The charge goes like this: the way a Protestant comes to join her respective ecclesial community is by way of judging the community's claims and making an individual evaluation of those claims in regard to whether or not they appear correct from the perspective of the Protestant. In this way, Protestants are effectively their own Popes because the authority of the respective ecclesial community is emergent from the Protestant herself.
Cross differentiates the Catholic from such a scenario: Catholics, after reading Scripture along with the tradition of interpreters and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they discover the true Church in a similar way that we discover Christ in scripture. This means that, contrary to Protestants who are (allegedly) their own popes, Catholics discover an already-existing authority that makes a claim upon themselves rather than conferring authority unto the community based on an individual judgment.
Walls makes several responses to Cross' attempt to avoid tu quoque: first, it's impractical to expect every reasonable Christian to take time to do rigorous study of church history and biblical studies in the way Cross suggests is necessary to discover the Catholic Church. Secondly, it's telling that there are plenty of Protestant theologians who have done something resembling the kind of work Cross suggests and still have not discovered the RCC as the true church. I suspect Cross would have to deny these scholars have actually done the work he suggests, and that probably won't go over very well. Third, it's absurd to think that Scripture would not be clear about doctrines that are necessary for a person's salvation if they're really divinely inspired. If RCC's really want to make correct ecclesiology a salvific issue, then why would Scripture need to be accompanied by such rigorous study? Fourth, Cross presents a false dilemma for Protestant interpreters of Scripture outside the RCC: he insists that "every interpretation that is made by men-without-divine authorization is the product of mere-man, and thus has no divine authority over man." Big if true. Walls responds: "It is a false dilemma to suggest that any authority must be either (1) utterly free of any sort of error or imperfection or (2) a mere human interpretation with no real authority." As long as Scripture carries a "self-authenticating" nature such that its divine authority lies within itself (as Michael Kruger suggests in Canon Revisited), it seems like interpreters need not have this infallibility.
I agree with most of Walls' criticisms, though he does have one additional objection that I don't think I can get behind. Recall that Cross thinks that RC's can discover the RCC through rigorous study and the guidance of the Holy Spirit in a similar way that we can discover Christ in Scripture. In response, Walls compares the beauty and splendor of Christ that draws us to our discovery of him in Scripture to the moral corruption of the historical RCC (that is probably not worth recounting). He concludes by noting that "The reality of the morally ambiguous history of the Church of Rome further undermines Cross's claim that 'the Church' can be discovered int he pages of Scripture." I am doubting that such an argument is sufficient to reject Cross's claim about the comparative discoveries of the Church and Christ for the following reason:
Christ claimed that nothing would prevail against his Church, and along with the great commission and the epistles of Paul (Esp. Ephesians 1), it's clear that the Church is supposed to be one of the main ways God works in the world. But neither of these claims entail a moral perfection about the church; indeed, it allows space for much moral failure to occur in the history of the Church due to the fact that it's made up of fallible humans. So, for the sake of argument, let's presume that a person is engaging in the kind of rigorous study that Cross suggests is sufficient to discover the Church: the fact of historical immorality appears to be a facet of a community that she should expect in investigating questions about ecclesiology. If that's the case, then Walls' objection appears to lose force; it's certainly not lost on Walls that every church community will eventually have a checkered history, but such history does not constitute a defeater for the idea that God might make his true ecclesial body one that is discovered in a way that is basic--even if it has a checkered history.
In sum, however, Walls appears to sufficiently defeat Cross' original argument; it turns out that there is "an inescapable element of individual judgment is involved for all persons who join any church or convert to one of them."
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