Dr. Peter Kreeft's conversion to Catholicism -

rule of faith

comment 545  http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/03/jason-stellman-tells-his-conversion-story/

Catholics actually ARE different from the “other protestants” you mention because our Rule of Faith is actually different. The more people we convince that the Church is the authoritative interpreter of scripture, the greater unity we have. Now, do a lot of people in our own pews need to be convinced of this? Yes, which is one of many things I do as a priest. (But, I’ll be bold and point out that one of the reasons there are so many “Bad Catholics” (a term I use only because its an argument that many here make against the Church) in our Churches is because they have been influenced by the protestant notion that they have the right to make their own opinions about God and the human person apart from the Rule of Faith).

Spot on! The Catholic “rule of faith” is the triad: Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium, where the elements thereof are understood to mutually interdependent, and where the function of the third is to interpret authoritatively the “Word of God” transmitted to us jointly by the first two. Protestants always either pit one of the three against the others, or endeavor simply to eliminate the second and/or third. But I’ve never found such strategies any more plausible historically than theologically.

penal substitution as viewed by the reformed and the Catholic

In comment found here: 458 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/

 " In the lecture below, Eleonore Stump explains how that claim (i.e. that God could not forgive us without punishing something) is incompatible with God’s love."

from comment 111http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/#comment-39666

You’re using the term “PSub,” meaning “penal substitutionary atonement,” but it is very important to be aware that the term “penal substitution” has a different meaning in Catholic theology than it does in Reformed theology. At the beginning of the article at the top of this page, you will see a link to a video by R.C. Sproul explaining the Reformed conception of penal substitution. If you watch it to the end, you will see that according to Sproul the Father essentially says to the Son, “God damn You.” According to that conception of penal substitution, bearing the curse means bearing the full punishment under justice for every sin committed by the elect. But that’s not what the term ‘penal substitution’ means in Catholic theology. In Catholic theology, ‘penal substitution’ means that Christ endured the curse of physical death (which was the curse God imposed on man after Adam’s sin) for our sakes, and offered Himself in a perfect sacrifice of loving obedience, in our place as our High Priest and Victim. That is also how the Orthodox and the Church Fathers understand the curse; see, for example, the letter of St. Augustine to Faustus, linked in the article above. It is a completely different conception of ‘penal substitution.’ So it would be equivocation to use the term ‘penal substitution’ as if in Catholic theology it meant the same as it does in Reformed theology. (Hence the statement by Fr. Murray is not about the Reformed conception of penal substitution, or indicate that there is dogmatic ‘space’ with the Catholic Tradition for the Reformed conception of penal substitution.)

It is true that in the Church Fathers there are distinct explanations of what was taking place on the Cross, but penal substitution (in the Reformed sense) was not among them, and is incompatible with the satisfaction account provided in the Catechism, and with Catholic soteriology considered as a whole. The doctrine taught by the magisterium is laid out not only in the Catechism but also in the Tradition taught and developed in both of the first two millennia. See, for example, the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on this subject, in “Aquinas and Trent: Part 6.”

You asked:

On what grounds are you asserting that the Father’s pouring out of wrath (holy indignation) towards sin which was borne by Christ (in behalf of the sinner) and therefore Christ experiencing the wrath of God toward sin (in view of redeeming man and exalting Christ) will diminish the beatific vision?

The ground is that hell is not heaven. If receiving God’s full wrath for sin did not “diminish the beatific vision,” there would be no difference between heaven and hell.

Regarding Novo millennio ineunte, it does not teach the Reformed conception of penal substitution, but rather the Catholic conception of penal substitution. My only point in making reference to it is that it upholds the traditional teaching that Christ maintained the beatific vision even during His passion.

from 17

Christ really is our substitute. He really did bear the curse, by bearing in His body the suffering and dissolution of death, and by bearing in His spirit the desolation that is the absence of spiritual consolation. By taking these upon Himself, freely, in self-sacrificial love, Christ offered something more pleasing to the Father than all our sins are displeasing. And in that way Christ merited for us the grace by which our sins are forgiven, we are restored to friendship with God, and we are saved from the punishment of hell. So Christ bears the curse, and in doing so participates in our punishment (i.e. the punishment of the curse), so that we can participate in His divine life, and avoid the ultimate punishment (i.e. eternal separation from God, in hell). In that (carefully qualified) sense, Christ’s atonement was one of penal substitution. But it was not one in which the Father imputed all our sins to Christ, and then poured out all His wrath for that sin, on Christ. The Father never hated the Son or hated any sin in the Son, because the Son was always sinless, and God the Father always sees the Son as the Son really is, sinless. Christ took on all human sin not by becoming intrinsically guilty (and thus deserving of punishment), or by imputation (and thus being falsely accused by an omniscient Being), but by (1) allowing Himself to suffer the effects of the curse, and (2) by seeing all the sin of all men for what it is in all its evil, and in solidarity with us (as one sharing our nature), with the grief of contrition freely and lovingly offering Himself as a perfect sacrifice for it.

from 18

Let me add something as a point of clarification and qualification. To be damned is to be without hope, and without charity. It is to know that one is eternally separated from God, with no hope, not even the possibility of there being hope. That is utter despair. To be damned is to hate God, and to hate His justice. To be damned is to hate oneself with never-ending hatred that knows itself to be never-ending. But Christ endured the cross for the joy set before Him; He always retained hope and charity. He did not despair (that would have been a mortal sin). Nor did He hate God. Thus He never hated Himself. Nor did He ever lose sanctifying grace; otherwise His human will would have been against His divine will. So, for these reasons, if we say that He experienced what it is like to be damned, we must include some very important qualifications. He experienced the external loss of divine protection, and the interior loss of spiritual consolation. The damned also experience that, so in those two respects Christ experienced what it is like to be damned. But Christ didn’t experience the despair, self-loathing, hatred for God and deprivation of grace that the damned experience. So in those respects Christ didn’t experience what it is like to be damned.

Update: For more on Christ’s vision of the Father while on the cross, especially in response to Balthasar, see comment #4 in the “Harrowing of Hell” thread.

from comment 73:

 What Jesus was doing on the cross was “serving” others (Mk. 10:45), as he did throughout his obedient life. He was not being punished by God, rather he was offering to God an obedient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

from 74: in commenting on a quote from Calvin and explaining that Calvin's view was different from modern Penal Sub views:  

In terms of your quotes, he says that Jesus “endured the death which is inflicted ON THE WICKED by an angry God.” That is not quite the same (though it is close) as saying that he “endured the death which was inflicted on him by an angry God.” Also if you look at Calvin’s comments on Matthew 27:46 he makes it clear that even though on the cross Jesus truly did feel the fear and sorrow of sinners as they stand before God’s Judgment Seat, in reality God was NOT alienated from him. Whereas modern penal substitution advocates see in Jesus’ language (My God, My God) an indication of God’s actual subjective abandonment of his own Son, Calvin sees in that same expression a confession of Jesus’ faith that God had in fact not abandoned him, though he could not feel his loving presence at that time.

and 77: Jesus does not cry out “God,” but “My God.” The fact that he does not address God as his father is hardly indicative of the assumptions you read into the language. I guess you’ve never taken the time to notice that in Calvin’s commentary on Matthew 27:46, he takes the cry “My God, My God” as a confession of Jesus’ faith that God had NOT in fact abandoned him on the cross. Despite his experience of suffering and sorrow (which Calvin does take to be a judicial execution of justice upon Jesus as the substitute) on the cross, Calvin does NOT think that God’s wrath was literally and subjectively “poured out” on his own Son. While Calvin did advocate penal substitution, he saw it only as Jesus experiencing the objective consequences of human sin, not as an actual punitive enactment of divine wrath on the part of God the Father. What started out as a minor overemphasis on the forensic context of the atonement in the Reformers, has become a monstrous false teaching in the hands of their less adept theological heirs.

from 253:

Verse 5 says “The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him”. According to Webster, “chasten” means “to correct by punishment or suffering”. Thus, the punishment for our sin fell on Jesus.

