Roman Catholicism admits that it is not like the early
Church. How can these differences be explained?
KENNY ON THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY
In
Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine he
acknowledged that the Church of
He
gave seven tests to show when a genuine development has taken place for it can
happen that some developments are not developments at all but errors. Among the tests is the idea that there must
be a basic doctrine that implies other ones so that they can be developed from
it and that another that this basic doctrine must come from the apostles to be
a real development.
Another
is that the development must fit the other revealed doctrines. Another is that the development must be
logically derived from the basic root doctrine.
Another
is that the development be the only possible one for trouble would ensue if a
doctrine implied two or three different things.
Another is that the development must have taken the simplest road to be
genuine. For example, the simplest
implication of a doctrine should be the accepted one.
Another
is that the developing be done by or validated by the legitimate authorities in
the Church. The doctrine must be meant
to be developed as well. For example, if
you say that the doctrine of original sin implies baptism is necessary for
infants to get rid of it then the problem is proving that original sin meant to
imply that. Perhaps God wipes the sin
after it appears without baptism or perhaps it will not be pardoned until the
child is able to renounce sin or perhaps if the child dies God will send it to
Limbo from where it can go to Heaven if it chooses. For a doctrine to be really open to
development it would have to explicitly say that it is just a root. The example we have given fits absolutely
none of the rules and yet it was a “developed” doctrine that is one of the
foundation stones of Roman Catholicism.
It proves that Roman Catholicism is wrong and a hoax. It really did alter and add to the Christian
faith.
Despite
the opposition when they first came out, Newman’s ideas were locked into the
Church’s official stance at the Second Vatican Council (page 210, The Lion
Concise Book of Christian Thought).
It
is a fact that few if any of the Catholic developments are in harmony with
these rules. The Church says it has to
understand doctrines better all the time meaning that the way a doctrine was
stated before could be inaccurate so it has to be improved. When Hell used to be thought of as a fire
with demons with horns in it under the earth that could have led to the
development of misleading doctrines, say that Hell will one day break out on
earth and that demons have bodies and that the sinners there deserve to burn as
if their despair is not enough. The
rules are useless except for exposing the sham of Roman Catholicism.
The Development of
Doctrine is a meaningless hypothesis for it opens the way to invent new
doctrines. For example, the early Church
insisted that sin committed after baptism had to be paid for in penance. Newman argued that the Church when dealing
with this idea came to discover that it implied that indulgences, merits,
purgatory, prayers, and masses for the dead should be believed in. But it could be argued that death is the
punishment that deals with the debt. The
Bible says that is what death is for (Romans 6:23). And it could be that God will be strict and
instead of sending you to purgatory he will miraculously and secretly amplify
your last agony at the point of death to pay off the debt in full. And it could be that we can’t help the souls
in Purgatory. Newman was lying. And when religion is full of mystery – it
cannot explain an all-good God allowing evil to happen despite having the power
to stop it - what sense does it make to say that the debt of penance infers
these things for what it infers may be beyond our grasp of logic and
inconceivable to our human earthly logic?
Newman knew that if the
early Church taught salvation though the blood of Jesus and that anybody who is
a sincere Christian and accepts Jesus as Lord and Saviour is in this Church
which is an invisible communion that that was enough to identify it with
Protestantism for that is Protestantism reduced to its bare essentials. Even Catholics have an invisible true Church
like that the Protestants believe in so it is nonsense to point to an
organisation and call it the true Church for it could be run by secret
apostates. Yet Newman needs an
impeccable organisation to make his system work and to prove that the system
directs one to faith in the visible Roman Catholic Church. See the point? Jesus said that the Church would never be
destroyed but the
The
Lion Concise Book of Christian Thought gives a good refutation of
Newman’s views. I repeat them here with
my own observations.
The
first problem is that Newman never justified the developments adequately and
ignored the fact that the early Church could have been mistaken say in the
matter of penance following forgiveness doctrine which denied that God is
generous with his forgiveness. It could
be said the doctrine was heretical though the Church accepted it and should
have known better for it was not an offshoot or anything of its doctrine that
God was love and mercy and generosity themselves but contrary to it.
Second,
Newman does not think about the Eastern Orthodox claim to be the true
infallible Catholic Church even though its system is older than the Catholic
one. Catholics will say that perhaps it
did not develop enough so the oldness proves nothing. But it is itself-sufficient and that is the
refutation of the Catholic reply. If the
Church has a sufficient system for getting revelation from God and being a
To
make the Church the one that has the divine guidance to say what scripture
means could and will lead to the Church stopping the Bible from being able to
speak for itself. The Church becomes the
real authority and the Bible is its subject.
