Assured Understanding or Ever-Changing Opinions?

Can we know divine revelation with assurance today? St. Paul wanted the Colossians to know it back in the 1st century:

…to have all the riches of assured understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, of Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

I say this in order that no one may delude you with beguiling speech.

So they can know it because the Apostles taught it to them and Jesus taught the Apostles. But it’s been a long time since those days. Can divine revelation be handed down through one person to the next without corruption, or is it instead like a epic game of Telephone where one person whispers a message in the next one’s ear, and he whispers into another’s, and so on for centuries, with small errors creeping in over time to render the final message today a garbled mess?

Icon of St. Paul

And how are we supposed to know who the persons are who will teach us the Faith in truth versus those persons who will try to “delude us with beguiling speech”? How can we tell the difference when innumerable men claim to be Christian teachers but contradict each other on doctrine after doctrine?

The Protestant answer to these questions are: 1) Divine revelation was preserved in the [sixty-six book] Bible and we know through redactive analysis that the copies of the copies of the copies of the originals that we possess are substantially similar to the originals, and 2) You will know those who try to delude you by testing what they say against [your interpretation of] the Scriptures.

The first answer is plausible I think. The idea is that anything oral will be corrupted quickly. Coupled with the Protestant rejection that there is a living, sacred Tradition of the Church that the Spirit guides and which connects us with Christ and therefore is trustworthy, the only thing we can hope was preserved–like Noah and the Ark–from the flood of the “Dark Ages” of history, are sixty-six particular books considered by Protestants to be inspired. The best we can do is read those books, try to figure out what they mean through study and prayer, and live with the thousands of different denominations that have sprung up as a result, either waving away the differences via lowest-common denominator Christianity or repudiating denominations which disagree with your own as “not listening to the Spirit.”

The second answer is less plausible. All Protestants say that one must “test everything” with the Holy Spirit and the Bible to avoid being deluded by false teachers, but in practice this means testing everything against their own interpretation of the Scriptures. And who is to say that their interpretation is correct? Thousands of denominations demonstrate that everyone thinks that their interpretation is correct, but obviously they cannot all be so.

Ultimately, Protestantism must admit that the propositions of the Faith are merely opinions and therefore subject to faith-challenged people like the Jesus Seminar coming up with radically different visions of who Jesus was, as well as faithful men like N.T. Wright overturning the tables on one of the few bastions of widely-accepted Protestant theology: justification.

The Catholic Church answers these questions by affirming that God has made it possible to know, with assured understanding, divine revelation in its fullness as revealed by Christ and in the ways that the Spirit has deepened the Church’s understanding of it over time. He has protected the deposit of Faith from corruption and from the attacks of “beguiling teachers” in every century, for He desires that we know the truth and be able to then live in the truth.

He didn’t just leave us some books, old tomes for us to puzzle over two thousand years later and try to figure out. He didn’t abandon His children during the “Dark Ages,” but in every century He has been with His people in the liturgy, in the sacraments, and in their hearts by His Spirit. The Catholic Church affirms that God’s promise to the Church has been unbroken. The deposit of the Faith are not opinions that a person–even a smart and faith-filled person like N.T. Wright–can come along and overturn. They are rather propositions that Christ gives us through His Church which we can confidently and reasonably assent to.

Finally, we can know His Church from those “beguilers” because it’s a big and ancient institution that everyone is familiar with and many utterly despise. It’s one of only two institutions that have the audacity and the credibility to claim to be the Church Christ established. (The other being the Orthodox.)