Audio only:
In this episode Trent addresses Redeemed Zoomer’s recent video on supposed Roman Catholic contradictions showing how it’s ultimately self-refuting.
I studied Protestantism for 20 years. . . I’m not converting. (Reply to Redeemed Zoomer)
Erick Ybarra on Salvation Outside of the Church
Ending the Icons Debate – Suan Sonna
Understanding the Catechism’s Death Penalty Revision
Did the Church Change Its Stance on Usury?
Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty
Transcription:
TRENT:
Recently Redeemed Zoomer made a video about 14 alleged contradictions in the historical teachings of the Catholic Church. So in today’s episode, we’re going to go through them and view them in light of what I consider to be Redeemed Zoomer two main arguments against Catholicism. But before I do that, I want to say two things. First, I want to give a big thanks to Redeemed Zoomer or RZ from here on out who reviewed this script to make sure that I understood his arguments before offering my reply. And second, I want to address a gut feeling some Protestants have when they see rebuttals like this one put out online. I feel like some of them have this train of thought. Wow, it took 10 Catholic apologists to respond to some guy who likes Minecraft. They’re in total panic damage control mode. If that’s what Catholics have to do, then this really shows how flimsy their position is.
The fact that many Catholic apologists might respond to a Redeemed Zoomer video or a Gavin Orland video does not mean those videos are a silver bullet against Catholicism. A dozen Christian apologists might respond to an Alex O’Connor video, but Protestants agree it’s annoying when atheists say that the mere number of Christian apologists responding to an atheist means that Christian apologists are in some kind of panicked damage control mode. I’ve created videos that multiple Protestant apologists have responded to, but I would never want Catholics to triumph fully say this fact alone proves I’ve refuted Protestantism. These kinds of videos only show that someone created content that has gotten a lot of views and so it will be prudent to respond to the errors or alleged errors in that content. That’s all. On the other hand, I’ve noticed some Catholics say that RZ is acting in bad faith because he recently said that Catholic arguments are bad or super weak or that Catholic apologists engage in sophisticated cope, but many Catholics think the same way about Protestantism without thinking that they are acting in bad faith.
So why can’t RZ do the same thing? RZ is wrong about stuff, but if you’re a Catholic, just point out where he’s wrong and you no need to get emotional about it. When someone criticizes our faith, we should offer a competent defense, not an emotionally defensive reaction. The latter isn’t helpful reassurance to Catholics and it’s not impressive to non-Catholics who are still on the fence about whether Catholicism is the church Jesus Christ established. Alright, now let’s get into the heart of Ar Z’s argument. Essentially he makes two different arguments in his video. One argument is that the Catholic church has made contradictory, infallibly defined statements of doctrine. If this ever happened, it would falsify Catholicism’s claim to having infallible teaching authority and make the church’s claim to having a divine origin extremely suspect. This is similar to atheistic and Muslim arguments against scripture which say that the Bible contains contradictions and so the text is not inert or it’s not divinely protected from error.
Therefore, we should be skeptical of the Bible’s divine origin. So you could call this the logical argument against Catholicism. The Catholic church has infallibly decreed doctrine X at one time and infallibly decreed doctrine not X at another time. Therefore, the Catholic church is not infallible because it contradicted itself. However, in order to make the logical argument against Catholicism, you’d have to show that the two statements were indeed both infallibly defined to be true because a non infallible teaching could be an error and that fact alone would not falsify Catholicism. The second argument is that the Catholic church has made contradictory non infallibly defined statements of doctrine or practice it’s ordinary teaching. In other words, the church has changed these ordinary teachings or practices over time. If these changes do not involve invalidly defined doctrine, then any single instance of such a change would not falsify Catholicism because there’s no divine promise that these changes or teachings would be without error.
However, frequent examples of such changes might make us skeptical of Catholicism’s trustworthiness or its ability to preserve doctrine. This collection of evidence would provide a more probabilistic argument against Catholicism than a strictly logical argument. So call this second argument of rzs the evidential argument against Catholicism. These two arguments parallel when atheists make logical and evidential arguments from evil against the existence of God. The logical argument from evil says that only one instance of evil is necessary to falsify theism because God and evil cannot logically coexist. Likewise, the logical argument against Catholicism says that only one instance of infallible contradictory teachings is needed to falsify Catholicism because contradictory infallible teachings and the Catholic church cannot coexist. In contrast, the evidential argument from evil says that while God and some evil can coexist, the sheer amount of evil in the world should make a skeptical God exists.
Likewise, R Z’s evidential argument against Catholicism says that while changing non infallible doctrines can coexist with Catholicism, the sheer number of these changes should make us skeptical the Catholic church’s Divine authority. And as I’ll show later however, this evidential argument opens the door for critiquing Protestantism on this issue because Protestants have also changed their teachings. For example, in our previous discussion I pointed out that the Westminster confession that Presbyterians rely on has changed its teaching on the Pope being the antichrist, which is why redeem Zoomer only considers the later version of the Westminster confession to be inert, which means that earlier Westminster confessions contained errors. So you’re saying that the revision that happened in 1789 in the American church, that’s the one you consider to be an errand because it improved upon the earlier one?
