I have been asked by my priest to defend my rejection of BOD. I have borrowed from you fellas on this forum and would appreciate a critique of my work. I know it's alot to ask but I have almost no options and must beg your time. Thank you.
Dear Father XXXXXX, please pray a Hail Mary for me.
The following is my position on baptism of desire and blood. Please allow a definition of terms and a statement of fundamental philosophy of my argument style.
1. Infallibly defined dogmas are categorical universal propositions in the order of truth-falsehood. This means they are formal objects of our Divine and Catholic Faith, they cannot change or be changed, and no extrinsic qualification can alter their meaning, applicability, status or truth value.
2. Sacred Scripture is guaranteed to be without error, and must be taken literally unless reason proves otherwise. The Ordinary Magesterium, the guarantor of Scripture, and the unanimous consent of the Fathers gives the final judgment on the meaning of Scripture.
3. I insist on using the laws of thought, especially the law of non-contradiction.
[/url] 4. The Catholic Church is that society of Christian believers united in the profession of the one Christian faith and the participation in the one sacramental system under the government of the Roman Pontiff.
[ii][/iurl]
5. I have elected to use a classic syllogistic style argument because of its simplicity and ease of identifying and combating the deconstruction of dogma which has been condemned by Pius IX[iurl=#_edn3][iii][/iurl], the Vatican I Council[iurl=#_edn4][iv][/iurl], and St. Pius X[iurl=#_edn5][v][/iurl], especially in Lamentabili "The dogmas of the faith are to be held only according to a practical sense, that is, as preceptive norms for action, but not as norms for believing." (Condemned) An example is in order and I will use an imagined support for baptism of desire as one: The scripture verse John 3:5 (“except a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven”) and John 6:53 (“Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you”) are similar and we know baptized children who have not reached the age of reason are excused from the necessity of the precept John 6:53 by their inability to commune, therefore, John 3:5 must not apply to those who cannot comply. This argument fails in its major premise; the two are solemn statements of Our Lord Jesus Christ concerning salvation but the similarity ends there. First, those who are subject to the proposition posited in John 3:5 are all men while in John 6:53 the precept binds only you, which is a different and smaller group. This is enough to break the argument as a presumptive fallacy but if you look deeper the difference is much more substantial. John 3:5 (which Trent tells us to take literally[iurl=#_edn6][vi][/iurl]) is a proposition concerning the truth-falsity of a certain quality or condition of any given man, is he baptized in water and the Holy Ghost or not? John 6:53 is a law commanding a behavior, you (we) must commune. Now reread the St Pius X quote above and you see that he condemned this linguistic deconstruction of a dogmatic truth. Its status as a true-false proposition has been eliminated in favor of an authority-obedience law or precept, which can be mitigated by circuмstance. "The dogmas of the faith are to be held only according to a practical sense, that is, as preceptive norms for action, but not as norms for believing." (Condemned). The Holy Ghost knows exactly what we need to combat Modernism and He delivers.
Concerning Original Sin:
The Council of Trent infallibly teaches that the only remedy for Original Sin is “the merit of the one mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath reconciled us to God in his own blood, made us unto justice, sanctification, and redemption” and that “the merit of Jesus Christ is applied…by the sacrament of baptism rightly administered in the form of the church.”
[vii] To help maintain the context of the above, the remedy is spoken of in the singular both in the introduction and the third verse and there is no mention of an “extraordinary” application method or form in the entire Decree Concerning Original Sin even though the stated purpose of the decree was to clear up “dissentions concerning original sin and the remedy thereof.” Assuming no argument concerning the first part, Christ’s merit, baptism of desire must be either a different method of application of Christ’s blood or the sacrament of baptism has more than one mode which is rightly administered in the form of the church.
1. To hold BOD is a different method of the application of Christ’s blood is to deny that baptism is necessary for salvation, which is anathema
[viii], or that somehow the fathers at Trent are not speaking of the sacrament of baptism in the canons on baptism, which is ridiculous.
2. To hold BOD is a different method of the application of Christ’s blood is to deny the papal decree of St. Siricius who declared that the sacrament of baptism is “the
unique help of the faith” when he ordered the bishops to baptize “those who in any necessity will need the holy stream of baptism..if the saving font be denied to those desiring it and
every single one of them exiting this world lose both the Kingdom and life.”
