Doctrine of God — Steve Macias

Doctrine and Dogma: Sources of Christian Teaching

Lesson two has a couple of basic ideas about doctrine, and the difference here is one that really matters, because the distinction you're gonna make in this book is between the idea of doctrine and the idea of dogma, and where the source of our teaching comes from.

Anglicanism and the Return to the Early Church

And this is gonna put a great distinction between Anglicans, in our last lesson, we talked about the idea that we have no theology of our own, the Anglicans don't pretend that we have our own new way of reading the scripture, but rather that we go to the church of the early fathers, which I think is really important, and there's a Latin phrase that you should know that is crucial to the idea of the Reformation, is ad fontes, or to the sources.

And whether you look at Calvin, or Luther, whether you look at any of the reformed theologians of the medieval period, who we would call of our camp, their goal was always to return back to the undivided church of the first several centuries.

So whether we talk about John Calvin, if you read the Institutes of Christian Religion, who does he quote as his sources? First of all, he goes to the holy scriptures, we know that Calvin believed the scriptures to be the authority, but then to suppose his idea of the understanding of the scriptures, he uses the early fathers.

So how can the early scriptures, how can the early church be understood? In the scriptures, it is through what has been received and recounted by the fathers. Now that's a very reformed way of saying it.

It's the church started out, the Pentecost, it existed throughout the centuries, somewhere it got off track, and the Reformation was going to back to find the place where it got off track and restart there.

Restorationism and Competing Sources of Authority

Now there are different views on how to do that, so one of them might be a very Baptist view, something we might call restorationist, to say that at the time of these holy scriptures, we had the perfect church of the apostles, but after the apostles died, the church goes off the rails, and the only way to restore the true church is if we only trust what we can deduce from the scriptures, ignoring creeds, ignoring the fathers, ignoring institutional church, and you can imagine what issues that might have because we see the divisions amongst Baptists today where whatever you translate the scriptures to mean becomes the authority of your Bible, your church, so that's why you can have one Baptist church that believes in a distensational idea that Christ could come at any moment and Russia is now the new Antichrist or something like that, or you can go back 100 years and the Baptist church can be completely different because they're not grounded in a historic view of the church, but what they believe today and can argue from the scripture becomes their authority.

That restoration view is very dangerous. It's also the view held by Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, not just our Baptist friends, but on the other extreme of that idea of how you come up with doctrine are people like the Roman Catholics or the Eastern Orthodox to some extent.

The Roman Catholics have the idea that the church is the bearer of authority in some sense. The Roman Catholic Church today would say that we receive the scriptures as a product of the church, of the product of the teaching ministry of the church, of the apostles, and that the scriptures are an authority, but throughout history, the scriptures have been not only interpreted by the fathers, but there is a separate ministry of the Roman Church called the magisterium that can infallibly define what doctrine is, and that kind of infallible definition is called dogma, so they're able to not only say what's clearly in the scripture, but also to go beyond what's in the scripture by certain authority.

Now, today, that's much different than maybe the Roman Catholic Church of 1 ,000 years ago or even 500 years ago, and we'll get to that when we talk about dogma, but I want you to have in your mind as we go through this those two extremes.

Scripture Alone and the Meaning of Doctrine

Where does your doctrine come from? Is it the individual and how they read the scripture, or is it the collective, how the church as an institution reads the scripture, and the Anglican view is neither of those.

It says the scripture is sufficient. We'll talk about what that means, and that the scripture is the only authority, and the only authority to do a couple of things we're gonna talk about, too. So, in your outline, we have what is doctrine?

They stop trying. What is doctrine? The formal teaching of the church, obviously from this Latin idea. Good morning. We have some papers over here. We have some for you. You just missed me talking about the Roman Catholic Church, but you already know all the stuff.

So, Mr. Zahn, is it doctrine or doctrine? Doctrine. Doctrine. Unless it has an L at the end, then it's doctrinal, right? So, the Latin word, docere, or to teach. So, when we talk about doctrine, it is what does the church teach?

What does the minister teach? What do families teach? What does the individual teach? What is taught when we say we are Christians? So, doctrine, therefore, is important and inescapable. How we live our lives is in accordance with our doctrine, what we've been taught, and what we do teach.

So, we can't be non-doctrinal Christians. If we just ignore doctrine as a study, we just follow whatever the common doctrine is of our age. So, we have to be intentional about how we define what it is we teach, and where we get our authority to believe what we believe.

