How Should we Explain Colossians 2:13 to a Protestant

[adrift]

. Catholics however reject the belief that Protestants are in the same Church.

You are incorrect in this statement from the Catechism:

838 "The Church knows that she is joined in many ways to the baptized who are honored by the name of Christian, but do not profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the successor of Peter."322 Those "who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in a certain, although imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church."323 With the Orthodox Churches, this communion is so profound “that it lacks little to attain the fullness that would permit a common celebration of the Lord’s Eucharist.”

 

[pablope]

It all comes down to the Divinity of Christ. If my Church begins teaching false doctrines I will leave it instantly, just as Luther felt the CC was doing.

Who decides what is false doctrine-you (the individual) or someone else?

And if someone else…who is that someone else?

And if you decide…what is your basis for deciding what is false doctrine and what is not?

Are you infallible when you decide what is false and what is not?

As for Luther…he could have followed the example before him of another reformer…Catherine of Sienna.

When Luther broke from the CC…he broke from the authority that can make his desired reforms take hold and take root. Look at what happend after he broke off and made himself the authority…his friends disagreed with him. And look at the fruits-thousands of protestant denoms…and you are one of its fruits.

catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0097.html

Why Only Catholicism Can Make Protestantism Work: Louis Bouyer on the Reformation

Yet we can go further than decrying the Reformation as unnecessary. In his ground-breaking work, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, Louis Bouyer argued that the Catholic Church herself is necessary for the full flowering of the Reformation principles. In other words, you need Catholicism to make Protestantism work — for Protestantism’s principles fully to develop. Thus, the Reformation was not only unnecessary; it was impossible. What the Reformers sought, argues Bouyer, could not be achieved without the Catholic Church.

From Bouyer’s conclusion we can infer at least two things. First, Protestantism can’t be all wrong, otherwise how could the Catholic Church bring about the “full flowering of the principles of the Reformation”? Second, left to itself, Protestantism will go astray and be untrue to some of its central principles. It’s these two points, as Bouyer articulates them, I would like to consider here. One thing should be said up-front: although a convert from French Protestantism, Bouyer is no anti-Protestant polemicist. His Spirit and Forms of Protestantism was written a half-century ago, a decade before Vatican II’s decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, yet it avoids the bitter anti-Protestantism that sometimes afflicted pre-conciliar Catholic works on Protestantism. That’s one reason the book remains useful, even after decades of post-conciliar ecumenism.

 

[dronald]

You are incorrect in this statement from the Catechism:

I stand corrected, and feel closer to the CC than ever.

God bless you, I pray that if God wills it, I’ll be Catholic. If I never do become Catholic and the CC is the absolute truth, I pray that God forgives me. I also pray that the Holy Spirit working through me can bring others to Jesus whether that be your Church or mine.

Let’s never let our differences separate us from Christ. I hope to one day rejoice and worship God in Heaven with all of you.

 

[adrift]

I stand corrected, and feel closer to the CC than ever.

God bless you, I pray that if God wills it, I’ll be Catholic. If I never do become Catholic and the CC is the absolute truth, I pray that God forgives me. I also pray that the Holy Spirit working through me can bring others to Jesus whether that be your Church or mine.

Let’s never let our differences separate us from Christ. I hope to one day rejoice and worship God in Heaven with all of you.

Amen!