CLIP:
Yes. I think the church has the authority to revise its statements because the church is fallible.
TRENT:
So even if RZ were correct about Catholicism changing its non infallibly defined teachings that would not justify abandoning Catholicism because Protestants do the same thing, but as I’ll show they do it to a much larger and much more severe degree that truly compromises important doctrines. But as I said, I’ll save that for later. What I want to do right now is go through these alleged contradictions from AR Z’s video and show that they do not involve two infallible teachings and contradiction, and so they do not support the logical argument against Catholicism. I’ll also show that we can understand these to be authentic developments of doctrine and so they don’t support the evidential argument against Catholicism. And when it comes to the logical argument, keep in mind that not everything a pope or an ecumenical counsel says is an infallibly defined teaching, but only what they say under certain specific conditions like the Pope speaking ex cathedra or an ecumenical counsel solemnly defining doctrine.
And in the case of the Second Vatican counsel, theologians agree it did not make any infallible declarations, so it cannot be used in any logical argument from contradiction against Catholicism. RZ said in his video that Cardinal Dolan and Francis Sullivan say Vatican II is infallible, but I haven’t found any record of these men saying this. In addition, I’m going to present evidence as I said before, that these cases of alleged doctrinal change can be explained as being authentic development of doctrine, and so they do not support R Z’s evidential argument against Catholicism. But I am going to offer this disclaimer before going forward. Many of these issues would require an entire video of their own to address, so I won’t be able to comprehensively or exhaustively address each of these topics. But if you’d like to help us create more videos to be able to do that, hit the subscribe button and support us@trendhornpodcast.com.
My goal instead is to point you in the right direction when it comes to resolving these difficulties. So let’s take a look at them. Number one, no salvation outside the church. I’m also going to subsume point number four on the saving nature of Protestant baptism into this point because they have a fair amount of overlap when it comes to no salvation outside the church. R Z’s first source Unum sanctum probably contains an infallible declaration that those who do not submit to the Roman pontiff cannot be saved. The pap bull ante domino given at the Council of Florence may also be an exercise in infallibility when it says that Pagans Jews heretics and schematics cannot become participants in eternal life. However, the modern documents RZ sites are not infallible in nature. Those documents include the Second Vatican Council, which as I said, did not teach anything Infallibly and the Roman Martyrology, which records 21 non-Catholic Coptic Martyrs who were beheaded by Muslim terrorists in 2015.
Papal canonization are generally considered acts of infallibility, but Pope Francis did not formally canonize the Coptic martyrs. The Roman martyrology contains martyred saints, but it also lists martyred blesseds and martyred individuals. It is not an infallible declaration that someone is in heaven like a papal canonization, and so it cannot be used in a strictly logical argument against Catholicism. The Council of Florence says that martyrdom does not undo the sin of schism if one chooses to remain outside the church. However, if someone is only incidentally a non-Catholic and dies a martyr because they did not resist the Catholic church in bad faith, it’s possible they may be saved. Pope Francis included the Coptic martyrs in the Roman martyrology as a show of unity with the Coptic church, which is why he did this with the consent of the head of the Coptic Church and not as an official teaching about the salvation of non-Catholics, but through acts like these and statements in the Second Vatican Council, did the Catholic church change its teaching or fail to uphold older infallible teachings on salvation?
No, because what has developed since then is recognizing there is a difference between defining the objective means of salvation and acknowledging that God can save a person through extraordinary means as long as that person does not sinfully reject the objective means of salvation such as if they acted out of a kind of ignorance. This has been noted throughout church history and in 1863, Pope Pius I said the following, because God knows searches and clearly understands the minds, hearts, thoughts and nature of all his supreme kindness and clemency do not permit anyone at all who is not guilty of deliberate sin to suffer eternal punishments. Also well known is the Catholic teaching that no one can be saved outside the Catholic church. Eternal salvation cannot be obtained by those who oppose the authority and statements of the same church and are stubbornly separated from the unity of the church and quote, this is a huge topic. I’ve already addressed my previous reply to Redeem Zoomer, which I’ll link below. I’d also recommend this video from Christian Wagner on the subject and this article from Eric Ibarra on Tante Domino, both of which I’ll link in the description. Zi also takes issue with the idea that the only people condemned for non-belief are those who know Catholicism is true and still reject it. He says this stretches invincible ignorance because as he says,
CLIP:
Who in their right mind would know something is true and necessary for salvation and still reject it?