If we go to Walmart today, we could find a nice little Christian section there at Walmart, and at the top of the bestseller and Christian section at Walmart, you'll see Sarah Young, Jesus Calling in seven or eight different versions.

And if you don't have an idea of what doctrine is or authority is or source of teaching is, you might believe that that's Christian. Now, the second part here, what does doctrine be, says the Anglican church.

Anglicanism and the Rejection of Private Revelation

And when we say the Anglican church, we mean those of the Anglican way. So, those of us who are Episcopalian, Anglican, use the Book of Common Prayer. Historically, the Church of England, the Anglican church has no special or private doctrine.

This was a big issue in the early church with the Gnostics, the idea that we might have secret knowledge, or an issue today with special cults who have a new prophet, whether it's Muhammad or Joseph Smith, who has a special revelation from an angel, or a new prophet, or a new word of God that comes down to them.

The Book of Revelation tells us not to add to it. St. Paul says that whether an angel himself comes to you, we cannot teach something contrary to what we've received. Now, the teaching of our church is the teaching of the ancient undivided church, Jesus Christ, as found in the Holy Scriptures.

Now, that's a loaded statement because how do you know exactly what the church, that was undivided, believes or teaches? And how do you define the undivided church? In our last lesson, we had the picture of the tree, where the trunk of the tree was Jesus and he found it under his 12 disciples.

And then over a few centuries, you saw it divide between East and West, and then the various branches of Protestantism or different Protestant denominations. But when we go back into our history, our doctrine finds a common point between Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants of all denominations.

And that can be seen in the Church of the Crees. So if you look at 325, First Nicaea, 381, Nicaea II, you go through Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, all of these early councils of the church, you have a church that is undivided, East and West together.

And this church appeals, not to itself, they argue that their authority did not rest in the miter they had on their head, if they did wear one, or the persuasiveness of their philosophy, but on what they received from apostles via Holy Scripture.

How do we know that God is triune? The Scriptures teach so. How do we know that there's incarnation? The Scriptures teach so. So the primitive church or the ancient undivided church is the church that believes the Scriptures.

And you can see clearly, as the centuries go on, the idea of doctrine being defined by Scripture only changed and transformed as the church divides. So where do we get this standard? It's from the Bible itself, 2 Peter 1 and 20 says, no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation.

So Mr. Cyril, or Mr. Athanasius, or Mr. Augustine, or even Mr. John Calvin, or even Mr. Martin Bucer, or even our blessed Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cramner, they can't come up with, this is what I believe the Scripture might say.

And so we always understood this as, the Scripture can't come up with new interpretations, no new private interpretations. What we believe today must be in conformity with what was handed down in the apostolic period, which was held through the early centuries of the church, received through the councils, and came up through the undivided church.

So there is such a thing, there is such a thing as an ancient undivided church, where they had a common view of the Scriptures. Now the second portion here comes to the idea of dogma. Now dogma's a fun word, and it includes those things, those things that must be believed as matters of great authority, must be believed as matters of great authority.

Dogma, Creeds, and Required Christian Beliefs

On page 15, he says, dogma is the most basic or fundamental sense of principles taught by the authority of the church as the necessary beliefs for salvation. Another way to say this is, the dogma are the things that we must believe to be considered, say, these are the things we must believe to be considered Christians.

So if you put something in the category of dogma, it's required, there's no wiggle room in dogma. So for example, God is a trinity, is a dogmatic idea. You can't come up with, well, sometimes we believe that.

So those are required dogmas. Dogma itself comes from the Greek word dokaion, which means to think, believe, or consider, and it's cognate in Latin, not cognate, I guess, but its equivalency in Latin is the idea of the word credo, or I believe.

So dogma and creed are the same idea, one expressed in Latin, one expressed in Greek. So when we come together on a Sunday and we say the Nicene Creed, we are confessing this is the dogma of what we believe.

If we confess during our daily offices the Apostles' Creed, this is the dogma of what it is. We talked about the creeds in the past, but the creeds being Apostles' Creed, a baptismal creed, what must you do to enter the church, the Nicene Creed being the institutional creed of the church, what must you do to be a part of the church?

Now, 2A here, I've added my favorite dogma, and 2A says, my karma ran over your dogma. I'm just kidding. What? What? Karma ran over your dogma. Now, there's a couple of senses which can be understood, like people who have a relativistic view of religion, the idea of karma, that our good works, our positive vibes is more important than what we actually believe, that our actions are more important than some set of beliefs written on a book or in a wall, which is the prevalent view of modern existential or semi-rational or experiential people, but it also gets to the point of dogma is largely maligned in our culture as something like stuffy or prohibitive, but dogma's very important for us to understand.

