What is Truth? How Some Roman Catholic Apologists Are Their Own Worst Enemies, by Timothy Enloe

"What is truth?" In a world where there are as many opinions as there are people, this is the perennial question of the human heart. Everyone from philosophers to plumbers must "choose you this day whom you will serve" (Joshua 1:8).

But truth has fallen on hard times in our day. Although everyone always relies upon the existence and knowability of truth to make any statements about anything, many who claim to be defenders of truth simply have no concept of what it is, and often unwittingly work contrary to their own stated goals.

For instance, a certain class of Roman Catholic apologist tries to defend truth by issuing attacks on the very concept of how anyone knows truth.

These apologists demean as ungrounded "private judgment" all truth claims that do not come from reliance on their Magisterium's interpretation of Scripture, yet deploy philosophical hairsplitting to prove that they themselves do not exercise "private judgment" on the meaning of the Magisterium's pronouncements.

They label non-Roman Catholics "super Popes" operating with more "de facto infallibility" than the Roman Pontiff himself claims, yet ignore the implications of this logic for their own assertions about "true Catholicism".

Some even claim that no Protestant can know what "truth" is because there is disagreement among Protestants, yet exempt themselves from a similar handicap based on disagreement among Roman Catholics.

No bad argument is too bad, it seems, for those who would defend the concept that Christian truth cannot be known with "certainty" apart from religious submission to the Roman Catholic Church.

One such truth-destroying apologetic was recently inflicted on cyberspace by Roman Catholic apologist Phil Porvaznik, in his paper A Reply to Protestant Apologist James White.

That paper was Porvaznik's reply to James White's "I Came to Bring...Disunity" (Luke 12:51), which concerned the polemic advantage that a certain militant segment of Roman Catholic apologetics is attempting to press regarding the conversion of Dr. White's sister, Patty Bonds, to Romanism.

In both his article and on his Dividing Line program of February 9, 2002, Dr. White has replied to the personal aspects of this situation.

Rather than respond point-by-point to Porvaznik's particular tirade, this paper will be concerned with rebutting that of which it was an instance--the general Roman Catholic apologetic reliance on skepticism as a weapon against Protestants.

• What's Wrong With This Worldview?

In itself, there is nothing wrong with the question "How do you know?", for it is a basic worldview question that everyone must answer. Because there are many worldviews there are a variety of answers to the question.

However, some answers such as skepticism, the one given by many Roman apologists (Porvaznik being a typical example), are inherently truth-decaying. In the article linked above, Porvaznik argued that no Protestant can really know truth because all he has is his own version of the truth.

Given that Porvaznik claims to be a Christian, and that therefore, his own position in Roman Catholicism is just as exposed to the arguments of modern unbelieving skepticism as is the Protestant's, such a tactic is quite strange. How odd to defend an absolute truth claim with the tools of relativism!

First, the argument can be reversed by noting that the Roman Catholic Church is itself just one voice among many, no more convincing than any of the others.

Any philosophical relativist could make mincemeat of every "objective" proof Porvaznik could dream up in defense of his Church by simply pointing out that the whole construct is merely Porvaznik's personal opinion, no different in quality or force than any Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Mormon, or Atheist's case for his own truth claims.

Why should anyone believe Rome's exclusive truth claims, since there is so much disagreement from other sectors of the religious world?

Second, the argument can be reversed by noting the enormous diversity that exists within Roman Catholicism itself.

The failure of Roman Catholics to agree on many issues that the Church has supposedly "clearly" defined is legendary. Was Vatican II an infallible council? Do the words of the Council of Trent support the partim-partim or the material sufficiency view of the relationship of Scripture and Tradition? Did the Pope approve "evolution"?

Are the "works of the law" that Paul says cannot justify a person works of merely the ceremonial law or all works period? On all these questions and many more, the real true answer literally depends on which Roman Catholic apologist one asks.¹

Who, then, is really telling us what the truth in Roman Catholicism is? Does anyone know? If Protestants evaluated these internal Roman Catholic disputes by the criterion of absolute agreement, we would conclude that no one knows the truth in Roman Catholicism because it doesn't exist.

After all, outside of a few items on which all Roman Catholics do agree, the only thing any Roman Catholic can give us is his personal interpretation of Roman Catholic teachings. How do we know that he is right?²

Third, the argument can be reversed by reducing it to an instance of the common Roman apologetic war on private judgment. I have already dealt with this elsewhere ³ and will not reproduce that material here.

Briefly, the argument amounts to using private judgment to deny the legitimacy of using private judgment. The absurdity of the argument is matched only by the tenacity with which it is held by many Roman apologists.

