Soul_Golem said:
The definition of infallibility is: do it because I said so. Successful Christians need no such authority, because their authority comes from God. There is also a different from the Word and infallibility. The Word, as stated in the Bible, is equal to God. The notion that a man can be infallible is no different than making that claim of equality to the Word. Not everything the men who put together the Bible was straight out of the mouth of God. Yet, the Bible makes the distinction between what it teaches and what the Word says. That is what the entire religious conflict stems from. Just read your Bible, it is full of doubt that comes from righteous men called to serve God. Moses himself doubted what God would want to do with him, but after doing what he was told by God he did not pursue infallibility.
Throughout the Bible, we have men who said "Thus saith the Lord" - Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Paul, etc. In essense they were say "Do as I told to do", because they we speaking the word of God, that it, God was speaking through them. They had the gift of prophecy, which is more than foretelling, it was forthtelling. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God's revelation through humans would cease after the first century. The pope is the continuation of God revealing us His will to us.
If God has not continued to reveal His will to us, the following items has not been revealed to us because the Bible is silent on these issues?
1. Bible never says anything against polygamy. In fact, Moses, David, and Solomon had more than one wife. The closest thing is Paul say an elder must have only one wife. but there is no command in the entire Bible against poygamy. Protesatants are hold on to something that was decreed by the Catholic Church and is not in the Bible.
2. The Bible itself does not provide a list of what should be in the Bible. After several councils it was decreed by the pope 405 AD. They Holy Spirit guided those Councils and the Pope to five us the Bible as we have it now. For instance, these Councils went through over 20 gospels and determined that only four (Matthew Mark, Luke and John) were from God. They rejected others such as the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, etc. This is why the Bible today does not have these latter so-called gospels in it. As a Catholic, I have complete trust in the process of canonization that went on in the fourth century. I believe that the Holy Spirit guided the whole process. But I do not see how Protestants can. If Protestantism was consistent, Protestants should reject the canonization of scripture and start from scratch. Christian bookstores would not sell Bibles, but instead, Matthew, Mark, Romans, Galations, Revelation, etc. as individual books, along with the Gospel of Peter, Gospel of May Magdalene. It would be left up to each individual Christian what is part of canon and what is not. The what be no church telling us what we should accept as being in the Bible.
3. If we were to going only on what the Bible says, we would be worshipping God on Saturday. There is no explicit command in the Bible to worship God on Sunday.
4. There is no explicit command against human cloning in the Bible. So if we limit ourselves to what the Bible says, we cannot say human cloning is wrong.