I think it's funny because it also plays on the idea of a car running over a dog. So, karma ran over your dogma. But what's the difference then between the various doctrines of the church and the dogma of the church?

Doctrine and Dogma in the Roman Catholic Tradition

So, for example, if you open up your Geneva Bible, so in 1599, the reformers in Geneva, Switzerland, came up with an English translation of the scripture with notes and smuggled it into England, Geneva Bible, and inside it was the first Bible that had not only the scripture translated faithfully, but also sermon notes, commentary sections below the actual text, and this Geneva Bible was at one time banned in England, but it had certain ideas that were peculiar to the Geneva church reformers, but some of them were peculiar just to, for example, when it gets to the idea of, say, Michael the Archangel, there's a little note in the Geneva Bible that says that is Jesus, meaning Jesus is Michael the Archangel.

I mean, that's not something that we confess, say, dogmatically, right? There are some ideas that teachers in the church come up with that can be defended scripturally that don't need to be believed by everybody to be considered Christian, right?

We all recognize those things. So that's the main difference between a doctrine, a teaching of the church, and a dogma, a required tenet of the faith. Now, this distinction between doctrine and dogma is understood differently in different churches.

So, for example, I have here the Roman Catholic view, and I've taken this actually from Mr. Aiken's book, so some of you guys know, is it John Aiken? Jimmy? Jimmy Aiken. Jimmy Aiken. Jimmy Aiken is a Catholic apologist, so this is their best defense of their distinction.

He says, dogma is divine, infallible, by Bible and or magisterium. Doctrine is taught by the church, but subject to error. So the idea in Jimmy Aiken's mind is the Roman Catholics have dogma, similar to we do, but then they also put down doctrine or ideas that may be true or may be changed in the future.

So some examples of Roman Catholic dogmas that have been introduced to the undivided church since the Reformation. So the Reformation, or post-Reformation council of Trent, for example, introduces dogmatically, as matters that must be accepted by those who call themselves Roman Catholics, the idea of transubstantiation.

So they move it from the category of doctrine. There were some people in the medieval period that believed that the body and blood of Christ were transformed to no longer being bread and wine, to now completely being the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And Aristotelian logic that followed it became a matter of dogma. So the council of Trent, the Roman Catholic council met, and they transformed this doctrine, this idea that was held by some people, into the category of, if you don't believe this, you are not a Christian.

And the word they like to use is, if you don't believe this, you are anathema, which is to say, accursed or destined to hell. They also added the doctrine of purgatory to be a dogmatic thing at the council of Trent as well.

So prior to the council of Trent, meaning prior to the Reformation, there was no dogmatic statement in the Western Church or the Eastern Church that said you had to believe in transubstantiation, or that you had to believe in purgatory.

And the Roman Catholic Church changes that understanding. So you see a development, largely in a response to the Anglican Church and the Protestant Reformation. Now, more recently, in the last, let's see, 1860s, I think is when Vatican I happened.

Papal Infallibility and Marian Dogmas

Vatican I issued a infallible decree, a matter of dogma, that the Pope, there are some things that the Pope speaks from his chair or ex-cathedra that become infallible. Now, mind you, from the time of the apostles to 1860s, is a pretty long time to not have this as a dogma, to papal infallibility or papal infallibility.

But as a consequence, the Roman Catholic Church moves further and further away from what we describe as the source of our doctrine, which is the teaching of the ancient, undivided Church of the Scripture.

There's no doctrine of papal infallibility in the Scripture, not even in the history of the Roman Church itself. But with that, they're able to move even further away, now that the Pope can speak infallibly, Pope Pius IX was able to, pardon the typo here, proclaim the Immaculate Conception of Mary, not Mart, Immaculate Conception of Mary.

Now, we all believe in the Immaculate Conception of Christ, but they took it a step further and they said, well, Mary herself must be immaculately conceived as well. Now, you can talk about these ideas, and there are ideas that are called pious doctrines or pious thoughts about the early Church.

So you can go back to the Church, and maybe you can find a writer who talks about or confesses that they believed that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven. Or maybe you can find a writer who believed in maybe the Immaculate Conception.