TRENT:
Well, we can ask the same question of those who know certain actions are necessary for salvation and still commit grave sins. People apparently in their right mind do that every day. That means the group of people who know Catholicism is true and still reject. It should not be ridiculed as an absurd hypothetical, however, RZ does make a good point about invincible ignorance. Traditionally, this referred to people who are ignorant of correct doctrine and could not overcome their ignorance on their own Vincible ignorance on the other hand, is quite common and there are many people who hear the voice of conscience telling them to learn more about Jesus Christ or learn more about his church and then they don’t listen to that voice because they know deep down it would be too hard or too risky to follow and they’d rather not do anything and just remain in ignorance.
Vatican two even says that salvation is a mere possibility for non-Catholics, not a probability and says the following, but often men deceived by the evil one, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie serving the creature rather than the Creator or some there are who living and dying in this world without God are exposed to final despair. Wherefore to promote the glory of God and procure the salvation of all of these and mindful of the command of the Lord, preach the gospel to every creature. The church fosters the missions with care and attention. Contradiction number two refers to the alleged contradiction between the authority of the Pope and the authority of ecumenical councils, especially in regard to things like the Western schism where there was a dispute about the identity of the true pope. I’ll refer you to Orthodox video on this subject for a complete breakdown of the issue, but I just want to address one part of R Z’s reply. In his original video, he claimed that the Vatican took an insanely high view of papal authority through the Pope basically acting like a Star Wars villain.
CLIP:
The main issue debated at the council was the infallibility of the Pope. Most members of the council supported it, but to varying degrees in frustration, Pope Pius the I in a Darth city manner declared I am the church and pressured all the bishops who didn’t support his infallibility to leave with the more moderate Bishop Swan. The council took a radical ultra mountainous position.
TRENT:
This makes it sound like Pope Pius the ninth took out his lightsaber and cut down the bishop standing in his way of declaring him being infallible, but that’s not what happened. Even if such a scenario would be pretty awesome if it did happen. In this article summarizing John O’Malley’s history of Vatican one, it says that because of the encroaching war between France and Germany, bishops had begun drifting home so that O’Malley tells us before the final vote in July, nearly a quarter of them were gone. Some left out of frustration, some to escape the war, but most did so to avoid a divisive non plat vote. On the final document, these bishops were called inopportune because most of them did not disagree with the dogma of papal infallibility. They just considered such an infallible declaration to be inopportune and more harmful to the cause of Christian ecumenism.
The majority of the council always favored the proposal so it would’ve passed regardless. Finally, the claim that Pope the ninth said, I am the tradition or I am. The church is incredibly suspect as it only comes from second and thirdhand accounts which contradict each other. As early as 1872, the Roman periodical Las Cica called out this propaganda saying the following, yet, the imp prudence of this singular narrator grows to the utmost when without citing writings or witnesses, he attributes heretical concepts and insulate propositions to some bishops, to cardinal greedy who is challenging papal infallibility with tradition, he angrily replied, I am tradition. I’ll make you profess your faith. Again, a slander full of foolishness for it attributes incredible ignorance to a most learned cardinal and places on the lips of a most wise and humble pope. Words intoxicated with falsehood and arrogance. The most prominent account describing this alleged exchange is from IANA’s Vinger, a German theologian who was a fierce critic of Pope Knife who later went on to be a formative influence of thematic old Catholic church.
Number three, second NAIA and veneration of icons. I have a long discussion of this issue in my response to Gavin Orland, so I’m not going to rehash all of those points here, but I will refer our viewers also to a book published last year by Michael Garten that questions assumptions about the lack of veneration of sacred images prior to the Council of Nsea, especially because of overlooked archeological evidence. RZ even admits this isn’t his strongest argument because it does not involve two contradictory magisterial statements at best. Second Nsea is wrong about the apostolic origins of icon veneration, but even if you believe sacred images came about later in church history, that can be a legitimate doctrinal development. RZ says believing icon veneration develops centuries after the apostles constitutes denying second nyia, but not everything said in ecumenical counsel becomes enduring doctrine or dogma. RZ says, however, Catholics cannot do this because second IIA relies on icon veneration coming from the apostles to justify the practice, but the specific anathema RZ quotes in his video only says it condemns the claim that making of images is a diabolical invention and not a tradition of our Holy Fathers, which doesn’t say anything about icons.
Going all the way back to the apostles and images were a tradition going back to the Patristic age, as can be seen in St. Basil, the greats homily on St. Barham where he tells painters adorned by your art, the mutilated figure of this officer of our army. As I show on my previous episode on the matter, the early church fathers did not oppose icons by citing the second commandment. They opposed it through different philosophical arguments that other fathers disputed. By the time we get to the second council of Nsea, the church saw the need of intervening and restricting those Christians who would tell other Christians paying respect to a sacred person through a sacred image as sinful. For a complete breakdown of this issue of icon veneration and Catholic doctrine. See the video by Swan Saana that I’ve linked below. Number five, has confession always been private.
