Guest
Casey Chalk holds degrees in History and Teaching from the University of Virginia and a Master’s Degree in Theology from the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College. He serves as an editor or regular contributor for many publications, including The New Oxford Review, The Federalist, Crisis Magazine, The American Conservative, and The Spectator. He is the author of The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity.
Links
- The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (book):
- Casey Chalk website
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
Sola scriptura or scripture alone is the foundational doctrine of Protestantism, but the doctrine itself is based on certain false presuppositions, which makes the whole doctrinal house of cards fall apart. That’s what we’re going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, I’m Eric Salmons, your host and inner chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to smash that like button and to subscribe to the channel, to follow us on social media @CrisisMag if you want to wade into social media, and I do not blame you if you do not want to. Okay, so our guest today is Casey Chalk. He’s a return guest. He was on for another book he wrote before, but I’ll give his quick bio here. He holds degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in Theology from the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College. He serves as editor, regular contributor for many publications, including The New Oxford Review, The Federalist, the American Conserve and The Spectator.
But we don’t care about any of those because he also is a regular contributor to Crisis Magazine, which is the only one that matters. No, those are all great magazines and I encourage people to check those out as well. Are you writing some for Catholic Answers now too? I feel like I saw you did that.
Casey Chalk:
Yeah, I am contributing to them. Not so much in the last couple of months, but their editor, Drew Belsky, great guy, reached out to me sometime I think last year and asked me to write. I do write a lot of writing on Protestant related issues because of my background.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, great. Yeah, so catholic ancestry. Check out Casey he’s all over the internet. You can find all his good stuff there. But today what we’re going to talk about is your new book, which is The Obscurity of Scripture, which I will say when I first saw that title, I’m like, man, you’re just coming out swinging because it sounds like you’re going against… It’s almost like something an atheist would write with that type of title, which is actually kind of nice because then you start to look into it like, oh, okay. So the subtitle is Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity. I told my wife, I was only going to say perspicuity once because I have a hard time pronouncing it. I’m just going to call it clarity, but we’ll talk about that in a second. So this book is from Emmaus Road Publishing.
Great book, but I want to dive in here on these doctrines of sola scriptura because a lot of Catholics, obviously, we deal with Protestants talking to them in apologetics, and usually it’s like, where in the Bible can I find this? They’ll say, the Bible is clear that it teaches justification by faith alone, and if we even bring up the fathers or tradition, they don’t really care. So I want to really help Catholics here understand sola scriptura, but understand more importantly the fatal flaw of sola scriptura, which is what your book’s about. But before we do all that, you mentioned already that used to be Protestant. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your Protestant background, how you became Catholic?
Casey Chalk:
Yeah, of course. Happy to do that. So I was actually born Catholic. I was baptized in the church. My parents and their parents, and probably going back more than a thousand years of Irish and Polish Catholics. But my parents left the church when I was pretty young. Shortly after my first communion. They ultimately landed in non-denominational Evangelicalism, so that was more or less the Christianity that I lived and breathed as a grade schooler, and I very much took that form of Christianity on for my own. I was a very excited and eager Evangelical Christian, but then I ran into a bunch of secular, and I don’t know, perhaps you could call them anti-Christian religious studies courses when I entered at the University of Virginia as an undergrad, and that required me to do a lot more investigating and studying, and I kind of realized that I didn’t really have the intellectual tools to combat a lot of these criticisms that I was encountering from secular scholars, and that ultimately drove me into a more intellectually robust and traditional former Protestantism, namely Calvinism.
So after I finished my undergrad degree, I started a degree in theology from Reformed Theological Seminary, one of the big Calvinist seminaries in the United States, and I got about halfway through that program before ultimately more or less getting exposed to much more robust, intellectually coherent arguments in favor of the Catholic Church and the magisterium. I was persuaded to return to the church of my youth, and I came back into the church and received the Sacrament of Confirmation in 2010 or 2011, I guess when I received the sacrament.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. So at the Reformed Theological Seminary, how did you have… I mean, I know the internet and everything, but my image of people who would be in that environment would be somewhat of a bubble. And I don’t even mean that as an insult, but they’re just very heads down learning the reformed theology, learning about Calvin, really getting into it. These guys are brilliant. I mean, they’re really smart guys who go through these programs and they really know their stuff, but what I found is often they also don’t know much outside of that world. How did you, in the midst of that, be able to find out about Catholicism or even look into it?
