became so prominent in Jewish thinking that it is referred to as “the Law of Moses” (Josh. 8:31; Luke 2:22; 1 Cor. 9:9; etc.) or even simply as “the Law” (Matt. 22:36; Luke 5:17; Rom. 2:12; etc.). The latter term also came to be applied to the first five books of the Bible—the Torah or Pentateuch—which contain this law. It is thus spoken of as “the Law,” in contrast to “the prophets,” which are the other major part of the Old Testament (Matt. 5:17; Luke 16:16; Rom. 3:21; etc.).
Traditionally, Jewish theologians have divided the commandments of the law into two classes: those that require an action (“thou shalt”) and those that forbid an action (“thou shalt not”). However, Christian theologians have distinguished three types of commandments, based on the nature of what they require or forbid.
The first are moral commandments, which convey ethical principles (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery”; Exod. 20:12-13). The second are ceremonial precepts that governed the ritual life of Israel (e.g., killing the Passover lamb or the distinction between clean and unclean foods; cf. Exod. 12; Lev. 11). The third type are often called the judicial or civil commands. These regulated the civil life of Israel. They include things like building codes (Deut. 22:8), penalties when one has committed theft (Lev. 6:5), and the establishment of safe zones where a person who has committed accidental homicide may flee (Num. 35:9-15).
Since the Law was given to the Jewish people, a key question for Christian theologians has been which of these commandments remain binding. One of the first controversies that faced the Church was whether Gentile converts to the Faith needed to be circumcised. The Church quickly determined that the answer was no (Acts 15; cf. Acts 10-11; Gal. 2). It was also established that Christians did not need to keep Jewish dietary laws or observe Jewish feast days (Col. 2:16; cf. Mark 7:19).
However, Jesus indicated that other commandments found in the Mosaic Law were binding, saying, “If you would enter life, keep the commandments,” and going on to explain, “You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, honor your father and mother, and, you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 19:17-19).
It thus appeared that certain commandments were binding on Christians, but others were not. Since the commandments that Jesus cited were moral in nature, whereas the ones Christians were not bound to observe were ceremonial, the solution adopted in Catholic circles was that it is God’s moral commandments that apply to all peoples.
Thus, Paul can speak of Gentiles who do not have the Law of Moses but who nevertheless “do by nature what the Law requires,” for “what the Law requires is written on their hearts” (Rom. 2:14-15). Since these moral commands are part of human nature, they constitute a “natural law” that all, including Christians, are bound to observe.
Christians are not bound to observe the ceremonial requirements of the Mosaic Law. These requirements pointed forward to the coming of Christ but have now been superseded (Col. 2:17). In their place, Christ has given us other ceremonies, such as baptism, which replaces circumcision and is thus “the circumcision of Christ” (Col. 2:11-12). Christians are thus bound not by the Law of Moses, but by “the law of Christ” (1 Cor. 9:21; Gal. 6:2).
At the time of the Reformation, some Protestants did not like the concept of natural law, which they thought violated the principle of sola scriptura by encouraging us to look to human nature to figure out moral questions. However, other Protestants retained natural-law reasoning.
All Protestants have held that Christians are bound to observe God’s moral commandments, and most have agreed that Christians are not bound to observe the ceremonial and civil precepts of the Mosaic Law. But not all agree.
For example, Seventh-Day Adventists have held that Christians are obliged to observe certain laws traditionally considered ceremonial, such as the requirement to keep the Jewish Sabbath (i.e., Saturday).
Similarly, some Reformed (Calvinist) Protestants have advocated a view known as Christian Reconstructionism or Theonomy, which holds that the civil law of modern societies should be informed by the civil commandments of the Mosaic Law. This includes the use of Mosaic penalties for various crimes, and some authors have advocated the use of the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality, blasphemy, witchcraft, and belonging to a false religion.
In addition, there have been many disputes in Protestant circles about whether particular practices are compatible with God’s law—including ones mentioned in the Bible (e.g., drinking alcohol, dancing, gambling, wearing makeup) and others not mentioned (e.g., smoking).