This class of Roman apologist does not hesitate to use any weapon it can find to defend the City of God -- even weapons taken from the godless philosophies of the City of Man. In this case, the weapon of choice is skepticism -- one of the most pernicious intellectual heresies of the Enlightenment's quest to destroy Christianity in the name of Reason.

Consider the claim that Protestants cannot "know for sure" that any of their beliefs are true since they do not claim that their churches are infallible.

From this premise a litany of arguments seek to show that on every issue from the canon of Scripture to justification to the identity of "the Church" to the Trinity, Protestants labor under the burden of not being able to know what is really true.

The answer, the Roman apologists typically assert, is to rely upon the judgment of "the infallible Church" -- which, of course, just happens to be their own denomination. This position is known as infallibilism, asserting that the only way anyone can know something is true is if he can eliminate all possibility of error regarding that thing.

Although it is common to find apologists such as Porvaznik who treat infallibilism as a mere given, it is an absurd epistemological position. If infallibility is the criterion for knowing truth, then the knowers themselves must be infallible.

If they are not, the quest for knowledge is subject to a never-ending backward chain of infallible justifications--certainty of each link in the chain can only as good as the infallible guarantee of the one behind it.

This is an argument that eliminates the Roman apologist's own position, for if he says he knows the Bible is inspired because the Magisterium tells him so the Protestant can simply ask how he knows the Magisterium's judgment is correct -- not to mention how he even knows he has picked the correct Magisterium to believe.

No matter how the apologist replies his answer will be an instance of private judgment--which kills his whole polemic against the Protestant.

Such self-defeat is, of course, the inevitable result of invoking any form of rigorous skepticism. Apologists who use skepticism as the basis of their work make a mockery of the entire discipline of apologetics, and must be rebuked in the strongest terms.

The argument that truth cannot be known because disagreement exists must be rejected. It is based in skepticism and it ends in skepticism, and skepticism is the antithesis of Christian apologetics.

If refuting one bad argument of Roman apologists was the only purpose, this article could end here. But since the form of argument sketched above is so common among such apologists and so uncritically promoted, it behooves us to look at some basic principles of knowledge that all Christian apologists should know thoroughly before they ever begin public apologetic work.

• How Do We Know Anything At All?

There is one valid foundation stone beneath the absurd argument outlined above--the undeniable fact that knowledge comes to us through certain means. Protestants do acknowledge this valid point.

There is no harm, for instance, in admitting that medieval monks who (at least towards the close of the Middle Ages) conceived of "the Church" as being an institution under the supreme power of the Roman Pontiff were the parties who preserved the Scriptures and passed them down to the Reformers, who in turn, passed them down to us. This is why Luther could say that Protestants got the Scriptures from the Papists. So what?

The problem occurs when apologists such as Porvaznik take the legitimate principle that knowledge comes through means and illegitimately apply it exclusively to their own Church.

They believe that all Christian knowledge comes solely through the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church -- i.e., that it is impossible to claim one really knows something about Christianity if one is not relying on that Magisterium.

Frequently it is also asserted that anyone who believes any truth (such as the Trinity or the inspiration of Scripture) that happens to be taught by the Roman Magisterium is being "inconsistent" for not also accepting other truths that happen to be promoted by it (such as the Marian dogmas or papal infallibility).⁴

This view is often advanced with the question, "If Scripture clearly teaches truth, why are there many interpretations of it?"--as if the Roman interpretation was not itself just one more interpretation!

Simply put, this polemic is a shameless assault on the very concepts of truth and knowledge. It is an attack upon logic and language, and therefore, an implicit denial that knowledge is possible at all.

Roman apologists know that Protestants claim to know a great deal about the Christian faith because they read the Scriptures and, using principles of hermeneutics that have been honed over centuries of use, gain significant truth from them.

Not content to allow that God's revelation in Scripture is clear if proper means of understanding it are used, however, today's postmodernism-soaked Roman apologists think themselves quite brilliant for saying that Scripture cannot be clear simply because people disagree about its meaning.

A favorite target for this shallow, self-refuting polemic is the doctrine of the Trinity, which, Protestants are told, simply cannot be derived from Scripture without the help of the Roman Magisterium. Supposedly the Bible can legitimately be made to teach modalism, Arianism, Monophysitism, and any number of other heretical notions because it is really not clear about the truth of God's nature.

It is amazing that some Christians seem to have no problem aligning themselves with liars simply to make polemic points about truth against other Christians.

Aside from the fact that this reveals (ironically!) these apologists' amazing lack of acquaintance with the writings of the Church Fathers against the heretics, it also indicates the presence of what one Reformed writer has labelled "imaginary apologetics" -- the phenomenon of substituting questions of the imagination as the appearance of an apologetic without bothering to think through the implications of the imaginary construct for one's own position.