It is just like the New Testament doctrine that the Old Testament must
be read the Christian way. Without the
New Testament our interpretation and understanding of the Old will be radically
different. If the Catholic Church
officially decides that John 6 is all about the transformation of bread and
wine into the body and blood of Jesus and uses its infallibility to see that
then we are not allowed to wonder if the doctrine is really taught by the
scripture at all. Newman even said that
just as the Old Testament has no authority except as interpreted by the New
Testament which is the supreme authority giving the Old only a relative
authority so the New Testament has only a relative authority because the Church
and the pope have the power to decree what it means by the power of the Holy
Spirit in them. This is blasphemous. It is a mistake for a Catholic to go to the
Bible to prove the papacy when the book is no good without the pope for that is
seeing the Bible not as it is or might be but as the pope says it should be
seen.
Apparently,
the only trace of a development of doctrine in the early Church was its
recognition of the view that that ordinations administered by heretics were
valid (page 57, Roman Catholic Claims).
The
Catholic Church was not revealed lock, stock and barrel by Jesus and the
apostles which everybody admits therefore all its new doctrines are not
developments but corruptions and should be discarded
In
Anthony Kenny’s Religion and Reason we read a good rational assessment
of the Catholic Church’s new doctrine that she developed over the centuries
after Jesus died. This is a summary.
He
noted that from the start the Church taught that instead of developing and
improving the faith of the Church is unchangeable and complete.
He
quoted Paul who condemned anybody who taught anything different (difference
here just means difference not necessarily contradiction. Two reports about the same event can be
different but that doesn’t mean they are contradictory) from what he taught as
implying that people who added to the gospel were doing wrong and changing the
gospel even if they never contradicted it (Galatians 1:8).
Some
centuries later, Pope Simplicius said that the apostolic doctrine has not
changed from the time of the apostles to his time. The syllabus of Pius IX in 1864 censured the
view that doctrines can develop. Kenny
said that this position was completely contradicted by history. To me that shows what an untrustworthy and
shifty religion Roman Catholicism is.
He
observed that the Church defining doctrines as belonging to the faith of the
apostles does not constitute development of doctrine because the idea was that
the Church had always held these doctrines and used her infallibility to show
that they were binding when they were being challenged. The Church has never defined infallibly that
Jesus was a male but if a heresy comes along claiming that Jesus was a woman it
will do it then. To me this suggests
that the Church is to be believed by Catholics to be always right even when it
does not employ its alleged infallibility.
Kenny
finds that it is impossible to find any doctrine that was believed until a heresy
came along to attack it thus requiring an infallible statement that the
doctrine was true. I would correct this
to say that this could only be true of doctrines that were very basic and which
are in the Apostles’ Creed. Kenny wrote
that many theologians agree with St Vincent of Lerins that that truth is
whatever the whole Church has believed before heresy appeared. If they are correct, this would mean that the
only truth we can find is in the Apostles’ Creed. But then again, I have to ask, how are we to
know what Christians believe? Do a
census? Vincent’s theory implies that
Church infallible declarations are invalid unless there has been worldwide
census taken first. Kenny criticises
Vincent’s view because the Church officially accepted many doctrines that were
not unanimously accepted before and today’s orthodoxy is tomorrow’s
unorthodoxy. I would add that since the
Church and Christ said that only a tiny number would be true brethren that it
makes no sense to talk about the unanimous faith of true Christians being right
for nobody knows who they are.
Kenny
observed that there has been no unanimous agreement on the Trinity, three
persons in one God, until after the Ecumenical Councils which made the doctrine
binding and official. Even Newman
admitted this. He observed that it couldn’t
be determined that Father, Son and Spirit were really one person and not three in
the theology of the early writers. They could
have thought them to be three Gods who were somehow entitled to be called one
God in some way like a man and woman can be called one flesh. There were problems with determining what the
earliest writers saying Jesus was divine or God meant. Newman confessed that St Hippolytus probably
did not believe that Jesus was always God the Son. St Methodius erred on the incarnation.
Pope
John XXII denied that the saved go to Heaven immediately after death which was
the majority belief in the Church some time before. St Bernard of Clairvaux had taught the same denial
as the pope. The Church rejected this
doctrine under Pope Benedict XII.
The
Church strongly taught that usury was forbidden, for centuries. It was sanctioned against far more strongly
than birth-control is in our day. Even
as late as 1745 it was still teaching it.
