I recently came across a comment by a (very errant, it seems) Catholic who claimed that the Latter-day Saint concept of modern
revelation and the Catholic understanding of Tradition are the equivalent of
one another. This is not the case and
reveals ignorance of both Latter-day Saint and
Roman Catholic theologies.
In LDS theology, modern revelation is en par with biblical
revelation. This alone would be anathema to Catholics as, while God can and
does speak in visions (e.g., Fatima [1917]), such is not binding and as
authoritative as inspired scripture and inspired oral tradition. Additionally,
we believe that God has revealed doctrines that were not revealed in this
dispensation, as we read in D&C 128:18:
. . . . . . for it is necessary in the ushering in of the
dispensation of the fulness of times, which dispensation is now beginning to
usher in, that a whole and complete and perfect union, and welding together of
dispensations, and keys, and powers, and glories should take place, and be
revealed from the days of Adam even to the present time. And not only this, but
those things which never have been revealed from the foundation of the world,
but have been kept hid from the wise and prudent, shall be revealed unto babes
and sucklings in this, the dispensation of the fulness of times.
Again, this would be anathema to
Catholicism, as the deposit of faith was revealed and would never be added to
(though there would be organic, not mutative, development of doctrine—see
Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine, for e.g.)
Against the evolution of doctrine (and as
a result, the naïve and ignorant belief that “tradition” can reveal new
doctrines, etc), consider the following from Pius X (a canonised saint) in his
September 1907 encyclical against Modernism, Pascendi
Dominici Gregis:
The Evolution of Doctrine
26. To finish with this whole question of faith and its shoots, it
remains to be seen, Venerable Brethren, what the Modernists have to say about
their development. First of all they lay down the general principle that in a
living religion everything is subject to change, and must change, and in this
way they pass to what may be said to be, among the chief of their doctrines,
that of Evolution. To the laws of evolution everything is subject -
dogma, Church, worship, the Books we revere as sacred, even faith itself, and
the penalty of disobedience is death. The enunciation of this principle will
not astonish anybody who bears in mind what the Modernists have had to say
about each of these subjects. Having laid down this law of evolution, the
Modernists themselves teach us how it works out. And first with regard to
faith. The primitive form of faith, they tell us, was rudimentary and common to
all men alike, for it had its origin in human nature and human life. Vital
evolution brought with it progress, not by the accretion of new and purely
adventitious forms from without, but by an increasing penetration of the
religious sentiment in the conscience. This progress was of two kinds: negative,
by the elimination of all foreign elements, such, for example, as the sentiment
of family or nationality; and positive by the intellectual and
moral refining of man, by means of which the idea was enlarged and enlightened
while the religious sentiment became more elevated and more intense. For the
progress of faith no other causes are to be assigned than those which are
adduced to explain its origin. But to them must be added those religious
geniuses whom we call prophets, and of whom Christ was the greatest; both
because in their lives and their words there was something mysterious which
faith attributed to the divinity, and because it fell to their lot to have new
and original experiences fully in harmony with the needs of their time. The
progress of dogma is due chiefly to the obstacles which faith has to surmount,
to the enemies it has to vanquish, to the contradictions it has to repel. Add
to this a perpetual striving to penetrate ever more profoundly its own
mysteries. Thus, to omit other examples, has it happened in the case of Christ:
in Him that divine something which faith admitted in Him expanded in such a way
that He was at last held to be God. The chief stimulus of evolution in the
domain of worship consists in the need of adapting itself to the uses and
customs of peoples, as well as the need of availing itself of the value which
certain acts have acquired by long usage. Finally, evolution in the Church
itself is fed by the need of accommodating itself to historical conditions and
of harmonising itself with existing forms of society. Such is religious
evolution in detail. And here, before proceeding further, we would have you
note well this whole theory of necessities and needs, for it is at
the root of the entire system of the Modernists, and it is upon it that they
will erect that famous method of theirs called the historical.
27. Still continuing the consideration of the evolution of doctrine, it
is to be noted that Evolution is due no doubt to those stimulants styled needs,
but, if left to their action alone, it would run a great risk of bursting the
bounds of tradition, and thus, turned aside from its primitive vital principle,
would lead to ruin instead of progress. Hence, studying more closely the ideas
of the Modernists, evolution is described as resulting from the conflict of two
forces, one of them tending towards progress, the other towards conservation.
The conserving force in the Church is tradition, and tradition is represented
by religious authority, and this both by right and in fact; for by right it is
in the very nature of authority to protect tradition, and, in fact, for
authority, raised as it is above the contingencies of life, feels hardly, or
not at all, the spurs of progress. The progressive force, on the contrary,
which responds to the inner needs lies in the individual consciences and
ferments there - especially in such of them as are in most intimate contact
with life. Note here, Venerable Brethren, the appearance already of that most
pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the
Church. Now it is by a species of compromise between the forces of conservation
and of progress, that is to say between authority and individual consciences,
that changes and advances take place. The individual consciences of some of
them act on the collective conscience, which brings pressure to bear on the
depositaries of authority, until the latter consent to a compromise, and, the
pact being made, authority sees to its maintenance.