Just as with the arguments about private judgment and "30,000 denominations", Roman apologists who invoke the support of heretical interpretations of Scripture are guilty of a gross double-standard -- they would never dream of exposing their position to the critique they level against Protestants!

Truth for this distorted logic is not public property to be tested and verified in iron-sharpening, honest conversation with others, but rather the private playground of one particular sect.

Rather than a function of a rigorous process of critical thinking, this view makes truth a function of mere decrees by an authority which is simply taken for granted. In the case of apologists such as Porvaznik that authority is the Roman Catholic Magisterium, which cannot be questioned by anything outside of itself since it is the determiner and guarantor of what truth in the Christian faith is.

Interestingly, despite their widespread aversion to presuppositional apologetics [note from Lion of Judah site owner: I myself disagree with presuppositional apologetics; it is a based upon Calvinistic thinking. Refutation of Roman Catholic claims does not depend upon presuppositional apologetics or upon Reformed thinking, contrary to the impression one gets from the Reformed], such apologists regularly treat their Magisterium exactly the same way Protestants treat the Bible.

That many of them think it is appropriate to do this reveals their deep confusion about the role of presuppositions in human knowledge in general and the Christian faith in particular. Thus, a brief excursus on presuppositions and their role in our knowledge claims is required.

Presuppositions are inescapable -- everyone has them and no one can escape them, because everyone has a worldview. Presuppositions -- worldviews -- are the answers to fundamental questions such as "Who are we?", "Where are we?", "What is wrong with our world?", and "What is the solution?"

Everyone brings a worldview to the table of discussion with others, and each worldview is the lens through which certain things are identified as "facts" and subsequently analyzed and integrated with other "facts".

Without presuppositions there could be no knowledge claims whatsoever, for there would be no way to even get the knowing process started. Everyone must start somewhere; no one starts from nowhere.

This recognition leads us into the murky waters of the conflict between a truly Christian epistemology and all forms of unbelieving epistemology.

One great problem in the modern world, one great front of this war between Christianity and Unbelief, is that the minds of most people are bound up tightly by the great myth of "objectivity".

It is no exaggeration to say that most people today, whether Atheist, Christian, or otherwise assume this model of knowledge and use their own self-proclaimed epistemological neutrality as a sort of sledgehammer to demolish all other views.

Such epistemological Modernists can easily be identified by such thinking as "We are objective, but you are biased,", "We just take the data as it is, but you constantly twist it to fit your own views", "I read the Fathers and saw that intellectual honesty required me to become Roman Catholic", and so forth. It needs to be stated in the strongest possible terms that this mode of thinking is a lie foisted upon us by the Enlightenment. It is an un-Christian way of thinking. [Note from Lion of Judah site owner: I do not agree that this premise is "un-Christian" or that it is a "lie."]

It does not become acceptable because many Christian apologists choose to base their work on it. It amounts to saying that we finite beings are our own reference points, that we can know things without starting anywhere, that we can be (or ought to be) epistemologically neutral.

It absurdly asserts that beginning with a "view from nowhere" we set out to learn "just the facts" simply by the power of our own reasoning faculties.

We might call this view "epistemological Pelagianism", for it pretends that each individual knower is an intellectual island unto himself, not affected by things outside or inside himself (philosophical baggage he is given by his upbringing) and entirely able of his own accord to reach out and settle on Pure Truth simply by the exercise of his own "free mind".

On the contrary, since we all have presuppositions, not one of us is or even can be "objective".

[Note from Lion of Judah site owner:

having presuppositions and biases does not mean that one cannot treat information fairly, accurately, honestly and objectively. It also works in the reverse: how often do we see atheists, for example, allowing their anti-Christian bias to distort the truths and claims of Christians regarding the Bible? I have seen it often enough.]

We all have biases, and we all must be selective because the sheer amount of data we must consider is so overwhelming that selection cannot be helped.

[Note from Lion of Judah site owner: I would say that the author is correct on that last point, but it does not necessarily follow that because one has a bias that one cannot approach information and treat information honestly, and without intentionally distorting it to suit one's own pet beliefs.]

Any apologetic that seeks to eliminate the possibility of its opponents' knowing truth by invoking rhetoric of "I am objective, but all you have is just your truth" and "You selectively read the sources because you have an agenda" is utterly out of bounds because it destroys all knowledge claims whatsoever--even the knowledge claims of the one who invokes that rhetoric!

There is no choice but to begin by acknowledging our presuppositions and go from there. We are Christians, not Atheists or Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims or Mormons. We are not "neutral" and we are not "objective".