When two groups of Protestants have different views of how God’s law should be applied, the group seen as requiring too much of Christians is likely to be accused of legalism, whereas the group seen as requiring too little is likely to be accused of antinomianism (from Greek roots meaning “against the law”).
In addition, these terms are applied to those who are seen as requiring too much or too little for salvation. Thus, those who think repentance from sin or baptism are required may be accused of teaching “works salvation” and legalism by those who do not, and the latter will be accused of antinomianism by those who do.”
“I have found that the canon of Scripture is the single most fruitful topic to discuss with Protestant friends. The canon is the set of books that make up the Bible—Scripture’s “table of contents”—and it is one of the most important issues between Catholics and Protestants for two reasons: first, because the Catholic and Protestant canons differ (Catholics have seventy-three books in their canon and Protestants have sixty-six); second, because Protestants believe in a doctrine called sola scriptura or “the Bible alone.”
Sola scriptura means that only the Bible is the sole, infallible rule of faith and the sole source of public revelation given by God to man. Under this doctrine, Scripture is the first, best, and ultimate depository for divine truth, as well as the only one that is without error, having been inspired by God himself, who cannot lie.
But for sola scriptura to be true, we must first be able to know which books, exactly, make up Scripture (i.e., the biblical canon). We must also know this biblical canon with a certainty strong enough to bind our consciences. After all, if we believe that God inspired books to be written such that they are without error but we don’t know which books those are, we are left in the unacceptable position of not knowing whether a given book is inspired (and therefore inerrant) or whether it is just another book written from the mind of a human being.
Martin Luther was not afraid to challenge the canon of Scripture. He relegated four New Testament books to an appendix, denying that they were divinely inspired. Though this alteration of the New Testament wasn’t adopted by the Protestant movements, his alteration of the Old Testament was, and by the end of the Reformation Protestantism had removed seven books (the deuterocanonicals) from the Old Testament canon.
This means if Protestantism is true, God allowed the early Church to put seven books in the Bible that didn’t belong there.
Why Protestants changed their canon
The Protestants rejected the books for several reasons, two of which we will focus on here. The first was a “problematic” passage in 2 Maccabees, and the second was their desire to go “back to the sources”—ad fontes—which to them meant using the same books that the Jews had decided upon.
2 Maccabees included a laudatory reference to prayers for the dead, a practice that the Catholic Church had encouraged for assisting the souls in purgatory. Recall Luther’s protest of the sale of indulgences to remove the temporal punishment due for already forgiven sins—punishment that must be paid before a soul would be fit to enter heaven. Luther and the Reformers rejected purgatory, so all that was connected with it also had to go: indulgences, prayers for the dead, and the communion of saints (which includes those both living and asleep in Christ).
The Reformers pointed out that these seven books were not included in the Jewish Hebrew Bible. For that reason, they argued, the books should not be accepted by Christians. Some Protestant apologists seek to bolster this claim by mentioning the theory that, around A.D. 90, a council of Jews at Jamnia explicitly rejected these books. (The consensus among modern scholars is that the Jews closed their canon closer to the end of the second century A.D.)
Others like to point out that some Church Fathers rejected one or more of these books. They strengthen this argument with the testimony of Josephus and Philo—two Jews from the first century—who also did not accept them.
Why the deuterocanonicals are inspired
Because Catholicism is true, the church Christ founded, and not the Jews, possessed the authority and divine guidance to discern the Old Testament canon.
A little historical background is needed here. The first Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, used during Jesus’ time, was called the Septuagint. It was an evolving set of books that was added to from the third century B.C. until the time of Christ. It remains the most ancient translation of the Old Testament that we have today and so is used to correct the errors that crept into the Hebrew (Masoretic) text, the oldest extant manuscripts of which date only from the ninth century.
The Septuagint was used extensively in the Near East by rabbis, and in the first century the apostles quoted prophecies from it in the books that became the New Testament. It was accepted as authoritative by the Jews of Alexandria and then by all Jews in Greek-speaking countries.
By the time of Christ, the Septuagint contained the deuterocanonical books. The majority of Old Testament quotes made by the New Testament authors come from the Septuagint. In fact, the early Church used the Septuagint as its primary Old Testament source until the fifth century. Its importance cannot be overstated.
