Infallibility

Among the many contributors to Christians' getting cross-wise with each other, one of the most annoying is the claim of absolute certainty about how the core beliefs of the faith should be expressed in diverse social, cultural, and religious contexts. That there are such beliefs, "the marrow of Christian truth," as John Wesley put it, is beyond dispute. But what these beliefs meant in their original settings and what they can mean in the here and now is not.

For instance, it is hard to figure out how to answer Islam's challenge that the doctrine of the Trinity contradicts the spirit of monotheism, when the categories in which this doctrine came to full expression in the fourth century are understood by hardly anyone in the twenty-first. Closer to home are the many challenges to spelling out a definitive understanding of human sexuality in a tradition springing from, in all probability, never-married, celibate founders (St. Paul figures prominently in this discussion) who thought nothing of demanding that their followers leave hearth and home, at whatever consequence to the family members left behind, to be remembered only for their fecundity.

When facing challenges like these, relying on people who must have absolute certainty at all costs is not wise; they are too anxious within themselves to be trustworthy guides for anyone else. What some of them are willing to sacrifice for their (false) sense of assurance is simply too costly --- truth itself. And yet, the sacrifices go on, often to great acclaim.

One especially insidious way that this proclivity expresses itself is in the insistence upon an infallible foundation for Christian teaching, on the basis of which core Christian beliefs can be promulgated as not only without error, but as incapable of ever being in error, period. You have to stop and think about this a little, for its full force to set in. God, we have believed, does not and cannot make mistakes. But human beings who do neither? Or a Book that does neither? Or interpreters of both who cannot be wrong in what they say about the teachers and the books that have gone before them? Only very, very insecure people, or at least very, very spiritual people in isolated moments of panic, would consider even the possibility of setting up any human creature on earth as bearing in his or her own finite nature the infallibility of God.

As if to offset at the outset the outrageousness of the infallibilist hypothesis, infallibilists themselves put on a good show of reminding us that important distinctions are to be made between eternal truths and temporal ones, and that they claim infallibility only for the former. Some truths, in other words, are true for some times and situations and not necessarily true for others. Earlier prohibitions against women speaking in church illustrate well this second kind of truth. As should denials of their authority over men --- or should they? And now we get a glimpse into how the trouble begins.

Non-infallible along with infallible teaching? A nice try, but rarely a successful one. For one reason, already suggested, we never seem to be able to agree for very long on exactly which truths belong to which category. Coptic Christians still balk at trinitarianism, Protestant Christians still balk at transubstantiation, and thoughtful Christians still balk at taking the Book of Revelation literally. A much more important reason for resisting this dubious distinction is that it rarely stays in place anyway. Like the nose of a desert camel, once a theologian slips one infallible doctrine under the tent under the cover of darkness, there soon follow many others in the full light of day, until there is room neither to move nor to breathe.

Recent practice of the Roman Catholic teaching hierarchy illustrates this danger well. "Non-infallible" teaching, particularly in the area of human sexuality and social ethics, has come to assume the force even if not the name of infallible dogma which is not to be questioned, under the threat of being silenced and ostracized within the church. Some of the most profound and influential Roman Catholic theologians of the past three decades have already suffered these ignominies --- Hans Kung, Tissa Balisuriya, Leonardo Boff, and Charles Curran, to name just a few --- and there will be more in years to come. The leader of this new Inquisition has been none other than the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. I learned of this new Pope's selection from a dental assistant who was hearing it on the radio at just the moment my dentist had started drilling out a cavity. There's a sermon in there somewhere.