Refutation of the Common Protestant Polemical Charge That Catholics Inconsistently & Arbitrarily Apply Private Judgment in Accepting Catholicism

I've heard this a hundred times if I've heard it once. I have seen it used by James White, Eric Svendsen, Steve Hays, and (endlessly) Tim Enloe, in their zealous efforts to refute Catholicism. In a slightly different form, it is also known as the infallibility regress argument (Svendsen in particular has utilized this one). Others now recycle the argument. But it is just as bad and fallacious as it ever was (even though its users appear to be supremely confident in its power to refute and persuade). Lo and behold, today it appeared in a combox on this blog from yet another person. One "Interlocutor" (presumably Protestant) wrote:

[E]veryone privately interprets to decide what church to join and authority to submit to. So this old canard by RC's about using private judgment kind of obscures the issue. I think the real issue is simply the need for infallible authority. RC's seem completely fine with a Protestant or EO interpreting history/scripture and coming to the RC conclusion and then leaving his church to join them, but if it's vice versa then forget it. Coming with that though is the need to drop any further private judgment that contradicts RC dogma given the claim of infallibility. It's just interesting that the very principle you use to join an EO or RC church is then supposed to be done away with. So really the question is not should/does the church have authority (everyone agrees it does) or how do you know (everyone is going to privately interpret scripture and tradition to come to their conclusion), but does it necessarily have to have infallible authority? If it doesn't, RC/EO have no epistemological advantage.

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In a very long debate with Protestant apologist Jason Engwer about the Church fathers and whether they adopted sola Scriptura as their rule of faith (he split as I was 40% of the way through my counter-reply: four out of the ten fathers under consideration), this came up also. He expressed basically the same idea in these words:

Dave said that Protestants make themselves the "final arbiter", since they rely on their own interpretation of scripture. I asked Dave why his reliance on his own interpretation of the church doesn't make him the final arbiter. His response to my question is an example of the sort of irrationality that characterizes his apologetics. Dave responded by quoting Charles Hodge discussing the responsibility of the individual to interpret scripture. Therefore, Dave argued, he wasn't misrepresenting Protestantism, since such a prominent Protestant as Charles Hodge refers to the individual interpreting scripture for himself.

But the issue isn't whether Protestants believe in personal interpretation. I never denied that they do. Rather, the issues are whether relying on personal interpretation is equivalent to considering yourself the final arbiter and whether Roman Catholics do the same thing. Obviously, Roman Catholics do rely on their own interpretation of the church, so why would Dave criticize reliance on personal interpretation?

I replied (this was in July 2003) with an argument that I had been using for some time (at least since 1996). It is reproduced in my book, More Biblical Evidence for Catholicism, chapter 13, pp. 135-141 (pp. 96-101 in the first edition). The dialogue is a paraphrase (of my opponents' words) based on a real dialogue; in this case, with Tim Enloe. Needless to say, as almost always when Tim is in a "debate" (one hesitates to even associate this word with him at all), he didn't reply:

P: Catholic apologists commonly assert that Catholics have a "certainty of faith" not present in Protestantism, by means of finding the "final" answer to serious questions in "the Church." The individual Catholic deludes himself into thinking that he has not, in fact, determined by himself a number of fallible "private judgments," none of which are any more "certain" than those which Protestants make in their own search after doctrinal (and biblical) orthodoxy. This is a double standard.

C: It is not simply a reliance upon the Church in blind faith; it is, rather, the combination of Church authority, patristic consensus, and the biblical material: Church, Tradition, and Bible: the "three-legged stool." We say that this was the methodology of the Fathers themselves, in their appeal to apostolic succession or Tradition (see, e.g., St. Irenaeus). It is essentially an historical, typically Jewish argument, not a philosophical one (philosophy deriving from the Greeks).

P: All of this examination of patristic consensus, past Church rulings, and the Bible is undertaken by fallible individuals, and thus, is equally as prone to error as Protestant beliefs.

C: One could say the same about the Fathers themselves, and the Councils. The whole point is that there is an identifiable apostolic deposit which is passed down, and Catholics accept that, as clarified by their Church. We don't reinvent Christianity in each generation; we accept what has been given to us, just as the apostles and Fathers before us did. This is not a philosophical matter; it is one of faith and legal-historical grounds of ascertainable fact.