Historical evidence also shows that there were multiple, conflicting Jewish canons at the time of Christ. Protestants claim that the Hebrew canon was closed at the time of Christ. But let’s stop and think about that: How could the Jews close their canon when they were still awaiting the advent of the new Elijah (John the Baptist) and the new Moses (Jesus)?
Recall that Malachi 4:5 tells us that God would send a new Elijah the prophet: “Behold I will send you Elias the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.” We know from John 1:19-25 that the Jews were eagerly awaiting this new Elijah, as well as the new Moses.
Since many prophets in the Old Covenant had been inspired by God to write books, it only makes sense that the Jews would expect these two great prophets to write books as well. Closing the Hebrew canon before the prophets’ advent, then, would have been unthinkable.
Timothy Michael Law, in his new book When God Spoke Greek, has demonstrated that the Jews did not close their canon until the second century A.D. This fact renders the (alleged) Jewish council’s decision at Jamnia moot. It should be noted that most scholars today doubt that any such council ever took place.
But even if it did, would Jewish leaders possess the authority to make a decision binding upon the Christian Church? Those Jews who had accepted Christ had already become Christians. The remainder had no authority to decide anything about divine truth, as that authority had passed to those filled with the Holy Spirit (i.e., the apostles). The same goes for the opinions of Josephus and Philo. The Jews did not have the authority to decide the canon. The Church did.
Law also shows that the Greek Septuagint is a witness to an, at times, even more ancient textual stream of the Hebrew scriptures when compared with the Masoretic text. Ironically, this meant that the Reformers goofed when they relied upon the Masoretic text and the (truncated) Hebrew canon in their attempt to go “back to the original sources.” They should have used the Septuagint translation and included the seven deuterocanonical books! Thus the argument that Christians should base their Old Testament off of the Hebrew Bible rather than the Greek Septuagint is dubious.
Regarding Church Fathers doubting the deuterocanonical books, it is true that several rejected one or more of them or put them on a level lower than the rest of Scripture. But many, including those with doubts, quoted them as Scripture with no distinction from the rest of the Bible.
The broader fact is that the testimony of the Fathers was not unanimous on the Old Testament canon. Even Jerome, the great biblical scholar, early in his career favored the Hebrew canon but then changed his mind and submitted his opinion to the wisdom of the Church, accepting the deuterocanonicals as Scripture (ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf203.vi.xii.ii.xxvii.html).
Finally, it should be pointed out that Protestants seeking to defend their canon based on historical evidence—even if they are convinced they have found sufficient proof—run into an insurmountable problem: Nowhere in Scripture does it say that this is the way to know which books belong in the canon. Such a criterion for choosing the canon in fact contradicts sola scriptura, because it is an extra-biblical principle.
A consistent Protestant argument for selecting the canon of Scripture, then, must itself come from Scripture, which would create a circular argument. Unfortunately—but providentially—no such instructions from God exist. No table of contents is found in any biblical book. No scroll with a table of contents is considered inspired by Protestants (or by Catholics).
The self-authenticating canon
Most Protestant apologists realize that all their stalwart arguments have iron-clad rebuttals. And so many have abandoned those arguments and cling to their last remaining bastion: They claim that the inspired books authenticate themselves. This idea is so widely used that it is worthy of a lengthy explanation.
The self-authenticating canon means that a true Christian can read a given book and easily tell whether it is inspired by God or not. The Holy Spirit dwelling within the Christian would witness to the book’s inspiration. This theory did away with the need for trusting the corrupted early Church or for tracing the messy history of the canon’s development. Instead, you as a faithful Christian simply picked up your Bible, read the books, and listened for the inner witness of the Spirit telling you that the books were inspired by God.
Similarly, you could theoretically pick up a non-canonical epistle or Gospel from the first or second century, read it, and note the absence of the Spirit’s confirmation of its inspiration. As Calvin described it:
It is utterly vain, then, to pretend that the power of judging Scripture so lies with the church and that its certainty depends upon churchly assent. Thus, while the church receives and gives its seal of approval to Scripture, it does not thereby render authentic what is otherwise doubtful or controversial. . . . As to their question—How can we be assured that this has sprung from God unless we have recourse to the decree of the church?—it is as if someone asked: Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste. . . . those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and Scripture indeed is self-authenticated (Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, vii.1, 2, 5).