First, what you’re doing in this line of reasoning here is presupposing that Webster is the definitive way of determining the meaning of Scripture. And that’s not a neutral presupposition, as I showed in “The Tradition and the Lexicon.” Second, there is more than one sense to the term translated as ‘punishment,’ but your line of argumentation conflates them. The Reformed notion is that on the cross Christ received the full retribution in the Father’s wrath for each sin ever committed (and to be committed) by the elect. The Catholic belief, by contrast, is that on the cross Christ took upon Himself the penalty that had been given to Adam (man) for sin, namely, death. But there was no animosity or break in communion between the Father and the Son, or wrath of the Father for the Son. Nor did Christ bear “the full retribution in the Father’s wrath” for any sin. Your line of reasoning, however, fails to make this distinction, and thus assumes that if Christ endured some penalty, then the Reformed notion of penal substitution must be true.

You can’t just ignore or reword verses that don’t fit your paradigm.

Again, explaining the meaning of a verse is not “rewording” a verse. When Jesus says “I am the door” (Jn 10:7), you rightly don’t conclude that Jesus has hinges.

Our paradigms must align with all of God’s word, as it was written.

Of course our paradigms must “align” with all of God’s word, as it was written. But that does not mean that the only correct interpretation is a wooden interpretation.

If the wages of sin is death, and Christ did not sin, why did He die? The answer is that punishment for our sin was imputed to Christ.

That conclusion does not follow from those two premises. My post above explains that Christ through His sacrifice offered a perfect gift of love to God, a gift that outweighed in its goodness the demerit of our sins, and thus satisfied God’s justice. You’re jumping to the conclusion that these verses entail an imputation of sin (or guilt) to Christ. But not only does that conclusion not follow from the verses, but there is an alternative way of understanding why Christ died, and how His death effected our salvation. That’s the whole point of the post above.

If our sins are forgiven and Christ did not bear the punishment for those sins, then how has justice been attained? It seems to me that your paradigm accounts for God’s perfect love but fails to account for His perfect justice.

The post at the top of this page explains this. If you don’t understand how the Catholic teaching accounts for God’s justice, then please read the post again.

from here  http://catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2013/09/why-penal-substitution-doesnt-work-part.html  Read this for further discussion on the differences and reasons --here is a bit from it:

But of course, God didn’t just simply forgive us. The question then is why the Cross? St. Thomas’ answer is that it was the most fitting way that we could have been redeemed. He writes (ST, III, 46, art. 3):

Guercino, Christ Crowned with Thorns (1622)

Among means to an end that one is the more suitable whereby the various concurring means employed are themselves helpful to such end. But in this that man was delivered by Christ's Passion, many other things besides deliverance from sin concurred for man's salvation. In the first place, man knows thereby how much God loves him, and is thereby stirred to love Him in return, and herein lies the perfection of human salvation; hence the Apostle says (Romans 5:8): "God commendeth His charity towards us; for when as yet we were sinners . . . Christ died for us." Secondly, because thereby He set us an example of obedience, humility, constancy, justice, and the other virtues displayed in the Passion, which are requisite for man's salvation. Hence it is written (1 Peter 2:21): "Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow in His steps." Thirdly, because Christ by His Passion not only delivered man from sin, but also merited justifying grace for him and the glory of bliss, as shall be shown later (48, 1; 49, 1, 5). Fourthly, because by this man is all the more bound to refrain from sin, according to 1 Corinthians 6:20: "You are bought with a great price: glorify and bear God in your body." Fifthly, because it redounded to man's greater dignity, that as man was overcome and deceived by the devil, so also it should be a man that should overthrow the devil; and as man deserved death, so a man by dying should vanquish death. Hence it is written (1 Corinthians 15:57): "Thanks be to God who hath given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." It was accordingly more fitting that we should be delivered by Christ's Passion than simply by God's good-will.

In other words, the Cross was the most fitting or best way to redeem mankind, but not because of strict justice (because, as we have seen, God could have pardoned us without any contradiction). The Cross was the best way to redeem us because (in addition to redeeming us) it also manifested the degree of God’s love for us, as well as the gravity of sin, and gave us a perfect example all a multiplicity of virtues, and on and on.

see also the follow up post http://catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2013/09/good-friday-superabundant-atonement.html

and from a comment 288 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/#comment-61530

I hope you don’t mind my butting in.

First, when presented with the Reformed question of how are sins can be paid for without punishment, this article answers that “Christ made atonement for the sins of all men by offering to God a sacrifice of love that was more pleasing to the Father than the combined sins of all men of all time are displeasing to Him.” This idea of God’s choice between pouring out wrath or accepting a loving sacrifice seems like a critical concept since it is mentioned at least twice, but I don’t see any source or citation. What supports this idea, and/or where did it originate?

If you look at the way offering and appeasement functioned in the OT, you’ll see that the concept of penal substitution (as the Reformed articulate it) is completely absent. For example, when Jacob was estranged from Esau and heard that he was only a few miles away heading in his direction, he sent ahead a series of offerings that “appeased” his brother’s wrath.

Likewise after the rebellion of Korah, Aaron was commanded to offer burnt incense in order to quench God’s wrath. In neither of these cases was anyone punished in the place of another. Instead, some sort of gift or action was considered by the offended party to be sufficient to restore fellowship. This is how we understand the sacrifice of Christ.

Second, why must God to choose between pouring out just wrath or delighting in Christ’s loving sacrifice? Under the Protestant view, I often asked why God couldn’t just forgive us without Calvary, and I was always told that God HAD to punish sins to remain Holy, and Jesus took the punishment in our place. The Catholic view described in this article poses a kind of meta-scenario where God can pour out wrath, but that the sin need not be punished if something (Christ’s love-sacrifice) would please Him more.

Ironically it is the Catholic view that actually extols the sufficiency of the cross, since Jesus’ self-offering, in and of itself, satisfies the Father. In the Protestant view God is only satisfied after he has meted out his fury upon his Son (an idea fraught with heaps of Trinitarian problems), whereas in the Catholic view the sacrifice of Christ, as such, appeases the Father.

A good way to make the distinction is by contrasting restitution and retribution. If you borrow my iPad and drop it in the pool by accident, but if you replace it with a new one, thereby making restitution, there is no need for me to seek retribution against you in any form. The only reason retribution would be pursued would be if you failed to make restitution. So if at the cross Jesus made restitution by offering a pleasing sacrifice, why would God need to also punish him?

It seems like the Protestant view involves God as a creditor, mankind as a defaulting debtor, and Christ as the voluntary guarantor who satisfies on our behalf a debt that MUST be paid. Under the Catholic position above, it seems that God is still a creditor, mankind is still a defaulting debtor, but Christ plays a slightly different role. Instead of writing a check to pay OUR indebtedness in His capacity as our guarantor, Christ writes a fat check in His OWN capacity. God apparently prefers the check from “Jesus” as opposed to the check from “Jesus, as guarantor of mankind.”

I am personally less than comfortable with all this accounting language. God is not a creditor, he is (by his very nature) a Father, and as a Father he reproduces his own divine image in his offspring—because that’s what fathers do. His earthly son, Adam, was called to offer himself back to God in sacrificial and self-giving love, because that’s what sons do. The divine Son did just this, thereby overcoming the chasm by assuming human nature so that we can have fellowship with God by a new and living way, through the veil, that is, through his flesh (Heb. 10).