P: The Protestant’s "certainty of faith" lies in the self-attesting Word of God, while the Catholic relies on the secondary testimony of the Church, a mere man-made entity, even if thought to be guided by the Holy Spirit.

C: No; everyone accepts the Scripture; that is not at issue. The alleged "self-attesting" nature of it is a real issue I have dealt with at great length. The "secondary testimony" here is that of the Luther and Calvin. If Scripture speaks of an infallible and indefectible Church, then that notion is relying on the Word of God. We rely on the apostolic Tradition passed down, verified and developed by the Fathers, Councils, great Doctors, and popes, and ultimately in the materially-sufficient Holy Scriptures.

You rely on the fallible, late-arriving distinctives of Luther and Calvin, and in effect grant them apostolic authority. They can flat-out invent doctrines and claim they are both historical and biblical. No pope would dare do that (on a few occasions when they came remotely close to that a mass uproar occurred). They are strictly dependent upon received precedent. Not so for Luther and Calvin, the “Super-Popes.”

P: Catholics don't really have "certainty of faith” and shouldn't pretend that they do. Protestants are more honest about their epistemology.

C: I have “certainty” in the sense that believing Christians and Jews have always possessed "certainty" (I recommend Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent in this regard). It is a rational faith, backed up by eyewitness testimony and historical evidences, and the history of doctrine. No one is saying (or should say) that there is an absolute certainty in a strict philosophical sense. But there is certainty in the sense of faith.

Like any acceptance of authority: it won't work if we are blinded by a closed mind and a prideful, self-centered will (compounded by the level of individual ignorance (or prior misinformation). That is true of any teaching system, including Catholicism. But that doesn't, of course, disprove the Catholic system. It is not private judgment per se which leads one to accept Catholicism; it is precisely the opposite: it is yielding up one's private judgment in the act of recognizing the Church for what it is: the spiritual authority ordained by God. One can do this reasonably by applying historical criteria, just as Christians have always done.

When I say "private judgment" I am talking about Christian authority and ecclesiology; not philosophical epistemology. I refer to the Protestant formal system of sola Scriptura, which places the individual in the position as the supreme and final arbiter of his own theology and destiny. This is a formal system of Christian authority, over against the Catholic three-legged stool of "Church, Tradition, and Scripture" -- all harmonious and not contradictory or competing.

So the Protestant -- by the exercise of this self-granted prerogative -- can stand there and judge all three legs of the stool (as Luther at Worms did), making his own conscience supreme (the corollary of private judgment). This we reject as unbiblical and against the entire previous history of the Church. And all Protestants do this -- by definition. Your variant may be more subtle, nuanced, and fine-tuned, and much less ahistorical, but all the versions boil down to a rejection of the apostolic authority of the Catholic Church.

Ultimately Protestants reserve the right to interpret Scripture against the Fathers, if their views do not correspond to the theological system they espouse (e.g., a rejection of the Real Presence in the Eucharist and baptismal regeneration: both virtually unanimous views of the Fathers). So in the end, Protestantism becomes a man-centered system (Calvin, Luther, Fox et al), rather than an apostolic, patristic, traditional-centered system, where the individual yields his judgment to the historic Christian consensus of the ages: the apostolic Tradition faithfully passed down and protected from error by the Holy Spirit.

P: God's Word is the ultimate, unquestionable authority.

C: Of course; but it has to be interpreted, so you can't avoid human authority. Why would you assume that God cannot protect His Church from error just as He protected His written revelation from error? On what basis do you assume that? After all (I make an analogical argument, of plausibility), the gift of infallibility is far lesser in order than the gift of inspiration, by which fallible, sinful men accurately and infallibly recorded the word of God in Sacred Scripture, without error. Both gifts are supernatural and divinely-granted. It seems to me that if God could and would do one thing, then He would certainly do the other, so as to maintain a unified truth and a consistent witness to the world.

I have always maintained that the Christian notion of truth and authority is historically-based, as opposed to philosophically-based. And it requires faith. So Catholic authority is not an airtight philosophical proposition as many non-Catholics seem to think it must be in order to be adhered to. But Protestantism is not, either, and contains within itself far more problematic elements. I contend that our view is biblical, consistent, apostolic, and patristic.

