The Pope seems to think that pure doctrine is sterile and bland. In order to add some taste to it, you need to allow for some diversity or development of what is believed. This is simply stupid. The purest of doctrines are never distilled water but are filled with a taste offensive to the world and to the believer except the Holy Spirit work through the Word to impart faith and by the means of grace to sustain that faith. The Trinity is distilled water? The Incarnation of God's Son in flesh is distilled water? The means of grace are distilled water? Absolution is distilled water? The Real Presence is distilled water? The resurrection of the body and the life everlasting are distilled water? The Pope is caving into the critics who claim that pure is the equivalent of bland, sterile, empty, and tasteless. Doubt and rejection are not the seasonings to make doctrine palatable and tasty. Really, somebody needs to give him a sleeping pill whenever he is around the press.
Then there is that crazy reference to the Creed. Is all of "catholic doctrine" in the Creed? Well, geez, if it was, somebody should have told the Reformers because we could have skipped 500 years of conflict if only we had known. The Reformers would not quibbling with the Creed. Their concern was with doctrines that were not confessed in the Creed but were deemed essential to salvation -- even though they could not explicitly be found in Scripture.
Francis, like many in our own tradition, likes to deride the idea of pure doctrine as either something unattainable or something political. Consider the myth that Constantine and the Nicene Council decided what books are in the Bible. Or the legends of a married Jesus. Or the choice to ignore explicit teaching in Scripture when it violates your own ideas of what is right or wrong. I admit that I am not a big fan of the death penalty but the Pope decided on his own that what was right in the past is no longer and thus decided that what Scripture says has an expiration date. I know many who would warm up to that idea. He claims that he is against ideology parading as doctrine and truth but he is the ideologue who derides eternal truth, presumes that truth develops and changes, and that who sits in the big chair in Rome gets to change it all. The zealots for pure doctrine are not the scandal of our age but Francis and his ilk are becoming an offense. The biggest enemies of the faith are not those outside the Church whom we all know but those who claim to be helping the Church and the faith while dismantling the truth yesterday, today, and forever the same and pawning the sacred treasure once handed down. Give me distilled water any day of the week if the choice is between that and the water in the creek in the pasture that the cows have just peed in. That is exactly what the world is doing when it presumes to correct Scripture and rescue purity from being sterile. What makes pure doctrine lively and powerful and profound and flavorful is that God gives that truth and by that truth God works to save us.
2 comments:
You're tapdancing around the fact that Pope Francis is the Antichrist.
Some quotes in support of your post!
Luther on doctrine: “If I were to strangle someone’s father and mother, wife and child, and try to choke him too, and then say, ‘Keep the peace (Ezek 13:10), dear friend, we wish to love one another, the matter is not so important that we should be divided over it,’ what would he say to me? This is what the fanatics do to Christ, the Lord, and God, the Father, and to mother church and the brethren with their rejection of God’s Word while at the same time claiming it for themselves.”
W. Martin: "Controversy for its own sake is sin. Controversy for the sake of truth is a divine mandate."
Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller on the church compromising with the culture: "Endeavoring to take away the offense of the Scriptures is taking away the Scriptures. There will be nothing left."
Walther on doctrine (Proper Distinction, pg 28): “When a theologian is asked to yield and make concessions in order that peace may at last be established in the Church, but refuses to do so even in a single point of doctrine, such an action looks to human reason like intolerable stubbornness, yea, like down-right malice. That is the reason why such theologians are loved and praised by few men during their lifetime. Most men rather revile them as disturbers of the peace, yea, as destroyers of the kingdom of God. They are regarded as men worthy of contempt. But in the end it becomes manifest that this very determined, inexorable tenacity in clinging to the pure teaching of the divine Word by no means tears down the Church; on the contrary, it is just this which, in the midst of greatest dissension, builds up the Church and ultimately brings about genuine peace. Therefore, woe to the Church which has no men of this stripe, men who stand as watchmen on the walls of Zion, sound the alarm whenever a foe threatens to rush the walls, and rally to the banner of Jesus Christ for a holy war! …Let us, then, my friends, likewise hold fast the treasure of the pure doctrine. Do not consider it strange if on that account you must bear reproach the same as they did. …Let this be your slogan: Fight unto death in behalf of the truth, and the Lord will fight for you!”
Gal 6:9 – cut off from salvation by abandoning doctrine; see also Gal 5:4
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