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Part 4, More about Authority

I was asked in a comment the other day when I was going to talk about theological reasons I chose the Celtic Catholic Church. The truth is that the basic theology of the church is pretty much the same as every church. This is the basic statement of faith for the Celtic Catholic Church:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father, through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation he came down from Heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures.

He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church, we acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sin, we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

This is called the Nicene Creed. It came out of the Council of Nicea in 325 AD and defines the basic beliefs of a Christian. It is succinct and covers all the bases. We say it every week. I love the Nicene Creed and its baby brother, the Apostle’s Creed, because it gives us an easy way to memorize the basics of our faith. (As an aside, I grew up in a denomination that said the Apostle’s Creed every week. When you ask me what I believe, that is my go to answer. I don’t have to guess and I don’t have to remember pages of theology. I can recite a statement that goes back to the earliest days of the Church.)

Back to the original question, I AM going to go into some theological issues over the next few blogs, but I first want to speak a little more to another aspect of authority. Martin Luther is famous for embracing Sola Scripture, Scripture alone. That sounds wonderful, but what does it mean?

Most (if not all) Christians would agree that the Bible is inspired by God. I’m not going to get all the way in the weeds with that, but in broad strokes, they would all agree that God had a hand in passing on the content of the Bible to us. Many Protestants take this a step further and accept a view called Inerrancy. This means that when the writers of Scripture wrote the Bible, those original documents were without error. The idea is that for the Bible to be trustworthy, it must be free from error.

I definitely believe in Biblical inspiration, and I don’t have an issue with the concept of inerrancy. The issue is interpretation. When faced with competing views on what the Bible says, how do we decide what is true?

In the early days of the church, these issues were decided by the leaders of the church. I mentioned Acts 15 last time. There were church councils that met over the years to address various questions of doctrine that arose in the church. However, over the years, especially in the Protestant denominations, the “Scripture alone” concept led to the idea that every Christian, or every community of Christians, could decide on their own what the Bible meant. There’s several huge issues with this:

  1. The Bible has a historical context. All of Scripture was written to particular people at particular points in history. The context in which it was written is vitally important to understanding it.
  2. The Bible was written by individuals. The writers of the Bible had something in mind when they wrote.
  3. The Bible was written in particular languages. There are some parts of the Bible that are exceedingly difficult to translate because we just cannot be sure what various words or idioms meant.

A great example of all this is the passage in 1 Timothy 2:8-15. Here we have Paul writing a letter to Timothy. This passage has been used for hundreds of years to say that women cannot be pastors, among other things. That seems obvious when reading it in English, but Paul didn’t write in English. We are reading an English translation of a Greek copy of a Greek letter written by a man who thinks in Hebrew. In addition, Paul wasn’t writing to a modern audience in America or Europe. He was writing to one man in one church in one city in the First Century. Can we really KNOW what Paul meant or to what situation he was writing? Not without asking Paul. So what do we do?

One option is for every Christian and every church to decide individually how to interpret the passage…

OR

…we can have a central authority that decides how we interpret.

Let me explain with an analogy. Does everyone get to make their own decisions on the length of a foot (12 in)? Of course not! How would that even work? You must have standards for civilization to exist. And everyone doesn’t get to determine for themselves what those standards mean. They exist outside our opinions and undergird our lives.

In the same way, the structure of our beliefs must exist outside our individual opinions. Otherwise, “everyone does what is right in their own eyes”, and we wind up with tens of thousands of denominations and belief systems, many of them at odds with each other.

The Celtic Catholic Church states the following on its website:

“The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are the basic summaries of faith and doctrine. The Bible is the fountain of teaching: anything that cannot be proved from Scripture is not required for belief by the people. Where Scripture is silent, the unified voice of the Church from the beginning of time until now (called Tradition) is consulted, but the testimony of Tradition never contradicts the testimony of Scripture. Reason and personal experience are also held in high regard, but they are always tempered and disciplined by Scripture and Tradition. Neither the Church as a whole nor her ministers individually ever teach anything as doctrine based solely on reason or experience.”

To break this down, the authority tree is:

  1. The Bible,
  2. The Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds…summaries of faith and doctrine,
  3. Tradition, or the unified voice of the church (which should never contradict Scripture),
  4. Reason and experience

So how does this work practically?

  1. The existence of God – the Bible is clear that God exists.
  2. The Trinity – we can infer this from the Bible, but it is clearly expressed in both creeds.
  3. Abortion – the Bible never mentions abortion at all directly, but the unified voice of the church since the beginning condemns abortion and that condemnation is in line with Scripture.
  4. Prosperity Gospel – through reason and experience, some Christians have come to the conclusion that God will only allow good into our lives if we have enough faith. This is not in line with the Bible or the witness of the church since the beginning, so it is rejected.

The Celtic Catholic Church is rooted in a time when there was one, unified voice on Christian faith and practice. That is one reason why I chose the Celtic Catholic Church.