Nowadays that doctrine is gone.
Kenny
observes that the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary was not known before the
fourth century and since 1950 Catholics are bound to believe it. This doctrine is one of the worst threats to
the idea of an unchangeable faith.
Kenny
admits that the idea that the apostolic doctrine might imply new doctrines that
the apostles never thought of but he sees that
The
deduction idea denies that God needs to do or allow bad things to happen for
some of his mysterious good purposes. Perhaps
he could let Mary rot for it. Thus the
idea is blasphemous. This is my
observation.
Kenny
then cites the teaching of theologians who say that the deduction process works
not through logic as we know it but through God’s logic which is different to
ours and which makes little sense to us for we are not as intelligent as
him. He calls this dangerous. It opens the way for the Church to change
whatever it likes as long as it pretends it has not changed truth but that God
sees how its contradictory doctrines can be reconciled even if we can’t or the
Church is left able to command whatever evil thing it likes.
Catholics
say that if there is no record of a doctrine being ancient it does not matter
for it was in oral tradition that was passed down from one generation to the
next. Kenny writes that for the fathers
and all the great Scholastics the truths necessary for salvation are all in the
Bible. Tradition was declared by them
not to be a new source of revelation but only a help in interpreting the Bible. The first person to come up with the oral
tradition idea was William of Ockham who died in 1349. How could the idea be true when it took that
long to appear? Kenny mentions Cardinal
Pole attacking with the approval of the Catholic Church the doctrine of Henry
VIII which claimed that both scripture and tradition were parallel sources of
revelation. Kenny write that third
century and later Christians never appealed to oral traditions and made a
little use of liturgical traditions for liturgy was a fixed thing and
apparently all believed that the Bible alone had the information about the
doctrine the Church of Christ should follow.
Origen could not depend on tradition to learn the identity of the true
author of the book of Hebrews so he examined its writing style and
contents. No good God would use a medium
for the transmission of revelation that could not be proven. Anybody could invent a doctrine and say it
was known in the early days and was not written down.
Kenny
says that the pope can only make infallible doctrines relating to matters which
are necessary for salvation. He says
there is no way of knowing if a pope only thought he was using his
infallibility but was mistaken for the doctrine he was defining was not
necessary for salvation. I say then that
the popes and Church have no right to say that doctrines like the assumption of
Mary into Heaven or whatever are necessary for salvation for if any are, the
most basic ones like the deity of Christ, the atonement he offered for us, the
resurrection of Christ, Heaven and Hell are the only doctrines necessary. To say that God cares about whether or not we
believe that Mary was taken up into Heaven bodily is foolish and blasphemous
for it makes him really petty.
To
say the pope is right that he can only make new dogmas that are necessary for
salvation is to say that the pope must infallibly know what is necessary for
salvation first. And then he must
infallibly know that he really knows this and is not mistaken. So before the pope can tell us infallibly
that Mary was taken bodily up into Heaven he has to infallibly know himself and
also know how the dogma is necessary.
This requires a vast amount of infallibility as to his
own psychological processes and the intricacies of theology. He would need to be very infallible indeed. The Church of Rome would never dare teach
such a foolish doctrine but it does teach it by implication.
It
is also worth remembering that the Church has always insisted that there were
doctrines necessary for salvation.
Nowadays it is said that you will lose your salvation if you know that a
doctrine is true and refuse to believe it.
But that could not possibly have been what the Church meant in the past. The Athanasian Creed for example condemned
anybody who denied any of the several articles of faith in it to hell and
excommunication. If it had just meant
that it would have said so. It meant
that sincere or not you would not get into Heaven if you denied anything it
said. The Church officially taught for
most of its existence that error excluded from Heaven and it was the belief
that sincerity was not good enough that led to the persecution of heretics.
The
Church often said that certain doctrines were necessary for salvation. This could only mean that sincere disbelief
after initial belief would cost one one’s salvation for otherwise it would just
say that any doctrines true or false that you believe to be true and then
reject will exclude from salvation. The
Church never went that far for it encouraged pagans and atheists to abandon
their doctrines. So doctrines necessary
for salvation means exactly what it says, that sincerity is not enough. Explicit membership in the Church and belief
in it is essential in the same way as having a gangrenous foot amputated is
necessary.
Conclusion
Roman Catholicism is not the Church supposedly founded by the apostles of Jesus Christ. It tells the worst lies possible to hide this fact.
WORKS
CONSULTED
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