Casey Chalk:
I think that is actually pretty accurate that if you are in a Protestant seminary, I think not just Calvinist, but any of the big Evangelical schools, you’re probably not going to spend a lot of time doing deep dive investigations of Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy or other religious traditions for that matter. Most of the education is focused on biblical studies, a little bit of Christian history, maybe a little bit of philosophy if you’re good. I got one philosophy course in my program. For me, the immediate impetus was that one of my very best friends who was at a separate reformed seminary in St. Louis Covenant Theological Seminary, he started to have some big questions about Protestantism, reformed thinking and ultimately converted to Catholicism in large part because of the ecumenical Bible study that he was in, not just with other Protestants, I think there were some Lutheran, but also a few Catholics.
So when my best friend or one of my best friends converted to Catholicism, it was a massive shock to me, and we were having lots of conversations. I was trying to persuade him not to do it, to stay in the Calvinist tradition, but once he did it, then of course, I was really eager to try and understand how he had come upon that decision. So that sort of served as the immediate instigator for my own studying of the Catholic Church and her claims.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. I got to go down the rabbit hole a little bit more because, so this is about 12, 15 years ago, around late 2008, 2009, 2010, around then? Okay, so what resources did you find in the Catholic world? ‘Cause I want to know what was it that worked? Was it Catholic answers? Was it something else? How did you find… And what really kind of clicked with you or were certain people? For me, I listened to Scott Hahn’s Tape, I read Karl Keating’s book, Catholicism and Fundamentalism, this is 30 years ago, and those were really a big deal. What was it for you that helped you?
Casey Chalk:
Yeah, certainly I read some Scott Hahn books, but that was actually after having been exposed to some arguments coming from more recent reformed converts to Catholicism who were former seminary students like myself, former theologians and pastors through a website, which unfortunately doesn’t do very much anymore, Called to Communion.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I’m very familiar with that. That was a great website.
Casey Chalk:
Yes, and I wrote for them for a time, I suppose I’m still an editor. We just really haven’t done anything because many of us have gotten very busy in our lives, but for a number of years it was an excellent resource, particularly for folks who were in the reformed Calvinist tradition and trying to investigate and understand the Catholic Church’s claims. So I just devoured the content on that website. And one of the best things about it was that they were very careful in moderating the Combox, and that ensured that there was a very high level of charity and an intellectual vigor in the debates that were available on the website.
Eric Sammons:
I remember years ago sending… One of my best friends is Calvinist, and I would send him links to that website often because I knew, like you said, it’s a very high level, very serious place for discussion on that matter. So that’s good to know. Hopefully, maybe it’ll make a comeback here someday and keep on going. So we want to talk about scripture now. Why don’t you just explain your own attitude towards the Bible as a Protestant? So you’re a devout Evangelical or Calvinist. If it’s changed, let us know, but how did you view the Bible and its importance and how did it dictate what you believed and things of that nature back then?
Casey Chalk:
So as an Evangelical, and then I think still as a Calvinist, I believed the classic doctrines of the Reformation, the five solas. Sola fide, sola gratia, sola Christus, sola scriptura. So I believed that it was the Bible alone that was the infallible rule of faith that should guide the Christian’s life, that basic instructions before leading Earth as a lot of Evangelicals like to say. So this idea that everything that I need to know about Christ, about God, about how to live a faithful Christian life is encapsulated, in particular the 66 books of the Protestant Canons since of course, they reject the deuterocanonical books that the Catholic Church recognizes. But I am a former high school history teacher so I was always interested in understanding the history of the church and how the canon was formed and how the-
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, that was your downfall right there.
Casey Chalk:
And how the reformers came to articulate these doctrines, which I just presumed also in part because of the doctrine of clarity, that this is just what the Bible teaches, no discussion, right? There’s no need to debate these things. Obviously the Bible teaches justification by grace through faith alone, not by your works. But once I started to study the history of the church and realized how complicated and complex the debates over justification, what counts as holy scripture, as the canon, those kinds of things, then I realized that I was going to have to do a lot more work in order to really understand why the Protestant position, which I believe was the right one, why it was coherent and cogent.
Eric Sammons:
I remember when I was Protestant, it was just an assumption that was never really questioned, never really discussed was the role of the Bible as being. When somebody said, the Bible says, or the Bible is clear that this teaches, then it just was simply true. And I am not saying all Protestants are like this, but I do think a lot of them are. But my main thought growing up and even as a high scholar, even a little bit in the college, it started to develop a little bit more if that was just, I wouldn’t have said it like this necessarily, but I almost had this view of the Bible got dropped down from heaven intact to 66 books, which is very similar to the Mormon case of the Book of Mormon and even the Quran with Islam, it’s a very similar. I had that same kind of view that it just showed up and that God gave it to us as a rule of faith.
