“Do you think it is not possible for inerrancy to creep into the Church? Because I do. Now granted, again my experience with the RC is limited. I am talking about..um..let us say...the LDS Church. You see, I saw all kinds of errors in their doctrine, their authority, and their hierarchy... and so I was led far, far away from God. I distanced myself as far from religion and Jesus Christ as I could because of it.
If you please.”
I will amend your word “inerrancy” to be “error” because I think you are asking if I think it is impossible for error to creep into the Church.
I will answer two ways: with what the Catholic Church teaches officially, and with what I personally think about that.
What the Church teaches is that Jesus gave the power of the Keys, to loose and to bind, to Peter and the Apostles, and promised that the Holy Spirit would be with the Church. I emphasize the point that Jesus didn’t leave a Bible, and there was no Bible for the first 400 years of the Christian Era, because the Catholic Church couldn’t agree on it, until finally it was proclaimed by a Pope and entered its final form (until Luther amended it and abridged it). The reason I emphasize this is because Protestants in general assert the infallibility of the Bible, produced by the Church under the auspices of the Holy Spirit, while making the challenge you do: that the Church itself can err. Catholic dogma is that on matters of faith and morals, of actual pronouncing true doctrines of faith and morality, the Church cannot err. The Bible, to is inerrant, but that is because it was written by bishops under the auspices of the Holy Spirit and selected by the Church. In other words, the Bible is inerrant BECAUSE the Church, which write it and compiled it, is infallible. The Church will acknowledge that the men of the Church can make grievous errors on disciplinary matters and other matters not involving the core faith and morals of the Church. Thus the excesses of the Inquisition, for example, are sins of the men that did them and were disciplinary errors of the Church hierarchy. But the Inquisition never proclaimed doctrine of faith and morals. Those doctrines are rarer, indeed very ancient, and they, and only they, are protected by God from erring. Note that the Church cannot simply make up new doctrines of faith and morals. For a doctrine to be infallible, it must be really, really old, and Catholics have to essentially have always been doing that since the days of the Church Fathers. That’s what the Church teaches.
I personally think that the Church’s doctrine makes sense from the perspective of logic and in the divine economy. However, I do think that the doctrine of infallibility is of necessity and prudence a LIMITED one, and that the only people who should ever be using it are high officials of the Catholic Church. When I see lay Catholics, in places like FR, bandying about charges of infallibility and heresy, I think this is a travesty. There is no official codex of the infallible doctrines of the Church. Most of them are OBVIOUS, but the Church is NOT a Protestant Church, it is NOT based on a text, and nobody has ever reduced all of 2000 years of traditions and beliefs to a written codex. There is the catechism of the Catholic Church, which contains thousands of pages of doctrines and dogmas, but it doesn’t specify which is infallible and which isn’t. Some are obvious: anything in the Creed is infallible. In general, if it is a rule of the Church, because of the power of the keys it doesn’t really matter if the doctrine is fallible or not. The Bishops and priests in the Apostolic Succession legitimately possess the keys and thus have the power to bind Catholics to doctrines. If the doctrines are disciplinary doctrines, and imperfect, or even if they err, the Catholic may privately and respectfully raise his concerns, but he has no right to lapse into the sin of defying the power of the keys, openly flouting the law and embarrassingly defying the Church. He is to be, if neccessary, long suffering.
I agree with all of that.
But I do have a caveat. There is a certain cadre of things, namely killing and torturing people, where the blood cries out SO STRONGLY to me that my willingness to meekly submit to the authority of the Church breaks down. In such cases, even the charge of heresy and the risk of my immortal soul are not enough to cause me to simply assent to that which is an abomination. The Catholic Church is doing no such thing now, and hasn’t killed anybody for about 400 years now. But it DID kill people, wrongly. Those people were killed under the disciplinary rules of the Church, so dogmatically the Church didn’t preach false faith and morals. But there is still a weakness here, because I see in the fact that the killers did not realize that they were actually committing mortal sins of murder means that they were actually under the emprise of a doctrine that did hazard the very existence of their soul. This starts to look dangerously like failure.
So, infallibility is one of those things that is both necessary for Catholicism and indeed Christianity, to work (specifically, if the Catholic Church can fail on matters of faith and morals, and does fail, then the Bible cannot possibly be inerrant, given that it was written and compiled by Catholics), but which must not be pressed too far as a basis for authority in any simple theological debate such as we are having on this thread. It will not do for some Catholic to get up and start bellowing that so-and-so is a heretic because my Church says so and we’re infallible! Even if it’s true, it won’t do. Infallibility is a necessary doctrine, but the ABUSE of infallibility is an error. And although there is a difference between disciplinary matters and matters of faith and morals, and the Church CAN err on the former matters, and is only infallible on the latter, that set of assertions has a thin-gruel feel to it, and it is best not to argue on the basis of infallibility in anything, to the extent it can’t be helped.
Hope that answers your question.
You are absolutely correct in that the reason we have a Bible is because of the Church.
The written Bible is one of the very instruments that keeps us grounded in fact. It is written and any changes that occur can be traced.
So when Mormons stand and say polygamy is not only condoned but is “required” then we can go to the history of the Bible and see that this is not so.
Before Martin Luther, no one but clerics had access to the Bible. If error crept into the local Churches, without congregations who were knowledgeable, then it went unnoticed. The people hungered for a Bible, just as they do now in countries like China where is is not available.
The publishing of Bibles was a work of God. Because now we have individual congregants with a basic knowledge of the writings of the Apostles and others. Clerics are kept in check by this knowledge. If authority is given to a man who is allowed to be led by the spirit of Satan, then we have chaos in our Churches. This is where we see abusive situations taking place. By empowering indiviuals to become educated about the Bible, we see less of these abuses. That is my humble opinion.
I think the Bible is a work of God and He intends for it to be used and understood. You believe it must be understood in context with a Church - and you are right because that’s what the Bible tell us. The Bible is the balance that keeps the Church in check and keeps abuses from running rampant due to satan-inspired men. You can’t tell me the Borgias were inerrant.