Aquinas on heresy

  • Thread starter Thread starter Caesar
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
JKirkLVNV said:
No.

This would do the faith actual harm, IMHO. While the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we’re called to and by Love, not coercion. You’d have people who were or became Catholic not out of faith, but out of fear. AND the Truth never has MUCH competition from falsehood. Will some fall and fail? Yes, that’s the downside of the radical gift of free will. God should be the only One to make the call.
Click to expand...
I’m not talking about converting through fear, or anything like that.

I am talking about keeping heresies away from the souls of the faithful. Defense, not offense.
 
Defense, not offense.
Click to expand...
Exactly.

Ideas can be more destructive than bodies. Some simply must be removed from circulation.

We must try to stop even the situation of temptation. We cannot throw people into a lion’s den and say, “Well…some of you will come out alive, and some won’t…that’s just providence.”

We cannot simply accept that people are in a den of sin, and say, “well, you have free will, you can resist if you want to…that’s just how the cookie crumbles.”

Yes, there will always be temptation…but we can try to eliminate it as much as possible. And the temptation to heresy is one that especially must be eliminated because it rocks the foundation of a Christian society, and removes people from even the potential of repenting from all other sins. A protestant who commits adultery is worse off than a Catholic who commits adultery because protestantism seperates them from even the possibility of repentence, because they have rejected Confession and that true Church which has the power of the forgiveness of sins.
 
batteddy said:
No. Christ usually called a spade a spade…even when the sin was “being allowed by God”.

I mean…he explicitly said that the one who handed him over to Pilate “had the greater sin”. You’ll notice that Jesus didn’t say, “well…what they did wasn’t that bad because its all part of God’s plan.” If Pilate had been commiting a sin by capital punishment in and of itself, Jesus would not have said, “You have this authority from God,” anymore than he excused Judas or the Sanhedrin.
Click to expand...
You cannot build a case for capital punishment out of that passage. You’re still proof texting. And I’m not saying that anyone was lacking culpability “because it was part of God’s plan,” from Pilate to the priests to Judas. I’m saying you can’t make it say what you’re saying it says.
 
And Mommyof4 starts hiding “heretics” in her attic and basement, keeping those who disagree with the government safe from persecution. Shhh… don’t tell anyone…
 
And I’m not saying that anyone was lacking culpability “because it was part of God’s plan,” from Pilate to the priests to Judas. I’m saying you can’t make it say what you’re saying it says
Click to expand...
I didnt say you were saying that.

What I’m saying is that Jesus specifically says that Pilate…as the valid governmental authority…was less culpable than the priests and Judas.

Because Judas had no authority to betray Him and the priests had no authority to torture Him even if He had been guilty… but Jesus explicitly recognized Pilate’s authority to kill Him had He been guilty (of course he wasn’t, so Pilate still had a sin…but the Sanhedrin had a DOUBLE sin: acting outside their authority AND hurting an innocent man. Pilate only had the latter)
 
…and now mommyof4 is sneaking more heretics away on boats to safe lands, away from batteddy and caesar…
 
And yet another serious thread turns into a sarcastic joke with allusions to Nazism.
 
Caesar said:
And yet another serious thread turns into a sarcastic joke with allusions to Nazism.
Click to expand...
That’s what’s scary…in your mind, it’s a serious thread! Which MEANS that any comparison to Nazism is entirely justified and warranted.

Please, please, please…at least let the local ordinary or maybe your metropolitan Archbishop know that you take this so seriously. No need to bother HH, they can fill him on on their ad limina visits.
 
Comparing heretics to murderers is a bad analogy, since after all, while the victims of murderers can’t come back to life, those who become heretics can, of course, revert back to the true faith. So what’s all this about killing the soul? Since heretics cannot kill the soul, they do not deserve the death penalty.

Moreover, In ST:II-II q. 11.3, St. Thomas compares heretics not to murderers but to forgers of money. Batteddy, Caesar, do you think forgers of money deserve the death penalty in this day and age? I don’t think so. Punished by law, yes. But executed? Nonsense.

There are no rights to heresy. Heresy should in every decent Christian commonwealth be discouraged and stigmatized, and if necessary heresiarchs should be prosecuted and their books censored, especially if their material **slanders **the Church. However, heretics do not deserve death. We do not need to create more martyrs for false causes.
 
Caesar said:
Supporting the heretics can lead to accepting the heresies.
Click to expand...
Let us put the clock back some 2000 years, and consider what the Pharisees had to say about Our Lord.
On the whole, they admired his moral teaching, but his spiritual teaching was heterodox in the extreme.
What! not washing hands before eating!
What keeping company with publicans and sinners!
What! this man claimed to be in Unity with Elohim!
Not just heterodoxy, not only heresy, but also blasphemy.
And so they judged, and handed him over to Kaiser, on a not so trumped up charge of treason. Strictly speaking, the treason charge was valid, but Pilate knew that he was being used.
Now is that what our two heroes want to see us return to?
Remember every new revelation is seen as heterodox. New is different, that is what the prefix ‘hetero’ means.
Teaching what is different is heresy.
There can be no doubt that what Our Lord taught, in defiance of the Pharisees was heterox, and heretical.
We ALL accept though, that this was a new revelation.
If the revelation is of God, then we believe it will grow: if it is of error, then it will wither.
We were told to expect daily new revelations, and to test them, for as a good tree bears good fruit, it will be known.
Just because a doctor comes not from our school, we should not reject him out of hand, for who is not against us is for our part.
Let us also remember that though Aquinas was Sainted, he was not the Pope, so his words are fallible, as are the words of any ordinary human.
 
JKirkLVNV said:
That’s what’s scary…in your mind, it’s a serious thread! Which MEANS that any comparison to Nazism is entirely justified and warranted.

Please, please, please…at least let the local ordinary or maybe your metropolitan Archbishop know that you take this so seriously. No need to bother HH, they can fill him on on their ad limina visits.
Click to expand...
This thread is to discuss Aquinas’ views on how to deal with heretics. Not to make jokes.
 
Caesar said:
This thread is to discuss Aquinas’ views on how to deal with heretics. Not to make jokes.
Click to expand...
Who’s joking??? If I ever see people persecuted for their religious beliefs, even if I don’t share those beliefs, I will do whatever I can to help them. Plain and simple.
 
First things first, we’d need a solidly Catholic empire (or State in general).

As things are now (at least in America), heretical churches are in the majority (though none of them individually is bigger than the Catholic Church taken 1 on 1). In order to stamp out heresy (and most of it is material) we would need just simple evangelization.

I think this question only really becomes relevant once the majority of the world is Catholic or at least the majority of a given country is Catholic-and not in name only or in “culture”.

In an academic sense, I would say that the execution of heretics in the past when there was not much in the way of better ways of dealing with them was acceptable. I think that today it is not, because 1)there are often more of them then there are of us, 2)most heretics are material heretics only, 3)even if the conditions were right, we have better and more effective ways of dealing with heresy, 4)no need giving heretics a “martyr complex” and 5)I think that you truly get more flies with honey than with vinegar, we can show our strength more effectively by ignoring the harangues and diatribes of heresy and by simply debating the more intellectual polemics and arguments.

The Church has nothing to fear from the Truth because the Truth is on our side.
 
This thread is very scary, especially for those like me who are considering joining the church.

How about we leave the judgments of people up to God? Aren’t we supposed to not judge people to hell? Isn’t that God’s job?

Jesus didn’t advocate putting the pharisees in jail, nor did any of the apostles.

Does this thread serve any useful purpose?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top