Now of course, as you learn more of the history, that’s not exactly the case. When that comes. So the idea that the Bible alone it was just the instruction manual given by God, it makes sense that you get a new dishwasher, you get an instruction manual with it. So of course you’re going to get an instruction manual life and that’s the Bible, but there’s no real concept of the history. But what you’re pinpointing in your book, The Obscurity of Scripture, is there is a huge presupposition there, and that is that the Bible’s clear. So the clarity of scripture, the perspicuity of scripture, why don’t you explain the basic Protestant belief of the perspicuity of scripture?
Casey Chalk:
So perspicuity would be the more academic term, the clarity of scripture would be the more popular one that perhaps some Protestants would be familiar with, although frankly, as a former Evangelical, I think even a lot of Protestants, if you were to ask them on the street, “Hey, do you believe in the clarity of scripture? What is the doctrine of clarity of scripture?” I think most of them would probably shrug their shoulders and not know what to say. And the reason for that, I would argue, is because the clarity of scripture is the most foundational of doctrines within Protestantism. It is the very air that Protestants breathe. It’s just presupposed in every single argument or idea that Protestants will propose or hear during their Sunday sermons and in Bible studies, in vacation Bible school, it’s all premised on this idea that the Bible is so clear that the common man should be able to understand.
This is kind of one of the major tenets of the reformation. Luther wanted to get the Bible in the hands of every layperson because he believed that if people just had enough access to it and could read it on their own and in their own homes and prayerfully study it, that they would come to the same conclusions about what it means as he had, certainly in regards to salvation, but any number of other theological issues. So there is some debate within Protestantism about what constitutes the actual doctrine of clarity. Perhaps the most popular one that you’ll hear will be something like the Bible is clear in regards to the essentials of the faith, the core doctrines of the faith. But then of course you have to ask, okay, what do you consider those core doctrines, right? Because there’s going to be lots of disagreement, but what’s important and what you can leave on the cutting room floor, maybe it’s not essential. Is baptism essential? Is the Eucharist essential? Any of those kinds of doctrines, there’s a lot of debate within Protestants about how relatively important they are.
Sometimes you’ll hear Protestants even say that all of the Bible or most of the Bible is clear. I think maybe I’m biased coming from the Calvinist perspective, but I think the most defensible version of this doctrine is the one that’s articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith. It’s a 17th century confessional church document out of the English Presbyterian tradition. And what they argue there is that the Bible is clear enough that any person, regardless of intellectual ability, academic training, should be able to prayerfully and humbly and guided by the Holy Spirit, understand what is necessary for salvation. And why that’s so important is because you can see there how it’s so directly tied to the doctrine of sola fide, this idea that we’re justified by grace through faith alone, which is sort of the initial genesis of Luther’s protest against the Catholic Church in the early 16th century.
So perspicuity and then belief in salvation by grace through faith alone are very much intertwined, but also as well sola scriptura because this idea that the Bible alone is the infallible rule of faith, well, you’re going to have to have some doctrine that explains how to interpret it. And the doctrine of clarity more or less serves as the key that unlocks all of the beautiful majesty and truths that are found in holy scripture.
Eric Sammons:
It really wouldn’t make no sense to say the Bible alone is all we need for salvation if people couldn’t understand the Bible. If somebody said, for example, this high level physics textbook is all you need to be saved, I think most people, uh-oh, we got a lot of people in trouble just simply can’t understand it through no fault of their own. And I think this is underlying one of the major narratives you see in the Protestant reformation. And even just recently, my wife was looking at history books for one of our kids we’re going to homeschool this year. She’s looking maybe in a different history book. And there was this whole section during the Reformation time where it talked about how Luther and some others, they were basically trying to free the Bible from the dictates of the church and from only being interpreted by church and because they believe everybody should be able to read the Bible.
And there’s an assumption there though, that by reading it, they would also understand what they’re reading of course. Now, is Luther the first one in history to kind of come up with this to back the sola scriptura? I know there are some Proto-Protestants before him, but do you see this all in the church fathers? Do you see it later in the Middle Ages before Luther, or is it just something Luther kind of pulled out of his hat?
Casey Chalk:
You see it a little bit in the writings of John Wickliffe, one of the Proto-Protestants and Englishmen I believe in the 14th century. But Luther and the first generation reformers are really the ones who articulate the doctrine as we understand it today. You’ll find some church fathers, there’s a few of them, and Protestants love to quote them as proof texting examples. You’ll find them saying things like, the Bible clearly teaches this, or the Bible is clear on that. But in my own investigations for both when I was studying the claims of the Catholic Church and then when I was writing this book, I think most of the time those quotations are very easily explained away when you look at the broader context. And you can see that they’re talking about scripture is… What they usually mean is that scripture is clear in regards to its moral commands because in that regard, the counter reformation saints like Bellarmine and Francis de Sales would agree with them that there’s a certain level of clarity.
