Cardinal Müller is a heretic /Part 3/
20 April 2020
Ad B) Quotes and responses to Müller’s statements in his book “Catholic Dogmatics” /continued/
Quote: “Such an event does not occur at the level of natural experience or knowledge. This gives rise to the problem of how to transfer it to the realm of human knowledge and language so that the resurrection of Jesus is not reified or spiritually diluted.”
Response: This gives rise to no problem. When things are accepted as they are, they completely remain in the realm of human knowledge and language. Jesus really died and really rose from the dead, and therefore He appeared to the apostles so that they made sure of that reality and then bore witness to His death and resurrection. But because Müller refuses to accept this simple truth of the Gospel, he invents artificial problems. Once again, he thus degrades the reality of Christ’s resurrection to a kind of private apparition, and then it is really a problem to convey it to people by “transferring it to the realm of human knowledge and language”.
In the following statements of his dogmatics, Müller describes the cognitive or gnostic process of man in order to be “able” to explain how this “miracle of apparition” occurred in the minds of the disciples. This is, of course, a completely heretical approach.
Quote: “The conceptual formation of man always depends on his experience of the world that is transmitted and mediated by sensory perception.”
Response: This strange-sounding statement should probably be a confirmation of the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of human knowledge. That is to say, all human knowledge begins in the senses. However, these senses can only perceive accidents (i.e. external properties rather than the essence of things). Cognition itself takes place beyond the realm of the senses when the mind abstracts the general concepts from the phenomena perceived by the senses, that is, “grasps” the essence of things. However, the very next statement suggests that Müller deviates from this classical (recognized by the Church) conception of the cognitive process to the Kantian heretical conception:
Quote: “However, objective experience always presupposes a non-objective horizon of the human mind.”
Response: That sounds dubious, to say the least. It speaks about objective experience, that is, a physical phenomenon and its effect on the human senses, and about the human mind and its “non-objective horizon”. In other words, Müller says that reality depends on how one sees it. By one-sidedly emphasizing the subjectivity of the human cognitive process and concealing that reality is independent of our cognition, he creates the impression that it is dependent on it if not in general, then at least in this case of Christ’s resurrection. This empty philosophizing eventually leads to questioning the testimony of eyewitnesses. Müller shifts the event of Christ’s resurrection from the realm of the material world to the realm of the cognitive process. This heresy of his denial of Christ’s resurrection in the flesh is related to the heretical Kantian conception of the cognitive process, namely the assertion that man cannot know with certainty the things of the world around him. Consequently, even God’s revelation is not a precisely proven fact; we can believe in it but it is only a subjective thing which we cannot prove. And this is a heresy because the resurrection of Christ is a proven historical fact the same as miracles in the Gospel or miracles performed through the apostles by which God affirmed the truth of their salvific mission. These are all historical facts and they are as proven as other events in human history.
Quote: “The transcendence of human reason is always a metaphysical prerequisite for forming a conception in general.”
Response: What could this possibly mean? By the transcendence of human reason, perhaps, he means the ability to perceive not only sensory phenomena (which animals can do) but also what is behind these phenomena, the essence of things. To form a conception perhaps simply means to understand what is going on. For example, I see a dawn and guess that the sun is rising, although I do not see the sun yet. It seems that the sentence actually does not make any sense; it just says that some people sometimes use reason…
With his sophisticated phrases, Müller gives the impression that he is an extremely capable theological expert. This is why people are convinced that they cannot understand Christian truths at such a high professional level as he does. But then, those who have always known with certainty that Jesus rose from the dead suddenly begin to have doubts that they might misunderstand it because there is a higher level according to which the Lord Jesus actually did not rise. But of course it is a heresy!
Quote: “In the concept of an objectively experienceable being, the transcendental non-objective experience of being is therefore always implicit as the horizon of knowledge and the origin of all being.”
