Question on Epistemology

From the chat feed on a video by Matt Fradd:

david cranford

If Roman Catholicism defines what is scripture and tradition how do you know it’s infallible interpretation is true?

Roman Catholicism both does and doesn't define it.

The Pope can say (and a whole council said) "II Maccabees is inspired Scripture" but the Pope doesn't define what words were in II Maccabees, they already were there.

The Pope can say St. Augustine is a Church Father and the consensus of Church Fathers is binding (same council said the latter in same session). But the Pope cannot define what St. Augustine says, it is already there.

It's a bit like Protestants defining 66 books as binding, tradition as just advisible, at Augsburg. The difference is that it's very unclear where Augsburg got any authority to define the Bible as 66 books or to pretend all Church Fathers could agree and still be in error. They still have some kind of test insofar as they don't write the 66 books at Augusburg, and when they go by Church Fathers which they also don't write. Except when they forge them as Wylie did, when pretending St. Ambrose had denied the Real Presence. Or when they forge translations, like when using "repetitions" in the translation of Matthew 6:7. It isn't there in the Greek, it isn't there in old translations to Latin, Syriac or Coptic, it comes from some Protestants' personal dislike for the Rosary.

Protestantism also doesn't get away without collective definitions.

Like if you don't define at least 66 books (out of the real 73) as inspired, you have no test to go by and can invent whatever you want.

You can also do that by inventing hermeneutic principles like "a prophetic day means a year" in order to make Apocalypse 13:5 compatible with seeing the historic papacy as Antichrist.

The two supports for that "principle" don't refer to hermeneutics, but to exchanges - a year of continued exile for each day in punishment for a sin committed those days, a day of fasting for each year of punishment, in a prophet's participation in the sufferings of his people. Either passage, it is about exchange, not about meaning. The 42 months mean 42 months. Not 1260 years.

But the wider problem is, how do we know any Scripture is true?

The Protestants themselves would refer to the earliest Church, we just claim to be continuing that Church and to be continuing its witness and to have the 73 books as the main consensus of the early Church. As soon as it has a consensus about the New Testament.

And whether a book is just stamped as "true story" or stamped as "divinely true" (story or wisdom or whatever), it is so stamped by a community. The Jews don't agree Matthew is divinely true and the Moslems don't agree its story of the Crucifixion is true, any more than that of the Resurrection. Accepting Matthew as divinely true and true story means to belong to a community other than Jews or Muslims. Even in secular history or science, if you don't belong to the communities involved in a war, you depend on them for your story of the war, and if you don't belong to the scientific community and don't travel to high mountains, you depend on the scientific community for "water boils at 100° C at the air pressure normal for sea level, and at lower temperatures in air pressures that are lower and are found higher up in mountains." Even if you don't belong to the community, you depend on it (until you maybe get an occasion to see it for yourself, but I never boiled potatoes in Cuzco, and am not likely to do so).

It is not a question of dictatorship for a community, it is a question of the community being a safer depository for truths than an individual mind.

However, the Catholic test very much does allow the definitions purporting to come from the community to be tested.

For instance, in 1994 a document was released in the Vatican, and tested by actual both Scripture and Tradition (as defined by Trentine Council) that document is not Roman Catholic.

New blog on the kid : John Shelby Spong and Joseph Ratzinger
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2022/10/john-shelby-spong-and-joseph-ratzinger.html

At least this is the case for the section condemning Fundamentalism, the one I looked into. It sounds Catholic to say "we must respect the incarnation of Truth, the real humanity of people who had limited resources" - so, does this mean that we having less limited resources (by implication) have ceased to be human? Well, if not, why not accept the hagiographers had adequate resources, humanly speaking, not limited to direct prophetic visions or auditions, though including those, for knowing for instance true history? And if you accept they had adequate resources, or could have, why not accept the history of a book you purport to accept as part of the word of God?

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Raphael
24.X.2022