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Edward Feser

Edward Feser
@FeserEdward

Nov 25, 2022
6 tweets
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1/6 Let’s take stock. Ivereigh @🇺🇦 Austen Ivereigh 🇺🇦 says that “freezing doctrine is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit – which Jesus called the one unforgivable.” But “freezing” doctrine is exactly what the Church does when it solemnly declares a doctrine to be a dogma.

2/6 In Pascendi, Pope St. Pius X condemns as a modernist heresy the view that dogma can change or evolve. Vatican I anathematizes those who would attribute a new sense to an existing dogma. Etc. In other words, the Church solemnly teaches that doctrine can be “frozen.”
3/6 Hence Ivereigh’s position is straightforwardly heretical. Worse, by Ivereigh’s own criteria, his position is blasphemous. For the Church’s condemnation of the thesis that dogma can change is itself the work of the Holy Spirit (since it was defined by a council etc.)
4/6 Hence Ivereigh is implicitly characterizing the work of the Holy Spirit as “blasphemous.” Which is itself blasphemous. (The good news is that Ivereigh is wrong that such a sin is “unforgivable.” He can still repent of his heresy and blasphemy, and I pray he does.)
5/6 Meanwhile, Ivereigh’s fans have been whining that he is not being read charitably. Yet even after a day of furious tweeting, none has succeeded in proposing an orthodox reading of the claim that “freezing doctrine is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” etc.
6/6 Instead there’s a been a lot of dust kicked up – chatter about everything from the death penalty to the synod to Pope Francis’s critics and so on – but, again, no actual explanation of exactly how Ivereigh’s words can be given an orthodox reading. Because they can’t be.
Edward Feser

Edward Feser

@FeserEdward
Professor of Philosophy, Scholastic, Catholic
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