No True Scotsman Fallacy

[Charlemagne_III]

As a Baptist I’ve been in bible study groups and house groups. We’re encouraged to read scripture through the eyes of the writer’s intended original audience. We’re warned not to mine verses and not to impose our own subjective view on what is being said. And, of course, the Spirit aids us. We’re encouraged to read research from bible scholars, and commentaries. Talks (you might call them sermons) also help. If we can’t agree we go to the pastor, and if he or she can’t work it out she talks it over with colleagues. If we still can’t agree, we agree to disagree.

So in other words you settle matters entirely by subjective decisions that no one is obliged to agree with. You have no creed, no pope, no bishops, no councils, no Bible but the one put together by the Catholic Church 1600 years ago. You just sit around in a circle and the Holy Spirit tells each of you the truth, and it doesn’t really matter if the Spirit tells ten contradictory truths because every one of those truths is as good as the other. You lack unity from above because plurality from below is good enough for you. You have no idea how vain and deceitful this kind of theology is, and that is why Protestantism as a whole has shipwrecked itself on the shores of moral relativism. Protestantism as a whole has divided Christianity and watered down its ability to save the world. Protestantism as a whole has no interest in heeding these words of Jesus Christ:

“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that thou has sent me.” - John 17:20-21

“Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one flock, one shepherd.” (John 10:16).

 

[Charlemagne_III]

So you don’t seem to have any support at all from the Church, What does your priest say, does he think it’s a good idea for you to tell someone she is not a true Catholic?

I have never told anyone he or she is not a true Christian, and it is juvenile in the extreme for you to suggest that I have. God sorts out who is true to Christ and who is false.

We have been talking about true and false Christians in the generic sense. They do exists. Some pretend to be Christians for personal gain. They are wolves among the sheep. They do not believe what the Catholic Church teaches and they flatly reject the authority of the Church while at the same time pretending to be loyal members. I will not mention names, but Catholics know them in Congress, for example, when they tell the public lies about what the Church teaches, and also when they vote their “conscience” while at the same time pretending it is a Catholic conscience formed by Catholic teaching. Hypocrites … every one of them.

 

[inocente]

Right here:

In other words, of one is a “member” and incorporated into the Body of Christ it is necessary to be one, holy, catholic AND apostolic. Being one or some of those things does not make one fully “Catholic” in the sense of being fully one with the “sole Church of Christ” (870) because all of those together are what defines the deepest and ultimate identity of the Church itself. It is not possible to share in the identity of the Church (i.e., be a true Catholic) without being one with that which identifies the Church as being THE TRUE Church.

In the text the words “holy, catholic and apostolic” are applied to the Church, not to individuals as you claim. I looked up apostolic, it means teaching or spiritual authority derived from the Apostles or pope, it doesn’t apply to “members”. Nor is it clear how the 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide can all be said to be holy, not without the word losing a lot of its meaning.

“The sole Church of Christ which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic”.

It’s the Church, not the members, nowhere does it say members.

 

[inocente]

So in other words you settle matters entirely by subjective decisions that no one is obliged to agree with. You have no creed, no pope, no bishops, no councils, no Bible but the one put together by the Catholic Church 1600 years ago. You just sit around in a circle and the Holy Spirit tells each of you the truth, and it doesn’t really matter if the Spirit tells ten contradictory truths because every one of those truths is as good as the other. You lack unity from above because plurality from below is good enough for you. You have no idea how vain and deceitful this kind of theology is, and that is why Protestantism as a whole has shipwrecked itself on the shores of moral relativism. Protestantism as a whole has divided Christianity and watered down its ability to save the world. Protestantism as a whole has no interest in heeding these words of Jesus Christ:

“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that thou has sent me.” - John 17:20-21

“Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one flock, one shepherd.” (John 10:16).

You asked me how we interpret the bible and I told you all the methods and aids we use.

You criticize that, but don’t say what your methods and aids are. You don’t appear to have any, your list doesn’t include anything which helps you, you seem to be completely isolated and alone when it comes to reading scripture. Why not list the methods and aids available to you as a Catholic for comparison?