Response: When we translate Müller’s statement word for word into normal language, we see that he probably means the following: By “an objectively experienceable being” he apparently means God, that is, a being who is experienced as He is. However, before the expression “an objectively experienceable being” he puts the phrase “in the concept of”. So he does not claim that such a being – God – exists but that some people perhaps think so. And to those who think that God – who is experienceable as He is – does exist Müller attributes the concept of the cognitive process. He further speaks about “transcendental non-objective experience of being” (implicit in this concept). What is meant by this “non-objective experience of being” is probably the Modernist “faith” which is not objective, not demonstrable and cannot be shared with others, but is a mere inner feeling or impression without the possibility of verifying its truthfulness. This Modernist faith is called “transcendental” apparently because its object is something other than pure “objective experience”, that is, something other than sensory perceptions caused by the physical phenomena of the world. So the subject of this Modernist pseudo-belief is something that cannot be proved.
The “horizon of knowledge” must obviously mean the possibility of knowing or that which can be known. The “origin of all being” again refers to the pantheistic, Kantian and Modernist “god” – now for a change not as something objectively existing but as an element in the cognitive process of man. The Kantian philosophy, as has already been said, removes the difference between being and knowing. Kant thinks that it makes sense to talk about being merely as something cognitive; he just does not think about things beyond our cognitive process. Things beyond the human mind seem not to exist for him.
So when we put the sentence together, we can say that Müller states something like this: Assuming that there is a God who directly sees the essence of all things, then it follows that in the human mind there is always the implicit possibility of experiencing this God as something that can be known, something that is the origin of all being (of course, in the context of the Kantian philosophy, without any possibility of verifying the authenticity or veracity of this “inner experience”).
But beware! In fact, Müller does not refer here to the true and living God but rather to an imaginary idea of a god trapped in the human mind, a man-invented god, who begins to exist when a person “recognizes” him, that is, when he invents him. Thus, Müller again leads the reader to believe that the “resurrection of Christ” occurred only in the minds of the apostles.
Quote: “The possibility of knowing God is based on his will for self-expression in the divine word, which is experienceable through a means accessible to the senses.”
Response: Yes, God can be known through His creation. He can be known because He placed order in the created world, created the things of this world “according to their kind”, i.e. according to a certain order, according to the ideas in His mind. Every created thing is what it is, what God wanted it to be. That is why each of these things is “intelligible”, i.e. capable of being grasped by the mind, since each of them has its God-given essence. And thanks to these ideas of God “imprinted” on theoretically “formless matter” or, in other words, thanks to God’s order in the world, God is accessible to our reason. The things of the world also have their hierarchy, lower and higher degrees of the perfection of being. By the gradual knowledge of higher and higher beings, the human mind comes to “grasp” spiritual things and eventually – enlightened by the grace of the Holy Spirit – to know God.
It is therefore true, and we can agree with Müller on this, that the very cognition of things, or rather of their essence, takes place in the extrasensory realm, by an act of reason which is spiritual – immaterial – in its essence. This is also true of the ordinary material things of this world, and all the more so of the cognition of God Himself.
This does not mean, however, that the resurrection of Christ should or could not take place in the physical realm, in time and space, and that it needs to be situated only in the cognitive process of the disciples, as is done by Müller. Quite the contrary! The fact of the physical resurrection of Jesus is knowable and accessible to our reason and faith because it took place in our time and space from which we naturally draw material for all our knowledge.
Let us point out that there are also appearances of God that are purely subjective, private; however, they definitely do not include Christ’s resurrection or appearance to the apostles!!! God appeared in a different way when He spoke to Abraham, for example. He also appeared in a different way to the Apostle Paul at the gates of Damascus. Some of his companions just saw the light, others just heard the voice, but only Paul saw Jesus. He appeared in a different way to St John in the apocalyptic vision. It was a visionary experience. However, when the Lord Jesus appeared from the Resurrection to the Ascension, it was something completely different. It was not an appearance like any of those mentioned above. It was a real encounter with the Risen Lord in His glorified body.
