Is Church history random or does it follow a logical trajectory?

Is Church history random or does it follow a logical trajectory?

Is church history random and have no aim or structure? Liberals would say that because they don't believe either that God knows the future , as in the heresy of open theism, or else they deny that God has a plan because they see so much senseless suffering of the innocent that they ask where is the supposed stupid plan of God when innocent people suffer most horribly and wicked people prosper!

Well first of all one of the problems is that God will not interfere with human free will.

And when the power that human beings can achieve reaches apocalyptic proportions then when evil men do things there can be apocalyptic consequences for innocent people. Hence, for example , over 100 million people in the 20th century died horribly under communist regimes in the sense that the leaders of these countries were such horrible men that they came from the devil, surely possessed by demons, unfathomably depraved individuals who doubted the existence of God and wanted to create a so-called utopia where everyone has enough to eat but at the expense of freedom and in the end giving nothing but oppressive poverty.

And their desire for this horrific so-called Utopia and their insane narcissism led them to murder and slaughter people that got in their way, many times who were people of faith who knew that such a system could never work.

That is not God's fault because he will not overthrow the free willing individual. God did not do that, those men did that God merely allowed it because again he does not interfere for you will. And why you mask?

Now people would say wouldn't it be better if God would just compel everybody to do what was good and then there wouldn't be any suffer ing. Well, first of all, we really have to ask ourselves what about arranged marriages?

There are still nations like Islamic places where marriages are forced and arranged regardless whether or whether the woman likes it or not.

At least in first world societies who are nevertheless godless today, a woman has the capacity to choose a man that she loves and that loves her.

No man or woman would want to marry someone that was forced to marry them because they want the other person to choose them for who they are feeling, right?

Love must necessarily be free to truly mean something, for someone who is just forced to do good for us is then a slave and is not personal nor a real loving gift.

This then explains moral evil. And there is nothing that God can do about it because as soon as the bad person has made his choice against the good person, the victim has already been harmed by the evil and arrogance in the person's heart the hardness of their heart.

It is too late to avoid the spiritual and other forms of harm that existed have already been done.

For if God tried to stop that from happening before the person made the choice , he would unfairly be preventing that person from free will preemptively.

Moving on, the kind of evil that is far more difficult to explain is physical evil because it doesn't have any real rhyme or reason. As it says in one of the scripture , rain and storms fall on both of the just and the unjust alike many times not discriminating between the moral character of the recipients of its wrath.

And what do we make of the millions of Christians every year who died terrible forms of death like cancer who wind up on the street etc etc when they didn't do anything to deserve it or other good people like Muslims Jews people who believe in God or even good atheist s who suffer tragedies that are not caused by any moral problem but just our accidents of nature etc etc?

Here, the catechism offers at least two partial answers, not that we can ever have the full answers until we meet God someday.

The lesser partial answer is that God has willed to create a world not perfect but journeying towards perfection and much the same way in which a human person was growing in maturity before they reach perfection at old age when their moral character has presumably reached a full phase of loving patience and so forth, versus before , when in their youth they were more proud lustful etc

In this sense the catechism explains there are simply the appearance of greater or more developed beings and other beings that are lesser in terms of gifts received and fortune and circumstances.

 It is a mystery . Yet now , the catechism however proposes the ultimate reason which is that God, in becoming a human being and suffering one of the most horrific forms of death , prolonged form of suffocation and agony… .

 Now is in full solidarity with human suffering, for he has seen it all All most all of what the human person is capable of seeing in terms of the short side of the stick.

Born and humble in depraved conditions of the cold.

Growing up poor working hard at a meager occupation of a carpenter.

As he comes into the public, he is radically rejected by many of his own people.

Finally betrayed by one of his disciples, cruelly mocked by the authorities, and then put to an unfathomably horrible death that is probably worse than the vast majority of human beings have ever experienced or will.