RZ says that the current catechism and the counsel of Trent contradict each other because Trent in Foully teaches that the following statement is false. The manner of confessing secretly to a priest alone, which the church hath ever observed from the beginning and doth observe is alien from the institution and command of Christ and is a human invention. However, paragraph 1447 of the catechism says in the early church that for some sins penitence had to do public penance for their sins often for years before receiving reconciliation. It then says that since the early middle ages, the sacrament has been performed in secret between penitent and priest. Now this cannot be used for the logical argument against Catholicism because the catechism is not infallible. Moreover, in these discussions people often confuse public acts of penance or sorrow for sin with public confession of the sins themselves. In fact, I have been guilty of spreading the common myth that confession of sins in the early church was done publicly before the congregation mepa culpa mepa.
I now see that there is very little evidence for this position. The first century document that did Ake says in the church you shall acknowledge your transgressions, but that doesn’t mean a person must confess his sins out loud to all the people in the church. Catholics still go to church for private confession and the evidence shows private confession existed long before the seventh century. St. Augustine talks about not wanting to publicly disclose that a person is a grave sinner by turning them away from communion, but this would not be necessary if confession of sins was already done in public, and so everybody knew each other’s sins. That’s why Hubbard and his thesis on this issue says the following, there appears to be no evidence whatsoever in Augustine’s writings to indicate that an individual sins were read out in public. The evidence from writers like Cian in the third century suggest that there was a long tradition of seeking out priests alone and not priests with the entire congregation for the solitary medicine of confession.
The catechism may simply be an error here or it may just be a sloppy way of saying that the assignment of penances, which was done publicly without acknowledging the nature of the sins, requiring the penance that that became private by the early Middle ages and is not about the confession of sins themselves. Either way, this is just a development in how the sacrament is celebrated, not a change in the essential form of the sacrament instituted by Christ who said that the apostles had the power to forgive and retain sins. Such an instruction would entail that sins must be confessed to the apostles so they could decide if they should forgive a truly contrite person or retain the sins of a person who isn’t truly sorry for what they’ve done. Number six is the death penalty immoral. RZ says the main problem here is that older sources like the catechism of the Council of Trent say the death penalty is good, whereas the current catechism says it is bad because it is an attack on human dignity and so it is now inadmissible.
Like the previous argument, this one cannot be used for the logical argument against Catholicism because it involves a non infallible teaching in the catechism. It could be a case that Pope Francis is making a prudential judgment about the death penalty that can be rejected after careful consideration or he was issuing a doctrinal teaching that falls into the rare category of doctrinal errors committed by a Pope. Don and Veda says the following, when it comes to the question of interventions in the prudential order, it could happen that some magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies. Bishops and their advisors have not always taken into immediate consideration every aspect or the entire complexity of a question, but it would be contrary to the truth if proceeding from some cases one were to conclude that the church’s magisterium can be habitually mistaken in its prudential judgments or that it does not enjoy divine assistance in the integral exercise of its mission.
So the catechisms teaching could be a mistaken prudential judgment or it could be a rare mistaken case of doctrine just like a pope in the Middle Ages who is mistaken about the beatific vision and had to be corrected on that later. Though these errors are rare and far between, which is why in some cases of non infallibly defined doctrine, a person could privately struggle with this doctrine. They just couldn’t publicly dissent from it. I’ll leave a link in the description below with an article from Jimmy Aiken describing how someone who doesn’t accept the church’s teaching on the death penalty could respond to their feelings about the issue, but there is another option for addressing this difficulty. One could see this part of the catechism as an authentic development of the doctrine regarding the death penalty. RZ says, the catechism teaches the death penalty is inherently immoral, but the catechism doesn’t use that language or call the death penalty intrinsically evil.
The catechism basically says the death penalty is bad and so we should not use it anymore even if different social conditions in the past justified its use. The death penalty was never a part of God’s plan from creation for human beings, so there will always be something deficient about it given that it came into the world to help human beings respond to the effects of sin. However, RZ says that if the morality of an act can change because of changing social circumstances, then that opens the floodgates for liberals to change Christian teaching on things like sexuality. But sexuality was a direct part of God’s plan for humanity from the beginning of creation. It was written into our very being. This is why core doctrines on sexuality like the man, woman nature of marriage cannot change. However, other doctrines that relate to things that do change over time like the way society might be particularly organized, these things can develop over time.
To make an analogy, debt slavery was never part of God’s plan for human beings. Yet the Bible contains passages like slaves obey your masters and some church fathers taught that debt slavery was part of God’s plan for regulating human inequalities brought about by sin and even though though this institution was once considered good or useful throughout a long part of church history, it can no longer be tolerated by Catholics in the modern world. This same kind of thinking can also be applied to the death penalty which was once meted out for all kinds of crimes, even things like theft, which we no longer consider to warrant capital punishment and because Protestants must explain how the biblical teaching on slavery developed so that what was once considered admissible for Christians is now at the very least inadmissible, they should be able to see how Catholics can chart a similar trajectory in the church’s views on the death penalty.
