"... Even Bible study, as too often conducted in the schools, is robbing the world of the priceless treasure of the word of God. The work of "higher criticism," in dissecting, conjecturing, reconstructing, is destroying faith in the Bible as a divine revelation; it is robbing God's word of power to control, uplift, and inspire human lives. {Ed 227.4}
Astounding! We have something we agree on!
We have a basket term that covers a variety of destroyers. It's called modernism.
Have you ever encountered someone in the Church who said it doesn't matter what religion you believe, or that truth is subjective? If so, you have probably encountered a Modernist.
What Is Modernism?
By its very nature, Modernism — the sythesis of all heresies, according to Pope St. Pius X — is hard to define because it doesn’t have an official creed. For this reason, it is like nailing jelly to a wall. There are some basic components to Modernism, however, some of which are as follows:
Principal Errors:
(1) God cannot be known and proved to exist by natural reason;
(2) external signs of revelation, such as miracles and prophecies, do not prove the divine origin of the Christian religion and are not suited to the intellect of modern man;
(3) Christ did not found a Church;
(4) and the essential structure of the Church can change;
(5) the Church's dogmas continually evolve over time so that they can change from meaning one thing to meaning another;
(6) faith is a blind religious feeling that wells up from the subconscious under the impulse of a heart and a will trained to morality, not a real assent of the intellect to divine truth learned by hearing it from an external source.
Background:
The heresy of Modernism was inspired by tendencies prevalent in liberal Protestantism and secular philosophy. It was influenced by nineteenth-century studies by Kant and Hegel, by liberal Protestant theologians and biblical critics (such as Schleiermacher and von Harnack), by the evolutionary theories of Darwin, and by certain liberal political movements in Europe. The centers of Modernism were in France, England, Italy, and Germany. Two of its leading figures were Fr. Alfred Loisy, a French theologian and Scripture scholar, and Fr. George Tyrrell, an Irish-born Protestant who became a Catholic and a Jesuit, though he was dismissed from the Jesuits in 1906.
The Heresy:
The Heresy:
Pope Piux X dubbed Modernism "the synthesis of all heresies." Modernists viewed doctrine not as a means of obtaining supernatural knowledge, but as a symbol of an unknowable ultimate reality or as a symbol of human religious expression. Because they do not contain genuine knowledge of the supernatural, theological dogmas are relative and may adopted or rejected based on whether they exercise power over people's imaginations. Those dogmas which are found productive to people's religious sentiments are to be accepted, then abandoned when they are no longer found satisfying. Dogmas may thus change over time, either being completely rejected or re-interpreted and given a meaning different than what they originally had.
The Heresy:
Since dogmas do not give us knowledge of the supernatural and religion is best viewed as an expression of human religious.aspirations, no real, objective knowledge of God is possible. Intellectual arguments in favor of his existence are useless, as are arguments based on miracles or fulfilled prophecies. In the Modernist view, the only knowledge we can have of God is subjective, found in individual religious experiences (which are binding on only those who receive them.
Since God is found primarily or exclusively in the human heart--in subjective experience--he is profoundly immanent in the world. Modernism has a tendency toward pantheism (the doctrine that God is identical with the world or a part of it), emphasizing his immanence at the expense of his transcendence.
Because theology does not give us knowledge of the supernatural, Scripture is best viewed as an expression of profound religious experiences had by its authors, but not as a sure guide to a knowledge of God and his ways. Scripture is not free from human error and contains much symbol and myth. Since it is historically unreliable and based on human religious sentiment, there is a gap between what it records and what actually took place.
This gap means that there is a great difference between the glorious Christ the Church proclaims (the Christ of faith) and the human Jesus who walked the hills of Israel (the Jesus of history). Jesus did not know (at least for certain) that he was the Messiah or God Incarnate. He did not intend to found a Church. He did not bestow the earthly leadership of this Church upon Peter. Except for baptism and the Lord's Supper, Christ did not institute any sacraments, and even these have been heavily colored by Christian theological reflection.
In view of the fact that theological dogmas are relative, all Christian denominations are equal with the Catholic Church. Even non-Christian religions are valid expressions of man's religious yearnings. It follows that the Church should have no special relationship with the state and that the state has no duty to uphold and promote the true religion. Instead of openly acknowledging that the state's power comes from God (Rom. 13:1) through Jesus Christ (Matt. 28:18), the state should be indifferent to all religions and to those with no religion.
Orthodox Response:
Although key Modernist claims had already been censured by Pius IX's
Syllabus of Errors (1864) or infallibly condemned by the First Vatican Council (1870), whose status as an ecumenical council was challenged by many Modernists,
it was necessary for the magisterium to take new action.
In December 1903, Pope Pius X approved a decree of the Holy Office that placed five of Loisy's works on the Index of Forbidden Books. Works by other Modernist authors were placed on the Index as well.
In June 1907 the Holy Office published a decree titled
Lamentabili,
which condemned 65 Modernist propositions. Pope Pius X added his censure to this document, declaring each and all of the errors to be condemned and proscribed.
In September the Pope published the encyclical
Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which further condemned Modernism. In November he published a
motu proprio titled
Praestantia Scripturae, which bound Catholics in conscience to embrace the decisions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and imposed the penalty of excommunication on those who contradicted
Lamentabili or
Pascendi....
...In the middle of the century, a strand of Modernism erupted through the writings of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, leading to Pope Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humanae Generis.
THBE, if you are going to cite "official Catholic teaching", make sure it is "official Catholic teaching", because anything with the word "Vatican" in it is not necessary binding and infallible, and it is not necessarily Catholic.. In fact, very few encyclicals are infallible. The Catholic Church is in a perpetual state of development and renewal (without any change in the original truths).
Centuries old teaching is useful, but it's outdated. I suggest you cite encyclicals that have been proclaimed in the last 100 years. And please, please, leave a link so context is readily available to readers.
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/
Well, I know lynchings is one thing thats been on the rise since Trump got in office, among other things. All in all, the pretense went straight out the window. It's better this way for black people, so that we know who we are really dealing with.