But if this were not enough , he didn't come nearly to be in solidarity but to offer this in love for us who have offended him in various degrees , either by thumbing our nose at him or by mocking or putting down other persons or harming them in whatever form.

Effectively we deserve hell if we have committed serious sin at any time in our lives , we deserve to be separated from him forever in agony, and yet in his own infinite love, he offers himself to pay this infinite debt for us, so that if he forgives this justice is still satiated for the ones that has been harmed immeasurably.

And is this therefore it brings in one of the more profound reasons that God allows even physical evil, which is that God can draw the most profound goods from the most terrible evils.

God himself suffered and died the most horrible death, and from it, he has drawn the redemption of the world , the capacity to redeem persons to be forgiven and to spend eternity with them even though they deserve most of them to be separated forever in fire.

What is more, now from evil to even greater good us that for those who themselves have been wronged by others, they can be like Christ and unite their hearts to forgive, and this way they become another Christ to help save other the people that have harmed themselves , just as Jesus forgave his enemies. This is loving to a greater degree than in a world in which there was no evil.

And this way following, human beings are able to love to a greater way than if the world had never fallen, which therefore makes the world more beautiful.

And in the final reason regarding physical evil, just as Christ offered the most terrible physical evil for us, so too we can take our physical levels of sickness disease and other misfortunes of our common day, and offer them up to Jesus and ask him to help give graces to other sinners to help save them from hell.

 These questions therefore , while not answering the totality of something , they give enough solutions to the problem of suffering so that we can answer

Liberals in their angry bitterness towards the so-called meaning of suffering of existence.

So now we return to their so-called claim that because suffering is meaningless, how the hell can there really be a plan of God to redeem the world?

Well effectively there is a structure of the truth of God. 

In fact, the church already delineates three supreme sources of divine truth that God has given us to reveal his wondrous mysteries and realities that we could never know unless he gave them to us.

In consequence , if a certain logical structure or hierarchy exists within these sources , might we not also expect that the trajectory of church history might follow them in a logical fashion seeing as, as it were, the devil will have to have a certain structured approach to attack it in order to achieve his goals of progressively tearing down the sources , so that, in the end , humanity is in such a depraved position of blindness, that they didn't realize they were a boiling frog.

Well I want to boldly suggest with strong evidence that this has definitely been the process of the devil, it simply is clearly plain when we look at the big picture of church history, whether or not you want to accept it , it really is the case if you wanted to be honest about the biggest and most severe attacks on the church’s truth!

Let's just go through it, Obviously we know from current church theology, there are three primary sources of divine revelation from which the church draws the truth of Christ.

Scripture, tradition, and the magisterium.

However if we really divulge ourselves into the ultimate question of all sources of truth, we can delineate this down to five as follows.

First of all, we can take the magisterium and divide it an attach it in a certain sense as follows.

The catechism plainly teaches that the purpose of the bishops, which is to say the primary brunt of the magisterium apart from Peter, is to give the sound interpretation of the sacred tradition and Scripture by the oral word of God.

And since the sacred tradition of the church is also the oral word of God , there is a basically profound connection that is unbreakable between the bishops of the Catholic Church and the sacred tradition.

And this can be sent considered a singular source.

Then the final part of the magisterium is the supreme manifestation which is Peter, who can be held as another singular.

This leaves us with scripture by itself which we already had.

So actually, we do still have three great forms of truth but they have been a little bit reorganized.

So where do we get five?

Well, we get five by inserting one huge source on top of it and one little source on the bottom.

And who is on top of Peter except God himself in the mystery of the Trinity and the incarnation, which are effectively the greatest and most central mysteries of the Catholic faith that could therefore be considered the supreme source of truth upon which everything of Catholic mystery is founded.

And what is the little one on the bottom except reason ,which itself is not even divine relation since it is intrinsic to every human being of his own natural faculty .

 For , the vast majority of human history even before Christ when there were the magnificent philosophers of greece,

Practically all human beings recognized that they had a brain to rationally work through things logically in the sense of these things are true and these things are false or at least that some things appear to be more true and some things appear to be less logical.