And while it may be hypothetically possible for God to have forgiven sins without the cross in some alternate universe about which we know nothing, if in our actual scenario salvation includes forgiveness of sins and our participation in the divine nature, the incarnation was necessary, and so was the atonement.

from comment  311 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/ a Catholic reply to a Protestant:

............................

I’m sorry if I misunderstood you by claiming you said Jesus experienced God’s wrath. If I understand your last comment, it seems you are insisting that Jesus experienced reprobation, but not necessarily God’s wrath? I don’t understand this, but maybe you can elaborate.

You say scripture doesn’t say how Jesus paid for our sins, but you follow that up by insisting that He paid for our sins by reprobation rather than by an offering of restitution. You seem to be saying that reprobation is the only possible explanation that Jesus experienced mortal death or feelings of forsakenness.

But you are begging the question by denying another explanation. For we are saying there is another explanation, that His whole life was a sacrifice of perfect love and obedience, and that this perfect sacrifice of love (completely giving up His life for our sake) was accepted by the Father as complete restitution for our sins. Our explanation for His mortal death and feelings of forsakenness is that we (not God) inflicted these things upon Him – by our sin.

Why did obedience necessitate experiencing mortal death? God loves us, and He wants us to experience joy, which we can experience only in fulfilling our purpose. Our purpose is to give up our own lives in sacrifice and love for God and others. Only in sacrifice and love do we find true joy.

Therefore since God loved us and wants us to experience joy, He chose to show us a life of superabundant love, by the example of His Son. What is perfect love? 1. Love bears all wrongs. 2. There is no greater love than to give up one’s life for our friends. Therefore, in order to show a life of superabundant love, Jesus was turned over to man to bear the wrongs of the whole world and to give up His life for every man. Nothing short of perfect obedience would have made restitution for our sins. Nothing short of superabundant love would have shown the Son’s perfect obedience. Nothing short of suffering the wrongs for all mankind would have demonstrated God’s superabundant love for us. Therefore, it was necessary that Jesus die, at the hand of all mankind, for the sins of all mankind, in order to pay the price for our sins.

In the article, Brian showed how Jesus’s perfect sacrificial love made complete restitution for our sins. Now, I have explained that theory again, and I have explained why suffering an unjust death at the hands of man was an essential part of that restitution. So, do you you still insist that God’s reprobation for sinners is the only possible explanation for Jesus’s suffering on the cross? Or do you see how it was necessary for Jesus to suffer mortal death at the hand of man in order to demonstrate a life of superabundant love and obedience, and thus make complete restitution for our sins?

If you still insist on reprobation rather than restitution, what is lacking from your side is an explanation of how an offering of perfect obedience would be insufficient to pay the price for our sins, or how paying the price for sins would necessitate furthermore experiencing an unjust reprobation from the Father (rather than an unjust punishment from man). Furthermore, I would appreciate an explanation of how Jesus could have atoned for our sins by penal substitution without experiencing the full punishment for sins. For the full punishment for sin is not just mortal death, but it is eternal death and eternal separation from God. Jesus experienced neither eternal death nor eternal separation from God. Therefore, the theory of penal substitution doesn’t explain how He paid the full price for our sins.

In contrast, the theory of restitution does explain how Jesus paid the full price for our sins.

from nicks blog---the comment section http://catholicnick.blogspot.com/2014/04/does-catholic-view-of-christs-atonement.html

Thomas Aquinas in his exposition of the Apostle’s Creed regarding Christ Descent into Hell, he wrote:

“There are four reasons why Christ together with His soul descended to the underworld. First, He wished to take

 upon

 Himself the entire punishment for our sin, and thus atone for its entire guilt. The punishment for the sin of man was not

 alone death of the body, but there was also a punishment of the soul, since the soul had its share in sin; and it was 

punished by being deprived of the beatific vision; and as yet no atonement had been offered whereby this punishment 

would be taken away. Therefore, before the coming of Christ all men, even the holy fathers after their death, descended

 into the underworld. Accordingly in order to take upon Himself most perfectly the punishment due to sinners, Christ not 

only suffered death, but also His soul descended to the underworld. He, however, descended for a different cause than 

did the fathers; for they did so out of necessity and were of necessity taken there and detained, but Christ descended 

there of His own power and free will: “I am counted among them that go down to the pit; I am become as a man without 

help, free among the dead” [Ps 87:5Vulgate]. The others were there as captives, but Christ was freely there.” (Expositio 

in Symbolum Apostolorum, translated by Joseph Collins).

from the CTC link above, comment 435

In Catholic theology, ‘penal substitution’ means that Christ endured the curse of physical death (which was the curse God imposed on man after Adam’s sin) for our sakes, and offered Himself in a perfect sacrifice of loving obedience, in our place as our High Priest and Victim.

In #157, Bryan explains:

It is true that for St. Thomas Christ is our substitute, but He substitutes for us not by receiving the wrath of God, but by offering in love the perfect sacrifice we could not offer. For St. Thomas, satisfaction and punishment are distinct, and the atonement is not by Christ taking from the Father the punishment we deserved, because it is not by punishment. It is by a satisfactory gift of love to the Father. Christ’s sacrifice is meritorious, says St. Thomas, precisely because it is an act of charity in the [human] will of Christ, inasmuch as Christ embraced the suffering of the cross out of love for the Father and the whole world.

from comment 437:

 in that same paragraph (Trent VI.7):

the final cause is the glory of God and of Christ and life everlasting; the efficient cause is the merciful God who washes and sanctifies gratuitously, signing and anointing with the holy Spirit of promise, who is the pledge of our inheritance, the meritorious cause is His most beloved only begotten, our Lord Jesus Christ, who, when we were enemies, for the exceeding charity wherewith he loved us, merited for us justification by His most holy passion on the wood of the cross and made satisfaction for us to God the Father,

He did it for us, meriting justification for us, making satisfaction for us, so that we might have everlasting life.

comment 449:

1. He seems to be saying that the entire doctrine of substitutionary atonement is based on the idea that God affirms falsehood.

   No, that’s over-simplifying what I’ve said. I believe in substitutionary atonement. Christ makes atonement for us, in our place. What requires God to affirm falsehood is extra nos imputation, whereby I’m actually unrighteous internally, but simulataneously declared by God to be righteous, and Christ is actually internally righteous, but simultaneously declared by God to be unrighteous. If God were to pour out His wrath in punishment for our sin on the innocent, knowing that innocent Victim is innocent, that would make God unjust, knowingly punishing an innocent Person for crimes He did not commit. The Catholic doctrine has no such problem.

   My point is that, ironically, he does the same thing albeit in a different way. Bryan agrees (with Keith F.) that in the atonement Christ substitutes his obedience/righteousness for our disobedience/unrighteousness but then explains that this is not literally true but only figuratively.

   Christ’s Person taking our place in the offering of the atoning sacrifice is not the same thing as Christ’s righteousness substituting for our righteousness. In the Catholic doctrine, there is no ontological or legal transfer of obedience, righteousness, sin, or guilt. In His human nature Christ bears our sin through solidarity with us, making an act of contrition to God for us as one of us, in fact, as our High Priest. But there is no ontological or legal transfer of guilt, sin, righteousness, or obedience between Christ and ourselves.

   In effect God affirms something that is not true in any literal sense.

   No, He does not.

   In the atonement, God affirms what is false.

   No, He does not.

   It is the Reformed view that simply takes God at His word. In atoning for our sins, Christ’s righteousness becomes ours literally!

   If that were “literally” true, then you would now be sinless. But even the Reformed believe that Christ’s righteousness remains extra nos (outside of us). Inside, you’re still dung, and filthy rags (unlike Christ, who is perfectly righteous), at least during this present life. So even in the Reformed view you don’t “literally” have Christ’s righteousness, at least not yet. You have to wait until you’re fully sanctified.
   
