I know exactly what the Scriptures are. As do you. But from point a to point b, you are missing something. Not quite sure how to put this, but; God is the Father, not the dude in the Vatican. Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit, not inspired by greed and selfishness. The Church is a spiritual term for the body of Christ as a whole; not what people deem "the church" to be. The Church is not built with stone. The Church is not the richest most powerful corporate organization on the planet as the catholic church would have you believe. It's not defined by what people tell you or label you. It is defined by your relationship with Christ himself. So don't defend yourself with "cuz they told me so" , because when you stand before Christ himself and he opens the books and that's your answer, you are going to have problems. Because it won't cut it. And he will tell you "depart from me ye worker of iniquity, i never knew you". The gate may be wide, but the way is narrow. And if you stop treating God like he was a fast food window, like what can he give me today? and you would stop being the natural man and be the spiritual man, you could discern what is spiritual and what is not. And you would have confidence in salvation through Christ himself, rather than being on the internet attempting to justify beliefs which you know to be false and are proven to be false, time and time again. You would prefer to stay in sin. It is in man's nature. I can walk you to the door brother, but I can't walk through it for you. And if the catholic church is God's final authority.... you are by default saying I am not part of the church, and am a non-believer. And of that, I would tend to disagree.
In truth, I do not know you. I am not really saying anything about you, per se, or you personally. In general, there is a great deal of what I would describe as pseudo-intellecutalization of the Scriptures that comes from those who make an idol of them. The Scriptures are writings, ancient writings. Jesus didn't leave Scriptures, he left a Church. Before that, among the Jews, he left a priesthood. In both cases, God revealed himself through prophetic priests. Some of what they said was written down, much of it was not.
I understand the desire to privilege the written word over the institutional word, but I do not believe that God intended this. I certainly don't believe that God intended to leave everything up to the untrained and untutored scholarly and legal skills of individuals.
In any case, this is THE divide between your religion and mine. Yours goes back to some late medieval guy who had the absurd and ridiculous pretension that the plowboy could read and understand difficult writings as well as the consecrated clergy. THAT is why we end up with the pseudo-intellectualism of today.
It's not very interesting. You say that we both know exactly what the Scriptures are, but we do not. The authority that you believe reposes in Scripture, I do not. That authority was given by God to the Church (and to the High Priest of the Temple before the Church). God never vested that authority in a set of scrolls, and the set of writings cannot usurp the authority that God gave to the institution.
There can never be any meeting of the minds on this. All there can be is increasing levels of verbal abuse. The Scriptures are not the highest authority. The Church is. You will say the opposite. Because what I say on this score seems as obviously absurd to you as what you say is patently absurd to me, all we can do is circle each other and jab at each other until we finally get angry. And what good is that?
Since the Reformation there has been, and there remains, a deep seated animosity and increduilty across the Protestant/Catholic divide. This cannot be repaired and it cannot really be bridged, any more than the theological divide between Jews and Christians can ever be fully bridged. In the end, Christianity is Jewish blasphemy, and Judaism is the denial of the one true Christian God.
All that Jews and Christians can do, to get along, is to not speak very deeply about religion. To find common points and choose to live alongside each other on the common points, because if one goes any deeper, one encounters the frank blasphemy of the other, followed by abuse for it.
This is no less true of Catholics and Protestants, or Protestants and the Orthodox, or Catholics and the Orthodox. We are not of different religions because of trivial things. We are of different religions because of profoundly important things, things that cannot and will not ever be compromised.
We can cooperate as long as we don't delve into them, but if we MUST delve into them, then the truth is that we each think that the other two are some from of stubborn and arrogant heretic.
We really DON'T see God the same way at all, and we don't see the same path TO God. We can feign that we do, to keep the peace, but when it comes right down to it, when pressed, the amity falls apart and the real, serious, differences in theology lead to hostility and, ultimately, outright abuse and warfare.
You spent a paragraph and a few posts telling me I'm wrong. I'm not, you are. Your whole way of looking at God and the world is cracked and deficient. It's as obvious to me as what is obvious to you about my way is obvious to you. There's no amount of spinning words that can fix that. Protestant and Catholic are as different as English and French, or Arab and Jew, or Southerner and Yankee - and the lengthy history of warfare and enmity is something that can be let alone, but it is never forgotten, and each's latent sense of superiority over the other remains, and is kindled anew when things become fraught.
Look over the pages of Christian Forums, and you do not see brothers striving together towards the light. You see brothers striving like Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau. We, you and I, have not been brought closer at all by our attempt to communicate. You've told me in various ways why my view of God and his revelation is deficient. And I just shake my head and wonder why in the world you think you're so smart about such things, such that you really believe that you have any capacity to lecture me, a Catholic, about any of it at all.
There is nothing good coming out of any of this. All the moreso on a thread in which a book that was rejected by the Catholic AND Orthodox (except for Ethiopian) AND all the Protestant Churches long ago.
There is apparently a deep-seated desire among many Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox to take up the sword of our ancestors and refight and relitigate the sources of division between us. In the past, nobody won. In the present, nobody won. I suppose we are paying it forward into the future, making certain, by our present obnoxious conduct, that Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant cannot and do not stand together, or like each other, or respect each other. That way, in our angry disunity, we can all slide into the mouth of Islam and secularism. But if that is the way it is to be, then that is the way it is to be. Most Protestants would rather be secular than Catholic, and back in the day the Orthodox frankly said "Better the turban of the Sultan than the miter of the Pope", and so that's exactly what they got - and given all of the history since, they would probably choose the same thing again.
The differences between our religions are unresolvable. We're not going to resolve them by fighting with each other. I'm of a mind to just drop it, because if I reply point by point to what you have written, I have to attack YOU, because the particular nature of Protestantism is that all of the earnestly held beliefs come from the logic and reasoning of just one mind - each particular Protestant - so it's really your mind against mine - every single time - when a Protestant talks to a Catholic. In general, Catholics don't find Protestants to be very smart, so it doesn't get anywhere but to a fight.
And why bother? It's too early and takes too much energy. And nobody ever convinced anybody of anything that way.
So let's go our separate ways. My lesson learned is what I already knew: communication across religious lines is a useless, pointless, aggravating effort best left alone. Your lesson learned is whatever you've learned by it. I won't characterize.