If we’re just talking about the idea that scripture clearly teaches that murder is sinful, lust or adultery is sinful, things like that, you should only worship God because it’s just so explicitly stated. But even there, we can look at the history of Christianity and see there’s been great debate even on questions of what constitutes murder. So you think even there where maybe we can agree at a surface level, if we see someone beaten to death on the street, I think most people will say, yeah, that looks like murder to me. But then if we’re talking about abortion or euthanasia, it becomes a lot more complicated and you’re going to start to see a lot of those divisions, even amongst Bible believing Christians over what constitutes murder or other supposedly clear moral commands from God.
Eric Sammons:
You also see in the Old Testament, God commanding the Israelites to kill a lot of people, so is that okay? Is that not murder? So even something like that. Now, so the question is then for what are some of the defenses? I know that like you said, that Protestants, it’s the air they breathe, and I found that that is definitely true, but if they’re challenged on it, do Protestants have any scriptural… I know it’s a secular argument, but let’s just grant it, any scriptural defenses of the perspicuity of scripture?
Casey Chalk:
Oh yeah, they have many and I devote an entire chapter of the book to running through them. And like you said, my goal here is not to refute them and say that scripture clearly teaches that it’s not clear because obviously that argument collapses upon itself and the Catholic Church doesn’t teach it anyway. But yes, I mean, they will cite verses. They get things from the Psalms about how your word is a lamp unto my feet. This idea that the word is something that illuminates, so it should be bringing clarity. They’ll cite 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17 talking about how all scripture is God breeds and useful teaching, training, correcting rebuking and righteousness as this idea in order… What is the second part of that verse?
Eric Sammons:
Being equipped for righteousness or something like that?
Casey Chalk:
Yes, equipped for every good work. I think it depends on your translation, but so they’ll cite those kinds of verses. But as I try to argue there is that the Catholic Church has very different interpretations on all of those verses and all of which can be very persuasively understood within a rubric or paradigm where you still need some kind of interpretive authority. And I think even the testimony of the New Testament bears that out. I mean, the Council of Jerusalem as described in Acts 15 is a debate over how to understand the Old Testament and what’s happening in salvation history in that immediate post-resurrection era. The early church is asking, “These Gentile converts, do they need to be circumcised? Do they need to obey the dietary laws? Do they need to obey Sabbath observance as Jews understand it?”
So these are questions over how to understand the Bible, and it’s ultimately the apostolic church which has to weigh in and make definitive declarations about whether or not the Gentiles have to do this, but certainly there’s plenty of other verses that the Catholic Church will cite as also substantiating this understanding of the necessity of an interpretive authority.
Eric Sammons:
The title of your book is The Obscurity of Scripture. So are you claiming that? What are you claiming? Is the Bible unclear about anything? Is it unclear about certain things? And if so, what? Is it clear about something? If so, what? Exactly, what do you mean when you say The Obscurity of Scripture? Because obviously if it’s super obscure, then it’s useless. So what do you mean when you say that?
Casey Chalk:
So I think that scripture is clear enough that we can make very basic assessments about its teachings. So for example, the Bible seems to be clear that God exists, right? The Bible seems to be clear that Christ is in some sense an interpretive authority, a representative of God. Scripture seems to be clear enough as win in the end. But the issue with a lot of these, and this is the reason why in seminaries, we have Christology and ecclesiology, right? This idea that Christ established a church and that church is in some sense supposed to continue through history, but the issue we have with all of these is that even if we can say that scripture clearly teaches that Christ is in some sense a representative of God, we immediately have to ask the questions of, well, in what sense is he God?
Because the church pretty heatedly debated that issue, particularly in the third and fourth centuries, and we required multiple church councils, namely Nicaea and Chalcedon, to flesh out a lot of those issues regarding whether Christ was of the same nature as God the Father. What role does the Holy Spirit play? Is Christ one person? Is he two persons? Does he have one or two wills? Does he have one or two natures? So even if we can say that yes, in some sense we recognize Christ and authority, we are going to need some kind of interpretive authority of scripture to make sense of who exactly Christ is and how he relates to God the Father and the Holy Spirit. To take just but one example, and you can say the same for any number of other things.
You can see in scripture that you can find broad consensus of even amongst Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, is that going back in the history, you’ll see that these were vigorously debated issues that required centuries of debate amongst the most brilliant minds, whether you’re talking church fathers or into the medieval church, to flesh these things out and for then ecumenical councils to reach some kind of agreement on.
Eric Sammons:
Now, from the Protestant point of view, what is your defense then of if it’s not scripture, if scripture isn’t clear, well, what is the purpose of scripture then? Because if we are just depending upon the church to tell us what to believe, why did God even give us a Bible? What’s the purpose of it?