For purposes of this paper, we pass over the question of how the competing claims of worldviews can be adjudicated, because here we are concerned with the claim of some Christian apologists (Roman Catholics such as Porvaznik) that within the Christian worldview certain other Christians (Protestants) cannot know truth because they disagree with each other about that truth.

These are fighting words, for they go to the root of the Christian worldview's theory of how human beings know. Apologists such as Porvaznik are basically asserting that Protestants are not consistent with the Christian worldview's theory of knowledge.

Having returned the favor by asserting that these Roman apologists are using a warmed-over Enlightenment epistemology that itself is not consistent with the Christian worldview, let me prove my case.

The Christian worldview contends that if God does not reveal truth, we cannot know it. [Note from Lion of Judah site owner: It does not follow from this, however, that we can know absolutely nothing about the world we live in, about others, or about their views.]

God is the ultimate ground of our knowledge. There is long tradition from Augustine to Calvin to modern Reformed thinkers that we can and do know truth simply because God Himself enlightens us.⁵

For the Christian, knowledge is possible because God made us to know, and He guarantees that we can, will, and do know. Knowlege is not a brute given outside of a preexisting framework of thought; knowledge is mediated first through revelation from God, and then through our own thinking process when we think God's thoughts after Him.

This is a presupposition that every Christian holds simply as part of the worldview, and it is neither subject to proof nor assailable by skeptical arguments. To question this principle is to overthrow the Christian worldview and intellectually identify oneself as something quite other than a Christian. [Note from Lion of Judah site owner: Not necessarily.]

If we know truth by means of God revealing it to us, how does this revelation reach us? Classically, the Christian worldview has stipulated that God's revelation comes to us in two major forms: general and special:

Now since we can and do know because God reveals, it follows that we can and do know from God's revelation in Scripture. Scripture is not a collection of vague abstractions which can be legitimately made to mean anything that any reader thinks or wishes it means.

Such a flexible view of texts has more in common with postmodernism than with Christianity, which is an interesting commentary on the source of the common Roman apologetic tactic of attacking the knowability of truth from Scripture.

This is especially so since as already mentioned such apologists love to point to heretical interpretations of Scripture as proof that Protestants cannot really "know" truth from Scripture apart from the Magisterium--though oddly the same logic is not applied to the fact that there are competing Magisteria, and even competing interpretations of the Roman Magisterium itself!

Against this foolish, self-defeating reliance on skepticism we assert that there is no way around the admission that truth can be known from reading Holy Scripture. This is a basic conviction of the Christian worldview. To attack it is to identify oneself intellectually with various philosophical enemies of the faith.

Now, in conversations with Protestants, Roman apologists regularly fail to distinguish between special revelation and explanations of special revelation--between God's voice directly speaking and logical deductions from God's voice directly speaking.

When pressed against the wall the Roman Catholic must admit that the word of the Church is not in the same category as the Word of God. Rome herself has denied that divine revelation is ongoing.

Divine revelation ceased with the close of the Apostolic age, and so Roman Catholicism speaks of the infallibility of the Church, not the inspiration of the Church. Infallibility is said to be a negative protection (error is prevented by God guiding the Magisterium to truth), not a positive one (error is prevented by God inspiring truth).

Consequently, the only way that anything the Church says could be on the same level as anything the Bible says is if the voice of the Church is what Scripture is--the voice of God.

For the Roman Catholic theory, the word of the Church is simply an infallible explanation of what God has revealed elsewhere; it is not God's revelation itself. God's revelation is unquestionable and forms the basis of all our knowledge claims; the means by which we appropriate that revelation (including the ministry of the visible Church), being subsequent to the revelation itself, simply are not--and, given the terms of the Christian worldview, cannot be!--the basis of our knowledge.

In essence this is the same sort of claim made by the Reformation regarding predestination--God predestines all that occurs, but He accomplishes all that He has predestined through His own ordained means.

Elect people do not live in hermetically sealed bubbles, saved by invisible, untraceable, unmediated actions of God directly on their souls; they are saved by hearing the Word preached by ordinary people using ordinary speech directed at ordinary ears and minds and hearts. The source is not the means, but the source does not (at least, not ordinarily) preclude the means, either.

Thus, God, the Source, deigns to give special revelation to man and does so by the means of prophets and apostles whose inspired words are transmitted to us today in Scripture--and only in Scripture.

Some Roman apologists may wish to dispute the sole location of revelation in Scripture, but until they can produce additional revelation that has the same universal (catholic) attestation as Scripture does their protests are meaningless, and in any case only reveal yet one more deep disagreement within their own camp. The fact of revelation is (and must be!) logically prior to all the means by which it is given, including the Church.

