Question 190 - Review in NOR saying Old Covenant is not revoked

Robert,

A man named Arthur C. Sippo did a review for New Oxford Review of a book, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism written by Paula Fredriksen. Mr. Sippo titled his review: “St. Augustine’s Defense of Judaism.” I’m sending you the complete article because I would like you to review Mr. Sippo’s review. I’m not sure, but I don’t think he has represented the Catholic Church very well. Would you mind giving me your thoughts? I believe this is the same man that gave you a very good review of your commentary on Romans and James.

Tracy M.

R. Sungenis: Tracy, I read the entire article. Thank you for sending it to me. I thought Dr. Sippo was doing very well in the article, and I was quite impressed. But when I got to the last two paragraphs I was a bit astounded at the conclusions he was making. Art is a friend of mine and I know his mind quite well, but I am quite puzzled at how he arrives at his conclusion. For the rest of our audience, I’ll transcribe what Art wrote in those last two paragraphs:

St. Augustine’s apologetic for Judaism was indeed a milestone in Christian thinking and helped lay the groundwork for a more positive Christian approach toward the Jews. It preserved the integrity of the Old Testament revelation while finding a justification for tolerance of the sizable Jewish minority in Romans society. But it cannot be considered the ultimate position of the Catholic Church. In modern times, Christians have begun to appreciate the Jews and their continuing efforts to be faithful to the revelations received by their ancestors. In the highest circles of the Catholic Church it has been recognized that the Old Covenant from Sinai was never revoked, even though the advent of Christ has superseded it. Christians in recent decades have begun to appreciate the religious symbolism of Jewish practices and feast days, and it is not uncommon for parishes to hold Seder meals during Holy Week to delve more deeply into the meaning of the Mass. Ironically, sooner than provide an independent witness to pagans for the truth of Christ, our encounters with observant Jews today bear witness to our own heritage in Judaism. There is much we can learn from Judaism that illumines the Gospels and the origins of Christianity.

Fredriksen’s book was written to reveal how St. Augustine developed a more positive view of Judaism and to try to show that the horrible anti-Semitic views and actions especially of the past two centuries are neither necessary nor inevitable. St. Augustine was able to move beyond the prejudices of his immediate forbears.

Well, as Art said in his review of my Romans commentary “he and I have agreed to disagree on several points…” Art’s above views are one of those issues on which we disagree. Again, I think he represented Augustine’s views very well, but apparently Art disagrees with Augustine’s view, since he says above, “But it cannot be considered the ultimate position of the Catholic Church.” I haven’t read Fredriksen’s book (incidentally, Fredriksen is Jewish, and of somewhat of a liberal strain), so I don’t know whether she agrees with Art’s assessment of Augustine, so I will only deal with Art’s opinion here. Art feels no obligation to either support Augustine’s view of the Jews, nor the Fathers that came before Augustine (Fathers who Art believes are more severe in their outlook of the Jews than Augustine). As such, Art presents a novel approach to the Jews, so it will have to be judged on its own merits.

Art’s statement: “In the highest circles of the Catholic Church it has been recognized that the Old Covenant from Sinai was never revoked, even though the advent of Christ has superseded it,” is very disappointing. I would have expected much more from a scholar of Art’s caliber, but I think this is a case of sentiment winning out over truth. First, Art’s couching of who is behind this idea is quite revealing. Who are the “highest circles of the Catholic Church”? Obviously, Art does not and cannot point to any official teaching of the Catholic Church that says the Mosaic covenant is not revoked, for there are no such statements. If he is thinking of John Paul II’s statement in 1980 in Mainz, Germany, well, that isn’t going to help him, since John Paul II never mentioned the Mosaic covenant. In fact, in 1986, John Paul II clarified what covenant he had in view that wasn’t revoked. He said it was the Abrahamic covenant, and made no mention of the Mosaic covenant. He was quite correct, since the Abrahamic covenant was made with Abraham and the world in Genesis 12-15, and transitioned into the New Covenant in Jesus Christ (cf. Galatians 3:6-8; Romans 4:1-26; John 8:51; Hebrews 11:8-20). But you will never find one word in John Paul II’s teaching saying the Mosaic covenant was not revoked.

Now, I know of only one other high profile cleric and another high profile document that said the Mosaic covenant was not revoked. Cardinal Keeler, who wrote the Reflections on Covenant and Missions document with Jewish rabbis in 2002 said that the Jews retain the “Old Covenant,” and by that term he was referring to the Mosaic covenant. But that document has no official standing in the Catholic Church, and Cardinal Keeler even admitted so after he was heavily criticized for it. Just recently, two USCCB committees chastised Keeler for the remarks he made in Reflections.

The other high profile document was the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, which said on page 131 that “the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them.” But, if Art isn’t already aware of it, the US bishops voted 231 to 14 to have that statement eliminated from the US catechism in all future editions. Now, except for some possible private statements by Cardinal Kasper pushing for the Mosaic covenant (but which have no authority), I don’t know what other “highest circles of the Catholic Church” Art is referring to. If Art cannot prove that John Paul II was referring to the Mosaic covenant, and he realizes that the US bishops eliminated a sentence pushing for the validity of the Mosaic covenant, and that the Vatican recently approved the excision of the guilty sentence, he has no place to turn to support his view.

But all this discussion is superfluous for the simple reason that when we say that the Mosaic covenant is “superseded,” by definition we mean that whatever came before is automatically revoked. Here is the definition of “supersede” in the World Book dictionary: “to take the place of; cause to be set aside; displace.” In other words, a new thing comes and replaces an old thing. Conversely, if we wanted to say that a new thing comes but doesn’t replace the old thing, then we would not use the word “superseded.” We might use “infrasede” or “parasede” (if I can coin two words for illustration) but not supersede.

As I’ve pointed out dozens of times in my essays, the definition of “supersede” is precisely how Scripture and the Church state what occurs when the New Covenant comes and the Old Covenant goes. The New Covenant REPLACES the Old Covenant, not merely comes along side of the Old Covenant so that the Old Covenant somehow remains in force. For example, Hebrews 7:18-19 says:

On the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.   

The words “former commandment” and “law” refer to the Mosaic covenant. Notice the words “set aside.” This is from the Greek “athetesis,” which means annul, revoke, extinguish. And there is a reason the Mosaic covenant is annulled, for it is “weak and useless.” It goes without saying that we wouldn’t want a covenant that was “weak and useless” to persist unrevoked, would we? So it shouldn’t be surprising to see the same message throughout the New Testament. Hebrews 10:9: “Then he says, ‘Behold, I come to do your will.’ He takes away the first [covenant] to establish the second [covenant]…”; 2 Corinthians 3:14: “For to this day when they [the Jews] read the Old Covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away”; Hebrews 8:7: “For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another”; Colossians 2:14: “Having canceled the written code, with its decrees, that was against us and stood opposed to us; He took it away nailing it to the cross.”

The Catholic Church’s official teaching has said the same: Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, para. 29: “…the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished…but on the gibbet of His death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross”; The Catechism of the Council of Trent: “…the people, aware of the abrogation of the Mosaic Law…”; Council of Florence: “that the matter pertaining to the law of the Old Testament, of the Mosaic law…although they were suited to the divine worship at that time, after our Lord’s coming had been signified by them, ceased, and the sacraments of the New Testament began”; Council of Trent: “but not even the Jews by the very letter of the law of Moses were able to be liberated or to rise therefrom”; Cardinal Ratzinger: “Thus the Sinai [Mosaic] Covenant is indeed superseded” (Many Religions – One Covenant, p. 70).

The Fathers have said the same, led by St. Augustine, the very Father from which Art is distancing himself:

St. Augustine: “Instead of the grace of the law which has passed away, we have received the grace of the gospel which is abiding; and instead of the shadows and types of the old dispensation, the truth has come by Jesus Christ. Jeremiah also prophesied thus in God’s name: ‘Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah...’ Observe what the prophet says, not to Gentiles, who had not been partakers in any former covenant, but to the Jewish nation. He who has given them the law by Moses, promises in place of it the New Covenant of the gospel, that they might no longer live in the oldness of the letter, but in the newness of the spirit” (Letters, 74, 4);

St. John Chrysostom: “Yet surely Paul’s object everywhere is to annul this Law….And with much reason; for it was through a fear and a horror of this that the Jews obstinately opposed grace” (Homily on Romans, 6:12); “And so while no one annuls a man’s covenant, the covenant of God after four hundred and thirty years is annulled; for if not that covenant but another instead of it bestows what is promised, then is it set aside, which is most unreasonable” (Homily on Galatians, Ch 3);

Justin Martyr: Now, law placed against law has abrogated that which is before it, and a covenant which comes after in like manner has put an end to the previous one; and an eternal and final law – namely, Christ – has been given to us, and the covenant is trustworthy…Have you not read…by Jeremiah, concerning this same new covenant, He thus speaks: ‘Behold, the days come,’ says the Lord, ‘that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah…’” (Dialogue with Trypho, Ch 11).

So, it is nonsensical to say that the Mosaic Covenant is “superseded yet not revoked.” I don’t know of any official Church teaching, any Father or medieval, any saint, doctor, pope, council, catechism or encyclopedia that says such a thing. The only ones I know who are saying it are a few liberal clerics who have already been shot down in one form or another in recent times. And just the fact that Art admits that “in modern times” these new ideas have surfaced, it puts the burden of proof (and what a heavy burden it is) on him and those who are giving us this new doctrine, for certainly the Church has never so much as entertained it in her 2000 years, much less made it Catholic faith and practice.