[ix] 3. To hold BOD is a different method of the application of Christ’s blood is to hold that salvation is possible without the sacraments, which is anathema to the fathers of Trent.
4. To hold BOD is a different method of the application of Christ’s blood is to deny that the sacrament of baptism is the instrumental cause of justification.
[xi] 5. To hold BOD is a different mode or type of baptism or that the grace of baptism is received “in voto” (like the sacrament of penance), thus preserving the instrumentation of the sacrament of baptism
[xii] in the application of the blood of Christ to our justification, one must separate necessarily (by his own admission) the water from the sacrament. Now one denies the testimony of the three, “in other words, the Spirit of sanctification and the blood of redemption and the water of baptism. These three are one and remain indivisible. None of them is separable from its link with the others.”
[xiii] 6. To hold BOD is a different mode etc, is to hold that true and natural water is not necessary for baptism which is anathema to Trent.
[xiv]
Concerning Justification:
The council of Trent defines Justification in the Sixth Session, Chapter IV as “a translation, from that state wherein man is born a child of the first Adam, to the state of grace, and of the adoption of the sons of God, through the second Adam, Jesus Christ, our Saviour. And this translation, since the promulgation of the Gospel, cannot be effected, without the laver of regeneration, or the desire thereof, as it is written; unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.” This is often quoted in support of BOD with the illusion that the Trent fathers meant to say that either condition, the laver of regeneration or the will to receive it, are sufficient for justification. This chapter in Trent is sometimes deceptively mistranslated (Denzinger) to support BOD. Trent also teaches that justification’s “instrumental cause is the sacrament of baptism. “
1. To hold BOD is to deny the literal meaning of John 3:5, the immediate scriptural support for the dogma, which the fathers at Trent commanded us to hold “as it is written”
[xv] and to reject any “sort of metaphor.”
[xvi] 2. To hold that either condition is sufficient for justification is to hold that the laver of regeneration, the form and matter of the sacrament, absent the will to receive it is sufficient for justification. This position is falsified immediately in chapter V, if one were to simply keep reading Trent and not attempt to take parts of chapter IV out of context.
3. To hold BOD is to deny the instrumental cause of justification is the sacrament of baptism, or to invent some new formula on what instrumentation is, both are constructs of man and not revelations from God.
4. Baptism of blood must be reduced to BOD no matter how you read this chapter in Trent or the preceding canon IV of the same Session, which is similarly worded. The sacraments and the will to receive them are necessary for salvation. To deny this is anathema.
Concerning the Sacrament of Baptism:
The Council of Vienne teaches “one baptism which regenerates all who are baptized in Christ must be faithfully confessed by all just as ‘one God and one faith’ [Eph. 4:5], which celebrated in water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit we believe to be commonly the perfect remedy for salvation…” The Council of Florence teaches, “Holy baptism, which is the gateway to the spiritual life, holds the first place among all the sacraments; through it we are made members of Christ and of the body of the Church. And since death entered the universe through the first man, ‘unless we are born again of water and the Spirit, we cannot,’ as the Truth says, ‘enter into the kingdom of heaven’ [John 3:5]. The matter of this sacrament is real and natural water.” Trent teaches that baptism is necessary for salvation and that water is necessary for baptism in the canons on baptism.
[xvii] The Nicene Creed states “I confess one baptism for the remission of sin” and Pope St. Siricius defined the sacrament of baptism as the unique or singular help of the faith.
1. To hold BOD is to deny the unique help of the faith, that is one baptism, solemnized in water, which is necessary for salvation because it regenerates all who are baptized in Christ and makes us members of the Church we must persevere in.
The denial I’m referring to in all these points is not overt or blatant as from one outside the Church but rather it is of the condemned modernist type which posits a dogma of the faith and then alters or qualifies the meaning or alters dogma’s status to that of precept. Those propositions that are revealed to us to assent to as true-false are altered by man to that of authority-obedience which can then be mitigated through circuмstance. This is a modernist error which I will not be guilty of and this is why I reject the manmade idea of BOD. Again I thank you for your time and priestly solicitude toward myself and my family.
