Since @ThomasdelVasto has made a couple "main-Motte" religious posts I thought I'd join in the fun.
I'm a Protestant with strong Reformed leanings. My wife, on the other hand, has just converted to Catholicism. This has led me to explore aspects of Catholic teaching, though necessarily at a surface level given the rich history. Aquinas alone would take months if not years to digest. I expected to disagree on Mary (perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, assumption) and the Pope (infallibility); and I still do (though I was surprised how recently these have become "dogma": I would have found it much easier to be a Catholic in 1800 than today). I am pleasantly surprised at how much weight they place on Scripture, Christ, and Assurance: there are far more shared hymns than I had anticipated, as as an example.
What follows is some of the reflections I had to this surface exploration. I would be thrilled to be corrected or critiqued by any of the Motte's Catholics, if nothing else to better understand my wife's flavor of the Christian faith. Many of these are reactions to "Catholicism" by Bishop Robert Barron, which my wife kindly bought to introduce me to the titular topic. While I presume he is orthodox Catholic, his interpretations may not be universally accepted by Catholics. If I challenge particular arguments from Barron, it should not be interpreted as an argument against Catholicism unless Barron is arguing for Church Dogma. His "Catholicism" is also meant as an introduction and for popular consumption, and his actual beliefs may have more nuance.
As part of this journey (which is certainly not over yet!), I also read (the dense and repetitive) "Divine Will and Human Choice" by Richard Muller and "Christus Victor" by Gustaf Aulén. These, too, have varying degrees of rigor. Muller and Aulén were both Protestants.
God’s freedom
While Reformed theology would affirm that God predestines both those who are saved and those who are damned, Catholics balk at this concept; arguing that this implies a God who would cause sin. God cannot will that which is against his nature. Catholics would appeal to God’s provision and common grace that allows humans consciences to (partially and weakly) discern good and evil. Yet we cannot perfectly discern this apart from divine revelation (scripture). And scripture states multiple times in the Exodus narrative that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Aquinas (as if often the case) provides the most rigorous Catholic argument I’ve heard for this hardening. God through an act of his will withdrew what grace was granted to Pharaoh. Absent God’s grace Pharaoh drew more into his sin. While Aquinas argued this case for the individual case of Pharaoh, it seems consistent to assume that were God to withdraw his common grace more broadly that all would fall into a state where our consciences are no longer capable of even partial discernment of good and evil. This is also consistent with God giving humans over to their lusts in Romans 1.
So far, this interpretation is consistent with scripture, though I am discomfited by the constraints this threatens to place on God: constraints that come perilously close to being primarily informed by our own interpretation or perspective of scripture and sin. God works and wills, including in sin.
Barron, if I read him correctly, goes a step further. He puts the "problem of sin" as one of the best arguments against God. I’ve never understood this as a problem for Christians. It is a deep problem for atheists, who have to explain or excuse their visceral (though often mis-aligned) desire for justice despite no objective basis for these judgments. Christians have no such need to explain or excuse: of course we are all deeply desirous for justice since we have (again, weakly and with great room for error) a sense of what transcendent goodness could be. A consistent perspective on the problem of evil would be that God defines good, and if we don’t understand his actions to be "good" that is a fault (a mis-calibration) of our fallen nature. The fact that Barron does not take this tack hints that he believes humanity’s desire for a "good" God is compatible with humanity’s definition of "good". This runs the grave risk of putting ourselves as a "judge" or external arbiter of God’s behavior.
Barron continues to put a soft face on hard truths. Later in the book, Barron says "God sends no one to hell, people freely choose to go there". This sharply contradicts scripture. Jesus talks about casting sinners into the outer darkness. Peter says the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. John’s Revelation describes those who receive a mark on their forehead drinking the wrath of God, mixed in the cup of his anger, and tormented with fire and brimstone. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Again, God is not passive: he works and wills.