That is until modern times that with relativism now persons don't even live according to reason.

We will come back to this momentarily. For now we can say that this is most evident and we can say this because if we simply look at an some example a modern times, where a guy was in a courtroom and says he identifies as a black man when he is white, and the court takes him seriously. What else can we say except that we live in an irrational world that has gone insane.

But anyway now we have the hierarchy and let's look in fact that when we take these sources one by one, and go down the pyramid, they decrease in terms of the amount of truth that can be attained from them when we take them by themselves apart from the others.

But, on the other hand , as we go down, the evidence for them as truly verasable gets better and better.

Start at the top with God as Trinity and incarnation.

There is no greater source of truth than God himself and his ultimate mystery. Yet if we wanted to even try to grasp the dogmas that have took centuries for the church to work out on this very subject, it would be virtually impossible on our own. Hence, although the Trinity and the incarnation are the most profound and greatest source of truth, they are the least evident of all the sources of truth.

Next down is Peter. Peter is the first great mediated source of truth on Earth and is the supreme mediator , since infallibility in teaching is granted him when he speaks Ex cathedra, or to settle disputes within the college of bishops.

He is the big cheese on Earth and is there for the greatest form of truth of the mediated sources of truth on Earth.

But as for the evidence of a supremacy, it is less evident than the other forms of general apostolic succession and Scripture, since quotes about general apostolic succession authority is far greater than quotes about than quotes about Peter’s supremacy.

Hence, again, Peter is the supreme and greatest source of truth by himself but he is far less evident than the bishops and tradition beneath him.

Next below him are the general bishops and sacred tradition as we have seen , who unfortunately are not quite as reliable as the papacy because they might dispute doctrine that ultimately might require the seat of Peter to declare or resolve.

Yet on the other hand, the evidence says we have just seen for their general authority is far greater than Peter’s because it is far more numerous in terms of its reference in the fathers than Peter's special office.

Now below the bishops and the tradition of course is the scriptures.

The scriptures taken by themselves are far less worthy of truth in terms of what is clear because whereas the bishops, guided by the spirit and the tradition, give a far more certain interpretation of scripture to protect the faithful from being led astray by error,

It's been blazingly proven and seen by human history that over the last 500 years following the Protestant rebellion, scripture taken by itself is a prescription for absolute chaos of a sea , a hurricane of confounding doctrines ad infinitum.

Yet the evidence for scripture is unbelievably more than the fathers because if you walk down the street and you ask someone, where can I find out truths about God and Jesus they're not going to say consult the Pope or the Trinity or the bishops they'll say go get the Bible because the Bible is a far more evident to the human mind than the average user than anyone else.

And this is even beyond the unbelievable testimony of the fathers themselves who quote the scriptures myriads in abundance more times than they do quote tradition or the authority of tradition and bishops.

Hence once again scripture is the least reliable source of divine revelation but it is the most evident source of divine revelation.

And finally reason at the bottom is the least reliable source of truth since it only gives you very base facts about religion, namely monotheism and some sense of natural law if even with difficulty.

And yet is not reason the most evident source of truth for any human person , since no human being can really claim immunity from reason , except in our modern day which is not live according to reason, an insane world that is completely upside down.

Every man has a brain that is joined to the soul of his intellect, that can reason between truths and untruths, or that least can begin to decide between what is reasonable and what is not reasonable, what makes sense and what does not make sense to whatever varying degrees.

And therefore again reason is the most evident source of truth yet the least useful.

Now we only have to go through the huge process of doctoral development after Constantine and see that the great attacks on the church follow this line of trajectory perfectly without exception.

And I am sorry to people who would critique me but this is absolutely not cherry picking history ! it is simply taking the big picture whether or not you want to accept it or not.

More specifically from the year 300 to around 700 inclusive , which is to say from the council of nicaea unto the iconoclastic heresy , the vast majority of the heresies were against the Trinity and/or the incarnation plain and simple. Some very minor exceptions but overall very small exceptions.

