Posted on 01/24/2007 8:41:04 AM PST by Joseph DeMaistre
The Church does not give authority to scripture. It is God's word that does and that's what Augustine recognized.
" It was the Church itself that decided on the books that went into the New Testament!"
Just as the Apostles recognized God, by what He had to say, so to did the men who read his words since then. The books of the NT are written by apostles and their associates. They were not written by Church members throughout the ages.
But that was only valid when those teaching were apostles that had face to face teaching from the Lord himself. All that came after that was corruptible, and unreliable unless it was in writing from those that had the face to face comunication. All else is hearsay.
The only thing more illogical and dishonest than guilt by association is guilt by false association.
Just returned. My have we been busy!
First, the assembly I attend has no pastor. We have elders, deacons, and a preacher. All of which are members of the congregation.
As to all the other issues... Wanting something to be doesn't make it so. Continued repetition of lies, no matter how many centuries the lies have been in existence, does not eventually cause them to be true. The RCC does not have a monopoly on God, His Word, His power on earth, or anything else of, from or by God. Far, far from it.
Again, I implore those who seek Truth to read Scripture. Don't invest your eternal destiny in mere men. Let the Holy Spirit speak to you in the way He does, through study of God's Word!
In other words, no authority at all, since Christ reserved all authority over the church unto himself. He called those that attempted to create false authority "nicolaitanos" and stated clearly that he hated them.
The scholarship is interesting and the texts compelling.
However, this would have been better served up as an answer on a thread bashing Catholics.
It is not good that Catholics should start fights like this.
We are, all of us, beset by the Devil. And the world is plunging headlong into darkness and the greatest danger in world history, with the proliferation of nuclear fire. Within the West, in Canada a Catholic councilman has been fined and forced to apologize for expressing his opposition to gay parades, and in England, the Catholic Church is about to be forced by law to provide gay adoptions. In California, Catholic Charities has been forced by law to provide birth control services as part of its medical plan.
And all of this is against the backdrop of 40 million dead babies in the US over the past 30 years, and other 150 million+ worldwide, the worst continuous slaughter of completely innocent human beings in all of history.
Now, in this crucible in which we find ourselves, in America, who are the most stalwart defenders of the good against the Devil? Catholics, yes (but see Pelosi and Kennedy), but also Baptists, especially, and Evangelicals.
And in China, where Christianity is expanding in spite of criminalization and martyrdom, who is driving most of the expansion and gaining the crown of martydom? Not, for the most part Catholic or Orthodox missionaries. No. It is Pentecostals. Jesus said many things, but one thing he did say is "You will know them by their fruits."
The fruits of our Protestant brethren in China have been exceedingly rich, and the most stalwartly anti-abortion regions of the United States are not the "blue states", which are almost invariably predominantly Catholic, but the Baptist "red states".
Pope after Pope, for 40 years, has called Christians to unity, and as Catholics we bear a special burden to foster unity with Christians and to try to heal the wounds to the Body of Christ that disunity of His Church have wrought. Were the Protestants wrong, doctrinally, in the Reformation? Yes. But the Catholics were wrong, desperately wrong, in matters of Church discipline. Corruption, sleaze and murder emanating from the See of Peter itself raised such a stench of evil that the Catholic Church itself, too, was responsible for the Reformation, just as the cover-up of gay priestly abuse of minors is today driving many Catholics out the doors in legitimate and righteous moral disgust at the sleaze and baseness of some Catholic clergy.
No.
We as Catholics cannot pick fights with Protestants.
Not any more.
We have been called to do something different.
We have to call them back to arms, under the Cross, all of us, against the Devil whose forces are surging around us all as never before. We cannot demand an admission of doctrinal error in them until we well and truly admit and atone for our own beastly sins and errors of a disciplinary nature.
There is a Devil to fight, and we are living in the direst and most murderous time ever: the slaughter of innocents continues unabated, and is threatening to make inroads into Latin American now as well.
We have to patiently bear the insults, and bear with good humor and humility the rebukes against us and our Church for the real sins, egregious and bloody, of our forebears, and the real sins, sleazy and pernicious of sexual predators in the present. Our doctrine may be pure, but we are known by our fruit, not just our doctrine. Jesus said you will know them by their fruit, and our fruit, though often very good, has also been very bad.
We cannot simply stand up and offer to refight the Reformation, because we were WRONG about much during the Reformation. So were the Protestants. That Christians mass murdered Christians, both wrong, was the work of the Devil carried out in the name of Jesus.
Simply hitting the reset button and going back to the doctrinal fights will not do. As Catholics, we ARE the One True Church. Our job is to LEAD. Not taunt. That means NOT launching doctrinal missiles at the Protestants. They are never persuaded in this way. But they do stand up and fate, and we renew all of the hatred and stupidity of the ages, both sides.
As Catholics, called to ecumenism, we cannot permit ourselves to do that anymore. When the truth of our doctrine is attacked then, and only then, is it appropriate to respond with the sort of detailed missive as you did, as a CORRECTIVE, and with humble and careful language, NOT with language calculated to give offense and insult.