Calvin makes two claims here. First, that the Church does not give authority to Scripture but rather Scripture has authority by the fact that God inspired it; second, that a Christian can know the canon from the Holy Spirit’s testimony within him, not by trusting a decision of the Church.
Calvin’s first claim has never been contested by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches, or any Christian. It is a straw man: The Church teaches that it received inspired texts from God (through human authors) and that God guided it in discerning which among many texts were truly inspired. The Church is thus the servant of written revelation and not its master.
Calvin’s second claim has become the common answer from Protestants who can’t concede that a corrupt Church selected the canon. There’s an element of truth to it: Surely the Holy Spirit does witness to our souls when we read the Bible. But Calvin sets up a false dichotomy here: Either the Church, by discerning the canon, imagines itself in authority over Scripture, or the canon is self-evident to any Christian. Calvin replaces the belief that God guided the Church in selecting the canon with the belief that God guides me or you in selecting it. He forces his readers to choose between these options, but in fact they are both false.
History contradicts Calvin’s claim
There is no principled reason, in Scripture or elsewhere, to believe that God would guide me or you in this discernment but not the Church. Moreover, Calvin’s subjective criterion for discerning the canon is surely impractical and unrealistic. How would a person seeking truth but not yet indwelt by the Holy Spirit know which books to read to find truth? What about a new Christian who had not learned to distinguish the inner voice of the Spirit from his own? At what point after his conversion would a Christian be considered ready to help define the canon? If two Christians disagreed, whose inner judgment would be used to arbitrate their dispute and identify the real canon?
Another problem with Calvin’s claim is that the facts of history contradict it. As we have seen, the selection of the canon was not an easy, debate-free process that ended with the close of written revelation in the early second century. Rather, the canon emerged slowly through a laborious process, with differing canons being proposed by different Church Fathers during these centuries.
If the canon were obvious and self-evident, the Holy Spirit would have led each of them to the same canon. Yet even these faithful, Spirit-filled men, so close to the time of the apostles and Christ himself, proposed different canons. It was not until almost A.D. 400 that the canon was settled, and it contained the seventy-three books of the Catholic Bible. When, more than 1,100 years later, the Reformers changed the canon by rejecting the seven deuterocanonical books (and Luther unsuccessfully tried to discard others), it was another example of intelligent and well-meaning Christians disagreeing about the “self-authenticated” canon.
The books of the canon are not obvious merely from reading them. Martin Luther should prove that to Protestants, since he was the founder of the Protestant Reformation, and yet he tried to jettison four books from the New Testament.
The Church discerns the Old Testament
This means that neither the New Testament nor the Old Testament is self-authenticating. And so we come full circle back to the question of the deuterocanonicals. Weighing this evidence, any open Protestant should be able to admit that the only thing keeping him back from considering these books as inspired by God is the Protestant tradition that rejected them. Is that tradition from God or from men?
The Church’s careful discernment of the canon settled on including the deuterocanonical books. And, with some occasional doubts, the books were consistently included in the canon from the 300s through the 1400s. In fact, the ecumenical council of Florence in the mid-1400s reaffirmed their inclusion in the Old Testament canon. This was long before Martin Luther and the first Protestants and lends further evidence that the Church accepted these books as inspired and did not “add” them to the canon in response to the Reformation, as many Protestants claim.
If Protestantism is true, then for more than a thousand years all of Christianity used an Old Testament that contained seven fully disposable, possibly deceptive books that God did not inspire. He did, however, allow the early Church to designate these books as Sacred Scripture and derive false teachings such as purgatory from their contents. Eventually, God’s chosen Reformer, Martin Luther, was able to straighten out this tragic error, even though his similar abridgment of the New Testament was a mistake.”
