I would be tempted to boil this issue down to two questions:
Is human weakness greater than God’s strength?
Did the Holy Spirit run out of steam after Revelation was written? Did He just lose interest?
I agree a lot with this. The two positions seem to be divided amongst whether God can overcome human frailty or not. I would argue with an unequivocal yes to this question-- what God has promised will certainly not fail.
This leads toward happygal’s response in my opinion.
happygal:
God can superintend everyone, but whether one allow themselves to do according to God’s will that is another question. If without God’s superintending who your Pope depend upon?? Himself to led the entire congregration.??
No and no.
I thought I had made this clear that without the Holy Spirit there is no guarantee for doctrinal purity.
What I find odd is that is that many who seem to be unwilling to accept that God has promised to clearly guide his Church without error still seem to believe that they are nonetheless guaranteed salvation in Christ.
In other words, they seem to be undermining their own claim to salvation whenever they insist that God has never guaranteed to clearly guide their church without error.
happygal:
Well I’m from a non denomination church, everytime my Pastor will mentioned we are not a perfect church and people, but we try our best to be one.
But that’s, to some extent, no different from the Catholic faith.
Many Catholics such as myself readilly admit that we are sinful and in need of Christ’s forgiveness. Infallible does not mean impeccable. The difference seems to be on the matter of the Holy Spirit’s ability to guide the Church infallibly or not.
If someone does not have this guarantee of doctrinal purity, then how can they know for sure if they are indeed guaranteed salvation as thier church claims?
I think positve answers to questions like these do indicate that these denominations actually do believe that their church must have some kind of concept of a guarantee for doctrinal purity.
If not, then how do they know for ceretain that they are guaranteed their salvation in Christ?
happygal:
But most protestant use the bible as a Source in our Sunday preaching, but depending on individual churches preaching , i never deny that they some which are really the extreme out from the majority in their believes. Thus i alwayscompare what my church teaching against the Catholic teaching which i find nothing you believe is not what i don’t believe…
Hmmm…that’s interesting. Could you expand on this a bit.
I’m honestly not sure if I’m understanding this correctly and would like to clarify a few things before I respond.
happygal:
Yup we can never claim anything wrong about individual believes as we are not suppose to judge other’s faith. However i do agree with you that it seem strange to others, why some believes A, others believes B…etc…etc…but it is ourself who are comparing against with others why they cannot believe what i believe…blar…blar…then we start to find any possible ways to convince that their is not entirely correct…blar…blar…but come to think of it, if God choose to reveal why this thing happens, then probably we won’'t even need to stand here defend our own believe system.
That’s not entirely accurate though. If God’s revelation were that clear, he would not have needed set up a church to guarantee that people understand what he means.
The problem is that the Scriptures can be misunderstood, that’s why God has maintained a living connection to the past to guarantee that the Scriptural record does not become distorted.
One could even point towards the Sacred Traditions and the Magisterium of the Church, essentially inversing the Scriptural record, in order to display that people cannot practice or teach something which is contrary to Scripture either.
For example, if a pope were to rise up and say “only a certain race of people can be Catholics”, or something like “only women can be priests”, or something like “all believers in Christ are actually minor gods”, these things would
blatently contradict both the Scriptural record and the previous magisterial teachings on this matter.
Of course, since the pope is guided by the Holy Spirit, he would never actually attempt to make any kind of official proclomation like the ones that I listed above in the first place.
In others, since he is guided by the Holy Spirit, he would never actually teach these things (nor would we expect him to teach these things in the future). And nothing taught as doctrine by the popes has actually contradicted itself, even when some popes were known to be rather despisable people morally speaking.
From the Catholic perspective, it is beleived that we need all three: Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the the Magisterium-- all guided by the Holy Spirit.