Apostolic and patristic Christianity was much more analogous to Old Testament Judaism, than to, say, Greek philosophy, with its abstract "epistemology" (and I say this as a Socratic myself; one who loves philosophy). Authority flowed always from commonly-acknowledged miraculous historical events and historical criteria: a sort of "Christian mythology" (i.e., a corporately-preserved story of origins) but what C.S. Lewis would describe as "true mythology."

P: I agree. But don’t you see that the selection and espousal of this "true mythology" was undertaken by fallible individuals, so that the end result could not be unquestioned? This is the Catholic difficulty of the “infallibility regress.”

C: Our claim is that the Church is infallible, and that the individual yields up his private judgment to the authority of the Church, based on apostolic succession. We have faith that God will guide His Church. It is a reasonable faith, which can be backed up by many sorts of reasonable evidences (primarily historical), though it ultimately transcends them all, as all matters of faith do.

That "true (verifiable) mythology" is the following: Jesus was the incarnate God, and was a real Person. We believe Scripture is materially sufficient, but not formally sufficient without the Church as a Guide. We believe that Scripture and Tradition are "twin fonts of the same divine wellspring," as the Second Vatican Council states.

Jesus performed miracles, and many people observed these. He rose from the dead, and proved the reality of that by appearing to more than 500 people, eating fish, showing that He possessed flesh and bones, etc. This is all historical, and a matter of eyewitness testimony (so one might say it is a historical-legal approach to theological truth).

Likewise with the Church. There was one, recognized deposit of faith, passed on from our Lord Jesus to the disciples and Apostles, which Paul repeatedly refers to. Jesus established a Church, with Peter as the head (Matthew 16:13-20). This Church has definite and discernible characteristics, described in the Bible. There were apostles, and their successors were and are bishops. There were popes as well, and they exercised authority over the Church Universal.

Now, how was this Church identifiable in the early days and in the patristic period? Again, it was the historical criteria of authenticity. The Fathers always appealed to apostolic succession (a demonstrable historical lineage of orthodoxy) and Scripture, not Scripture Alone. The heretics were the ones who adopted Scripture Alone as their principle, because they knew that they couldn't produce the historical lineage (hence an early manifestation of the unChristian and unbiblical a-historicism which has been a dominant flaw of Protestantism ever since its inception).

Protestants thus adopted the heretical principle of formal authority, whereas Catholics have consistently adopted apostolic succession as the criteria of Christian truth and legitimate, divinely-ordained authority. The Catholic Church traces itself back to the beginning in an unbroken line, centered in the Roman See and the papacy.

So when someone like me (a very low-church evangelical) becomes convinced of Catholicism, it is not merely another Protestant exercise of private judgment and de facto alleged self-infallibility. It is, to the contrary, the yielding up of private judgment and the acknowledgement of something far greater than oneself: an entity which is "out there;" which has always been there since Christ established it, preserving (only by God's enabling grace and will) apostolic Christian truth in its fullness and undiluted splendor.

One can reasonably accept Catholicism, based on the historical criteria, just as one would accept the historicity of the Resurrection or the Virgin Birth, or the authority of the Bible – itself grounded in historically-verifiable elements (e.g., fulfilled prophecy, the continuance of the Jews, the astounding transformation of the early Christians, etc.). It is on the basis of history (and, of course, faith as well), as opposed to some alleged prideful, illusory, self-infallibility. Popes and ecumenical councils are just as bound to the received deposit of faith, as I am. I wanted apostolic, biblical Christianity: the Christianity which Jesus taught the disciples; not man-made variants, each containing maybe a few noble emphases left over from historical, apostolic Christianity, but always in the final analysis grossly-deficient (though also quite beneficial and good insofar as they do contain many valid Christian truths).

All of these issues are complex in and of themselves, but that is the Catholic answer: we appeal to the patristic and apostolic (Pauline) methods of determining theological and apostolic truth. The Bible is central in all this as well (absolutely!); it is just not exclusive of Church authority. How can it be? Its very parameters were authoritatively declared by this self-same Church. Before then, various Fathers disagreed somewhat on the canon. Again, it is not a matter solely of sin. Authority was truly needed to settle that issue, just as it is needed to settle theological issues. Scripture Alone will not suffice.

