Does Dogma Evolve?
You know the conversations.
“Catholicism is so out-dated and inflexible!” “You don’t really need to follow the Vatican’s teaching to be loyal to the faith.” “Catholic to Catholic Church: It’s Reality-Check Time.”
There are all manner of arguments people make to assert that the Catholic Church should evolve with the times to stay modern, to gain proselytes lest followers depart and the cranky old religion ceases to exist. “Change or perish!” they say.
And they’ve been saying it for 2,000 plus years.
It’s sensible to reply, “Well, Truth does not change.” It’s easy to then launch into an explanation about the objectivity and immutability of Divine Revelation, until the inquisitor asks you about, say, the sacraments.
People both inside and outside the Church argue that dogma has in fact evolved over time and the evolution of the sacraments are often cited as evidence. They’ll say marriage wasn’t originally a sacrament and penance was just developed to control people; they’ll point out that Christ said nothing about there being seven sacraments and, rather, those rituals just evolved as part of a complex rubric to make Christianity relevant to changing cultures. And so forth. It’s the same type of argument made for other issues as well, and the intent is to prove that religion is subjective.
You may counter with the objective dogmatic definitions put forth at the Council of Trent articulating the Seven Sacraments instituted by Christ: “If anyone says that the sacraments of the New Law were not all instituted by our Lord Jesus Christ, or that there are more or less than seven…let him be [ahem] anathema.” Your opponent, hopefully interested in sincerely understanding this question, will then be quick to remind you that the Council of Trent wasn’t held until 1547 and the Didache from the first or second century only mentions the precepts of Baptism and the Eucharist.
And you might be stumped. Does dogma evolve?
Dogma is Latin and it refers to the tenets or doctrine authoritatively laid down by God. In other words, it is God’s Law. I struggled with this question, yet it seemed so familiar. Then it hit me. Science! This question is relevant to the modern scientific mind, believer or non-believer, because it’s the same as asking whether the laws of physics evolve.
Those are God’s laws too. The honest scientist knows he is not the author of scientific truth; he is the discoverer and communicator of it. God is Author of all Truth. The mysteries of nature are there for us to discover and use to better the conditions in our temporal life. The mysteries of faith were revealed to us by God in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, for the sake of our salvation, to better our condition in eternal life, so to speak.
St. Thomas Aquinas says at the very beginning of his Summa Theologica that theology is the sacred science that seeks to discover how to articulate those divinely revealed truths more purely, guided by the Holy Spirit, over time. The very word “science” implies a systematic study of something objective. Theology is the highest science.
So, it isn’t dogma that evolves; it’s man’s understanding of it that develops.
There always were seven sacraments, even in the earliest days of Christianity before the Church fully articulated them. Even before mankind understood them, the sacraments announced and prepared the Divine Revelation of Christ to be given to the Church. The mystery of the Incarnation, true man and true God, was the foundation for the sacraments and the “powers that come forth” from the Body of Christ as the “masterworks of God” in the new and everlasting covenant. (CCC 1115-1116)
God wrote that equation.
Anyone who thinks dogma should evolve with changing times and cultures so that it is more acceptable to the masses, needs to be reminded that protons and electrons existed before we learned to draw them on paper; that even when no one understood that a microorganism can convert carbohydrates to carbon dioxide and alcohol, we made bread and wine using live yeast; that before Sir Isaac Newton explained the relationship between objects and their motion, the acceleration (a) of a body was still directly proportional to the force (F) and inversely proportional to the mass (m) of it; and that even before a child knows the mathematical proofs to show why you shouldn’t stand in the crosswalk while a school bus is heading right for you, he knows why you shouldn’t argue with objective truth — because you’ll lose.
Truth is truth. All that evolves is the clarity with which we see it.
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Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen
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I hear these arguments all the time & this is a super explanation. I’ll definitely be printing it off and using it. I give doctrine talks to young mothers who are just so eager to KNOW and the more clear the explanation the easier it is for them, especially when they’re only half listening while trying to keep a toddler and a baby in order at the same time. Thanks a million.
