Replies

You are misdirecting. We are not talking about how “individuals” conduct their personal lives, but rather how they worship their faith. This is a doctrine issue.

Yet another example, in spectacular shallow Bible Christianity!

The Church went “off-track?” Yes, the Holy Spirit suddenly took flight.

Maybe you ought to read up on what the early Church Fathers wrote.

In the year 110 A.D., not even fifteen years after John’s Book of Revelation was written, while on his way to execution St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote:

“Where the bishop is present, there let the congregations gather, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church”. The Church believes that when the bishops speak as teachers, Christ speaks; for he said to them: “He who hears you, hears me; and he who rejects you, rejects me” (Lk 10, 16).

St. Paul in his letters also warns the faithful to hold fast to the tradition they received: “We command you, brothers, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to avoid any brother who wanders from the straight path and does not follow the tradition you received from us” (2 Th 3, 6).

The tradition of the Catholic Mass as theological and historical scholars will tell you (of course, we don’t expect Bible Christians to be familiar with any of that, would we?) was celebrated by the early disciples of Christ and the Church fathers.

Truth be told, such towering theologians of the caliber of Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, and Benedict (whose works are studied in colleges and universities around the world), to say nothing of such Catholic intellectual giants like Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, would find Protestantism today has been reduced to a crude caricature of what Christ taught his disciples, what they learned, and practiced, and what was handed down through to the successors of St. Peter.

Today Protestantism and Episcopalianism as are many mainline Evangelical denominations in a state of evil rut by claiming scriptural warrant for the ordination of married gays and lesbian pastors. But the rot had its inception from the very beginnings of Protestantism where it soon collapsed into warring offshoots and factions.

Thus one can hopscotch across town through half a dozen corner street Bible-Christian churches: a First Baptist; a First AME; a First Presbyterian; a First Methodist; a First Unitarian; a first Emmanuel until one settles in a congregation that is more in line with one’s “own” interpretations of scripture.

In short, every Tom, Dick, and Harry and their “milkmaid” (a term used by Luther himself) gets a freelance hand to know the Word of God and ironically from a Bible whose canonical texts were first infallibly authenticated under Petrine authority in the Synod of Rome AD 382.

Protestants should at least concede a point which Martin Luther, their religion’s founder, also conceded, namely, that the Catholic Church safeguarded and identified the Bible: He wrote: “We are obliged to yield many things to the Catholics – (for example), that they possess the Word of God, which we received from them; otherwise, we should have known nothing at all about it.”

That infallibility and the authority to teach ONE truth as Christ commanded in His Great Commission to “go Forth and TEACH all nations” This is to teach ONE truth and assured to Peter: “And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.”

Why Protestant pastors will not accept Petrine authority may have its reasons elsewhere. Should they do so, they will have to close up their ministries and with that goes their lucrative source of income which they have amassed for themselves and their families.

Easter Service becomes a vapid sunrise picnic on the beach singing “Alleluias””Hosannas” holding hands and doing an early morning Kumabaya. Little do they understand, that without belief in the Eucharist there is no Easter, there is no Resurrection to believe. Indeed, it is a travesty of a service. As John 6:53 recounts:

“Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.”

John in 11:53 complements this when Christ told Martha:

“Jesus said to her: I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live.”

Even renowned Protestant theologians and pastors have believed this central feature and converted to Catholicism. Here are three examples:

1. Ulf Ekman, the founder of Scandinavia’s biggest Bible school, with a congregation of some 4000 individuals, converted to Catholicism because his theological inquiry confirmed for him the indispensability of the Catholic sacraments.

2. Francis J. Beckwith, a “born-again” evangelical, a tenured professor at Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Tex, was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, an association of 4,300 Protestant theologians resigned and joined the Catholic Church. One blogger likened it to Hulk Hogan’s defection from the World Wrestling Federation to the rival World Championship Wrestling league.

3. Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, was a pre-eminent Lutheran theologian in America. He knew his Bible-text and history like no other Protestant. When he converted to Catholicism he said, “I have long believed that the Roman Catholic Church is the fullest expression of the church of Christ through time.”

The Bible Christians here on FR are reduced playing neophyte “internet” theologian by telling us how Paul tried to “correct” Peter etc., or this or that, or attacking the Eucharist, or the Sacraments; or Marian devotions with incoherent and out-of-context reference to scripture. This is the shallow nonsense of Bible Christians and why now scores of Protestant theologians have decamped at great personal sacrifice and consider Protestantism awash in sheer rubbish.

Thus the early Church historian J. N. D. Kelly, a Protestant, writes, “[W]here in practice was [the] apostolic testimony or tradition to be found? . . . The most obvious answer was that the apostles had committed it orally to the Church, where it had been handed down from generation to generation. . . . Unlike the alleged secret tradition of the Gnostics, it was entirely public and open, having been entrusted by the apostles to their successors, and by these in turn to those who followed them, and was visible in the Church for all who cared to look for it” (Early Christian Doctrines, 37).

Don’t take my word. Here’s one original source. St. Irenaeus:

“It is possible, then, for everyone in every church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the apostles which has been made known to us throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the apostles and their successors down to our own times, men who neither knew nor taught anything like what these heretics rave about” (Against Heresies 3:3:1 [A.D. 189]).