Obviously, a lot more can be set on this subject and I can hear several objections already being raised to me comparing the death penalty to death slavery. That’s why I’m going to address this in a longer episode dedicated just to the issue of the death penalty, and I’m going to continue on with R Z’s contradictions and I’ll note later in this episode. Why even if you think the change in the teaching on the death penalty is an error on the Catholic church’s part that does not open the door for Protestantism to become a viable alternative. Number seven, worship with non-Catholics. In Mortali Animos Pope 11 criticized people who call themselves pan Christians and wanted all believers to be united into one invisible church rather than be united within the visible Catholic church that Christ established. RZ calls Mali Animos a clear and uncompromising rejection of the ecumenical movement, but that’s not true.
In his book, ecumenical Associations James Oliver says, Pope Xi both welcome the separated brethren and clearly stated what was and was not possible for Catholics regarding dialogue with non-Catholic Christians concerning theological differences and unity. Catholics cannot pray with non-Catholics in an active sense that affirms their deficient worship, but we can pray with non-Catholics in another sense, namely in the sense of praying in their presence or passively worshiping alongside them. Saint Alfonso Leggo said the following, it is not permitted to be present at the sacred rights of infidels and heretics in such a way that you would be judged to be in communion with them. Pi C 11 encyclical contains various disciplinary judgments about ecumenism, but these disciplinary judgments can change and be abrogated by later popes just as popes have changed how long one must fast before receiving the Eucharist over the course of church history in 1949 with permission from Pope Pius 12, the congregation of the doctrine of the faith released a document on ecumenism that outlined when it was and was not appropriate.
So this is not some radical post Vatican II development. Here’s a part of the 1949 instruction. The previous permission of the Holy Sea special for each case is always required and in the petition asking for it, it must also be stated, what are the questions to be treated and who the speakers are to be? Although in all these meetings and conferences, any communication whatsoever in worship must be avoided. Yet the recitation in common of the Lord’s Prayer or of some prayer approved by the Catholic church is not forbidden for opening or closing the said meetings. So we see ecumenism was not universally condemned, it was instead regulated and how it is regulated can change over time as long as one does not directly sanction taking part in false acts of worship like offering sacrifice to a false God. Number eight, the issue of usury, usury or charging interest on loans involves the teachings of the second ladder in council, which RZ says is infallible.
However, second ladder in never made an infallible declaration on usury. John Nunan, who’s written the most famous study in the history of usury and church teaching admits that there have never been any infallible declarations saying that charging interest on loans is always immoral, only longstanding teachings and practice in the early church. The only related infallible teaching will be the fifth laddering council’s infallible decree that the mounts of piety, a kind of charitable medieval pawn shop where one could borrow money did not constitute the sin of usy. The Bible and church history never treat lending money at interest as being intrinsically evil or something that can never be done under any circumstance. For example, the Bible does not allow Christians to commit adultery with unbelievers rather than believers. It universally outlaws adultery. However, it did allow believers to engage in practices that caused harm and it limited the harm that was caused over time.
This can be seen in the Old Testament saying an Israelite could not buy other Israelites as slaves or make other Israelites to facto slaves by lending money to them. However, in Israelite could buy slaves from foreigners and he could lend money to foreigners. In the writings of the church, fathers usury was primarily condemned because it harmed the poor. St. Basil and St. Ambrose described usury leading to children being sold into slavery or people unloving themselves in despair over debts they could not pay the second lettering. Council condemned usury because of the ferocious greed of user, but it did not do so because it was a principle of justice or say that it was intrinsically wrong. Nunan who used the change in the teaching on usury to try and argue the church had changed his teaching on contraception admits that the church since the Middle ages has had the same teaching on lending money.
It’s just been applied in different ways. He writes the following usury, the act of taking profit on a loan without a just title is sinful. What is a just title? What is technically to be treated as a loan are matters of debate, positive law and changing evolution. The development of these points is great, but the pure and narrow dogma is the same today as in 1200. In other words, through most of modern church history, it was assumed money lending harm the poor, and so loans were presumed evil unless they could be proven to have a justifiable reason or a just title. However, as modern economies changed, this presumption also changed until we get to the modern era where money lending is presumed to be good unless there’s evidence to show in a particular case that it’s bad, like high interest rates. Catholic philosopher Christopher Kor says this would be on par with the church teaching that surgery is evil in the Middle Ages because it was so dangerous.
However, the church would then allow surgery in the modern age because now it’s become relatively safe. I’d recommend the article linked Below by Dr. Cazo for more complete discussion of this issue. Number nine, communion under both kinds. This alleged contradiction deals with the practice of offering either the body of Christ under the form of bread or the blood of Christ under the form of wine to communicates and not both of them at the same time. RZ admits this is not an infallible contradiction, so it can’t be used in a logical argument against Catholicism. The church does infallibly teach that it is not necessary to receive Christ under the form of bread and the form of wine in order to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist and this teaching has not been contradicted. Instead, this objection will be part of R Z’s evidential argument because he claims this shows the Catholic church has not retained important apostolic traditions, but even early Protestants recognize that one could fully receive Christ through communion in one kind.
