From Carl Trueman’s review of Journeys of Faith:
[Brad] Gregory is more savage: for him (as for his Notre Dame colleague, Christian Smith), the diversity of Protestant interpretations of the Bible puts the lie to any notion of perspicuity. This is very much at the heart of his book, The Unintended Reformation, and I hope to address his case in more detail in my review of that work next month. Yet as I read his response to Castaldo, I could not help but feel considerable irritation, especially when Gregory argues that perspicuity depends upon a circular argument.
Roman Catholicism can scarcely stand in judgment on circularity when it comes to issues of authority. The papacy in its modern form emerges over time; it is, if you like, a result of historical process. How do we know the results of this process are the right ones? Well, there is a sense in which Roman Catholics just do. This was not, of course, quite so clear at the start of the fifteenth century, but we can brush that aside as a momentary aberration. . . .
If Gregory can claim that Protestants exclude those with whom they disagree on interpretation in order to manufacture a consensus, then it seems to us Protestants that Roman Catholics do much the same with the historical process: the theological significance of late medieval conciliarism is routinely minimized; the flip-flop on doctrinal issues over the years is simply side-stepped; the ecclesiastical use of things as disparate as the Turin Shroud and the Donation of Constantine is ignored, excused or spun; and the pro-active fostering of the cult of charlatans like Padre Pio is simply weird and deeply unChristian to Protestant eyes.
If Roman Catholics are free to argue that the history of Protestantism has made the Bible impossible, I submit that for Protestants like myself, the history of Roman Catholicism has made the Church implausible.
