Open Our Eyes And Minds to Truth- Part III

Part I and Part II of this series began the discussion of how God protects His revelation.

Limitations on God’s Protection

Earlier, I mentioned a common flaw that I noticed in people of every faith group. Now, I return to a more detailed 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.  It took me many decades to realize, as an explicitly conscious fact with undeniable consequences, 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 widespread errors regarding the Catholic Faith are serious obstacles that hinder the recognition of the truth of that Faith by many. 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 implicitly 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,1869-170).

Contrary to this irreformably 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. What follows began for me with a simple rejection of the careless act of replacing the word “defines” with the word ‘teaches’ or sometimes the omission of both. A more recent example of a serious change in meaning is the replacement of the word “defines” with the words “formally teaches”. This careless attitude toward the Catholic Faith by zealous and nominally faithful Catholics puzzled me for years.

However, that change and other distortions are fallible human opinions, not the actual defined doctrine of the Catholic Church!  Those Catholics in error regarding the “meaning” of this definition also ignore the explicit limitation that the Divine protective gift is identified as being present only during a Pope’s act of defining a doctrine, “concerning faith and morals” that is to be held by the universal Church. Eventually, I recognized this flawed pattern in theological teaching.

The human assumptions and misstatements of this doctrine are 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 Divinely protected definitions are not declared to be infallible. That ‘such definitions are irreformable’ means only that they do not contain any error,[3] it does not mean that they are complete in affirming everything of importance that God has revealed on the subject. I submit that the distinction is crucial!

The Nicene Creed is a historical example of this limitation in God’s protection of His Revelation through the Church. The crucially important Filioque 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 the Divine assistance does not guarantee that anyone will correctly understand the meaning of the definition. Not even the Pope. The defined doctrine affirms only that Divine help assures the absence of error in the defined doctrine itself.

My second example is precisely another 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 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, but not nuance, 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 their forebears, the earlier Protestant “Reformers of the Christian Faith”, they ignore the truth that Peter is the Rock; and, 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.  Their opinion is also a direct denial of Christ’s explicit 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 “expert”, but 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. As faithful Christians, we should neither overstate nor understate the protection that Jesus promised that He would provide through and for the Church.

This short brief quote of a key relevant statement is from Chapter 2, paragraph 14 of The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, and is the Second Vatican Council’s clarification of the nature of the Church.^[4]

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. If they fail moreover to respond to that grace in thought, word and deed, not only shall they not be saved but they will be the more severely judged.

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.

An important example of this for both my Catholic and Protestant brethren is Christ’s parable that the “kingdom of heaven” is similar to the workers in the vineyard that Jesus describes in Matthew 20: 1-26. I believe this parable is relevant to the situation of all who profess to follow Christ. Bluntly, within my experience of over 65 years, as I initially wrote this, Catholic theologians and all who have had any formal study of theology have failed to understand and accurately communicate the lesson and importance of this parable and also a crucial lesson in Scripture’s multiple accounts of the failure of the Scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees to recognize Christ.