How does God work and will (1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God. Does God create the potentials as he actualizes them? Thus no "possibles" exist for God, simply "actuals"? This also could be seen as a constraint on God and limit his radical freedom. Both these potential concepts of God’s will and freedom (of which I’m sure there are hundreds of alternative concepts) seem to be operating at a level above how Barron conceptualizes God’s freedom. Put crassly, Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator.
God’s atoning work
The freedom God enjoys in his omnipotence has implications for a theological understanding of Atonement. The "big two" theories of Atonement, Satisfaction and Substitution, emphasize the sacrificial nature of the cross. This sacrificial interpretation retains God’s complete sovereignty with Christ’s death being an act of perichoretic propitiation. The incarnation and death was necessary because of God. It was not necessary because of anything external to God.
Catholics consider Substitution theory, which is the most common concept of Atonement in Reformed circles, to be heresy. Belief in the other concepts of Atonement are allowed. In the Satisfaction theory, which my understanding is that most if not all Catholics affirm, Jesus is our great high priest and a perfect offering, but does not receive the judgement of God. Christ died for our sins, but not in our place.
"Christus Victor" makes the historical case for Ransom theory. In principal, this theory could bring Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox together: the church Fathers at least strongly hinted at Ransom theory being the primary lens through which they interpret the cross, and the church universally recognizes the importance of the church Fathers. Aulén makes the case that Luther was also an adherent to Ransom theory. Yet this theory risks making God subservient to morality or law, proposing that Jesus was paid to Satan in exchange for humanity (2). Uncharitably, this theory makes God beholden to the "laws" of commerce, even transaction with a brigand.
However, I do find Ransom theory to have its merits. In heavily Reformed theology Satan is almost considered an afterthought. Satan plays no necessary role in the arc of human redemption and salvation. Ransom theory, on the other hand, puts Satan in a prominent place: he is either the kidnapper of human souls or is the (legitimate, in some sense) owner of human souls. The exchange of Christ for humanity and the subsequent torture and murder of Christ was simultaneously Satan’s crowning achievement and his destruction. This interpretation echos Jesus’ parable of the landowner who sent servants to collect from the tenants only to have them beaten or killed. The frustrated landowner finally sent his own son, but the tenants murdered him hoping to take his inheritance. At the conclusion of the parable, the chief priests react that the landowner will bring the tenants to a “wretched end”. Christ’s death and resurrection was the ultimate victory over Sin, Death, and the Devil, bringing this triumvirate to a “wretched end”. Indeed, this victory can be interpreted as more complete than Satisfaction or Substitution theories: it not only removes the penalty of sin, but defeats the sin itself.
Conclusion?
I plan to read and think more on this topic. Next on my list is "Deification through the Cross" by Khaled Anatolios. Any other book recommendations are welcome. I'm particularly interested in Catholic perspectives Atonement that go deeper than Barron's book.
(1) As I read "The Divine Will and Human Choice" I had to continuously bite my tongue. My mathematical training was screaming "But Kolmogorov!". Yet Kolmogorov is but a model, and Muller was trying to describe reality. Muller, though, had merely words to try to describe reality and I kept mentally begging for a more rigorous algebraic representation to more clearly and concisely communicate. Of course, the algebraic representation is itself a model, but so are words: anyone who uses ChatGPT or Claude is implicitly recognizing that words are not reality but just a map or model of reality.
(2) In CS Lewis' The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan (representing Christ) is beholden to the "deep magic".
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Notes -
I didn't say they were claims to infallibility, I said they are examples of infallible statements we see in the past, given the definitions of Vatican I.
Oh, fair. Sorry for misreading you.
I'm not sure what significance that is? You can declare statements infallible post facto, but the doctrine of papal infallibility is nonetheless an innovation, surely? Or do you disagree with my assertion that Munificentissimus Deus and Ineffabilis Deus are the only two uncontested instances of papal infallibility? (The latter of which also predates Vatican I, actually.)
