The Papacy and History

Yesterday's post was actually a sidetrack from what I wanted to write about. So I shall try again. The comment I wanted to focus on in terms of development of doctrine is something a protestant church history professor said. I don't remember his name or the exact quote but it was along the lines of the pope having an amazing ability to be on the right side of every heresy. One of the themes of church history is a string of heretical ideas. Protestants accept these as heresies. They don't think the Monophysites or the Nestorians had it right. So this guy was remarking how important it was that none of these heresies were embraced by the pope of the day. That would have been a disaster. He even went so far as to call that providential. That is that the grace of God was helping the pope get on the right side of one controversy after another.

What he is saying is that the catholic method of arriving at doctrinal truth worked. It worked when you would not expect human effort to work. That is a hard thing for many to grasp. Protestants agree with the answers the popes arrived at so that helps. Often they just see arriving at the right answer as being quite easy. Just open your bible and there it is. So they don't see it as remarkable that the papacy did not lead the whole church into any of these heresies. This is why you need to be deep in history.

Heresies don't last unless there is some reason why people believe them. Why would those reasons not apply to the pope as much as to anyone else? There were some human reasons. The pope often has an outsiders perspective. He often has better understanding of the tradition of the church. But that has been true of many protestant leaders and many of them have fallen for false teaching anyway. If there is anything 500 years of protestantism has taught us is how easily a church can go wrong. There is a lot of talk about 30,000 existing protestant denominations. The reality is there are many more that no longer exist. They all had leaders that tried to follow the bible. It isn't that easy.

Then there is the point where one must notice that the empirical evidence is not only remarkable but it is exactly the kind of remarkable evidence you would expect if what the Catholic church teaches about the papacy is true. Being grateful for God keeping His church from error in the past is good. But thinking about how God has done that is important because we know God is consistent. He is not going to be faithful to a principle for many centuries and then abandon it.

Development Overview

Getting back to development of doctrine, we have seen that it is possible to argue the believability of Israel as God's chosen nation by looking at the religious and moral history of Israel and comparing it to that of other nations at that time. We have seen that the difference between protestant Christianity and historical Christianity is apparent on so many issues that protestants can't really think about history too often or too deeply.

But Newman took it a step further. He tried to show Catholicism did not suffer from the same problem. That is hard to do. First of all, he is trying to prove a negative. He is arguing something does not exist. Secondly, he is trying to evaluate the logical flow of doctrine for consistency independently of whether they are true or not. That is almost impossible for most people to do. They get so powerfully influenced by whether they believe or disbelieve the doctrine itself they cannot honestly evaluate whether their was development or corruption. Newman tries to help by introducing some structure into the process. But if people want to arrive at a certain answer they generally can. The question is whether they can put aside their personal agendas long enough to hear God speak.

Perhaps an example is useful. One instance of development in the world of science was the move from the theory of the planets orbiting the earth in circular orbits to the planets orbiting the sun in elliptical orbits. Now if you wanted to argue this was a corruption you could. An ellipse is not a circle. So the old theory was false. The orbits are almost circular but they are not. So you could see an approximation being replaced by a better approximation. But if you didn't want to see that you could see a false theory being replaced by a true one.

So if you understand how much history there is. How many doctrinal categories and how many changes that occurred. Then you think about how each one of these is going to be a struggle to be objective because every person is going to come to the matter with a ton of baggage on all of them. Can a protestant assess the development of the papacy or the Marian dogmas without being overwhelmed by what his tradition has taught him about these matters? For me it took time. Ideas that seem absolutely obvious to me now took me years to arrive at.

It is hard work but it is worth it. I think once you get Newman's concept this is the closest thing to absolute proof of the truth of Christianity. Newman understood that his analysis would be a strong argument for Catholicism or atheism. The good new is the consistency of Catholicism is a powerful evidence in favor of a supernatural power being behind the Catholic church. It is something so far beyond what humans are capable of. Logically it could be an evil supernatural power but that seems like a stretch. Even if you are tempted to believe that you can apply Pascal's wager and discern there is no good reason to believe that.

Development of Doctrine and Theology of the Body are two ideas so amazing that anyone who understands them will become Catholic. The trouble is they are hard to understand. We have many biases around sex and religion. They are like those old 3D pictures you had stare at for a while before you could see anything. Then you saw it and it was like Wow! They are like that but you need to contemplate them a lot longer.

Development of Doctrine and Israel

One of the things we can see when we study religions of the period from the time of Moses to the time of Jesus is that the religion of Israel stands out. They had some doctrines that were quite different but many nations had beliefs we would consider unusual. Theirs was more unusual but it is hard to pin down exactly what was different in the nature of the teachings. What is easiest to notice is how little that religion changed over that 1500 year period. They had times where they strayed but they always came back. They had additional prophesy, especially about the Messiah, but they didn't seem to leave big pieces of their faith behind. You follow other people groups of the time and you find gods came and went. Morals changed. Stories about creation and whatever else they had changed. The Israelites stuck with the same 10 commandments, the same creation out of nothing (which was unique to them all this time), the same story of the promised even the same liturgies and feasts. Even today the Jews practice basically the same religion. It is quite remarkable.

But if you ask the question about the various religions of that time. If you wonder which one could be basically the true religion while the others are lesser attempts to arrive at truth. One thing you would expect if one such faith existed would be that it should be remarkably immutable. So if we don't assume all religions are the same but examine them to see if one stands out as having truth claims that are inherently more believable then we are likely to focus in on the teachings of Moses and the Israelite prophets.

Now some would argue that Israel was unique and that it's religion was remarkably unchanging but there are other explanations for that. That is other than God actually revealing Himself to Israel in a special way. That is a logical possibility. Often their ability to pass on information accurately from one generation to the next is cited. There are a few problems with that. One is that it describes what was unique about Israel but does not explain it. Why did they have an ability to pass on information without distortion? We don't know. We are just sure it was not a grace from God. Is that rational thinking?

The other problem with this theory is it proves too much. If Israel is good at passing on information accurately then we should believe all the stories about God's miracles? They don't want to go there. They want to say most of the stories are false. But how do you say the source of the information is good and yet the content is all wrong? We are not talking about one or two miracles. There is basically a constant stream of these stories over a long period of time. Some involved a small number of witnesses but many involved battles that would have been witnessed by thousands. Could such good record keepers record all these events if they didn't happen?

This is the essence of development of doctrine. That God's truth should logically have a certain character. It is going to look different from man making up stuff about God. It is going to transcend time and place. If we find such character where we would not humanly expect it then we can rationally argue that God is working in some special way. Most of the time development of doctrine is applied to the New Testament era. The argument is exactly the same. I shall go there in another post.