But it is not until Pope Pius IX that this is declared a matter of dogma, that if you don't believe that Mary was immaculately conceived, then you are anathema. So this is a big difference, the bucket of doctrine and the bucket of dogma.

The bucket of dogma says this is the benchmark of what it means to be a Christian, to be Orthodox, to be Catholic. And you can see just through these examples of the Roman Catholic Church of ways they've added to it.

Now, we can find other doctrines within the Anglican world that could also make this big statement on, which is contrary to the anathema with that. Then there's also the recent, more recent than the last 30 years, the acceptance of, say, females and oars and other branches of Anglicanism, which we can also say anathema to that.

But by what standard do we say dogma and doctrine? Is it the magisterium, as the Roman Catholics do? Is it the pope? Is it the cardinals, the church teachers? Or is it something greater? And so the Anglicans must say it is the scripture, the holy scripture.

Anglican Articles and the Sufficiency of Scripture

And so the Anglican view of doctrine versus dogma here on number four, it says, the Anglican Church, as did all the undivided church, has committed itself to scriptural doctrine only, which is the distinction, but that's what makes us say that our authority is the scripture.

Now, over the period of the Reformation, period of several decades, the church produced the argument to above 39, went back down to 39, arguing, and eventually published after Thomas Cranmer died. But in here, we give a good definition of what it means to have an Anglican view.

And this is also subscribed to by our particular parish and the ministers here and membership here. So it's important for us to know it. The Anglican view on doctrine and dogma is outlined here on page 603.

So if you go to the back of your prayer book, it lists out all of the articles of religion. And it's similar to say like the Westminster Confession, but it has a different intention. So the articles are not an exhaustive answer to every theological question you might have.

These are, again, questions of dogma. What is the minimum we have to believe to be considered? So here on page 603, article number six, which is called Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scripture for Salvation, it says, Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.

Before the First Vatican Council, you didn't believe all. Or the Immaculate Conception of Mary, if you were born before the reign of Pope Pius IX, you don't believe all things necessary for salvation because Roman Catholic has added some things to that to be necessary to believe.

So the Anglican view goes back to the scripture. But it also goes on, it says, so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required. I think that's a helpful distinction, too.

It says, how do you handle something like papal infallibility from the scripture if it's not in the history of the church as the understanding of the scripture, then it can't be. So this is a big distinction, truly scriptural.

The final word here before it gets to the list of the books of the Bible, it says, thought to be requisite or necessary because there are things and doctrines that we may believe. So for example, does that affect my, live your Christian life, right?

Creeds as Boundaries for Christian Faith

But if somebody believed that they're, now, the next section here in the book, because just coming from the scripture, inside the gutters, sometimes they fill them with piping or sometimes they have little posts that pop out of the lanes.

But the creeds function like gutter posts. They protect us. So we're standing down, looking the lane of the bowling alley, and now at the end are the pins of salvation. Here I am, the bowling ball of the Christian life.

And as I go down this lane, I have on my right side the scripture, right? Protecting me from falling into the gutter. And then I have here on my left side the creeds. And as long as those things are held in the proper tension, no matter where my ball goes in these various doctrines, those dogmatic statements keep me, the gutter, out of the position, out of hell.

So the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed are helpful for understanding that. If you look on page 18 of Tarsultano, the creeds do not develop necessarily as an extension of the scripture. They don't mean to be adding to the scripture.

The creeds are a response. First of all, the Apostles' Creed is established so that we might, who believe the scriptures, confess our belief in the scriptures. So the Apostles' Creed was all that was required for someone to be baptized.

But then what if we had doubts about the nature of Christ or arguments about the body of Christ or the incarnation of Christ? The creeds were not taking the scripture and going next chapter, next book.

The creeds were how do we defend what the scripture has said? And so the councils of the church, beginning at Nicaea, gathered together all the bishops of the world, east and west, and they began to debate.

Now, many of you already know the history. Deacon Athanasius is there, and it's Constantine the Great calling the council, Saint Nicholas punching Arius, all those details that come with the council. But the council produces the creed in a response to Arian heresy or to Gnostic heresy.

So the creeds are meant to protect the scripture, not continue to develop doctrine. The creeds are meant as a defense of what we already believed, not an addition to the Christian faith. Sometimes restorationists, Baptists or Mormons, will say that the church changed at Nicaea, that suddenly there are bishops after this point or suddenly, after this point, the church has come under Constantinian captivity.