I think it is also necessary to comment on Art’s statement that: “Christians in recent decades have begun to appreciate the religious symbolism of Jewish practices and feast days, and it is not uncommon for parishes to hold Seder meals during Holy Week to delve more deeply into the meaning of the Mass.” Well, it’s one thing “to appreciate the religious symbolism of Jewish practices and feast days,” but it is quite another “for parishes to hold Seder meals during Holy Week to delve more deeply into the meaning of the Mass.” St. Paul appreciated the symbolism of the Passover as he calls Christ “our Passover” (1 Cor 5:7), but he never told us to celebrate the Jewish Passover at the Christian mass (1 Cor 11:17-34), and neither did any pope, council, saint, doctor, catechism or council. Art has 2000 years of Catholic teaching to overcome before he ever can suggest that it is permissible to celebrate a Seder meal. For something this heavy (since it, and the idea that the Mosaic covenant is not revoked, verges on heresy), one should first inquire from the highest authority at the Vatican whether such beliefs and practices are permissible before one even suggests to a Catholic that they are. This is serious business.

I think I should also comment on Art’s statement that “our encounters with observant Jews today bear witness to our own heritage in Judaism. There is much we can learn from Judaism that illumines the Gospels and the origins of Christianity.” Granted, Old Testament Judaism has much to offer in helping us to understand the origins of Christianity. After all, St. Paul said that Christ was our Passover, so it would behoove us to know what the Passover was in order to better understand Christ. But this doesn’t mean that we can also say: “our encounters with observant Jews today bear witness to our own heritage in Judaism,” for the simple fact that today’s Judaism is not the Old Testament religion of yesterday. The “Judaism” of the Old Testament did not deny that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. In fact, Jesus says that Abraham rejoiced to see the day of Christ (John 8:56). Isaiah wrote of the Messiah and his suffering (Isaiah 53). All the prophets did the same (Luke 24:44). But today’s Judaism certainly DOES deny that Jesus Christ is God and the Messiah. Thus, the two religions (Judaism in the Old Testament and Judaism of today) couldn’t be any further apart. One is true, the other is apostate and of the devil. So how could “observant Jews today” have any connection with the “heritage of Judaism”? The only connection Jews of today might have with Old Testament Judaism is that they claim to follow Moses, but even then, as Jesus said of the Jewish Pharisees,

Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; it is Moses who accuses you, on whom you set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" (John 5:45-47 RSV).

In other words, the Jews might CLAIM to know Moses, but they don’t know him at all, because Moses looked forward to Christ. The Jews of today are not looking forward to Christ as their Messiah. They are looking for another messiah, someone who is not Jesus Christ.

At this point I also need to add that the idea that Judaism today is a viable, valid and God-glorifying religion is one of the most dangerous heresies ever to hit the Church, on par with the Arian heresy of the Church’s early years. This is because both modern Judaism and ancient Arianism have one very significant feature in common: they both deny the divinity of Christ.

Art’s remark that “in the highest circles of the Catholic Church it has been recognized that the Old Covenant from Sinai was never revoked” is, to be honest, very disturbing, if not frightening. In the Arian heresy there were many bishops and cardinals “in the highest circles of the Catholic Church” who were denying that Jesus Christ was God, and they all thought they were orthodox in saying so. This shows, like nothing else in Catholic history, how powerfully deceptive the devil is. Once you start giving legitimacy to a people who deny the cardinal doctrine of Christianity (Christ’s divinity) you are asking for nothing but trouble. Art should know better. Since when do we determine Catholic doctrine by a head count of “the highest circles of the Catholic Church” and ignore the dogmatic Tradition passed down to us, especially when some of those “highest circles” are notorious for their liberal and unorthodox views? Art knows what the Tradition says; he knows what Scripture says, but he is apparently ignoring both of them because of some theological sentiment he has for the Jews. I’m afraid that much of the teaching we are hearing today concerning the Jews is built on nothing but sentiment, and it is this very sentiment that the devil is using to create heterodoxy in the Catholic Church.

Question 189 - On God changing his mind

Robert,

Regarding God’s changing his mind, I'm not at all convinced that we are attributing "lies" to God if we don't interpret those kinds of passages as a real change of mind on His part. Like the one in Exodus you bring up: 32: 10. I would read that as a threat to destroy rebellious Israel, not as an expression of a firm and definite intention to do so  - an intention, therefore, that would have to be subsequently changed and revoked in order not to destroy them after all. A father may often threaten a child with a certain punishment even while knowing in his own mind he's not going to carry through on it. What the threat communicates to the child is that the father is thinking about this punishment, and that his father, for all he knows, is likely to inflict that punishment if he doesn't shape up, seek forgiveness, or whatever. So that threat is not a "lie" to the child, because what it communicates to him is the truth, although not the whole truth, of what his father is thinking. Even if a threat is cast grammatically as a simple prediction ("I shall destroy you"), it is not a "lie" just because the threatener really knows that in the end he is not going to destroy the miscreant after all.

Brian F.

R. Sungenis: Although I understand the analogy of the father and the child, I believe it is inadequate to help in this situation. In fact, I think in the end it actually works against you because you end up having to bring God down to the level of a human father, which is precisely the criticism I am given sometimes for making it appear that God gets angry and changes his mind – as a human father would do! In other words, your analogy can be made to support either hypothesis, depending on how one views the analogy. It doesn’t support or deny my thesis or yours. It only shows how complicated arriving at an answer may be to this thorny issue.

Still, I find it hard to accept that God’s threat of destroying Israel for their sin of worshiping the golden calf is not a threat that he intended on carrying out. Call it what you will (perhaps “lie” may be too much here), but the fact is, if the threat carried no potentiality of actually destroying Israel unless repentance or appeasement occurred, then we not only call into question any passages that illustrates appeasement and repentance to alter God’s potential judgment, but we call into question that whole basis for the Atonement of Christ. If God’s threat to send someone to hell does not carry the full potentiality that God would send them to hell if there is no appeasement and repentance, then why have Christ go through the appeasement process? Likewise, why have Moses go through the appeasement process in Exodus 32 if God never intended on carrying out his threat?

Once we bar ourselves from taking a face value perspective in these types of passages, it begins to create endless problems with trying to make sense out of the rest of Scripture. For example, in the next chapter, Exodus 33, God is still angry at the Jews for what they did in Exodus 32, so he tells Moses that he doesn’t want to go with the Jews through the desert. So Moses pleads with God once again, and then God changes his mind, but only does so because it is Moses who has appeased him. When we read further in the story we see why Moses had such appeal with God, for it tells us in verse 11 that God would speak to Moses face to face, as a friend speaks to a friend. Obviously, they had a very intimate relationship. In verse 14, after Moses appeased God, God changes his mind in verse 14 and decides to go with the Jews.

To read this passage and interpret it such that God, even though he threatened not to go with the Jews did not really intend not to go is, to me, simply to empty this passage of the very thing it is trying to teach us about God, that is, that a righteous person, namely, Moses, can appeal to God from his already established intimate relationship, and persuade him to relent of his wrath and forgive. If not, then we turn Moses appeasement and friendship into mere story-filler, theatrics that have no real meaning. But that is not the Christianity I know. The whole basis of Christianity is that we can appease a wrathful God with propitiatory sacrifice, because he is not an immovable abstract entity but a personal being who listens to the pleas of his creatures and moves because of those pleas. 

I think you have to admit that, the only reason you have an objection to reading this passage at face value is because there is an overriding metaphysical issue that intrudes and says we cannot do so. But to me, Scripture takes precedence over metaphysics, especially when metaphysics begins to make Scripture contradict itself. To me it is plain that if God threatens and God cannot lie, then the threat MUST carry the potentiality of being exercised unless something equally important to God (i.e., appeasement) allows God to justifiably change the threat into forgiveness. If not, then as I said above, we disrupt the whole threat-appeasement-forgiveness economy of biblical history.
 
Brian F. Maybe we have to distinguish between a "literal sense" and a "slavishly literal sense" of a statement. According to the classical and patristic hermeneutic, as I understand it, the "literal sense" of a given biblical passage doesn't necessarily mean "taking it literally". For instance, when a metaphor is used, e.g., "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!", the "literal sense" of Jesus' words here is not that we should physically mutilate ourselves by tearing out the organ of vision from our head. No, the "literal sense" means "the meaning of the words" (as distinct from the typological or allegorical sense of the things or events mentioned, especially in the OT looking foward to the New). And the meaning of Jesus' words is what he intended to communicate by them. So the "literal sense", thus understood, includes or 'takes in board' their metaphorical character. In the cited example, the true 'literal sense' of Our Lord's admonition is simply that we should remorselessly remove the occasions of sin in our lives - like the guy in the movie "Fireproof" who finally smashes up his computer with a sledge hammer as the only way to stop himself from watching Internet porn.

R. Sungenis: Yes, of course. I have no objection to this kind of exegesis. But this just begs the question of whether passages such as Exodus 32-33 are suggesting such a hermeneutic. There are passages of OT Scripture that speak of God having human body parts, but we don’t interpret these literally because, in the hierarch of truths in Scripture, Scripture tells us that God is a spirit and does not have human body parts. (Notice here, however, that we don’t have a metaphysical philosophy that is telling us such, but only the hierarchy of Scriptural truths, a very simple process of evaluation).