That would be more helpful than off-topic sectarian blustering, which, let’s face it, might be viewed as a desperate attempt to cover your retreat.

 

[Peter_Plato]

In the text the words “holy, catholic and apostolic” are applied to the Church, not to individuals as you claim. I looked up apostolic, it means teaching or spiritual authority derived from the Apostles or pope, it doesn’t apply to “members”. Nor is it clear how the 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide can all be said to be holy, not without the word losing a lot of its meaning.

“The sole Church of Christ which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic”.

It’s the Church, not the members, nowhere does it say members.

Read carefully…

The Church is ultimately one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in her deepest and ultimate identity, because it is in her that “the Kingdom of heaven,” the "Reign of God,"380 already exists and will be fulfilled at the end of time. The kingdom has come in the person of Christ and grows mysteriously in the hearts of those incorporated into him, until its full eschatological manifestation. Then all those he has redeemed and made "holy and blameless before him in love,"381 will be gathered together as the one People of God, the "Bride of the Lamb,"382 "the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God."383 For "the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb."384

If the “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Reign of God” already exists and will be fulfilled at the end of time in the “Person of Christ” who "grows mysteriously in the hearts of those incorporated into him, then it is “within” those members that the very identity of the Church is found.

The CCC is making the claim that the Church is “one, holy, catholic and apostolic” in her deepest identity AND that “deepest identity” is in the person of Christ who exists and grows in the hearts of those “incorporated into him.” The Church is identified with the members who are united to Christ in precisely this way and thereby form the “Body of Christ,” the Church.

Read Paul on this: 1 Cor 12:12->

Read newadvent.org/cathen/10663a.htm

Read the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi

The Church is Christ living and active in human beings who are the “members” of his Body. The Church is not merely the body of its teachings nor some abstract principle of authority.

 

[inocente]

I have never told anyone he or she is not a true Christian, and it is juvenile in the extreme for you to suggest that I have. God sorts out who is true to Christ and who is false.

I didn’t say “Christian”, I said “What does your priest say, does he think it’s a good idea for you to tell someone she is not a true Catholic?”

Does he?

We have been talking about true and false Christians in the generic sense. They do exists. Some pretend to be Christians for personal gain. They are wolves among the sheep. They do not believe what the Catholic Church teaches and they flatly reject the authority of the Church while at the same time pretending to be loyal members. I will not mention names, but Catholics know them in Congress, for example, when they tell the public lies about what the Church teaches, and also when they vote their “conscience” while at the same time pretending it is a Catholic conscience formed by Catholic teaching. Hypocrites … every one of them.

If you say something about a group, you’re saying it of every individual in that group. And if you say a politician is not a true Catholic, then by implication you’re saying that those who vote for her are not true Catholics, and you run the risk of sowing discord and division in your church.

Surely it’s for your bishop to decide whether a politician is misrepresenting the Church, and you can support another politician without getting into name calling.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

**

If you say something about a group, you’re saying it of every individual in that group. And if you say a politician is not a true Catholic, then by implication you’re saying that those who vote for her are not true Catholics, and you run the risk of sowing discord and division in your church./QUOTE]

Some Protestants are invincibly ignorant of Catholic theology and have that excuse for opposing Catholic theology because they have been deceived by all the anti-Catholic propaganda of many generations in their families.

It is the corrupt Catholic politicians who by not being true to Catholic theology are sowing discord among Catholics. Catholics who vote for corrupt Catholic politicians are sometimes ignorant of their corruption. The Catholics who are not ignorant of their corruption and vote for them anyway will have to answer not to me, but to God.

And please stop sticking out you tongue at me at the end of each post. That’s an ad hominem.

