revelation, faith, and tradition: catholic ecumenical dialogue

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© Calvin Theological Seminary 2014

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CalvinTheological

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CTJ 49 (2014): 25–62

Revelation, Faith, and Tradition:Catholic Ecumenical Dialogue

Eduardo Echeverria

Introduction

Fifty years after the Second Vatican Council, by and large ecumenical dialogue has replaced Catholic and Reformed apologetics. In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of such apologetics, in part, because of the movement of several distinguished Protestant theologians of vari-ous confessional traditions—Lutherans Reinhard Hütter, Bruce Marshall, and Mickey Mattox; Anglicans, Russell Reno and Douglas Farrow; and Mennonite, Gerald Schlabach—have come into full communion with the Catholic Church.1 In this article, I single out the distinguished theologian, Reinhard Hütter, whose movement toward full communion was motivated by the traditional question of authority.2 This article brings Hütter into ecumenical dialogue with another distinguished theologian, namely, the orthodox Presbyterian, Michael S. Horton, who has leveled certain charges against the Catholic Church.3 Horton defends Reformed theology and has criticized some key points of Catholic thought. Thus, his writings offer an

1 See Jason Byassee, “Going Catholic,” The Christian Century, August 22, 2008, 18–23, account of theologians who left their Protestant communities for the Catholic Church. “The list includes three Lutherans—Reinhard Hütter and Bruce Marshall, theologians at Methodist seminaries (Duke and Southern Methodist), and Mickey Mattox, a Luther scholar at Marquette; two Anglicans—Rusty Reno of Creighton and Douglas Farrow of McGill University; and a Mennonite—Gerald Schlabach of St. Thomas University.”

2 Reinhard Hütter is professor of Christian theology at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. In this article, I draw on his article, “Relinquishing the Principle of Private Judgment in Matters of Divine Truth: A Protestant Theologian’s Journey into the Catholic Church,” Nova et Vetera 9, no. 4 (2011): 865–81. Hütter gives, in this article, an intellectual account as well as moving testimony of his reasons for coming into full communion with the Catholic Church. See also his article, “Why Does the Pope Matter to Protestants?” Nova et Vetera 6, no. 3 (2008): 675–80. For Mickey Mattox’s account of his reasons for coming into the Catholic Church from the Lutheran tradition, see Changing Churches: An Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran Conversation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).

3 Michael S. Horton is the J. Gresham Machen professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, Escondido, California.

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opportunity to revisit Catholic responses to such traditional Reformation critiques in our contemporary context.

In his treatise on systematic theology,4 Horton claims that the Catholic Church (1) has an unacceptable dogma of implicit faith, (2) has unjustifi-ably and inconsistently rejected the role of private judgment in matters of discerning divine truth, and (3) has affirmed the primacy of the magiste-rium of the Catholic Church. Indeed, the Church’s exclusive assertion, he claims, is not of sola scriptura or of sola traditio but is of the solum magisterium.

This article engages Horton in ecumenical dialogue. Such dialogue pre-supposes a mutual understanding of each other’s views. “Study is absolutely required for this, and should be pursued with fidelity to truth and in a spirit of good will,” Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, rightly states.5 One of the aims of this article is to better understand Horton’s objections so that the Catholic faith is expressed without being an obstacle to dialogue with Reformed theologians.

Horton claims that the Catholic Church has an unacceptable dogma of implicit faith, meaning thereby that the Church “requires acceptance of all dogmas commanded by the Church.” He adds, “The basis for this implicit faith is the church’s own inherent authority.”6 In a more popular context in which Horton summarily states his view of the magisterium, he has written that implicit faith means “just believe whatever the church teaches”; in fact, he claims that “Rome defines faith as fides implicita: tak-ing the church’s word for it. For Rome, faith is not trust in Jesus Christ according to the gospel, but yielding assent and obedience unreservedly simply to everything the church teaches as necessary to salvation.”7 Horton claims that this understanding of faith entails a blind faith or trust in the church and hence “a sacrifice of the intellect and an abandonment of one’s personal responsibility for one’s commitments to the decisions and acts of others.”8

Furthermore, Horton also claims that regardless of the difference between the Catholic and Reformed traditions on the question of ultimate theological authority—Rome allegedly transfers ultimate theological

4 Michael S. Horton, The Christian Faith, A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 187–89.

5 Vatican II, November 21, 1964, Unitatis Redintegratio, “Decree on Ecumenism,” no. 9. Online at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat–ii_decree_19641121_unitatis–redintegratio_en.html.

6 Horton, Christian Faith, 189.

7 Michael Horton, “Who’s in Charge Here? The Illusions of Church Infallibility,” no. 13. Online at http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/06/13/who’s–in–charge–here–the–illusions–of–church–infallibility/.

8 Horton, “Who’s in Charge Here?” no. 13.

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REVELATION, FAITH, AND TRADITION: CATHOLIC ECUMENICAL DIALOGUE

authority from Scripture to the magisterium. The latter being the teach-ing office whereby the Church makes judgment in matters of divine truth should not lead us to deny the similarity, methodologically speaking, between these traditions on the role played out by an act of individual responsibility. This act is informed by what Hütter calls the principle of private judgment, meaning thereby “this act of deciding, this individual arbi-tration and adjudication of matters of divine truth.”9 Horton suggests that private judgment is an ultimate principle, that we are all “Protestants,” and hence, to the extent that we must make use of private judgment, this stance can never be relinquished. He emphasizes this point:

In the very act of making the decision to transfer ultimate authority from Scripture to the magisterium, he or she is weighing various biblical passages and theological arguments. The goal (shifting the burden of responsibility from oneself to the church) is contradicted by the method. At this point, one cannot simply surrender to a Reformed church or a Roman church; they must make a decision after careful personal study. We’re both in the same shoes.10

In other words, according to Horton, the principle of private judgment is the last court of appeal both for the Catholic and the Protestant. The Catholic deceives himself to think otherwise. There is no self-renunciation in matters of divine truth; for example, submitting to the magisterium, without a private judgment that one is justified or not in surrendering him-self to the judgment of the Church in those matters.

Horton traces the alleged primacy of the magisterium of the Catholic Church—indeed, the Church’s exclusive assertion, he claims, not of sola scriptura or of sola traditio but of the solum magisterium—to a theologically and biblically flawed understanding of Scripture and tradition in relation to divine revelation and the Church. Horton writes:

The magisterium (the teaching office, with the pope as primate) proposes or commands dogmas to be believed on the assumption that the apostolic authority that produced the New Testament continues in an unbroken suc-cession through Rome’s popes. While Scripture and postcanonical tradition differ in degree of authority, they belong to the same genus [of a single deposit of the Word of God], since they are both equally the offspring of divine revela-tion in the church.11

The upshot of Horton’s critique is that the Catholic Church subscribes to a doctrine of ongoing revelation, regarding itself to be the author or source of divine truth, and hence “virtually erasing any distinction between inspiration (pertaining exclusively to the biblical texts) and illumination

9 Hütter, “Relinquishing the Principle of Private Judgment,” 866.


11 Horton, Christian Faith, 189. The italicized words within the bracket are from Dei Verbum, no. 10.


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(pertaining to the church’s interpretation).”12 In short, on this matter of Scripture and tradition nothing has changed in the Catholic Church, according to Horton, even with Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum.13

In my response to Horton, I propose to show that he does not represent Catholicism fairly. For example, he is mistaken on the first two points. He misunderstands not only the concept of fides implicita—never mind that he inexplicably calls it a dogma of the Church but provides no documenta-tion for that claim—but also the role of the principle of private judgment in matters of divine truth. Regarding the concept of fides implicita, I will argue that it has nothing to do with “blind faith,” but rather that, properly understood, it makes sense in an epistemology of testimony. Regarding the principle of private judgment, he seems to be arguing that this is an ultimate, a foundational principle, for all Christians and hence can never be left behind. Horton’s critical remark presses the Catholic theologian to make clear his position on the role of private judgment in discerning mat-ters of divine truth. Pace Horton, I argue that the Catholic theologian, such as the former Lutheran, Hütter, does not as such reject the principle of private judgment but rather only opposes its abuse. Private judgment plays a key role in the act of deciding whether or not to “assent to the Church’s teaching and simultaneously surrender to the Church’s judgment in mat-ters of divine truth.”14 Still, adds Hütter, although private judgment cannot be avoided and hence it is legitimate, unlike Horton, Hütter argues that enclosed in an act of intentionally assenting to the Church’s teaching and simultaneously surrendering to its judgment in matters of divine truth is, as he correctly states, “an act of equally intentional [self-]renunciation.” Yes, to this extent Horton is right, “there is no renunciation without a prior affirmation.”15 As Hütter rightly adds, however, “by assenting to the divine truth as believed, taught, and proclaimed by the Catholic Church, I renounce myself as the supreme and final court of deciding matters of divine truth.”16

Regarding the third point, Horton’s critical remarks raise some impor-tant questions regarding the Church’s understanding of the relationship between Scripture and tradition that I shall briefly address.17 Questions

12 Michael S. Horton, “Sufficient for Faith and Practice: Covenant and Canon,” Modern Reformation 19, no. 3 (2010): 10–15.

13 Horton, Christian Faith, 188–89.



16 Hütter, “Relinquishing the Principle of Private Judgment,” 865–66.

17 I address this fundamental theological question at length in my ecumenical study on Catholicism and the Reformed tradition, Berkouwer and Catholicism, Disputed Questions,

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such as whether “Roman Catholic teaching elides the important distinction between inspiration and illumination”18 shall be addressed, but the chief systematic theological question addressed concerns the proper interpreta-tion of the teaching of Dei Verbum. If—as Dei Verbum teaches—Scripture, tradition, and the Church are intrinsically and necessarily related as a net-work of interdependent authorities (“ita inter se connecti et consociari, ut unum sine aliis non consistat”), with these authorities functioning together, each in its own way (“singula suo modo”),19 how can we avoid making Scripture subservient to tradition or to the teaching office of the Church, leaving us with either “sola traditio” or “solum magisterium” (both of which are uncatholic) as the ultimate source of authority?

Implicit Faith

What is implicit faith? According to Horton, implicit faith is the act of “yielding assent and obedience unreservedly simply to everything the church teaches as necessary to salvation.”20 This sweeping generalization describing the logic of faith wrongly suggests that the faithful are called to believe the Christian faith because of the Church’s authority. Indeed, that is precisely what Horton thinks: “The basis for this implicit faith is the church’s own inherent authority.”21 In his judgment, this understand-ing of faith entails a blind trust in the church and hence “a sacrifice of the intellect and an abandonment of one’s personal responsibility for one’s commitments to the decisions and acts of others.”22 Significantly, Horton does not provide any documentation to support his claim that the Church has a dogma of implicit faith. In the Catholic tradition a dogma is a teaching of the Church that the faithful ought to believe “as divinely and formally revealed and, as such, as irreformable.”23 Furthermore, Horton never actually gives any documentation to support his claim that the authority of the Catholic Church is the basis—“I believe because of the Church’s authority”24—for intentionally assenting to the divine truth

Studies in Reformed Theology, vol. 24 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), 272–393.


19 These Latin phrases in quotations within the brackets are from Dei Verbum, no. 10.

20 Michael Horton, “Who’s in Charge Here?” no. 13.



23 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the ‘Professio Fidei’,” June 29, 1998, no. 5.

24 Horton contrasts the positions of Rome and the Reformation on authority as follows: “We do not believe the Bible’s teachings because of the Church’s authority, but we do believe them through the church and its ministry” (Christian Faith, 218; italics in original; see also, 189–90).


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that is believed, taught, and proclaimed by the Catholic Church rather than being a divine instrument through which we assent to that truth. In addition, he never actually defines what he means by implicit. He simply assumes that implicit means blind trust. Moreover, he never actu-ally provides any documentation that either the Church or the Catholic theological tradition understand the nature of faith, especially the object of faith, to be such that “the church rather than Christ [is] the object of faith,”25 or, alternatively, “that the faithful must believe everything that the church teaches (fides implicita), based on the authority of the church”26 rather than on the authority of Christ. In connection with the matter of faith’s object, Horton does not provide any documentation that the Church holds faith to be “sufficiently defined as mere assent even to true doctrines.”27 Last but not least, he never gives any documentation at all that the Church understands faith to be solely “an act of the church rather than of the individual.”28 Still, there are real issues behind these objections raised by Horton. Therefore, even though his objections rest on sweeping generalizations not to mention misunderstandings, some of these are perpetrated by Catholics, and to that extent they share in the responsibility for them,29 I turn now, however briefly, to address these issues.

The first question before us is the primacy of the authority of God, of his Word, in short, of divine revelation over the authority of the Church—which is an authority derived from Christ. On what grounds must I inten-tionally assent to the divine truth that is believed, taught, and proclaimed


26 Horton, Christian Faith, 192, italics in original.

27 Horton, Christian Faith, 583, 585.

28 Horton, Christian Faith, 582. In setting up this opposition between the personal act of faith and the Church, Horton refers to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 168. He does qualify this opposition on 582n56: “At the same time, the element of personal trust is not entirely absent in these more recent definitions of faith [in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 142–84].” But this reluctant qualification does not lead him to revise his claim that the Roman Catholic theology of faith regards faith to be “an act of the church rather than of the individual” (582). Horton’s sweeping generalization lacks documentation; not surprisingly since it is unsupportable: the Church teaches that faith is simultaneously a per-sonal and an ecclesial act.

29 On the intensification of the authority of the teaching office in the post–Tridentine period, see the brief historical account by the unofficial ecumenical group of Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic scholars and pastors, Le Groupe Des Dombes, “One Teacher” Doctrinal Authority in the Church, trans. Catherine E. Clifford (2005; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 55–73, and at 58, “The trauma of the breakup of unity never ceased to occupy the collective unconscious of the Catholic Church, and it especially influenced the magiste-rium’s work… . The need to strengthen the unity of the portions of Christianity that remain attached to Rome and the desire to display the spiritual power of the papacy converged to accentuate the pope’s magisterial authority.”

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by the Catholic Church? Put differently, what is the motive for the assent of faith? In order to explain the difference between divine revelation and the authority of the Church, between the basis of assent and the means through which I assent, I will cite from the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), from Vatican I’s Dei Filius (1870), and from Vatican II’s Dei Verbum (1965).

Though the word faith has a variety of meanings in the Sacred Scriptures, we here speak only of that faith by which we yield our entire assent to whatever has been divinely revealed. That faith thus understood is necessary to salva-tion no man can reasonably doubt, particularly since it is written: Without faith it is impossible to please God [Heb. 11:6]. For as the end proposed to man as his ultimate happiness is far above the reach of human under-standing, it was therefore necessary that it should be made known to him by God. This knowledge, however, is nothing else than faith, by which we yield our unhesitating assent to whatever the authority of our Holy Mother the Church teaches us to have been revealed by God; for the faithful cannot doubt those things of which God, who is truth itself, is the author.30

Since human beings are totally dependent on God as their creator and lord, and created reason is completely subject to uncreated truth, we are obliged to yield to God the revealer full submission of intellect and will by faith. This faith, which is the beginning of human salvation, the Catholic Church professes to be a supernatural virtue, by means of which, with the grace of God inspiring and assisting us, we believe to be true what He has revealed, not because we perceive its intrinsic truth by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God himself, who makes the revelation and can neither deceive nor be deceived.31

“The obedience of faith” (Rom. 13:26; see 1:5; 2 Cor. 10:5-6) “is to be given to God who reveals, an obedience by which man commits his whole self freely to God, offering the full submission of intellect and will to God who reveals,” and freely assenting to the truth revealed by Him. To make this act of faith, the grace of God and the interior help of the Holy Spirit must precede and assist, moving the heart and turning it to God, opening the eyes of the mind and giving “ joy and ease to everyone in assenting to the truth and believing it.” To bring about an ever deeper understanding of revelation the same Holy Spirit constantly brings faith to completion by His gifts. Through divine revelation, God chose to show forth and communicate Himself and the eternal decisions of His will regarding the salvation of men. That is to say, He chose to share with them those divine treasures which totally transcend the understanding of the human mind.32

30 Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests, Translated into English with Notes by John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan (1566; repr., New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1923), pt. 1, The Creed, Faith.

31 Vatican I, Dei Filius, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Chapter 3, On Faith.

32 Vatican II, Dei Verbum, 1965, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, nos. 5–6. The quotes within the quotation are from Vatican I (1870) and the Second Council of


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Horton thinks that the motive of the act of faith for assenting to divine truth is obedience to the Church’s authority rather than the trustworthi-ness of God himself. Hence, this conviction leads to his claim that the Church’s position on the matter of ultimate theological authority is the position of solum magisterium. Given this claim, I do not see how he can make sense of the above passages and many others.33 He is mistaken in claiming that the Church’s teaching office is the motive of the act of faith for assenting to divine truth, for this position would make the teaching office the supreme norm of faith. Horton can only think this because he thinks the Church confuses the grounds of faith with the means through which I assent to divine truth. These passages do clearly give primacy to the authority of God—of his Word (divine revelation) over the authority of the Church. Pace Horton, the Church does not confuse the source of truth, which is divine revelation, with the responsibility of the Church’s teaching office to certify divine truth.34 In other words, the magisterium is not a source of divine revelation but only an authoritative aid to discerning what belongs to the content of revelation. Only Scripture and tradition are such revelatory sources, but the latter does not play a supplementary or additive role with respect to the former; rather tradition’s role is interpretative and explicative.35

With all due respect to Horton, the Catholic Church rejects the idea of an “ongoing revelation.”36 It should suffice to recall here Proposition 21 of Pius

Orange (529).

33 For example, John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 1998 Encyclical Letter, no. 13. See also, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, August 6, 2000, no. 7. Horton mistakenly thinks (Christian Faith, 742) that this document from the CDF is an encyclical of John Paul II.

34 Rev. James T. O’Connor makes this point regarding the “relationship that exists between infallibility and truth.” He writes: “”Infallibility does not render a doctrine of the Church more true than it ever was. Infallibility is formally concerned not with the truth as such but rather with the certitude with which the truth is known. There are doctrines that are true but have never been proclaimed infallibly; there are doctrines that have long been held to be true but are only proclaimed infallibly after a long passage of time in the Church’s history; there are doctrines that are true, taught by the Church, but about which the Church does not have the absolute certitude that enables her to proclaim the truth definitively” (“The Infallibility of the Church’s Magisterium,” in The Gift of Infallibility, ed. Bishop Vincent Ferrer Gasser, The Official Relatio on Infallibility at Vatican Council I, July 11, 1870. Translated with Commentary by the Rev. James T. O’Connor, 2nd updated edition [San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008], 121).

35 I shall return to this Catholic understanding of divine revelation later in the text.

36 Horton, Christian Faith, 192. Horton acknowledges that the Catholic Church rejects the idea of postapostolic revelation; indeed, nothing can be added to the deposit of faith (Christian Faith, 189n13). He cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 67. He could also have cited no. 73: “God has revealed himself fully by sending his own Son, in whom he had established his covenant forever. The Son is his Father’s definitive Word; so there will

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X’s Lamentabili Sane (1907), Syllabus of Errors Concerning the Modernists, in which the following modernist thesis is rejected: “Revelation, constitut-ing the object of the Catholic faith, was not completed with the Apostles” (Revelatio, objectum fidei catholicae constituens, non fuit cum Apostolis completa). In addition, in Dei Verbum we read: “The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (see 1 Tim. 6:14 and Titus 2:13).”37 Hence, in defend-ing the gift of the magisterium, the Church does not elide, as Horton claims, “the important distinction between inspiration and illumination.”38 Certainly, the Church has teaching authority, indeed shares in the author-ity of Scripture, as I will argue below, but it “is only a secondary rule, mea-sured by the primary rule, which is divine Revelation.”39 In the words of Dei Verbum that distinguish the magisterial authority of the Word of God from the ministerial authority of the Church’s teaching office,40

the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office is not above the Word of God, but serves it [Quod quidem Magisterium non supra verbum Dei est, sed eidem ministrat], teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed.41

Perhaps we can make this point clearer by distinguishing between the “formal reason” of faith and the Church’s teaching authority. The former is the reason why we believe something, say, that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. We believe it by virtue of divine revelation. “Divine revela-tion is thus the reason without which there would be no reason to have

be no further Revelation after him.” Still, Horton claims that the Catholic Church holds to the “two source theory of revelation” in which, as Horton says, “revelation takes two forms—the written (Scripture) and the unwritten (tradition)” (189n13). I address this claim below.

37 Vatican II, Dei Verbum, no. 4.


39 Yves M.–J. Congar, Meaning of Tradition, trans. A. N. Woodrow (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 69.

40 The Council of Trent, Fourth Session: The canonical Scriptures states the role of the teaching office is safeguarding the canonical Scriptures (The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. and intro. H. J. Schroeder, [1941; repr., Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books, 1978], 18–19). This decree is restated at Vatican I, Dei Filius, Chapter 2, On Revelation, no. 8. See also later in Dei Filius, Chapter 4, On Faith and Reason, no. 14.

41 Vatican II, Dei Verbum, no. 10.


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faith.”42 The latter, Church authority, is the means the Church has “to avoid losing that most precious revelation.”43 The Dominican Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534) explains what these means are:

And so that no error might appear in the proposal or explanation of things to be believed, the Holy Spirit provided a created rule, which is the sense and the doctrine of the Church, so that the authority of the Church is the infallible rule of the proposition and explanation of things which must be believed by faith. Therefore, two infallible rules concur in faith, namely divine revelation and the authority of the Church; there is between them this difference: divine revelation is the formal reason of the object of faith, and the authority of the Church is the minister of the object of faith.44

The second issue before us pertains to the Catholic Church’s theology of faith. Horton is mistaken in claiming that the Catholic Church holds that faith is “sufficiently defined as mere assent to true doctrines.” The cited passages above also should make clear that the Church’s theology of faith rejects the opposition that Horton foists on the Church as a false dilemma. Faith is a rich and complex real-ity involving the whole man, a full submission of intellect and will to divine revelation: Faith is more but not less than an intellectual act involving unconditional assent to propositions (belief that); it is also a personal commitment, an integral act of trusting in God (belief in) whereby “we commit ourselves to God” in “a moment of fundamental choice which involves the whole person.”45 As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed. As personal adherence to God and assent to his truth, Christian faith differs from our faith in any human person. It is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God and to believe abso-lutely what he says. It would be futile and false to place such faith in a creature.”46 Thus, there is no opposition, on the Church’s teaching, between the personal (belief in) and the propositional (belief that). Similarly, Horton is mistaken in claiming that there is an opposition

42 Charles Morerod, The Church and the Human Quest for Truth (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2008), 48.

43 Morerod, Church and the Human Quest for Truth, 47.

44 Cajetan, In Summ. Theol., IIa, IIae, q.1, a.1, no. X; as cited in Morerod, Church and the Human Quest for Truth, 47.

45 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 13. See also the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1814: “Faith is the theological virtue [i.e., permanent disposition] by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself. By faith ‘man freely commits his entire self to God’ [Dei Verbum, no. 5]. For this reason the believer seeks to know and do God’s will.”

46 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 150.

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between the personal act of faith and the Church. The act of faith is simultaneously a personal and an ecclesial act. To quote again from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Faith is a personal act—the free response of the human person to the initia-tive of God who reveals himself. But faith is not an isolated act. No one can believe alone, just as no one can live alone. You have not given yourself faith as you have not given yourself life: the believer has received faith from others and should hand it on to others. Our love for Jesus and for our neighbor impels us to speak to others about our faith. Each believer is thus a link in the great chain of believers. I cannot believe without being carried by the faith of oth-ers, and by my faith I help support others in the faith. “I believe” (Apostles’ Creed) is the faith of the Church professed personally by each believer, prin-cipally during Baptism. “We believe” (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) is the faith of the Church confessed by the bishops assembled in council or more generally by the liturgical assembly of believers. “I believe” is also the Church, our mother, responding to God by faith as she teaches us to say both “I believe” and “We believe.”47

These two points that I have made about a Catholic theology of faith bring us back to Horton’s main objection to the notion of implicit faith, namely, faith as blind trust in the Church.48 The Catholic Church neither has an official teaching on fides implicita nor does its normative teaching on faith define faith (as Horton claims) as fides implicita. The latter should be evident from our discussion thus far. The locus classicus of this under-standing and critique of the misuse of implicit faith is Calvin’s Institutes, 3.2.2–3. If I understand Calvin correctly, he objects to a misuse of the notion of implicit faith, one in which pious ignorance rests on the assump-tion that faith need not involve knowledge or understanding in any sense whatsoever that results in “a blind adherence to the church, an inclina-tion to place more confidence in the church than in God.”49 Prescinding from the Rome and Reformation polemics of the sixteenth-century, the Catholic theological tradition would likely agree with Calvin’s critique of the misuse of the notion of implicit faith. I say misuse of this notion

47 Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 166–67. Later the Catechism again rejects the opposi-tion Horton foists on the Church as a false dilemma: “Faith is a personal adherence of the whole man to God who reveals himself. It involves an assent of the intellect and will to the self–revelation God has made through his deeds and words” (no. 177), and “‘Believing’ is an ecclesial act: the Church’s faith precedes, engenders, supports and nourishes our faith. The Church is the mother of all believers. ‘No one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother’ (St. Cyprian, De unit. 6: PL 4, 519)” (no. 181). I have eliminated excessive italicizing in these sentences.

48 This misunderstanding persists in David Samuel, “The Place of Private Judgment,” Churchman 108, no. 1 (1994): 6–21.

49 Arvin Vos, Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 21–28, and at 22. I have profited from Vos’s discussion of implicit faith, especially with respect to Aquinas.


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because Calvin accepts a notion of implicit faith (Institutes, 3.2.3) even while asserting that faith rests on knowledge and understanding. Yes, “faith involves knowledge, according to Calvin, [but] it is not a compre-hension that can be characterized as sight; ignorance always remains.”50 Vos goes on to explain:

Although Calvin does not define what he means by implicit, it is clear that it involves an inability to understand. When this occurs for believers, Calvin advises them to suspend judgment and to affirm what the church teaches. He does not pause to indicate whether this reliance on the church is per-missible with only some teachings (e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity, the Incarnation, etc.) or with all. While Calvin is in favor of maintaining a unity with the church, he considers his opponents’ “reverence for the church”—that is to say, their willingness to accept anything that the church says—to be an error.51

However, what is missing in Calvin is amply considered in Thomas Aquinas’ reflections on the question, “Is it necessary to believe explicitly?”52 “Yes” is Aquinas’ answer to this question, and he helpfully clarifies the meaning of implicit faith in developing his answer to the question as to when and to what extent faith must be explicit.

When a number of things are contained virtually in one thing, we say they are there implicitly, as, for instance, conclusions in principles. A thing is con-tained explicitly in another if it actually exists in it. Consequently, one who knows some general principles has implicit knowledge of all the particular conclusions. One, however, who actually considers the conclusions is said to know them explicitly.

For example, knowing the basic principles of gardening means know-ing implicitly how to plant and grow vegetables, but only someone who has actually grown vegetables has explicit knowledge of the fact that soil needs to be specially conditioned to suit your crop, the right amount of water must be given, and the optimal weather conditions that must be pres-ent. Aquinas then turns to applying this distinction between implicit and explicit to matters of faith by arguing that those “who believe that the faith of the Church is true [thereby] implicitly … believe the individual points included in the faith of the Church.” Let us pause here for a moment to ask why Aquinas’ point about implicit faith cannot be identified with the blind faith attacked by Horton.

50 Vos, Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought, 22.


52 St. Thomas Aquinas, Truth, vol. 2, Questions 10–20. Translated from the definitive Leonine text by James V. McGlynn (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), 258–64: q. 14, a. 11: Is It Necessary to Believe Explicitly?; similarly, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 2, 6 and 8. All citations of Aquinas in the next couple of paragraphs, unless otherwise indicated, are from Truth, 14, 11.

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Consider the Köhlerglaube—the charcoal burner’s faith—the individual who when asked what he believes responds, “I believe what the Church believes.” Josef Pieper has come to the defense of this man and with good reason, namely, on the basis of an epistemology of testimony.53

It seems to me that this much-ridiculed man gave an answer by no means nonsensical and contemptible. On the contrary, his reply was intelligent, to the point, and precise, and would be perfectly acceptable in all other fields. If, for example, I were asked my opinion on the structure of the cosmos or the nature of matter, I would reply with a reference to modern physics. It is true that I have only a vague knowledge of its conclusions; but by subscribing to the opinions of men like Planck, Bohr, de Broglie, and Heisenberg I truly share in those conclusions, although the exact manner of my sharing may be rather hard to define. In precisely the same way fides implicita can enable the simplest mind, the one farthest removed from the original light as well as the only half instructed, to “belong” and to have a share in the revealed truth—by virtue of his believing tie to one who knows at first hand—which in this case means not only to the first recipient of the divine speech but to its Author Himself.54

Pared down for my purpose here, an epistemology of testimony involves an individual’s believing through someone’s testimony and such an act of believing always means to believe someone and to believe something.55 By virtue of that believing, we share in the knowledge of a knower who knows firsthand. In this light, we can then see how it is that believing something as real and true through someone else’s testimony is a legitimate way to justify implicit faith.56 Helpful in this connection is Kevin Vanhoozer’s succinct definition of testimony, which holds also for our convictions grounded in divine testimony, indeed, in the testimony of the Church to the Word of God. Enlisting his definition, we can say that testimony is “a speech act in which the witness’s very act of stat-ing p is offered as evidence ‘that p,’ it being assumed that the witness has the relevant competence or credentials to state truly ‘that p.’”57 On this account of testimony, we accept the truth of statements that we do

53 I appeal to an epistemology of testimony to give an account of the relationship between revelation and authority in my book, Berkouwer and Catholicism, 255–65.

54 Josef Pieper, Belief and Faith, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 81–82.

55 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 177: “‘To believe’ has thus a twofold reference: the person and to the truth: to the truth, by trust in the person who bears witness to it.”

56 Despite Horton’s appeal to an epistemology of testimony to get at the nature of revela-tion (Christian Faith, 132), he fails to see the import of such an epistemology as a legitimate way to justify implicit faith.

57 Kevin Vanhoozer, “Hermeneutics of I—Witness Testimony,” in First Theology: God, Scriptures and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity; Leicester: Apollos, 2002), 257–74, at 269.


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not see directly for ourselves but that it is reasonable to accept on the trustworthy word of others. The importance of testimony subordinates seeing to hearing58 in the acquisition of beliefs about a whole range of matters, scientific, historical, moral, theological, and many others. In John Paul II’s own words, “there are in the life of a human being many more truths which are simply believed than truths which are acquired by way of personal verification.”59 Briefly, then, “by saying ‘I believe’, we express at the same time a double reference: to the person and to the truth; to the truth in consideration of the person who enjoys special claims to credulity.”60 So, faith does not merely believe a proposition, believing that p is true, but rather believing a person and that what he says about that p is true. Faith necessarily involves both a propositional attitude and an attitude of trust toward a person. This, too, is Aquinas’s view. “Whoever believes, assents to someone’s words; hence in every form of belief, the person to whose words assent is given seems to hold the prin-cipal place and to be the end, as it were, while the things by holding which one assents to that person hold a secondary place.”61 Hence, for Aquinas, “it belongs to faith to believe something and in someone.”62 The upshot of my argument is that recognizing the importance of tes-timony in all areas of life, will make us far less resistant to the notion of implicit faith as it is applied to matters of faith and the testimony of the Church.

Against this background, I turn now to consider briefly Aquinas’ clarification of when and to what extent faith must be explicit. Aquinas asserts

[1] there are some matters of faith which everyone is bound to believe explic-itly in every age. [2] Other matters of faith must be believed explicitly in every age but not by everyone. [3] Still other matters everyone must believe explicitly, but not in every age. And, finally, [4] there are things that need not be believed explicitly by everyone or in every age.63

58 Aquinas states, “Other things being equal, sight is more certain than hearing; but if (the authority) of the persons from whom we hear greatly surpasses that of the seer’s sight, hearing is more certain than sight … and much more is a man certain about what he hears from God who cannot be deceived, than about what he sees with his own reason which can be mistaken.” Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. iv, a.8. ad.2.

59 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 31.

60 John Paul II, Catechesis on the Creed, vol. 1, God Father and Creator (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1996), 31; italics belong to the original.

61 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 11, a. 1.

62 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 129, a. 6.

63 Thomas Aquinas, Truth, vol. II, trans. James V. McGlynn (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1994), q. 14, art. 11, resp.

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As to when and to what extent faith must be explicit depends on two criteria, namely, one’s place in the church and where one is in the history of revelation (the period from creation to the Fall; the period from the law and the prophets until the coming of Christ; and the period from the fullness of time, which is the age of grace, to the coming of Christ, to the end).

Regarding point one, Aquinas argues that it is necessary for the faith-ful in every age to explicitly believe two things: First, “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6). Second, one who knows that God exists and providentially governs the affairs of men knows implicitly “that God would provide everything neces-sary for the salvation of those who love Him.”

Regarding point two, Aquinas argues that what must be explicit and what remains implicit differs with regard to one’s place in the church. For example, teachers in matters of faith, theologians, catechists, and the like have “faith which is completely explicit.”64 Aquinas continues: “But not all believers have this completeness; hence, there are levels of belief in the Church, so that some are placed over others to teach them in matters of faith. Consequently, not all are required explicitly to believe all matters of faith.” Aquinas’ point here makes good sense. There are degrees of responsibility in view of one’s ability and opportunity for deepening our understanding of matters of faith. Of course, neither Aquinas nor for that matter the Church has a “place for those who would use implicit faith as an excuse for indolence.”65 In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “‘Faith seeks understanding’: it is intrinsic to faith that a believer desires to know better the One in whom he has put his faith and to understand better what He has revealed; a more penetrating knowledge will in turn call forth a greater faith, increasingly set afire by love.”66

Regarding point three, Aquinas argues that there is a growing develop-ment of faith’s knowledge of God “for the whole human race just as there is for individual men.” Hence, even teachers of the faith “are not bound to believe everything explicitly in every age.” In particular, it is important to note that in the fullness of time, which is the age of grace, argues Aquinas, “everybody, the leaders [in matters of faith] and the ordinary people, have to have explicit faith in the Trinity and in the Redeemer.”

Yet, bringing us to point four,

only the leaders, and not the ordinary people, are bound to believe explic-itly all the matters of faith concerning the Trinity and the Redeemer. The

64 The same point is made in Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.2, a. 6.


66 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 158.


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ordinary people must, however, believe explicitly the general articles, such as that God is triune, that the Son of God was made flesh, and rose from the dead, and other like matters which the Church commemorates in her feasts.67

In other words, the ordinary believer must explicitly know the faith-content (fides quae) of the creeds but not necessarily the highly articulate explanations implicit in that content and given detailed explanations in dogmatic theologies of the Trinity, Christology, and so forth. Aquinas’ point is indisputable, namely, as Vos puts it, “some individuals are more able than others to understand theological complexities.”68 In sum, first, nei-ther Aquinas nor the Church defend the sort of implicit faith that Horton attacks, namely, “pious ignorance” (Calvin) or blind trust in the Church, and, second, Aquinas not only requires that “all believers must have some knowledge of the essentials of faith,”69 but he also defends implicit faith, which makes sense in an epistemology of testimony.

Private Judgment

Pace Horton, the issue dividing him from the Catholic tradition is not over a necessary role for private judgment, or as Horton puts it, “personal commitment in view of one’s ultimate authority.”70 Catholic theologian Reinhard Hütter calls private judgment an individual act of deciding, arbitrating, and adjudicating matters of divine truth. This judgment is a complex act involving several moments. The first “moment” itself has two dimensions: “[1] intentional assent to the Church’s teaching and [2] simultaneously a surrender to the Church’s judgment in matters of divine truth.” There is, however, a second moment to this complex act that “is enclosed in the first,” according to Hütter: “an act of equally intentional renunciation … [of] myself as the supreme and final court of deciding matters of divine truth.” In other words,

renouncing the principle of private judgment in matters of divine truth fol-lows upon the act of surrendering to the judgment of the Church. It follows upon accepting all that the Church proposes and teaches to be revealed by God, explicitly and implicitly. And it follows, last but not least, upon accept-ing the magisterium of the Catholic Church to be the infallible, divinely

67 The Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees with Aquinas: “In order to be a Christian it is necessary to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God (cf. Acts 8:37; 1 John 2:23)” (no. 454). A little earlier it says: “The transmission of the Christian faith consists primarily in proclaiming Jesus Christ in order to lead others to faith in him” (no. 425). Horton’s claim that “for Rome, faith is not trust in Jesus Christ according to the gospel,” is unsupportable.




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created and ordained instrument of communicating, expounding, defining, and defending the divine truth.71

Notice that Hütter presupposes here the distinction I briefly explained in the last section between the “formal reason” of faith and the Church’s teaching authority. Divine revelation is the formal reason of the object of faith, and the authority of the Church is the instrument or means of the object of faith. Furthermore, this intentional assent and surrender is not itself an act of private judgment but rather “properties of the fullness of the one ‘divine faith’ which is a gift of grace.” Yes, adds Hütter, “the convert uses private judgment right up to the act of assent, but the act of assent itself is neither motivated nor informed by private judgment.”72 This last claim is the key to understanding Hütter’s position on private judgment, but it requires some explanation.

Contemporary Protestant theology of all kinds—from evangelical, Lutheran, Reformed, and liberal—labors in a vacuum of magisterial authority and guidance, and therefore this theology is “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Eph 4:14).73 Hütter argues that this vacuum is the result of the lack of clarity regarding an authorita-tive teaching office, whether such an office exists, who the subject that exercises its authority is, and the nature and extent of that authority. The absence of magisterial authority does not mean theologizing is bereft of normative sources, such as, to quote Horton,

(1) the Scriptures as the infallible canon, qualitatively distinct from all other sources and authorities; (2) under this magisterial norm, the ministerial service of creeds and confessions; (3) contemporary proclamation of God’s Word in the church around the world; (4) long-standing interpretations in the tradition; (5) the particular nuances of individual theologians.74

Therefore, according to Horton, sola Scriptura is not an antitradition principle. “The churches of the Reformation embrace ecumenical creeds and agree on specific confessions and catechisms.”75

71 Hütter, “Relinquishing the Principle of Private Judgment,” 866; italics added.


73 Carl E. Braaten writes regarding Lutherans, “Like other Protestants they possess no concrete official and public locus of authority whose task is to implement the authority of the normative sources of the faith. Where does the buck stop when it comes to matters of interpretation and application? Are all opinions of equal validity? The church must have not only normative sources; it must have authoritative offices whose primary task is to teach the whole church.” Mother Church, Ecclesiology and Ecumenism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 96).

74 Horton, Christian Faith, 218. Hütter gives a similar list of normative sources in “Relinquishing the Principle of Private Judgment,” 876. So, too, by Le Groupe Des Dombes, in “One Teacher” Doctrinal Authority in the Church, no. 127.



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Even so, Hütter presses his point that the selection of these normative sources on which a theologian’s theological judgments rests is a matter of private judgment. Furthermore, there is no agreement on how these sources relate to each other; whether there is an authoritative teaching office to clarify definitively how these sources are to be ordered and ranked; and how to adjudicate among conflicting theological and quasimagisterial teachings, given the absence of an authoritative, not to say infallible, instrument of teaching. The upshot is that resolving these questions was unavoidably the result of one’s own private judgment. Recently, Brad S. Gregory has argued this very point in a widely-praised book. He refers to those Protestants who distinguish their view of sola Scriptura from radical Protestants who under-stood the latter to be an antitradition principle. This latter view “opened the way to an individualistic, hermeneutical anarchy,” according to Gregory. By contrast, he adds that “magisterial reformers such as Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, and Calvin maintained the importance of many aspects of tradition, such as the writings of the church fathers or the decrees of the early ecu-menical councils, in addition to scripture.”76 Obviously, this, too, is Horton’s view. Nevertheless, is this distinction tenable in light of Horton’s emphasis that “scripture alone” is a self-sufficient basis for Christian faith and life? Gregory responds:

This distinction is untenable, because despite the undeniable influence of the church fathers … on the magisterial Protestant reformers, and not withstand-ing their acceptance of early conciliar decrees, the magisterial reformers rejected patristic theological claims and interpretations of scripture, just as they rejected medieval exegesis, papal decrees, canon law, conciliar decrees, and ecclesiastical practices, precisely wherever any of these contradicted their own interpretations of the Bible. In no sense therefore was “tradition” for magisterial Protestant reformers an authority to which they deferred relative to their respective readings of scripture, as it was for their Catholic counter-parts. This was the whole and part of the power of “scripture alone.” Neither magisterial nor radical Protestant reformers modified their hermeneutical judgments when these were at odds with traditional authorities; instead, they rejected the latter at each point of disagreement. In principle and as a corollary of sola scriptura, tradition thus retained for them no independent authority … . The difference between magisterial and radical reformers was therefore not that the former accepted some patristic writers, conciliar decrees, and ecclesiastical tradition as authoritative and the latter none. Rather, they all rejected every putative “authority” whenever the latter diverged from what each regarded as God’s truth, based on scripture as they respectively and con-trarily understood it.77

In this light, we may, consequently, understand Hütter’s argument that the Protestant theologian, such as the Lutheran theologian he was before

76 Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 95.

77 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 95–96; italics in the original.

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entering into full communion with the Catholic Church, faced a dilemma: Either … I had to accept “the tacit functional infallibility of Luther as the authoritative magisterium in identifying the normative canon in the canon of Scripture and in the most central matters of faith and morals.” “Or … I had to accept the reality of a fallible, collective magisterium made up of sundry Lutheran church leaders, synods, and theologians from whose fallible teaching I would accept what I, according to my own fallible lights, would regard as right. At the end of either alternative, what stared back at me was the ugly face of the seemingly inescapable principle of private judgment in matters of divine truth.”78

This dilemma is not just one internal to Lutheranism. One may find it similarly expressed in the Reformed tradition: either I grant a practi-cal and functional infallibility—based on my private judgment—to Calvin himself such that the central tenets of his theology open up the true mean-ing of the Scriptures, or the fallible interpretations of a fallible teaching office within the Reformed tradition—made up of church leaders, synods, and theologians—is accepted and—again, by my own private judgment—I regard it as right. The latter is Horton’s view. Yes, the church has a teach-ing office established by Christ, “but it depends on the illumination of the Spirit for its fallible interpretations of the infallible canon inspired by the Spirit.”79 The acceptance of this church’s teaching is again a matter of my private judgment. “For what other criterion integral to the faith and supe-rior to the principle of private judgment could lay a claim on my allegiance and fidelity?” Hütter questions:

The Protestant canon of Scripture … interpreted in light of Luther’s [or Calvin’s] own fallible theological tenets? Hardly so. A contingent consen-sus of Lutherans [Reformed] gathering in one place and at one time and agreeing upon a particular expression of the faith based on a reading of Scripture in light of said tenets? Hardly so. A Lutheran [Reformed] selec-tion of the ecumenical councils—whose doctrinal decisions, according to Luther and Lutheran teaching [Calvin and Reformed teaching], are not infallible—and a Lutheran [Reformed] selection of the teachings from the Church fathers? Hardly so. Individual Lutheran [Reformed] theologians of great standing? Hardly so. An accumulative combination of all the above? Hardly so. I had finally reached the end of a road that turned out to be a cul-de-sac.80

78 Assumed here is that “by faithfully following the central tenets of his theology, under no circumstances could one wander from the truth of the faith and fall into error.” Hütter, “Relinquishing the Principle of Private Judgment,” 877. Instead of the magisterial Reformer Luther, one could fill in the name of Calvin here, given the necessary place he has in the Reformed tradition and hence in Horton’s theology.




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Therefore, we are now left with the principle of private judgment as the last court of appeal in deciding matters of divine truth, and to the possibility of the “increasing evacuating of the faith’s content,” resulting from the increasing diminishment of the doctrinal unity of faith, and to the possibility of “an ever so subtle skepticism regarding the truth of the faith itself,” making one “at first vulnerable and eventually subject to unbelief.”81 This possibility follows from acknowledging “once and for all that Christ had not given to his followers an infallible instrument by means of which they were to be protected from error in all the central truths of faith and morals.”82 Horton roots the fallible interpretations of a fallible teaching office and hence the unavailability of the knowledge of all the central truths of the faith in its integral fullness in “the struggle between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet,’ the certainty of a promise [John 16:13] and the certainty of possession.”83 In short, faith’s knowledge of the central truths in their integral fullness is only eschatologically available. As Hütter explains,

What is available now is some sort of promise together with small fragments of a pledge that takes shape in various and often contradictory forms. But that again would entail that Christ, who called Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life, was Himself only an eschatological promise and by no means present among His disciples through that divine Paraclete who would lead His follow-ers into all Truth. But such a reduction of the most central tenets of the faith to a merely eschatological promise would contradict Christ’s own promise.84

The contradiction alluded to here by Hütter is rooted in the fact that fal-libilism is irreconcilable with the finality of Christian belief.85 “Fallibilism does not challenge the claim that we can know the truth, but rather the belief that we can know that we have attained the final truth with absolute certainty.”86 The upshot here is that nothing that we claim to know now is beyond revision, irreformable, and irreversibly true; all Church doctrine is reversible in principle—including the claim that Christ himself is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and henceforth we are unable to account



83 Horton, “Who’s in Charge Here?” See also http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/ 2012/06/13/who’s–in–charge–here–the–illusions–of–church–infallibility/.

84 Hütter, “Relinquishing the Principle of Private Judgment,” 877–78.

85 I address the claim that fallibilism is irreconcilable with the finality of Christian faith in an article, “Revelation and Foundationalism: Towards a Historically Conscious Foundationalism,” Josephinum Journal of Theology, forthcoming.

86 This definition of fallibilism is by Richard Bernstein, “Philosophers Respond to [John Paul II’s] Fides et Ratio,” Books and Culture 5 (July/August 1999): 30–32. The two other phi-losophers reviewing the philosopher–pope’s 1998 encyclical are Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga.

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for the universal, objective, perduring, and materially continuous claims of Christian faith and thought. The only alternative to this conclusion is to relinquish the principle of private judgment as the supreme court of appeal in deciding matters of divine truth. Asks Hütter, “But how was this to be done?”87 The brief answer to this question here must be, “By renounc-ing myself as the supreme and final court of deciding matters of divine truth.”88 In an existential act of assent, which is fundamental and com-prehensive, an act that itself is neither motivated nor informed by private judgment, I not only assent to the Church’s teaching but also surrender to the divine truth that is believed, taught, and proclaimed by the Church. I receive the central truths of the faith in their integral fullness through the Church’s teaching office.

Horton contests this claim that the magisterium authoritatively decides matters of divine truth with greater certainty and clarity. There are “libraries full of decrees and encyclicals, conciliar decisions and counter-decisions, bulls and promulgations” and as “any student of church history recognizes … the teacher [in this case] is often far more obscure than the [biblical] text.”89 This is another example of Horton’s making a sweeping generalization without documentation. The rebuttal to Horton’s charge is that the magisterium of the Catholic Church provides an interpretation of its own teaching. For example, consider the sixteen documents of Vatican II. Unquestionably, in the years following the council (1962–1965), these documents were misinterpreted and misunderstood by proponents of the “Spirit of Vatican II.” In 1985, on the twentieth anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council, John Paul II convened an extraordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops. With the aim in mind of encouraging a deeper reception and implementation of the Council’s documents, the Synod set forth in the Final Report a proper hermeneutic of the Council, namely, a framework for properly interpreting them, in particular, six her-meneutical principles for sound interpretation.90 Furthermore, during the twenty-seven year pontificate of John Paul II, he provided an authoritative interpretation of these documents. Joseph Ratzinger, who for twenty-five years (1981-2005) was the Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and who became Pope Benedict XVI, continued to deepen the



89 Horton, “Who’s in Charge Here?” no. 13; see also, Christian Faith, 195. These are just sweeping generalizations with no documentation. This charge is not new. It was made in a lecture at the close of the session of Knox College, Toronto, on 7 April 1880 by Rev. Professor William McLaren, Professor of Systematic Theology, Knox College, Toronto. It was pub-lished as The Rule of Faith and Private Judgment (Toronto: C. Blackett Robinson, 1880), 20–24.

90 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, Rome, 1985, A Message to the People of God and The Final Report (Washington, D.C.: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1986).


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authoritative interpretation of the council—the hermeneutics of continu-ity and renewal—begun by his predecessor, continued by him during his tenure as Prefect, and extended through his many writings as pope.

Furthermore, pace Horton, an infallible canon needs an infallible teach-ing office but not because the Scripture “is a dark, obscure, and mysteri-ous book (rendered more so by Rome’s allegorizing exegesis).”91 Rather, it is because the Christian faith is social, asserting dogmatic truths, and universally valid, meaning thereby a lasting message of truth intended for all ages, to the point that “it must humanly speaking have an infallible expounder.” “There can be no combination on the basis of truth without an organ of truth,” in Newman’s words. Newman continues to set up the dilemma that follows from not having an “organ of truth,” which in recent centuries has been called the Magisterium:

Else you will secure unity of form at the loss of unity of doctrine, or unity of doctrine at the loss of unity of form; you will have to choose between a comprehension of opinions and a resolution into parties, between latitudi-narian and sectarian error. You may be tolerant or intolerant of contrarieties of thought, but contrarieties you will have. By the Church of England a hollow uniformity is preferred to an infallible chair; and by the sects of England, an interminable division… . The doctrine of infallibility … secures the object, while it gives definiteness and force to the matter, of the Revelation.92

Thus, the notion of infallibility in respect of the Church’s teaching office makes good theological sense when seen in light of other Christian beliefs, such as the following:

1. God provides for the Church effective means by which it may and will in fact remain in the truth of the gospel till the end of time.

2. Among these means are not only the canonical Scriptures but also, as an essential counterpart to the Scriptures, the pastoral office. Without such a pastoral office the Christian community would not be adequately protected against corruptions of the gospel.

3. The pastoral office is exercised for the universal Church by the bearer of the Petrine office (which means, for Catholics, by the pope). It is

91 Another sweeping generalization by Horton for which he provides no documentation—from the decrees of the Council of Trent, Vatican I and II, the biblical encyclicals of the papal magisterium of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century (Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus [1893], Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus [1920], Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu [1943]), the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s 1993 document, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, and from Benedict XVI, Post–Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Verbum Domini [2010]—that the rationale for an infallible magiste-rium, according to the Catholic Church, “is a dark, obscure, and mysterious book (rendered more so by Rome’s allegorizing exegesis),” that is allegedly the Scripture (“Who’s in Charge Here?” no. 13; see also, Christian Faith, 195).

92 J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), pt. 1, chap. 2, sec. 2, 90–91.

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therefore reasonable to suppose that the pope is equipped by God with a special charism (or grace of office) for correctly interpreting the gospel to the universal Church, as circumstances may require.

4. In order that the papacy may adequately discharge its function of preserving unity in the faith and exposing dangerous errors, the pa-pal charism must include the power to assert the truth of the gospel and to condemn contrary errors in a decisive and obligatory manner. Authoritative pronouncements from the Petrine office that are seri-ously binding on all the faithful must have adequately certified truth, for there could be no obligation to believe what could probably be error.93

Pace Horton, the motive of faith’s assent cannot be reduced to mere obedience to the authority of the Church’s teaching office. Hütter never confuses the source of divine truth with “God’s infallible instrument of conveying divine truth, ‘the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth’ (1 Tim. 3:15).” Rather we assent because we pos-sess divine faith, which is a gift of God’s grace, convinced of the truth of the God who reveals himself through the Church’s magisterium as “the infallible, divinely created and ordained instrument of communicating, expounding, defining, and defending the divine truth.”94 Yet, Hütter asks, “Wasn’t my existential assent at least informed by private judgment? Had I not been guided to this very impasse [as sketched above] and hence to this insight [that I need to renounce myself] by my own private judgments? How could one relinquish private judgment on the basis of one’s private judgment?” Hütter eventually came to resolve this conundrum with the help of John Henry Newman who argued that “converts must use their own private judgment in the act of conversion.”

They use it in order ultimately to supersede it; as a man out of doors uses a lamp in a dark night, and puts it out when he gets home. What would be thought of his bringing it into his drawing room? … if he came in with a great-coat on his back, a hat on his head, an umbrella under his arm, and a large stable-lantern in his hand?95

93 Avery Dulles, “Moderate Infallibilism,” in Teaching Authority and Infallibility in the Church, ed. Paul C. Empie, et al. (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1978), 81–100, and at 83. For a similar set of claims, see Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, pt. 1, chap. 2, sec. 2, 89–91. It is impossible here to enter into a discussion of the three different ways that the dogma of papal infallibility has been interpreted. Vatican I affirmed a moderate infallibil-ism. On the arguments for moderate infallibilism and the rejection of maximalism and conciliarism, see Vatican Bishop Vincent Ferrer Gasser, The Gift of Infallibility, The Official Relatio on Infallibility at Vatican Council I, July 11, 1870, 60–89. See also, Le Groupe Des Dombes, “One Teacher” Doctrinal Authority in the Church, 66–67.


95 John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (London: Longmans, Green, 1906), 203, as cited in Hütter, “Relinquishing the Principle of Private Judgment,” 878.


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Similarly, continues Hütter, “My own lights had become superfluous; I could leave the principle of private judgment outside the door.”96 In the words of the Psalmist, “For with You is the fountain of life; In Your light, I see light” (Ps. 36:9).

Scripture and Tradition in Relation to Revelation and to the Church

The major problem with Horton’s interpretation of the Catholic tradi-tion’s teaching on the relationship between Scripture and the Church’s living tradition is that he misconstrues their relationship such that his sweeping generalizations (without documentation) about the Church’s teaching authority suggests that he takes the latter to be absolute—a source of divine truth or revelation—its role being that of a constitution rather than a court, a master over the Word of God rather than a servant of that Word, and the source of the Scripture’s authority.97 A prime exam-ple of Horton’s misinterpretation is the standard Protestant charge that the Catholic position regarding biblical authority is such that the Church confers upon Scripture its canonical authority, thus creating the Bible’s normativity, rather than merely recognizing or receiving its authority.98 Herman Bavinck is a more careful interpreter of the Church’s teaching on the doctrine of scriptural authority than is Horton. Unlike Horton, Bavinck at least begins by acknowledging that, according to Vatican I99 and, I would add, Vatican II,100 “The church, by its recognition, does not make Scripture inspired, canonical, authentic, and so forth.” Says Bavinck, “The Vatican Council (1870), after all, recognized the books of the Old and the New Testament as canonical precisely ‘because, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and as such have been entrusted to the church,’”101 Indeed, he even acknowledges


97 Horton, Christian Faith, 187–98.

98 Horton, Christian Faith, 195. Horton’s claim is a typical charge among evangelical and Reformed Protestants. This misinterpretation is a legacy of Calvin: “But a most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the con-sent of the church. As if the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended upon the decision of men” (Institutes 1,7,1). I critically discuss this misinterpretation and several of its defenders in my book, “In the Beginning…” A Theology of the Body (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2011), 44–59, 66–67. Most recently, see my study, Berkouwer and Catholicism, 319–93.

99 Vatican I, Dei Filius, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Chapter 2, Of Revelation, nos. 5–7.

100 Dei Verbum, no. 11.

101 Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, vol. 1 (Kampen: Kok, 1895), 426; ET: Reformed Dogmatics, Prolegomena, 1, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 457. The quote within the quote is from Vatican I, Dei Filius, chap. 2, no. 7.

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that “Roman Catholic theologians distinguish between the authority of Scripture with respect to itself (quoad se) and with respect to us (quoad nos).”102 The point of this distinction is to make clear that Scripture’s canonical authority with respect to itself is grounded in its being divinely inspired, having divine authorship, and therefore entrusted to the Church by the Holy Spirit, “as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated” (in the words of Vatican I).103 Thus, scriptural authority is not established quoad nos. In other words, in the act of canonizing, the Church’s act is a recep-tive rather than an authorizing act. Yet, Bavinck still insists that Rome faces a “powerful contradiction.”

On the one hand, in the doctrine of Scripture they attempt to prove its inspi-ration and authority from Scripture itself. On the other, having come to the doctrine of the church, they attempt to weaken those proofs and to dem-onstrate that only the witness [or authority] of the church offers conclusive certainty [of Scripture’s canonical authority].104

Where exactly is the powerful contradiction here? Are not ontological and epistemological questions elided here, that is, between what there is and how we can know it? To say that the canonical authority of Scripture is grounded in, rather than known by, an ecclesial act of determining which books are canonical would subvert the ontological order of things. The Church does not subvert this order: the Scripture’s canonical authority is not grounded in the Church’s act of canonization, but in itself, its objective reality of being divinely inspired, having divine authorship, and entrusted to the Church by the Holy Spirit. The ecclesial act of canonization merely acknowledges and accepts the Scripture’s canonical status in light of cer-tain criteria, such as apostolicity, orthodoxy, and so forth.

Now, because Horton takes an occasional swipe at the then Joseph Ratzinger in his 1965 essay, “Revelation and Tradition,”105 as well as Vatican II’s Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), I will for the most part concentrate my attention on these texts in responding to Horton’s charges in regard to the Catholic Church’s position on Scripture and tradition in relation to revelation and to the Church. For example, Horton suggests that Ratzinger’s theology of revelation (1) undermines the uniquely normative character of Holy Scripture because Ratzinger allegedly supports a doctrine of solum magisterium, (2) supports a doctrine

102 Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, vol, 1, 426 [457]; italics in original.

103 Vatican I, Dei Filius, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, chap. 4, Of Faith and Reason, no. 8.

104 Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, vol. 1, 426 [458].

105 Joseph Ratzinger, “Ein Versuch zur Frage des Traditionsbegriffs,” in Offenbarung und Überlieferung (Freiburg: Herder, 1965), 25–69; ET: “Revelation and Tradition,” in Revelation and Tradition, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 26–66.


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of continuing revelation—thereby conflating inspiration and illumina-tion—in an effort to support the (3) “many extra-scriptural dogmas that [Catholic] theologians must hold.”106 Actually, as I will show, Horton is mis-taken about (1) and (2) being aspects of Ratzinger’s theology of revelation, but he also misunderstands Ratzinger on (3). What Ratzinger actually questions is the epistemological sufficiency of discerning and theologically justifying through Scripture alone (sola scriptura) all Christian dogmas: “neither the great dogmas of Christian antiquity, of what was once the con-sensus quinquesaecularis, nor, even less, the new ones of 1854 and 1950.”107 A good example of this point is given by Aidan Nichols. He writes:

Thus, for instance, the faith of a Catholic Christian in the divinity of Christ does not have its rule—its criterion—simply in the Scriptures, for the Scriptures alone did not prevent Arius of Alexandria from teaching that the Son is a cre-ated intermediary. Catholic faith in the Son’s Godhood has its rule also in an act of the Church’s extraordinary magisterium, the dogma of the homoousion proclaimed at Nicaea I (325).108

Ratzinger holds that all these dogmas in some sense go beyond the Bible but nevertheless still justifiably belong to the content of revelation. In the words of Dei Verbum, “it is not from Sacred Scripture alone [non per solam Scripturam] that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed.”109 In his commentary on Dei Verbum, Ratzinger writes: “The function of tradition is seen here as a making certain of the truth, i.e., it belongs in the formal and gnoseological sphere—and, in fact, this is the sphere in which the significance of tradition is to be sought.”110 Although I can only mention it in passing, this, too, was the view of that master of systematic and ecumenical theology, G. C. Berkouwer.

The [Second Vatican] council … limited the significance of tradition to indicating certitude, the church’s knowledge of the faith. This is the point at which the non per solam Scripturam functions in the life of the church, for here the believer is confronted with Scripture in its connection with tradition and church. But this does not yet imply that traditions are an independent source of revelation alongside Holy Scripture.111


107 Ratzinger, “Ein Versuch zur Frage des Traditionsbegriffs,” 32; ET: “Revelation and Tradition,” 33.

108 Aidan Nichols, Figuring Out the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2013), 19–20.


110 Ratzinger in his commentary on Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, 195.

111 G. C. Berkouwer, Nabetrachting op het Concilie (Kampen: Kok, 1968), 115–116 (my trans-lation). This is Berkouwer’s second book on Vatican II, but it remains untranslated. His first book on the council was Vatikaans Concilie en de nieuwe theologie (Kampen: Kok, 1964); ET: The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, trans. Lewis Smedes (Grand Rapids:

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The doctrine of God’s special revelation that is more or less explicitly present in “Revelation and Tradition,” and fully present in Dei Verbum, deals with the origin (agent), content, manner, and purpose of that revelation. Ratzinger holds that divine revelation involves “God’s whole speech and action with man.”112 First, then, the agent of special revelation is God him-self because revelation originates with God. In the opening words of Dei Verbum: “It pleased God, in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself and to make known the mystery of his will (cf. Eph 1:9).”113 God is the agent of revelation because revelation itself originates with His having its source in God’s being. In this sense, revelation goes beyond the fact of Scripture in that the latter finds its source in God’s self-revelatory action.

Nevertheless, revelation also goes beyond Scripture in that God is also the one who brings to realization the purpose of revelation, namely, to make Scripture known to us in faith, which is identical with the indwell-ing of Christ. “This means that the reception of revelation is equivalent to entering into the Christ-reality.”114 The purpose of revelation refers to a “reality which scripture makes known but which is not itself simply identical with scripture.”115 This reference to the reality that is revealed by God in and through Scripture raises the question regarding the content of revela-tion. What is it that is revealed?

In a fundamental sense, God reveals himself, and so we may say that the content of revelation is God’s own proper reality, his own self, the gift of himself “as a communion of persons inviting human persons to enter into communion.”116 In sum, says Ratzinger about the opening words of Dei Verbum quoted above, “it is God himself, the person of God, from whom revelation proceeds and to whom it returns, and thus revelation

Eerdmans, 1965). He also wrote three books before Vatican II on Catholicism, De Strijd Om Het Roomsch–Katholieke Dogma (Kampen: Kok, 1940); Conflict met Rome, Tweede Druk (Kampen: Kok, 1949); ET: The Conflict with Rome, trans. David Freeman (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958); and Nieuwe Perspectieven in De Controvers: Rome–Reformatie, Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel 20, no. 1 (Amsterdam: Noord–Hollandsche UitgeversMaatschappij, 1957). I have dealt with Berkouwer’s assessment of the Catholic view on Scripture and Tradition both before and after Vatican II in my study, Berkouwer and Catholicism, 273–393.





116 Germain Grisez, “On Interpreting Dogmas,” Communio: International Catholic Review 17 (1990): 120.


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necessarily reaches—also with the person who receives it—into the per-sonal center of man, it touches him in the depths of his being, not only in his individual faculties, in his will and understanding.”117 Of particu-lar significance here is not only that the notion of revelation, as God’s action, requires a human recipient in order for revelation to realize its purpose of establishing an interpersonal relationship between God him-self and man, but also God’s self-revelation “is ultimately not [merely] information, but unity and transformation,”118 that is, not only informing us of salvation but actually bringing it about in a human recipient of his revelation.

Furthermore, the content of revelation includes God’s revealing him-self in the economy of redemptive history in words and actions, of divine actions and divinely given interpretations of those actions, with the words and deeds being inextricably bound together, making up one whole,119 culminating in Jesus Christ who is both the mediator and the fullness of revelation. Most significantly, that is the manner of God’s self-revelation. Again, Dei Verbum explains the intimate connection between words and deeds: “the works performed by God in the history of salvation show forth and bear out the doctrine and realities signified by the words; the words, for their part, proclaim the works, and bring to light the mystery they contain.”120 In sum, “the most intimate truth which this revelation gives us about God and the salvation of man shines forth in Christ, who is himself both the mediator and the sum total of Revelation” [see Matt. 11:27; John 1:14, 17; 14:6; 17:1–3; 2 Cor. 3:16, 4:6; Eph. 1:3–14].121 Moreover, revelation is also propositional, having a truth-conveying status, with such proposi-tions being “meaningful as ways of rendering explicit the one mystery of Christ.”122

There is more to Ratzinger’s theology of revelation that Horton com-pletely overlooks: Revelation necessarily includes both an objective dimen-sion and a subjective dimension.123 Regarding the former, it refers to

117 Ratzinger’s commentary on Dei Verbum, in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 3 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 171.

118 Ratzinger’s commentary on Dei Verbum, 175.

119 Eduard Schillebeeckx, The Real Achievement of Vatican II, trans. H. J. J. Vaughan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 40: “Factual and verbal revelation form one entity.”




123 This, too, was Herman Bavinck’s view: “Objective revelation in Christ is not sufficient, but there needs to be added a working of the Spirit in order that human beings may acknowl-edge and accept that revelation of God and thereby become the image of the Son.” Most

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God’s self-revelation in action and word, culminating in the formation of an objective deposit of faith as integral to the history of redemption. Regarding the latter, it refers to the act of God’s self-presence, indeed the act of God’s revealing himself in a living subject, by the power of the Holy Spirit, enabling man to respond in faith to the reality of revelation. Given the subjective dimension of revelation, we can understand why Ratzinger says, “Scripture is not revelation but at most only a part of the latter’s greater reality.”124 “Revelation, therefore, is more than scripture to the extent that reality exceeds information about it.” That is, he adds, “it signifies a reality which scripture makes known but which is not itself simply identical with scripture… . For revelation always and only becomes a reality where there is faith.”125 Of course Ratzinger is not denying that the “reality of revelation is a word-reality,” a verbal-propositional reality, ontologically speaking. He continues:

The fact remains, however, that the mere presence of the word of Scripture is not the reality of revelation itself, which is never simply “there.” The above remark is simply meant to draw attention to the difference between scripture and the reality which makes itself known in scripture, a difference which is not annulled by the verbal character of revelation.126

We would misunderstand Ratzinger if we took him to be saying that the Scripture becomes revelation when it is actually known to man in faith, as if Ratzinger is suggesting that the verbal character of

significant, Bavinck adds, “[S]o external and objective revelation demands an internal rev-elation in the subject… . But it can come into its own only if it is positioned in relation to the objective revelation granted in Christ. Detached from or elevated above this revelation, it loses its criterion and corrective and opens the door to all sorts of arbitrariness and fanati-cism. Even the very concept of subjective revelation is determined and controlled by that of objective revelation” (Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, vol. 1, 320 [347–48]).



Ratzinger means this in an epistemological not ontological sense.

126 Ratzinger, “Ein Versuch zur Frage des Traditionsbegriffs,” 34n12; ET: “Revelation and Tradition,” 70n12. Pace Peter Leithart, who claims that Ratzinger’s view of revelation seems to deny its verbal character. Leithart states: “For Protestants (at least “radical” Protestants of a Hamannian variety), God’s verbal communication is not some unfortunate second–class communication that will one day be surpassed; it is inherent in the relation of God to humanity. Because God is Word, He is a God who speaks and writes, and thus and only thus we know Him. Following a long tradition, Benedict appears to hope for a pure interior communication that bypasses the ‘limits’ of language. From this angle, it is surprising to discover that Protestantism is more fundamentally sacramental than Catholicism, insofar as Protestants believe that God always and everywhere, in new as much as in old, communicates through created means.” Available at http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2013/05/tradition–and–the–word/.


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Scripture remains external to revelation. No, that would be a version, in Ratzinger’s own words, of an “extreme actualistic theology according to which the word of God only takes place in the word of Scripture as a new event each time it is read.”127 Ratzinger of course does not elide the dif-ference between ontological and epistemological matters. Rather, he is merely making an epistemological point: “Revelation is in fact fully pres-ent only when, in addition to the material statements which testify to it, its own inner reality is itself operative in the form of faith. Consequently revelation to some degree includes its recipient, without whom it does not [fully] exist.”128 Given the qualification he makes in this paragraph about revelation being “fully” present only when it is operative in the form of faith, I think it is justified not only (1) to think that he is speak-ing here in an epistemological sense but also (2) to insert “fully” in front of the last word of the concluding sentence of this quotation.129 In sum, given the subjective dimension of revelation, we can understand why revelation’s living reality comes to realize its purpose—living con-tact with the Father’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit—only when it is fully present, making itself known, to man in faith.

This conclusion brings us to the final point of rebuttal regarding Horton’s charges about Ratzinger’s theology of special revelation. Looking more closely at the uniquely normative character of Scripture (in that the-ology entails the primacy of the Word of God) there are several points that need to be emphasized.

First, regarding the relationship between Scripture and tradition, we can exclude three possibilities that the Council of Trent regarded as dead-ends.130 It rejected the idea of postapostolic revelation made to the Church because—pace Horton—there is no ongoing revelation in the Church’s teaching on divine revelation. Also rejected is the gnostic idea that there exists “unwritten apostolic doctrine alongside Scripture,” that is, “secret information … preserved within her [the Church] since the time of the apostles.”131 Finally, also rejected as a dead-end is the Protestant position

127 Ratzinger in his commentary on Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, 270n12.


129 Bavinck makes a simliar point about the objective and subjective dimensions of revela-tion in Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, vol. 1, 320. ET: 347–48.

130 I am deeply indebted to Aidan Nichols, The Shape of Catholic Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 165–80, but especially at 176–77, for my account of the possibilities closed and left open by the Council of Trent.

131 Joseph Ratzinger, “Primacy, Episcopacy, and Successio Apostolica,” (his 1961 essay) in God’s Word, Scripture, Tradition, Office, trans. Henry Taylor, ed. Peter Hünermann Thomas

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of sola Scriptura as an antitradition principle, meaning thereby not only the notion that opposes Scripture and tradition—in other words, “solo Scriptura”132 or scriptura nuda, “naked scripture”—but also the idea that Scripture is epistemologically self-sufficient for justifying dogmas such that tradition (e.g., councils, creeds, confessions, catechisms) in no analo-gous sense whatsoever shares in the authority of Scripture for the purpose of securing Scripture’s own authority. At the same time, Trent left open three possibilities.

First, the two-source theory of revelation that was the theologically dominant view in the period between the sixteenth-century Council of Trent and the nineteenth century was left open. In an address to the German-speaking bishops (October 10, 1962) on the eve of the solemn inauguration of Vatican II, Ratzinger describes this theory that he finds unacceptable:

Scripture and tradition contain revelation and they do this in such a way that parts of revelation are only in tradition. Tradition offers a plus in content over Scripture, because the former is made up of unwritten words passé[d] on solely ‘from hand to hand’ in the Church… . Clearly this doctrine [of Scripture and tradition as two sources of revelation] has without doubt the backing of most all textbooks of theology.133

Second, also left open is the so-called classical view of the High Middle Ages, namely, “all revelation is virtually contained in Scripture, requiring, however, the Church’s interpretation, leaning on apostolic tradition, for its explication.”134

There is one final view left open by Trent: the view that sees “Tradition (now spelled with a capital “T” and distinguished from traditions in the plural) as theologically prior to the Bible, and defines that Tradition … [to be] the life and consciousness of the Church, of which Scripture forms an essential part.” Nichols continues:

On this view, Scripture can still be called the supreme norm of faith, the norma non normata … . Tradition with a capital T is, therefore, revelation in its transmission. It finds two sorts of expression: in the books of the Bible and in the unwritten traditions [councils, creeds, confessions, the liturgy, the sacra-ments, art and architecture of the Church]. To judge the Bible on the basis of Tradition as expressed in traditions is not, pace Protestant fears, to submit

Söding (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008), 27.

132 Horton clearly rejects interpreting sola Scriptura in the sense of Scripture alone (solo Scriptura) apart from tradition, that is, ecumenical creeds, as well as the confessions and catechisms unique to the Reformed tradition (see Christian Faith, 187).

133 Joseph Ratzinger, “Six Texts by Prof. Joseph Ratzinger as peritus before and during Vatican Council II,” trans. and annotations by Jared Wicks, Gregorianum 89, 2 (2008): 269–85, and at 273.

134 Nichols, Shape of Catholic Theology, 276.


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the Bible to an alien authority, but rather to identify and declare what is the Bible’s own deepest reality.135

In short, on this third view, tradition envelopes the total life and action of the Church, being at once a reality larger than but also inclusive of Scripture, enabling the Church to grasp the deeper meaning of Scripture itself. This third possibility integrates the uniquely normative character of Scripture, as the supreme rule of faith, as Dei Verbum calls Scripture,136 in an intrinsically and necessarily related way to traditions. On this view, Scripture must be interpreted in the concrete life of the Church, her liv-ing tradition, through the teaching authority of the ecclesiastical magis-terium, which is under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.137 “Scripture is

135 Nichols, Shape of Catholic Theology, 276–77.


Therefore, like the Christian religion itself, all the preaching of the Church must be nourished and regulated by Sacred Scripture. For in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlast-ing source of spiritual life. Consequently these words are perfectly applicable to Sacred Scripture: “For the word of God is living and active” (Heb. 4:12) and “it has power to build you up and give you your heritage among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32; see 1 Thess. 2:13).

Furthermore, continuing in the same vein of stressing the primary importance of the written Word of God, Dei Verbum states that it is about “easy access to Sacred Scripture [that] should be provided for all the Christian faithful.” In addition,

The bride of the incarnate Word, the Church taught by the Holy Spirit, is concerned to move ahead toward a deeper understanding of the Sacred Scriptures so that she may increasingly feed her sons with the divine words … . Catholic exegetes then and other students of sacred theology, working diligently together and using appropriate means, should devote their energies, under the watchful care of the sacred teaching office of the Church, to an exploration and exposition of the divine writings. This should be so done that as many ministers of the divine word as possible will be able effectively to pro-vide the nourishment of the Scriptures for the people of God, to enlighten their minds, strengthen their wills, and set men’s hearts on fire with the love of God.

More of this priority is found in the remaining passages of Dei Verbum:

By scrutinizing in the light of faith all truth stored up in the mystery of Christ [and of course this scrutinizing necessarily happens in the context of the living tradition of the Church], theology is most powerfully strengthened and constantly rejuvenated by that [written] word. For the Sacred Scriptures contain the word of God and since they are inspired, really are the word of God; and so the study of the sacred page is, as it were, the soul of sacred theology. By the same [written] word of Scripture the ministry of the word also, that is, pastoral preaching, catechetics and all Christian instruction, in which the liturgical homily must hold the foremost place, is nourished [by the written Word of Scripture] in a healthy way and flourishes in a holy way. (no. 21)

Arguably, then, when Dei Verbum affirms a necessary and intrinsic relatedness of tradition and the Church to Scripture, it also affirms a prima scriptura.

137 In John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint (“On Commitment to Ecumenism”), 1995 Encyclical

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the light of the Church, and the Church the life of Scripture,” as Bavinck eloquently put it.138 The Church’s living tradition, on this view, has its own loci, as indicated above, but it is more an environment or context in which we properly read Scripture than it is an independent source of revelation in addition to Scripture.139 This, too, is John Paul II’s view: “the relation-ship between Sacred Scripture, as the highest authority in matters of faith, and Sacred Tradition, as indispensable to the interpretation of the Word of God.”140 Although it is impossible fully to argue the point here, I hold this third possibility to be Ratzinger’s view.

In the light of this third possibility, there is a second point worth empha-sizing in Ratzinger’s theology of revelation, specifically, tradition is sacred in origin by virtue of being the gospel, the apostolic paradosis; it is rev-elation in transmission. In other words, the inner source of the positive epistemological sources of revelation, Scripture and tradition, is “the liv-ing Word of God from which scripture and tradition springs and without which their significance for faith cannot be understood.”141 According to Ratzinger,

At the beginning of all tradition stands the fact that the Father gives the Son over to the world and that the Son for his part allows himself to be given over to the “nations,” as a sign. This original paradosis, in its character as judg-ment and gift of salvation, is continued in the abiding presence of Christ in his Body, the Church. To that extent the whole mystery of Christ’s continu-ing presence is primarily the whole reality which is transmitted in tradition, the decisive fundamental reality which is antecedent to all particular explicit expressions, even those of scripture, and which represents what has in fact to be handed down.142

Against this background, we can understand why Dei Verbum sees Scripture and tradition as two streams flowing out of the one divine source, that is, the original paradosis, which is God’s continual self-giving of Christ to his Church “under the double form of the living kerygma and its written expression in Scripture (cf. 1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:12 and 14; 2 Tim. 3:15).”143

Letter, no. 79, he, too, regards Scripture as the norma non normata: “the relationship between Sacred Scripture, as the highest authority in matters of faith, and Sacred Tradition, as indis-pensable to the interpretation of the Word of God.”