Quote: “The Easter experience consists in the fact that God communicates himself in the transcendental knowledge horizon of the disciples through the self-witness of Jesus, who makes himself seen by the disciples in such a way that they can perceive him as living with God.”
Response: In this statement, Müller has already uttered a clear heresy! He definitely confirms here that, in his view, the resurrection and appearance of Jesus simply took place in the minds of the disciples. According to him, the Easter “experience” does not consist in the fact that the Risen Christ showed the disciples His glorified body and convinced them of His physical and historical resurrection (“a spirit does not have flesh and bones” [Lk 24:39]), but rather that it was an “experience” in the “knowledge horizon”, that is, in the minds of the disciples. This heretical blasphemy only escalates in the next statements:
Quote: “The use of the Old-Testament theophanic formulas (cf. Ex 3:2) clearly indicates that the Easter apparitions are events that fall within the scope of revelation.”
Response: With the expression “theophanic formulas”, Müller eliminates even the slightest doubt that he considers the resurrection to be simply an invention of the apostles. By distinguishing between “apparition” and “revelation”, he tries to create the impression that he takes into account God’s objective revelation, the content of which is the deposit of faith. However, he has just blown to atoms its foundations by denying the knowability of the material world (in which these particular apparitions take place) and by explicitly denying the greatest miracle of God that has ever happened – the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. What nonsense! For it was not possible that the One (Acts 2:31) who Himself is God’s revelation to mankind should be “left in Hades”.
In the case of the apostles, one cannot speak about a kind of mystical vision (apparition) but rather about the real presence of Jesus. “Look at My hands and My feet. It is I Myself. Touch Me and see; for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” (Lk 24:39) Placing the physical appearances of the Risen Jesus on a level with mystical visions is manipulation and heresy.
Quote: “A running camera would not have been able to make an audio-visual recording of either the Easter apparitions of Jesus in front of his disciples, nor of the Resurrection event which, at its core, is the consummation of the personal relation of the Father to the incarnate Son in the Holy Spirit.”
Response: This statement is the solution to the whole puzzle of what the author meant to say. If a running camera would not have been able to make a recording of Christ’s resurrection or of His physical appearances to the disciples, it definitely means that the resurrection was not one in the flesh. And when Jesus appeared in the Upper Room and said to the disciples, “Touch Me, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones,” this Jesus – according to Müller – lied and influenced the poor apostles with a kind of suggestion like David Copperfield. He did not have a body, but He dulled the senses of the disciples and made them think He did have a body. Müller utters this blasphemous lie, this heresy, in his text. But if what Müller says were true, where did the body disappear from the tomb? In Müller’s view, it was probably a sort of magic trick like when illusionists make a man locked in a box “disappear”. What god does Müller actually believe in? In a juggler who makes fun of people?
Quote: “In contrast to human reason, technical devices and animals are not capable of a transcendental experience and thus also lack the ability to be addressed by the Word of God through perceptible phenomena and signs. Only human reason in its inner unity of categoricality and transcendentality is determinable by the Spirit of God to enable it to perceive in the sensory cognitive image (triggered by the revelation event) the personal reality of Jesus as the cause of this sensory-mental cognitive image.”
Response: The last words of the extract really ring down the curtain on the whole swamp of heresies. In Müller’s view, the resurrection was in fact a “sensory-mental cognitive image”. There is nothing to add. Thus, according to the faith of Card. Müller, Christ is not risen and so Card. Müller is still in his sins.
We hereby call on Cardinal Müller to repent publicly of his heresies. In this way, he will set an example to all who have been misguided by his writings.
+ Elijah
Patriarch of the Byzantine Catholic Patriarchate
+ Methodius OSBMr + Timothy OSBMr
Secretary Bishops
Fr Wenceslas Fr David
Download: Cardinal Müller is a heretic /Part 3/ (20/4/2020)