   

Grace: Sufficient and Efficacious

from comment 7 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2011/12/lawrence-feingold-on-sufficient-and-efficacious-grace/#comment-59305

I still was wondering: is it true that Christ’s passion merited sufficient grace for the salvation of all men but not efficient grace for all men?

The internal theological disagreement described in the lecture above extends to the very concept of “efficacious grace.” As Prof. Feingold explains above, for Molina there is no intrinsic difference between efficacious grace and merely sufficient grace. Given that conception of “efficacious grace,” Christ’s Passion merited efficacious grace for all men, and yet this grace can be resisted successfully, and so not all are saved. For Báñez, by contrast, there is an intrinsic difference between efficacious grace and merely sufficient grace, and “efficacious grace” cannot ultimately be successfully resisted. Given that conception of “efficacious grace,” and given the falsehood of universalism, it would follow that Christ’s Passion did not merit efficacious grace for all men. So answering your question depends upon the particular definition of “efficacious grace” in view.

see also https://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/grace7.htm  [this is about :

Grace: Commentary on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, Chapter Seven

Rev. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.

EFFICACIOUS GRACE  so check the link out

Is 53

from comment 142  http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/#comment-59297  see comment 142

You wrote:

At the very least it must be acknowledged that the Church Fathers taught that the punishment of physical death due to trangression was visited on the Innocent Son by the Father (through the instrument of evil men)–how else could Is 53:10 say: “And the Lord was pleased to bruise Him (Hebrew “Crush Him”) in infirmity” [Douay-Rheims]

If by that you mean that the Church Fathers taught that by the one divine will God the Father (and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit) handed the Son in His human nature over to suffering and death by the hands of wicked men, then yes, but that is fully compatible with the satisfaction doctrine, and in no way indicates or suggests the Protestant position. If, however, you mean that the Church Fathers taught that God the Father used His Son as a divine punching bag, so as to get out all of His wrath for sin, then no. That notion is nowhere to be found in the Church Fathers. If God takes no delight in the death of the wicked, a fortiori He derives no pleasure in bruising the innocent. The meaning of the Isaiah passage is that it pleased God to bring about our redemption by this plan, namely, handing over His Son to be put to death by our hands, so that in His human nature He might make satisfaction to God for our sins.

from comment 251:

 doesn’t contradict any of Isaiah 53. Verse 10 does not mean that Christ made Himself guilty. Rather, it means that He made Himself an offering to atone for guilt. You’re assuming that the only way to be a “guilt offering” is to have guilt imputed to oneself, but that’s precisely the point in question, so your objection begs the question.

Further, you did not reconcile the assertion of your original post… ["The Father was never angry with Christ. Nor did the Father pour out His wrath on the Son."] …with Isaiah 53:10… “But the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief;”

The meaning is not that the Father delights in torturing His Son, but rather that God was pleased with this way (i.e. Christ’s incarnation and Passion and death) as the means by which to reconcile us to Himself. His pleasure is with the plan in which the Son suffered (at our hands) for our sake, not with the suffering per se of the Son. As I wrote in comment #142 above, “The meaning of the Isaiah passage is that it pleased God to bring about our redemption by this plan, namely, handing over His Son to be put to death by our hands, so that in His human nature He might make satisfaction to God for our sins.”

from comment 4 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/the-harrowing-of-hell/

If Christ lost the Beatific Vision during His three hours on the cross, then He did not consciously die for your sins and mine, but only for sins in the abstract, because by the natural power of His human intellect He could not have known all at once all the persons of the world and all our sins. Nor could He therefore have suffered for all our sins, interiorly. Only if He knew all our sins particularly and individually, could He grieve with the pain of contrition in solidarity with us, for each of our sins. And therefore only if He retained the Beatific Vision could He make atonement for each of our sins by His internal suffering. In the year 2000 Pope John Paul II wrote of this in his Apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte:

26. Jesus’ cry on the Cross, dear Brothers and Sisters, is not the cry of anguish of a man without hope, but the prayer of the Son who offers his life to the Father in love, for the salvation of all. At the very moment when he identifies with our sin, “abandoned” by the Father, he “abandons” himself into the hands of the Father. His eyes remain fixed on the Father. Precisely because of the knowledge and experience of the Father which he alone has, even at this moment of darkness he sees clearly the gravity of sin and suffers because of it. He alone, who sees the Father and rejoices fully in him, can understand completely what it means to resist the Father’s love by sin. More than an experience of physical pain, his Passion is an agonizing suffering of the soul. Theological tradition has not failed to ask how Jesus could possibly experience at one and the same time his profound unity with the Father, by its very nature a source of joy and happiness, and an agony that goes all the way to his final cry of abandonment. The simultaneous presence of these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects is rooted in the fathomless depths of the hypostatic union. (emphasis mine)

Pope John Paul II teaches here that it was precisely because Christ retained the Beatific Vision that He could (and did) see the full gravity of all human sins and therefore suffer for all of them in all of their offensiveness to God whom we should love above all things. How could He suffer more than anyone has ever suffered, while at the same time holding on to the joy of the Beatific Vision? Pope John Paul II says that this is a mystery, and thus we should not try to explain it away by eliminating either Christ’s Beatific Vision or His suffering. Pope John Paul II goes on in the next paragraph to say:

27. Faced with this mystery, we are greatly helped not only by theological investigation but also by that great heritage which is the “lived theology” of the saints. The saints offer us precious insights which enable us to understand more easily the intuition of faith, thanks to the special enlightenment which some of them have received from the Holy Spirit, or even through their personal experience of those terrible states of trial which the mystical tradition describes as the “dark night”. Not infrequently the saints have undergone something akin to Jesus’ experience on the Cross in the paradoxical blending of bliss and pain. In the Dialogue of Divine Providence, God the Father shows Catherine of Siena how joy and suffering can be present together in holy souls: “Thus the soul is blissful and afflicted: afflicted on account of the sins of its neighbour, blissful on account of the union and the affection of charity which it has inwardly received. These souls imitate the spotless Lamb, my Only-begotten Son, who on the Cross was both blissful and afflicted”. In the same way, Thérèse of Lisieux lived her agony in communion with the agony of Jesus, “experiencing” in herself the very paradox of Jesus’s own bliss and anguish: “In the Garden of Olives our Lord was blessed with all the joys of the Trinity, yet his dying was no less harsh. It is a mystery, but I assure you that, on the basis of what I myself am feeling, I can understand something of it”. What an illuminating testimony! Moreover, the accounts given by the Evangelists themselves provide a basis for this intuition on the part of the Church of Christ’s consciousness when they record that, even in the depths of his pain, he died imploring forgiveness for his executioners (cf. Lk 23:34) and expressing to the Father his ultimate filial abandonment: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46).

Here he points out how the great saints have a taste of this mystery in their own lives, in that they simultaneously in different but interrelated respects experience the joy of hope and charity to be fulfilled in the life to come, and the suffering and pain caused by the sins of one’s neighbor (and even of oneself) and by all the present woes due to the not-yet-ness of the culmination of all things in Heaven. On the cross Jesus in His human intellect didn’t lose sight of the loving face of His Father, but simultaneously He experienced in His body and soul the full measure of the desolation, disorder, madness and suffering of this world under the curse of sin. That’s what He is expressing in His “Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?, His full and total immersion into the God-forsakeness of this fallen world of fallen man in its cursed condition in this present life. This is what it means that He bore the curse, namely, that He entered into the fallenness of this world, even unto death.

