Dr. John Bergsma

So anything that had been decided by the church in previous centuries was up for grabs.

And at any point somebody could rise and say, we think we got the idea of the Trinity wrong.

We think we got the idea of marriage wrong.

We think we got the idea of the Eucharist wrong, blah, blah, blah.

And we can reopen up that can of worms and rehash it.

And there's so many examples of this in Protestantism.

Some Protestant groups reopened the Trinitarian controversies, and you have Jesus-only Protestants who think that

Jesus is the Father and he is the Spirit, and they're all basically one person.

It's the ancient heresy of modalism.

That is very much alive and well in American Protestantism among churches that call themselves the apostolic churches, okay?

So these things get, you know, the Jehovah's Witnesses brought back the whole Aryan controversy and said, oh, we got homoousius wrong, it's just homoi, he's tertium quid, et cetera.

And so you're back to Jesus not being fully divine in that, you know, schismatic heresy.

So in order to make theological progress, we have to recognize the authority of tradition,

And the authority of councils, yes, what councils represent is the apostles gathered together.

In Matthew 18, Jesus told the gathered apostles that whatever they bound and loosed would have been bound and loosed in heaven.

So the apostles as a group have this authority that's manifested in ecumenical council.

And also the Pope by himself has that authority because in

Matthew 16, Jesus gives that authority to Peter personally in the you singular.

So he and his successors after him can also bind and loose motu proprio by their own authority.

Yeah.