Conclave and the Papal Election

[Wildeybeast]

Papal supremacy is what you are thinking of. The Pope can change interpretations where rules are unclear, but he can't say 'adultery is fine now kids, have fun'. He can't over rule God.

As a Jew, I'd like to point out that we have been publishing an FAQ on the bible for years. It's called the Talmud.

As have Catholic and Protestant churches. That's basically what theology is. My point was that these amount to the debates we see in the rules forums. Until God himself steps in and issues something definitive, such commentaries and interpretations are just personal opinion, no matter how well supported by RAW or RAI they may be.

[ElectricPaladin]

Papal supremacy is what you are thinking of. The Pope can change interpretations where rules are unclear, but he can't say 'adultery is fine now kids, have fun'. He can't over rule God.

That's the difference. We can.

What? We're the ones who have got to live with these meshuggah laws, not him!

[Nabterayl]

No I meant the thing were whatever the pope says god will support? (The entire plot for Dogma?)
So if he changes decrees something unsinful....it is...?

Oh, a plenary indulgence. Same thing, but it's a total replacement for penance as opposed to partial replacement. The notion that the Pope, even to Catholics, decides what's sinful is a Hollywood/Protestant/Protestant Hollywood misperception (again, speaking as a religious Protestant here). As I expect you will not be surprised to learn, Dogma does not exhibit a nuanced understanding of Catholic theology.

As Wildey ably explained, the Church's theological, social, and moral authority to declare what's sinful fundamentally rests on its ability to explain that action X is or is not in line with the teachings of Jesus (let's use that term, which could be misinterpreted too narrowly, but is less likely to be misinterpreted than "the teachings of Scripture," which is routinely misinterpreted too broadly by people who know just enough Christian doctrine to be dangerous* ). The historical to-do between Protestants and Catholics has tended to obscure, at least in predominantly Protestant cultures, the fact that Catholics quite agree with their Protestant cousins that theological doctrine must be founded on Scripture. To give a 40K analogy, the nature of wargaming means that the rules are whatever two opponents say they are. If two players got together with their Privateer Press miniatures and agreed to play Warmachine using those models, the nature of their two-man community is such that they can do that. However, at that point, they cannot credibly claim to be playing Warhammer 40,000. It is true that in 40K the rules can be modified however two players agree, but if the rules aren't founded on the published 40K rules, you aren't playing 40K.

Similarly, all brands of Christianity have to have doctrine that is founded on Scripture. As with any text, there are areas where it is unclear whether the text permits something and others where it is quite clear. Let me give two examples:

Jesus agreed with the rabbis that the greatest commandment is "you shall love the Lord your God in all your heart and in all your soul and in all your understanding" (my translation). You can look through the rest of the text but there are no passages contradicting that notion. If the Pope declared that it is sinful to love the Lord your God in all your heart and in all your soul and in all your understanding, that would not make it so. He could stamp ex cathedra on the proclamation till the cows came home, and nobody would buy it. The Pope cannot simply declare things sinful or unsinful in a vacuum; he's bounded by (among other things) the text of Scripture.

On the other hand, in religion as in wargaming, the questions people have are rarely squarely addressed in the text. For instance, Jesus also said, "But I say to you that everyone who looks upon a wife in order to lust after her already has committed adultery with her in his heart" (my translation again). Now, if a person has been eyeing up a married gal and planning ways that he can have sex with her, this text is pretty clearly on point. If you're looking at a woman to fan the flames of your desire because you actually want to have sex with her, you can't defend that on moral grounds by saying, "But I haven't actually had sex with her yet!" But there are not that many people who wonder about that sort of situation. A lot more people wonder about the moral turpitude of looking or thinking about a gal of indeterminate marital status (on the internet, say) in order to get their rocks off. What does this text say, if anything, about that situation?

My answer to that is probably clear from the way I translated gunaika, which (owing to ancient Greek social mores can) mean either "woman" or "wife" depending entirely on context. But you can probably see how honest people can disagree as to the interpretation of that quote vis a vis pornography (or plain old sexual fantasies starring your woman of choice). Imagine what would happen if the BoLS rules lounge got hold of that one. Hopefully you agree there is room for people to disagree in good faith. If not, I've picked a bad example, but you probably get the idea.

This kind of disagreement - where there is room for honest disagreement - where the Catholic Church provides more structure for resolution. In this kind of rules-lawyery dispute, the Pope can act essentially as a Supreme Court by declaring an official interpretation. Like the Supreme Court, he doesn't do it often, and like the Supreme Court, the interpretation still has to be founded on the underlying text. This is perhaps not so extraordinary for an organization of over a billion people who are all interpreting the same text; Lord knows the 40K community is way smaller than that and we b1tch and moan all the time that our central interpretive authority isn't responsive enough. But the Protestant world has nothing like it; when Protestants disagree over an interpretation of Scripture, our tradition is simply to keep arguing. Protestants have core theological questions about which we have been arguing for nearly half a millennium, which looks pretty stupid from a certain point of view.