Besides, Scripture itself points to the teaching authority of the Church, anyway, so it is a false dichotomy from the get-go, to pit the Church against the Bible, as if there is some inherent contradiction or "competition" between them. The apostles and Fathers saw no such dichotomy. I imitate Paul, just as he imitated Christ (as he commanded me to do).

I had another debate in May 2003 with a Protestant who was apparently anonymous, entitled Private Judgment and Finding the Right Church: Is the Catholic Rule of Faith and Epistemology Inherently Incoherent? It is no longer on my blog; I believe I incorporated it in some form into one of my books: probably (without bothering to check) More Biblical Evidence for Catholicism or Bible Conversations. The following are his actual words and my replies.

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Thanks for the thoughtful response and the time you spent on this. I appreciate it.

See what you think of this. I find Newman's conclusion to contradict his own thesis. I agree with a great deal of what he said in regard to our eminent capacity to err. Here's where I come to what seems a clear inconsistency in Newman's proposed solution to his stated dilemma. To set the stage, I think we would agree that none of us are really entertaining such a radical fall of reasoning as to think that we may not read the words of Scripture correctly, for instance. Rather, the common pitfall we see is that of misunderstanding what we read.

Correct. That gets into the whole vexed discussion of perspicuity, but I basically agree.

In such a "limited" fallenness of reason, the possibilities for error are still pretty much endless, whether from blatant misinterpretation to the more subtle error of a wrong interpretive grid. Yet Newman's thesis regarding the error of the personal judgements of Protestants et al relies on his own personal judgement as to what Scripture is teaching in regard to the primacy of the Church as teacher, and in regard to what actually constitutes the Church.

This is the usual objection, often called "infallibility regress" argument. I'm well-familiar with it. Where I think it breaks down is in its tacit assumption that no one can determine (not with finality or "authority") what the Church is. It is essentially a proposal of radical skepticism or rationalism at the expense (to a degree) of supernatural faith and revelation: it amounts (when closely scrutinized) to a belief that God doesn't have the power to grant one the faith and grace of finding the apostolic Christian Church, so that he can in turn discover true doctrine and theology and hence be better able to follow Jesus.

To the extent that Protestantism denies this possibility altogether, and leaves the task of discovering true Christian doctrine, Tradition, and Church squarely and ultimately on the shoulders of the individual, I think it must be opposed as both nonsensical and unbiblical as well.

This is not merely a philosophical proposition. The Bible clearly (I think) teaches about both an authoritative Church and a Tradition. The fathers assumed this, and that was their ultimate appeal against the heretics, who invariably relied on their private judgment in the "non-ecclesiastical" sense that Newman wrote about, and sola Scriptura. For the Fathers, what had "always been believed" was the determinant of orthodoxy. God had the power to preserve apostolic doctrine inviolate and to protect the true church from error.

It requires faith to believe this, and that is what a Catholic does: we have faith that this Church can exist and that it can be identified and located. We don't say this rests on our own individual choice. It is already there; like "stumbling upon" the Pacific Ocean or Mt. Everest. We don't determine whether the thing exists or not. And we must believe it is what it claims to be by faith, absolutely. Why should that surprise anyone except a person who thinks that Christianity is determined purely by arbitrary choice and rationalism without faith?

That is no longer simply philosophy or subjective preference, as if Christianity were reduced to Philosophy 0101 (where someone might prefer Kierkegaaard to Kant) or the selection of a flavor of ice cream. If we are to be biblical, the Bible refers often to a "passed-down tradition." It is Out There. It exists. Newman would say that one can find this and submit themselves to it, by God's grace (not human reason, though it is not inconsistent with the latter, nor with any biblical teaching).

This is the Catch-22 that I find in the reasoning of any Catholic who has concluded that the Church is the only safe refuge from the dangerous and unprotected wasteland of private interpretation. It's an attempt to solve a problem that we all face, but it doesn't solve it, because that decision itself has been privately made, through human reasonings.

I disagree. We make the choice, but we don't say that the choice was mere reasoning. It was led by God's grace and necessary aid, just as salvation must be so originated. No one denies that Christians choose whether or not to follow God and become a disciple of Jesus. But that very choice was made possible only by God's grace; otherwise it couldn't have occurred at all, given the Fall (and the contrary view is the heresy of Pelagianism). Likewise, this is what we believe about the choice of the Catholic Church as the one founded by Christ, which we believe can be traced back to apostolic times in unbroken historical succession. This does not entirely exclude other Christians from the fold; not at all -- but that's another discussion and I can't get into that at the moment.