The reform theologian Francis Turan said, although both signs are not received, they do not cease to be made partakers of the whole thing signified, which is indivisible. One Corinthians 1127 refers to people who eat the bread or drink the blood unworthily, which implies some may do one or the other and still receive the full blessings when this is done reverently or a full punishment when it’s done without reverence. For more complete treatment of this issue, see the YouTube channel since 33 AD and their video on the subject link below and be sure to check out the rest of his channel because he has really solid apologetic content that goes beyond the typical surface level answers and objections. Numbers 10 and 11 deal with the Pope’s temporal authority and papal supremacy in the first millennium. First Protestants and Catholics would agree that no earthly power can be an ultimate authority.
Romans 13 says, the state only has power because of God’s design. That means the civil state must be subordinate to God. It falls from this that the state must be subordinate to the church of the living God and if the church has a supreme pastor, the state must be subordinate to that pastor IE the Pope. But that does not mean the church should dictate everything the state does or on the other extreme that the church should have no involvement in the runnings of the state whatsoever. Throughout the history of Christendom, the Pope acquired and lost power as the ruler of particular lands and peoples even today the Pope is a particular ruler and head of state, albeit the smallest country on earth over time, the understanding of the Pope’s temporal authority or the authority over powers in this world. In contrast to his spiritual authority, this has changed as can be seen in the work of the Catholic theologian Francisco Suarez in 16th century.
Just because temporal power often coincided with papal authority does not mean temporal power is an essential part of the papal office. Don Veda says the following, the theologian knows that some judges of the magisterium could be justified at the time in which they were made because while the pronouncements contain true assertions and others which were not sure, both types were inextricably connected, only time is permitted discernment and after deeper study the attainment of true doctrinal progress. Contradiction number 11 details more with the Pope’s supreme spiritual authority, which is an essential part of the papal office. The contradiction claims to be between Vatican One’s assertion about the antiquity of this authority and a recent Vatican document on the papacy and ecumenism, but this does not form a logical argument against Catholicism because neither of these statements was infallibly defined. The recent Vatican document outright says in it that it is a study document that does not claim to exhaust the subject nor to summarize the Catholic magisterium on it, the Vatican one statement on the Pope’s authority being known in every age isn’t an infallible teaching either.
In fact, this passage which RZ cited in his video was not a bombastic declaration from 1870 the year when the council was held. Instead, it was a quote from the papal Legat Philip at the Council of Ephesus in the year 4 31, which provides evidence that Vatican one is indeed correct and that the Pope’s primacy was known in the early church. If you want the complete treatment of evidence for the papacy in the first millennium, I recommend Eric IRA’s book The Papacy revisiting the debate between Catholics and Orthodox Number 12, giving communion to the divorced and remarried. This like the others does not involve any logical contradictions because at most one chapter or even just one footnote of Pope Francis’ ex of Morris Letitia is an error. Specifically, it is the material dealing with couples in invalid marriages being able to receive communion under some circumstances.
The document does not contradict the infallible teaching that remarriage after divorce involves the sin of adultery. It simply raises the issue of whether some couples in these kinds of unions are not fully culpable for their sinful sexual relations and so they could still receive communion. The idea that someone is not fully culpable for his or her sins has been known all throughout church history, which means that not all grave acts are mortal sins to be Im mortal sin. A person must also have full knowledge and fully consent to a grave act and our understanding of grave sin and moral acts can develop over time. To give you an example, the church once refused funerals for people who died by being unli because they were considered manifest grave sinners. But we now know that unliving while still being a grave act is not automatically a mortal sin because a person might not be culpable for the sin due to something like a mental illness.
In those cases, a person does not have full knowledge or they don’t have full consent, but that would not eliminate the category of mortally sinful unli as someone might commit this act out of a malicious desire for others to imitate him or to escape rightful punishment in this life. Likewise, there could be cases where a spouse in an invalid marriage feels compelled to have sexual relations and she cannot leave the situation so her culpability for this act or his culpability for this act would be diminished because the person lacks full consent. If you want more on the subject, I recommend Pedro Gabrielle’s book, the Orthodoxy of a Morris Letitia. Now it’s fair, one could argue that a Morris Letitia, even if it’s true in principle for a tiny minority of cases, gives ammunition to people who would excuse sin for a large number of cases rather than accompany the truly repentant who are in difficult situations, and that would be a prudential judgment, not a dogmatic fact against the truth of Catholicism.
