TRADITION
ITSELF COMMANDS BIBLE ALONE
KENNY ON THE
DEVELOPMENT THEORY
FOREWORD
The
Roman Catholic Church follows the Bible as the word of God. But it is not from the Bible alone that the
Church gets its doctrines. The vast
majority of Catholic teachings are not in the Bible. The new teaching that God used evolution to
make man and woman is not in the Bible.
The new doctrine that the Bible has errors is totally contrary to the
Bible which claims that God wrote it as well as men. The new doctrine that capital punishment is
wrong except in very rare and unusual circumstances is totally contradictory to
the Bible which is very liberal with it and claims divine authority for this
liberalism. The new doctrine that
homosexuality is of unknown origin is contrary to the Bible which says in
Romans 1 that the urge is granted to people as punishment for sin and the Old
Testament makes no exceptions to the rule that homosexuals caught together in
the act must be put to death. The
doctrine that God is a spirit in the Greek philosophy sense of being a
substance with no parts or components is contrary to the Bible which only says
that God cannot be seen and is like the wind or breath. The doctrine that the pope is the successor
of Peter, that Peter was the first pope, that Peter was the first bishop of
These
are some of the doctrines that are not in the Bible. In fact there are far more than that. But where did the Church get them from? It got them from tradition. Tradition is the word of God as well as the
Bible according to the Church. Tradition
can be reasoned out from existing doctrine or the Bible or it can simply be
what the Church says it always did or believed.
The latter was the Church’s excuse for claiming that Mary went bodily up
to Heaven to live forever there as Queen which is not to be found in the first
or second century of the Church or in the Bible. Obviously the Church can do without
tradition written down which opens the way for it to teach what it wants and
say it was something revealed by God. It
based many doctrines on written evidence of tradition in the past that turned
out to be fraudulent such as the Donation of Constantine which gave power to
the bishop of
The
Christian gospel is intended for everybody though that doesn’t imply that all
will be called by God into the Church and to be saved. Christ
commanded that the gospel be taught to all creation. The apostle said that God is a God of clarity
not confusion. Now if this is so, to
have another word of God that depends on oral tradition and a huge volume of
writings from the first century down to the papal encyclicals of today is
totally contradicting the gospel. We
must remember as well that theologians disagree sharply about what is genuine
tradition and how to interpret it and that the Church is only loosely united –
its made up of disagreeing schools of thought.
The
Roman Catholic Church believes that tradition and the Bible are both the word
of God and tradition must be used to find out what the Bible is about. The pope and the bishops have to interpret
the Bible for you using this other source of revelation. The injustice of this is plain in the fact
that the earliest traditions of the Church all taught that the Old Testament
Law was full of symbolism and was not literally true - a form of interpretation
that the Church vehemently rejects. For
example, the commandment God gave Abraham to get physically circumcised was
taken as saying get spiritually not physically circumcised. It was really twisting the whole book. The Epistle of Barnabas, which was considered
part of the Bible by many early Christians, and the Epistle of Diognetus were
the two most anti literal would-be scriptures.
Tradition to a Catholic just means whatever is in the early days of the
Church that agrees with the pope and the Church. They don’t have the integrity to admit this.
Some
say the Church has not made up its mind if Tradition adds to scripture or not (Lion
Concise Book of Christian Thought, page 217).
It is claimed that the Council of Trent taught that it has and so that
Tradition adds to scripture but that is disputed. But it is obvious that the Church does regard
Tradition as addition to scripture though not as scripture. The Church does not teach that the writings
of the fathers of the Church and the pope are scripture but it does teach that
their teachings are God’s word and infallible.
So tradition is not the written word of God in the way the Bible
is.
It
is thought that the Traditions that Trent said were entitled to as much
veneration as scripture seem to have been ones for practice like Sunday worship
and the baptism of infants which were allegedly practiced since the apostles
governed the Church (ibid 160). If this thought
is correct then the decree cannot apply to traditions that cannot be traced
back to the apostles. This would mean
that the Church need not make the other traditions such as birth-control being
a sin equal to the Bible and indeed should not. It would also mean that when
the Catholic Church has gone on so long without the other traditions it should scrap
them.
But
if
How
could a Church that does not even know if its doctrines like the Immaculate
Conception – to pick one out of many – are Tradition or not be infallible when
it says the Immaculate Conception is true?
A doctrine has to be Tradition or equal to Scripture if not better than
it to be infallible. And it can’t be
better for the Church never said that though it treated it as better.