Apart from this faith aspect, the Catholic (especially apologists such as myself) claims that our view of ecclesiology and theology is backed up by both history and the Bible, as well as reason. I would argue (among many other things) the fact that the Bible teaches one true Church, as evidenced by the early Protestant internal divisions. In the early days, they still believed that each school was the one, and the true Church in some sense. There was a visible structure (e.g., Calvin's Geneva, or the Lutheran princes, who took over from the bishops). They believed in one church and one truth, however they may have defined it.

Today's Protestants, however, are much less concerned with that and oftentimes become literally ecclesiological relativists, where Church affiliation comes down to worship styles, a good choir, a pastor who gives "meaty" or heart --stirring sermons, enough pretty girls to meet, etc.). I exaggerate to make a point. This is how many people choose where to go to church: not by a long study and comparison of competing doctrines or reading apologetics. I know many Protestants detest this as I do, but it still exists and is a problem. And it comes from the extreme application of this "private judgment" business, that Newman wrote about.

In other words, it's an entirely valid observation to note that coming to such a conclusion involves private interpretation of Scripture, and it's an equally valid question to ask why one is sure that that private interpretation itself isn't faulty.

Sure, if Christianity were simply philosophy or a Baskin-Robbins situation: "what flavor of the 47 ice creams should I pick?" It is not. Christianity has a history, and whatever side one comes down on cannot exclude the historical criteria because they are intrinsic to Christianity and the biblical worldview, and always have been. This is simply what Christianity is. To be a-historical is as unbiblical as it is essentially foreign to a Christian outlook. Failing that, one can try to construct alternate ecclesiologies, as Luther and Calvin did. I think they fail as alternates of the Catholic Church, to the extent that they are alternates (i.e., where we disagree doctrinally). Why I think that would require huge discussions, where many points are dealt with in turn. It is a cumulative argument, involving a "wheel" of many spokes.

It goes against the democratic equal-opportunity times in which we live, but I see the only way out of this dilemma to be in laying hold of the revelation of God, not just TO me, but INTO me. If the Catholic Church is that to which I must belong, and if right reasoning would show that to anyone with an open mind, God must show ME individually as much, because I am anything but an open-minded man - indeed, I believe that such a thing is merely a popular myth - and I am a man eminently capable of reasoning wrongly without so much as missing a beat. But if God does indeed work in this way, that undermines one of the very arguments commonly made to defend the necessity of submitting to the Church in the first place, namely that of the fallibility of private interpretation.

No, as explained above. We arrive at truth by many different means. Belief in God is that way: it is experiential, moral, imaginative, philosophical (if someone is of that bent of mind), allegorical, etc. I became a committed evangelical Christian back in 1977 largely because of what is called the "moral argument," which is not rationality per se but an internal sense of what is right and wrong, and that Christianity embodied those values. I started thinking about Catholicism initially because of another moral issue: contraception.

But see, even that was not exclusively a "Catholic" discussion, once one discovers, as I did, that all Christians whatsoever opposed contraception till the 1930 Anglican Lambeth Conference. Since I was already committed to the importance of Church history and the unchangeableness of Christian moral teaching, and believed that God protected True Christian Doctrine and Morality, and I had arrived at this judgment through my own study, discussions, and reflections as a long-time pro-lifer and activist, I looked around and saw who today taught that contraception was wrong, which was the historic Christian position.

The choice is clear: even the Orthodox, who pride themselves on being so eminently "traditional" have partially caved on that issue. They haven't maintained their own traditional disapproval and prohibition. To me that is caving to the zeitgeist -- the spirit of the age, modernism, and the sexual revolution (which thrived on the use of contraception, for obvious reasons). And that had a profound effect on me because Christianity is a conservative force in culture: it preserves the old values passed down from the apostles, as taught in the Bible. It doesn't get carried away with all the latest fads and fancies. So that was just one aspect of my decision to convert to Catholicism.