But keep in mind that a Morris Letitia warns against views that would generalize a willful neglect of the moral law just because of a few exceptional cases where a person lacks culpability. It says the following, a lukewarm attitude, any kind of relativism or an undue reticence. In proposing that ideal would be a lack of fidelity to the gospel and also of love on the part of the church for young people themselves to show understanding in the face of exceptional situations never implies dimming the light of the fuller ideal or proposing less than what Jesus offers to the human being. Number 13, religious liberty. This alleged contradiction involves the syllabus of errors, the encyclical, libert tos, and Vatican. Two on the question religious liberty, none of which are infallible documents. So once again, the logical argument can’t move forward. Past condemnations of religious liberty, were focused on the idea that error has no rights and religion should not be viewed through an indifferent tense lens which sees all faces containing the same paths to reach God, but that does not preclude the church from defending a concept of religious liberty that recognizes people have rights and so the state should not infringe on their right to worship God in a way that coerces them to belong to the true religion.
The Second Vatican Council even said the truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power, religious freedom in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore, it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men in societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ. For more on this subject, check out this article@catholic.com. Finally, RZ says that changes in the mass being in the vernacular rather than Latin are not a dogmatic contradiction, so that was his 14th contradiction. I’m not going to ignore it because obviously the church has the authority to decide what are the non-essential elements of the liturgy that can change, which includes the language the liturgy is celebrated in.
Now, as I said before, there’s no way I could comprehensively address all of the issues r he raised while keeping this episode to a manageable length. Even though it’s already much longer than my normal episodes, it’s just a lot easier to make an objection than to answer an objection, but hopefully in the future I’ll address some of these topics in their own episodes. I do hope you’ve seen that the examples RZ chose do not furnish a solid logical argument against Catholicism because there’s no case of two infallible teachings directly contradicting each other. We aren’t even talking about explaining away alleged contradictions as Christians must often do in defending scripture. We’re just saying that in basically all of these cases and the sources that are cited, they aren’t infallibly defined teachings at all, so any errors in them would not refute Catholicism. We’ve also seen there’s good reason to believe that these are not even errors, they are byproducts of authentic doctrinal development.
Now, RZ might object that this is all very convenient whenever a teaching gives the Catholic church trouble. Just say it isn’t infallible. But notice that RZ never gave a criteria for determining when a concealer or papal decree is infallible, and he admits throughout his video it’s possible some of these statements are not infallible in nature, so he doesn’t have any grounds to say a Catholic who denies these statements are infallible is being arbitrary. Instead, a Catholic can say the church has various well agreed upon methods to determine the presence of infallible teachings in magisterial documents like the presence of language saying something is being defined. The code of Canon law is also clear that no doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident for more on that issue. See my colleague Jimmy Akins book Teaching with Authority, so there is not a strong logical argument against Catholicism, and the evidential argument is undermined by explanations that show these changes of the result of authentic doctrinal development.
This would be similar to a theist who says that there is no good logical argument from evil and seemingly gratuitous evils are not actually gratuitous because their purpose in promoting the good can be explained. But to continue the analogy a bit further, a theist could also say, look, even if you don’t accept my explanations for why God allows certain evils that wouldn’t show atheism is true because theism is still better at explaining evil in the world around us than atheism. Likewise, even if you don’t accept my previous explanations for these apparent doctrinal changes that would not show Protestantism were true, that’s because Catholicism is still better at safeguarding doctrine than Protestantism. I can make this argument because once RZ criticized Catholicism for changing non infallible teachings, he opened the door to comparing it to Protestantism on this same question and seeing which one is at least better at safeguarding revelation.
Protestants believe the church is an authoritative fallible institution, whereas Catholics believe the church can act infallibly, but it does not always act infallibly. Catholics cannot falsify Protestantism through any single instance of doctrinal change because Protestants could just say their church and their confessions are not infallible. However, ar Z’s argument about the total number of changes in non infallible teaching making Catholicism less likely to be true also applies to Protestantism because Protestantism also gives non infallible teachings that as we saw earlier in this episode, RZ admits can change over time or could be an error, and this shows that these ecclesial communities are not reliable sources of sound doctrine or at least they’re much less reliable than Catholicism and that’s all the Catholic needs to prove. For example, RZ says that Catholic distinctions about infallible doctrine are not foolproof as Catholic theologians disagree about which doctrines have been infallibly defined.
While Protestants agree there are at least 66 infallible books in the Bible, Protestants may not have an infallible canon list for scripture, but Catholics don’t have an infallible infallible doctrine list either, so it doesn’t matter. But I think the best way to answer critiques like these is through a best rather than an only paradigm saying that only the Catholic church is free from doctrinal confusion is not true. It’s a bad apologetic. Instead, one can make the more modest and defensible claim that Catholicism is the best or it has the least doctrinal confusion. This can be seen in its representatives of the Catholic magisterium being more in agreement about which doctrines are essential to the faith than the members of what you might call the Protestant magisterium pastors and theologians being in agreement on what constitute essential doctrine. We also must remember that classical Protestants like rz reject what they call solo scriptura or the claim that the church has no authority and the Bible is the only authority.
