How God Protects His Revelation- Part II

Part I introduced the thesis that God must protect His Revelation from the pollution of errors introduced by people.  A study of By the way, do ask anyone who asserts that this method of proclaiming the Kingdom God,   despite its institution by Jesus, was changed with the death of the Apostles:  “Exactly where is this fallible opinion explicitly taught in Scripture?”  I submit that Paul explicitly teaches the exact opposite in several of his letters, including the command:

So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter (2 Thes 2:15).

Here is a small sampling of the lessons in Scripture about the nature, role, and importance of the Church.

They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us.  But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us (1 John 2:19).

If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.  Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven (Matt 18:17–18).

I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim 3:14–16).

These are the things you must insist on and teach.  Let no one despise your youth, but set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.  Until5] I arrive, give attention to the public reading of scripture, to exhorting, to teaching.  Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you through prophecy with the laying on of hands by the council of elders.  Put these things into practice, devote yourself to them, so that all may see your progress.  Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; continue in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers (1 Tim 4:11–16) See also Phil 2: 12.

Why do you call me “Lord, Lord,” and do not do what I tell you?  I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them.  That one is like a man building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built.  But the one who hears  and does not act on them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, and great was the ruin of that house (Luke 6: 46–49).

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained  (John 20:21–23).

And there is an even more direct and explicit Scriptural lesson showing the fallacy of the Protestant “Bible alone” doctrine in this statement of Christ that remains true today:

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf.  Yet you refuse to come to me to have life (John 5:39–40).

The writings of Paul confirm and shed light on the full meaning of that comment on Scripture by Jesus, which remains true throughout history to our present day.  As Paul states, the Kingdom of God is proclaimed by and through the Church, which is the body of Christ present in the world.

And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (Eph 1:22–23).

Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior.  Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands (Eph 5:22–24).

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.  And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues.  Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles?  Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? (1 Cor 12:27–30) See also 1 Cor 13: 1-3.

For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church,  because we are members of his body (Eph 5:29–30).

In Ephesians 3: 8-13, Paul explicitly proclaims the central and vital role of “the Church” in God’s eternal plan:

this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Eph 3: 8-10).

The truth is that the doctrines of that historical Church, still taught today, are identifiably present in the written historical records from the earliest period of time for which we have any written record.  And the claimed contradictions of those doctrines in the Bible are grossly exaggerated; they just don’t hold up under careful investigation.

The same cannot be said for the fundamental and historically new doctrines introduced as the foundation of Protestantism by the Reformers in the fifteenth century.   Do put this claim to the test, if you don’t believe it.  Mr. Patrick Madrid on Relevant Radio, for example, is an excellent resource of Biblical facts that consistently identify the errors in those novel doctrines and claims that are the foundation of the Protestant “Re-formation” of Christianity.

There is even a foreshadowing of the Protestant rebellion in the Scriptural lesson of the Rebellion of Korah that is described in Numbers 16: 1-35.  It is not merely I, but also Jude 11, the next to last book of the New Testament Scripture, that explicitly calls the Christian Community’s attention to, and thus, identifies that the story of the Rebellion of Korah is a lesson and warning for Christians!

Scripture’s identification and the first example of the existing Christian Church’s response to errors about the Faith, a response that brings about a clarification and a more explicitly detailed statement of those disputed details or facets of the Faith is described in the 15^th chapter of Acts.  In the Church that Christ is continuing to build on the Rock of Peter, that process is called “development of doctrine”, which means a deeper and more detailed understanding of a part of God’s Revelation, that was present from the beginning, but just not that well understood.

Here are several explicit Scriptural lessons about this common experience of not initially understanding God’s Revelation:  Luke 2: 49-50, Mark 6: 50-52, Mk 7:17–19, Mk 9:30–32, Lk 9:43–45, Jn 20:8–9, Jn 10:5–6,  Acts 7:25–26, and especially Jesus’ specific warning in the parable of the sower in Matt 13:19.

The Scriptural lesson in  Acts 8: 26- 40 is an example of God’s plan for resolving many of these failures to initially understand the details of His Revelation.  It’s worth reading the whole lesson.

Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over to this chariot and join it.’ So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’  He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me? (Acts 8: 29-31).

I remind you that these quotes from Scripture are some of the choices set before us.  So, yes, stretch forth your hand to whatever you choose.  But never forget, ignore, or be deceived about the fact that in these choices lies “life” or “death”:  and God has promised that whichever you choose will be given to you.

Earlier, I mentioned a common flaw that I noticed in people of every faith group.  Now, I return to a discussion of that flaw.   People of every “Jewish” and “Christian” faith persuasion that I have met, either in person or through other means such as their writing,  put more trust and faith in the teaching of other fallible people than they put in the reliable source of God’s revelation that they acknowledge and profess to accept!  And it took me many decades to realize, as an explicitly conscious fact, that this is also a flaw in Catholics.

Here I will give two Catholic examples for those who are interested.  I do this in the hope of correcting two widely accepted destructive errors, for the benefit of both Catholics and Protestants.  These two errors regarding the Faith are serious obstacles that hinder the recognition of the truth of the Catholic Faith by many.  And the misunderstanding is spiritually unhealthy for Catholics.

We can all recognize what the following words say. The crucial and badly misunderstood issue is what do these words mean?

that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to be endowed

The First Vatican Council defined as a dogma of the Catholic faith that when certain defined conditions are met, then and only then, the definition affirms that the Pope [and indirectly also the Church:

is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to be endowed in defining doctrine concerning faith and morals: and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves [and not from the consent of the Church] (“The Vatican Council 1869-1870” by Dom Cuthbert Butler).

