Dr. John Bergsma

Maybe if folks have had geometry,

in high school, you know how you start with these axioms in Euclidean geometry, and then you can derive theorems from it, you know?

Like you can work out, well, the implications of these axioms are, you know, these angles do whatever.

And that's the way I saw it, that Clement of Rome, like, give me apostolic succession, give me sacramental realism and sacramental regeneration.

Give me the importance of the visible unity of the Church, etc.

Give me the veneration of tradition as well as the veneration of Scripture, and so on.

And everything else that the Catholic Church believes down to the present day, it can be derived, so to speak, from those basic principles.

Look at Justin Martyr's description of the worship of early Christians, and you'll see it sounds like Mass as we celebrate it today.

There is so much continuity.

The divinity of Christ, his equality with the Father and the Spirit, Christ's presence in the sacraments, especially the Most Holy Eucharist,

the authority of the apostles and by derivation, the authority of their successors.

It is clearly the same religion, even though it's grown and become deeper.

So far, you know,

Far from being a council of despair or some kind of principle that leads to epistemic nihilism, development of doctrine is to me, extraordinarily hopeful

And what development of doctrine means is, as the centuries pass, we enter into the faith that we've been given more and more deeply.

We begin to realize its implications, and we begin to understand better and better how to speak of it with precision.

Through experience, we learned that certain language used to describe our faith really doesn't work well in the long haul, and that other language to describe the faith does work well and preserves us from error and from heresy.

And so we come up with terms like homoousios versus homoiousios and homoousios.

person and nature and infallible and inerrant and so on.

And so we come up with terms that allow us to describe what we believe with greater precision than the first Christians experienced, even though the content of what we believe is essentially the same.