The Church's Considered, Mature Rejection Of Roman Catholic Teaching

I want to add something to the points Steve Hays has been making lately about development of doctrine. It's common for Roman Catholics to tell us that the church often doesn't define a doctrine until it's been violated. Supposedly, the church develops a fuller understanding of the faith, or expresses what it understands more fully, as it struggles against heretics and other opponents. Or something that existed in seed form all along won't grow into a tree until the church later gives the subject more consideration for some other reason. Large and complicated beliefs that are not only consistent with scripture, but also implied by it, such as Trinitarianism and the canon of scripture, are often cited as examples.

But what about beliefs that aren't so large and complicated, seem to be contradicted by scripture, and were also contradicted by the early patristic Christians? I've cited prayer to the dead and angels as examples in the past. We've argued at length that the Catholic view of prayer is contradicted by both scripture and early patristic Christianity. Prayer has existed since the earliest generations of human history. And you wouldn't expect an understanding of the proper recipients of prayer to take as long to develop as it takes to develop an understanding of something as large and complicated as Trinitarianism or the canon of scripture. The Bible comments on thousands of years of prayer in human history. It's a topic that's addressed explicitly and frequently in scripture. The same is true of prayer in the early patristic sources. Men like Tertullian and Cyprian wrote entire treatises on the subject. Celsus was objecting to the Christian view of prayer, namely that Christians pray only to God, when he wrote against Christianity in the second century. Origen responded to Celsus in the third century by defending the Christian view that we should pray only to God. Why should we have to wait until thousands of years after prayer originated, and hundreds of years into church history, after an initial widespread Christian agreement that we shouldn't pray to the dead and angels, before an understanding is developed that we should pray to them? As Steve noted in his earlier posts, not all developments are of the same nature. To put the development of Trinitarianism in the same category as the development of prayer to the dead and angels is perverse.

To cite another example, what about the sinlessness of Mary? If you go here, you'll find links to three articles I wrote about opposition to her sinlessness in the Bible and other pre-Reformation sources. Those sources include medieval Popes. And, as with prayer to the dead and angels, it's not as though we'd expect people to need as long to develop an understanding of Mary's alleged sinlessness as they need to develop an understanding of something like Trinitarianism or the canon of scripture. The scope of human sinfulness was on people's minds well before the patristic era. Probably the most famous example is what Paul said about the subject in Romans 3. But that's not the only place where scripture discusses the topic, and Paul wasn't the only Biblical author to address it. Patristic writers gave the issue a lot of thought as well, which is why they wrote so many comments about how Jesus is the only sinless human. (In addition to referring to Mary as a sinner by name and detailing some of the sins they thought she committed.) Why should we think the church needed more time to think about whether Mary was a sinner or that there was no need to clarify the church's supposed belief in her sinlessness when church fathers and Popes had been contradicting her sinlessness for hundreds of years?

I've discussed other examples of a similar nature elsewhere. See here on the papacy, here on purgatory, etc.

Even without taking factors into account like what scripture teaches or how widespread a belief was in extrabiblical sources, how would a Catholic adequately explain why particular individuals contradicted Catholic belief? When Clement of Rome contradicts the Catholic view of justification, Hermas contradicts the Catholic view of prayer, or Hippolytus contradicts the Catholic view of Mary's perpetual virginity, for example, how plausible is it to argue that such sources living in Rome were ignorant of Roman Catholic traditions allegedly handed down since the time of the apostles? If there was such an erroneous understanding of the faith in a location as important to the church as Rome was according to Roman Catholicism, then wouldn't a clarification (development) have been appropriate at that point?

Catholics sometimes appeal to the popularity of Catholic beliefs in more recent church history, such as the popularity of a belief in seven sacraments from the medieval era onward. If Catholics want to appeal to that sort of more recent consensus among professing Christians, why should we think a modern consensus is right? Why think it overrides a consensus of earlier generations? Polling indicates that many Catholics don't believe in some of the teachings of Roman Catholicism, such as transubstantiation. If we combine those Catholics with non-Catholics who are identified as Christian in some manner, and there's thereby a majority who reject transubstantiation, should we conclude that a rejection of transubstantiation is part of the understanding of the eucharist that the church has developed over time? Since Catholics don't want us to think of development along those lines, what's their alternative, and how can we verify that it's correct?