Contrary to this irreformable defined doctrine of the Catholic faith, many well-informed Catholics assume and teach that the identified words assert that the Pope is “infallible” when he teaches a matter of faith or morals.”  Or sometimes that is even shortened to just that the Pope is infallible.

But that is a fallible human opinion, not the actually defined doctrine of the Catholic Church!  Those Catholics in error regarding the “meaning” of this definition also ignore the fact that the divine protective gift is explicitly identified as being present only during a Pope’s act of defining a doctrine, “concerning faith or morals to be held by the universal Church”.

The human assumption is not a defined doctrine of the Catholic Church, and in fact, the Church’s explicitly defined conclusion is that “such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves”!

Notice that even the identified definitions are not declared to be infallible.  That ‘such definitions are irreformable’ means only that they do not contain any error,[8] it does not mean that they are complete in affirming everything of importance that God has revealed on the subject.

The Nicene Creed is a historical example of this limitation in God’s protection of His Revelation through the Church.  The crucially important “Filoque” needed to be added later, though there was no error in what the Creed did affirm as it was promulgated by the Council of Nicea.

That God protects His revelation in and through the Church should never be ignored or forgotten.  But we should also remember some important related details:

Every individual living today was taught the faith they profess by other fallible humans.  Thus the faith that we each learned in our separated faith communities was mostly taught to us by other fallible individuals; rather than learned directly from the reliably protected source of God’s Revelation, which we explicitly acknowledge and profess to believe.

This is true even of the Pope!  Indeed, as Mr. Dennis Prager astutely noted:  “Pope Francis learned his leftism from society long before he learned his theology from the Church.”  And there is more!  The protection provided through divine assistance does not guarantee that anyone will correctly understand the meaning of the definition.  Not even the Pope.  The defined doctrine only affirms that divine protection guarantees the absence of any error in the definition itself.

My second example is precisely such a definition of faith that has been tragically misunderstood by both Protestants and Catholics.  The clarification of its real meaning by the Second Vatican Council was even the cause of an exodus from the Church by some who chose to cling tenaciously to their erroneous opinion about what that doctrine meant.

I am referring to the Catholic Doctrine that, “There is no salvation outside the Church”.  Both Catholics and Protestants have erroneously assumed that the meaning of this doctrine was that one must be an acknowledged practicing member, visibly in good standing within the Catholic Church in order to be saved.  In fact, the doctrine was never primarily intended to be a statement about who isn’t saved; rather, it was always an accurate statement about the very nature of salvation itself.  There would have been much less irritation, heartburn, and confusion for everyone if the Church had initially stated the doctrine as:  “There is no salvation outside the body of Christ.”  The two statements are equivalent in meaning, as Scripture teaches us in this lesson:

For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness  (Rom 12:4–8).

Tragically, the misunderstanding of the meaning of this doctrine was so widespread and deeply entrenched among even well-informed Catholics, that when the Second Vatican Council corrected their error, a sizeable group chose to believe that the 2000 plus Bishops of the Council had erred and that the pope wasn’t really the pope.  They continue to believe the absurdity that in their rejection of the Council and the validity of all the Popes since the Council, it is they who are the faithful Catholics.

Like the earlier Protestant Reformers, they fail to see the absurdity of the claim that the tiny body of breakaways is the Church and that the universal Church is wrong.  They also ignore the fact that they are denying Christ’s promise to be with and protect his body, the Church.

The way that the Second Vatican Council corrected the misunderstanding was not by changing the doctrine; but rather, by clarifying its meaning.  And that expanded explanation also serves to correct those Catholics who today, as self-proclaimed experts, claim to understand and present the Catholic faith better than the major body of Bishops who are in communion with the Pope, who is the visible successor of Peter, the rock foundation that Jesus provided for His Church.

The lesson from this error should be obvious, though here again, it took me decades to become explicitly conscious of it.  Indeed, it took me decades to see the truth without its being overlaid by what I had been incorrectly taught by so many fallible teachers.  While God’s revelation to man is protected from corruption and error through the “body of Christ, which is the Church”, we the individual members of Christ’s body are not so protected!  We do have God’s grace to aid us, but that does not make us infallible or guarantee that we won’t make errors.

This short brief quote of a key relevant statement is from the Second Vatican Council’s explanation of the nature of the Church in, Chapter 2, paragraph 14 of The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.

This Sacred Council wishes to turn its attention firstly to the Catholic faithful. Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, it teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation. Christ, present to us in His Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation. In explicit terms He Himself affirmed the necessity of faith and baptism and thereby affirmed also the necessity of the Church, for through baptism as through a door men enter the Church. Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.

They are fully incorporated in the society of the Church who, possessing the Spirit of Christ accept her entire system and all the means of salvation given to her, and are united with her as part of her visible bodily structure, and through her with Christ, who rules her through the Supreme Pontiff and the bishops. The bonds which bind men to the Church in a visible way are the profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical government and communion. He is not saved, however, who, though part of the body of the Church, does not persevere in charity. He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but, as it were, only in a “bodily” manner and not “in his heart.” All the Church’s children should remember that their exalted status is to be attributed not to their own merits but to the special grace of Christ.

The Council went on to explicitly acknowledge real and important links to many who are not yet fully incorporated into her society because of various circumstances, including limited knowledge that is often mixed with errors.  Those who desire the truth would benefit from reading the details firsthand.

It is my relatively recent observation and conclusion that the various lessons in Scripture, as also in the teaching of the Catholic Church, are analogous to the pieces of a jig saw puzzle.  They need to be correctly fitted together to accurately see the whole picture being taught by God’s Revelation.