stan the man
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Private judgement
Because the Magisterium is an essential component of the Church and authorized by God, it must have corresponding authority and must be able to bind private judgments so that they do not go beyond certain bounds. Boundless private judgment is precisely the problem God set up the Magisterium to cure. There is simply no way to harmonize the existence of a divinely authorized Magisterium and an absolute right to private judgment.
There can and is a harmonization between the Magisterium and a limited right to private judgment, and this is what we find in the Catholic Church. Individual laymen and theologians can exercise their private judgment in reading the Scriptures all they want so long as they do not transgress what the Magisterium has settled. There is free reign for private judgment and opinion within the bounds of established Christian teaching. It is the crossing of these bounds that the Magisterium was set up to prevent.
This is the way in which the intellect of the individual is harmonized with the teaching authority of Christ, as exercised through his Church. God gave each individual a rational soul which, if it is not impeded, will enable him to learn, understand, and know the Scriptures and the teachings of Christ. This exercise of private interpretation is to be encouraged and fostered. People have been given a faculty by God, and they must be encouraged to fulfill the responsibility that comes along with that faculty.
But they were not given the faculty or the responsibility of building Christian theology from the ground up all by themselves. The average Christian was not given the responsibility to do this, nor the ability to do this. Not even the bishops who constitute the Magisterium have the responsibility or the ability to do this as individuals. Nor does even the pope himself have this responsibility or ability, since he is bound by all the previous decisions of the Magisterium. No one individual, since the day that public revelation stopped, has had the right or responsibility to decide all of the Christian faith for himself, not even the organs of the Magisterium God created.
Thus it is not the case that the Magisterium can simply decide what it wants people to teach and require them to believe that. The Magisterium itself is bound by its own prior infallible teachings and, while it can delve deeper into issues and add new clarity to them, it cannot deny what has once been infallibly settled (consequently, it never has). Thus, under the exercise of the divinely appointed teaching authority, Christian theology grows organically, not mutagenically. New depth, clarity, and context is added to what has been settled, but what has been settled remains settled, as was God's intention from the very beginning.
There is no room in the divine plan to have Christian theology periodically scrapped and reconstructed from the ground up. That is what generates the winds of doctrine the Magisterium is to combat. It is the Magisterium's task to see that Christian theology grows in a stable, orderly, and organic way.
There are not to be periodic "reboots" of Christian theology. If there were to be such, if the Church's theology could so degenerate that it periodically had be scrapped and reconstituted from nothing, then the Church would not be "the pillar and foundation of truth," as the New Testament declares it to be (1 Timothy 3:15), and the Magisterium could not fulfill its function of preventing the faithful from being blown about by every wind of doctrine. Believers could have no security that they were not living in one of the theologically corrupt times before a reboot; nor could they have any sense of doctrinal security during a reboot, when theology was hastily being reformulated; nor could they have any security after a reboot, since they would not know if theology—especially the theology in their denomination—had been reformulated in the right way.
The idea of periodic reboots to Christian theology, rather than slow, organic development into greater clarity and depth, robs the average believer, who is not a theologian, of any security his church is imparting to him the real teachings of Christ, thus making him vulnerable to competing teachings, and thus stopping God's appointed teachers of being able to fulfill their mission of anchoring the average believer so he will not be blown about by the winds of contrary doctrinal claims.
In fact, the attempted reboots of the past have been what has unleashed these winds, as when historic Christian theology is scrapped reformulated, people do not come to the same conclusions about how it is to be recast. Thus the Reformation issued a host of new sects—Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, and others.
And, of course, when people disagree about doctrines, some of them are going to be wrong, and heresies will be taught. When people attempt to reboot the system, heresy and schism are the inevitable consequences, just as system errors and corrupted files are the result of rebooting a computer while its software is still running. The program of the Christian Church must thus be allowed to play itself out to the end. Only in this manner can the accuracy of the results be guaranteed.
All you will do is reinvent the errors of the past that the program has already eliminated. Thus today we see heresies like Gnosticism, Arianism, Sabellianism, and polytheism reappearing in the guises of New Age Christianity, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Oneness Pentecostals, and the Mormons, all of which began as attempts to scrap historic Christian teaching and reboot the system.