The Roman Catholic Church is born out of the church of Nicaea. That's not the case at all. Nicaea represents when the church could all agree, and this is what the scripture teaches. And whether you were in Rome or Antioch or Alexandria, whether you were as far as southeast as Turkey or all the way to the Britain Islands, every single person could agree and confess the faith.

So that's something unique there. This gives us the boundary markers of what it means to be in, and their initial draft of the Nicene Creed didn't include little bits about the Holy Spirit, and so the subsequent council in Constantinople in 381 included Basil's work on the Holy Spirit.

That entire paragraph is basically lived from Basil's work itself. So the Anglican view fed in the scripture with, but each point of the creed itself must stand wholly if something in the creed, Antiochians believe this, they debated, does it say so in the scripture?

So that's important. So moving on from, hopefully we're reciting, there are here listed out the nine doctrines that God has a trinity. Now these doctrines, I think they're kind of, they're different and just personal.

The Personal and Unique Nature of God

It's very different than what is this impersonal force that doesn't, that hears your prayers and may have justice on you, but has no personal relationship with you. But we know God is personal as he revealed himself in the scripture, spoken to us personally, gave his son to us personally, lived with us personally.

We also know that God is unique. Now good reformed Christians, we recognize that the uniqueness of God is also part of this creature, creator distinction. No one is like God, he is the creator, he is separate from his creation, he is unique from his creation.

Divine Sovereignty, Life, and Freedom

No part of humankind can be seen as the same as God. We are made after his image, after his likeness, we think his thoughts after him, he is unique, we follow his patterns. D, God is sovereign. Now this is a good reformed word.

There is, as Heidegger would say, not one square inch of all of human existence where God does not say mine. So every atom, as Ventile would say, belongs to God, God is sovereign. He's sovereign over history, he's sovereign over salvation, he's sovereign over the sacraments, which means that you are not.

So you don't save yourself, you don't grant yourself salvation, you don't pray yourself into heaven, you don't marry yourself, you don't celebrate sacraments on yourself, you don't create a church by yourself.

God is sovereign, we are sinners. God is alive, we are dead. So next one, E is free. A very important theological concept, the freedom of God, meaning God is not constrained by the natural rules of our world, that's why we can have miracles, but also God is free and the nature we experience is His freedom expressed over us, not the other way around.

One of the common apologetics questions that is tossed around in any introductory classes, can God create a rock so big that He cannot pick it up? You guys heard that one before. Can God create a rock so big that He can't pick it up?

Which challenges the freedom of God. Is He constrained to the natural recourses of this world or is He something else? So God is free. Next one is God is one. God is one. This is obviously the call of the ancient Israel, the belief of Israel, that there are not any multiplicity of gods or any division in God.

God is one. Echoing Hebrews, our next doctrine is, which is important because this was also one of the reasons why the Nicene Creed hadn't been written because there were ancient heretics like Marcion, not to be confused with Messias, right?

God’s Unchangeableness and Self-Revelation

Marcion, who said that there was a God of the Old Testament and He's spiritual, but God is changeless. He is the same in Genesis, Exodus, even Leviticus, as He is in, and in Revelation. So it's the same God, doesn't change, doesn't become something different.

God expresses Himself. I think we've talked about this a couple of times. Friends in the CRC have a great about how God could not express any of these characteristics, especially our last one, without being a trinity.

How does a God who is one express the idea of love, which love requires, and then we understand when there's a Son, there's a Holy Ghost, and their relationship becomes their life, the creator, and their roles in the trinity also comes down.

And then finally, God is love. So God is love. The characteristics of God are expressed, each of these in this, nine doctrines of how we define who God is. And so if you use these characteristics as the God of most other religions, the God of Mormonism, fit these nine characteristics, He changes.

He's not unique. He's not sovereign. Is the God of, say, Eastern Orthodoxy? Does He fit the maybe 1 ,000 years ago? Or, like we said, Islam. You can use these nine doctrines of God, and the fact that they're from Scripture, to apply them over any type of religious system that might hook its head up.

The Nine Doctrines as a Framework for Evaluating Theology

So when you see even modern Christian use, it says take the extreme Arminians, not Jacob Arminians, who are probably more Calvinist than most Baptists today, but the extreme Arminians who say, I pray myself to salvation, walk my way into salvation somehow.

Those prayers, that theological system, contradicts the sovereignty of God, or the unchangeable nature of God, right? So these doctrines of who God is frame and protect our worldview. So they come from the Scripture.

