Reading the Bible can lead you to God, and devotion to Mary because in the rosary, God is never neglected. If we did, we would not recite the Apostles Creed, Our Father, the Doxology (Glory Be), or recite the first Mysteries of one of four Mysterious, which contains the life of Jesus Christ.
God alone saves.
Manny,
God bless, and peace be to you.
When reading someone like Thomas Aquinas, I often cannot help but laugh. Not derisively-- I have far too much respect for him to act as such. But, just, you know, chuckle to myself at the amusing form in which he argues. After you read a couple of Thomas’ questions you get familiar with the way he deals with objections.
I always laugh because I can see certain manouvers coming from a mile away. Usually he pivots on a phrase like this, where something can be thought of in two ways or two senses. For instance, in question 90 on the essence of law, he responds to an objection by saying, “it may be in something in two ways.” Or, in the first question of the second part about man’s last end when he says, “We can speak of the last end in two ways.”
What’s important is that Thomas, by doing this, recognizes the legitimacy of the objection, and then delineates in what sense it is true and in what sense it is false.
Can we take, “saved” according to various senses? It seems to me that when we say, “God saves you” we mean saves in a slightly different way than when we say, “faith saves you,” and in a slightly different way than when we say, 'baptism saves you," and in a slightly different way when we say, “your brother saved you” (as in James). All of these are
biblical expressions, and yet clearly we cannot take all of these in an unrestricted fashion.
Manny, is saying, “God alone saves,” somehow restrictive to saying, “baptism saves you?” Obviously the first is a sound statement of Christian theology. Obviously the second is a saying entrusted to us through the Epistle of Peter by an inerrant author.
I think ultimately we all agree in this thread-- it is not as if any of these mediate things exist divorced from God, whether faith, our Christian brother, baptism or the bible. Reading the Bible saves us at least as much as in the sense that the brother who rescues us from our error in James 5 saves us-- not to say that the Bible effects some ontological change in our being, unites our soul in charity to God, etc, but that the Bible is, like the good Christian brother who leads us from our sin, a means by which we are saved.
This type of language can be taken to an alarming degree if we aren’t careful.
Or again, much closer to home Manny-- what do you call the man who is ordained and ministers the sacraments? A priest?
But remember that Thomas Aquinas reminds us that, “only Christ is the true priest, the others being only his ministers.” (CCC 1545).
Now, picture a Protestant makes a topic: Catholic ministers are NOT priests.
Now, he says this averring that, “God alone is the true priest.” And, of course, he is absolutely right.
But he fails to see the sense in what sense Catholic priests really are, “priests”-- in the sense that they
share in Christ’s one priesthood because Christ’s priesthood is made present in the Catholic priesthood.
It would be somewhat like this-- saying the Bible doesn’t save us. Why? God
alone saves us (true!). But it is almost a linguistic problem, because there is a sense in which the Bible can save us, just as there is a sense in which our Christian brother can save us, etc.
Do you get my point? Do we agree that ultimately we all think the same thing? If you disagree Manny, can you point out to me where you think the likeness between the Christian brother of James and the Bible are, which I think are sufficiently alike to use similar language?
Thanks!
-Rob
myself, Syele, SinginBeauty, & Co., who have hung around here long enough to get a better idea of what Catholics believe than, say, the likes of a Lorraine Boettner.
me) committed the entire New Testament & chunks of the Old one to memory, and 
assume that since we haven’t, we must, perforce,
not be Christians…
:byzsoc: