Joe Heschmeyer examines Protestant critiques of papal authority and the problem of personal interpretation.

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Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to explore the personal interpretation of scripture problem. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m going to give a version of this Catholic argument, give what I think is a pretty smart Protestant objection to it, and then explain why that Protestant objection is actually missing and important distinction, a distinction that many of us miss Catholic, Protestant, whatever, about the two types of faith that we’re required to have biblically. So tune in because there’s a couple things we’re going to cover and hopefully it’ll all come together in the end. We’ll see. First, what is the personal interpretation of scripture problem? If you’ve been involved in any kind of Catholic Protestant dialogue or argument or anything like this, there’s a chance that you’ve seen Catholics point out like, Hey, that’s just your personal interpretation of scripture.

You’ve got 2000 years of Christians who read the New Testament as saying baptism actually saves you. And then 500 years ago, some Protestants came along and said, no, actually it’s just a symbol. And the Catholic objection is that’s just your personal interpretation of scripture. Now maybe that argument means something to you. Maybe that argument sounds vacuous, but I want to unpack it. And to do that, I want to start with pointing out a certain tendency I see among some Protestants to identify certain problems and overlook other ones. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. JC Ryle is who I want to look to. He’s a pretty famous 19th century evangelical Anglican. If evangelical Anglican means something to you, great. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it. He’s in the Church of England, but he’s on the more low churchy Protestant side rather than the high churchy smells and bells side.

That’s it in a nutshell. And he warns against anything like infallibility. He doesn’t seem to have a very good understanding of what papal infallibility is. He seems to think it’s just the idea that Pope can never sin. That’s not what papal infallibility is. And so he looks at Galatians two where St. Peter sends and is called out for it by St. Paul. And so Ri says from this, well, who does not see when he reads the history of the Church of Christ repeated proofs that the best of men can air? Okay, so I want to stop right there because this is something that can be surprising to a lot of Catholics when they read Protestant authors that Protestants tend to have a really complicated relationship with earlier Christians. Certainly they have a complicated relationship with the earliest Christians, the early church fathers, but they also tend to have a really strangely complicated relationship even with the Protestant reformers that they think the reformers were wrong and maybe even heretically wrong on a lot of theological issues because their own form of Christianity in many cases is very new.

It’s very recent and it affirms things that had been denied for a very long time and it denies things that had been affirmed for a very long time. And so it leaves people in a very strange place of to say, all these people before me had gotten these major things wrong. So even though I want to look up to them and admire them, maybe draw from their wisdom and their inspiration, I can’t just follow them because we have such radically different forms of Christianity. And so Ry puts it like this, the early fathers, he means here, the earliest Christians, the early fathers were zealous according to their knowledge and ready to die for Christ, but many of them advocated ritualism and nearly all sow the seeds of many superstitions. And look, we wouldn’t call it ritualism and superstitions, but what he’s identifying is really true.

The early church fathers, the people dying for Christ, people who give us a New Testament are super Catholic. And so if you’re someone who’s really not Catholic, you’re going to have a complicated relationship. You want to admire everything they’ve done for us, but you can’t get on the same boat theologically. You regard them as heretics, they would’ve regarded you as a heretic. That’s going to create a problem, but it’s also a problem when you get to the reformers. So Royal puts it like this. He says, the reformers were honored instruments in the hand of God for reviving the cause of truth on earth, yet hardly one of them can be named who do not make some great mistake. And so he gives all kinds of types of mistakes. So this includes theological ones. He says Luther held tightly to the doctrine of consubstantiation, but he also includes things that he just uses like personal failings.

Millan was often Tim and undecided Calvin permitted CTAs to be burnt. Those are not equal size personal failings. We get the idea. Cranmer recanted and fell away for a time from his first faith that’s actually understating things. Cranmer was kind of all over the place in terms of what he publicly professed as a faith based on who the king was at the time. Jewel subscribed to Roman Catholic church doctrines for fear of death. Hooper disturbed the Church of England by demanding the need to wear ceremonial vestments when ministering the Puritans in later times denounced Christian liberty and freedoms as doctrines from the pit of hell. Wesley’s John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and Top Lady in one of his peers at the time, who was a hardcore Calvinist last century abused each other in most shameful language. Wesley was pretty clear. He didn’t even consider Calvinists like top lady Christians.

Irving in our own day gave way to the delusion of speaking in unknown tongues. So you can see he has these people that he wants to admire, and yet he thinks they all get some major things wrong, including many times major theological doctrines wrong. And so there’s two ways you can go with that. One way is to say, huh, I have a form of Christianity that increasingly looks idiosyncratic just to me and my immediate peers. That’s a problem that doesn’t look like the faith Jesus founded. But the other way you could go is the way that Ryle goes and say, well, this shows that you can’t trust people. He puts it like this. He says, we all naturally love to have a pope of our own. We are far too ready to think that because some great minister or some learned man says a thing or because our own minister whom we love says a thing, then it must be right without examining whether it is in scripture or not.

And look, I’ll grant sometimes that can be a problem that you can just blindly go along with what some theologian says, internet personality says whatever the case is. But it strikes me that he is misreading, or I guess I’d say it strikes me that he is ignoring a much bigger problem than the small problem he’s focused on. And I’ll explain that in a second here, but notice that he’s saying, okay, the problem is we want a pope and the solution is we need to just examine whether we think what our preferred pope is saying is in scripture or not. This leads him to a diagnosis that strikes me as 180 degrees wrong. He says this, most men dislike the trouble of thinking for themselves. They like following a leader. They’re like sheep. When one goes over the hill, all the rest follow here at Antioch.

Even Barnabas was carried away. We can all fancy that good man saying an old apostle like Peter, surely cannot be wrong following him. I cannot air. Okay, now why do I say this Seems to me to be 180 degrees misdiagnosing the spiritual condition of Christians, at least in the West. Well, namely this, we’re radically individualistic by nature. Our culture is radically individualistic and has been since at least the enlightenment. This isn’t something new to 2024. This is true in his days. Well, although I think it’s becoming more and more pronounced as time goes on, men don’t dislike the trouble of thinking for themselves. They dislike the trouble of obeying. The problem isn’t that we are like sheep. The problem is that Christ calls us to be like sheep and we’re not like sheep. We want to be the shepherds. We want to be the Pope.

We want to be the President. We want to be Christ. We want to run the show. We don’t want to follow somebody else. We might like the idea of somebody else calling all the shots, but as soon as we see them doing something that isn’t what we would personally do, that following thing goes right out the door. So it strikes me that royal’s solution to this problem is just leaning into our spiritual problem rather than correcting it. There’s a reason Hebrews 1317 has to tell us to obey our leaders and listen to them because we don’t naturally want to do that. But Riley is like, Hey, don’t be so obedient. Don’t be so willing to follow other people. Barnabas should have been more skeptical of the apostles. That’s how he is reading the situation. Even though you’ll look in vain for a passage in the New Testament that says, be more skeptical of the apostles, trust your leadership less.

You’re not going to find that passage because that’s not the primary advice we need to be hearing. And so the result isn’t, oh look, because I’m so distrustful of my leaders and my church and those who’ve gone before me and the early Christians, now I’m just perfectly following scripture. No, no, no. The problem isn’t that I’ve gotten rid of all those false popes. The problem is that the ultimate false pope is every individual, like each man a pope. That’s the problem. This is a personal interpretation problem in a nutshell, and I think one of the finest ways this was presented, it’s not called that, but one of the finest ways the personal interpretation problem was presented was by a Protestant author by the name of Keith Matheson in a book called The Shape of Soul of Scriptura, a book with which I profoundly disagree, but I think this passage was fantastic.

Matheson says, the problem is that there are different interpretations of scripture. So let’s just pause there because Ri seems not even to be attuned to that problem. Ryle is thinking that, oh, well all these other people failed. They just needed to read scripture more. But when Luther is believing in concept substantiation, it’s not because he’s ignoring scripture. He very famously, when he’s arguing with Ulrich’s wingy points, Jesus says, this is my body. And Luther’s entire argument, which is in Luther’s small catechism is, is means is this is my body, means this is my body. The problem isn’t that he is not reading scripture. The problem is that he interprets Jesus to mean this is literally his body and Zwingli says it represents his body. If you’re on Zwingli’s side of that argument as rile is, you can hardly say the problem is that Luther isn’t reading scripture or that Catholics aren’t reading scripture because the plain surface level reading of scripture is on the Catholic and the Lutheran side, not on the zw side.

So Matheson’s point is a good one. The problem isn’t that one side of these disputes is reading scripture. The other one just says, ignore scripture, follow me instead. No, the problem is that both sides are reading scripture but interpreting it differently. So he says, the problem is that there are different interpretations of scripture and Christians are told that these can be resolved by a simple appeal to scripture, but is it possible to resolve the problem of different interpretations of scripture by an appeal to another interpretation of scripture? And the answer should be obvious. No. Imagine tomorrow some new form of Christians come up and their whole thing is, Hey, Jesus says if your hand caused you to sin, cut it off. And so we mutilate hands, that’s our whole shtick, and you say, Hey guys, I’m pretty sure that was hyperbolic, figurative kind of language.

