Bunthorne has suggested that I toss up a preliminary post about why the Magisterium is necessary. He has a notion that if you specify the essence of a thing then its properties will follow, and that the purpose of a thing pertains to its essence.
So here it goes. Please fill the comments box with what I should have said.
The nature of every community is determined by the common good around which it is gathered. God gave to the Church as her principle good Christ, the Word of God, who includes in himself both revelation and sanctification: our minds conformed to Christ is revelation and our whole person conformed to Christ is sanctification. The Church then hands herself down over the centuries, illuminating and sanctifying each successive generation by passing on Christ.
This task of handing down the Word of God could easily go astray, because men’s thoughts and conditions change over time. Something unchanging was needed to insure that the Church would stay on the right track. God solved this by giving the Church written documents, because written documents do not change over time the way oral traditions do. But this mirror against which the Church could check herself needed to be of the same kind as the thing safeguarded: it needed to be the very word of God. Hence we have the inspired Scriptures, whose purpose is to serve Tradition, which is the Church handing Christ down by handing herself down in her entirety.
Every community requires an authority to oversee and protect the common good that defines it. Since the good of Scripture embraces both truth and action, both revelation and ritual, some authority was needed to protect the integrity of revelation and the validity of rituals. This is the magisterium, whose purpose is to serve Tradition and therefore also to interpret Scripture and regulate worship.
So Tradition, Scripture, and Magisterium flow inseparably from the very nature of the Church; remove any one of them, and the others fall.
Two points need special emphasis for the present project. First, the minds and conditions of men change over time, so men of different eras or backgrounds will not read the same text the same way. Second, the very nature of the written text is that it admits of multiple interpretations, just as the very nature of a tool is that its shape admits of multiple uses. Both points imply that writings are not sufficient to teach the truth: Scripture and magisterial documents both need the magisterium itself to interpret them when doubts arise.
It may be pertinent here to answer a possible objection. If Scripture requires an authoritative interpreter to avoid confusion and ambiguity, then the interpretation will require an interpreter, and so on ad infinitum.
The answer to the objection is that it is unreasonable to expect people in general to come up on their own with the correct interpretation of any writing regarding difficult subjects, even writing whose author is God. But the fact that an explanation of the writing can itself be misunderstood does not mean that it is equally easy to misunderstand, and this is all the truer when the explanation can come later and be specifically tailored to the various misunderstandings which have in fact arisen regarding the original text. Similarly, explanations of explanations can in prinicple be clearer still. Hence, a finite series of interpretive remarks can reasonably be expected to eventually produce at least moral certitude of the correct meaning.
Right. In other words, the key is that the living Magisterium can itself know the minds of the questioners and tailor its answer directly to the minds of these individuals. An unchanging text cannot tailor itself in the same way to meet the weaknesses of each mind that reads it.
Exactly. And this is true even of God’s writings. While God could in principle anticipate every possible misinterpretation and head them off at the outset, this would require a text of infinite size. The only way this can exist is in the manner of a potential infinite, i.e. a living interpreter.
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