Monday, March 18, 2024

Francisco Radecki and Dominic Radecki (Sedevacantists) on the difference between the evolution and development of doctrine

  

Evolution of Doctrine

 

John Courtney Murray said the Modernist concept of Evolution of Doctrine was the most important contribution from Vatican II. By teaching there are no definite fonts of Revelation (Scripture and Tradition) and that doctrine is in a continual state of change that adapts to present conditions, religion is subject to personal interpretation. People then feel free to determine beliefs and morals on their own without any need for God. Everything became possible once the Modernist theory of the Evolution of Doctrine was accepted by the Council.

 

Development of Doctrine

 

Although similar in name, the concept of Development of Doctrine directly refers to God, Who, through the course of history, made infallible doctrines clearer. Author, G. K. Chesterton described Modernism as a dilution of dogma based on skepticism. He explained that Development of Doctrine is not an essential change of beliefs, as taught by Modernists, but a perfection and clarification of those same beliefs. This occurs when a pope or general council formally defined or settled a previously debated issue.

 

When we talk of a child being well-developed, we mean that he has grown bigger and strong with his own strength; not that he is padded with borrowed pillows or walks on stilts to make him look taller. When we say a puppy develops into a dog, we do not mean that his growth is a gradual compromise with a cat; we mean he becomes more doggy and not less.

 

Development is the expansion of all the possibilities of a doctrine, as there is time to distinguish them and draw them out; and the point here is that the enlargement of medieval theology was simply the whole comprehension of theology. (G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas and Aquinas: the Dumb Ox, pp. 27-28) (Francisco Radecki and Dominic Radecki, Vatican II Exposed as Counterfeit Catholicism [Wayne, Mich.: St. Joseph’s Media, 2019], 337-38)