The Roman Catholic argument for interpretive authority based on 'tradition' is weak

I was speaking to my non-Christian friend last night in church. In his journey of evaluating various religions, he is currently on Roman Catholicism (RC). One of the items we discussed was the RC understanding of authority.

In a nutshell, RCs believe that "The Church gave birth to the Bible" but the Reformers would argue that "The Bible gave birth to The Church".

It is understandable why that is the RC view given its current government. Saying "The Church gave birth to The Bible" implies that the Bible is a product of man - it is written by holy men with divine inspiration, but men nonetheless. The Bible is also written in human language - thus it is not only that "authorship" is up for grabs, "interpretation" is too. Coupled with the fact that the Bible is an ancient document, the circumstances leaves a vacumm for the RC to jump in and claim the ability and authority to infallibly interpret the Scriptures. The claim cannot stop at mere interpretation, the claim has to go further - authorship. In effect, whatsoever God Himself may have said is now fully subject to The Church.

In holding this view, the RC has to claim that they are further protected from corruption.

In my view, this is the first strike against them. Historically until today, any single human being or worse still, organised body cannot hold a case for purity.

The second problem with this view is that the logic of "The Church gave birth to the Bible" is weak. 

This statement is only true in the sense so far as a mechanical explanation - human beings made paper, wrote stuff on it, and bound it. Nobody is under the delusion that a complete black leather bounded King James Version Bible suddenly fell from heaven.

The Reformer's position is that God's Word is pre-existent, through the Word - The very breath of God - God breathes life into human beings dead in sins. These people are then called to write down whatever God reveals to them - what God already has in mind. My point is this: God's message, God's life, God's breath, and God's plan are pre-existent - it is then revealed by God then written down by man. The writing down down of the words is an explanation on the mechanism of how it came to us bounded in a book, not on its divine origins.

Like science, laws of nature are pre-existent. As men discover, we pen things down. Just because we write things down doesn't give us authority to change the constants. Claiming infallible authority to interpret Scripture by virtue of being good at taking minutes is like saying scientists are the ultimate infallible interpreter of reality by virtue of publishing science textbooks. It is like saying Watts controls the nature steam because he invented the steam engine. It is quite ridiculous to argue that way.

Granted, author intention is important in interpretation of Scripture. The RCs might have a good argument if they could show that they consulted the original authors of the Biblical texts. They don't. And new and doctrines they cook up over the ages that contradict with plain Scripture just adds to the position they cannot defend.

RCs will appeal to all sorts of verses in the Bible about the "handing down of gospel traditions",but what they are not realizing is that it isn't a lack of Bible verses. They cannot defend the Roman Catholic Church's infallibility or getting authority by virtue of binding the first Bible. Unless one must have blind faith in the Pope, one cannot make a good case for the Roman Catholic's exclusivity to understanding scriptures.

By making up infallible 'traditions' as they go which do not stand up to the standards of Scriptures, they are in good company of the Mormons.