Justasking4, I responded in my earlier posts to nearly everything you just said. You appear to be so confident that you have completely missed my responses. I’ll respond to a little bit of that again, but I’m mostly going to skip those parts. There were several posts I wrote earlier that you didn’t respond to, and my responses to those arguments tend to be in those.
You are also doing this very thing. You also judge and interpret what you think are traditions
The Church defines Tradition when it is called into question. If the practice of Church teaching and thought that has been maintained from the time of the apostles has not been
questioned, there is no need to define it. We’ll simply believe these infallible truths that have been passed down without needing a list. That’s not our own personal human interpretations- it’s interpretation that can easily be traced straight back through the Early Church to the apostles, and can be seen as having always been part of general Catholic belief and practice. Only someone who is trying to find an excuse to NOT believe these revealed truths is going to demand an infallible list of them before believing them. To everyone else, the teaching that has been in place from the beginning and is still common practice is clear.
The Magesterium tends to define infallible Traditions that have always been believed if they have been suddenly called into question. Prior to these attacks on Church Tradition, an infallible declaration is
unnecessary. Because everyone believes it and has always believed it
. But when the belief does come under serious attack, infallible declarations about Traditions get made. You want a list? Here’s a list of Sacred Traditions that have been dogmatically defined by the Magesterium:
catholicfirst.com/thefaith/churchdocuments/dogmas.cfm
There are many Catholic books available that provide lists like this, and sometimes, I’ve heard, more complete lists.
Lists of Catholic Traditions that have never come under serious attack are unnecessary. These form a solid deposit of faith that the vast majority of Catholics have always believed. Those that
have come under serious attack – like the divinity of Christ – get dogmatically defined.
I wanted to give this argument of yours a pretty thorough response and a list- you insist on them
, because it’s a good question and one I haven’t responded to, to you, before.
Here’s one that I have responded to before, though. I’ll respond to it again, even though it annoys me because I’ve already responded to it and you ignored my reply, just shifting soil to make an unrelated attack against the Marian dogmas.
two your church has interpreted infallibly less than 20 verses of the Scriptures.
It has interpreted a vast number of doctrines. I provided a list of a lot of them above. When you have all those doctrines and look at scripture in their light, it’s clear what the correct interpretations are of loads of scriptures more than a mere 20. You don’t have to have them dogmatically defined, because the interpretations are dead obvious. For instance, the power of baptismal waters to save the soul has been dogmatically defined.
Therefore when we read scriptures that have not been infallibly interpreted, such as, “whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” (I haven’t seen the list of infallibly interpreted verses, but I’m guessing this isn’t one of them), we have the infallible dogma about the power of baptismal waters to save, so we know infallibly what this passage is talking about without having to figure it out for ourselves. Does that make sense to you?
In this way, when we have the dogmas to work from, we can read hundreds of scriptures and understand infallibly what vitally important layers of their meaning are, because the Church has defined the dogma and we simply apply the dogma to the scripture that refers to it.