I applaud your efforts at Biblical exegesis. They were effective at presenting much of the doctrinal truth. Unfortunately, the scholarship was put to a bad use: picking a fight with our Protestant brethren, fellow Christians, soldiers in Christ. That is wrong. We must not do that anymore. Our doom is upon us all; the Devil is thronging all around. Us shooting into a circle and embittering each other at each other with all of the old issues of doctrine is not a fight we should be having unless we MUST, and not a fight we should be INITIATING at all.
I like the scholarship. It is very good.
I dislike the purpose to which it was put: starting a fight.
Ask yourself this: to whom does the glory of God chiefly go in the sweeping conversion of Korea and China?
Not to the Catholic Church.
Fighting Protestant words here is easy.
Fighting Communists there, as individual Protestants are doing in record numbers, that is very hard.
It is to those ends our efforts should be bent, not to dividing the body of Christ further.
So, if Jesus wanted Scripture to be the rule of faith, why did he leave us a Church, and not a Bible? He could have written the New Testament himself, could he not?
How can you say the Church doesn't have the authority to determine which writings are Sared Scripture, when it was the Church herself that decided what books went into Scripture? Your circular reasoning is astonishing.
You mean the lies of the Protestant "Reformation". What I meant was that Protestantism's ideas about Christianity would have been every bit as novel to the early Christians as those of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Nothing like private interpretation of the scriptures to set things on the wrong path. Do you claim infallibility for your interpretation?
I'd say they could find people who arrive at the same views within the catholic church. You're just foisting off a straw man argument...not very honest of you.
I truly long for the day when all of Christ's followers will be free from denomination.
>>Yes, when Protestant sectarians give up their pride and return to the bonds of the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church.
Sectarianism is a sin, yet it wasn't the Catholics who created 10s of thousands of denominations, each claiming to be faithful to the Bible alone. Lutherans, Calvinists, Arminians, Liberal Protestants, etc.
>>If there is one Holy Spirit, One God, then there must be one truth. Realizing that led me away from the mess that is Protestantism. I have no regrets about leaving Protestantism behind me.
I never said anything about the Reformation. An honest reading of Scripture debunks much of the theological ideas that sprung from it.
I hold to Scripture, and maintain that God gave us the model for Christian activity in it. Reading the behavior of, and interaction amongst the early Christians ought to cause every hierarchically structured organization claiming Christ to re-think their positions.
The Church has replaced God?
As to all the other issues... Wanting something to be doesn't make it so. Continued repetition of lies, no matter how many centuries the lies have been in existence, does not eventually cause them to be true. The RCC does not have a monopoly on God, His Word, His power on earth, or anything else of, from or by God. Far, far from it.
>>Have you ever bothered reading the early Fathers of the Church without the blinders of your Protestant partisanship on? I challenge you to do what I did. Try to discover whether the earliest Christians understood the Scriptures the way you do today, or were they closer to what Catholics or the Orthodox believe? That's a rhetorical question.
>>The only thing here with you is fear of being wrong. Where does your sect get its authority to interpret the Bible, not to mention you personally? The Torah wasn't subject to private interpretation under the Old Covenant, nor is the Gospel in the New Covenant.
>>Understanding history is to cease to be a Protestant. I got saved by joining Christ's original Church, the Catholic Church. To say the Roman Catholic Church didn't exist until centuries later is bunk. Perhaps the rigid, regimented structures developed later, but the kernel of the episcopacy, not to mention the local Church of Rome existed from the First Century.
>>Pope St. Clement I, a student of Sts. Peter and Paul, wrote a commentary on the apostolic preachings around 90 A.D. When did your sect start?
Listen, if the Protestants want to go around throwing stones here on FR, they shouldn't go unchallenged. I agree there are larger threats here, but if they're willing to stop posting their anti-Catholic venom, I'll respond in kind and stop posting anti-Protestant polemics.
God gave all authority to the Church, not just to preach, but to rule. Giving reverence to the Church isn't any difference than your giving reverence to the ol' US of A.
So does being a patriotic American replace God with patriotism? What about the idols of George Washington, etc. (sarcasm)
Protestantism is a strawman.
Just as the Apostles recognized God, by what He had to say, so to did the men who read his words since then. The books of the NT are written by apostles and their associates. They were not written by Church members throughout the ages.
>>But the Church decided upon which books were spurious and which were products of divine inspiration in the 4th century. If it wasn't for the Catholic Church, you wouldn't have the New Testament you take for granted. Maybe you should be reading Thomas, Peter, Judas and Bartholemew instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. What authority do you have to say the neo-Gnostics are wrong about what books belong in the Bible?
>>All you have is your own private interpretation. The canon of Scripture is Tradition with a big T. Its definition came from God through the Church.
thank you for admitting that your posts are "Anti-Protestant polemics." I do hope you continue to post them. They should be more fun now that we know your motives.
Since you started this thread by bashing Mormons in order try to get the goats of the protestants, perhaps you could post an Anti-Mormon polemic once in a while as well. Those always make for interesting threads.
Carry on.
The word preceded the church, not the other way around.
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