Tom Woods and Michael Malice have put together an entertaining but excellent video on the American Constitution and what a horrendous disaster is the idea that we are guided by a “living, breathing” document. Have a watch.
As the video was rolling, I couldn’t help but think about tradition in the role of Christianity, which Catholicism puts such emphasis upon, and the role of interpreters. Obviously, no document can compile itself, interpret itself, or apply its lessons to a modern-day context. Rather, you need people to do that. This is as true for the constitution as it is the Bible.
The problem with the United States is that it attempts to preserve the tradition of the constitution with fallible interpreters – many of whom despise the tradition they are charged to uphold – and we see how far that has gotten us. Others who may not despise the tradition hardly care about the tradition – could barely tell you what is in the tradition to begin with – despite paying it lip service whenever it plays to the favor of their political talking point.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, preserves tradition but with an infallible interpreter – namely, God, guiding and protecting his Church from error on the essential matters of faith and morals. This, of course, leaves room for development of doctrine (Trinity, for example), but never invention or change. Scripture remains the highest authority, but that authority is made intelligible, practical, and livable via the authority God has invested in His Church. Lose the infallible interpreter and you get countless, successive denominations of Christianity each contending they have the correct self-interpretation of a “book” that was never meant to be self-interpreting in the first place. We exchange one authority for billions.
But the constitution is another example of why we need (something like) the Catholic magisterium, so Christianity doesn’t become like the United States – open to distortions and amnesic to itself. God knows human beings are naturally fallible (they could not have been otherwise), but that we need people as judges, guides, and interpreters, even and especially when it comes to the Bible. So, in His wisdom he left us, not with a mere collection of writings, but a Church – Christ’s body – to judge error free not only which of those writings are legitimate Scripture in the first place, but what is necessary to attain salvation. Less we resign ourselves to the idea that God asks the impossible of us, could it have been any other way?
PS – I appeared on The Tom Woods show last year to discuss my book How to Be Better at (Almost) Everything.