God even used movies and music to bring me to Him back when I was a thoroughly secular pagan in the 70s (somewhat like C.S. Lewis, who came to Christianity through the route of mythology, Wagnerian music, and the like). Selection of a church should be a matter of faith and prayer AND all the usual reasoning involved, just as conversion to Jesus Himself is, since the Church, if it exists, is a supernatural entity, even though fallible and sinful men and women are in it.

If the Church has been given the keys to right interpretation by God Himself, God must still reveal that to whomever He would have know it, such is our helpless estate.

But since individual salvation or regeneration or conversion or being "born again" or committing oneself to Jesus Christ as His disciple (whatever one chooses to call it) itself is of the same nature, I don't see that this reduces to relativism and "helplessness." Somehow we come to believe in God. I think He can be seen in the works of creation, as Romans 1 teaches. But it requires faith and revelation to believe in the Holy Trinity or the Incarnation or Jesus' Resurrection. Those things are revealed; they aren't part of natural law, like God's existence or innate realizations that murder or lying are wrong and evil.

Likewise, in choosing a church or denomination. All you can do is pray, study the issues, read all the sides you care to read, talk to people, look at the history of the various groups, study early Church history, study the Bible through and through and choose what you think is the closest to the biblical Church, as revealed in the Bible (and -- if you value Church history and a visible Church as a continuation of the Incarnation, so to speak -- what has existed in fact for 2000 years). It still takes God's grace, just as conversion does. I have plenty of biblical arguments throughout my website, if you are seeking those.

Yet, and I think this is a crucial point, the defense of this doctrine is carried on by its adherents in the same rationalistic terms that just about every other doctrine in Christendom is defended, which I think is a serious error that afflicts most of Christendom today, by the way.

If the above analysis (or Newman's) is "rationalistic," you must demonstrate that to me. I deny this. In fact; quite the contrary, I am specifically reducing the entire matter to faith and the supernatural and revelation, with reason assuming an altogether secondary role. But I will not renounce or demote reason, either. I submit all my beliefs to reason and the law of non-contradiction, and I believe that my viewpoint is eminently reasonable, or else I wouldn't hold it for a second.

Consider ancient Israel and her numerous apostasies. I know the parallel is not exact, but there is merit in looking at this. It has always been true that "the Lord knows those who are His", and "all are not Israel who are descended from Israel". Yet how often was the truth assumed to reside in the temple, even as God was revealing Himself to a lonely prophet, and condemning the "Establishment religion" as apostate. Then as now, each individual was in need of personal revelation from God if he would hope to know where the truth resided.

Newman does not deny this, but he places it within the proper context, just as he does with his influential arguments about the conscience or the role of the laity. He refuses to become anti-institutional or a-historical. The Church can (and has) become very corrupt in human terms. It is in constant need of revival and reformation. This is the human condition. Yet it lasts and survives because God protects it from the folly and wickedness of men, just as He preserved ancient Israel as a people and the Bible as a written revelation.

The Bible teaches that the Church has sinners in it, and that this shouldn't make us lose faith. I have a lot of material along those lines. And ancient Israel did not believe in sola Scriptura at all. I have a chapter about that in my second book which I can send you or paste, if necessary.

Ecclesiastical continuity and tradition were clearly not enough to authenticate the true church then. Why must it necessarily be different from that now?

I deny this. The ancient Jews always had the Mosaic Law. They had the Davidic Covenant. There was a clear identifiable tradition. That didn't change when corruption occurred cyclically. They kept discovering the Law and their God again and again, and revived themselves (or, I should say, cooperated with God's revival of them). You act as if corruption wiped out the Law. It didn't, no more than David's sin wiped out the Davidic Covenant, or Paul's or Moses or Peter's sin made them incapable of writing inspired Scripture and being leaders of their people.

I place a lot of weight on the defense given for any given truth which is pressed up me as something I ought to believe. If a defense is rationalistic from start to last, I find it seriously lacking as a compelling defense, because I've seen with my own eyes the necessity of a personal revelation from God of anything concerning the things of God which I am to believe rightly.

I couldn't agree more. I have experienced that in both my conversions, and I have had plenty of spiritual experiences (I am a charismatic), and instances of various gifts such as discernment of spirits (which are easily able to be confirmed by later discoveries and further information), which are useful to me in my line of work. I think you are exactly right, but I don't think your position leads to a despair of ever finding a church or True Doctrine, or a de facto Christian relativism or radical subjectivity.

