Continuation.
The application and wisdom needed for
avoiding and rejecting profane innovations
in things and in words
48. The Catholic Church, taught and assisted by her divine Founder whose Spirit has formed her according to perfect freedom, knows that she has the power to teach the truth entrusted to her and to hand it on free from error without being tied in any material way to forms, opinions or words. When JESUS Christ sent the apostles to preach and to teach, he did not restrict their mission to any specific, determined mode, but left this to be suggested to his Church by the Spirit according to the needs of time and circumstances. ‘But the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you’.(81) The Spirit that gives life to the Church teaches her all things. She cannot err because the Spirit moves her in whatever way she teaches these things, and he himself only suggests whatever she had first heard from JESUS Christ. The Church’s freedom in her mode of teaching is a natural consequence of her unerring certainty; and the latter is a proof of the former.
JESUS Christ also said, ‘Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes.’*(82) {OLR} These words clearly indicate the development his doctrine would undergo. On another occasion he had likened it to a grain of mustard seed that would grow to become the greatest of the shrubs. If instruction in revealed doctrine could be reduced to simple repetition of his divine words or those of the bible, without comment or development, there would be no need for him to send prophets, wise men and writers to his Church. It would have been sufficient to empower trustworthy mediocrities to repeat endlessly the formulae they had received.
But St. Paul, one of the wise men and scribes promised by Christ, was conscious of his own particular mission, and that of others, when he wrote, ‘God has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life.’*(83) {OLR} Moreover, the Spirit of Christ guides not only teachers in the Church, but listeners also, so that they may understand what is said. Consequently St. Paul’s other words, recommending in thought and life the Christian freedom given by Christ through his Spirit, are applicable to all things, ‘Now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we may serve not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit.’*(84) {OLR}
50. The same divine Spirit who assures both the Church and the private teacher accepting the Church as master and teacher that the received truth will not be falsified by the way in which it is expressed, also inspires the Church and her followers with horror and detestation for godless innovations in fact and vocabulary. The Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, who are at one about this, go further by indicating which matters are godless innovations, and which are not.
Detestation, horror and discernment of godless truths are the fruit of the Spirit, and can never be lacking in the Church and amongst holy people. On occasion, such abhorrence is expressed by means of the holy, fiery zeal with which the Church expels heretics, and individual teachers attack them with irrefutable arguments drawn from the Scriptures or tradition or reason itself.
Notes
(81) Jn 14: 26.
(82) Matt 23: 34.
(83) 2 Cor 3: 6.
(84) Rom 7: 6. Cf. About the Author’s Studies (Introduction to Philosophy, vol. 1, Durham, 2004): on Christian freedom of thought.