Moving on after the iconoclastic heresy, which IS a christological and incarnational lie that denies the incarnational revelation of Christ as the word of God made visible, insofar as it rejected sacred images, The church responded that effectively on the contrary sacred images are completely permittable since they corroborate that Jesus Christ is in fact the incarnation of the mysteries of God made visible to the human eye and senses.

And what was the huge attack after that? Well there was no question that it was the great schism hands down. And what does that attack? That's right, Peter who is just underneath the trinity.

What is the next supreme attack?

Well, let us pause for the Middle ages. the reality is the middle ages were more or less the height of Catholic civilization in Western Europe.

Islam as it were was attacking the church from without by trying to get in and to take over the Holy Land as well as Western European convert it , but Islam has already appeared in the phase of trinitarian and christo heresies and in fact is effectively the culmination of such heresies, definitively denying everything of the Trinity and the incarnation , and retaining only the shell of the gospel.

Therefore the crusades don't count.

Beyond this there are the resurgency of the dualistic heresies in the catharsis and the Alba jensians, but this doesn't count because dualistic heresy already arose before the church gained her freedom in Constantine in things like gnosticism and Docetism and marcionism and manichaeism etc., and even know this, that the dualistic heresies are nothing less than an assault on both the incarnation and the nature of God and therefore a certain prelude to the trinitarian and christological heresies which therefore fit our narrative thus far as well.

Hence, these heresies which were most of the subject of the inquisitions do not count because they are not new.

Pretty much the only other thing left was proto protestantism , The most of which was wyclef, huss and the waldenses. and this in fact just leads just to what is the next great attack which is that supreme heretical rebellion that cut off the Middle ages and started the worst division of Christians that ever has been and most likely ever will be since there is no greater form of division except heresy.

And what in fact are the Protestants attacking except the entire magisterium which is to say not merely Peter, who the Orthodox scorned, but all of the magisterium the bishops and their tradition, clinging only the scripture.

After this phase, they call it the modern phase and this is where the world is beginning to move away from Christianity and towards in a certain sense of worldliness.

Here the world is getting disillusioned with organized and so-called supernaturally inclined religion because of all of the divisions in the wars and the hatreds and other scandals.

Therefore, in the so-called enlightenment, religion starts to being accepted at least from reason as in a base creator and moral law with the deists and the rationalists, but soon later as the as these supernaturally dead infidels themselves confounded religion with reason even worse than the Protestants did with scripture, the natural result was for the world to become disillusioned even with religion itself and simply start appointing reason towards the creation through science philosophy psychology etc which is to say, trying to find the meaning of life and understanding the scientific realities of the world apart from God.

In this regard then , what they scorned was the scriptures and effectively all divine revelation, going to a brute reason.

Thomas Jefferson effectively rewrote the whole New Testament and put out the miracles.

In this manner, this is what we would call solo ratio, a certain counterpart to the sola scriptura of the Protestant age.

But moving into the 20th century even reason is now cast aside because even the existence of God is rejected, which is contrary to reason, since as we saw God can be known for reason. The primary manifestation of this horror was the oppressive communism overtaking much of the eastern part of the world with totalitarian atheism. Then later now in our Western culture, the absolutely insane relativist materialism, which is even more unreasonable, since it says that you can have two completely contradictory things both completely true at the same time!

And this phase is clearly darkness and that is what the devil wanted from the beginning.

But see, he had to do it gradually, because with the blood of the popes and the Martyrs very fresh on the ground right with Constantine's conquering, he couldn't just come out and say, see, these bishops and popes are hypocrites ,reject them and become as it were heretics? No way! It was too early to do that so we had to work his way down.

So there you go things to ponder.

Later we will argue that stuff like this is what would really be in the apocalypse in terms of theology and the ages, versus just petty details of the first century, which is what most of the wonderful Catholic apologists like to trumpet with their preterism!