You’re not actually supposed to do that. And then the solution is, okay, let’s all pull out our Bibles and see what Jesus says. And then they open it up and they read, and Jesus says, if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. And they say, ah, I guess we were right, because I don’t see any italics as say figurative or hyperbolic, so it must be literal. The point there is it’s not that they believe in scripture and you don’t or vice versa. The idea is you both want to do what Jesus is calling you to, but one of you thinks it’s a literal calling and one of you thinks it’s hyperbolic. And so the question isn’t do we want to follow Jesus? The question isn’t do we want to listen to scripture? The question is what does Jesus mean? What do the scriptures mean?

That is a question of interpretation, and so matheson is right. You can’t settle that by simply saying, what does scripture say? Because the question is what does scripture mean as he puts it? The problem that adherence of solo scripture haven’t noticed is that any appeal to scripture is an appeal to an interpretation of scripture. Now he’s got this whole thing about how he thinks Sola s scriptura in its original Protestant form can avoid this while in this more advanced evangelical forms, it falls into this trap. I think he’s wrong there, but we’ll all leave it aside because the point he’s making here is right, any appeal to scripture is an appeal to an interpretation of scripture. Therefore, the only question is whose interpretation the difference between you and the imaginary group that I made up? Isn’t that one of you is reading scripture and the other one’s not?

It’s whose interpretation is right here. That’s the whole question. That’s it. That’s it. The entire question, and that is frequently the entire question in Christian theology. And as Madison points out when we’re facing conflicting interpretation of the scripture like that, we can’t just put a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve our differences of opinion as if it were a Ouija board. It’s not just, okay, we’re all going to put our hands in the Bible and move ’em around and what letters does it end up on? It doesn’t work like that. In order for scripture to serve as an authority at all, it must be read exegeted and interpreted by somebody. That’s his argument. I think that is a fantastic argument in favor of the need for a trustworthy church. You and I can’t be our own popes. We should know we are obviously not infallible.

We can obviously misread the scripture and it is not clear to us when we’ve misread it because think about it this way, your confidence about a particular passage of scripture that you’re reading it right is just no predictor of your accuracy. What I mean by that is there are plenty of people and you can look around the internet and look at them yourself who are extremely confident that they’re interpreting the Bible correctly. While you and I can sit back and say, oh, they’ve completely misread that their confidence doesn’t mean they’re right, and so we should recognize that if that’s true of them, that might also be true of us, that if I’m very confident that I’m interpreting such and such passage of the Bible correctly, my confidence is no guarantee that I’m not the one who’s just confidently wrong. And so as a result, I cannot just place my trust in my own private reading of scripture, but also none of these different forms of Protestantism claim to have anything like infallibility, and so I can’t place it in any of those either.

So all of that is a pretty strong argument it seems to me against Protestantism in favor of something like the Catholic church. So that’s the argument in a nutshell. That’s part one. Part two, the Protestant response to that and the Protestant response is how are Catholics and Orthodox and cops any different? Don’t you guys all end up in the same problem? And for this, I want to turn to a book called The Shape of Solo Scriptura by Keith Matheson. That is the exact same book I was just quoting from because he has this argument that no, you can’t trust that your church got it right because you can’t even trust that it is the true church founded by Christ and he’s going to make the argument that ultimately it comes down to private individual judgment for every one of us, and here’s how he makes the argument, and he says, A person could assert that only one branch is a true visible church.

That is the answer of Rome orthodoxy in some Protestant communions. Now for some reason, even though he’s perfectly comfortable calling the Eastern Orthodox orthodoxy, he can’t bring himself to just say Roman Catholic church. He has to just say Rome. It’s an obnoxious sort of knee-jerk pejorative, but if anything from the Catholic side, it kind of, I don’t know. There’s something kind of heartening about it. I’ll say this, and I know this is a digression. Atheists will sometimes say like, oh, there’s a thousand different gods out there. How do I know which one’s real? And the very clever Christian answer I’ve heard is, what’s the one you hate? Well, likewise, if it’s, oh, there’s these different groups claiming to be the true church, how do I know which one it is? It’s like the one you can’t even call by its name, the one you can’t even call the Roman Catholic Church even while you’re fine saying orthodoxy, that kind of knee jerk antipathy is sometimes a good spiritual sign like, oh, you’re pushing against something.

