Your opinion is private while mine is not!

Fr. Alvin Kimel, an ex-Anglican priest who became Roman Catholic, wrote a critique of “Protestantism” I have seen several times before.

First, his response was to an Anglican priest, so not everything there is applicable to Lutheran doctrines. What I write here is from a Lutheran perspective, so it does not respond to all of Fr. Kimel’s points.

One of the most common critiques of “protestantism” is that protestants are, by definition, guilty of “private judgment” while Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox (if one is Roman Catholic), or the Eastern Orthodox alone (if one is Eastern Orthodox) are not guilty of private judgment, because they are under the authority of the pope, or the Church. Protestants are guilty of private judgment because they do not have an ecclesiastical structure to resolve doctrinal disputes.

Fr. “WB” at the Whitehall Blog basically repeats the common “protestant” response to this—that any prot who moves to a non-prot denomination has done so through logical reasoning and “private judgment”, so why is that OK but another’s decision not?

Now, when I discuss this with EO/RCC apologists, I cannot seem to get a clear answer as to why one person’s choice is private, while another’s is not. And Fr. Kimel, in my opinion, does not give a clear answer either. The answer always seems to boil down to “because we are right”.

Fr. Kimel wrote “All parties agree that private judgment must be exercised in the decision to become Catholic or Orthodox. As Cardinal Newman wrote to Mrs. Helbert in 1869, “Private judgment must be your guide, till you are in the Church. You do not begin with faith, but with reason, and you end with faith.” But what does Newman mean by ending with faith? Helbert was already a believing Christian. She was struggling not whether to believe in Christ but whether to become Catholic. The solution is to be found in the difference between the Church as a magisterial community that authorizes binding doctrines in the name of God and the Church as denomination that projects theological opinions.”

It seems that one’s decisions are private until one decides to join the RCC (or EO) church. When one joins the Church, one is under authority and hence one’s beliefs are no longer private. This belief is not a rational belief, but a product of the faith of the RC convert, as Fr. Kimel states “the Catholic gives his assent because he believes that the Catholic Church has the authority to propose irreformable doctrine.” What this boils down to, in my opinion, is that the RC simply believes his choice is right, based on faith, and so he is no longer “guilty” of private judgment. Since the “protestant” makes a different choice, he is guilty of private judgment, because he does not conform to the choice of the RC convert.

This way of reasoning seems a little convenient for the RC convert to me. I do not see how there is any difference between the “protestant” and the RC convert—except of course their choices individually determined! Another issue is that the individual RC believer must still interpret what the RCC teaches—and he does this individually and conforms his views either to a greater or lesser extent to the actual teachings of the RCC.

Finally, all these questions about epistemology—how can we know what to believe?—miss the point, in my opinion. I believe they are ultimately futile. In a sense, Fr. Kimel is right, we perceive these things through faith, not reason alone. The problem comes when we try to dress up our faith in intellectual garb to make it sound as if another should follow one’s own private decision because of logical necessity.