Comment by dragonwriter
8 months ago
As someone who has been Catholic most of my life, it certainly applies just as much to the Catholic Church (even to there being diverse beliefs within the Church at any given time, and certainly to change over time.)
Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change because God can't change. Again, if it changes, then it isn't true. I'm not (here) arguing that it's true; only that in order to adhere to it, one must hold that it doesn't change. That, obviously, doesn't imply that every member of the Catholic Church believes the same thing. Nor does it imply that practice will look different in various times and places, although practice will always have the same goal (Union with the Divine Essence) and therefore be in essence the same thing.
EDIT: "will look different" should obviously be "will not look different"
> Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change
Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.
> Again, if it changes, then it isn't true.
If it changes, and it was claimed to be a universal constant, than either the before- or after-change version isn't true, sure, that's trivially true.
I said
>> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.
To which you said
> "The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time
> Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.
The teaching of the Catholic Church just is revelation. Individual Catholics or churchmen may believe all kinds of things, some contrary to revelation and/or each other, but that's something distinct. What has manifestly changed?
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> Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change because God can't change.
The "God can't change" part seems a bit above our paygrade, no?
Not to mention: Who are we to say that God wouldn't reveal things to us gradually — and maybe in a changing way?
EXAMPLE: We still teach our kids that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Later, we refine the teachings.
This misunderstands the theology and metaphysics very profoundly.
The immutability of God is a necessary theological conclusion. If God changes, then He isn't God, by definition. It would be a metaphysical absurdity. Change presupposes imperfection and, therefore the potential for perfection, i.e., full actualization, but God as the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, is pure act with no potential left to actualize. God is fully dynamic, but this is quite different from change. He may appear to change from our temporal perspective as events are distributed in time, but from an eternal perspective, all is actualized, "simultaneous", so to speak.
W.r.t. gradual revelation, that is exactly what Scripture is a record of. A Catholic reading will demonstrate that revelation is in the business of slowly revealing to Man who God is (at least that which cannot be known through unaided reason; quite a bit can be known through reason alone), preparing him for the culmination of public revelation in the Incarnation of the Logos, something foreshadowed in the Old Testament. And furthermore, the Catholic Church recognizes the development of doctrine, which you could call a refinement and deepening of understanding of what has been revealed. I like the analogy to mathematics, even if it is imperfect: all the theorems that follow from a set of axioms are in a sense already in the axioms, and so mathematics is in the business of unpacking them.
However, this gradual revelation and development of doctrine, in order to be authentic, cannot contradict what was known previously, at least to a certain accuracy, if not precision. Of course, here is where people can get tripped up by analogical devices and literal-mindedness. Scripture is written using the idioms, paradigms, and language of the people who wrote it and for whom it was written. That means that some of the language may not agree with strict scientific descriptions of the 21st century. However, when that does occur, you will note that the sense is not the reference: when the Bible speaks of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west in order to communicate some theological truth, it is not making astronomical claims about the sun and the earth. It is using this language as instruments to communicate something, often by analogy. In fact, analogy is essential to theology, something captured in the concept of the analogia entis. Univocal or equivocal approaches to the subject of God have been the source of numerous heresies.
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