The independence of Scripture

The book Catholicism and Fundamentalism, by Karl Keating, was very important for my decision to convert to Catholicism. My beliefs were basically of the kind that was attacked in the chapters of that book, and I found many of them to be satisfactorily refuted in it. However, after some time being a Catholic, I have come to believe that the ninth chapter of the book is gravely misleading.

In the ninth chapter, “Inspiration of the Bible”, which was later converted into the Catholic Answers tract Proving Inspiration, Karl Keating points out that many Protestants have no rational basis for believing in the inspiration of Scripture. The belief in inspiration is accepted as a kind of axiom, or taken to somehow be directly proved to the believer by the Holy Spirit. This should be unsatisfactory to those Protestants, and it was to me at the time. In its place, Keating proposes his famous “spiral argument” as the Catholic view: the Bible, taken merely as a human document, shows that Jesus rose from the dead and founded the Catholic Church. Since Jesus’s resurrection vindicates his claim to be God, the identification of the Church he founded with the Church at Rome allows us to safely place divine faith upon her; with this faith, we believe the Church’s claim that the Bible is an inspired book.

This is beautiful and amazing. However, it is heavily implied that this is the only possible rational basis to believe in the inspiration of Scripture. And, early on, I did believe this. This interpretation, which I will call the “strong interpretation” of Keating, turned out to be a terrible mistake, because it relied upon a denial of the infallibility of the Apostles. I will explain this next.

The Bible verses claiming that the Bible is inspired were supposed by Keating to be irrelevant to proving the Bible’s inspiration, because “a book of false scriptures can easily assert that it is inspired, and many do”. According to the strong interpretation, I would explain this as follows: the Bible, as a human document, proves that Jesus rose from the dead and built the Catholic Church, but the parts of the Bible that could be used to claim its own inspiration are not words attributed to Jesus, and therefore could, in principle, be the Apostles’ own mistaken opinion – unless the book is already taken to be inspired, which is what we are trying to prove, and therefore would be “obviously circular reasoning”, as Keating says.

The problem with this is that it assumes that the Apostles were not infallible except when writing inspired books. And this is not true, since the Apostles were also infallible teachers. This doctrine may be taken from the Bible itself, as said in the official relatio of Vatican I:

The case was different with the infallibility of the other Apostles; each of them individually was infallible: but this infallibility was extraordinary, granted to them in an extraordinary mode and for an extraordinary purpose, as appears from the words of Christ when He took leave of them before ascending into heaven, saying: “You will receive the power of the Holy Spirit who will come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). This promise of the coming Holy Spirit was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost, and, clothed by the Holy Spirit as by power from on high, they began to bear witness to the word of life and to preach in the name of Jesus, “the Lord cooperating with them and confirming their preaching by the signs which accompanied them” (Mk. 16:20).

The Apostles were infallible teachers, and the fact that Jesus made them infallible teachers may be known from the Bible itself, taken as a human document. Therefore, the passages in which they claim their own books to be inspired may easily be taken as divine doctrine, and many of the usual Protestant proofs of the inspiration of Scripture may function as intended. The infallibility of the Apostles is the missing link; it secures the ability of the believer to believe in Scripture independently of his belief in the Church. If the Apostles are taken to be fallible, then one may easily doubt their opinion about the inspiration of their books, and the degree of doubt to be applied to their claims has no inherent reason to be lower than, say, the degree to be applied to the Koran’s claim of its own inspiration, which was the point made by the strong interpretation.

Another point to note here is that Protestants who do not believe in the individual infallibility of the Apostles really are just as irrational as Keating charged them to be. Also, if they do believe in the individual infallibility of the Apostles, there is no reason for them to believe exclusively their doctrines that were preserved in the Bible – the writings of the Fathers, although not inspired, may sometimes also be taken to have preserved the infallible teaching of the Apostles.

The first rule of conversation

The first rule of conversation is “say something”.

If you say something, you are taking part in the conversation. If you do not say something, you are not taking part in the conversation. If no one says anything, a conversation does not happen.

What you say does not need to be interesting. Something uninteresting, indeed even something as blatantly obvious as “it is raining” (said when it is raining) may be valid and even profitable conversation. It may lead someone else to think of something interesting to comment about what you said, or at least something else to say; the goal, of course, is for people to say interesting things to each other, but this may take some work to happen.

The first rule of conversation enters into some tension with the first rule of being an intellectual, which is, “do not speak about what you do not understand”. This explains why intellectuals are often imagined as studying in solitude, as in an “ivory tower”.

Novel doctrine of lying

Note: This blog post has been retracted, since I no longer think of it as a good representation of how I think about its topic. I may, or may not, have written a better post about the same topic since; check the full list of posts.

I think lying should be defined in such a way that it does not require the intent to deceive. The reason is this: take the case of someone who believes that words have different definitions from the ones that they really do. He goes on to speak his mind, but everyone misunderstands him, because he was using the words in the wrong way. I think this is better described as a case of a man who ‘inadvertently lied’ than of a man who did anything else. His act contains the core of why a lie is wrong: a misuse of words, a perversion of signs. He may be excused from the lie, just as a man may be excused who killed a man accidentally, but his act is, essentially, a lie.

Therefore, I would propose that a lie be defined in this way: “a lie is something said in such a way as to communicate something different from what the speaker believes to be true”. This means that mistakes are not lying, since they are the communication of the speaker’s honest belief, and fiction is generally not lying, since the way it is told does not communicate that the story actually happened. But also, intent is irrelevant, which I think is superior to the common doctrine.

Also, under this new definition, a speaker may be lying if he believes in a falsehood but decides to ‘deceive’ his listener by telling something different, and what he decides to say happens to be the truth; which I think everyone understands to be a true lie, belying another problem with the common definitions, which state that a lie must be a falsehood.