Casey Chalk:
So what I’m not denying is the fact that obviously scripture has been benefiting Christians regardless of whether they’re in or out of the Catholic Church since the Reformation and even before, since obviously the break with the East is much earlier. The church has taught that even Christians outside of the Catholic Church are able to benefit from reading their Bible. And we can see that just from the fact that our Protestant brothers and sisters come to the same agreement on what scripture teaches, whether we’re talking about the Trinity or the need for a serious prayer life or even to read scripture, or in regards to church polity, the fact that we need to be meeting together and worshiping together and have some sort of liturgy. So I’m not denying any of that. But even then, even if a Protestant comes to what we as Catholics would say is the correct interpretation of the Bible, they have no means of having confirmation of that belief.
They’re more or less on their own, an individual with no means of some sort of objective criterion or confirmation for their personal interpretation. So that’s the role that the magisterium and the church serves. So I guess to answer your question, Eric, yeah, the Bible is still obviously a great gift from God that Christians are benefiting from regardless of whether or not they are Catholics. The problem though is that without some sort of extra biblical authority, there’s going to be this continual divergence of church bodies that will go on forever and ultimately leads to lots of confusion. It does terrible damage to the witness of Christianity in the world because those who are outside look at this and go, “Well, who am I supposed to believe, the Catholics or the Protestants, the Orthodox? Which brand of Protestantism?” So that’s why the magisterium is such a necessity.
Eric Sammons:
So one thing you mentioned earlier about the Trinity, I’m just convinced the Trinity is one of the best defenses against Prostatism because I believe there’s zero chance that a Protestant today would just come with Trinity from the Bible alone. It took more than 300 years and some of these great thinkers to finally determine, okay, this is how we’re going to understand, this is the proper way to understand it. And if you just get somebody who has complete ignorance of Christianity, complete ignorance, give him a Bible, he’s not coming up with the Trinity. I mean, he’s going to come up with some idea that there’s God, there’s Jesus and the Holy Spirit, somehow are all connected, but I just think it would be very difficult for him. Because there’s too many verses that in isolation would make it look like, okay, the Holy Spirit’s lesser, Jesus is lesser, all these different things.
But let me get to my question, which is… I know you can’t really answer this question, but I’m going to ask you anyway, why didn’t God make it clear? Why would he give us as our sacred text, a book that the common man can’t pick up and completely understand? Like I said, I know you can’t really answer it ’cause you can’t talk for God, but what about that question? Because it does seem to be a more reasonable thing to expect from God and so on the Protestant side I can see them thinking that so why wouldn’t he do that?
Casey Chalk:
I think we do always need to be careful in terms of more or less try and speak for God in terms of what would be reasonable for him, although certainly I would’ve articulated an argument similar to what you just said, Eric, when I was a Protestant. My best guess is that this has to do with the very nature of man and how God relates to us and perhaps even the way God relates to himself as a Trinitarian being. Because even within the Trinity there is a hierarchy. There is a structure between God the Father, and then Jesus being begotten, and the Holy Spirit spirating out of Jesus and God the Father. So even there we can see that there is this kind of hierarchy that exists, and certainly that’s the case in human nature and in human communities. I mean, even in the most egalitarian human societies that have ever existed, there has always been still some sort of hierarchy and authority that has existed.
So I would presume then that the reason why God did not create a salvation economy whereby we’re all able to be individually on our own receiving immediate revelation from God is because he’s trying to teach us something about ourselves and perhaps even himself in the way that we’re supposed to relate to one another and ultimately relate to him in terms of recognizing some sort of authority outside of ourselves. Because really, if we could be all magisterium unto ourselves, think of the chaos that would’ve just transpired from that, even if we agreed on many things,
Eric Sammons:
Because even if the Bible actually was clear, it doesn’t mean we’d actually still agree because of fallen nature. I mean, our fallen nature impacts our intellect as much as our will, and both of those actually impact our reading of scripture because something can be very clear and our wills could make it where we don’t want to do it so it becomes unclear. I mean, you see that with a lot… Like you were saying, something like abortion being immoral is clear. I mean, it is clear, but our fallen intellects, our fallen wills don’t want it to be because we want to live a certain way, and then abortion helps us live that way. So yeah, I think you’re right that just having to submit ourselves to some type of authority, for some reason God wants us to do that, that’s how we’re made. So how would you then describe the Catholic way of coming to clarity about what the Bible teaches?
What would be the way that the church comes to that and how does a Catholic come to that? If we’re talking to a prophet saying, here’s how you can know what the clear teaching of scripture is.