Okay, so when he says Rome, just understand he doesn’t mean the city of Rome. He doesn’t mean the Roman Empire. He means the Roman Catholic Church, which is really just called the Catholic Church. Calling it Roman Catholic was a concession to Anglicans. Either way, this is the answer of Rome orthodoxy in some Protestant communities that there’s one true church, but on what basis can one make that claim? Here’s his argument. One could argue that his branch is the one true branch because it is closest to the teaching of scripture of Protestant nomination or to the father’s Roman orthodoxy. Now, that’s not a good understanding of either the Catholic or Orthodox claim, but in any case, but his argument is this, but according to whose interpretation of the scripture or the fathers, is this one branch closest to the teaching of scripture or the fathers?

I’ll just say here, the Catholic argument isn’t we are the one true church because we’ve done the best of holding onto the teachings that Jesus gave 2000 years ago or that we’ve done the best job of holding onto what the early Christians believed. No, the argument that we have as Catholics is Jesus literally founded our church is 2000 years old. Leaving aside the fact that we’ve faithfully preserved that which is also true, we’re also just that church in terms of identity. If I said, well, how do I know which church is the United States of America? Are you going to tell me it’s yours because you most preserve the ideals of American liberty? It’s like, no, no, we’re just telling you it’s ours because George Washington and the founders and all that did their thing in 1776 and 1789, it literally historically is that institution. It is historically literally that body, whether you think it deviated from the teachings over time or not is a second question as a mere question of identity.

If I say where did the Roman Catholic Church come from? Well, it came from the first century with Jesus establishing the church on Peter. That’s the actual Catholic claim, not that we are the true church because we’re the closest to what the early church fathers had to say on a certain subject. That’s misunderstanding the idea, but I just mentioned that as kind of an aside because he’s still going to, I think you can tweak his argument to make it still sort of work to say, well, you still have to make some kind of interpretation. I still have to read history or theology or whatever it is to say that thing I just said. Someone else could read history and say, no, maybe Constantine invented the Catholic church. Maybe Pope Francis invented the Catholic church. Somebody else did it somewhere along the line. So that’s one argument he thinks is false.

Second, he said a person, and this is kind of an answer to, so you say, okay, whose interpretation of scripture or the fathers has this one branch being the closest? You could say it’s your own interpretation, but he says, then you’re trapped in radical subjectivity. The person would have to say that Rome is the true branch or orthodox or Protestant nomination because it comes closest to his interpretation of what the scriptures or the fathers teach. Now, again, I think that’s not true because that’s not the actual Catholic claim, but you can at least see that objection and you’ll find plenty of Protestants making this objection. Oh, you’re also guilty of personal interpretation. You say, I should listen to 2000 years of history, but how do I know 2000 years of history say so? Oh, you’re telling me that your reading of history, you’re still using your reason, you’re still using your personal interpretation. Oh, you should say I should listen to the Catholic church. Well, your personal interpretation tells you Jesus founded it on Peter, so there’s an element of personal interpretation that’s the kind of counter.

Then it says, well, okay, instead of appealing to your own individual interpretation, you could say that the Catholic church is a true church because it says so, but then you’re caught in an untenable circular argument. Rome would be the one true church because Roman adhere to the teaching of scripture and tradition as interpreted by Rome orthodoxy be the one true church because orthodoxy appeals to, excuse me, adheres to scripture and tradition as interpreted by orthodoxy, et cetera. So he’s saying if you’re going to say the Catholic church is one true church or the Orthodox church is one true church or whatever, you’re either going to have to say because it agrees with my personal reading of scripture, tradition, history, whatever, and therefore it all comes back to my personal private judgment or because the church says so and then it’s just circular.

He says this question begging, circularity is vicious. You seem to be caught in a logical problem either way. Now, fascinatingly, it would seem like this is going to plague every Protestant denomination just as much, but mathes in sees a way out. He argues this. He says, the remaining choice is to assert that the one invisible church is found scattered throughout numerous visible fragments or branches. This would allow an appeal to the corporate witness of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit bears a remarkably unanimous witness to the common confession of faith that has been handed down over the centuries. Now, before I get into his argument that we’re in the same position, I want to just call a flag on that play and I want to appeal to Flannery O’Connor because Flannery O’Connor makes the point I think pretty eloquently that what Matheson has just described is incoherent and impossible, and she does it in a letter to Dr.

T rpi from 1959. It’s not even one of her public thing. It is in her collection of letters that was published after her death, and she says, PVI is a Protestant. She says to him, we mean entirely different things when we each say ... Read more on Catholic.com