UPDATE: One of the best refutations I’ve seen online, of Balthasar’s claim that Christ did not have the beatific vision, is Unam Sanctum Catholicam‘s “Balthasar, Christ and the Beatific Vision.”

catholic & Lutheran dialogue

http://www.lutheranworld.org/sites/default/files/From%20Conflict%20to%20Communion.pdf

, “From Conflict to Communion: Lutheran-Catholic Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017,” has been released to pave the way for joint observances of Luther’s action by both Lutherans and Catholics, a development that certainly could not have been foreseen in previous centuries.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/after-five-centuries-of-division-catholics-and-lutherans-consider-their-com/#ixzz2coR0XZQi

Interpretive paradigms

Protestants and Catholics come at theology, history, etc with different interpretive paradigms. I am going to give a quote about this below . IP =interpretive paradigm. CIP = Catholic interpretive paradigm and PIP =protestant paradigms. AS = apostolic succession

This quote is found at comment 468 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/03/jason-stellman-tells-his-conversion-story/#comment-58593

Those are fair issues to raise, though I have addressed them more than once before (presumably when you were not involved). I’ll try to present my responses as succinctly as possible.

You ask:

Can you speak more to your philosophy of evidence? Are you suggesting that all the evidence for/against RCC is theory-laden? For that matter, are all facts and evidence theory-laden?

A body of knowledge about some subject-matter what the Greeks called episteme. That is distinct from, albeit related in certain ways to, knowledge by direct experience–for which the word gnosis is typically used. When the subject-matter is not purely formal–as it is in logic and mathematics–but is at least partly empirical, all “evidence” is “theory-laden.” (Some philosophers of science argue that even the purely formal disciplines are theory-laden, but that’s not a topic that need concern us.) That is to say, what we count as evidence is determined in part by the theory with which we organize empirical observations and facts into an explanatory and thus intelligible whole. E.g., astronomers count the “red-shift” recorded when observing distant galaxies over time as evidence that those galaxies are receding from us at a rate which increases with their distance from us. Counting red shift as such evidence assumes the validity of general relativity as a theory; in that sense, the evidence is theory-laden. Theory-ladenness becomes even more evident in less rigorous disciplines such as history, where the significance of various bits of documentary and archeological evidence depends in part on the explanatory narrative or theory into which the historian is trying to fit them.

Now astronomy, history, and every other “discipline” save theology are purely human disciplines. They explore subjects about which we can acquire episteme by human reason alone. Theology, however, takes special divine revelation (SDR) as its primary subject-matter. SDR consists precisely in that which cannot be discovered by human reason alone, but which God must show and tell us if we are to know its content at all. Hence, we can know it only on divine authority. A fortunate few, such as the OT “prophets” and the Apostles, have received SDR by direct experience; they had gnosis of it. But most of us can have only episteme of it. And theology, above all “epistemic” disciplines, is “theory-laden.”

That’s because one cannot determine the theological significance of various historical and other facts without a principled means of distinguishing SDR as such from human opinions about the vehicles or “sources” by which SDR is allegedly transmitted to us. Without such a means, theology is incapable of achieving its most important purpose, which is to deepen our understanding of SDR as such, not just developing opinions about where it is to be found and how to interpret it. So the data relevant to theology are “theory-laden” in the sense that, to do theology at all, one must bring some IP to the data studied, thus assigning some theological significance to them, rather than extract one’s theology logically or scientifically from the data.

I get the sense that the historical claims ground the CIP (esp. AS), but then it seems that criticisms of the historical claims are rejected as question-begging because (it is alleged that) the CIP is being rejected. But then that seems to mean that the claims of RCC are not in principle defeasible, because the historical grounds the CIP but one cannot assess the historical claims unless one first adopts CIP. But if one is not using the CIP, then one’s criticisms are dismissed as question-begging.

That’s a misunderstanding I’ve encountered before. Often, it’s motivated by the assumption that theologically significant doctrines can be either read directly off, or logically inferred from, the data afforded us by “the sources” and other, associated historical data. That assumption is characteristic of the PIP, but I argue that it does not provide a principled means of distinguishing between divine revelation as such and human opinions about the data, and thus is inherently question-begging. That doesn’t mean, though, that “history” and “the sources” are simply irrelevant to theology. Since Christianity is, among other things, a historical religion, it means that such things are indeed theologically significant. But the particular theological significance one gives them is determined by the theological IP one brings to them. And there are of course different, mutually incompatible IPs, such as the CIP and the PIP. Then the question becomes: “Very well: Which IP? Which ‘theory’–i.e., which theological IP–is the most reasonable one to bring to the historical data, given that all theology is “theory-laden” in that sense?”

To answer that, one must do two things, in the following order: (1) Determine which IPs afford a “principled means” of doing what I said; (2) Determine which IP, among those that do what’s called for by (1), makes the most overall sense of the data. My argument is that the PIP fails at stage (1). But that doesn’t automatically leave Catholicism as the only option. Other religious traditions–such as the Eastern-Orthodox and the Mormon–contain IPs with such “principled means” too. They just differ, to this-or-that degree, from the CIP. That’s when we move on to stage (2), and that’s where historical considerations become directly and even more relevant–though not of course solely relevant.

At the heart of the Christian religion is defeasibility: find the bones of Jesus and it’s all over. That is, there is a fact of the matter that is in principle defeasible, irrespective of paradigms. Would you agree or not? If you do agree, what does it look like in the case of AS? Is AS defeasible?

Christianity is “defeasible” in principle, but not in practice. Here’s what I mean.

St. Paul asserted: “If Christ be not risen, then our faith is vain.” That is true. So if Jesus did not rise bodily from the grave, to a form of corporeal existence for which we know no precedent, then Christianity is false. But that doesn’t mean we could discover some set of bones to be that of Jesus–even if Jesus’ bones were actually lying around somewhere. How would we know they are Jesus’ bones? We simply lack the means to establish such a thing at this historical distance–and that distance was probably too great anyhow by the time the Apostle John died, toward the end of the 1st century AD.

The same goes for apostolic succession (which is what I presume you mean by ‘AS’). In principle, if we had a much richer data-set from the first century or so of the Church’s life than we do, we could learn that the succession of leadership in what came, during the 2nd century, to be called the “catholic church” does not satisfy the Church’s criteria for valid AS. But we don’t have that rich a dataset. And even if the dataset we have got richer over time, thanks to archaeological discoveries, it’s hard to imagine it settling any question of theological significance. We would just find ourselves debating whether the new data really do show that the Church’s criteria for valid AS weren’t satisfied. And that debate would, of course, hinge on which IPs are brought to the data.

I keep trying to get some people to see that we need to be discussing stage (1) above before we get to stage (2). You can observe the results yourself in this thread. I find them frustrating sometimes.

and here also here from comment 294 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/05/the-tu-quoque/#comment-40058--below

As I see it, the fundamental issue in this debate is whether there is a principled way, as opposed to anad hoc way, of distinguishing between the assent of divine faith and that of human opinion. That is what became clear to me in the debate a few years ago with “Kepha” and his friends. The clam that Bryan, I, and others at CTC makes is that the Catholic interpretive paradigm (CIP) does provide such a principled way and that the conservative-Protestant IP (CPIP) does not. I believe your comment confirms that.

On the CPIP, the best that inquirers can do is examine the scriptural, patristic, and historical evidence for themselves and reach theological conclusions that must be provisional because they are rightly professed to be fallible. That, in effect, is what you have affirmed and what Kepha has done. And if there is no living authority to infallibly distinguish theological opinions from propositions truly conveying divine revelation, that is the best we can do. But that, I argue, yields merely the assent of opinion, not of divine faith. The assent of divine faith entails assenting to truths revealed by God and doing so on divine authority. That in turn entails recognizing certain secondary authorities as infallibly setting forth what God would have us believe, and believing it unreservedly, not provisionally, because it bears the stamp of divine authority. On the CPIP, that secondary authority is the Bible and the Bible alone. But if, as the CPIP would have it, all our acts of assent are fallible, then the conviction that the Bible contains such-and-such books and is divinely inspired is itself fallible and thus provisional. That makes it an opinion, not an an assent of divine faith. On the other hand, the assent of the Catholic to the tripartite authority of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium is an act of divine faith, not a provisionally formed and held opinion. That is because, on the CIP, there is a living authority, the Magisterium, which is divinely protected from error under certain conditions, and thus bears the stamp of divine authority when it rules that Scripture and Tradition have such-and-such content and are to be interpreted in such-and-such a way rather than others.