Roman
doctrine says, “All our doctrines are true including those that are not taught
in scripture for they have come down to us from the apostles in the form of
tradition. They have come from those who
knew what the Bible was all about and what agreed with it.”
Protestant
critics of Catholicism are more anxious than they should be to show that
Catholic doctrines originated long after apostolic times. But it doesn’t really matter when they
started. Why?
A
doctrine could easily have been made up by some old fraud a week after or even
before the last of the apostles died and then attributed to an apostle so no
matter how early a tradition is it is no good for there is no guarantee that it
originated with an apostle and the Bible predicts great opposition to the truth
even from inside the Church. It shows
that it is risky to depend on tradition and that God would not want you to.
The Roman Church cannot
teach that tradition is a good enough authority on its own but only accept it
in so far as it concurs with and sheds more light on Bible revelation. This would mean that tradition would have to
be implied by scripture before it could be accepted. In that case, why have tradition when
common-sense would do?
The
Church admits that much tradition is nonsense and it takes the rest to be God’s
word. But when it is up to a man and
other men to decide which of its traditions are genuine the Roman Catholic ends
up in a pit of dishonesty. It is not
honest to argue that the pope and Church identify divine tradition and that
this tradition shows that they are of divine institution - it is the lie of
circular reasoning. There is just no
reason why anyone who holds that the pope and the Church are the authority
should start to doubt this.
The
Church censures all traditions that conflict with scripture (Radio Replies,
First Volume, page 125) so ones that do not are okay. But anyone can create doctrines that can be
said to be complimentary to and not contrary to scripture. For example, you can teach that the Virgin is
the fourth person of the Godhead for the Bible mentions three but does not say
there are only three. If the Bible was
meant to be interpreted by other material then we can make it mean what we like
to a tremendous extent. The Bible does
not contain rules for every moral question, rightly or wrongly, it says that
armed with its general guidance we can work out God’s will so it turns out that
we don’t need them.
Tradition is superior to
the Bible in the Catholic Church no matter what it would have you believe. The Bible is interpreted by Tradition and
since the interpreter is more important than the interpreted Tradition is superior. If Tradition is man-made the result will be a
“gospel” with perverted teachings that don’t fit the scriptures.
When
you interpret a book in accordance with something else you are concealing its
true meaning. For example, if tradition
said the Bible meant that Jesus was only symbolically God then that would
destroy the Bible doctrine of his deity.
In Catholicism, tradition is above the Bible for it determines its
meaning and the
When
Vatican
II claimed that tradition was not superior to the Bible for it and scripture
are to be accepted as being entitled to the same devotion (Dogmatic
Constitution on Divine Revelation, Chapter 2, Part 9) but that is a fib.
When
religion is full of doctrines that cannot be understood Roman Catholicism is
able to say what she likes to a great extent and call her contradictory
doctrines coherent truths or paradoxes that we cannot understand. She says that her understanding of truth
always needs improvement so this is her excuse.
She is able to reconcile any absurd traditions with the Bible as long as
she teaches the importance of mystery.
The
authority of Tradition presupposes the Church having the power to be infallible
not some of the time but all the time.
That is the only way Tradition can be safe so the pope and the
infallible councils are superior to both.
The pope is now superior to the councils for he must summon them and
decide who attends them. It makes one
wonder about the councils that were never convened by popes at all.
Unlike
Protestantism, Roman Catholicism does not derive its doctrines from the Bible
alone but from Tradition as well.
Tradition with a capital T is the word of God.
The
Catholic argument that since the Bible sometimes speaks well of tradition and
treats it as authoritive, tradition must be an additional authority to the
Bible is untenable because the Bible never says tradition is the other
authority. Those traditions might have
been divinely inspired and might have been incorporated into and enshrined in scripture
alone as they were. The Bible started
off as inspired traditions which were written down.
And
it may be true that there are inspired traditions outside the Bible but that
does not mean that we have to rely on them or are meant to. The Bible never tells us to listen to
tradition outside its teaching. It was
different to take tradition as the word of God during the apostles’ day for
they infallibly discerned the infallible ones but it is too risky to do so
now. The Bible is complete so there is
no need to. Protestants believe the
Bible doesn’t answer all questions but say that it answers enough.
If
a lot of important answers are left out of the Bible does that prove that
tradition is needed and complements the Bible?
It does not when the Bible does not tell us who has the accurate
tradition.