My understanding was that because there isn't a clear label, theologians can and often do debate whether exactly which statements come under papal infallibility and which do not.
Yes, I disagree that those are the only two uncontested instances of papal infallibility. There's about 200 or so.
The doctrine of papal infallibility is not an innovation. The four definitions put out by Vatican 1 were present in the early Church, see https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858047945971&view=1up&seq=1 for an argument for this.
Going straight to the section on papal infallibility, from page 53 onwards, this seems... straightforwardly false, to me? It's not true that the pope was understood to have universal jurisdiction, and his argument that universal jurisdiction coupled with the infallibility of the church as a whole body implies the infallibility of the pope seems like a non sequitur. To say that God will not allow the church as a whole body to permanently fall into grievous error does not imply that any particular individual in the church, not even the individual ex hypothesi at its head, cannot fall into error. It certainly does not imply that any such head is authorised to unilaterally promulgate new doctrine.
On the contrary, ancient sources that speak highly of the popes often do so on the basis of the pope's defense of doctrines known to be true some other way - this is what Vincent of Lérins argues, for instance. Vincent affirms some kind of infallibility of the church but without affirming a similar status for the pope. Pope Stephen is praised for his adherence to the tradition of the ancients, which is the relevant authority.
Fortescue cites many examples of ancient authors respecting the pope in some way, which is unproblematic as far as it goes, but then makes the unmerited assumption that all of these statements in the aggregate, none of which individually imply papal infallibility, do collectively imply it. Isn't that absurd?
I think the part you skipped over has some important context that lay out the bones of his argument. He put in two chapters to demonstrate that the Pope did have universal jurisdiction over the whole Church, if you just skip past the part where he argues this you're ignoring his whole argument.
One of the things you miss is that he summarized the papal claims of Vatican I (page 16):
The first point he takes as manifestly obvious because the Anglicans of his time would agree with the statement "The Bishop of Rome is the First Bishop of Christendom." But to back it up he says, "What it comes to in practice is this: The Bishop of Rome is the right person to take the lead in any common action of the whole Church; particularly it is his right to summon a general council, to preside at it, either himself or by his legate, to confirm its decisions." So basically this is demonstrated in Church history through the Pope's authority over councils. But also demonstrated elsewhere. St. Vincent says:
Yes, he goes on to say, "that it is our duty, not to lead religion whither we would, but rather to follow religion whither it leads."
If you think this part of St. Vincent shows something different than what Catholics believe you are mistaken. The Pope can only be infallible to the degree he does not contradict prior Church teaching. He prunes branches, he doesn't create them. The Pope didn't make the Assumption a long-standing mystery of the Rosary, that was part of the "sense of the faithful" for ages before a formal declaration was made.
Anyways, he goes on to show the Pope has episcopal jurisdiction over all members of the Church. For example, in the letter of Clement, Clement acts as if he can boss around the Corinthians. "If, however, any shall disobey the words spoken by Him through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in transgression and serious danger." The Bishop of Rome steps into a large number of early controversies and commands things. Victor of Rome did the same with the Quartodecimans. St. Ignatius argued against Victor, so maybe that sounds like a case against it, but if you read his letter to Victor all his arguments show he believes Victor has this authority, he's just hoping Victor doesn't use it. And so on and so forth. Chapter V is pretty rich in examples.
Next he goes into his third point, "To be a member of the Catholic Church a man must be in communion with the Pope." This is just the logical inverse of point number 2 - if the Pope has jurisdiction over the whole Church, to be in the Church is to have the Pope as one of your leaders. Fortescue of course offers various prooftexts but I don't think I need to get into them here.
The fourth point is similarly a logical consequence of the above points. You say that St. Vincent argues for the infallibility of the Church. Well said. Now, what does that infallibility mean for the Pope? If the Pope is the head of the infallible Church, responsible for every member of the Church, can he lead the whole Church into error? God forbid!
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