Thank you. **

 

[Peter_Plato]

From the encyclical vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_29061943_mystici-corporis-christi_en.html

1. That the Church is a body is frequently asserted in the Sacred Scriptures. “Christ,” says the Apostle, “is the Head of the Body of the Church.”[13] If the Church is a body, it must be an unbroken unity, according to those words of Paul: “Though many we are one body in Christ.”[14] But it is not enough that the Body of the Church should be an unbroken unity; it must also be something definite and perceptible to the senses as Our predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII, in his Encyclical Satis Cognitum asserts: "the Church is visible because she is a body.[15] Hence they err in a matter of divine truth, who imagine the Church to be invisible, intangible, a something merely “pneumatological” as they say, by which many Christian communities, though they differ from each other in their profession of faith, are united by an invisible bond.
2. But a body calls also for a multiplicity of members, which are linked together in such a way as to help one another. And as in the body when one member suffers, all the other members share its pain, and the healthy members come to the assistance of the ailing, so in the Church the individual members do not live for themselves alone, but also help their fellows, and all work in mutual collaboration for the common comfort and for the more perfect building up of the whole Body.
3. Again, as in nature a body is not formed by any haphazard grouping of members but must be constituted of organs, that is of members, that have not the same function and are arranged in due order; so for this reason above all the Church is called a body, that it is constituted by the coalescence of structurally untied parts, and that it has a variety of members reciprocally dependent. It is thus the Apostle describes the Church when he writes: “As in one body we have many members, but all the members have not the same office: so we being many are one body in Christ, and everyone members one of another.” [16]

 

[Peter_Plato]

If you say something about a group, you’re saying it of every individual in that group. And if you say a politician is not a true Catholic, then by implication you’re saying that those who vote for her are not true Catholics, and you run the risk of sowing discord and division in your church.

I am not clear that pointing at discord or division and calling it out for what it is constitutes “sowing” discord.

The reality may be that those who dissent are the ones sowing the discord and someone who identifies it as such is merely reporting that “We have a problem, here!”

A healthy body has mechanisms for identifying foreign entities or cancerous cells that have “gone rogue.” While it may be true that a healthy body does have differing roles and members tasked with unique jobs to do, there is an underlying unity of purpose. When members lose the primary intent of the whole body and act contrary to the good of the body, those “members” are best identified as endangering the health of the body as a whole.

At times invasive foreign entities (viruses and germy thingies) enter the body pretending to be a part of it, but seek to harm it “from the inside” so to speak. That is when the body’s defensive system comes into action and identifies the foreign bodies as intruders - wolves among sheep - pretending to be part of the body, but really functioning as cancerous cells.

So, to identify what it means to be a “true” Catholic is akin to identifying what it means to be a member of a healthy body - a cell in that body - which is functioning “true to” or in accord with the ultimate good of the body. Best to identify invasive cells or cancerous cells for what they are - destructive to the health of the body.

 

[Peter_Plato]

@inocente:

Now read my post #70 again.

Read again…

*I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral men;
not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.
But rather I wrote to you not to associate with any one who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of immorality *or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber—not even to eat with such a one.
For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the Church whom you are to judge?
God judges those outside. " Drive out the wicked person from among you."
(1 Cor 5:9-13)

Still think I am “quote mining?”

What Paul - who, by the way, first explicated the ‘mystical Body of Christ’ - is getting at when he says “Drive out the wicked person from among you” is quite consistent with ridding a healthy body of invasive or cancerous cells. There is no quote mining here, just a consistent implication from the entirety of Paul’s theology concerning what the Church as the “Mystical Body of Christ” is.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I didn’t say “Christian”, I said “What does your priest say, does he think it’s a good idea for you to tell someone she is not a true Catholic?”

It might be a good idea to distinguish between sinners who recognize what sin is and are sincerely trying to be healed from sin and be redeemed as against those who, for whatever reason, are attempting to undermine the purpose of the Church and God’s plan for salvation by making evil appear to be good and good appear to be evil.

In the case of the former, the Church is a hospital for sinners.

In the case of the latter, the Church is not a refuge for scoundrels or wolves who, under the cover of innocuous “appearances” are only interested in the destruction of others and profiting from evil. Jesus, himself, portrayed those “types” as serpents whose only intent is outfitting those they encounter for hell.

If you want to insist we have no way of knowing or recognizing the difference between these two instances, then we are really in trouble because our “defenses” have been completely compromised and the ramparts finally breached.

That is your take, fortunately, because Jesus’ claim is quite different: “The gates of hell will NOT prevail…”

 

[schaeffer]

so we’ve moved from “true” to “true to”?

that’ll work!