Now of course, most things that people actually care about do fall under the heading of areas of Scripture where the application of the relevant texts to the question is not crystal clear, and those are situations where the Pope could, if he felt like Supreme Courting it up, declare a different official interpretation than is current. Just like with SCOTUS reversing itself, he might still have to make a persuasive interpretive argument to get any kind of widespread buy-in, but it could be done. Of course, also as with SCOTUS, it would be an abuse of the papacy's power to reverse the official interpretation of the text unless the pope actually believed that the current official interpretation is wrong. This is even more true in matters of religion than in matters of constitutional law. Just as the role of the Supreme Court is to remind the people of the limits they agreed to put on themselves, even if transgressing those limits seems like a good idea and in so doing enhance their liberty (unless we believe that the constitution itself is bad), so too is the role of a church.

As to the specific theology of indulgences, in the Catholic Church there are essentially two things that happen when one sins. The first is that your relationship with God is soured. If you have kids, you are familiar with the analogy most commonly used to describe this situation. Yesterday I told my two year old daughter to put her dirty socks in the hamper. She refused. This adversely affected her ability to hang out with me on the couch and watch My Little Pony with me. Of course, it did not adversely affect my willingness to take a bullet for her. The second thing that happens is that one asks a priest to prescribe a penance. The point of this is to put one in the right frame of mind to acknowledge one's wrong and be contrite about it. My daughter eventually put the socks in the hamper, tearfully showed me what she had done, and all was well between us (perhaps you can see why Protestants dispense with this second thing).

An indulgence is an alternative to the second thing. On its face you can see how this is probably no big deal. But you can also see how people might begin to take it the wrong way. When a person has sinned, what ought to happen (since they themselves believe they have sinned) is that they want to make it up to the person sinned against. But it often happens that we need help to feel that way. If you've ever not been able to stop being mad at or ashamed to face your spouse or significant other, you know what this is like even without needing to be religious. Penance is intended to help this. Let's take a very minor sin. I often work in San Francisco, where there are a lot of deserving homeless and a lot of drugged-out undeserving homeless. One day, feeling fed up, I say something contemptuous to the next homeless person I see. The sin here is that I was unkind to a stranger, and also that I have no compassion for the entire class of homeless people. You don't need to know much about Jesus to know that he would not approve of that, even if he wouldn't necessarily empty his wallet to every homeless person who asked.

So what should my penance be? Maybe I should live on the streets for a week. Or maybe I should fund a soup kitchen. Both of those are maybe a little extreme (I'm exaggerating for the example), but both are probably sensible even though one of them costs money. And honestly, me funding a soup kitchen may well do more good in the long run than me living on the streets for a week.

The objection people had/have to the abuses of the indulgence "system" were twofold. First, there was a sense (widely shared after the fact, including by me, but also by Catholics at the time) that people were focusing on penance at the expense of actually repenting. They had begun to dread their penance more than the sundering of their relationship with God, and thus were content to pay their way out of penance whether or not they ever put their proverbial socks in the hamper. This is, for all sorts of reasons, not the behavior we expect of people who actually believe - and there are all sorts of reasons we might be concerned by rich people who don't actually believe (particularly if we live in the Middle Ages or Renaissance). Second, there was a sense that people didn't actually understand what indulgences were. Their official definition as alternative penance never changed, but there was a sense that people thought they were actually buying forgiveness of sin (a sense I have to agree with, seeing as here we are in 2013 and plenty of people don't seem to know that they aren't that).

[Wildeybeast]

Very well put indeed Nab, though I'd like to flag up something on the indulgence thing. The objections you make are perfectly valid, but in addition there are two other issues which protestants got het up about. One is that they were exploited by some members of the clergy as a means of gaining temporal power for their own, less than godly, purposes. The second is the idea that you can in some way buy forgiveness. To suggest that human actions can in some way influence or even bind God to a course of action was a big issue. Divine Grace cannot be earned, its very nature is that it is freely given by God. Furthermore, we are incapable of redeeming our own sins. If we were able to do so, there would have been no need for the sacrifice of Jesus.

[Psychosplodge]

That is a really well thought out response.
I believe Kevin Smith (writer/directer of Dogma) is a lapsed catholic, just for reference.

Also it's cruel to deprive a child of MLP

[Nabterayl]

Quite true, Wildey. As with a lot of Protestant objections to "popery," I think those are objections to the way people started misconstruing the doctrine (albeit on a wide scale, as even the Catholics of the time admitted) rather than the doctrine itself, but quite true.

[Wildeybeast]

Very true. The Catholic church was as guilty as anyone of losing sight of what the various doctrines actually were. The Council of Trent did do a lot to address such issues, though very much after the horse had bolted.