Bob Update

"Bob" and I concluded the conversation we started back at the beginning of the month. As you may recall, he and I were arguing about the concept of the Magisterium, with me defending it (a funny position for me indeed, if you knew me in my private life!) and Bob attempting to prove that the Magisterium's authority is self-referential and so non-existant.

I briefly terminated the conversation when I was accused of falling into the Arian heresy, after I asserted that Jesus was God in response to Bob's question "why did Jesus not need a 'truth detector' even though he was fully human?" I got extraordinarily frustrated with the accusation of heresy, because I felt that Bob was simply waiting for me to assert something about Jesus' divinity so he could lob that grenade, and so I dropped the conversation. (I am not saying Bob was waiting to do this; I am saying that was what it felt like at that moment.)

In spite of the churlish manner I used to dismiss the conversation, Bob very kindly offered his good wishes and prayers when Mrs. Kairos Guy took so suddenly and seriously ill. So I tried to renew my patience and charity (as limited as they are) and continue the conversation, and we ended it on a much more amicable note, though still in strenuous disagreement.

Unfortunately, Bob has ended it in an illustration of exactly why Jesus did leave us a Magisterium. He wrote:
You are quite right to notice that individul interpretation of
revelation is often likely to lead people astray. It is risky. William Blake
wrote that, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" but he was
overly optimistic. Most often it leads to depravity, degradtion, and
disintegration.

But the safer road, the less risky path of received and conventional
wisdom leads us to the plateau of Nowhere. It's got a fairly nice view, it's
a bit elevated above the plain, and receives the rain first - but it's like
a mesa in the sky - a trap with no exit. A pretty prison and secure place.

I don't quite know what to do with that. The term "received" here seems to be the teensiest bit perjorative, but in the context of the Roman Church it can only mean received from God, which is no prison but instead the only true liberation.

In the end, I think Bob has fallen into one of those errors that the Devil always sends into the world in pairs--the extremes of belief--while he supposes I have fallen to the opposite.

The Magisterium is the repository of Sacred Tradition, the lens through which Scripture and revelation come into clearest focus. But, because it is a human institution, it is flawed, and the lens does not always show clearly. The errors therefore lie in either total surrender to the Magisterium--the pretense that because it is divinely ordained and inspired it cannot commit error--or in complete emphasis on the flaws--the view that it is really only "a guidebook" (to use Bob's word). Falling into the first error can certainly lead one into sin, either directly (think of the ownership of slaves by clergy in the antebellum South) or indirectly, by the adoption of a Phariseeic mentality. The second error is the eternal human failing of pride. *I* know best. God has chosen to reveal *to me* the Truth he has kept hidden from His People for two thousand years.

The difficult course between the errors is hard because it does not offer the comforts of certainty. When is it safest to deviate from Magisterial pronouncement? When is it safest to yield personal belief to sacred tradition? The virtues of wisdom and humility in tandem are required to steer this path. One needs to learn *how* to dispute Tradition in addition to *why.*

UPDATE: I should add, before anyone gets the wrong idea, that Bob was more specific in his assertion of the Arian Heresy than I have detailed here. I still think he was not only wrong about me, but somewhat misconstruing the heresy, but I don't want to be using my blog to misstate his views.