Now the main reason for acknowledging such an authority is not that its existence can reasonably be inferred from the scriptural, patristic, and historical dataset–though such an inference can be upheld as a reasonable opinion, and should be so upheld by the Catholic–but that, absent such authority, there is no principled way to distinguish the assent of divine faith from that of human opinion. Adherents of the CPIP will of course affirm that the Bible is the sole inerrant rule of faith, and in so doing might imagine they’ve got such a principled distinction. But they do not. They accept the Bible–or at least the bulk thereof–for what it is in fact, but they have no way to explain why that acceptance is anything more than an opinion. The Catholic does. Of course that does not by itself show that Catholicism is true. What it does show, however, is that the CIP has something necessary for the assent of faith, and that the CPIP lacks it.

I realize that Kepha, you, and many others believe that the Magisterium’s claims for itself can be shown to be false by an honest examination of the historical record. That is not an unreasonable opinion, though I believe it to be less cogent than the opposite opinion. My real objection to that approach is that it assumes the validity of the CPIP rather than demonstrating it. It assumes, in other words, that the Magisterium’s claim to have the sort of authority I say is necessary can be adequately assessed by somebody with a more reliable understanding of the deposit of faith than the Magisterium itself has. But that is simply to assume the validity of the CPIP and the invalidity of the CIP. Thus it begs the question.

Given as much, and given also that the CIP has something necessary that the CPIP lacks, I conclude that Kepha and friends have not only failed to make their case, but cannot do so even in principle. Their position leaves us only with opinion, not faith. I’ve noticed that you and many others are willing to bite that bullet, but I hardly think that it allows for what Jesus Christ would consider faith.

from 127 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/08/why-evangelicals-are-getting-high-a-response-to-rebecca-vandoodewaard/#comment-58605

However, if we want to have certainty in our act of faith in divine revelation, it is necessary that our rule of faith possess divine authority. Would you deny this? The teaching office of the Church (expressed in Scripture, oral tradition, and magisterial authority) happens to be the rule of faith that possesses that divine authority such that we can assent to supernatural divine revelation with certainty.

The problem (one problem) with SS is that Scripture does not have divine authority precisely AS THE RULE OF FAITH. (Its authority is of a different nature. Inspired, yes, but not the Rule of faith.) No divine authority has authorized us to use Scripture in this way.

from 476 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/03/jason-stellman-tells-his-conversion-story/

The focus of our discussion is the question whether a case for one’s religion can be made without“presupposing” the truth of one’s religion. Well, answering that question calls for disambiguating the term. If by ‘presupposing’ one means starting by actually asserting the truth of one’s religion, then the answer is pretty clearly yes–regardless of which religion one is making the case for. That’s because such an approach is inherently question-begging. Begging the question is a fallacy; fallacies are unpersuasive; and the apologist is looking to persuade. So if he starts by begging the question, he defeats his own purpose. But if by ‘presupposing’ one means treating one’s key religious beliefs assuppositions just for argument’s sake, rather than as assertions to be accepted without argument, then the answer is no. Indeed, the only sensible approach is to show that, supposing certain religious beliefs are true, one can develop a comprehensive account of reality that makes more sense overall than alternatives which deny one or more of those beliefs. That’s what I see Reformed “presuppositional” apologetics trying to do, and that’s how I see the Catholic apologetic based on MOCs.

Notice, however, that the procedure I recommend is essentially that of formulating and deploying an interpretive paradigm. The apologist needs to show that “supposing,” for argument’s sake, some set of religious beliefs R, a very wide range of facts is better interpreted and explained by adopting R as a conjoint set of truths than by rejecting one or more of R’s elements. That describes how I argue for adopting the CIP, and I take it that’s essentially how you would argue for your adopting your IP. Given, however, that a combox is not the place for exhibiting that “wide range of facts” in detail, our efforts are best devoted to the starting point: inquiring about what the distinctive purpose of a theological IP is and how, in principle, a theological IP can achieve the distinctive purpose of such IPs.

It is there at the beginning, I think, that our disagreement really lies. I hold that the distinctive purpose of theological IPs is to afford a principled distinction between divine revelation and human opinion, so that divine revelation as such can be reliably identified and its content stated as the “suppositions” one is adopting. That’s the distinctive purpose because, unless one achieves it, one does not have the right sort of starting point from which to draw logical consequences. My main argument for the CIP is that the CIP is fit to achieve that purpose while the PIP is not.

end of quote.  

It is good to go to these comments at the site for the entire discussion. Here is another excerpt from a comment 477 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/03/jason-stellman-tells-his-conversion-story/

in the OT, divine revelation was still in the process of unfolding and “pointing” toward that definitive form –i.e. the “Christ-event”– which had not yet been reached, and about which anybody could actually be infallible, by virtue of inheriting Christ’s teaching authority. Accordingly, I don’t need to posit an IP for the OT Jews that would involve infallibility. When the OT Jews were morally culpable for not living by what God was giving them, that was not because their leaders were infallible, so that they should all have known better, but because their collective experience included both what was in fact a developing divine revelation and enough evidence thereof to make living by the Torah more reasonable than not

and

The CIP is not “grounded” in the “historical claim of an unbroken chain of apostolic succession,” if by that you mean that making such a claim is needed as the CIP’s logical starting point. The CIP is “grounded” in such a chain only insofar as the historical existence of such a chain is one of the necessary conditions for the truth of Catholicism. But that is a separate question from that of the relative utility of the CIP for doing what theological IPs are supposed to do. The utility of the CIP for that purpose is that the CIP, unlike the PIP, affords a principled distinction between divine revelation and human opinion. If Catholicism, which necessarily contains and deploys the CIP, is also true, then there has indeed been “an unbroken chain of apostolic succession” in the Church. But the existence of that chain does not need to be established first in order to exhibit the epistemic utility of the CIP. Rather, the epistemic utility of the CIP, as I’ve described it, is one good reason to believe that Catholicism is true, and thus one good reason to believe that there is indeed such a chain. Independent historical evidence for that chain is an additional sort of evidence for the truth of Catholicism, and it’s also needed.

For reasons I’ve already explained, though, I don’t think that issue is in any way decisive. There’s enough evidence for such a chain to make belief in its existence reasonable enough, but by no means enough to prove it or, of course, to disprove it. In general, that’s all a case for making an assent of faith in some “historical” religion can do. So the fact that the existence of an “unbroken chain of apostolic succession” cannot be proven purely by the methods of historical inquiry is not a weakness either of the CIP in particular or of Catholicism more broadly considered.

and

You write:

So, the Protestant can do at least two things. (1) He can reject that the “principled means” is either not a necessary or not a sufficient condition for knowledge of what is divine revelation and what is mere human opinion or (2) He can put forth a de jure case of his IP. Would you agree?

Assuming that by ‘reject’ you mean ‘argue’, I would agree only with qualifications.

As to (1), nobody argues that a given IP’s containing a “principled means” of the sort in question is a “sufficient” condition for adopting that IP. It is only a “necessary” condition. If a given Protestant wants to argue that it’s not even a necessary condition, then he’s committed to saying that the Christian religion is essentially a matter of opinion, inasmuch as we cannot distinguish in a principled way between expressions of divine revelation and human theological opinions. I have seen plenty of Protestants recognize and accept that consequence. To my mind, that’s pretty devastating for their position. For it’s tantamount to saying that faith, as distinct from opinion, is impossible. Good luck with that.