This is why classical Protestants subscribe to creeds and confessions like the London Baptist Confession or the Westminster Confession that RZ follows, or at least the later version of it, which he says is without error but not divinely protected from error. So a Catholic can make this counterargument. Catholicism is the most trustworthy guide to doctrine because even if you believe it has aired regarding some non infallible teachings in the past, Protestantism has made more errors on more important doctrines. As so it is less likely to be true than Catholicism. Remember, R Z’s evidential argument only deals with probabilities, so all the Catholic must do is show that Protestantism has a higher probability of being false than Catholicism, not that Catholicism is free from any difficulties that would lower its probability of being true, and some of the issues that Arzi brought up also cut against the probability Protestantism is true.
For example, if you fault Catholicism for changing the pre medieval non infallible teaching on usury found in the early church fathers, then you have to fault Protestants for doing the same thing because they in general do not think lending money at interest is sinful. If you fault Catholics for changing the pre medieval, non infallible teaching on the permissibility of executing heretics, then you have to fault Protestants for doing the same thing. Since most modern Protestants say that this should no longer be done or it’s inadmissible if you will, even though the Protestant reformers were fine with it, as can be seen in Philip Mellon’s desire to execute Anabaptist and John Calvin’s execution of the heretic Michael Vedas, and similar to changes in the teaching on the death penalty, the Protestant reformers generally accepted the morality of slavery and many Protestants argued that even racial slavery was part of God’s plan for humanity as can be seen in books like a Bible defense of slavery, the Catholic church’s teaching on slavery also had to develop during this period.
But my point is that by RZ standard, Protestantism also was not reliable regarding what Christians ought to believe on this moral issue. However, there are many cases where Protestants have changed their teaching on doctrines while Catholics have retained the apostolic tradition on these matters. In my episode on pro-choice Protestantism for example, I showed that even many conservative nomination and conservative figures like Billy Graham accepted the morality of abortion in some respect during the 1960s and 1970s and didn’t repent of this error until eighties and nineties. Even though the Catholic church always condemned abortion, they were so outspoken and consistent on this matter that Protestants in the United States said that opposition to abortion was a Catholic issue. Moreover, many Protestant denominations affirm so-called same-sex marriage and ordained female pastors, but the Catholic church does not do this. It has safeguarded apostolic tradition, R Z’s own denomination, the Presbyterian church USA where he’s studying to be a pastor is pro homosexuality and so-called same-sex marriage is prole abortion and does not think that abortion is a sin and ordained so-called female pastors.
Now, RZ says that Christians should not abandon churches like this but work to reform them a movement he calls Operation Reconquista. But this still shows that these Protestant ecclesial communities are very, very fallible in nature, much more so than Catholicism. However, even the most conservative Protestant denominations and the Eastern Orthodox have changed their teachings on important issues like the permissibility of contraception or the permissibility of remarriage after divorce. The Catholic church in contrast, has retained its condemnation of these sins and as the only major church to do so, Protestant denominations also demonstrate their fallibility by failing to condemn or in some cases embracing modern evils like in feature ization or renting out wombs through gestational surrogacy. Even though the Catholic church has repudiated these evils. We also have no idea if Protestants have maintained the apostolic traditions regarding many other important issues. For example, RZ objects to the Catholic church seeming to change its teaching on who can be saved, but Protestants don’t even agree on this teaching.
RZ himself has said that anyone without exception who never hears the gospel even through no fault of his own because the person never met a Christian is lost. But many, many Protestants disagree with this harsh form of exclusivism, which would say that a nine-year-old Native American girl who reached the age of moral accountability is definitely burning in hell because she was born before Christian missionaries arrive to her people. Protestantisms disagreements also concern important issues like the mode of baptism or who can be baptized. In contrast, the Catholic churches both east and west, agree on the conditions for the validity and lysate of the sacraments. Even if they have different liturgical practices, they do not consider, for example, a Catholic who is baptized as an infant with pouring to have an invalid baptism. In comparison to an adult undergoing full immersion, both forms of baptism are valid.
So if you’re a Catholic and ar Z’s video shook you by bringing up instances where the Catholic church seemed to change non infallible teaching, remember that the grass is not greener on the other side. Ask yourself, which theological framework has the fewest number of difficulties instead of jumping ship at the first sign of difficulties? And remember, at the end of the day, our belief in the faith does not rest on the ability to answer every single argument raised against it. Most Protestants admit they cannot personally explain every alleged contradiction in scripture that atheists might present to them, but their conviction scripture is true, trumps those arguments and shows the contradictions are only apparent and not real. Likewise, Catholics can rest in their knowledge of the church being the pillar and foundation of truth, the authority that explains why we even have a Bible that constitutes diverse human writings, and we can know these writings are sacred scripture and that they have divine authority and that all of this is the best explanation for the Christian faith, even if like many other aspects of the faith difficulties will remain in our understanding of it until the Lord comes again in glory.
Thank you all so much for watching and don’t forget to check out the links below to go deeper on many of these issues.