Rescued One
...yet not I, but the grace of God that is with me
- Dec 12, 2002
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Agreed. There are a few on here who claim scriptural superiority and I have challenges them to back up their theology with scriptures that show their point of view. The ones I have an issue with will not do this and just claim God has told them through scripture and they are right and you are wrong. You can post scriptures that clearly contradict what they are saying and they still do not accept it.
I am always open to people believing something different to me, as long as it is in line with scripture and they can show that. If its down to a difference in interpretation of the Word I can accept to disagree but that we interpret it differently. Sometimes I will even agree with them if it proves my interpretation (including what I have been taught) is incorrect. After all, we are all fallible, only God is not.
To be more specific Jesus said that.
Did you know that though you consider doing so when confronted by the challenging theology of others pious, you actually undermine and falsify them by patronizing their faith and position.
This actually leads to the opposite of what you probably thought, you're helping the secularization of Christianity all together.
If theology falls into the fallpit where there's no room for challenges and/ or need for good reasons to uphold doctrine and normative theology without being ostracized, then in the end Christianity will end up as a private matter, a faith where everyone claim orthodoxy in their interpretation of scripture and no theology is open for discussion.
If all Christians saw theology this way then we'd face a completely privatised and secular, subjective religion.
The reason why this is the case?
If no-one's allowed to question any part of what constitutes your faith in God then the door into a fruitful theological discussion is forever closed.
So, to all you in here (and there are several of you) who seek to toss your own subjective interpretation of scripture on others and do your best to strangle discussion by claiming superior insight in scripture.
You end up in that ditch, you run the errand of the world, a world who seek to undermine Christianity and shatter the faithful and spreading them around, cut of the rest of the Christian world. The world wants to see Christianity torn apart and privatised to the level where even evangelizing people will be ilegalised.
Sola Scriptura with every man as interpreter can easily be the end of Christianity as a cultural and moral voice in a increasingly anti Christian world.
The reason this deception that a mere lay can understand the great depth in scripture has to do with the vacuum made possible by pluralism not any reformers.
Correlation does not imply causation - WikipediaI hear what you have said, and it makes a lot of sense. Here is my problem with it:
My own Church, the Catholic, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of people (maybe more) over centuries, for their refusal to submit the authority of the Church on various matters. This was not resolved by the Church "changing its mind", but through a massive European civil war - the wars of the Reformation - that killed a third of Germany, and that ultimately ended with the state assuming supervisory powers over the Church's power to kill. The Church was never persuaded theologically to back down from its positions, it was forced down and neutered by external authority. Old news? In present day news, tens of thousands of children, heavily skewed towards young boys, were raped and molested by the priesthood over the course of decades and decades, and the Church had no internal mechanism to see it or address it. Once again, it was not theological authorities or persuasion or anything "Of the Church" that changed this, it was the power of the civil police and prosecutorial services, in country after country, that, once again, had to move in and forcibly impose order upon many of the clergy. The Church hierarchy, for its part, served (and to an extent still serves) to protect many individual clergymen, and the financial resources of the Church), from fully bearing the responsibility for these crimes and sins.
Simply put, the Catholic Church has proven itself over the course of centuries to be untrustworthy with power, and unable to supervise itself. When left to its own devices, it resorts to power and claims of authority to silence criticism and obscure crimes. THAT is why the Catholic Church cannot be wholly trusted, and why people cannot seriously cede their final authority to judge things to the Church. Those who were too trusting of the Church in modern times had their children raped.
Now, that's the way it IS, and there is no sugar coating it. And it's WHY your plea - to simply cede authority and ground to the institutional Church - does not work. The Church has already failed so spectacularly and terribly, over so many centuries, that it's impossible for thinking people to trust it. Catholics still listen to it, and reason out what the Church teaches, but gone - long gone - is the notion that the Church is deeply invested with supernatural wisdom and even perfection. We have ALL seen that this is not so, and we've seen what happens to people who trust it too much: they get raped, and the Church defends the rapists! This is so, and it cannot be gainsayed. It is the REASON why your suggestion cannot work for Catholics: our church is not good enough in its behavior over centuries to be granted that sort of final authority over us that would be required for your ideology to work, for Catholics.
The moral flaws and murderous behavior is mirrored in the Protestant Churches also. The old ones - Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, older forms of Calvinist Reformed, tore a swath of bloody hell and burnt flesh across Europe on their side of the wars of the Reformation. Nobody excuses the Catholics for what they did, other than some Catholics who turn a blind eye to it, but few hold the old Protestant Churches to the same standard and point out their utter barbarity and rotten fruit: 100,000 "witches" burnt in Germany, 20,000 burnt by the Kirk in Scotland, the killings of Catholics - particularly clergy - all across England for the "treason" of remaining Catholic, the bloody depredations of the Presbyterian "plantation" in Ireland, and Cromwell's barbaric campaigns there. It is very bad stuff, every bit as bad as what the Catholics are (properly) accused of doing in those days. And this, mind you, was all intellectually led and justified by the INSTITUTIONAL churches. It was not individuals running off with their own interpretations, but whole movements led from the top.