The existence of Scripture as God's revelation in no way precludes the existence of and legitimate operations of the Church as the proclaimer of the revelation. It is permissible to say with St. Augustine that we would not have believed the Gospel except the authority of the Church moved us if all we mean by that statement is that God used the Church to identify, preserve, and convey the revelation of Scripture to us.

To take such a principle as meaning that we cannot know truth from Scripture unless the Church gives us an infallible guarantee of it is not only irrational, but in violation of the Christian worldview itself. Scripture is revelation--it is given so that we may know (cf. 1 Jn. 5:13). Thus it follows that we can and do know truth from reading Scripture.

Given these facts, why, then, does the Roman Catholic think that the logic of the Church, the Church's explanation of the revelation, is the criterion of true knowledge in the Christian faith and not open to criticism?

Aside from the wrongheaded identification of this "the Church" merely with the official hierarchy (as if the laymen are not themselves part of the Church that is explaining Scripture!), why is an additional step arbitrarily inserted into the knowing process and then the implications of that step (pure fideism--believing just because the Church says so) not followed out?

This is the system, we recall, which posits that the Church's logical arguments for a doctrine can be erroneous but the doctrine itself can still be infallible: "It must be observed that the infallibility of the Papal doctrinal decision extends only to the dogma as such and not to the reasons given as leading up to the dogma."⁷

According to Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, "It is also true that theologians must always have recourse to the sources of divine revelation; for it is their duty to indicate how what is taught by the living magisterium is found, either explicitly or implicitly, in Sacred Scripture and in divine 'tradition'..."

This is an exceedingly strange way to do epistemology! There are no checks and balances on such a system, no way to hold it accountable. The distinctions between source and means, between Author and minister, between revelation and explanation, between text and interpretation are completely obliterated and fideism is the result.

Rather than the presuppositions simply defining the system (as is the case with all worldviews), the Roman Catholic presuppositions have so completely become the system that it is impossible to analyze the system's fit with evidence, impossible to detect and repair problems.

Perhaps despite the denial of ongoing revelation, it really is true that vox Ecclesiae, vox Dei. The difficulty in pinning Roman Catholics down to one definite position that they will stay with is notorious.

The oddity of seeing them treat the Church as if her authority can be directly paralleled with that of Scripture in such a way that if we do not have the Magisterium we cannot know the revealed truth of God is directly offset by the oddity of their unwillingness to go the whole mile and simply admit that their system reduces to sola Ecclesia.

Sola Scriptura, however, is not plagued by this baggage. Properly understood, sola Scriptura states that all truths necessary for salvation are revealed in Scripture, and that the visible Church is one of the means by which we can come to know the truths revealed in Scripture.

Note how the claims of the Christian worldview are neatly encapsulated here: God's revelation (in Scripture) is the basis of our knowledge, but the visible Church is one means by which we come to understand that knowledge. The Church is important, but not in the same way Scripture is. The Church is the minister of truth, not the source of truth.

Yet, confessional, historic Protestants are not "Fundamentalists"--we do not pretend that we can step back in time to the Apostolic Age, discarding all our own blinders to "just" know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth simply by individually reading our modern English translations.

While we affirm that all matters essential for salvation may be obtained from the mere reading of Scripture, we deny that individuals operating solely by their own lights can determine all truth for themselves by their own private reading of Scripture.

A person may (and should, given the nature of logic and language) come to see the Trinity plainly taught in Scripture, but this does not mean that person has no use for the Council of Nicea or the Definition of Chalcedon as supplementary aids to his understanding of the Trinity.

Further, we are not relativists and skeptics. Reformed Baptists do not believe that Presbyterians are "right in their own way", and so on. Each broad community of Protestants believes the rest are in error on those points at which there is disagreement.

But the key to understand here (the key that apologists such as Porvaznik do not grasp) is that truth is, in fact, known by Protestants despite our disagreements. This brings us to logic and language, the real targets of Roman Catholic diatribes against the supposed unknowability of truth in Protestantism.

Foundational to all human thought are the laws of logic. Two of these are crucial here. The Law of Noncontradiction says that no idea and its negation can both be true at the same time and in the same sense. This entails that when there is a contradiction between two ideas, at least one of them must be false (and all parties in the dispute can know that at least one of them must be false).

To deny this is to undermine rational thought itself. Contradictions cannot be simultaneously true at the same time in the same sense.

Indeed, the Law of Noncontradiction defines the difference between "true" and "false", for if this law was not true then no one could ever make any statement about "true" and "false" since those categories would not exist in a situation where contradictions could be simultaneously "true" in the same sense.