Jesus’
condemnation of tradition only forbids non-inspired tradition or man-made tradition
(Matthew 15). It is thought then that it
is not proof at least by itself that the Bible alone must be heeded. But the Bible warns that most people will
tend towards apostasy and Jesus and the apostles warned about heretics implying
that even if tradition was accepted as a parallel authority to the Bible it
could not be depended on once the overseers, the apostles, were gone. So the context of Jesus’ condemnation
strongly suggests that only tradition that ends up as scripture should be
followed. And we must remember that
Jesus only said it was man-made tradition because it didn’t fit the Old
Testament and added to its teaching. There
is no point in condemning man-made tradition if no method is left for
distinguishing between man’s teaching and God’s. Jesus made it simple.
Catholics
suppose that Isaiah 59:21 in which God says his word will be in the mouths of
his people forever is a prediction about the Catholic Church which teaches by
word of mouth and not only by a book.
Tradition is what is handed down by word of mouth and this verse is
supposed to teach the Catholic doctrine.
But if the word were to be in a book alone Isaiah would still have
written these words.
1
Peter
John
The
apostle Paul declared that what would become the great apostasy had started (2
Thessalonians 2) so how could we trust tradition? Tradition was the only excuse the apostates
would have had for altering the faith.
The
Bible predicts that most of the people calling themselves Christians would
abandon the faith one day and speaks of the awesome power of Satan to delude (2
Thessalonians 2:3 – it speaks of a “great falling away” or apostasy). It says that false teachings and fabricated
apostolic traditions were already being concocted while the apostles were alive
under the guidance of Satan (2 Thessalonians 2:1, 2). Obviously, even if a tradition could be
traced back to the lifetime of the apostles it does not mean that it is a
revelation of God. The Devil might have
created the traditions Catholics speak of and the papacy. In Matthew 12 Jesus said that when demons are
cast out and can find no home for there is nobody left to possess they will go
back to the man they have left and if he is open to their influence they will
take worse demons than themselves with them to possess him and that will happen
to Jesus’ evil generation. This implies
firstly that tradition is dangerous and the demons have the knowledge and power
to pull off a seemingly foolproof deception and it implies that the New
Testament could well be a demonic fabrication and that only books you are 100%
sure of can be considered to be God’s word.
But no such books exist and Jesus really shot himself in the foot.
When
the Bible warns of a great apostasy and makes it clear that the world – meaning
the vast majority so it is practically the whole world so even most Christians
will be traitors though they might continue to infest the Church. Church traditions are most likely to be
diabolical or fraudulent in origin and we have to avoid them.
The
very tradition that the Catholic Church makes superior to the Bible and a
supplement to the Bible says that it should be ignored in favour of the
Bible!
The
tradition that the fathers honoured and obeyed was tradition that restated what
was in the scriptures and was in the scriptures. (See page 15, Traditional Doctrines of
the Roman Catholic Church Examined.) St Cyprian is quoted as saying that tradition
is just what is taught in the scriptures.
Cyril of Alexandria said that the scriptures are enough and more than
enough and Tertullian condemned Hermogenes unless he could show that his
teachings were in the Bible and pronounced a curse on those who add to and
subtract from the Bible and St Basil interpreted the apostles as saying that
nobody should believe anything unless it is written in the Bible (page
16).
Justin
Martyr was the first source of what Rome recognises as divinely inspired
tradition to say that Christ forbade belief in what men say and counselled his
followers to believe only in what he himself and the Jewish prophets taught
(page 26, Evangelical Catholics; page 23, But the Bible Does
Not Say So).
St
Irenaeus stated that the Church will find every doctrine it needs in the
prophets and the gospels (page 26, Evangelical Catholics). He wrote that when the heretics are refuted
from the scriptures they attack the scriptures as being incorrect or
uncanonical so in that case he appeals to tradition to confute them (page 27, Church
and Infallibility). But what
Irenaeus meant by tradition was the practice of revering the scriptures as
infallible. He argued that since they
were believed to be infallible by tradition since the time of the apostles they
were real and uncorrupted. A bible only
believer would say much the same thing without regarding tradition as an
additional authority.
St
Athanasius wrote that the scriptures are enough for learning the truth in
(Conte Gentes. 1,1).
St
John Chrysostom commanded that no man must be listened to in religion without
being checked out by the Bible first (2 Corinthians 6, Homily 13). The same instructed in his Homily on Romans
that we must read no other but Jesus and need no other mind (page 27, Secrets
of Romanism).