But there are no passages of Scripture that prohibit us from taking Exodus 32-33 at face value and saying that God gets angry and that God can change is mind. The passages that are often appealed to in order to give at least some prohibition to God changing his mind (such as Malachi 3:6) are simply not speaking about whether God can change his mind when faced with the free will repentance of man, but only that God, in his divine essence, cannot change who He is. He will always do what God does, because God cannot change. But I would add, if always doing what God does includes the fact that He will change his mind from threat to forgiveness when confronted with the free will repentance of man, then so be it, God hasn’t changed. For me to say otherwise is to force my ideas upon God and Scripture rather than the other way around.

Brian F. Also, you speak of God changing his mind (or emotions) while not changing "in his essence". I can't make any philosophical sense of that, because in God there is no distinction between His essence and His existence. God is pure act, with no potency at all. But change of any sort implies potency that is unrealized until it is actualized ("reduced to act" in classical terminology) when the change takes place. But in God there can be no unrealized potential at all. He is eternally all He ever could be. So I still can't see how the "changes" you want to attribute to God could be reconciled with his immutability, as that word has been understood for centuries by the Church. Maybe the Church has, as you say, never expressly defined something against what you're proposing; but Vatican I anathematizes any "reinterpretation" of a dogma - giving its words a different meaning from what they have hitherto been understood to mean. And it seems to me your projected thesis would be giving to the word "immutable" in Lateran IV and Vatican I a different sense or meaning from what the Fathers of those Councils had in mind. (We would identify what they had in mind by looking at the approved theologians of that time and seeing what they said about it.)

R. Sungenis: I beg to differ here. A “reinterpretation” can only refer to what the Church has dogmatically stated as the correct interpretation that someone is now attempting to change. For example, if the Church has said that the Eucharist can only be understood as a complete change from bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (as it did at Lateran IV), then any “reinterpretation” of that dogma into say, Schillebeeckx’s idea of “transignification,” is anathema.

But while saying this, the Church is not also saying that the only way to understand how the bread and wine can be changed into the body and blood of Christ must, with no exceptions, incorporate the metaphysics of Thomas that uses Aristotle’s accidens and substance paradigm. The Church would never force that paradigm on us, because it simply has no way of verifying that it is correct. The only thing the Church knows, de fide, is that the bread and wine change completely into the body and blood of Christ. How it happens, no one really knows.

As regards potency and act, again, the Church has not dogmatized any of this. I could just as easily say that, if one wants to use the parameters of potency and act, then we can say that when God changes his mind in a temporal situation (Exodus 32-33) it is just as pure an act as anything else God does, since God knew from all eternity that he would change his mind in that particular situation. Changing his mind, then, is not a potency. It is no more a potency than God becoming man in Jesus Christ. God is doing as God has planned from all eternity. Nothing escapes his knowledge. The problem for us, really, is not between act and potency, but in understanding who God is, and HOW he can be that way. I confess, I have not the slightest clue. To be honest with you, I’m still struggling with why God bothered to create us at all, considering that he knew most of the human race would end up in hell. All I know is that God is God and does not lie, and that Scripture is the inerrant revelation of God, and I want to protect that revelation as much as I possibly can, and hope that someday God will explain to me why He did what He did.

As regards Thomas himself, I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that we didn’t understand any of these issues until Thomas found the answer 1200 years after Christ, and did so by the likes of a pagan philosopher named Aristotle, and just because they happened to find Aristotle’s library only a century prior. Sometimes I wonder whether Thomas’ desire to throw out much of his teaching after he saw the vision from God has to do with his penchant to run to Aristotle to explain Christian doctrine. If you’ve ever studied Aristotle, he is full of contradictions. His whole notion of God is based on “non-movement.” Anything that moves is imperfect and thus cannot be God. But Aristotle had no concept of the Christian God, and therefore no concept of a God who is, indeed, “moved” by the propitiation of Christ and other humans, like Moses. Thomas had the unenviable task of trying to combine Aristotle’s non-moving God with the moving God of Christianity, and it ended up creating a lot of tension between metaphysics and Scripture that still hasn’t been solved to this day. I hope to unravel some of it in my dissertation.

The fact remains that, as much as Thomas is revered, he wasn’t quoted once in any Church dogma. Church dogma quotes Scripture because Scripture is inerrant and it is Scripture that the Church must defend, not necessarily Thomas. As far as I see Thomas, he’s good on some things, weak on others, as all the Fathers and medievals are. The only time we are commanded to uphold them as official revealers of truth is when they are in consensus. Prior to that, I think we need to be very careful forming a cult around Thomas, or even Augustine, for that matter. They were men as fallible as you and I, and neither of them had some special tap into divine revelation, barring Thomas’ vision which led him to question all his previous work.

Brian F.  The fact that some early patristic writers may have had ideas similar to yours does not mean those ideas would still be acceptable today, now that God's immutability has been defined, in a historical context that shows it was understood at the time of definition in the sense of the philosophia perennis (Aristotelian-Thomistic), and so always has to be understod in that sense from that time on.

R. Sungenis: Again, I believe this is off the mark. The immutability of God was not “defined” by an appeal to Thomas or any other theologian. It was defined precisely WITHOUT specific appeal to Thomas or anyone else. The Church simply says that God doesn’t change, and rightly so. The Church did not get into any other specifics of that issue.

God be with you.

Question 188 - Catholics for Israel's Ariel Ben Ami (2)

Mr. Sungenis,

To be honest, we are not interested in entering into a polemical debate with you.  Several members of Catholics for Israel have read your critique and all agree that it is written in a bad spirit.  You may claim to not be anti-Semitic on a racial level, but few can doubt that you hold strong anti-Jewish views. 

R. Sungenis: If you believe so, then be man enough to show the evidence, instead of engaging in personal attacks and general accusations. Otherwise, you are doing the same thing of which you accuse me.

Ami: Apparently you have decided that you are a champion of Catholic orthodoxy, over your bishop,

R. Sungenis: My bishop is teaching a heresy, as is his vicar general. I have proved that by their own written words. Canon Law 212, 2-3 says it is my “duty” to make this known to him and “all the Christian faithful.”

Ami: over most Catholic apologists who are all ‘sadly misinformed’,

R. Sungenis: Yes, since many of them are teaching the same heresy about the validity of the Old Covenant as you do.

Ami: over Cardinal Schoenborn, the editor of the Catechism, who has publicly declared that he believes that the return of the Jews to Israel is a fulfillment of prophecy.

R. Sungenis: Cardinal Schönborn can have any opinion he likes. That doesn’t make him right. St. Augustine and all the other Fathers didn’t believe that Jews returning to Israel is a fulfillment of prophecy. Does that make all of them wrong and the Cardinal correct? When you can show from Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium that your view is the correct one, then you have something. Until then, you are only engaging in the same misguided beliefs here as you do on your website about the Jews and Israel.

Ami:  Not to mention the general sympathy of pope John Paul II and of Benedict XVI regarding the return of the Jewish people to Israel.

R. Sungenis: “Sympathy”? Yes, we all have sympathy for the Jews to have a portion of land in Israel that was mandated to them by the United Nations.  But since 1948, Israel has taken land that was not given to them by the UN, and has refused to give it back. Read resolutions 221 and 338 of the charter on Israel. The Jews keep this land because they think they are still God’s chosen people and are entitled to the land because of their heritage. Wrong. The Jews are no longer the chosen people and they are no longer entitled to land, except what the nations give to them.

Ami: Since we are but “ideologues” who need to return to catechism class to learn our Catholic faith, I doubt any dialogue with you might be fruitful since only you, apparently, have preserved the true Catholic faith in all its purity.

R. Sungenis: Sure, I understand, Mr. Ami. That is what people like you normally retort when your theology is exposed for the errors it contains – you blame it on your critic for bringing it to light instead of learning from it and correcting your view.

Ami: For sure, the subject of Zionism and of the place of Judaism within the divine plan of salvation is a topic that is legitimately debatable and we understand that.  We do not wish to engage in innuendos or personal attacks, but frankly it is hard to not perceive pride and arrogance in your statements that Robert Sungenis is the standard of orthodoxy that all should follow.

R. Sungenis: Then stop being hypocritical. Don’t say you want to debate Zionism and then turn around and make a derogatory remark that I am the “standard of orthodoxy that all should follow.” As for what the “standard of orthodoxy” is, the USCCB and its approval by the Vatican, has already made that clear, have they not? They took out the sentence from the US catechism that said the Mosaic covenant was still valid for the Jews, and it was I who started that campaign two years ago. So I suggest that you stop rallying around popular sentiments, Mr. Ami, and start doing your homework. I laid out some very significant challenges to you and you simply refuse to address them. Instead you want to play schoolyard games of name-calling. Unfortunately for you, if that is the depth of your theological prowess, your doctrines will fall with you. If you’re going to preach, you better be able to back it up with facts instead of accusations of “anti-semitism” or “anti-Jewish” if someone doesn’t agree with you. That tactic simply doesn’t work any more.

Ami: After some 10 years of experience living in Israel and countless conversations with Jews of all sorts, I have come to the firm conviction that the kind of supersessionism and lack of respect towards Judaism that you hold is one of the greatest obstacles keeping Jews out of the Church.