With all this in mind, one understands how it is that the Modernists
express astonishment when they are reprimanded or punished. What is imputed to
them as a fault they regard as a sacred duty. Being in intimate contact with
consciences they know better than anybody else, and certainly better than the
ecclesiastical authority, what needs exist - nay, they embody them, so to
speak, in themselves. Having a voice and a pen they use both publicly, for this
is their duty. Let authority rebuke them as much as it pleases - they have
their own conscience on their side and an intimate experience which tells them
with certainty that what they deserve is not blame but praise. Then they
reflect that, after all there is no progress without a battle and no battle
without its victim, and victims they are willing to be like the prophets and
Christ Himself. They have no bitterness in their hearts against the authority
which uses them roughly, for after all it is only doing its duty as authority.
Their sole grief is that it remains deaf to their warnings, because delay
multiplies the obstacles which impede the progress of souls, but the hour will
most surely come when there will be no further chance for tergiversation, for
if the laws of evolution may be checked for a while, they cannot be ultimately
destroyed. And so they go their way, reprimands and condemnations
notwithstanding, masking an incredible audacity under a mock semblance of
humility. While they make a show of bowing their heads, their hands and minds
are more intent than ever on carrying out their purposes. And this policy they
follow willingly and wittingly, both because it is part of their system that
authority is to be stimulated but not dethroned, and because it is necessary
for them to remain within the ranks of the Church in order that they may
gradually transform the collective conscience - thus unconsciously avowing that
the common conscience is not with them, and that they have no right to claim to
be its interpreters.
28. Thus then, Venerable Brethren, for the Modernists, both as authors
and propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church.
Nor indeed are they without precursors in their doctrines, for it was of these
that Our Predecessor Pius IX wrote: These enemies of divine revelation
extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would
have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the
work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of
perfection by human efforts. On the subject of revelation and dogma in
particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new - we find it
condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX., where it is enunciated in these
terms: Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to
continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human
reason; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: The
doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human
intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but
as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded
and infallibly interpreted. Hence the sense, too, of the sacred dogmas is that
which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to
be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth.
Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, impeded by
this pronouncement - on the contrary it is aided and promoted. For the same
Council continues: Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore,
increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals and in the mass,
in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries
- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same
sense, the same acceptation.
Session IV of Trent (April 1546) stated:
783 [DS 1501] The
sacred and holy ecumenical and general Synod of Trent, lawfully assembled in
the Holy Spirit, with the same three Legates of the Apostolic See presiding
over it, keeping this constantly in view, that with the abolishing of errors,
the purity itself of the Gospel is preserved in the Church, which promised
before through the Prophets in the Holy Scriptures our Lord Jesus Christ the
Son of God first promulgated with His own mouth, and then commanded “to be
preached” by His apostles “to every creature” as the source of every saving
truth and of instruction in morals [Matt. 28:19 ff.; Mark 16:15], and [the
Synod] clearly perceiving that this truth and instruction are contained in the
written books and in the unwritten traditions, which have been received by the
apostles from the mouth of Christ Himself, or from the apostles themselves, at
the dictation of the Holy Spirit, have come down even to us, transmitted as it
were from hand to hand, [the Synod] following the examples of the orthodox
Fathers, receives and holds in veneration with an equal affection of piety and
reverence all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament, since one God
is the author of both, and also the traditions themselves, those that appertain
both to faith and to morals, as having been dictated either by Christ’s own
word of mouth, or by the Holy Spirit, and preserved in the Catholic Church by a
continuous succession. And so that no doubt may arise in anyone’s mind as to
which are the books that are accepted by this Synod, it has decreed that a list
of the Sacred books be added to this decree.
Also note the following from the Vatican
I's dogmatic constitution on the Church which defined papal infallibility, Pastor Aeternus:
[DS 3070] For, the
Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that by His revelation
they might disclose new doctrine, but that by His help they might guard
sacredly the revelation transmitted through the apostles and the deposit of
faith, and might faithfully set it forth. Indeed, all the venerable fathers
have embraced their apostolic doctrine, and the holy orthodox Doctors have
venerated and followed it, knowing full well that the See of St. Peter always
remains unimpaired by any error, according to the divine promise of our Lord
the Savior made to the chief of His disciples: “I have prayed for thee, that
thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren” [Luke
22:32].
We can see this in the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception. Pius IX, in defining it as a de fide dogma Ineffabilis Deus,
asserted that:
[The doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception] always existed in the Church as a doctrine that has been
received from our ancestors, and that has been stamped with the character of
revealed doctrine"
Of course, Rome’s claims are easily disproven when one examines,
not just the Bible, but the claim that such beliefs are part of “apostolic oral
tradition.” On the Immaculate Conception, see, for e.g.:
Answering
Tim Staples on Patristic Mariology and the Immaculate Conception
However, the point of this article is not to refute Rome’s claims,
but instead, to show that one is not doing justice to Latter-day Saint and
Roman Catholic interactions when they claim the LDS belief in modern revelation
is equivalent or almost equivalent to the RC belief in (apostolic oral)
Tradition.
