I’m reading Trent Horn’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. He speaks of Karl Keating’s argument for scriptural inspiration, saying “when taken as just a reliable human document, the Bible shows that Christ not only rose from the dead, but that he established a Church built on the apostles.” These apostles “were then able to authoritatively declare the Bible to be the word of God.” So the Bible proves the church and the church proves the veracity of the Bible. That’s called circular reasoning, isn’t it? Horn doesn’t think so.
This is not a circular argument, in which an inspired Bible is used to prove the Church’s authority and the Church’s authority is used to prove that the Bible is inspired. Instead, as Keating says, it is a “spiral argument,” in which the Bible is assumed to be a merely human document that records the creation of a divinely instituted Church. This Church then had the authority to pronounce which human writings also had God as their author.
The level of cognitive dissonance in this statement is absolutely astounding. He can assert that calling it a “spiral argument” somehow removes the circularity of the argument, but in essence, he is still using the Bible to prove the Church to prove the Bible. No Christian ever regards the Bible as “a merely human document.” People regard the Bible as authoritative because they see it as divinely authored. I get that this is a distinctly Catholic explanation of things, but no Catholic ever sees the Bible this way, either. It is, defacto, divinely inspired in their eyes. The so-called divine nature of the Catholic church is in no way illustrated in the pages of the Bible, and we still have the basic problem of Biblical error: how are we to know that that particular portion of the Bible detailing the founding of the church is accurate? In short, we don’t. We have to take that on faith. And who is the one explaining all of this? The Church. So the Church says the Bible is just a humanly written document that proves the Church is divinely inspired, which then proves the Bible is not just a humanly-written document.
It’s almost as convoluted as God impregnating Mary to give birth to God to die to appease God’s anger, which is the story of Christianity in its most simplistic form.