R. Sungenis: “Lack of respect toward Judaism”? Is that the basis of your complaint? First of all, Mr. Ami, I “respect” Judaism like I respect every other worldly religion. They have bits of truth but most of it is false. I am here to alert them to the falsity of these religions so that they can come to the Light and save their soul, because only the Devil would want to keep them in these false religions. Judaism is a religion that denies the deity of Jesus Christ as its cardinal doctrine. How much “respect” do you want me to have for a religion like that? The only respect I can give it is what Jesus gave it in the Gospel of John. I suggest you read chapters 5-9 to find out what that is. As for “the kind of supersessionism” I hold to, let me enlighten you, Mr. Ami, there is only ONE kind of supersessionism – the kind the Catholic Church has taught for 2000 years. And I can tell you that it did not, and does not, teach your KIND of supersessionism. If you believe I am wrong, then show me from either Scripture, Tradition or the Magisterium.

Ami: And by the way, we have informed the Holy Father of our apostolate and I have personally met the apostolic nuncio here in Israel, Msgr. Antonio Franco, who was quite encouraging and did not have a single negative word to say about our work.

R. Sungenis: I don’t have a “single negative word to say about your work” either, Mr. Ami. My critique of your work was not “negative.” It was meant to be positive, so that you would see the correct doctrine. But if you think that being positive about your work means only that one has to agree with your brand of supersessionism and view of Judaism and Israel, then you are sadly mistaken. The Catholic Church has simply not taught your theology anywhere in its history. Learn from it, Mr. Ami. You are being deceived by some very influential people.

Best regards in Christ.

Question 187 – Catholics for Israel's Ariel Ben Ami

Ariel Ben Ami: Mr. Sungenis has even come into conflict with his own bishop regarding his position against the Jews.

R. Sungenis: “Conflict” with a bishop is common in Catholic history, because not all bishops protect and defend the Catholic faith. That’s why the US bishops, in a vote of 231 to 14, voted to change the bishop’s catechism of 2006 that had a heresy in it about the Mosaic covenant. My bishop, unfortunately, like you, believes and promotes the heresy that the Old Covenant is somehow still valid for the Jewish people. I suggest you find out the real story of Bishop Rhoades and his vicar general Father William King from our website article on the issue before you start making slanderous innuendos about me. (http://www.catholicintl.com/qa/Ask_Your_Question_about_the_Jews.pdf)

Ariel Ben Ami: Strange that of all people who would choose to critique our apostolate, it turns out that he is the first.

R. Sungenis: Unfortunately, yes, I’m the first. That just tells you how sadly misinformed most Catholic apologists are to the dangerous heresies that are attacking the Catholic Church under the guise of Jewish ecumenism. What’s “strange,” Mr. Ami, is that you would support these heresies. As long as you do, you will have me to contend with.

Ariel Ben Ami: He obviously has some kind of a negative fixation on the Jews.

R. Sungenis: This is the typical comment from ideologues such as yourself who think that criticism of false Jewish beliefs (like your belief in a “limited Zionism”) is merely because I have a “negative fixation” on Jews. I assure you, the only “fixation” I have is on Jesus Christ and protecting his Catholic Church from heresies, such as the ones you are promoting on your website. I suggest you learn the Catholic faith first before you start preaching to the rest of us how the Jews or Jewish converts fit into the Catholic Church.

Ariel Ben Ami: It’s too bad he doesn’t choose to spend his energy in a more constructive way for the Church.

R. Sungenis: So my condemnation about your heretical views about the Old Covenant and Zionism is not constructive? It is the most constructive thing I can do for the Church, since no one else seems to have the courage to do so. As for other “constructive” things I do, Mr. Ami, I’ve spent the last 17 years promoting the Catholic Church with books, articles and lectures. Jewish heresies and our denouncement of them are only a percentage of our work.

Ariel Ben Ami: And by the way we also oppose Judaizing (which means trying to Judaize gentiles) just as we oppose the equally wrong idea of de-judaizing the Jews, which is one of the greatest obstacles that Christians have traditionally put in their way to encountering Christ (and which Mr. Sungenis sadly continues).  I would be interested in knowing how many Jews were warmed up to receive the Gospel through his work.

R. Sungenis: Jews that want the truth have been “warmed up” tremendously. They write to me and tell me every week. It’s Jews like you who want to hold on to Jewish racial and spiritual distinctions who don’t like what I have to say, and they use the same childish accusations that you do, instead of arguing about the facts with me. I suggest you take a good look at the critique I gave of your website and answer them one-by-one instead of engaging in name-calling and slander.

Ariel Ben Ami: You may or may not know that Robert Sungenis is well know for holding anti-semitic attitudes,

R. Sungenis: I don’t have any anti-semitic attitudes. You have anti-Robert Sungenis attitudes simply because I try to correct your false beliefs about the Jews.

Ariel Ben Ami: and barely has any credibility left regarding this subject.

R. Sungenis: Is that why the Vatican and the USCCB listened to my critique of the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults which had claimed that the Mosaic covenant was still valid for the Jews? I was the only Catholic in the world to alarm the Vatican and the US bishops to this error, and they listened.  

Ariel Ben Ami: However, we are reading the document with interest and considering whether it is worthy of a response.

With blessings in Christ, Ariel Ben Ami, Catholics for Israel (www.israelcatholic.com), Jerusalem

 R. Sungenis: I encourage you to do so, Mr. Ami. It would be much better than the name-calling and innuendo that you engaged in here.

Question 186 - Shea blog claims USCCB catechism changes nothing

Robert,

On Mark Shea's blog it is being touted that the USCCB catechism's deletion of the sentence saying that the Mosaic covenant is valid for the Jews "changes nothing" because, being only a US catechism, it has no authority. They also say that the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church is the true authority and that it says the Old Covenant is not revoked. How do you respond to this?

T. Ryan

R. Sungenis: First and foremost, it shows that Shea and his groupies are trying desperately to have the Mosaic covenant perpetuated for the Jews, and thus it shows that they are all in heresy, with Shea as their ring leader.

Second, two weeks ago the Vatican gave the USCCB change to the US catechism the "recognitio," which means that the Vatican has recognized and has no objections to the deletion from the US catechism the sentence about the Mosaic covenant being eternally valid. So the obvious question is, why would the Vatican approve the USCCB knowing that the CCC says the Old Covenant is not revoked? That, of course, would be a contradiction if the Old Covenant in the CCC referred to the Mosaic covenant.

Third, and obviously then, when the 1994 CCC says the Old Covenant is not revoked, it is not referring to the Mosaic covenant. You won't find the words "Mosaic covenant within 300 pages of the statement on p. 34, para 121. What you will find is the phrase "Old Testament." In other words, the 1994 Catechism is juxtaposing the word "Covenant" and "Testament," not promoting the idea that the Mosaic covenant is still valid for the Jews. The 1994 Catechism is saying nothing more than that the Old Testament is still valid for Christians to use in their daily life, not valid for the Jews as a legal covenant between them and God. If the 1994 Catechism did not issue this warning, then we would be Marcionites, people who rejected the Old Testament altogether and see it as having not even practical value.

Here are the surrounding paragraphs in the CCC. Note how many times the Old Testament is the referent for the Old Covenant.

The Old Testament

121 The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked.

122 Indeed, “the economy of the Old Testament was deliberately SO oriented that it should prepare for and declare in prophecy the coming of Christ, redeemer of all men.” “Even though they contain matters imperfect and provisional, the books of the Old Testament bear witness to the whole divine pedagogy of God's saving love: these writings “are a storehouse of sublime teaching on God and of sound wisdom on human life, as well as a wonderful treasury of prayers; in them, too, the mystery of our salvation is present in a hidden way.”

123 Christians venerate the Old Testament as true Word of God. the Church has always vigorously opposed the idea of rejecting the Old Testament under the pretext that the New has rendered it void (Marcionism).

We should also note that the Mosaic covenant isn't mentioned by the 1994 Catechism until page 301 at paragraph 1164, and there it distinguishes the Mosaic law from New Testament feasts.

1164 From the time of the Mosaic law, the People of God have observed fixed feasts, beginning with Passover, to commemorate the astonishing actions of the Savior God, to give him thanks for them, to perpetuate their remembrance, and to teach new generations to conform their conduct to them. In the age of the Church, between the Passover of Christ already accomplished once for all, and its consummation in the kingdom of God, the liturgy celebrated on fixed days bears the imprint of the newness of the mystery of Christ.

The only other times the 1994 CCC mentions the Old Covenant are those in which it is distinguished from the New Covenant, and once again, the Old Covenant is juxtaposed with the Old Testament, showing that the 1994 CCC regards the Old Covenant as a reference to the Old Testament, not to the Mosaic covenant; and no mention is ever made of the Mosaic covenant remaining valid for the Jewish people:

128 The Church, as early as apostolic times, and then constantly in her Tradition, has illuminated the unity of the divine plan in the two Testaments through typology, which discerns in God's works of the Old Covenant prefigurations of what he accomplished in the fullness of time in the person of his incarnate Son.

129 Christians therefore read the Old Testament in the light of Christ crucified and risen. Such typological reading discloses the inexhaustible content of the Old Testament; but it must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as Revelation reaffirmed by our Lord himself. Besides, the New Testament has to be read in the light of the Old. Early Christian catechesis made constant use of the Old Testament. As an old saying put it, the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.

200 These are the words with which the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed begins. the confession of God's oneness, which has its roots in the divine revelation of the Old Covenant, is inseparable from the profession of God's existence and is equally fundamental. God is unique; there is only one God: “The Christian faith confesses that God is one in nature, substance and essence.”

1093 In the sacramental economy the Holy Spirit fulfills what was prefigured in the Old Covenant. Since Christ's Church was “prepared in marvelous fashion in the history of the people of Israel and in the Old Covenant,” the Church's liturgy has retained certain elements of the worship of the Old Covenant as integral and irreplaceable, adopting them as her own: -notably, reading the Old Testament; -praying the Psalms; -above all, recalling the saving events and significant realities which have found their fulfillment in the mystery of Christ (promise and covenant, Exodus and Passover, kingdom and temple, exile and return).