Because the Magisterium is an essential component of the Church and authorized by God, it must have corresponding authority and must be able to bind private judgments so that they do not go beyond certain bounds. Boundless private judgment is precisely the problem God set up the Magisterium to cure. There is simply no way to harmonize the existence of a divinely authorized Magisterium and an absolute right to private judgment.
There can and is a harmonization between the Magisterium and a limited right to private judgment, and this is what we find in the Catholic Church. Individual laymen and theologians can exercise their private judgment in reading the Scriptures all they want so long as they do not transgress what the Magisterium has settled. There is free reign for private judgment and opinion within the bounds of established Christian teaching. It is the crossing of these bounds that the Magisterium was set up to prevent.
This is the way in which the intellect of the individual is harmonized with the teaching authority of Christ, as exercised through his Church. God gave each individual a rational soul which, if it is not impeded, will enable him to learn, understand, and know the Scriptures and the teachings of Christ. This exercise of private interpretation is to be encouraged and fostered. People have been given a faculty by God, and they must be encouraged to fulfill the responsibility that comes along with that faculty.
But they were not given the faculty or the responsibility of building Christian theology from the ground up all by themselves. The average Christian was not given the responsibility to do this, nor the ability to do this. Not even the bishops who constitute the Magisterium have the responsibility or the ability to do this as individuals. Nor does even the pope himself have this responsibility or ability, since he is bound by all the previous decisions of the Magisterium. No one individual, since the day that public revelation stopped, has had the right or responsibility to decide all of the Christian faith for himself, not even the organs of the Magisterium God created.
Thus it is not the case that the Magisterium can simply decide what it wants people to teach and require them to believe that. The Magisterium itself is bound by its own prior infallible teachings and, while it can delve deeper into issues and add new clarity to them, it cannot deny what has once been infallibly settled (consequently, it never has). Thus, under the exercise of the divinely appointed teaching authority, Christian theology grows organically, not mutagenically. New depth, clarity, and context is added to what has been settled, but what has been settled remains settled, as was God's intention from the very beginning.
There is no room in the divine plan to have Christian theology periodically scrapped and reconstructed from the ground up. That is what generates the winds of doctrine the Magisterium is to combat. It is the Magisterium's task to see that Christian theology grows in a stable, orderly, and organic way.
There are not to be periodic "reboots" of Christian theology. If there were to be such, if the Church's theology could so degenerate that it periodically had be scrapped and reconstituted from nothing, then the Church would not be "the pillar and foundation of truth," as the New Testament declares it to be (1 Timothy 3:15), and the Magisterium could not fulfill its function of preventing the faithful from being blown about by every wind of doctrine. Believers could have no security that they were not living in one of the theologically corrupt times before a reboot; nor could they have any sense of doctrinal security during a reboot, when theology was hastily being reformulated; nor could they have any security after a reboot, since they would not know if theology—especially the theology in their denomination—had been reformulated in the right way.
The idea of periodic reboots to Christian theology, rather than slow, organic development into greater clarity and depth, robs the average believer, who is not a theologian, of any security his church is imparting to him the real teachings of Christ, thus making him vulnerable to competing teachings, and thus stopping God's appointed teachers of being able to fulfill their mission of anchoring the average believer so he will not be blown about by the winds of contrary doctrinal claims.
In fact, the attempted reboots of the past have been what has unleashed these winds, as when historic Christian theology is scrapped reformulated, people do not come to the same conclusions about how it is to be recast. Thus the Reformation issued a host of new sects—Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, and others.
And, of course, when people disagree about doctrines, some of them are going to be wrong, and heresies will be taught. When people attempt to reboot the system, heresy and schism are the inevitable consequences, just as system errors and corrupted files are the result of rebooting a computer while its software is still running. The program of the Christian Church must thus be allowed to play itself out to the end. Only in this manner can the accuracy of the results be guaranteed.
All you will do is reinvent the errors of the past that the program has already eliminated. Thus today we see heresies like Gnosticism, Arianism, Sabellianism, and polytheism reappearing in the guises of New Age Christianity, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Oneness Pentecostals, and the Mormons, all of which began as attempts to scrap historic Christian teaching and reboot the system.
