[dragonwriter]

> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.

"The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time, and for any given time and group of Christians tend to include a mix of teachings that are held by those Christians to be fundamental and eternal, and teachings that are held by those Christians to be applicable in the current context (the latter tend to be presented as an application of the former to the perceived current circumstances, but may or may not be the result of applying any rational process to explicitly held eternal beliefs to any specifically articulated beliefs about the modern world.)

Your objection seems to be grounded in claims about the "teachings of Christianity" that are empirically untrue of the actual teachings of actual Christianity as it has actually existed in the material world. They may apply to some abstract ideal of Christianity, but in that case a "modern Christianity" could still exist as a concrete Christianity that more closely approached the abstract ideal than current concrete forms.

[geye1234]

That's fair. Let's replace 'Christianity' with 'the Catholic Church', since what you say undoubtedly applies to Protestantism, and in a less obvious way to Eastern Orthodoxy. And remember, I'm saying 'timeless if true'; the 'true' part is assumed for the purpose of this argument.

[dragonwriter]

As someone who has been Catholic most of my life, it certainly applies just as much to the Catholic Church (even to there being diverse beliefs within the Church at any given time, and certainly to change over time.)

[geye1234]

Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change because God can't change. Again, if it changes, then it isn't true. I'm not (here) arguing that it's true; only that in order to adhere to it, one must hold that it doesn't change. That, obviously, doesn't imply that every member of the Catholic Church believes the same thing. Nor does it imply that practice will look different in various times and places, although practice will always have the same goal (Union with the Divine Essence) and therefore be in essence the same thing.

EDIT: "will look different" should obviously be "will not look different"

[dragonwriter]

> Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change

Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.

> Again, if it changes, then it isn't true.

If it changes, and it was claimed to be a universal constant, than either the before- or after-change version isn't true, sure, that's trivially true.

[geye1234]

I said

>> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.

To which you said

> "The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time

> Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.

The teaching of the Catholic Church just is revelation. Individual Catholics or churchmen may believe all kinds of things, some contrary to revelation and/or each other, but that's something distinct. What has manifestly changed?

[dragonwriter]

> The teaching of the Catholic Church just is revelation.

No, even in the view of the official teachings of the Catholic Church, the teachings of the Catholic Church include, but extend well beyond, revelation.

If the teachings were only what was understood to be unquestionably part of the content of revelation, then there would be no teachings which were not dogmas.

[dctoedt]

> Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change because God can't change.

The "God can't change" part seems a bit above our paygrade, no?

Not to mention: Who are we to say that God wouldn't reveal things to us gradually — and maybe in a changing way?

EXAMPLE: We still teach our kids that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Later, we refine the teachings.

[lo_zamoyski]

This misunderstands the theology and metaphysics very profoundly.

The immutability of God is a necessary theological conclusion. If God changes, then He isn't God, by definition. It would be a metaphysical absurdity. Change presupposes imperfection and, therefore the potential for perfection, i.e., full actualization, but God as the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, is pure act with no potential left to actualize. God is fully dynamic, but this is quite different from change. He may appear to change from our temporal perspective as events are distributed in time, but from an eternal perspective, all is actualized, "simultaneous", so to speak.

W.r.t. gradual revelation, that is exactly what Scripture is a record of. A Catholic reading will demonstrate that revelation is in the business of slowly revealing to Man who God is (at least that which cannot be known through unaided reason; quite a bit can be known through reason alone), preparing him for the culmination of public revelation in the Incarnation of the Logos, something foreshadowed in the Old Testament. And furthermore, the Catholic Church recognizes the development of doctrine, which you could call a refinement and deepening of understanding of what has been revealed. I like the analogy to mathematics, even if it is imperfect: all the theorems that follow from a set of axioms are in a sense already in the axioms, and so mathematics is in the business of unpacking them.

However, this gradual revelation and development of doctrine, in order to be authentic, cannot contradict what was known previously, at least to a certain accuracy, if not precision. Of course, here is where people can get tripped up by analogical devices and literal-mindedness. Scripture is written using the idioms, paradigms, and language of the people who wrote it and for whom it was written. That means that some of the language may not agree with strict scientific descriptions of the 21st century. However, when that does occur, you will note that the sense is not the reference: when the Bible speaks of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west in order to communicate some theological truth, it is not making astronomical claims about the sun and the earth. It is using this language as instruments to communicate something, often by analogy. In fact, analogy is essential to theology, something captured in the concept of the analogia entis. Univocal or equivocal approaches to the subject of God have been the source of numerous heresies.

[dctoedt]

> The immutability of God is a necessary theological conclusion. If God changes, then He isn't God, by definition. It would be a metaphysical absurdity.

Is that so? Just because some people can't conceive of a mutable God, it doesn't mean it's impossible by definition. (Quantum mechanics was equally "inconceivable," until it wasn't.)

For the sake of argument, let's assume that God exists. Of course it's not our place to proclaim that God does change — that's above our paygrade, too. But to purport to categorically rule out the possibility is not just Dunning-Kruger arrogance, it's blasphemy.

Our discussion brings to mind chapter 38 of the Book of Job. We can summarize it (profanely) as God's saying to Job, in essence, "Who the f*ck are you to question me?"

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2038&versio...