1145 A sacramental celebration is woven from signs and symbols. In keeping with the divine pedagogy of salvation, their meaning is rooted in the work of creation and in human culture, specified by the events of the Old Covenant and fully revealed in the person and work of Christ.

1150 Signs of the covenant. The Chosen People received from God distinctive signs and symbols that marked its liturgical life. These are no longer solely celebrations of cosmic cycles and social gestures, but signs of the covenant, symbols of God's mighty deeds for his people. Among these liturgical signs from the Old Covenant are circumcision, anointing and consecration of kings and priests, laying on of hands, sacrifices, and above all the Passover. The Church sees in these signs a prefiguring of the sacraments of the New Covenant.,

et al.

Question 185 – Scott Hahn and the Holy Spirit issue

Hi Robert,
 
You may have already seen this on the blog Unam Sanctam Catholicam titled, Scott Hahn's "maternal" spirit compared to ancient heresies. (Sept 28, 2009)
 
http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/2009/09/scott-hahns-maternal-spirit-compared-to.html
 
Scott Hahn responded to the blogger here (Oct 1, 2009):
 
http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/2009/10/scott-hahns-response.html
 
Or go directly to the bloggers main page, these are the two most recent posts as of today.
 
http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/
 
Thought this may be of interest to you.
 
Thanks for all the work that you do!
 
God bless.
 
Greg

R. Sungenis: Greg, thank you for sending this. I think Hahn defended himself about as good as he could, but there still remains some problems, as you will see below. Perhaps it was all a big misunderstanding. Only Hahn knows for sure, because only he knows what he really believes about this issue. I had always found it difficult to gauge just how much Hahn was attributing by means of metaphors to the Holy Spirit as opposed to how much he was singling out the Holy Spirit as the only person of the Trinity to have these feminine characteristics. In fact, in reading his explanation, I’m still somewhat unclear as to the where he stands.

I think it is easy to grant to Hahn that he is not saying the Holy Spirit is feminine in the sense of having a feminine gender. I think that goes without saying. But I think he is saying, of all the persons of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the one to whom we can attribute feminine characteristics. The problem lies, however, in just how Hahn attributes these feminine characteristics. Is Hahn saying that they are ontologically based in the substance of the Holy Spirit? If so, then it seems that feminine characteristics are part and parcel with the being of the Holy Spirit, even if one claims that the same Holy Spirit is not feminine in regards to gender.

On the other hand, is Hahn merely saying that if we were to see feminine characteristics somewhere in the Trinity then the Holy Spirit would be the best candidate to exhibit them (even though the Father and the Son are sometimes seen in light of feminine characteristics as well)? Again, I’m not sure what he is saying at this point. In what way is the Holy Spirit, in Hahn’s view, distinct from the Father and the Son with regard to feminine characteristics?

If Hahn’s whole thesis is merely saying that the Holy Spirit is preponderantly pictured as having what we normally understand as “feminine” or “motherly” actions toward human beings or toward the other two persons of the Trinity, perhaps there is not much cause for much alarm. But if in some way these feminine aspects of the Holy Spirit that Hahn wants to emphasize are ontologically based wherein the Holy Spirit is now distinguished from the Father and Son because of them, then I believe we have a serious problem, for we are out of the realm of mere metaphors and into the substance of the Godhead.

Hahn’s quote of Cardinal Ratzinger, which states: "Because of the teaching about the Spirit, one can as it were practically have a presentiment of the primordial type of the feminine, in a mysterious, veiled manner, within God himself,” is troublesome for me. First, I don’t know precisely what the cardinal is trying to say, for the language is very obtuse, at least not without some more context to flesh it out.

The use of “as it were” seems to make Ratzinger’s imagery merely a hypothetical suggestion rather than a confirmed teaching. Also, I have a hard time wrapping myself around the clause “a presentiment of the primordial type of the feminine.” A presentiment is a foreboding of something bad, so how that fits with promoting the idea of a “primordial type of the feminine” I don’t know. Perhaps the English translation is bad.

Lastly, when we speak of “primordial” we are commonly talking about the beginning, and more specifically, the prototype to whatever is subsequent. But here again is where one might see a slippage into the ontological, since a “primordial” feminine would have to mean that it came before anything subsequent, existing as such for all eternity. Again, I see a confusion here between ontology and metaphors. All in all, the clause “a presentiment of the primordial type of the feminine…within God himself” is much too vague and ambiguous a sentence to use as support for Hahn’s theory. Hahn needs to first unwrap what Ratzinger is really saying before it can be commandeered as a support.

As for the Catechism at para. 370, I don’t think this offers Hahn much help for the simple fact that it is not singling out the Holy Spirit but is speaking of the Godhead in toto.

The quote from St. Aphrahat is certainly interesting, but not any real support, since Aphrahat is merely  expressing in poetical style his affection for the Holy Spirit as his “mother.” Obviously, Aphrahat is not saying the Holy Spirit IS a mother, so it must be metaphorical. If Hahn is going to use Aphrahat as a support for his thesis (whatever that thesis is), he would have to show Aphrahat having a fully thought-out theology of the Holy Spirit in which the “motherly” aspects he writes in devotion can be transferred into a theological understanding of the Holy Spirit as distinguished from the Father and Son. From what I know and have read of Aphrahat, there is no such thought-out theology. Logically, if there is no other statement from Aphrahat that speaks of the Holy Spirit in feminine or motherly characteristics, we may be doing him a disservice by appealing to him as a progenitor of Hahn’s thesis. This is especially true in light of the fact that the Eastern Fathers had a tendency to use rich and flowery language in their theological descriptions, much more than the Western Fathers did. (There is actually a specific word for this type of Eastern writing, but I can’t remember what it is).

Hence, it is no surprise to me that all of the ancient witnesses that Hahn can garner to his aid (however minimal they may be), are all Easterners, and all use the same type of ornate imagery common among Easterners. As regards to doctrine, the Easterners wouldn’t be bothered by this ornate language, since, from what I can see, they confined these rich descriptions to their hymns and prayers, not their doctrinal stances. Granted, our motto is lex orendi, lex credendi, but still, prayers have much more of a poetical license than strict doctrinal formulations.  

Kolbe’s use of the phrase “uncreated Immaculate Conception” and “quasi-incarnation of the Holy Spirit” in reference to the Blessed Virgin is also troublesome. First, Kolbe was sainted not for his theological knowledge but because of his impeccable life, so he really shouldn’t be esteemed as a “theologian of unimpeachable orthodoxy,” in the sense that whatever Kolbe said in the theological realm is “unimpeachable.”

Second, the Church has never used such vague and ambiguous language of the Holy Spirit, not even close. What is a “quasi-incarnation”? Either one is incarnated or one is not. There is no in-between state. This kind of terminology only creates confusion; it doesn’t clear up anything. Likewise, “uncreated Immaculate Conception” is Kolbe’s invention, since it certainly wasn’t used by anyone in Catholic history. If we don’t draw these solid lines around how we describe the Holy Spirit, the whole enterprise becomes a shell game of word meanings and implications. This ought not to be. When we speak of the Holy Spirit we must be as precise as humanly possible. Metaphors about feminine and motherly characteristic may be good in prayers and homilies, but certainly not in doctrinal formulations.

For the same reason, the quote from Edith Stein is also troubling. Here we have use of what seems to be an ontological categorization of the Holy Spirit (in distinction to the Father and Son) by her use of “prototype.” She says “Thus we can see the prototype of the feminine being in the Spirit of God.” Once again, if Edith Stein were a noted and decorated pneumatologist for the Catholic Church, we might take pause and give her words some weight, even if they seemed to run counter to traditional descriptions of the Holy Spirit. But Edith Stein, saint or not, was not recognized for her insights on pneumatology, but for her impeccable life in service to God. Thus, she is not an authority on this subject, and certainly not one to support a major thesis such as the one Hahn is promoting. Edith Stein simply had no thought-out theology of the Holy Spirit to even be considered a support for Hahn’s thesis. Proof-texting from Stein, or anyone else for that matter, is simply not enough.

As for Scheeben, he is merely using an analogy when he says "As the mother is the bond of love between father and child, so in God the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son." Whether Scheeben would want to be categorized as supporting Hahn’s thesis (and again, I’m not sure what that thesis really is), remains to be seen. Hahn is certainly not going to prove that Scheeben is on his side by extracting a mere analogy from his writings.

I also have problem with the use of the quote: "As Eve can, in a figurative sense, be called simply the rib of Adam... St. Methodius goes so far as to assert that the Holy Spirit is the rib of the Word (costa Verbi)." Once again, we have another Easterner (Methodius) using ornate language. Westerners did not use this language, and even many Easterners were cautious about using it, especially those who were the articulators of Catholic doctrine on the Trinity (Athanasius). Moreover, Hahn gives us no context for Methodius’ assertion (e.g., was this a prayer or a doctrinal formulation?), nor does he explain what precisely Methodius means by such a strange mixed metaphor as “rib of the Word.” In a way, Methodius’ phrase is non-sensical, and it certainly has no support from any other patristic writer.  

