Posted on 05/09/2007 10:01:17 AM PDT by NYer
Actually, it was the other way around after a very short time. There was general agreement among the body, but Paul had to rebuke both Peter and Barnabas when they faltered. That is what the church is: believers bouncing their beliefs off of each other to see who is heading astray. The written word is the only "authority" we have, and all must be held to that standard.
Discuss the issues all you want but do NOT make it personal.
“Bouncing their beliefs off of one another?” In any case, Paul had virtual autonomy in his missionary area, which was the Northeast or at least the Churches he established in Asia and Greece and finally in Ephesus where he acted as a virtual patriarch. That authority was rooted in conformity with the teachings of the Church the authority of the churches he founded was rooted in his. One purpose of his later jouneys as well as his letters was to make sure that those pastors were toeing the line. I simply don’t see how one can read Acts and not understand that the government of the church depicted as
based on authority and disciple, both enforced by the leaders of the Church with Paul as their hierarch.
Unfortunately, Ludwig Ott's, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, is still being sold vs. grabbed off the net (impressive for its publish date).
My understanding is that someone would be considered a Catholic at least from the POV of church discipline (not necessarily from the POV of soteriology)...
Perhaps this statement can bring both questions into focus. Is the "Church Visible" equated with the Roman Catholic Church in toto (as opposed to the Church Catholic)? For example, do Bp Lancelot Andrews and St Theophan the Recluse remain outside of it? Or worse: were they outside, but let in later by a council in which neither the Orthodox or Anglicans were invited to attend? When Pope Benedict XVI met with His Holiness Bartholomew was it a meeting of two members of the Visible Church?
If you believe Ludwig Ott's work would explain this question without the "or worse" option, then I'm off to amazon. Either way, thank you for your reply.
That idea is what our Lord said he despised; he called it nicolaitan, greek for tyranny.
Again, this is a complex question, particularly in regard to the Orthodox, since they have valid sacraments.
However, since an anathema is a formal excommunication, and neither of the persons you mention were in communion with the Roman Pontiff (and therefore not able to be excommunicated), it stands to reason that they are outside the boundaries of the visible Catholic Church at least in the most narrow juridical sense -- that is, in the sense applicable in matters of church discipline.
Another test, a practical one. Suppose that Bp Andrews married someone, about whom we need not worry except to assert that she was baptized, but not a Catholic. Catholics are required to obey the "Catholic form" of marriage, meaning that their marriage must be witnessed by a cleric or appropriate dispensations must be granted. If Bp Andrews and his wife had then entered the Catholic church, their marriage would have been viewed as valid, since they were juridically outside the Catholic church when they contracted it and were not bound by Catholic marriage law.
When Pope Benedict XVI met with His Holiness Bartholomew was it a meeting of two members of the Visible Church?
It all depends ... maybe. :-)
Did our Lord speak to his disciples in Greek? IAC, I do not think of all authority as authoritarn. The radical writer, C. Wirght Mills, said there are three forms of power: authority, manipulation and force. Authority requires consent. Manipulations forces the will as force the body. Peter and Paul followed Our Lord, and the Spirit. The Spirit gives authority.
The first written record of what he said is in greek, so greek it is.
The word as written is the authority. Humans are not just fallible, they are evil to the core, so that which is spoken by men must be filtered through the word.
If men are evil, then they are quite capable of misinterpreting even the written word especially if the words are in a language not their own. I assume you didn’t grow up speaking koine in your home.
To grossly misinterpret the written word requires intention. The Holy spirit guided the translators of the KJV/Geneva texts as surely as he guided all those that made their own copies of Paul’s letters out of a desire to spread his spirit inspired teaching.
I strongly believe in a living, active God, that will not allow his word to be lost. He protects it all to protect us; read Psalm 91 a few times.
I have to disagree completely with that. It is the majority text, not by just a plurality, but by thousands to one or two. To believe in a God that cannot protect his word is to diminish God to man's level. The protective patterns in those texts are far beyond anyone but God to produce; that is the clincher of the digital age; mathematical beauty far greater than the most powerful computers can produce.
Comparing God's perfect word with masonic deception like Smith's is blasphemy.
I do not doubt that the words are inspired, but I do not see why I should think that the committee that produced the KJB, or the translators of earlier English versions, should have enjoyed any more protection from error than St. Jerome when he translated much of the Bible into contemporary Latin. Jerome was not only fluent in Greek and Hebrew but had copies of the Scripture which were not available to English scholars working 1000 years later.
Yet they got it right in English, soon to be the primary language of the world, and Jerome’s vulgate had numerous apparently deliberate, politically derived errors, which were prevented from affecting the spread of the Gospel due to the death of latin. God has a plan.
God indeed has a plan, but if it was to make English the “primary language” of the world, he took long enough. The universality of the English language does not go back even 200 years while Latin was the language of the liturgy for most of Europe for a thousand years and for most of the Americas for the past five hundred. You do seem to think that the scholars appointed by King James were divinely inspired, but I have to reason to think so. For the ordinary person, the English of that Bible is almost as hard to comprehend as Latin is for a speaker of Italian. As an evangelixing medium, therefore, it definitely has its limits.
As an evangelizing medium, its without equal. It is the source of the translations of almost all of the asian and south american native language bibles that were done by the Wycliff group, along with many Pacific island dialects of the polynesian language. It is one of the Lord's most magnificent works.
So why do you need the English Bible? Wouldn’t it be better just to go to copies in the original Greek and.or Hebrew, as Jerome did and the translators of the KJB?
Because that's the Bible that God sent to us to restore his word. The ressurection of the church from the dark ages required the ressurection of his word across the world.
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