The Pope And Infallibility

From The Christian Reader:

The Pope and his Infallibility


One of the more troubling doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church—from a Protestant perspective at least—is "papal infallibility." In today's excerpt from The History of Christian Thought, we read about the First Vatican Council, which is where this doctrine was first officially publicized. It is interesting to note that even some Catholics could not accept this bold-faced grab for ecclesiastical power. Even though it certainly is beneficial in having an ultimate human authority on all matters pertaining to "faith or morals," it is not a benefit that the Bible imparts to any one man.







The Bible speaks about wisdom in plurality. In fact, even the Godhead is a council of three. It is understandable why Pope Pius IX wanted this power to be officially stated; when the heat is on and there is no clear line in the sand between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, it is easy to get confused about what is right and what is wrong. Papal infallibility indeed gives the pope the legitimacy to be the voice of the church in a time of confusion, but the question must be asked as to whether the Bible allows for this legitimacy. Protestants, since the time of the Reformation, have answered in the negative. In fact, during the Reformation, Protestants decentralized the Bible and put the Scriptures into the hands of the people, in their own language. They believed (and still believe) that God would speak through His Word to His people—not just one person.



THE FIRST VATICAN COUNCIL



To Pope Pius IX it seemed that everything about the modern world was campaigning against the Roman Catholic Church. The rationalism and faith in unaided human progress that still remained from the Enlightenment; political and theological liberalism; biblical scholarship, the rapid rise of modern science—all seemed to be threatening the faith of the church. In 1864 he published the Syllabus of Errors, a long list of "modern" beliefs, all of which he roundly condemned. The general tone of the document was summed up in the final and most damnable "error" of all, number 80: "The Roman pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization."

The pope was determined to ensure that the condemnation was ratified by the whole church, and in 1869 the First Vatican Council was called to carry this out. Over eight hundred Catholic leaders from all around the world attended. Although it was of course dominated by Europeans, this was the first Catholic Church council to involve non-Europeans. Even Orthodox leaders were invited, but they did not come—hardly surprising given what the main decree of the council would be.

The council vigorously upheld the teachings of the Council of Trent and affirmed the pope's condemnation of the Syllabus of Errors. It upheld his teaching in that document that reason is decidedly inferior to revelation and that revelation is to be found solely through the Roman Catholic Church. There was no hint of ecumenicalism here!

But the most important decision of the council concerned the pope himself. It declared that the pope is the supreme leader of the church and that this fact can never be reversed or altered. And it decreed:



When the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.

The notion of papal infallibility had for a long time been largely assumed; now for the first time it was not only explicit but made an article of faith. Many Catholics refused to accept it and formed the sect known as the Old Catholics, so called because they clung to the pre-Vatican I faith. They recognized that the council represented an unthinking conservatism, a complete rejection of modernism and a trenchant reactionism that threatened to keep the church stuck in the Middle Ages, increasingly irrelevant to the modern world. It would be nearly a century before the Catholic Church would finally deal with these problems in a conservative and creative way, at the Second Vatican Council.



[Excerpt from Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2003), 256-257.]





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