The Law of the Excluded Middle says that when two contradictory ideas exhaust the possibilities, only one of them can be true (and all the parties in the dispute can know that only one of them can be true). These two laws are negative tests for truth--they cannot by themselves tell us what the truth is in a dispute, but they can show us that there is truth to be had in that dispute.

Applying these two laws to Protestant disagreements (and, indeed, all disagreements about anything) leads to the following conclusions.

(1) If a given person believes an idea is wrong and its opposite right, he can justly claim to know there is truth to be had (because contradictory ideas cannot both be true simultaneously), and

(2) the thing he believes is true is either true or false--someone is definitely wrong (if the two ideas exhaust the possibilities). From this point, knowledge is sought by a process of thinking through the data at hand, analyzing premises and inferences, drawing out meaning from the sources.

The point here is not that someone may go through this process and reach an incorrect conclusion (this could happen to the Roman Catholic as well as to the Protestant!), but that truth can be discovered in this manner.

To deny this is to deny that anyone -- not just Protestants --can know truth. Not even the Roman Catholic knows truth merely because his Magisterium tells him; he knows truth because at some level he does, in fact, apply just such a critical process to everything the Magisterium tells him.

Using logic and principles of hermeneutics, then, the Protestant can justly claim to draw truth out of Scripture apart from the reasoning and conclusions of the Roman Catholic Magisterium. He can justly claim to know truth from Scripture even if it turns out later (through subsequent investigation of Scripture) that he was wrong.

The line of thought to which Porvaznik has committed himself, skepticism, will require him to counter this point by drawing the tired (and self-refuting) distinction between fact and belief that is the main characteristic of unbelieving Enlightenment thought.

To defend his assertions, Porvaznik will gratuitously have to grant himself adherence to "objective fact" while dismissing his opponent as a mere purveyor of "subjective belief"--which, he in fact does.

But like all modern skeptics, he can then be easily refuted by denying the fact / belief dichotomy, by demanding "objective" (that is, presupposition-less) proof that his own view is correct, by applying his own skeptical criteria on his own knowledge claims.

He cannot meet these demands (indeed, no one can!), and so by his own truth-tests, he does not know truth. (Of course, we do not actually deploy this absurd test against the Roman Catholic; we are simply noting that if it is a valid truth-test, it eliminates his position as well as ours).

Qualitatively, a given Protestant's belief that his views are true is not in the slightest different from the Roman Catholic's belief that his views are true. The Roman Catholic cannot escape the "dilemma" posed by the question, "How do you know your beliefs are true?"

Indeed, for him it is worse than he might ever imagine it to be for the Protestant--worse because his claim reduces to the need for he himself to be infallible if he is to "know for sure" that his beliefs are true. That he thinks he has more "certainty" about his beliefs because he believes an infallible Church backs him up is evidence only of his own uncritical epistemology, not of the supposed unknowability of truth for Protestants.

Disagreements are proof only of human frailty and fallibility, not of inability to know truth. Confessional Protestants believe in the principle that the visible Church can and should make logical deductions from the text of Scripture, using (among other things) such time-honored principles of hermeneutics as St. Augustine presents in his book On Christian Doctrine.

What apologists like Porvaznik fail to grasp is that the human application of logic, the discipline of hermeneutics, is not infallible.

Just as Rome disagrees with the Eastern Orthodox over matters of logical deduction concerning the role of Peter in the Church, so too do Protestants disagree with each other over matters of logical deduction from the text of Scripture. Everywhere one turns, whether within a given communion or between different communions, disagreement exists.

So what? This has been the case ever since the Apostolic Age itself, as is eloquently testified by Paul in 1 Cor. 11:19 ("No doubt there must also be factions among you, in order that those who are approved may have become evident among you").

We come again, then, to the skepticism of apologists like Porvaznik about the ability of the written Word of God to convey truth to our minds. It is gratuitously assumed that because Protestants disagree about some of the Bible's teachings, none of them can know the truth about those teachings.

However, gratuitous assertions may be gratuitously denied and Protestants are not only correct to deny this one, but required to deny it. The terms of the Christian worldview state that we truly know because God has made us in His image and given us that ability.

Language--His own and ours--conveys truth and we can really know that truth. It is absurd for Porvaznik to assert that truth cannot be known by means of language (Scripture) simply because there is disagreement at some points. The assertion boomerangs on his own position (the Magisterium also communicates truth with words), destroying it utterly. It amounts to the ridiculous, self-refuting statement "Words don't mean anything. Understand?"

On the contrary, all rational people confess that words communicate meaning no matter how much people may disagree about that meaning.

