Posted on 12/26/2011 6:08:22 PM PST by rzman21
In my experience and the experience of those I know and those I read and hear about, the Holy Spirit doesn't works that way...
First thing is, you don't interpret the scripture...God does the interpreting...
What the Holy Spirit does is lead you to more scripture that will confirm or deny what you are researching...And more likely than not, he will do it with far more than just a couple of verses to get you good ground to stand on...
The key is not understanding what you are reading...The key is believing what your are reading...God will provide the understanding with the scripture to back it up...
Sola scriptura is correct-as the Holy Spirit (God Himself) who never contradicts Himself will lead the person reading to either believe or reject against God’s will Christ. I certainly do ~not~ need the Catholic Church to tell me what the plain words of the Gospel says!~
>>What verse EXPLICITLY says Sola Scriptura?
What verse lists the canon of scripture?
And what convicts you that you have the Holy Spirit guiding you and not just your own conscience?
I don’t know where you get that anyone is discounting the word of God. We Catholics believe that all scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit.
We also believe the Holy Spirit guides His Church in properly understanding the Word, as pointed out in the article, to avoid the confusion of doctrines (Doctrines of men) in the hundreds or even thousands of Protestant sects, none of which agree on many details, and which all claim to be based on Holy Scripture alone.
I also converted from being a “sola” believer. All the points in the article are familiar. I can’t say that any one sealed the deal for me; but one that stands out in memory is the fact that he early Christians did not have New Testaments to read.
>>As did I. (From what sect?) Most Protestants, however, are unwilling to think critically about Sola Scriptura, I think, due to an ancient hatred of the Catholic Church.
My entire family is still on the other side of the fence.
Hitler was a twisted individual in more ways than one, and Freud’s fraud of a “psychoanalysis” would have titillated rather than offended him, from everything that I’ve read upon the matter. Maybe a public rationalization along those lines was plausible, but the man himself would have been privately fascinated.
Hitler was a quarter Jewish himself. He idealized that which he was not, blonde haired, blue eyed and tall. He fancied himself an artist but was repeatedly rejected, took to hanging out in the beer halls as a result and fell in with radicals. He was born, baptized and raised a Catholic, but rejected that as an adult, rejected all Christian belief in fact, but did recognize the political usefulness of manipulating the majority Protestant population through their church.
He was confused, sexually ambiguous, embittered and alienated. He eventually found, though, that he had a gift of compelling speech. All the self hatred morphed into a racial and national “pride” drummed up out of some psychosexual nonsense that he, himself embraced, along with occult in the form of Teutonic paganism. Sounds rather like Freud on crack to me, as opposed to a rejection of it.
Therefore, that he jumped on the bandwagon of a “Christian Socialist Movement” at that time, much as he attempted to coopt and pervert the church for his own ends later after attaining power, is no surprise at all to those who have looked at his history and how he operated from early adulthood onward. Public piety, private perversion on a scale seldom seen.
He was a mess in every sense of the word, but apparently quite the amazing public speaker. Right place, right time, ruthless and amoral to the point of demonic.
The remarkable thing is how much those non-Catholic Christians who believe in the role of Sacred Tradition have managed to share in common with Catholicism.
Whereas, Sola Scriptura believers are all over the map on basic tenets of the faith ranging from the Unitarians on one end of the spectrum to the Lutherans on the opposite extreme.
But the one thing that undergirds all Protestant theology is anti-Catholicism, so I think it is proper to call them all devout anti-Catholics.
First thing is, you don’t interpret the scripture...God does the interpreting
>>That’s why you have 10s of thousands of competing interpretations of the scriptures among Sola Scriptura believers.
What confidence do you have that God is interpreting your Bible objectively speaking?
His name was John...
>>Unitarianism began in the 16th century and arose from the Anabaptist movement and its radical interpretation of Sola Scriptura.
............
This is one tenth right. Yes unitarianism branched from Poland into england.
However, it gained legitimacy in the english speaking world through Issac Newton. Who was a fervid believer in the arian heresy...why? because it was the logical outcome of cartesian logic. He was a prolific writer on the subject. Because Newton was considered to be something of a demigod in the English speaking world—the brightest minds for nearly two hundred year figured if the master believed that Jesus was just a man — it must be so. Heck you can find Newton referred to in theological tracts of the 19th century.
However, that’s just the English speaking world. Descartes made his way to the continental religious thinking through the higher criticism school. This school treated the bible as a myth like greek myths or norse myths. If you examine all miracles including those of Moses and Jesus as myths then of course mana from heaven are perhaps quail. And of course Jesus is just a man.
The higher criticism school took over the protestant seminaries in Europe in the 1850’s (at the same time the atheists took over the philosophy departments there.) The higher criticism school made the crossing to American liberal seminaries as early as the 1890’s but didn’t fully take them over until the 1940’s.
In the catholic church, Arianism shows up among progressive catholics in the guise of Liberation theology which both Pope John Paul II and Benedict have strongly opposed
“But the one thing that undergirds all Protestant theology is anti-Catholicism,”
Pure nonsense
But Sola Scriptura paved the way fro Decartes by elevating the individual’s conscience over understanding the Bible rather than the Pope or the Catholic Church.
