**“To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” **
John Henry Cardinal Newman, convert from Anglicanism
Spot on ! I would do exactly the same !
Why rely on teachers to tell the truth, over scripture ? If the teacher is wrong, so will you be ! And how will you know that the teacher is wrong ? Scripture !
Spot on ! I would do exactly the same !
Why rely on teachers to tell the truth, over scripture ? If the teacher is wrong, so will you be ! And how will you know that the teacher is wrong ? Scripture !
That sounds good to the ear but completely fails in practice. As a result of such zealous attempts to declare individuals as the infallible interpreters of Scripture, there have been well over
38,000 church splits,
over eight million casualties in wars started by Protestants against Catholics, and more than
41.6 million dead babies on account of Protestantism’s embrace of abortion.
Of course, this is all because individual people thought they could interpret Scripture better than the Catholic Church. Had there been no Reformation, those wars and splits wouldn’t have happened, and abortion would never have been embraced by the popular culture.
So, do you really think that Jesus approves of all of that carnage? Do you think the Holy Spirit endorsed all of those divisions and wars, or endorsed the destruction of so many of His temples?
Why do you think the Bible stands alone as the sole authority, anyway? Because of this?
[BIBLEDRB]2 Timothy 3:16-17[/BIBLEDRB]
So, are abortion, divorce, wars, and church schisms what the Bible means by “every good work?” Of course not, which is part of the reason
why Paul said to Timothy that other things were needed to be equipped for every good work besides the Bible.
Moreover, this whole attitude of
Why rely on teachers to tell the truth, over scripture ?
is itself unscriptural. It presupposes that only the smart people who read their Bibles to “get the truth for themselves” are the ones that God wills to have knowledge of the truth. That is not what the Bible says.
[BIBLEDRB]1 Timothy 2:3-4[/BIBLEDRB]
If it is truly the will of God for EVERYONE to come to knowledge of the truth, then why is it that so few people agree with this whole “let’s get rid of the teachers and just study the Bible for ourselves” approach? Didn’t Jesus Himself appoint TEACHERS, namely the Apostles, to be the spiritual fathers of all Christians?
[BIBLEDRB]1 Corinthians 4:15[/BIBLEDRB]
Why did the Ethiopian eunuch need one of these Apostles to teach him the Scriptures?
[BIBLEDRB]Acts 8:26-36[/BIBLEDRB]
Why then do you believe that there are no longer any apostles or elders and everyone has to rely on only the Bible to find out the truth? Do you think that God doesn’t want children who can’t understand the BIble for themselves to have the truth?
[BIBLEDRB]Luke 18:16[/BIBLEDRB]
And if you believe in marriage, you believe that when you get married,
you know that you need to have an elder there to witness your marriage before God. You acknowledge that unless you “go through” the marriage ritual, with an elder present, your relations with your spouse would be sinful fornication and that it is only because you were married according to the law of God that the sin of fornication was taken away. In other words, you acknowledge that there are elders,
that there are Sacraments, that marriage is a Sacrament and thus
that God has established an eldership, a presbyterate, a priesthood–and that they alone have the power to administer the Sacraments.