Anabaptists and "low church" evangelicals, in Europe were mostly victims, not predators, but in America, the largest Baptist group, the Southern Baptists, bear that name because they were staunch, stubborn theological defenders of black slavery and segregation. They have since modified their theology, but that stinking fruit of theological evil was not the brainchild of some individual minds running amok: it was the spiritual position of the largest Protestant Church in America.
Similiarly, in the 1970s the Mormon God changed his mind about black people, and suddenly it was no longer theologically correct to exclude them.
All of these crimes against humanity were perpetrated from the TOP of the Church downward. They were not local symptoms of individuals breaking free of authority. It was Top Down evil - the very top to which you urge we look.
Swimming against this tide is one counterexample. One. Single. Counterexample. One church that came out of the Reformation Era that came to have substantial side that never murdered people over religion - not ever - that always opposed slavery, that never justified predations against American Indians for their land. And THIS particular Church literally has no organized theology at all. Everything is left to the individual moved by the Holy Spirit. They are not "Bible Alone" - the Bible is not their go to, the Holy Spirit is, on an individual level. They make no major decisions without unanimity, and they wait for it, discussing things, calling on the Holy Spirit to "cover" them in their meetings. The only old Christian sect with NO blood on their hands, at all, is the Quakers, and they are the very antithesis of "turn to Church authority" that you suggest. Their fruit has been pretty good too: they brought down slavery in the British Empire, considered men and women equal centuries before anybody else did, and are even the source of the "single pricing" system we have in our commerce today (as opposed to the "Arab bazaar" haggling style of commerce which was the way it was done before). Because the Quakers could always be counted upon to give the same price to all, people quickly learned that they could send children or mentally weak farmhands to go buy supplies from the Quaker merchants - something that could never be done with other merchants: they'd rob the weak-minded blind in the haggling. The Quaker one-price-for-all, great or small, approach was HIGHLY OFFENSIVE to everybody else in commerce at the time, and all sorts of efforts were made to outlaw it and crush it out. It won out because customers everywhere overwhelmingly favor it. Now it is the norm. Thank the Quakers for that.
In terms of BEHAVIOR, the Christians who are farthest from your model: the Quakers - who individually rely entirely upon direct revelation from the Holy Spirit, and collectively wait on the Spirit to give them unanimity - are by far and without question the most Christian of all of the Christianities. There is no other Christianity of the 16th Century Era of any substantial size that has a track record that doesn't include murder and oppression. And yet the Quakers are not only not beholden to a Church hierarchy for their theology, they are not Sola Scripturalists either. They are, for all practical purposes, Spirit Alone people, on an individual level - with neither organized church nor written Scripture as final authority. The individual himself, listening directly to God speaking to him through the Holy Spirit, is the final authority of every aspect of the faith. The purpose of the "Meeting" - where they traditionally sit in silence, with no preacher and no sermon and no readings, only rising as individuals to speak "when the spirit moves them" - is for the Spirit to move many of them to a common purpose, and thereby be able to collectively move to help people.
And THAT approach, the utter antithesis of what you have said, has brought more practical benefit to the world (the end of slavery in the British Empire, women's suffrage, the single pricing system), without any of the moral authority-killing murder and torture, than any other Christian Church of any since in Western Europe or the Americas in the 16th Century.
"You will know them by their fruits", Jesus said. The Quakers have, by far, the best fruit of any Christianity of the last 500 years. And they have no murders to their Church's discredit. That's the most powerful counter-argument I would make to what you have said.
The organized, institutional Churches that rely on turning to theologians for final authority have an abysmal track record of injustice and sin and have produced some fruit so bad that one has to draw lines under history and say "But we're DIFFERENT now."
The Quakers don't have to do that, and they have no final theological authority in their church at all, neither a body of men NOR the Bible. Just God speaking to them individually.
Judged by outcomes, that seems to be the best way. Take book and building out of it and have individuals turn to God and call upon him, with no authority to bind each other at all, only the ability to persuade, as the same Holy Spirit moves from mind to mind.
Judged by the fruit, and by the comparative track record of violence and sin, it is impossible to gainsay the Quaker approach.
Because of the bitter fruit of the past 500 years, it is likewise impossible to place ultimate faith in the wisdom of theologians in the church hierarchies, because the results have been so bloodyhanded and evil, over and over again. It works for transmitting organizational power. It does not, however, work at transmitting the peace of Christ.
Essentially - I have heard your argument, but I must respectfully dissent. The Quakers are the proven best model for approaching God. Our own Church has really made a hash of it, and still can't get out of its own way. The more Quakerlike we all become, the better.
If you don't like non-Catholicism, we won't force you to leave your pope.
I can personally affirm that the God promised zOE-life is far superior to anyone's "sola scriptura" and definitely beyond "Holy Tradition". With out life there is no understanding of Scripture. They remain but lifeless words on a page left unlived and unbreathed!
The theology of man is foolishly trying to limit thee infinite of God's Word into finite principles of systematics that cannot breath or live beyond their hierarchal limited resources of their goofy ideas.
That includes the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church and all Reformisms. Which is everyone!