God bless,
JoeZ
[/url] 1- Law of identity: Everything is the same as itself; or a statement cannot remain the same and change its truth-value.
2- Law of non-contradiction: Nothing can exist and not exist at the same time and in the same respect; or no statement is both true and false.
3- Law of excluded middle: Something either exists or not exists; or every statement is either true or false.
[ii] St. Robert Bellarmine [iii] Pope Pius IX; Dnz 1636 and Syllabus, Dnz 1705, 1708, 1709, 1715, 1716, 1717 [iv] Vatican I Council; Dnz 1792, 1797, 738 [v] Pope St. Pius X; Dnz 2026, 2022, 2079, and 2095 but the Dnz omitted some and butchered its subsidiary ref Dnz 1800 so I have pasted it here: from PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS: 28. Thus then, Venerable Brethren, for the Modernists, both as authors and propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor indeed are they without precursors in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our Predecessor Pius IX wrote: These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts. On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new - we find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX., where it is enunciated in these terms: Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence the sense, too, of the sacred dogmas is that which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth. Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, impeded by this pronouncement - on the contrary it is aided and promoted. For the same Council continues: Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries - but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/docuмents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html [vi] Trent Seventh Session; on Baptism, canon II [vii] Trent Fifth Session; Decree on Original Sin 3rd verse [viii] Trent Seventh Session; on Baptism, canon V [ix] Pope St. Siricius, Decree to Himerius, A.D. 385:
LATIN: “Sicut sacram ergo paschalem reverentiam in nullo dicimus esse minuendam, ita infantibus qui necdum loqui poterunt per aetatem vel his, quibus in qualibet necessitate opus fuerit sacra unda baptismatis, omni volumus celeritate succurri, ne ad nostrarum perniciem tendat animarum, si negato desiderantibus fonte salutari exiens unusquisque de saeculo et regnum perdat et vitam.
“Therefore just as we say that the holy paschal observance is in no way to be diminished, we also say that to infants who will not yet be able to speak on account of their age or to those who in any necessity will need the holy stream of baptism, we wish succor to be brought with all celerity, lest it should tend to the perdition of our souls if the saving font be denied to those desiring it and every single one of them exiting this world lose both the Kingdom and life.”
Quicuмque etiam discrimen naufragii, hostilitatis incursum, obsidionis ambiguum vel cuiuslibet corporalis aegritudinis desperationem inciderint, et sibi unico credulitatis auxilio poposcerint subveniri, eodem quo poscunt momento temporis expetitae regenerationis praemia consequantur. Hactenus erratum in hac parte sufficiat; nunc praefatam regulam omnes teneant sacerdotes, qui nolunt ab apostolicae petrae, super quam Christus universalem construxit Ecclesiam, soliditate divelli.”
Whoever should fall into the peril of shipwreck, the incursion of an enemy, the uncertainty of a siege or the desperation of any bodily sickness, and should beg to be relieved by the unique help of faith, let them obtain the rewards of the much sought-after regeneration in the same moment of time in which they beg for it. Let the previous error in this matter be enough; [but] now let all priests maintain the aforesaid rule, who do not want to be torn from the solidity of the apostolic rock upon which Christ constructed His universal Church.From cathinfo.com or usePope St. Siricius http://www.historyandapologetics.com/2015/02/letter-of-pope-siricius-to-bishop.html - [/iurl] Trent Seventh Session; Decree on the Sacraments, canon IV
[iurl=#_ednref][xi][/iurl] Trent Sixth Session; Decree on Justification, chapter VII
[iurl=#_ednref][xii][/iurl] Trent Sixth Session; Decree on Justification, chapter VII
[iurl=#_ednref][xiii][/iurl] Pope St Leo the Great [url=http://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecuм04.htm]http://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecuм04.htm[/url]
[iurl=#_ednref][xiv][/iurl] Trent Seventh Session; on Baptism, canon II
[iurl=#_ednref][xv][/iurl] Trent Sixth Session, chapter IV
[iurl=#_ednref][xvi][/iurl] Trent Seventh Session; on Baptism, canon II
[iurl=#_ednref][xvii][/iurl] Trent Seventh Session, canon II and V[/i][/i]
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