As for “R. Garrigou-Lagrange, OP; L. Bouyer; J. Kentenich; B. Ashley, OP; Cardinal Y. Congar (Tradition & Traditions, pp. 372-75); F.X. Durrwell; A. Feuillet; H.M. Manteau-Bonamy, OP” supporting “this notion,” I don’t know what “notion” Hahn is referring to. If these eminent theologians are supporting Hahn’s thesis, then he would do himself a service, and us as well, to show specifically what they are saying as support.  At this point, I don’t know anything in their writings that is supportive. I think it is safe to say that, if there was supporting argumentation that was clear and concise, Hahn would have excerpted quotes from their books just as he did with, say, Kolbe or Methodius. At this point in the controversy, Hahn cannot hold up mere source citations as support. He must dig deep into these theologians and draw out the specific evidence. This is his thesis. It behooves him to do the homework.

As for Catherine LaCugna’s objections to accepting feminine traits attached to the Holy Spirit for fear of further subordination of women, Hahn needs to show that this lone opinion is the consensus among Catholic feminists. I haven’t done any research on this particular angle of the argument myself, but I can imagine that there are a significant portion of Catholic feminists who applaud the idea that the Holy Spirit is considered feminine, in distinction to the Father and Son. What more basis can one have for Catholic feminism than the fact that God, in some sense, is feminine? This would make Eve much more than a rib appendage from Adam, for she would be an appendage from the Holy Spirit which only used Adam as the vehicle!

Again, thanks for bringing this to my attention.

God be with you.

R. Sungenis

Question 184 - Mark Shea and the Old Covenant

Robert,

Mark Shea is at it again. This time he is trying to defend his view of the Old Covenant in light of the recent change to the US adult catechism. He is also trying to bar you from taking any credit for the outcome. Do you have anything to say about it?

John D.

http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/09/reader-writes_29.html

A reader writes

Thought you might be interested in this since it was a bone of contention for you at one point. The Vatican has instructed that the following passage in the CCC page 131 be changed:

"Thus the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them."

Shea: Yep (well, sort of, actually the change was to the American bishop's adult catechism, not the CCC). They changed the language to: “To the Jewish people, whom God first chose to hear his Word, ‘belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.’ (Romans 9: 4-5; cf. CCC, no 839)

My reader continues:

I was referring to this post where you linked your Tale of Two Covenants series, and then you proffered the CCC passage in question as a succinct summary of a point in your position which had come under scrutiny. You then poked fun at Bob Sungenis for taking action to request that this passage be reexamined-a request that has apparently turned out to be a fruitful one. I appreciate you steering us away from some of his kookier ideas, but thought he deserved some credit on this one. What do you think?

Shea: Bob's been taking credit for that revision, though as far as I know, nobody has ever really demonstrated that he is the one who caused it. He simply claims credit.

R. Sungenis: Leave it to Mark Shea to twist the facts. I “simply claim credit” because I was the only Catholic apologist to actively and publically warn both the US bishops and the Vatican to the heretical sentence in the US catechism. Mr. Shea didn’t lift a finger to help, and neither did any other Catholic apologist, including Scott Hahn, Karl Keating, Steve Ray, Patrick Madrid, Tim Staples, Leon Suprenant, or any of the dozens that are traversing our landscape. Are any of them claiming to have written articles on their own blogs or magazines prior to the change in the catechism; did any of them write to Cardinal Levada at the Vatican or the USCCB? The answer is no. I was left all alone. But now that I have been proved right, the same apologists who were previously silent are all scurrying to find some excuse why they didn’t support me. The excuses range from Leon Suprenant’s ridiculous claim that “there were other reviewers of the catechism long before Bob Sungenis came along,” to Mr. Shea’s equally ludicrous excuse that we will see below. Fortunately, there are a good number of blog participants who are not so easily shoved aside. They recognize that it was through my hard work in making the matter a public and ecclesiastical issue that these reversals are coming about.  

Shea: I could just as easily claim that, since I wrote the Tale of Two Covenants series, the American bishops must have read my pieces and decided to revise the Catechism. The causal connection is just as clear as it is for Sungenis' claim. However, I don't live in Bob's egocentric universe and so I don't claim credit.

R. Sungenis: This is asinine. Mr. Shea couldn’t possibly take credit for the excision of the erroneous statement from the US catechism, first, because he made no direct appeal for such an excision, not one word. Additionally, his article make no claim to seeing an error in the US catechism. In fact, Mr. Shea previously used the statement on page 131 of the US catechism to bolster his present belief that the Mosaic covenant is still valid! When the US bishops voted to take out the sentence, Mr. Shea didn’t have anything to say, for his blog was silent about the issue for months on end. Only when he was prodded by some smart blogger did Mr. Shea venture an excuse as to what occurred. In fact, Mr. Shea wrote me an email just a few months ago accusing me of being a “supersessionist”! If he denies it, I’ll produce the email in my next QA.

Shea: In fact, all the change does is eliminate the possibility of precisely the ambiguity I was concerned about: the notion that the Old Covenant is salvific. It does not, in the slightest, suggest that the Old Covenant is not still binding on unbaptized Jews.

R. Sungenis: This statement just proves once again that Mr. Shea is an inept Catholic apologist. No matter how many times he is told about his illogic, he persists in it. Let’s reason this out once again, shall we?

First, whether the Mosaic covenant is considered salvific or not is superfluous. The bottom line is: if the Mosaic covenant is no longer valid, then it is no longer valid for either salvation or condemnation. Covenants cannot be split into two. They are either wholly valid or wholly invalid. This is basic Theology 101, but Mr. Shea never had exposure to such course work, since he has never attended a theological institution.

Second, neither we nor the Jews need the Old Covenant to condemn anyone in sin. The job of condemnation is now done by the New Covenant. In fact, the condemnation is even stricter in the New Covenant than it was in the Old, which is the whole basis for why Jesus says “you have heard it was said…but I say unto you” in the Sermon on the Mount. It is the very reason that Hebrews 10:26-31 says there will be “severer punishment” for those who fall away from the New Covenant than there was under the Old Covenant when one was stoned by two or three witnesses. Today, the witnesses are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit through the Church (Matthew 16:18-19). In other words, in the New Covenant we have provision for both salvation and condemnation. The Old Covenant does not serve in either capacity, for it has been revoked (cf., Hebrews 7:18; 8:1-13; 10:9; 2 Corinthians 3:6-14). The only thing the Mosaic covenant can provide is principles by which the New Covenant judgment is made. But it is the New Covenant only that provides the legal basis for the judgment.

Shea: Weirdly, Bob goes on insisting that I believe in a "dual covenant theory" when, in fact, I continue to say what I've always said: that Jews are bound by the covenant with Moses until they are baptized, precisely because the point of the Mosaic covenant is to point them to Christ.

R. Sungenis: As long as Mr. Shea says that the Old Covenant continues to condemn the Jews, then it must be a valid covenant, for it could not condemn, at least formally and legally, unless it was valid. Invalid covenants don’t condemn; only valid ones do. If the Old Covenant is valid, that means it stands alongside of the New Covenant as another valid covenant. Logically, if there are two covenants, then we have a “dual-covenant.” Hence, despite how Mr. Shea attempts to cover over his beliefs, he believes in the dual-covenant theory, albeit with an innovation not heard of until he introduced it in the third millennium.

Once again, the problem with Mr. Shea’s theology is that he is under the mistaken belief that the Old Covenant condemns while the New Covenant saves. Wrong. The Old Covenant doesn’t do anything except provide principles for the New Covenant. It is the New Covenant alone that either saves or condemns, for both Jew and Gentile.

Shea: Nothing I say contradicts the revised catechism, any more than it contradicts the previous text. The covenant with Moses cannot save and I have never said it could. Bob goes on maintaining that I believe it can. I don't know why.

R. Sungenis: Either Mr. Shea is a liar or he is losing his wits. I have NEVER said that he believes the Old Covenant has the power to save. I have made it very clear in my critiques of his articles that he believes that the Mosaic covenant is valid to condemn the Jews, not save them. This was made clear in my essay on the subject that was published in Culture Wars. See my section on Shea’s views at:

http://www.catholicintl.com/articles/The%20Old%20Covenant%20Revoked%20or%20Not%20Revoked%20for%20Culture%20Wars.pdf

As a matter of fact, I challenged Mr. Shea to show us any Father, medieval, pope, council, saint or doctor who taught that the Old Covenant is still valid to condemn people, not save them. Of course, he never answered the challenge, but it is easy to see why – no one held to Mr. Shea’s novel position.

Shea: My opinion is, of course, merely my opinion. It is acceptable within orthodox Catholi circles, but not the only acceptable opinion. Just to be clear lest anybody think I somehow demand everybody agree with me.

R. Sungenis: Yes, his view is an “opinion,” but it is not an accepted opinion. I don’t know anyone in the Catholic scholarly world who holds to it. It is Mr. Shea’s own invention. If Mr. Shea wants to disprove my charge, then he should cite some authorities who agree with his view instead of merely saying that they do.

Question 183 - Michael Forrest talking to Mark Shea

Dear Robert,

Mark Shea posted some comments by Michael Forrest that I thought you might be interested to see. Do you care to comment? Forrest’s comments are below, and then Mark Shea adds something.

John D.

________________________

Shea: Helping Michael Forrest Finish His Act of Reparation

He writes:

Forrest: FYI, we just posted two final articles at the blog then we're closing it down (not adding anything new).

