Onenow, surely you know other Christians interpret that Jesus built His Church on the words of Peter, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” God’s blessings and peace to along your faith journey.
Yes but Matt,
when did those Christians start interpreting and by whose authority?
The Holy Spirit cannot teach against Himself.
Millions of Catholic (and orthodox) Christians, in reading the same Scriptures, contemplating the same historical traditions and writings, and guided by the Spirit through much prayer, have reached
a different, and a much ‘older’ interpretation.
Do you really think that God is so ‘unsporting’ that He has given us an authority of
any kind (and this goes for whether you believe that The Church, The Bible, The Holy Spirit, or “The Conscience” is your authority) that cannot **BE an authority? **
What would be the point of
having an authority if you weren’t
certain of it?
If the authority gave
you one ‘truth’ and somebody else a completely different one?
How unGod like is the concept of a God who doesn’t ‘care’, a God who gives different truths, a God who just sits in the clouds and expects people to pick from amongst literally thousands of so-called truths the one ‘real truth’. . .
It goes against everything that Scripture and Tradition and history itself tell us. It goes against our deepest instincts of reason.
See, here’s the thing. I perfectly understand that I cannot grasp the entire truth about God, because I’m not God. We all know that as human beings, we are never going to be able to grasp the entire truth about anything.
BUT. . .there is a difference between saying, “I will never be able to understand the whole truth about what the Trinity is while I am on earth” (which is perfectly true) and saying, "There is no WAY to know the TRUTH about the Trinity.’
And that’s a mistake I think a lot of people are making --the mistake in thinking that because a concept is beyond our grasp in TOTAL, that what we CAN grasp in our human intellect is something that is capable of several different but ‘equal’ truths.
Rather, while we will not know on earth the fullness of what the Trinity is, we know for SURE that it is Three Divine Persons in One God.
Sadly, Matt, we have Christian brothers and sisters who won’t even accept this truth.
I have the greatest respect for Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses for example, and I’m the first to say that they try to follow a very Christian PATH in many ways, but they are not themselves truly Christian because they refuse to accept a fundamental dogma of what a Christian IS. If I claim to follow Christ but the Christ I follow is 'some good guy but not a god", then I’m not really following the Real Christ. I’m following a fake Christ. The fake Christ might have some ‘good qualities’ but ultimately he is fake, and I’m in huge danger of following some of the false aspects to my downfall if I ignore the truth of who Christ really is.
It matters. We can’t be indifferent, we can’t be relativists. . .we have to seek the truth and we have to know that the truth is something which is fundamentally real, solid, unchangeable and capable of being understood sufficiently by those who seek it.