Disagreements may be evidence that a given message was not understood by some of the recipients, but it is not a universal disproof of the notion that real meaning exists in the words and can be discovered with diligent effort. Further, sometimes people actually do know (whether with their minds or hearts is irrelevant) a truth they say they do not know.

Knowing truth is different from acquiescing in it. To say that disagreement means no one can know truth is to assault the very possibility of human knowledge.

Porvaznik wrote his article to convey meaning to his readers, and he fully (and rightly) expected his readers to understand him. Is it unreasonable to assume God wrote His Words with the same purpose in mind?

If we can read Porvaznik's essay and understand it without an infallible interpreter, why can we not read God's Words and understand them without an infallible interpreter? If I disagree with Porvaznik's essay, does that mean one or both of us cannot know the truth about the subject he wrote about?

Porvaznik's position is simply incoherent. There simply is no need to insert an "infallible interpreter" into the human knowing process. It is an absurd fifth wheel that requires the individual knower himself to be infallible in order to avoid an infinite regress of infallible justifications of knowledge.

We can know truth despite all disagreements. Any other position is extreme skepticism--though in Porvaznik's case it is self-serving skepticism since he immediately exempts himself from the truth-destroying acid of skepticism to which he so liberally subjects the Protestant position.

• A Realistic Appraisal of Protestant Doctrinal Differences

For several years, Eric Svendsen has been pointing out that all Roman Catholic attempts to parallel the relative "unity" of "Catholicism" and "Protestantism" are fallacious because they require the Roman Catholic to compare a single entity (Rome) with multiple entities (Reformed Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans).⁸

This point also applies to Porvaznik's assertion that "Truth is not something you can embrace in Protestantism, nor can you 'hold it precious' since it doesn't exist". Such a criticism is unfair in the extreme, for it speaks out of both sides of its mouth.

One moment it implies that there is such a thing as "Protestantism" (a single organizational entity that can be compared with the single organizational entity of "Catholicism") and the next it asserts that there is no such thing because there are so many competing denominations. Which is it?

Aside from the convenient waffling of this argument form, it is simply false. Critics such as Porvaznik routinely miss the fact that there is an enormous amount of substantive agreement among Protestants. At least, there is agreement on the most basic truth of all--the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Protestants do not hold (as do Roman Catholics) that the truth of the Christian faith is a tightly woven, comprehensive set of de fide dogmas, defection from any of which results in the collapse of the entire faith.

There are doctrines without which Christianity cannot survive and there are doctrines without which it can survive. No Protestant asserts that some doctrine he disagrees with other Protestants on is a doctrine that destroys the whole faith, and thus, creates another "the Church". Contra Porvaznik's overly-confident, shallow polemic, there is a great deal of truth that is actually known by all Protestants.

Further, speaking of "Protestantism", there is a single, corporate entity that agrees on a great deal of truth--and that derived (amazingly enough given Roman skepticism about the clarity of Scripture) from intensive, communal reflection on Scripture.

We might justly speak of a "Protestant Magisterium" of sorts, which promotes real unity and peace, not enforced uniformity and suppressed consciences at war with truth. That this "Protestant Magisterium" is radically decentralized is no proof that it does not exist or even that it is ineffective in resolving conflicts.⁹

Organizational disunity is not the same thing as the disunity Christ prayed against in John 17. Whatever practical benefits such unity would have for our witness to the world, the lack of such simply is not devastating to the faith.

Christianity has survived for nearly a thousand years since the first great split between East and West, and it has survived for another five hundred years since the Western split at the Reformation.

It has even survived despite the real anarchy that has afflicted it in America from the time of the nineteenth century's Second Great Awakening.¹⁰

Arguments such as Porvaznik's only appear strong because they exploit every disagreement whatsoever between Protestants, making "incessant disagreement over everything" the norm of the whole system.

This is a common problem that Roman apologists have--reading into the Protestant system their own understandings of "unity" and "faith". Thus, they see the doctrinal element of faith as assent to a tightly woven, comprehensive set of de fide dogmas, and proceed blithely down a perfectionistic path to prejudice and partisan politics.

It is Rome that damns other Christian groups for holding "false Gospels" by rejecting such abstruse, highly nuanced things as the Marian dogmas, transubstantiation, and the decrees of the Council of Trent.

It is Rome that says one must give religious assent of the mind to whatever the Church says in order to be saved.

It is Rome that treats virtually every aspect of Christian doctrine as fundamental to "the Gospel", and thus, Rome which ends up saying that if you do not agree with her on Item X, you hold "a different Gospel".

By contrast, all the Protestant denominations hold that "the Gospel" is simply the message of the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ which saves us when we simply believe apart from works (sola fide).