St
Jerome protested against creating things as if they were tradition from the
apostles without scripture saying they are true (commentary on Haggai, Cap
1.2). He informed Helvidius that
anything that was not written in the Bible was to be rejected. He said the Church does not admit anything
that is not found in the scriptures (page 23, But the Bible
Does Not Say So).
St
Basil (329-379) said that since Jesus said his sheep hear his voice and do not
listen to strangers that it is wrong to make a doctrine that is not mentioned
in the scriptures (De Fide, Garnier’s Edition, Vol II, page
313). (See page 26, Evangelical Catholics).
Augustine
commanded that any doctrine that is not in the Bible must be refused (page 26, Evangelical
Catholics). In 400 AD he expressly
stated that he bows only to the authority of the canonical books and that all
that is needed for faith and living is in them (page 23, But the Bible
Does Not Say So).
In
Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine he
acknowledged that the Church of
According
to him the
Newman
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.
There
must be a basic doctrine that implies other ones so that they can be developed
from it and that another.
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. 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.
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 for they help themselves or that the saints have already taken
care of it. And when religion is full of
mystery – it cannot explain evil 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 was lying.
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 his Church
which is an invisible communion that that was enough to identify it with
Protestantism for that is Protestantism reduced to its bare essentials. Though they deny it, 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
infallible visible true Church organisation to make his system of development work.
He needs to prove that the
system directs one to faith in the Catholic Church. It doesn’t.
It makes the Romish faith totally unconvincing.
Jesus said that the Church
would never be destroyed. Catholics believe
he meant that the true Church on earth would never pass away. The
The Development of Dogma
idea suggests that a new dogma can occur to a school in the Church and if the
Church won’t exalt that dogma to dogma-hood then the school can leave the
Church and do it itself and become the true Church. Church means a teaching body and
community. The idea of a true Church is
impossible to accept for a part of the Church will have greater closeness to
the truth than will the official heads for there are many things not
definitively settled. The section will
be a truer Church or body of teaching than the mainstream Church.
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 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. Yet the Church says
that it needs infallibility just to safeguard God’s truth when it is questioned
to prove that it really is revealed by God.
It says it usually uses it then.
Kenny
wrote that many theologians agree with St Vincent of Lerins that that truth is
whatever the whole Church has believed before heresy appeared. This would mean that the only truth we can
find is in the Apostles’ Creed. The
Church cannot admit that. We 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 for he observed that even when the early writers called Christ
God or said that the three persons were equal nobody knew if the writers
believed that the believers in the divine Christ believed that the Father Son
and Spirit were really one person and not three or if the person who declared
them to be there persons but equal believed they were three Gods who were
somehow entitled to be called one God in some way like a man and woman can be
called one flesh. 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
thing. 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
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. The pope can make a
dogma anytime. Thus he needs to know
what doctrines are needed for salvation all the time just in case. This knowledge would be a gift to him from
God. So the pope is automatically
infallible all the time for if he knows a doctrine is necessary for salvation he
knows the doctrine is true. He knows how
a doctrine is needed for salvation and why.
He knows what the doctrine is.
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. 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 religious 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 and is in fact often dangerous.
Conclusion
The
Church has no authority from its God to believe the doctrines it has that are
not in the Bible. The doctrines come
from purely human authority and to believe them is to believe men not God.
WORKS
CONSULTED
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS CATHOLICS ARE ASKING, Tony Coffey, Harvest House
Publishers, Oregon ,2006
Catholicism
and Christianity, Cecil John Cadoux, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1928
Catholicism
and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press,
Encyclopaedia
of Bible Difficulties, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan,
Evangelical
Catholics, A New Phenomenon,
How
to Interpret the Bible, Fr Francis Cleary, SJ,
Lectures
and Replies, Thomas Carr, Archbishop of
Lions
Concise Book of Christian Thought,
Reason
and Belief, Bland Blanschard,
Roman
Catholic Claims, Charles Gore, Longmans,
Secrets
of Romanism, Joseph Zachello, Loizeaux Brothers,
The
Bible Does Not Say So, Rev Roberto Nisbet, Church Book Room Press,
The Church and
Infallibility, BC
Traditional
Doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church Examined, Rev CCJ Butlin, Protestant Truth
Society,
Vicars
of Christ, Peter de Rosa, Corgi,
Whatever
Happened to Heaven? Dave Hunt, Harvest House,