Casey Chalk:
So what this requires, and this is hard in doing debates with Protestants from a lot of different traditions, particularly those that don’t really have much of any knowledge or background in church history or the role of tradition is you kind of have to try your best to get them outside of just viewing everything about their Christian experience and belief as existing within this bubble of the Bible. Because really that’s not the case even for the strictest Bible believing Christians that have repudiated all tradition and church fathers and whatever. They’re still operating out of some kind of tradition, they just don’t realize it. For most of them, if they’re low church Protestants that believe those kind of things, they’re coming out of the Anabaptist tradition, which is just a separate reformational movement that, well, Luther certainly condemned it. So I think you have to do that.
But if at least you can get Protestants to admit to some degree that there is this part to their belief as a Christian that isn’t just found exclusively in holy Scripture, then you can tell them that the Catholic Church doesn’t articulate an argument for its authority just based on some sort of fideistic devotion as if you just have to believe it because that’s just the way it is, and the church is powerful, and you should just listen to her. The church has argued, has always argued that people should believe in her because she has strong motives of credibility, and that language comes from the catechism and from various church documents. The church has motives of credibility, extra biblical proofs that substantiate her claim to be who she claims to be. So for example, apostolic succession, which is an extra biblical historically verifiable and researchable demonstration that she can demonstrate that her authority comes from bishops who have been succeeding one another, going back to the apostles themselves.
But there are many other motives of credibility. The miracles that have transpired ever since the early church are a fantastic example of that. The church’s holiness and unity over time. If anybody has any familiarity with the greatest of Catholic saints, they’ll know that. I mean, no other Christian tradition can claim the holiness of our most laudable saints. I’m thinking of people perhaps like… Well, certainly early saints like the martyrs, but even more recently, people… The Feast Day that we’re celebrating, the day that this is being recorded, St. Teresa Benedict of the Cross, I mean, what a remarkable story of faithfulness to Christ in the face of Nazi persecution. So I think those are just a few of the examples of the motives of credibility that Protestants can investigate and consider in order to recognize that the church is indeed who she claims to be.
Eric Sammons:
And I think it’s important also to recognize it’s not a secular argument here. We’re not saying because the Bible said that Jesus came down the earth, died, was resurrected and found a church, therefore we believe in the church and it gives us the Bible, but we start with the Bible. What we’re saying is it’s a historically accurate fact to say there was a man named Jesus who made these claims, so we’re taking the Bible as a historically reliable document. And I think any true historian, not ideologues would agree that yes, the historical record, the basic historical record, even if you might want to dispute certain aspects, is true that there was a man who was Jesus, he made these claims, he died, his followers all said he rose from the dead, and they followed him. He found a church. They then had the succession of bishops who then said, okay, these writings are the ones that we accept as inspired, as infallible, as the true word of God.
So you don’t start with the idea of you’re depending on the infallible inspired word of God. You start with the historical facts, and then you build, like you said, the most credibility that these credible sources that then build up to that. So now one thing though, I think that might be a little bit confusing for Protestants definitely and for Catholics as well, what is the role of the church in clarifying the scriptures? What I mean by that, I know Protestants who assume that the Catholic Church has defined the correct interpretation of every verse in the Bible, and that’s obviously not true. In fact, I think I remember it’s only just a few that they’ve said, okay, this is the teaching church for this specific passage. So what is the role of the church when it comes to interpreting the Bible and making it clear to us?
Casey Chalk:
Eric, that’s actually a really fantastic point. I was actually just talking with a Calvinist friend of mine, and he asked more or less that question. He said, “Where is the resource that I can find to go see what the Catholic Church’s official opinion on every verse of the Bible is?” You’ll be looking for a long time.
Eric Sammons:
That’d be a big book.
Casey Chalk:
It doesn’t exist. And the reason for that is that the church actually has a very open-minded perspective. I mean, it doesn’t sound like that because we’re saying that there’s this magisterial authority that says what the Bible teaches and doesn’t teach. But the church really is very open-minded when it comes to scriptural interpretation because the church, and again, this goes back to the earliest church fathers, has this very beautiful and complex understanding of scripture operating on different levels. There’s the literal interpretation, the moral, the anagogical interpretations, which all interrelate and bring various beautiful reflections to the fore as we read scripture. So Eric, you’re entirely right that there’s only been a few cases where the church has said, you definitely cannot interpret scripture to mean X. And a lot of that actually happened at the Council of Trent.
That was the Post Reformation Council that rejected Lutheran and Calvinist teachings because the debates were so explicitly over very particular parts of the Bible, and even more narrowly on a few verses in some of St. Paul’s epistles. So the church gives Christians lots of room to maneuver and reflect and try to understand what scripture teaches. And in many cases, certainly we would say that all Catholic teachings find their origin and their substance and their defense in the Bible, and we can claim various proof texts to defend any Catholic teaching that we have. If you just open scripture and read it tonight, prayerfully, you may come to certain interpretations of what this means for you personally or how to understand this on a moral level or anagogical level that could be unique and different and no one’s thought of before.
