Epistemological Crisis

After a long and sobering examination of the disagreements among Protestants, Brad Gregory ( The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society ) draws the obvious conclusion: Whatever its merits as a theological principle, sola scriptura failed to unite the Protestant church. Not that the modern alternative – sola ratio – fared any better. Gregory shows that the views of philosophers are as deep and diverse as among Protestants.

He recognizes that the pluralism, suspicion of religious authority, and skepticism exists within the Catholic church (111), though he thinks that it’s misguided to level off the differences between Catholic and Protestant diversity.

When he speaks of Catholic pluralism, though, it is implicitly characterized as the infiltration of the Reformation spirit into the Catholic church. But that doesn’t get to the heart of the epistemological crisis introduced by the Reformation.

The sheer fact of a splintered Western church created the crisis (what is the true church? What is the correct reading of Scripture? What is the truth and how do we arrive at it?), and the Catholic church was hit by the crisis as much as Protestants. If sola scriptura failed to maintain the unity of the church, so too did the Tridentine and post-Tridentine solutions to Scripture and tradition. After all, Protestants remain unconvinced by Trent.

The Catholic strategies of unity can be said to be successful only if one assumes that the Catholic church is the sole true church (or the place where the church “subsists”) – which is precisely the question in debate.

If there’s a post-Reformation epistemological crisis in the West, we all in it, not just Protestants. None of the strategies for building consensus – neither Protestant nor Catholic – have been successful in uniting the whole church.