As to (2), the only way I’ve seen Protestants as such making the sort of case you envision is their arguing that the truth of their brand of Protestantism–whatever that may be in a given case–can be understood and affirmed not merely by faith but actually as knowledge. I think that’s a bridge too far, and would be even for Catholics trying to argue similarly for Catholicism. It’s a form of rationalism that not even most Protestants accept, and Catholics certainly should not accept.

from 484 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/03/jason-stellman-tells-his-conversion-story/

way of determining when the Church teaches with her full authority.

The Catholic Church has a relatively clear, consistent, and authoritative way of doing that. It’s been usefully set forth in such relatively recent magisterial documents as Lumen Gentium (§25) and Ratzinger’s Doctrinal Commentary, to both of which I linked in #466. It doesn’t work automatically like software, but it has produced a large body of settled results, and provides a reliable template for resolving disputed questions as they arise. In Eastern Orthodoxy, however, I have found no similarly clear, consistent, and authoritative way of determining when “the Church” teaches with her full authority. To be sure, EOs agree that seven “ecumenical councils” of the first millennium taught infallibly and thus, as instances of the Church teaching with her full authority, bind all her members accordingly. But there’s no clear, consistent, and authoritative account in Orthodoxy as to the necessary and sufficient conditions for treating a given council as thus binding on the whole Church. One gets several different answers depending on which Orthodox clerics and theologians one asks. Nor do EOs see any particular bishopric, patriarchate, or synod as ever infallible. So I have concluded that Catholicism has a “principled” means of making the necessary determination, while Orthodoxy has only ad hoc means of doing so.

from 485

 What seems to lie at root in so many of these debates concerning the motives of credibility, the nature of faith, reason, and revelation – in short, theological first principles in general – is an implicit rejection of epistemological realism; which, of course, is part and parcel of the modern background intellectual ambiance. I think you are certainly correct in noting that the resort to presuppositionalism among many Reformed Christians arises from a lack of familiarity with the epistemological foundations of the philosophia perennis and its (successful) critique of modern tendencies toward epistemological skepticism, whether in their continental-Kantian or English-American analytical varieties.

[end of quote. Explaning terms.  First from Wilipedia

 "Presuppositionalism is a school of Christian apologetics that believes the Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. It presupposes that the Bible is divine revelation and attempts to expose flaws in other worldviews. It claims that apart from presuppositions, one could not make sense of any human experience, and there can be no set of neutral assumptions from which to reason with a non-Christian.^[1] Presuppositionalists claim that a Christian cannot consistently declare his belief in the necessary existence of the God of the Bible and simultaneously argue on the basis of a different set of assumptions that God may not exist and Biblical revelation may not be true. Presuppositionalism is the predominant apologetic of contemporary conservative Calvinist and Reformed churches.^{[2][not in citation given]} Two schools of presuppositionalism exist, based on the different teachings of Cornelius Van Til and Gordon Haddon Clark. Presuppositionalism contrasts with classical apologetics and evidential apologetics."

and

"Epistemological realism is a philosophical position, a subcategory of objectivism, holding that what you know about an object exists independently of your mind. It opposesepistemological idealism.

Epistemological realism is related directly to the correspondence theory of truth, which claims that the world exists independently and innately to our perceptions of it. Our sensory data then reflect or correspond to the innate world."

and http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/philosophia%20perennis :

Definition of PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS

: a group of universal philosophical problems, principles, and ideas (as concepts of God, freedom, and immortality) that perennially constitutes the primary subject matter of philosophical thought : the foundations of Roman Catholic Christian principles esp. as philosophically formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas and Neothomists <some Philosophia Perenniswhich would be agreed on in advance as a sort of intellectual base of operations — H.D.Aiken> 

more on this here:http://www.religiousworlds.com/text/prenphil.html

The philosophia perennis or Perennial Philosophy affirms that a direct insight into the nature of Reality is a universally human possibility -- whether it be gained after practice of spiritual disciplines and study of scriptures or through a wholly unanticipated illuminating experience of union with God or the Ultimate. A result of such awareness is the confidence that we have devolved from a single Source and the process of spiritual development is completed and perfected in our return to that One.

 To call this perennial is to say that such an insight reappears in diverse times and places, not limited to any particular culture, class, or community. In more formal words, this philosophy has been described as

"the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality behind the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in [one] something identical with divine Reality and the ethic that places [one's] final end in the knowledge of the Immanent and Transcendent Ground of all things."

In other words, the term philosophia perennis is intended to describe a philosophy that has been formulated by those who have experienced direct communion with God or the Ultimate. However brief the experience, it transforms the thinking mind of the experiencer, so that they are never the same again. Such revelatory experience, captured however dimly in symbols supplied by human language or by whatever artistic expression, however often repeated through the ages by people of all races, genders, cultures and religious beliefs, open onto the Perennial Philosophy.

from comment 501 on the Stellman post:

  Firstly, the point (as I understand it) of Mike’s insistence upon first attending to paradigms before attending to evidence flows directly from the nature of the subject matter. That subject matter is not, in the first place, the truth or falsity of Catholicism; but, rather, the very nature of divine revelation per se; and the means by which men might conceivably come to know the content of divine revelation in light of its defined nature. The question certainly does concern epistemology, but not an “epistemology-of-disagreement”. The question involves epistemological issues which are more fundamental.

The crucial part of the definition of divine revelation which drives the insistence upon paradigm considerations first, followed by evidential considerations second, is the notion that truths or dogmas which have been “divinely revealed” cannot – in principle – be known as such through unaided use of the native capacities of the human intellect (else why the need that they be divinely revealed in the first place). Nothing about the unaided human intellect and its relation to the world of external secondary causes can provide the intellect with notions about that which is beyond detection within the natural network of secondary causes. Examples – all articles of faith – would be doctrines such as the Trinitarian nature of God, the hypostatic union of Christ, the reality of the states of heaven and hell (or purgatory), the efficacy of sacraments, the inspired quality of a codex of 66 (73) books, etc. All such notions pertain to the content of divine revelation and are traditionally understood to flow from God’s transcendent knowledge as the result of a positive act of divine self-disclosure. Hence, if men are to assent to such notions as being divinely revealed (as opposed to being mere human opinions or plausible theological constructs), while simultaneously seeking to avoid the charge of unmitigated fideism, men must necessarily either receive such notions personally and directly (intuition, ecstasy, Sprit-induced illumination, etc.), or else they must assent to such notions on the basis of some external proximate authority which promulgates such notions as being revealed by God.

Notice that in both cases, whether reception through direct personal illumination or promulgation by some proximate authority; given a definition of divinely revealed truths as truths which are beyond the reach of unaided human reason; whatever notions are to be assented to as divinely revealed must be understood as having originated with God, and as having been protected from error in their reception and/or promulgation. If such notions were said not to originate with God, they could in no wise be understood as divinely revealed. They would be – by the promulgator or receiver’s own admission – mere human theological opinions. But also, if such truth claims could be potentially errant in some way (on the side of the receiver/promulgator); then, although such notions might in fact have originated from God, there would remain no epistemic means by which an onlooker might distinguish between those notions which really are items of divine revelation, and those which are mere theological constructs or aberrations. In short, when considering the very nature of the content of divine revelation – de fide articles of faith – infallibility emerges as being – in some way, shape or form – of the essence. Without it, any potential noetic distinction between divine revelation as such, and mere human theological opinion, collapses.