138 Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, vol. 1, 356 [384].

139 Nichols, Shape of Catholic Theology, 16.

140 John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint (“On Commitment to Ecumenism”), 1995 Encyclical Letter, no. 79.



143 Josef Rupert Geiselmann, The Meaning of Tradition, trans. W. J. O’Hara (London/


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In particular, J. R. Geiselmann correctly notes, “Holy Scripture is the para-dosis of the apostolic kerygma, become writing.”144 Alternatively put, “New Testament Scripture is the written counterpart of apostolic tradition.”145 On this view, the gospel of Jesus Christ has been proclaimed as the living Word of God to us in Scripture as well as in the Church’s living tradition. They merge into a “unity” in the sense that the necessary content of faith, the Christ-reality, is wholly present in both Scripture and the Church’s liv-ing tradition, and moving toward the same goal under the action of the one Holy Spirit, which is to contribute effectively to the salvation of souls.

Third, the living tradition of the Church plays an interpretative role, according to Ratzinger, but not as a parallel stream of knowl-edge existing “independently [of Scripture], but only as exposition, interpretation ‘according to the scriptures.”146 In this respect, tradi-tion “remains tied to what has occurred and what has been spoken. In that way is expressed its link with God’s concrete action in this history and its unique historical character: the ‘once,’ which is just as essential to the reality of Christian revelation as the ‘forever.’”147 Fourth, Ratzinger continues, “the organ of tradition is the author-ity of the Church, that is, those who have authority in it”; expressly those who hold ecclesial office by virtue of apostolic succession.148 In other words, the bearer of tradition is the Church. In this connec-tion, it is fundamental to note that in Ratzinger’s theology of revela-tion the Church has the duty to be vigilant “in the exegesis which investigates the literal sense, and so guards the link with the sarx of the Logos, in opposition to all gnosis.”149 Fifth, so as to emphasize the

Freiburg: Burns & Oates/Herder, 1966), 23; italics in original.

144 Josef Rupert Geiselmann, “Scripture, Tradition, and the Church: An Ecumenical Problem,” in Christianity Divided, Protestant and Roman Catholic Theological Issues, ed. Daniel J. Callahan, et al. (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 55; italics in original.

145 Geiselmann, The Meaning of Tradition, 23, and also, 24.

146 Ratzinger, “Ein Versuch zur Frage des Traditionsbegriffs,” 46; ET: “Revelation and Tradition,” 47: “The explication of the Christ–reality, which is revelation and which has its double yet single enduring presence in faith and in the Church, occurs in the proclamation of the gospel. This preaching, therefore, by its very nature is an unfolding, a making explicit, and it is so in two ways, corresponding to the double form of revelation in the old covenant and the new.” (40; ET: 41). This explication unfolds in an Old Testament theology of the Old Testament, a New Testament theology of the Old Testament, a New Testament theology of the New Testament, and a Church theology of the New Testament that is called dogmatic theology (40–44; ET: 43–44).



149 Ratzinger, “Ein Versuch zur Frage des Traditionsbegriffs,” 47; ET: “Revelation and

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uniquely normative character of Scripture, Ratzinger adds, “To that extent, therefore, there exists something like a certain independence of scripture as a separate, and in many respects perfectly unambigu-ous, criterion in the face of the Church’s magisterium.”150 Of course Ratzinger is quick to distinguish the historically ascertainable literal meaning of the text as a relatively independent criterion from an absolute criterion subsisting in and for itself. Still, he adds, there is a “real criterion” here, “the test of which even the pronouncements of the magisterium itself have to meet.”151 Therefore, once again, the magisterium is a servant of the Word of God, having the urgent task “of guarding the purity of the testimony once given, and of defend-ing the sarx of history against the caprice of gnosis which perpetually seeks to establish its own autonomy.”152

Yes, Horton is correct that Dei Verbum holds that Scripture, tradition, and the Church are intrinsically and necessarily related as a network of interdependent authorities.153 Yes, these authorities function together (each in its own way) differing in degree of authority, with Scripture being the supreme rule of faith, the norma non normata, such that Scripture is not subservient to tradition or to the teaching office of the Church. Horton overlooks the significance of this point because he incorrectly thinks, as I argued earlier, that Ratzinger and Dei Verbum confuse the source of truth, which is divine revelation, with the responsibility of the Church’s teaching office to certify divine truth. Pace Horton, the Church does not hold that the teaching office of the Church operates on its own, that is, without refer-ence to any superior norm. In Ratzinger’s own words:

Incorporated into the Church’s authoritative ministry of giving testimony which draws its right and force from the presence of the Spirit and from Christ’s perpetual presence, by which he is ever the Christ of today, the func-tion of bearing witness, which belongs to the unique Word of Scripture set down once and for all, will have to be restored to its full rights and force. For that Word derives its abiding validity from the unique character of the historical redemptive act of Jesus Christ, who once gave up his crucified body, himself, to the Father and so has perfected for all time those who are

Tradition,” 48.




153 Braaten rightly explains, “Lutherans have stressed orthodox faith. Catholics have stressed episcopal order. Neither orthodoxy nor episcopacy alone can deal with the crisis of authority in the church. Orthodoxy without episcopacy is blind; episcopacy without ortho-doxy is empty” (Mother Church, 97).


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sanctified (cf. Heb. 10:14; 7:27), he who is Christ yesterday and today and forever (Heb. 13:8).154

Nevertheless, Scripture is not the only touchstone, but it is the prime touchstone for discerning divine truth. The content of the living Word of God is given further explicit formulation subsequent to Scripture in the unwritten traditions of councils, creeds, and confessions; the Church’s liturgy; its sacraments, in short, in the living tradition of the Church; and therewith it is the necessary context for properly interpreting Scripture with the teaching office of the Church being the guardian of the deposit of faith, being “not above the word of God, but serving it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupu-lously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit.” It is in the context of this living tradi-tion that we must consider the question of doctrinal development—dis-tinguishing authentic and inauthentic development in light of ecclesial warrants. “The fundamental norm for development is always Scripture, as interpreted preeminently by the universal and consentient judgments of ecumenical councils, but also by the consensus of holy and learned doctors, by the faithful generally, and by the bishop of Rome.”155 Yes, the Church does not confuse the authority of God, of his Word, in short, of divine revelation, with the authority of the Church, which is an authority derived from Christ, as Ratzinger states above.156 Nevertheless, it holds that the Church’s teaching office,157 which speaks in the name of the

154 Ratzinger, “Ein Versuch zur Frage des Traditionsbegriffs,” 48–49; ET: “Revelation and Tradition,” 49.

155 Thomas G. Gaurino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 84. See also, the 2012 document of the International Theological Commission, Theology Today, Perspective, Principles, and Criteria (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press). I examine the issue of doctrinal develop-ment in Berkouwer and Catholicism, 394–471.

156 Ratzinger develops this point in the 1990 document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Veritatis, Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian. Online at: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19900524_theologian–vocation_en.html. See also Ratzinger’s illuminating remarks to journalists during a 26 June 1990, press conference called to present this instruc-tion available at: http://catholicism.org/theology–not–private–ratzinger.html.

157 For a defense of the Church’s teaching as an apostolic office, see Charles Journet, Primacy of Peter, Trans. John Chapin (Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press), 57. It would take us too far afield to theologically justify the Catholic teaching that this teaching office is an apostolic office by virtue of apostolic succession. Berkouwer writes, “Reformed thought contends rather unanimously that the doctrine of apostolic succession rests on a misun-derstanding of the special function of the apostles, a function which was defined by the situation within the history of salvation in which they were ordained, a situation which renders their peculiar office untransferable and unrepeatable. Oscar Cullman has per-formed a noteworthy service in showing that the once–for–allness of the ‘salvation time’ that broke into the world with Christ gives to the apostles, as eye–witnesses of that time, a

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Church for the whole Church, partakes in the special assistance of the Holy Spirit, keeping the Church from falling away from the gospel of Jesus Christ.158

Although I have refuted the charges that Professor Horton leveled against the Catholic Church, I sincerely appreciated the opportunity to think through in my response the issues raised by his charges. I hope my response encourages him to take another shot at “a fresh constructive and critical evaluation both of the contemporary teaching and practice of the Roman Catholic Church and of the classical controverted issues.” This is one possible contemporary Reformed attitude to Catholicism, but it is evidently not characteristic of Horton’s own approach. His approach is essentially negative because he remains either “to be con-vinced that the modern developments of the Roman Catholic Church have really addressed the issues of the Reformation,” or he has “been largely untouched by the ecumenical exchanges of recent times and [has] therefore not been challenged or encouraged to reconsider [his] traditional stance.”159 As brothers in Christ, and as one whose writings

unique position. The Reformed consensus insists that though these offices were properly established to govern the Church as time went on, these offices were not apostolic offices. They were means by which the apostolic proclamation would be continuously recalled, so that Christ’s high priestly prayer would be fulfilled in the Church.” Vatikaans Concilie en de Nieuwe Theologie, 202–3 (166).

Journet responds to Oscar Cullman and hence to the Reformed consensus that Berkouwer, and also Horton (Christian Faith, 189), share. Catholic doctrine “distin-guishes between a mission of the apostles which is an extraordinary non–communicable charisma relating to the foundation of the Church, and ordinary communicable charisma relating to the preservation of the Church… . Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. It is perfectly clear that the mission of the apostles comprised a charisma which was by its very nature non–transferable. What is denied here is that in spite of a differ-ence in level, which no one doubts, there was an infallible homogeneity and continuity between the divinely revealed deposit of faith revealed once and for all by the apostles, on the one hand, and its actual preservation through the ages by means of a divinely assisted teaching office, on the other; between the essential structure of the Church in the never–to–be–repeated days of its foundation by the apostles and the essential struc-ture of the Church in the course of its pilgrimage through time; or, more profoundly, between the mystery of Christ as the Head and the mystery of the Church as his Body.” The Primacy of Peter, 53, 57.

158 Avery Cardinal Dulles, “Tradition: Authentic and Unauthentic,” Communio 28 (2001): 377–85.

159 Horton’s stance with respect to Catholics seems to be one or the other of the fol-lowing: Either he remains “to be convinced that the modern developments of the Roman Catholic Church have really addressed the issues of the Reformation,” or he has “been largely untouched by the ecumenical exchanges of recent times and [has] therefore not been challenged or encouraged to reconsider [his] traditional stance” (“Towards a Common Understanding of the Church” in Deepening Communion, International Ecumenical Documents with Roman Catholic Participation, ed. William G. Rusch and Jeffrey Gros, F.S.C. [Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1998], 179–229, and for the

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testify to my having learned a great deal from the Reformed tradition, I hope that we shall be able to avail ourselves of the gift of authentic ecumenism at the service of truth.160

quotes in the text and in this note, 187.

160 John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, no. 38. For a brief account of the reasons why Berkouwer made a transition to a more positive approach to Roman Catholicism, see my article, “The Accidental Protestant,” First Things, February 2014, 41–46. I give a more extensive account in Berkouwer and Catholicism, 20–109.