Continued from September 14....
Through the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his
truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by
Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the
Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s Dei
Verbum: “by divine revelation God
wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his
will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its
basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and
uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine
revelation. Thus Catholics believe that
just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed
through the Church because they come from him.
As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not
change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of
“development” that Blessed John Henry Newman discussed in his Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine: “the bodily structure of a grown man is not merely
that of a magnified boy; he differs from what he was in his make and
proportions; still manhood is the perfection of boyhood, adding something of
its own, yet keeping what it finds.” Here a caution: to say the Church “develops,” is not to say the Church “changes.” What is true about God’s teachings revealed through the Church
2,000 years ago is just as true in the twenty-first century.
We can now see why modern secularists are so contemptuous and spiteful toward the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church. They do not understand Her fundamental assumptions, and so utter foolish questions such as,
“When will the Catholic Church come into the twenty-first century? Foolish
because this question itself is permeated with a postulation about progress
toward perfection that does not make sense to the Catholic worldview. The more
appropriate question? What has God revealed to us about what it means to live a
healthy life, and how do we best live that life? The answer, according to
Catholicism, is that we should conform our lives to those timeless truths
revealed through the Church in order to enter into a rightly ordered (not disordered) relationship
with God.
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