More on Gary Wills

Andrew Sullivan's gives a positive review of Gary Wills. As I predicted there is much in Wills' writing that is very seductive and intellectually thrilling. He does have a way of packaging old nostrums in a manner that makes them seem fresh. Here is one show-stopper that appealled to Sullivan :

And he quotes Augustine to show how:

"When Peter was told, 'I will give you the keys of heaven's kingdom, and what you tie on earth will have been tied in heaven, what you untie on earth will have been untied in heaven,' he was standing for the entire church, which does not collapse though it is beaten, in this world, by every kind of trial, as if by rain, flood, and tempest. It is founded on a Stone [Petra], from which Peter took his name Stone-founded [Petrus]; for the Stone did not take its name from the Stone-Founded, but the Stone-Founded from the Stone - as Christ does not take his name from Christians, but Christians from Christ.... Because the Stone was Christ."

That's right, Gary Wills [and it appears Andrew Sullivan] are promoting the Protestant interpretation of that seminal passage. I think as a Catholic child, the first two things my parents taught me were: (a) the Pope is infallible only on matters of morality and religion and (b) "thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall build my church." Heck, that's probably the only passage in the Bible I have memorized. Until earlier this year, I had no idea that the Protestants separate the rock (Peter) from the rock upon which the church is founded, and it just seems like a bit of an interpretive stretch.

So, is Sullivan heading over to the Anglicans? Nope, because he has this next passage:

Why not just reject the "stone-founded" and become a Protestant? The answer is an obvious one: Because Jesus instituted this unifying element in the church and because we have no other source of authority. But what about the Bible, as Protestants argue? Because, quite simply, the Bible is not independent of the church. It was compiled by the early church; its very contents were arrived at by a process of debate and chance and institutional combat. The Bible is a product of tradition - not the other way round. Our very faith as Christians is dependent on a legacy of fallible human beings remembering, believing, questioning and praying. We have no other way to know the meaning of the God of the New Testament. This is our human inheritance - of a divine revelation.

This seems like a very orthodox position. The third thing I learned as a child was that since the Church had compiled the Bible in the first place, it was the the proper agency to interpret it.

But, Sullivan and Wills still have a problem. All of the arguments about sola fide and tradition are really about authority. All Christian denomination explicitly or implicitly use tradition in interpreting the Bible. But they all don't agree about who gets do the interpreting. The Protestants are Protestants because they don't trust the Catholic church to get the interpretation right. Catholics in contrast concede that the Church - in the sense of the magisterium - gets final say. Sullivan acknowledges that "we have no other authority." At some point, the whole reason for having authority is to use that authority authoritatively.