Love & truth,
Matthew
Summa Catechetica, "Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam." – St Anselm, "“Si comprehendus, non est Deus.” -St Augustine, "Let your religion be less of a theory, and more of a love affair." -G.K. Chesterton, “When we pray we speak to God; but when we read, God speaks to us.” -St Jerome, "As the reading of bad books fills the mind with worldly and poisonous sentiments; so, on the other hand, the reading of pious works fills the soul with holy thoughts and good desires." -St. Alphonsus Liguori, "And above all, be on your guard not to want to get anything done by force, because God has given free will to everyone and wants to force no one, but only proposes, invites and counsels." –St. Angela Merici, “Yet such are the pity and compassion of this Lord of ours, so desirous is He that we should seek Him and enjoy His company, that in one way or another He never ceases calling us to Him . . . God here speaks to souls through words uttered by pious people, by sermons or good books, and in many other such ways.” —St. Teresa of Avila, "I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men and women who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, and who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity… I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism, and where lie the main inconsistences and absurdities of the Protestant theory.” (St. John Henry Newman, “Duties of Catholics Towards the Protestant View,” Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England), "We cannot always have access to a spiritual Father for counsel in our actions and in our doubts, but reading will abundantly supply his place by giving us directions to escape the illusions of the devil and of our own self-love, and at the same time to submit to the divine will.” —St. Alphonsus Ligouri, "The harm that comes to souls from the lack of reading holy books makes me shudder . . . What power spiritual reading has to lead to a change of course, and to make even worldly people enter into the way of perfection." –St. Padre Pio, "Screens may grab our attention, but books change our lives!" – Word on Fire, "Reading has made many saints!" -St Josemaría Escrivá, "Do you pray? You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to you." —St. Jerome, from his Letter 22 to Eustochium, "Encounter, not confrontation; attraction, not promotion; dialogue, not debate." -cf Pope Francis, "God here speaks to souls through…good books“ – St Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, "You will not see anyone who is really striving after his advancement who is not given to spiritual reading. And as to him who neglects it, the fact will soon be observed by his progress.” -St Athanasius, "To convert someone, go and take them by the hand and guide them." -St Thomas Aquinas, OP. 1 saint ruins ALL the cynicism in Hell & on Earth. “When we pray we talk to God; when we read God talks to us…All spiritual growth comes from reading and reflection.” -St Isidore of Seville, “Also in some meditations today I earnestly asked our Lord to watch over my compositions that they might do me no harm through the enmity or imprudence of any man or my own; that He would have them as His own and employ or not employ them as He should see fit. And this I believe is heard.” -GM Hopkins, SJ, "Only God knows the good that can come about by reading one good Catholic book." — St. John Bosco, "Why don't you try explaining it to them?" – cf St Peter Canisius, SJ, Doctor of the Church, Doctor of the Catechism, "Already I was coming to appreciate that often apologetics consists of offering theological eye glasses of varying prescriptions to an inquirer. Only one prescription will give him clear sight; all the others will give him at best indistinct sight. What you want him to see—some particular truth of the Faith—will remain fuzzy to him until you come across theological eye glasses that precisely compensate for his particular defect of vision." -Karl Keating, "The more perfectly we know God, the more perfectly we love Him." -St Thomas Aquinas, OP, ST, I-II,67,6 ad 3, “But always when I was without a book, my soul would at once become disturbed, and my thoughts wandered." —St. Teresa of Avila, "Let those who think I have said too little and those who think I have said too much, forgive me; and let those who think I have said just enough thank God with me." –St. Augustine, "Without good books and spiritual reading, it will be morally impossible to save our souls." —St. Alphonsus Liguori "Never read books you aren't sure about. . . even supposing that these bad books are very well written from a literary point of view. Let me ask you this: Would you drink something you knew was poisoned just because it was offered to you in a golden cup?" -St. John Bosco " To teach in order to lead others to faith is the task of every preacher and of each believer." —St. Thomas Aquinas, OP. "Prayer purifies us, reading instructs us. Both are good when both are possible. Otherwise, prayer is better than reading." –St. Isidore of Seville “The aid of spiritual books is for you a necessity.… You, who are in the midst of battle, must protect yourself with the buckler of holy thoughts drawn from good books.” -St. John Chrysostom