R. Sungenis: Perhaps when Mr. Forrest read in my recent FAQ that support for me has increased over the last four years (not decreased as he was expecting), he decided that his efforts against me were having little effect. If you are not aware, Mr. Forrest and his cohorts engineered an Internet smear campaign against me for the last four years, which included telling people to boycott our apostolate and our products. They also told everyone to treat me as an excommunicant, based on their idiosyncratic interpretation of Matthew 18:15-18. Their goal was to get me out of the business of Catholic apologetics by hoping to ruin me financially. Fortunately, God had other plans. Apparently, He was setting up Forrest and his gang for a big fall, which only recently occurred, about which you will read below.

Forrest: After Bishop Rhoades' letter was published at CUF and in Lay Witness, we wanted to put up a final piece making clear that he is not a dual covenant guy. And then we finished with a summary piece.

R. Sungenis: Mr. Forrest still lives in the land of illusion. I have met few men in my life who can sound so convincing yet twist the truth so well to suit their own agenda. In the letter that Bishop Rhoades wrote on February 7, 2008 in answer to Forrest’s mailed-in questions, never once did Forrest ask the bishop the $64,000 question: “Bishop Rhoades, do you believe that the Jews still possess the Old Covenant, the Mosaic covenant, and that it is still valid for them?” Instead, Mr. Forrest lobbed theological softballs to Bishop Rhoades, questions that the bishop could easily get around without admitting his belief in dual covenant theology.

Further, I posted in the same FAQ the fact that Bishop Rhoades’ vicar general, Fr. William King (the very person Rhoades commissioned to communicate with me and who said that he “speaks for the bishop” on these matters) wrote a confidential email on July 15, 2008 to all the priests and deacons of his diocese which admitted the fact that the Harrisburg chancery, under the direction of Bishop Rhoades, believes and teaches dual covenant theology. Since Mr. Forrest still has trouble either believing it or accepting that it really exists, let me reproduce that email right here:

So there you have it. Fr. King, who in his own words is “a representative of the Diocese of Harrisburg,” is secretly slandering Robert Sungenis to all the priests and deacons of Harrisburg, while stating that the traditional doctrine of “supercessionism [sic] of the Old Testament Covenant stands apart from and in discord with authentic Catholic teaching.” How much clearer could it be that everything I’ve been saying about the Harrisburg diocese is true? Obviously, these people cannot be trusted. In public, Bishop Rhoades gave one impression to Mr. Forrest but in secret he and his vicar general were doing precisely the opposite.

Now, my guess is that Mr. Forrest will try to wiggle out of this problem by claiming that the email was written by the vicar general, not Bishop Rhoades. So let’s deal with that presumption. The first problem is that Fr. King told me in his July 2007 meeting that he “speaks for the bishop” on this matter. Second, we know that Bishop Rhoades would certainly not let Fr. King write an email from the chancery affirming dual covenant theology if Bishop Rhoades did not hold to the same theology. As soon as I received Fr. King’s above email from a friend in Harrisburg, I immediately wrote to both Bishop Rhoades and Fr. King, asking them to retract the slander; apologize to me and write another letter to the priests and deacons publicizing the apology; and relinquish their support of dual covenant theology. The only response I received was a letter from Fr. King saying that he wasn’t going to respond, making up some excuse that he feared I was going to sue him over the issue. Third, if Bishop Rhoades did allow Fr. King to write the above email supporting dual covenant theology but disagreed with Fr. King’s view, then the bishop would be guilty of allowing Fr. King to disseminate a heresy to all the priests and deacons of Harrisburg, not to mention the parishioners under their care.

Hence, because of the July 2008 email from Fr. King we have all the evidence we need that the diocese of Harrisburg is teaching the heresy of dual covenant theology, that the Old Covenant is still valid for the Jews. There has been absolutely no statement from either Bishop Rhoades or Fr. King to the contrary, and Mr. Forrest has failed to follow up with another query to Bishop Rhoades in order to ask him the $64,000 question.  

So why can’t Mr. Forrest see this? Because Mr. Forrest has shown himself to be a blind ideologue who will not allow the faintest impression to reach the public (after his four years of slander against me on his blog) that he has been wrong about the central issue of this controversy. For two solid years after my meeting with Fr. King, Mr. Forrest and his gang of theological thugs plastered my name all over the Internet claiming that Bishop Rhoades and the Harrisburg chancery were completely innocent of my charges. They then used this presumption to further denigrate me and claim that I was “continuing to defy the bishop,” which then led them, as I said earlier, to tell everyone to treat me as an excommunicant; to ignore me, and to boycott my books and other products. But I hope you can see clearly by the admission in Fr. King’s email why Mr. Forrest and his crew were always on the wrong track.

Forrest can’t see any of this, even when it is made plain to him, because from the beginning he and his cohorts have had an overriding goal – to rid me from the landscape of Catholic apologetics. Beginning in 2005, Mr. Forrest was on the phone to dozens of prominent Catholics over the last four years convincing them that I was a menace to Catholic apologetics because of my outspokenness on Jewish matters. Of course, it was easy to make me a piñata, for I had already defied the Catholic consensus by being one of the only apologists to take on the Jewish issues when the infamous Reflections on Covenant and Missions document was published in 2002. Mr. Forrest’s co-author on the blog, David Palm, called me one day in 2005 and said he was going to start a public campaign against me because of my “writings on the Jews and geocentrism.” Imagine that. (Despite the fact that Mr. Forrest also supports geocentrism – and I know so because Mr. Forrest told me and Dale Vree at the New Oxford Review – that small fact doesn’t seem to bother Mr. Palm). As for the Jewish issues, take it for what it’s worth, but David Palm, a convert from Protestantism, graduated from Trinity Evangelical Seminary, one of the leading Protestant Zionist institutions in America.

Despite the machinations of Forrest and company, God, slowly but surely, vindicated me in several ways.

First, the article I wrote in 2002 which started the whole controversy and made my name mud in Catholic circles, i.e., my 50-page critique of the Reflections on Covenant and Missions document (a document which advocated dual covenant theology and further stated that the Jews do not need Christian salvation to get to heaven) was critiqued in 2009 by a USCCB committee and published worldwide. Although it took seven years for the USCCB to act, it confirmed my original critique of the Reflections document.

Second, God vindicated me by having the same USCCB vote by an overwhelming majority to eliminate the very sentence on page 131 of its United States Catholic Catechism for Adults that for two whole years I had been saying was heretical (The sentence on page 131 reads: “Thus the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them”). I was the only Catholic in the world who pointed out this heretical statement. Recently, the Vatican issued a “Recognitio” to the USCCB’s decision to excise that heretical sentence, thus affirming from the Church’s highest authority that the Mosaic covenant is no longer valid for the Jews – the very doctrine I have been preaching for the last seven years.

Third, God vindicated me when Fr. King’s July 2008 “confidential” email espousing dual covenant theology was exposed. This was the final proof that the Harrisburg diocese was playing a cat and mouse game with the public. When it came, Forrest’s party was over. With the admission from the Harrisburg diocese that it is promoting dual covenant theology, Mr. Forrest and his infamous bloggers have completely lost their credibility, and the letter that Bishop Rhoades wrote to Forrest which Forrest interpreted as Rhoades’ denial of dual covenant theology has been exposed as the deceptive farce I claimed it to be from the moment it was publicized in February 2008. But this is what the truth does. It turns a lie on its head, although sometimes we have to wait a long time before it does its work.  

I should also mention that Mr. Forrest’s unwillingness to admit what Fr. King has finally revealed about the Harrisburg chancery’s push for dual covenant theology is the same reason that Leon Suprenant of CUF (the organization that Mr. Forrest mentions above, and which Mr. Forrest had strongly encouraged to attack me beginning in 2005) had the gall to deny my two years of work in exposing the heresy on page 131 in the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults. After I wrote about a half-dozen essays on our website and a major article in Culture Wars, I also wrote to the Vatican and told the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the US catechism’s heresy. The blogs show that most people in Catholic circles knew that I was engaged in this lone crusade. About a year after I wrote to the Vatican, and just six months after I published my findings in Culture Wars, the 246 bishops of the United States voted 231-14-1 in June 2008 to eliminate the erroneous sentence from the next edition of the catechism.

So what did Leon Suprenant then claim? He claimed that I shouldn’t be given any credit for the change because “there were other reviewers of the catechism long before Bob Sungenis came along.” Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a credit seeker. But I will not stand by and allow the president of one of the finer Catholic institutions of America (CUF) use this incident to continue his campaign of personal defamation against me. Besides, anyone with half a brain would realize that, if there were, as Mr. Suprenant claims, “other reviewers,” then it is quite obvious that these reviewers didn’t catch the heretical sentence before the catechism was published! If they did catch it, then no one at the USCCB listened to them, since the USCCB went ahead and published the heretical sentence despite the alleged review!

So why does Mr. Suprenant make such ludicrous claims? Because, as is the problem with Mr. Forrest, to admit that Robert Sungenis was right would bring their whole slanderous enterprise against me to a screeching halt.

Forrest: I don't know how it's possible at this juncture, but I was kind of shocked that Bob is now back to openly trying to prove that only a few hundred thousand Jews died in the Holocaust and that they had it comin' because of their treachery. (He got that from the notorious Benjamin Freedman).