Thee, of God, given and promised zOE is so far beyond man's invented theology, that it runs circles around them and wonders why everyone is stuck in the lifeless filthy mud, completely useless, and going nowhere!
God didn't put you there: theology did!
Q: What unites as one? A: God's Life, God's Love, God's breathed Word.
Q: What divides, and continues to divine us? A: theology!
Here is what it comes down to for many of these folks: pride. The idea that they should be under the spiritual authority or guidance of another is offensive to them. They say that our Lord Jesus is their authority. They say that Sacred Scripture is their authority. But they will never once say that a church or a pastor is their authority, because putting themselves under the authority of a church or a pastor does not allow them to be in control and to believe anything and everything that they want to believe, all the while claiming to be guided by the Holy Sprit as a pretense.
Interesting you mention this. Christianity Today (an Evangelical publication) published an interview with a NT scholar from Notre Dame university. He elaborated a bit more on your quoted statement and I think for a Catholic theologian gave a very balanced assessment.
The Freedom and Chaos of Sola Scriptura
One thing to consider for your OP is many who post for or against Sola Scriptura usually have a modern view which is actually what I call "solo meo."
The Reformers did not disparage the teaching office, nor did they toss out councils and synods. For example, the Westminster Confession is a good source to review the definition of Sola Scriptura.
Westminster Confession of Faith
And stabat explains the reason is that Christianity is made so unappealing.
The first quote you make tries to imply an elect predestined, which is how you context "the sheep" as if to say they are who they are, and our need to radiate the good news has nothing to do with it.
That's not " God said" . "That's phoebe said, proof texting words from scripture, to support her apriori position.
I can select words out of context to support any doctrine I like. And many do that.
So in presenting your position as " God said" - perhaps you should say " I think God meant this.... by this.."
Which is stabats point. Presentation of opinion matters.
To be more specific Jesus said that.
Now, I'm asking this honestly, but since you mention "hate" for the Catholic Church as proof that it is "Christ's true Church", what do you make of what the Catholic Church has done throughout history?
You have a great misunderstanding of what Sola Scriptura is.
Sola Scriptura is not "every man as interpreter".
So what you are positing, God is incapable of speaking with clarity and perspicuity, and normal, everyday people are too dumb to understand scripture. Many of the Apostles were common, everyday people, so where were the scholars that interpreted scripture for them?
Your god is too small.
Your comment proves Stabats general issue.
How does theological nitpicking help? And why the combative tone in many posts?
In this case: What was the point in your comment? How does it affect the conversation an iota? Do you do deny the deity of Jesus? Do you regard Jesus' word as any less or more significant than God the Father? Do you think Father and Son disagree on it? I cannot think you believe any of those.
So why say it at all? Why then pick a theological nit that has no effect on the authority of what was said, when the question is not WHAT was said, we all read, but interpretation and deduction from it. So why bother to say "It was Jesus, not God", other than try to find one more issue of disagreement?
THAT is the point being made generally by Stabat.
How does theological nitpicking help?
Anyway....we have laboured the point.
If the talks on the tone of theological squabbling is a problem, emblazoned as it is with lexical equivalent statements of " I AM RIGHT, CATHOLICS ARE WRONG", then clearly derailing talks about the tone of theological squabbling are even more perverse than the squabbling.
The entire reformation was based on the idea that "every milkmaid" as Luther put it, "the priesthood of all believers" so called, can interpret scripture and have their own doctrine, when freed of the shackles of early church tradition, so as Luther said it "there are now as many doctrines as heads" as 10000 flavours and counting show.
So since there can only be one truth, all who push their own version should recognise theirs is only one interpretation - so stating " I think it means" rather than "it means" when so at odds with the early church, is likely to be a more productive discussion.
There are more productive things to do.
So other than repeat I agree with stabat.
I am out of this thread.
the whole concept of believing in the Trinity dogma for example makes no sense if one claim to reject theology and just read Scripture, yet most such people do believe in the Trinity, that is highly inconsistent...
What about Jesus' baptism by John? How does that not support the "concept" of the Trinity?
What about Jesus' baptism by John? How does that not support the "concept" of the Trinity?
It does point to the Trinity.What about Jesus' baptism by John? How does that not support the "concept" of the Trinity?
Over and over again we tell you that there has been and still is fallible and sinful men among us and that includes Our clergy as well and time and time again you forwards this rethorical question.
What makes this so hard to remember and/ or to grasp?
no one has ever claimed that catholic clergy are sinless...
It does point to the Trinity.
On the other hand that passage could also be used to support the adoptionism heresy or even Nestorianism.
You will recall it was you who sugested that the hate shown toward the Catholic Church proves that it is indeed the "one true Church", so my question is, what does the hate shown by the Catholic Church (to the point of murdering thousands who would no agree with what it taught) prove about it?
No it was not, it was Gracia who suggested it...
Luther was a scholar and way to intelligent to hand over the important task of scriptural interpretation to random bakers, carvers and farmers...
You didnt understand my post, how can you ever understand scripture??
Redemption doesnt nessisarily have to do with understanding and knowledge, but if one thing it has to do with humility and obediance
thats where the pride of the lone interpreter may and I repeat MAY come in the way of said persons salvation.
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