Hence, the minimum necessary requirement for establishing that some set of doctrines are divinely revealed, is that the one who receives and/or promulgates such doctrines be understood to in some way participate God’s infallibility, at least with respect to the reception and/or promulgation of those particular doctrines. Otherwise, no one encountering said reception or promulgation would have any reason for thinking that the doctrines received or promulgated are divinely revealed as opposed to being mere theological opinions. In other words, any paradigmatic account of how men receive divine revelation as divine revelation; which, by its own stated principles, excludes the possibility of avoiding the epistemic collapse of divine revelation into mere human theological opinion, is ipso facto, incapable of enabling men to identify divine revelation as such.

As a result, the argument for assessing general paradigmatic structures prior to assessing particular evidentiary credibility for paradigms themselves, is that proceeding in this way has the efficiency advantage of ruling out multiple paradigmatic religious options prior to an assessment of the evidential motives for affirming whether – in fact – some purported paradigmatic source really does (or does not) participate God’s infallibility. In fact, epistemic efficiency is one principle reason given by Aristotle and others for always proceeding pedagogically from the general to the particular. In the case at hand, this method reduces the body of evidence which needs to be evaluated at the outset by directing the intellect’s attention to only those evidences which are said to support the revelatory claims of those paradigms whose working principles potentially allow for the maintenance of a real distinction between divine revelation and mere human theological opinion. Those paradigms which – in principle – do not afford the possibility of maintaining this distinction can be safely set aside without expending further evidentiary efforts.

Of course, necessity does not entail sufficiency. Therefore, in addition to merely establishing that some paradigm (supposing its claims could be evidentially substantiated) would be capable – on its stated principles – of maintaining a real distinction between divine revelation and human theological opinion; one must eventually turn to particular evidence in order to determine whether there are reasonable grounds for thinking that the paradigm in question does in fact enjoy some participation in God’s infallibility which would enables its principles to achieve their function. Nevertheless, assessing the paradigm first, to determine if its stated principles meet the minimum necessary condition for maintaining a real distinction between divine revelation and human theological opinion remains the most logical course. Protestantism – on its own paradigmatic principles – provides no means by which to maintain a real distinction between the content of divine revelation as such and mere human theological opinion (or so Mike, myself and many others, both Catholic and non-Catholic have argued). Catholicism, considered strictly as a paradigm (prescinding temporarily from an assessment of its evidential credibility) does potentially enable the maintenance of such a distinction (as do some other religious paradigms – considered strictly paradigmatically).

Accordingly, there is no point sifting through a mountain of “evidence” in “support of Protestantism” so long as the subject at hand involves understanding how men might recognize divine revelation as such. One already knows at the outset, through a strictly paradigmatic evaluation of Protestantism, that no matter what evidence may surface, the very principles of the paradigm, as stated by the paradigm’s own proponents, can never – in principle – deliver the goods. One is then free to concentrate on other paradigms (such as Catholicism or EO, etc) to assess their evidentiary credibility.

Of course, one way to avoid the force of the argument here (the argument that a paradigmatic assessment should be made prior to an evidential assessment), is to deny that the distinction between something called divine revelation and mere human theological opinion is a religious distinction worth worrying about in the first place. Some interlocutors here seem willing to bite that bullet. To me, that option seems only a hop-skip-and jump away from denying that religion is worth worrying about.

from comment 506

Theological disagreement, both across religions in general and within the three main traditions of Christianity in particular–Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism–just does involve interpreting the same set of known data in mutually incompatible ways. That’s what I mean by differences of “interpretive paradigms.” Such IP differences cannot be rationally assessed in terms of premises or theses characteristic of one or more of the clashing IPs but not of all of them. For doing that would just beg the questions. Clashing IPs can be rationally assessed, without begging questions, only in terms of what is common to all of them, or at least acceptable in terms of all. But in order to make such an assessment, we must also reach agreement on what the purpose of theological IPs, precisely astheological, should be. Only then can we deploy rational criteria, common to all, for determining whether a given IP achieves that purpose, and if it does, how well.

Among Christians, reaching agreement on the distinctive purpose of theological IPs, and assessing them in view of that purpose, requires premising that (a) God has definitively revealed himself in Jesus Christ; (b) what God has thereby revealed is expressible as the doctrinal content of the deposit of faith; (c) we can identify the means by which said deposit is transmitted to us who have not received it directly from the source, so that (d) we can render the assent of faith, as opposed to that of opinion, to what has been revealed and transmitted on the divine authority of the source. If not all of (a)-(d) are acceptable to you, then there isn’t much for us to talk about–at least not in the present context. But if they are all acceptable, then we can and should agree that the distinctive purpose of a theological IP is how well it enables us to do (c) for the sake of (d), granted that (a) and (b) are true.

Now I hold that we need a “principled” means, as opposed to an ad hoc means, of doing (c) for the sake of (d), because without such a means, there would no way to do it that is both reliable and non-arbitrary, so that rational assessment of IPs against each other would be impossible. If there were no such way, then the distinctive purpose of theological IPs would be unattainable, and theology would be nothing more than the retailing of more-or-less plausible opinions–which is not the same thing as knowing the content of divine revelation and deepening our understanding of it. To be sure, I have encountered many Protestants who are perfectly content with that consequence. I do not know whether you are one of them. But whether you are or not, such a stance is tantamount to admitting that faith, as distinct from opinion, is impossible, and that we should learn to live with that. To my mind, that’s a pretty devastating consequence. But if you’re cool with it, we probably have nothing more to say to each other about IPs and their purposes.

All the same, if you’re willing to grant that the distinctive purpose of theological IPs, as I’ve described it, somehow is attainable, then we need to carry out what we’ve been calling “stage 1,” before we move on to stage 2. That’s because, from the standpoint of stage-2 evaluation alone, more than one Christian IP (not the Mormon) is rationally plausible, so that none can demonstrably prove itself over against the others, and the only way to adjudicate among them would be to move beyond the plausible but self-serving historical narratives to more theoretical considerations. Given as much, we should first evaluate the clashing IPs in stage-1 terms, so as to determine which is fit to achieve the distinctive purpose of theological IPs. If a given IP turns out to be unfit to achieve its purpose, then no matter how plausible some may otherwise find its associated historical narrative, it fails precisely as theology. With that understood, my main argument is that the PIP fails utterly at stage (1), and that the CIP emerges better than the EOIP from a stage-(1) evaluation– even though Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy can each cite rationally plausible historical narratives in their own support and in their own terms, so that if all we considered is stage (2), each can come up looking pretty good.

As I see it, then, you could argue against my two-stage approach in one of two ways. First, you could argue that we need no “principled distinction” of the sort I talk about, because what I characterize as the distinctive purpose of theological IPs is unattainable and therefore unnecessary. If so, then stage (1) should simply be dropped, and we should focus simply on stage 2. That, as I’ve already implied, is a fairly common Protestant response, with the consequence I’ve indicated. Or, secondly, you could agree that a stage-(1) evaluation of IPs is needed roughly for the reasons I give, but disagree with me about how the CIP, PIP, and EOIP emerge from such an evaluation. Either way, I suspect, you’ll have some bullet-biting to do–if you want to continue this discussion at all, and move the ball. But your first option, I should think, would be a more useful one to pursue.

from 528 

But I spent the first 30 years of my life in Protestant circles, and am perfectly aware that there is plenty of doctrinal obstinacy and ignorance circulating among the troops. Both Catholics and Protestants share that kind of authority crisis, and I would be the last to go wagering bets as to which camp has the worst of it in that respect. But, it is, to my mind, a distinct disadvantage to be in a camp which has bothan obstinacy/ignorance authority crisis and an authority crisis seated at the root of its theological principles; as opposed to a camp which only suffers from one of those two evils. So yes, Catholics share some serious authority problems with Protestants. But there are also some serious authority problems unique to Protestant approaches to theology which Catholicism (so the argument which you reject goes) resolves. I think it is this later sort of authority problem which CTC and CCC are focused upon.