R. Sungenis: First, I’m not trying “to prove” anything about the Holocaust. This is just another example of how Mr. Forrest twists my words for his own devious purposes. In my recent FAQ, I merely said that, like many other scholars who have recently begun to investigate this issue, it is becoming increasing difficult to believe that six million Jews were killed in Nazi internment camps. One example of this evidence is the fact that the worldwide Jewish population from 1940 to 1948 did not decrease by even a half million, much less six million. We can see the significance of this if we compare it to today. Today, some 60 years after World War II, there are only about 14 million Jews in the world. If today the Jewish population dropped by 6 million, this would leave 8 million and it would be rather noticeable, to say the least. Logically, the same would have been noticed in 1948. But the international population records show that the numbers of Jews after World War II were virtually the same as before World War II. Interestingly enough, Reader’s Digest was touting the six million figure in 1943 long before World War II was over in 1945. How could its writers know the final figure before the war was over, especially before the so-called “final solution” was even implemented? Like me, any intelligent person is going to ask questions when he sees this contradictory evidence, especially when the Jews use the figure of six million to push their political agenda, as even the Jewish author, Norman Finklestein has documented very well in his book, The Holocaust Industry.

I also said that the documented records of the International Red Cross show that there were less than a few hundred thousand Jews who died in Nazi camps, and that most of those were from disease. In my FAQ, I offered to show the Red Cross records to anyone who would want to see them. But does Mr. Forrest ask to see them? No. He doesn’t want to see them. He’s never made any in depth investigation whether there were six million Jews killed, and he probably never will. He is simply a Jewish ideologue that has decided not to tolerate any opposition to his view of the matter. Instead of admitting his own negligence, he accuses me of trying “to prove” something that I only suggested ought to be investigated by an international commission so that we can finally get to the truth of the matter. Only people who are interested in truth will want an investigation, whereas those who are interested in preserving an image will object to it. This is precisely why in Germany today the Jews in power have orchestrated a fear campaign against anyone who publically questions the six million figure, and they send people to prison who have the courage to show the contrary evidence.

As for Benjamin Freedman, please note well that Mr. Forrest calls him “notorious.” Interesting, isn’t it? Here we have a card-carrying member of the Jewish race, a former Zionist himself, who suddenly found out the truth of what the Jews did prior to World War II, but Mr. Forrest refuses to listen to Freedman for even a moment, and essentially decides to call this fine Jewish man a liar. But the only one notorious here is Mr. Forrest. You can’t reason with a person like Forrest. He has already made up his mind that the Jews did not, and do not, engage in any significant malfeasance. Any evidence you present to him to the contrary (as I did recently with Bishop Rhoades’ and Fr. King’s promotion of dual covenant theology) he will just twist and distort to make it look like he is right and you are wrong. Mr. Forrest really isn’t interested in the truth. He is only interested in protecting his agenda, and we can all see very clearly what that agenda is.

Another indication of Mr. Forrest’s agenda is his blog’s total silence regarding any critical remarks of Jewish converts Roy Schoeman and David Moss. As I pointed out in a recent essay in Culture Wars, Dr. Ray Kavane (who was a consultant to Moss and Schoeman’s Association of Hebrew Catholics, and whose brother, Fr. Eugene Kavane, was the founder of AHC) and I have made it clear for anyone who wants to read it that Mr. Schoeman and Mr. Moss’ teaching on various Catholic and Jewish matters is heretical. Dr. Kavane is a graduate of the Lateran University in Rome, so he knows his theology. I have outlined Schoeman and Moss’ erroneous teachings time and time again, in stark detail, quoting their own words. But does Mr. Forrest or his blog cohorts say one word in concession, or do they communicate to Messers Schoeman and Moss to stop their heretical and racist teachings? No, they have never admitted that Schoeman and Moss are teaching erroneous doctrines, much less confront them. Why? Figure it out for yourself. Mr. Forrest is in this campaign to protect his Jewish ideology. If it means keeping silent about Schoeman and Moss’ heresies; if it means keeping silent about the heresy of dual covenant theology taught by the Harrisburg diocese and Bishop Rhoades’ complicity in it; if it means denying me any credit for the change in the USCCB catechism; or if it means distorting my words about the Holocaust, then Mr. Forrest will do it, because the goal here, as it has been for the last four years, is to destroy me and anyone else who criticizes or questions Jewish interests.

Forrest: For me, I've looked at it this way - I helped him by writing pro-life articles and unintentionally enabling him for about 3 years. I kind of made a promise to the Lord that I would help neutralize the damage he does for the same amount of time, as reparation. Well, this September, it makes three years since "Sungenis and the Jews" first came out. God willing, I'm done.

R. Sungenis: First of all, Mr. Forrest needs to redo his math. He started his public internet campaign against me in 2005, which makes it four years, not three. Regardless, his words here are another example of how he twists the truth. Right before he left our apostolate in early 2005 Mr. Forrest and I were working on a critical essay regarding the papacy of John Paul II. In other words, it wasn’t just “pro-life” articles that Forrest was writing for us. He was an integral part of all that we did at CAI. He was the vice-president of CAI, for goodness sake! In fact, before the Jewish issues came up that separated us, Mr. Forrest and I marveled about how well we got along and how we agreed with each other on so many things. Mr. Forrest would call me up weekly, sometimes daily, to talk for hours about theology and other things. My wife and I had a running joke that whenever Mr. Forrest called she wouldn’t see me for at least an hour. Mr. Forrest was also going to be the Godfather of my son who was born in 2005. Our families were planning a camping trip that same year. So yes, despite Mr. Forrest’s attempts to minimize his role at CAI, we were very close and it is not an exaggeration to say that Mr. Forrest was the right hand man of our apostolate. In fact, he asked me to have the authority to edit any article before it was published by CAI, and I gave him that power. So all his talk about just “writing pro-life articles” and merely “enabling him for 3 years” is just another example of Mr. Forrest’s constant penchant to twist the facts to his advantage.   

Mark Shea: Sounds fair. Probably time to move on. I don't see Sungenis' nuttiness gain much purchase at this point. God willing, his Bp. will finally shut him down.

R. Sungenis: Unfortunately, Mr. Forrest and Mr. Shea can’t see their own hypocrisy. As noted above, in his attempted defense of Bishop Rhoades, Mr. Forrest condemns “dual covenant” theology. But Mark Shea, by his own admission, advocates dual covenant theology (although he insists that the Old Covenant remains in force only, as he puts it, “to condemn”). In fact, Mr. Shea wrote me an email a few months ago and chastised me for being a “supersessionist,” the very doctrine that Mr. Forrest says he believes and promotes. Obviously, when it comes to attacking Robert Sungenis, such glaring differences are brushed over. I don’t think I need to say anymore.

September 28, 2009

Question 182 – Concerning the Papacy

Dear Mr. Sungenis,

I am not a scholar or anything and my arguments are not the best Orthodoxy can produce. But I will just tell you two of my own personal arguments on why the Vatican I notion of the papacy is simply not true.

First, the idea of papal jurisdiction over the entire Church, East and West, is a myth. The East never believed or accepted such an idea. If it were true, we would see it accepted everywhere. One good example is the Saint Cyprian vs Saint Stephen dispute over baptism. While the pope expressed his opinion, it is a fact of history that the East never followed him. Saint Cyprian's position continued to be held by the East and was even ratified in the Council of Trullo. The canons of Saint Basil also agree with and support Saint Cyprian's position. This is not something we would expect to see if the pope had jurisdiction over the east and the final word on the subject.

RS: I'm afraid you are badly misinformed. Although there have always been skirmishes between the East and West, there is documented proof in Mansi and many other Catholic scholars that the East bowed to the pope's commands as common practice. I had to study this issue when I was preparing for a debate on the papacy. There was absolutely no question that, prior to 1054, the East was in almost total subservience to the pope of Rome.

"the reformed papacy of the 11th century used a long-standing Western tradition of exegesis when it applied systematically and legalistically the passages on the role of Peter (especially Mt.16:18, Lk. 22:32, and Jn. 21:15-17) to the bishop of Rome. This tradition was not shared by the East, yet it was not totally ignored by the Byzantines, some of whom used it occasionally, especially in documents addressed to Rome and intended to win the popes' sympathy. But it was never given an ultimate theological significance". [Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p.97].

RS: I'm sorry, but Meyendorff has shown himself to be a biased scholar on many occasions.

Second, the Filioque heresy. The Council of 879-880 confirmed the original text of the Nicene Creed and formally anathematized anyone who would  either "compose another confession of faith" or corrupt the creed with "illigitimate words, or additions, or subtractions." [Mansi XVII, 520 E.]. Rome changed the Creed. And the eighth procedding of the Seventh Ecumenical Council condemns anyone who changes any ecclesiastical tradition, written or unwritten. Rome has changed multiple traditions and violated many canons. I have many more arguments and I hope to make a Youtube video on this in the near future.

RS: Filioque is a matter of esoteric trinitarian doctrine. There is much more to the split of East and West than the Filioque. It was political at its roots, and Filioque became a good excuse. The point in fact remains that unless you can prove that the East did not bow to the pope's doctrine and direction prior to 1054, then there is no authoritative basis for the East to decide for their version of the Filioque, since the pope doesn't suddenly lose his divine authority to determine doctrine a mere 1000 years after Christ ascended into heaven. Your challenge is to prove that the pope had no authority over the East from the first century to the 11th century. If you can't, then you are obliged to accept the pope at all times, including his version of the Filioque.

 A person with an Orthodox conscience cannot remain in communion with bishops who preach heresy; and that is not a subjective opinion, but the universal dictum of the Fathers.

RS: That's right, but the question is: who is holding the heresy? Unless you can answer the above question satisfactorily, it is you who holds the heresy.

 I have noticed that it is usually the most pious protestants and Catholics who become Orthodox.

Euthymios

RS: I'm sure you have "pious" people in your ranks, just as we do, but that is not a criterion to decide what religion is true and which is heretical.