PAPAL INFALLIBILITY: A PROTESTANT RESPONSE

...God's truth can only be realized in a person and his name is Jesus of Nazareth...

...Many are therefore led to conclude, as does Kaufman, that "In the practical order there will probably never again be a solemn, dogmatic definition by pope or council...

...Further, it is by no means as deeply embedded in the Roman Catholic tradition as, for example, papal primacy...

...but from a Reformation perspective, it seems satisfactory...

...But there is still another role which infallibility has played for which no effective substitute is yet in sight...

...This role is traditionally spoken of as that of maintaining unity in faith, but it can also be described in terms borrowed from the sociology of knowledge or communications theory...

...It is not repudiated, but is rather relegated to- the limbo already occupied by such doctrinal pronouncements as those of Trent on indulgences, or of Innocent III on "no salvation outside the church," or of Florence on the "matter" of the sacrament of orders...

...It can be argued that the institutional and psycho-social functions of papal infallibility are much more crucial than his presentation indicates...

...No one else, as far as I know, is currently quoting Abbot Butler to the effect that infallibility is ecumenically easier to deal with than primacy...

...Theological acceptability, however, is not the whole story, and this brings us to dimensions of the problem which Father Kaufman, perhaps for reasons of space, does not discuss...

...In recent articles on Cardinal Manning, George Williams of Harvard suggests' that Vatican I was perhaps essential in maintaining the international character of the Catholic Church and in defending its independence against the political, economic and cultural establishments of the day...

...Perhaps collegiality and subsidiarity will be able to replace the lopsidedly monarchic patterns of the past...

...and Kaufman's supporting arguments, as he notes, are actually "conservative...

...They professed eagerness for reconciliation with the pope and with their Catholic brethren providing they were not asked to deny anything scriptural nor to affirm anything un-scriptural...

...Infallibility, whether of tradition, bible, pope or council, has at times served to sustain cognitive communities, universes of mutually intelligible discourse, and theological enterprises which are at least partially cooperative and cumulative...

...There is much to be said for the contention that no historically conditioned, verbal statement can ever encompass the truth of God...

...This is what makes the issue of infallibility vastly more difficult than Father Kaufman's excellent but too narrowly focused essay would lead one to suspect.lead one to suspect...

...It can therefore be demoted to inactive status without injury either to communal identity or to the inner logic of the Catholic understanding of Christianity...

...From this point of view, the present crisis of authority and belief is fundamentally a problem in communal consensus building...

...Similarly, infallibility is now becoming dysfunctional...

...Thus, the problem with which we are confronted is similar to that spoken of in the parable of the seven devils...

...When this is done, the dubious historical antecedents of infallibility become evident, as do the limitations and uncertainties of its meaning...

...Perhaps papal infallibility is no longer needed for these purposes...

...It has provided transcendent legitimations and sanctions for Roman centralism and for the papal personality cult of the last century...

...Whether a substitute can be found in the sensus fidelium as this is formed in its encounters with the world by scripture, tradition and the teaching office of the church is as yet uncertain...

...They largely reiterate the commonplaces of much current Catholic thought...

...Since Vatican II, uniformity in doctrinal articulation is not an ecumenical desideratum even for Catholics...

...When one is driven out and the room is left empty, swept and garnished, it is all too likely that its place will be taken by seven devils each worse than the first...

...Infallibility is symbolically powerful in ways which go far beyond its propositional content...

...Its nineteenth century role was to defend the church against nationalism and secularism, but now it simply creates difficulties both within the church and in relation to non-Catholics...

...There are reasons for doubting, to mention one example, that the Catholic churches behind the iron curtain would still be Roman if it had not been for the first Vatican Council...

...Mutual recognition of the Christian legitimacy of each other's professions of faith is all that is needed...

...Without such devices, the shrill voices of individual whims and private revelations preempt the stage, and communal thinking of either the prosaic or creative varieties becomes impossible...

...These formulations may have had a certain legitimacy at the time of their promulgation, but now that the fundamental issues with which they were concerned are better understood, as most contemporary Catholic theologians seem to hold, they have quite rightly fallen into desuetude...

...It might be well to spell out more explicitly than Kaufman does what george A. lindbeck, the well-known Lutheran theologian and member of the faculty of the Yale Divinity School, served as a Protestant observer at the Second Vatican Council...

...The historic linchpins of these processes are bent and broken by the erosion of biblical infallibility among Protestants and of magisterial infallibility among Catholics...

...Catholics need not insist on its acceptance nor non-Catholics on its repudiation...

...It is a less formidable obstacle to Christian unity than is primacy, and that, so the American Catholic-Lutheran dialogue maintains, "need not be a barrier to reconciliation...

...It has done this by ensuring that there is a common point of reference, a center with which everyone must, at the very least, argue and debate...

...As a non-Catholic, I must leave to others the question of the theological acceptability of this position from the Roman Catholic point of view...

...This sounds strange, as Kaufman himself observes...

...The problem appears to be solved in the sense that infallibility becomes an inactive or inoperative dogma...

...All that is needed, he holds, is "to return to Vatican I and seek to understand the dogma in the context of the original definition...

...Without it, the church would have abandoned the working classes even more completely than it did, and Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum might have been impossible...

...However regrettable these may be, they have also been conditions, perhaps necessary ones, for the maintenance of ecclesiastical unity amidst the disestablishments, social upheavals and persecutions of recent times...

...If this happens, so the implied argument concludes, infallibility will no longer be church-dividing...

...is involved in regarding this as a solution...

...They will perhaps continue to disagree on whether it was in the past a legitimate or illegitimate, a Christian or anti-Christian, doctrine, but it would be wrong to make the settlement of such retrospective historical questions a condition for unity...

...Yet on reflecting there is nothing absurd about the suggestion...

...The Reformers, especially the Lutheran ones, claimed to be contending only for the freedom of the gospel...

...The ascription of infallibility to some finite authority has been idolatrous and enslaving for both Protestants and Catholics, but it has also constituted a theological analogue to the scientific insistence that hypotheses be experimentally testable, or to the legal requirement that there be constitutions and supreme courts which terminate the process of appeal...

...Mutual doctrinal recognition of the kind we have mentioned would seem to more than meet this requirement...

...There should, then, be no great difficulty in "defusing" the dogma of infallibility...