There is a discussion thread over at the message boards I frequent on the question of how and whether one can know if one's reading of the Scripture is correct, or whether a change in historic Christian practice can be predicated upon that notion that the Holy Spirit demands this change. The discussion is centering on the question of authority and whether the Church can claim the authority to correctly interpret the Bible vis a vis the individual Christian reader.
Many of the criticisms of the Church's authority center upon the notion that individual Christians are sinful, and that entities like the Roman Catholic Church have sanctioned the Crusades or the Inquisition, and therefore, the Church lacks any credible authority because, after all, Christians are the Church. In fact, among Protestants in particular, though non-Christians as well, this is one of the primary criticisms against the so-called “institutional Church” having any sort of authority over and above that of the individual, or of authority being vested in any visible earthly body of Christians.
But this criticism fails in two general ways: by virtue that the criticism itself is false and wrongly argued, as well as by virtue of what the Scripture actually says about the Church and the consequences of those claims. In this post I will address the failures of the criticism itself.
1. The Failure of the Criticism
This resort to the sinfulness of the members of the Church (the so-called “hypocrite defense”) presumes that no body of Christians can truthfully and really claim, let alone exercise, authority (in any this-worldly sense) over the beliefs and practices of individuals because the same Church or Christian group that would so exercise that authority is itself made up of fallible sinners and such an authority would be compromised by those fallible sinners.
This criticism fails in a number of ways, a few of which I wish to highlight.
a. It Commits the Fallacy of Composition