That’s very possible and the church welcomes that kind of reflection. The church just wants to serve as this sort of guardrail to ensure that you don’t fall off and end up in some kind of heresy that will do damage to your soul and to the wellbeing of the church.
Eric Sammons:
I think a good example of the church being a little bit more broad than people will expect is I think on the teaching of predestination, because a lot of Catholics kind of assume that we reject that teaching because it’s the big one of Calvin and everything, but the truth is that because scripture actually is kind of clear that there is such a thing as predestination, the question is what is it? And from my reading at least the church seems to be kind of broad-minded on we’re not going to set a very specific meaning of the word predestination. We are going to allow for the teaching predestination. We accept this, but what exactly it means to the minute detail, like a Calvin would’ve said, and even Augustine kind of did, we have some room for debate within that. And I think that’s a big difference between how the Catholic Church looks at the Bible and your typical Protestant major church, they’re going to define it very specifically, something like that.
They’re going to say, predestination, associated Calvinist, it means this. Whereas the guy at church is like, “Yeah, there’s predestination. It does mean these general things, but we’re kind of going to leave it up in the air because I assume that’s just because the Holy Spirit hasn’t decided we need to know exactly what it means.” Is that a good understanding of predestination? I mean, am I wrong about that? Is that how you see it too?
Casey Chalk:
Yeah, as far as I understand it. Although I haven’t invested a huge amount of energy in understanding the history of that debate in the Catholic Church, I’m trying to think of, it was a couple of different theological movements I want to say. One of them was the Jesuits, and I forget who they were debating, I think in the 17th century. And I think ultimately the church just basically ruled saying, “We’re not going to come down saying which one of you is right. We’re just going to tell you that basically you certainly can’t hold double predestination as being example. You cannot hold that position.” And then there are various other conclusions from the doctrine of predestination you’re also not able to hold, but there certainly is gray area and room for debate on that doctrine as there are for many others.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Okay, so let’s say you’re a Catholic, you have a Protestant friend and you want to talk to them about this issue. Now, first of all, buy the book, The Obscurity of Scripture, if you really want to understand it, and that will help you a lot. But what would you say would be the game plan of a Catholic who wants to do apologetics with a Protestant friend when they’re talking about solo scriptura or something like that, about this issue in particular?
Casey Chalk:
Thanks for that, Eric. And I really would emphasize that it is a controversial claim that I’m making in this book, not just that the perspicuity or clarity of scripture is wrong, but the fact that I’m arguing that it’s actually the most foundational Protestant doctrines, which that’s a really contentious, controversial thing to argue because most Protestants would not agree with me on that. But all the more reason I encourage Catholics to get this book for their Protestant friends and relatives, because I think it will hopefully engender a lot of really interesting conversations. But in terms of a great place to start, I think I would just ask them, do you believe the Bible is clear? And then I presume they’ll say yes, it’s clear. Say, okay, how is it clear?
And just start doing that Socratic model of trying to understand. And not in an antagonistic way, just I’m trying to understand your own particular Protestant beliefs and where you’re coming from and how you come to the various beliefs you do about your own particular Protestant tradition. Help me understand what you mean by the Bible being clear. And then you can ask, well, how do you deal with Protestants who disagree with you over these verses or parts of the Bible that you view as clear? And just try to draw that information out of them because it worked for Socrates, it worked for Christ. The more that you just ask questions and help people to think about their own perspectives and paradigms, the more likely it is that that light will turn on, especially if it’s done in a charitable rather than antagonistic way.
At least that’s the way that it works for me personally, is that as a number of my former Protestant friends who had become Catholic, kept asking me and pushing me to defend my own beliefs or just even to articulate them effectively, the more I realized, wow, I do not have strong ground upon which to stand as a Protestant.
Eric Sammons:
And I think that’s great advice just in general when you’re doing any type of apologetics, is asking a lot of questions because I think there’s two things. First of all, understanding their position helps you better to be able to discuss it with them and truly have a good debate with them. You saw, obviously, St. Thomas is the best example of somebody who truly understood his opponent’s arguments before he tried to go against them. But I also do think, especially with the clarity of scripture, that is something that I, at least in my experience, the vast majority protestants never think of. Like you said, it’s assumed it’s part of the everybody. So when you start asking those questions, they then need to look into it themselves. And that’s when you say, well, I have a great book you could read about it.
And I do want to say that, that obviously Catholics should read this because it will help them in discussions, but if you have a Protestant friend who is open-minded, I mean obviously some Protestants won’t want to take the time, and they’re willing to really look into it, I would say offer this book to them. And what I always do was I’d always do a book trade. I’d always say, “Okay, here’s a book I like you to read, why don’t you give me a book you’d like me to read?” Now, obviously I’m talking about people who they should know their faith before they’re doing something like this, because obviously if you don’t know your faith and you read some Protestant book, you might get confused, something like that. But I’m talking about if you already kind of know your faith and that’s not a problem, that’s a great way because then you can read their book that they give you, talk about that, but then they get in their hands a Catholic book that can really hopefully help them.