That was an exceptional post, I learned a lot. Though you are probably doing “mom” stuff with the other three of your four hands; regarding the one that typed the post, I can only say… peek-a-boo, Stacy, your degrees are showing.
So, I could tell you how totally spot on I think you are, but that would be far too easy. Instead, I have chosen to burden you with a relevant (I hope) excerpt from, IT’S THE DEVIL STUPID, messaged to you in FB. Oh and BTW, Good Morning!
The quickest way to short-circuit the “get with the times” argument to get people back is to point out that those religious bodies that did “get with the times” are now dying.
So many times St. Thomas clarifies confusion by reminding us of the limits of our cognition and our language.
In Summa Part I, Q3. St. Thomas observes repeatedly that our understanding of God is error prone. For example, it seems that God must have parts. St. Thomas patiently explains that finite human cognition can only grasp substances by subject and predicate relations. So while God is truly simple, we tend to speak about Him as a substance with accidents because that’s how we grasp things. (I learn so much lately by studying the replies to objections, which I used to gloss over, but now I see that St. Thomas makes some of his sharpest distinctions in those sections!)
Similarly, the Thomistic Psychology of Summa Part I, Q75 to Q89 contrasts the instantaneous knowledge (intuition) of Angels with the prolonged mental discussion (discursive understanding) of humans. We can’t fathom an Angel’s immediate grasp of divine truth because it comes instantaneously, “in a flash,” whereas for us, understanding takes patience, time, and hard work.
Isn’t it true? Don’t we indeed look at things in our own autobiographies differently over time, often more charitably, but always with a sense that we grow closer to grasping the truth? Don’t we spend hours ruminating about what that conversation meant, what happened at that dinner party?
The meaning of a situation unfolds slowly over time, not because truth is a moving object, but because we are in motion, finite, flawed, restless and distracted by sin.
As Jeff pointed out through St. Thomas: In lay language: Although God’s Law’s don’t change what if our assumptions about those laws are flawed? If we first believed that the accelleration constant was 40 ft/sec2 rather than 32.2 ft/sec2 and we crashed and killed many people because we were firm in our misunderstanding, then whoops, sorry folks, we were close but not quite right. In similar fashion, how do we know that our understanding of the truth of the sacraments is dialed in correctly? Look at the current confusion around the sacrament of confirmation as an example. I don’t think we are either 1) Teaching it correctly or 2) Have it quite dialed in….. Another point is that when it comes to physics, we teach it correctly, when it comes to theology, we don’t…. just saying……
Mel,
That, to me, is a worthy conversation to have, there was one here:
http://www.acceptingabundance.com/theologians-and-dissent/
Here’s a summary of how I understand it,
1) No one can dismiss what the Church teaches and still be a theologian.
2) In areas where there is more clarification needed, people can have opinions and sometimes those opinions among groups of theologians can even aid the Magisterium.
3) No open dissent, because open dissent only divides the flock (as a parent, I get this).
It is (should be) the same in science. Acceleration due to gravity is taught correctly because it is widely accepted and demonstrable, just as much of what the Church has articulated. However, there are areas in the physical sciences that are not fully understood and thus are not part of basic education yet.
So for something like Confirmation, we should follow and teach what our bishops in our diocese instructs, and if a parishioner believes something is not right or should be changed, the proper channels for communication would be to talk to your priest and possibly then to your bishop.
How do others understand it? Jennifer, Val, Colin, Jeff?
In response to Stacy’s call for info on assent and teaching, all of us should acquire a copy of Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, by Dr. Ludwig Ott. It is definitive on what is and is not a matter of settled theology.
Every article of dogma is presented clearly, and each one is identified according to its level of theological certitude.
Rather than present the whole system here, I will give you this web site (sorry I am incompetent with html so I’m just going to give the url, you youngsters are too far ahead of me, and I long ago decided to resign myself to writing my maximum likelihood algorithms in good old fashioned object oriented C++, it was good enough in my day, whippersnappers!):
http://www.ewtn.com/library/doctrine/TRIGINFL.HTM
Everything that Stacy said is correct, and there is lots of information on the levels of theological opinion so can know with confidence exactly how many degrees of freedom we have when we opine.