All Protestants agree on "the Gospel", which, recalling the discussion above about the meaning of "perspicuity", is a synonym for "the things necessary for salvation". Thus, to borrow the fascinating terms of another Roman apologist's article on the amazing degree of disagreement that exists among Roman Catholics, "Protestants agree on everything. It's everything else we disagree on".¹¹

Conclusion

Unfortunately for skeptics like Porvaznik, truth is a public phenomenon and public accountability for public sophistry can be demanded. Christianity is and has always been a very public religion, rooted deeply in the knowable space-time world.

Although its basic truth claims have always had deeply personal ramifications, they have never been wedded exclusively to personal, sectarian concerns, and this means that they do not belong merely to one professing Christian group.

The criterion of real knowledge is not and never has been "submission of the mind to the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church", and we are fully within our epistemic rights to dismiss such a notion as a desperate defense for a system that is truly indefensible when it is forced to operate on the same level as every other system.

I am reminded of Jack Nicholson's line from the movie A Few Good Men: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!" Truer words could not be spoken of a large segment of today's militant Roman Catholic apologists.

Apologetics is supposed to be the discipline of witnessing for truth. When, however, truth is actually attacked and damaged under the connotative banner of "apologetics", we must conclude that the word has lost its meaning.

Perhaps it is time for those who pride themselves on their continuity with the Church Fathers to revisit the powerful words of the great second-century Bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus:

Porvaznik and all who argue like he does seem to be incapable of constructing fair arguments that do not overthrow their own position. Invoking skepticism in the name of apologetics and substituting imagination for reality, Porvaznik and those who argue as he does are their own worst enemies.

Notes

1. Links to discussions regarding these and many other differences among Roman Catholics can be found at Roman Catholic Divisions and the Use of Private Judgment, by Eric Svendsen.

2. Hence, I have found it useful to speak of the apparent Roman apologist belief in "the perspicuity of the Magisterium". When challenged by other Roman Catholics on matters in dispute, the typical response from "true Catholics" is "You aren't reading the Pope's words at face value--you're importing foreign meanings into the words and distorting the message".

This is, of course, exactly the sort of reasoning these very apologists criticize when Protestants apply it to their disagreements about the clear teachings of Scripture.

3. See Private Judgment: A Summary Response to Dave Armstrong's Claims, The Reformation Doctrine of Private Judgment, Infallible Interpreters of Infallible Guides -- A Reply to Gary Michuta's Paper, and The "Baptized Humanism" of the Reformed?. Also see the log of the chatroom discussion between Chris Jenkins and Roman apologist Scott Windsor on Do Roman Catholics Have to Interpret the Words of the Magisterium?

4. In terms of historiography, I have dealt with this sort of claim at The Incredible Myth of "Consistency".

5. See Ronald H. Nash, The Word of God and the Mind of Man (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1982) pp. 79-90, and compare with Ronald B. Mayers, Balanced Apologetics: Using Evidences and Presuppositions in Defense of the Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1984), pp. 36-63 (general epistemology), 88-95 (on Augustine), and 103-117 (on Calvin).

6. David T. King, Holy Scripture: The Ground and Pillar of Our Faith, Volume 1 (Battleground, WA: Christian Resources, Inc., 2001), pg. 26

7. Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, ed. James Canon Bastible (Rockford: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., reprinted 1974), pg. 200. Emphasis mine.

8. See his articles 30,000 Protestant Denominations?, 30,000 Protestant Denominations -- Revisited, and question 2 of the Roman Catholic Challenge. Also see pp. 119-125 of his book Evangelical Answers: A Critique of Current Roman Catholic Apologists (Lindenhurst, NY: Reformation Press, 1999).

9. This point is developed at some length in my articles against John Pacheco, The Black Hole of Protestant Epistemology and Sharpening A Blunt Instrument.

10. As a general rule, Roman Catholic apologists are grossly ignorant of the history of Reformational Protestantism in America. Blissfully unaware of the early, rich Calvinist heritage of America and its gradual descent into such abominable heresies as the Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney, the decisionist revivalism of the great Arminian "campmeetings" (which produced what Philip Schaff called "a host of sects"), and, eventually, the arrogant know-nothingism of modern Fundamentalism, these apologists typically imagine that today's situation is how Protestantism always was in America--and perhaps even the best it is able to produce. Again we see how a little polemic bluster and a few half-remembered website articles can easily be substituted for real knowledge-- which is all the more ironic since today's Roman apologists think their strongest point is the field of Church history!

11. See Mark Shea's intriguing article Catholic "Officialdom" and Theological Ambiguity and my reply at What? You Guys Don't Agree About Everything?