So that’s one method that I’ve found successful. And it is not just a method, it really is a way to understand where they’re coming from ’cause they give me a book that explains where they’re coming from. I give them a book where I come from, and I think it’s a better way to really do the apologetics. Okay. So again, the book, Obscurity of Scripture, the last question I wanted to ask you and then we’ll wrap it up, I want to make sure it’s clear and I know you’ve hinted at this, you’ve even said it a few times, but I want to make sure it’s clear in Catholic listening to this. You’re not saying Catholics shouldn’t read the Bible and they can’t understand it, so when it comes to a Catholic, an individual Catholic reading the Bible, how do we approach it and how is it clear for us in that sense?
Casey Chalk:
Well, first, I would always encourage Catholics reading scripture to pick up a version of the Bible, a study Bible that has really fantastic footnotes and may be a commentary to go alongside with it so for example, the Ignatius Study Bible. I know you can buy the entire New Testament. I’m sure at some point soon the Old Testament will be ready as well, I think they’re still working on a couple of the last books. But that actually came out, I think it was published in 2010, so it was published the year that I was dealing with a lot of these issues. I mean, that was a tremendous gift from God that I was able to immediately go to a lot of these most highly debated verses in St. Paul’s letters and the gospels and get an official Catholic interpretation of these, which in the Ignatius Study Bible, has the imprimatur on it.
There are many other fantastic Catholic biblical studies resources that Catholics can access as they read through scripture that have that imprimatur on it so that they can rest. They can have a level of confidence that as they read, they’ll be able to have the magisterium guiding them, shepherding them along as they’re reading scripture so that they don’t end up coming to some kind of wacky idea that would do harm to their soul or their understanding of the church.
Eric Sammons:
Right. It’s like the Ethiopian eunuch and St. Philip comes to them and eunuch says, “How can I understand unless somebody explains it to me?” I would just second that. I was looking back there because I thought I had the Ignatius Study Bible New Testament back there, but I think my wife was using it for something. But the Dedicate Bible, it’s published by Ignatius as well. That’s very good. I’ve said on this podcast a number of times, but I’ll say it again, that I think the best resource for Catholics who really want to read the Bible is the St. Paul Center, which is the publishers, they own Emmaus Road Publishing, which has published this book, but if you really want to understand the Bible, they have a lot of online resources and books and things of that nature. So the point is that the Bible still can speak to us individually and tell us things.
I actually was reading a passage this morning. I’m reading through John right now, the Gospel of John, and it had a big meaning for me personally. That’s not the same thing as, okay, now all of a sudden it’s some definition of a doctrine. It’s not like all of a sudden I’m like, oh no, actually the Trinity is actually four persons or something. It wasn’t like, no. It’s just something in my personal life that was very meaningful and powerful for me, and it was very clear to me what it meant. And I’m not saying that that verse meant anything to anybody else, it just to me was very clear, okay, this is I think what the Lord is trying to tell me right now through this passage of the Bible. So I think it’s still something very useful for Catholics. But like you said, always in the context, because if you start reading the passage and you start thinking something that’s a little bit outside the church’s teaching, those good study notes will tell you, no, that’s going outside the boundaries.
Okay, great. Casey, well, I really appreciate this. So I want to encourage people, again, The Obscurity of Scripture. A lot of us have Catholic friends. I mean, I don’t know about your family. My family’s still Protestant, so I discuss these things with them at times. I think it’s good to have these resources available. Now, as far as the stuff you’re working on now, is there a way people can find out other stuff you’re doing? Where are the main sites? I know you write for Crisis, so go to Crisis, but where else are you really doing a lot of your writing these days?
Casey Chalk:
Folks can check out my website, caseychalk.com, it has a list of all the different places where I consistently write. I just had a piece today published at The American Conservative on the great Catholic Jesuit English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins from the 19th century, which I’m not a poetry guy, but I ran across a resource that really helped to kind of illuminate a lot of Hopkins’ poetry. So folks can check out the websites like The American Conservative, Catholic World Report, New Oxford Review, and they’ll find a lot of my most recent writing.
Eric Sammons:
Very good. I did not realize you had a website. I’m glad you said that. I’ll put a link to the book to get the book in the show notes, but also a link to your website so people can easily get to it. Okay, well, thanks Casey. I really appreciate you taking some time out here to talk about this.
Casey Chalk:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on again, Eric.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, thanks. Until next time, everybody. God love you.