For this same reason, any doctrine which compels me to reject my own understanding on the basis of fallibility seems to be fatally flawed, in that it necessitates that I temporarily accept the very thing it asks me to reject.

I agree again. The Catholic case, like the case for God and the case for generic Christianity, rests upon truths that can be known and verified outside of itself. It is not circular at all, as so often charged. The views that are truly circular are those such as presuppositional Calvinism or Mormonism, where natural reasoning is disparaged and frowned upon and one simply accepts the truth on fideistic grounds. Catholics don't do that at all. We believe very much in both faith and reason.

The truths that are most compelling to me are the ones which I have come to see as being the only possibilities in a given situation.

That was the case with myself, regarding the prohibition of contraception. I was convinced that it was wrong, and that it's wrongness had always been believed by Christians. I looked around to see who taught this today. The choice was very easy, as there is only one Christian group (apart from some possible dinky ones) which has maintained the traditional Christian position over against the spirit of the age and the Sexual Revolution.

The doctrines of grace present themselves compellingly to me in this way. Newman's thesis fails this test in two ways. First, his own agreement with the necessity of grace, along with his trust in the reliability of the reasoning by which he has understood Scripture to be teaching submission to the interpretation of the Church, should both lead him to affirm that God reveals Himself INTO individuals, but this would undermine his thesis about the necessity of the Church as interpreter of Scripture.

Not at all. In fact, the two are able to be synthesized and harmonized, as in his view and the Catholic view. One can have a personal confirmation or experience, yet interpret and understand it in such a way that it is not intrinsically opposed to the historical, institutional, corporate aspects of Christian ecclesiology. Newman deals with this very issue at length in his famous Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, the classic Catholic treatment of the individual conscience. But he arrives at a position very different from Luther's.

Luther (at the Diet of Worms in 1521) made the conscience and private judgment epistemologically and practically superior to everything else, be it Church or Council or pope or Tradition. In that view, the individual is radically brought back to himself as the ultimate criteria of truthfulness (yet he contradicted himself by adopting a State Church view and advocacy of capital punishment for a number of heresies, real or otherwise -- such as the Anabaptist belief in adult baptism).

I think the folly of that position is obvious, and the frightening consequences equally so. But this is what Protestants believe. This is what sola Scriptura and rejection of the binding authority of a Church and Councils reduce to. There are only so many choices which are not self-contradictory. Newman and Catholics don't have to make this opposition. We believe both that there is an identifiable Tradition and that individuals by God's grace are capable of finding it and accepting it in good faith and total sincerity, in a non-contradictory, spiritually-fulfilling manner.

Secondly, what he denies explicitly, in decrying personal interpretation, he nevertheless must avail himself of in order to formulate his thesis.

No, because the Catholic Church and apostolic Tradition are already entities "out there" which are not mere private interpretations. This tradition has been passed down and preserved and people are capable of finding it. St. Paul assumes this throughout his letters and the Fathers did also. Catholics believe as they do: that God has given us a revealed truth (which includes ecclesiology and a Church) and that he can enable individuals to discover it through grace and faith, so that they can get on with their lives and serve Him and their fellow men, rather than spending their lives on a perpetual agnostic-type quest for something that either doesn't exist or very imperfectly only, or that one can never know enough to accept on the basis of reason. We make things so complicated that God always intended to be quite simple.

Thanks for your thoughts!

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The argument on private judgment and the "infallibility regress", as used in Protestant polemics
in recent times, involves a double fallacy. The first has to do with the definition of private judgment (see my lengthy "debate" with Tim Enloe on this, from October 2001) and the second is the unchallenged (and probably unconscious) assumption that the Christian faith can be reduced to epistemology; i.e., philosophy. But it cannot. Any Christian worldview also requires faith. The Protestant polemicist who uses this argument seems to momentarily forget that, as if Catholicism and Protestantism were two competing philosophical systems, rather than variants of the religion and theology of Christianity.

I readily agree that reason and philosophy ought to be consistent with any adopted Christian view (and I think it is with my Catholicism), but the latter ought not be reduced to mere philosophy. That is the fallacy here, along with the definitional one, that makes this argument (though impressive and perhaps daunting to some at first glance) rather weak in the final analysis and easily refuted.