Fr. John Whiteford, a convert Russian Orthodox priest observes, about Sola Scriptura and Descartes.
Protestant scholars (both “liberals” and “conservatives” have erred in that they have misapplied empirical methodologies to the realm of theology and biblical studies. I use the term “Empiricism” to describe these efforts. I am using this term broadly to refer to the rationalistic and materialistic worldview that has possessed the Western mind, and is continuing to spread throughout the world. Positivist systems of thought (of which Empiricism is one) attempt to anchor themselves on some basis of “certain” knowledge. 11 Empiricism, strictly speaking, is the belief that all knowledge is based on experience, and that only things which can be established by means of scientific observation can be known with certainty. Hand in hand with the methods of observation and experience, came the principle of methodological doubt, the prime example of this being the philosophy of Rene Descartes who began his discussion of philosophy by showing that everything in the universe can be doubted except ones own existence, and so with the firm basis of this one undoubtable truth (”I think, therefore I am”) he sought to build his system of philosophy. Now the Reformers, at first, were content with the assumption that the Bible was the basis of certainty upon which theology and philosophy could rest. But as the humanistic spirit of the Enlightenment gained in ascendancy, Protestant scholars turned their rationalistic methods on the Bible itself—seeking to discover what could be known with “certainty” from it. Liberal Protestant scholars have already finished this endeavor, and having “peeled back the onion” they now are left only with their own opinions and sentimentality as the basis for whatever faith they have left.
http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/tca_solascriptura.aspx
One could also argue that Protestantism is a subset of Nominalism, which had an equal influence on Decartes, as the following essay on the consequences of the Protestant Revolution:
Eventually, the philosophy of Ockham led to the Rationalism of Rene Descartes and Goffried Leibnitz; it would find its logical conclusion in the Pantheism of Baruch Spinoza; and it would greatly contribute to the uprise of Social Materialism (modern capitalism) as formulated by John Locke, David Hume, and Auguste Comte. Further, we know that John Locke became a great influence on the thinking of such philosophic “giants” as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill of England, as well as Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau of France. 29
Pure nonsense
>>How so?
The Church Fathers, the Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox teach X, so Protestants teach Y. Logical deduction therefore suggests that anti-Catholicism is the tie that binds for all Protestants in their belief in Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide.
Totally agree.
A few years ago I was visiting in Northern Germany (formerly East Germany) There was a huge family get together for the friend I was traveling with, many of the family were in their 80’s and 90’s.
It was absolutely astonishing as these old German women told their stories of how as children, they ran ran their homes along the Baltic Sea, family dispersed and never returned. It took over a year for the family to reunite. That was prior to WW I.
The old women were singing beautiful Christian hymns in German, when all of a sudden, their younger brother who was across the table from me started crying. He stated, “That was the hymn we sang as I was inducted into Hitler’s army. (He was on a Panzer tank crew, was captured by the Russians on May 8, 1945, while walking home from the front, sent to Siberia and allowed to leave Siberia in 1952 to return to Germany as a high ranking police officer(spy))
This was the first time I realized that Hitler sold the war to the German people as a Christian war. Sure opened my eyes!
You said “But the one thing that undergirds all Protestant theology is anti-Catholicism”.
The one thing that undergirds Protestants theology is that Jesus is the Son of God, he died for our sins, and we all have access to God through Jesus.
We don’t need a priest, pastor, minister, saint, deacon or anyone else to intercede on our behalf.
Despite what they claim in Rome, it is not the center of the universe.
And while I am familiar with the writings of Watchman Nee and those like him, I do not see anywhere in the scritpures where it is advocated that we seek such a dept of spiritual enlightment...
As Watchman Nee points out, his initial training and education into the spiritual realm was long before he became a Christian and did not involve Jesus Christ...
You start getting intimate with the spirit world, you're getting way beyond where I am willing to go...
I am completely skeptical of anyone who comes along with claims of the knowledge of the spirit world to begin with and anyone has those claims had better have the witness of Jesus Christ...Or we will know who their real father is...
The study of the soul is really fascinating...I've delved into it a little but not enough to know anything...
Who and what is Jesus Christ in your belief, tired&retired?
We don’t need a priest, pastor, minister, saint, deacon or anyone else to intercede on our behalf.
Despite what they claim in Rome, it is not the center of the universe.
>>You just made my point for me,thank you.
No I didn’t make your point for you. The world does not revolve around you. My pointing it out doesn’t make me anti-catholic.
Jesus stands alone as the Word of God.
See St. John Chapter 1 Verse 1 - In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Jesus’ life and death alone created Christianity forever without his followers ever needing to read a single word of the Bible. Catholics understand this - sola scriptura protestants do not. Our Lord never specified that His words be recorded.
You list the 10s of thousands of competing interpretations and I'll go thru them for ya...
Is that how your religion got you??? Sensationislism??>
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