Talk:Precepts of the Church

The 'external link' given on this page seems to have no relationship to its title,'Commandments of the Church', but links to the webpage of an anti-Catholic Church organization.Mugpi (talk) 00:47, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Name change
Should this article be named Precepts of the Church? That seems to be what it is talking about and the current title confuses it with the Ten Commendments. Mluehrmann (talk) 16:01, 16 May 2009 (UTC)This stuff is crap
 * Done. (Only took 10 years lol) I've never seen "commandment" until this page. "Precept" is much more common, at least in the contemporary literature. Canon Law Junkie §§§ Talk 03:14, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Our Lord?
The most obvious reason for the Church commandments is Church authority, which has a right to be obeyed as delegated by Our Lord[3], which common tradition subsums under the Fourth Commandment.

[3] “He that heareth you, heareth me.” Lk 10:16

This sentence implies the reason the Church needs to be obeyed as that it has been charged by an actual supernatural being. It should be altered to remove the Christian bias. The Church believes it has authority as it believes it represents the will of God.

The footnote referencing the Bible is weak as well. The Bible is a religious document. It can't be used to validate anything except in reference to itself. If you stated the Church believes it has authority based on this verse, then it makes more sense, but then it probably should be in the body of the text, not as a footnote.


 * Well, the thing was in its main outlines written by me; and even my own aim was not to produce something that fittingly defines the lemma, but something that does this only better than previously the case. What made things easier was the fact that if anything is wrong about the tone, the NPOV has a reputation of being pushed enough at Wikipedia. That being said,
 * A Christian bias does no harm in an article about the Church Commandments, as a non-Christian, as such, doesn't even enter the encircling discussion. However I concede that I wrote in specifically Catholic tone as well.
 * This is the wrong article to discuss whether the Church believes to have authority. Obviously she does, as every Tom, Dick or Harry knows when asked in the street. The Church commandments can be seen as but instances where this authority is used. If looked at more carefully, we may also find out (what I thought worth some thought) that the actual command of the Church is often a precisation of other things. This is where Scripture came into the article.
 * This had, admittedly, besides being interesting in itself, the ulterior motive to refute the prejudice that the Church would in fact really demand many and exhausting things by her arbitrary judgment. Since (though this may be a prejudice of my own) this has been specifically stressed in history by Protestants, the virtual debate-partner could be supposed to accept Biblical evidence as decisive.
 * In this context that I mentioned one of the verses where (according to my opinion, though I don't doubt we might find quotes in established apologists or even magisterial documents) the Church authority is mentioned. Now this was done rather from a sense of completeness, than the wish to evidence this doctrine; which obviously must be discussed elsewhere.
 * Besides, though Our Lord himself has authority because He is God (not only: a supernatural being; it would be difficult to prove that an angel per se had authority over a man; the devil, thank God!, has no longer (Lord deliver us from evil)), the Church was charged by Him in his manhood, that is, capable of being the subject of history. That the historical document narrating the event is also believed to be inspired does not enter the discussion as long as it is accepted as historical.--131.159.0.7 (talk) 11:04, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Per the first unsigned comment, I've changed "Our Lord" to simply "Jesus." I've also added a second biblical citation, "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." Matt 16:19b. RSV. This was the charge given directly to Peter. For the Church generally, cf. also Matt 18:18.

Obviously this article concerns "precepts" taught by the Catholic Church, and considered to be binding on the Catholic faithful. Hence it will present the Precepts from within that perspective, and in this section will present the rationale from that perspective as well. But it should not presume that all readers are Catholic, nor even necessarily Christian. BlueMesa171 (talk) 04:58, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Precisation?
Some of the writing in this article leads me to believe that parts of it were translated from Latin or Italian. Or perhaps English was not the author's first language. In the section on "Reasons" we have this sentence: "Thus again, the commanding act of the Church rather consists in the precisation." The word used, "precisation" is not found in any of the standard English dictionaries. One example of work needed to clean up some cloudy ambiguous language. I think the sense here is that of providing precision, or a precise articulation of obligations incumbent on the Catholic faithful. BlueMesa171 (talk) 04:10, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed. The sentence you cite, amongst others, is less than, shall we say, clear and straightforward? I would try editing, but I have no understating of the subject.
 * As for "precisation", it is a word in (specialised) English, but rather uncommon even there I think. It's used in some academic fields, like Linguistics (where I learnt it, from papers like this and this), Logic and, I believe, in some Mathematical, and Law areas. It means something like "stipulate", and more or less refers to the narrowing down (or "precising" - ick, I know!) of a lexical item or term, that might have a more general meaning. By extension, in the maths and legal senses, I assume a similar restriction of meaning is meant by the word: So maybe that's the intent of its use in this article - like the legal use? But it does not help to make the meaning clearer at all!
 * (Realise you made your point a year ago, so I'm rather late to the party, but that is my take on it!)
 * Change diff 49.177.61.250 (talk) 07:13, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The Laura Grimm Synthese article is also on JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20114147 . 2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk) 01:19, 16 October 2021 (UTC)