They define who God is, and they feed back into how we defend and protect the faith. All right, so you guys have these. If you want to read through the Scripture proofs, Toshitano gave a ton of Scripture proofs on each of the nine doctrines, and I think they're helpful, but are there any questions?

Councils, Ecumenical Authority, and Church Division

We have the Crees, and these were made by the councils. So the Episcopal Church has continued to have councils, and that's where they have orders. Kind of. Yeah, so. But are we, do we do that?

So there's a couple of issues with councils today. So who calls the first council of Messiah? There's an emperor involved, and there's the bishops involved, and there's the Pentarchy involved, which is the archbishops of the various national councils, if you have those components.

You agree to a council, and you come together to do that. But after about 1000 AD, when you have this schism between the East and the West, you no longer have the components to call a council. The West has to call a council that is not, by definition, ecumenical.

So ecumenical means universal. We're having jurisdiction of the whole church. Once the church is divided between East and West, now think of it like a civil war. Once North and South are divided, whatever legislation they pass in the North doesn't apply to the South, right?

It doesn't represent the entire country. The same thing happens here in church history. The East can develop doctrine, and the West can develop doctrine, which they did, but it would not be binding on the entire church.

Now, the Western church, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, goes on to have many what they call ecumenical councils. I can't remember the exact number, but they're past double digits now, right? 22, I think.

22, yeah. So we have five, we say, are infallible, seven that are commonly accepted councils of the undivided church, and then they've added another 15 or so. You said the Roman Catholics, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they've added another 15 ecumenical councils with these dogmatic statements. Now, the Eastern church has tried to have pan-Orthodox synods, so where they try to get the various national churches to agree on things, but they have not had an ecumenical council on that.

Now, in Western Christendom, we have conferences of some authority. The Anglican Communion churches come together with resolutions, but there are no teeth behind those, right? So they stand only by consent.

So if Lambeth, for example, tomorrow says, we're gonna add another book of the Bible, so it's not the same as the Roman Catholic Church. It says, oh, you don't accept papal invalidability. You're no longer a Christian, and that happened.

During the first Vatican Council, there were a number of national churches. So you might, if you read about history of the 19th century, you'll read about the national Polish Catholic, they were basically executed, created schism, but we don't need it either, right?

So we have the sufficient definition of what it means to be a Christian here in the Undivided Church. We don't need to add anything to this. We just need to go back to what we have. The problem is we're not sticking to what we already have decided on.

The Authority of Tradition and Contemporary Anglican Questions

So, for example, male orders, what would you say? Does the ancient Undivided Church have male and female priests? No, they only have male priests. So, problem solved, we don't need a council. So, but Father, you had something to add there.

I have to correct myself, it's 21. Thank you, Medical Academy. 21, oh, okay, 21. Well, 22 is coming with Pope Frankie, as we must all reduce our carbon emissions by suicide or something like that. But any other questions on the idea of doctrine, doctrine of Catholicism?

The Magisterium and the Limits of Papal Authority

Except for the Magisterium. So the Magisterium in the Roman Catholic Church is driven by, traditionally, they have Hewitt cult, and then if, with the Pope, John Calvin said, no paedo-communion, so that's the Magisterium, no exceptions.

19th century, they only did communion once a month, so that's the Magisterium, no more. But yeah, in the Roman Catholic Church, it's supposed to be the authority of the Pope. It's supposed to be the authority of the church in consensus.

But the Roman Catholic Church today, its Magisterium is really a mess, because you have some Popes who have spoken, saying God, they also have statements about the assumption of Mary, and Mary being called Redemptrix, but then exist in a type of schizophrenia where many of these post-Vatican II theologians, Trent says, if you don't believe X, Y, and Z, you're anathema.

And then post-Vatican II, it's like,.

Well, salvation is universal.

When Roman Catholic Dogma Goes Too Far

So the idea of dogma, a immovable, not to say that Anglicanism is perfect. Any other questions? Yeah, so at what point did the Catholics go too far, where it's like, you guys are out, right?

So, or the Orthodox, for that matter, so then we would say, they're no longer part of the Holy Catholic Church, it's just us.

I would say the Catholics went too far at Trent. So at Trent is when they make the big leap. So there were probably faithful Christians throughout Western Europe who could call themselves, you know, fit the same doctrines as us, all the way up to Trent.

And you could have been a Christian of good conscience in the Catholic Church up until Trent. But at Trent, the Church has so substantially changed that it no longer is the same. So I'd like to mention more.