My sister went on a face book rant this morning about how some people just need to come to grip with the fact that Jesus died for our sins and we all going to heaven and how God loves each and every one of us and bla bla bla.
She must have been talking to my dad about religion.
My sister is of the modern day non-denom(possibly Methodist in origin) mega-church mentality. My dad is somewhat of a cross between Southern Baptist/Calvanist/Seventh Day Adventist with a twist of Mormon delusion for flavor.
Other than that neither one are really in your face religious types. That is, until someone pushes their religion buttons. (don’t look at me like that)
Anyway… So your post today is kinda what I woke thinking about this morning. Not so much the evolution of Dogma but the way churches and the way people who go to those churches think in general evolve to fit the times.
One one hand we have my sister. A modern woman who has no need for the biblical violence and strict laws and the overwhelming guilt and the fear that goes along with being a Christian. She comes to the conclusion that God is love and Jesus died for us so we can spend eternity basking in the love of God.
Is stark contrast to her is my dad. The bible is infallible, all white people are the Jews and thus Gods chosen people the Sabbath is Saturday not Sunday and when Jesus returns he is gonna be pissed off like you won’t believe. But no matter what happen follow Jesus.
There you have it; two people who believe in the same God and Western thinking(ish)but each one has “evolved” their out-take or world-view to fit or cope with their individual needs.
My wife is telling me to go to sleep so I can’t finish what I started. Maybe I can find some time at work tomorrow…. Goodnight Y’all
Hey speaking of Mormons… I recently got some Mormon propaganda stuck to my front door. Is just me or does their image of Jesus look like a cross between Chuck Norris and the old Brawny paper towel man? Just asking.
Ok. I’m awake and back.
So by your definition of dogma I would have to say the answer is no, it does not evolve. It’s a fundamental truth. At least by your standards it’s a fundamental truth.
If that holds to be true there would be no reason for evolution. But because our perceptions of whats fundamental at best slightly different from each other, it would appear that it has to change.
Gravity is still gravity even though it differs with the various masses it effects. Waves of light speed up in a vacuum and slow down in a medium but it’s still light. Again the only thing that has changed is the perception. I don’t know how it works with the metaphysical realms of thought, that’s why you have the PhD in theology and I don’t.
I find it funny that a lot of the arguments put forward by atheists is the evolve or die argument. What would they have the churches change into? Are the atheists wanting the churches to “evolve” into something more pleasant to deal with? I thought they wanted them to go away forever. I’ve tried to get a simple straight answer out of them but I just got attacked verbally for being a wishy-washy agnostic.
Oh well. Que sera sera.
Stacy: What an excellent short article; concise and accurate. Thank you for sharing your writing.
Stacy,
I just wrote a big long response and lost it! Arrggh! I guess it wasn’t meant to be.
In a nutshell: The Science analogy is a good analogy, but with the Sacraments, our lab conditions are so variable that even though the notion of “God’s Law” being consistent is true, the lab condition variables put across the perception we are changing.
For example, Confirmation. The practice widely differs even within the same Diocese. The East, at infancy, the West, from before communion age, to high school age, now a movement to move it back to an earlier age….
I am sorry I lost my earlier post, it was much more developed and I am out of time…..
Andrew, although not technically an aetheist I can tell you most of us don’t want or need to church (any church) to go away. We don’t need them to evolve in their beliefs. We just simple want them to realize that not all believe what they believe and as such they cannot dictate our lives based on their beleifs.
I hope that is simple and concise enough?
Alan, since dogma is the core fundamental belief of a religion almost nothing can or will change those beliefs. Dogma is for the most part static, in a rut, not going anywhere anytime soon. It would take something catastrophic and drastic to uproot it. The Church and other religious institutions are under moral obligations to administer those fundamental tenants to its followers. By no means are they obliged to accommodate or even at best tolerate any other ideology.
What you are suggesting is social justice and social acceptance. Nice thoughts and good intentions for sure but naive all the same. As long as people are separated by time and space, language and ideologies we will always harbor mistrust and animosity towards one another. Which by the way is probably the reason people search so fervently for one fundamental truth to unite us all. Or possibly to subdue all. It’s all up in the air!