 

[Charlemagne_III]

so we’ve moved from “true” to “true to”?

that’ll work!

Something of a distinction without a difference.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Something of a distinction without a difference.

A “true” Catholic is someone who is “true to” all the teachings of the Catholic Church.

He doesn’t get to pick and choose which doctrines he will accept or reject, much as the Protestants like to do with their doctrine of private interpretation.

There is nothing in the CCC that will dispute the above sentence; and the call for unity by Christ, one shepherd and one flock (John 10:16) is indisputable.

 

[schaeffer]

A “true” Catholic is someone who is “true to” all the teachings of the Catholic Church.

This answers the question I asked earlier, as to whether or not the “Bad Popes” were true Catholics.

Given this understanding they were not true Catholics.

I understand that either way nothing they did in their personal lives impacted the validity of statements of faith that may have occurred during their papacy. And certainly there is no doctrine of the Church that allows for their behavior.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

This answers the question I asked earlier, as to whether or not the “Bad Popes” were true Catholics.

Given this understanding they were not true Catholics.

I understand that either way nothing they did in their personal lives impacted the validity of statements of faith that may have occurred during their papacy. And certainly there is no doctrine of the Church that allows for their behavior.

No Catholic is automatically a saint, including popes. But to be an immoral pope is not necessarily to be a heretic. The Church has been safeguarded from heresy, even when it has not been safeguarded from immoral popes. And yes, some of the popes in the Middle Ages might well not have been admirable, and may have been corrupt by any standard, but they could still have believed in the truths of the Catholic faith. If they did not, and if they merely used the papacy to advance themselves and their personal avaricious agendas, they were not true to the Catholic Church, and, unless they repented before they died, are likely in hell. I cannot think of a single pope who argued for the view that a Catholic can believe as he likes, which is the Protestant view. I can’t think of a single pope who has repudiated the principle of infallibility of the Catholic Church. I can think of many Protestants who have repudiated the principle of infallibility, except of course that they are infallibly certain the Catholic Church is not infallible.

Are you able to reveal your religious or non-religious status? It is not a requirement, but it would be interesting to know, since answers to your points could be more easily crafted if that were known.

 

[Peter_Plato]

so we’ve moved from “true” to “true to”?

that’ll work!

Perhaps “true to” in the sense of “aligned to” which allows for human weakness and tendency to fail. In other words, someone could, in a general sense, be headed in the same direction and ultimately believe in the truth of what the Church teaches and wills to align themselves with their understanding of that truth, however limited, but owing to the difficulty of that challenge fails to live it out, even quite often. That is quite different from a person who knows or has limited knowledge of the truth but in no way desires to be aligned with it or even continually seeks to undermine it.

I suspect this is not an either/or kind of issue, but that does not rule out that such determinations can sometimes be made or that individuals can change in the process.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

“Thee have I preached; Thee have I taught. Never have I said anything against Thee. If anything was not well said, that is to be attributed to my ignorance. Neither do I wish to be obstinate in my opinions, but if I have written anything erroneous … I submit all to the judgment and correction of the Holy Roman Church, in whose obedience I now pass from this life.” Thomas Aquinas

Here we have a case of a** true Catholic because he was true to** what a Catholic is supposed to be, one who unquestioningly aligns himself with and submits himself to the authoritative teachings of the Church, unlike say a Martin Luther who opposes himself without humility to much of what the Church teaches.

 

[schaeffer]

I cannot think of a single pope who argued for the view that a Catholic can believe as he likes…

Are you able to reveal your religious or non-religious status? It is not a requirement, but it would be interesting to know, since answers to your points could be more easily crafted if that were known.

I can’t think of a single Pope who argued that either.

Neither can I think of why my religious status would alter your answers. If truth is truth is truth, and the teachings of the Catholic Church are unchanging, then they remain the same no matter the beliefs, or lack thereof of anyone else.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I can’t think of a single Pope who argued that either.

Neither can I think of why my religious status would alter your answers. If truth is truth is truth, and the teachings of the Catholic Church are unchanging, then they remain the same no matter the beliefs, or lack thereof of anyone else.

It’s fine with me if you don’t want to reveal that.