Justasking4, I didn’t respond to your earlier post because originally I sent you five posts, and you only responded to one of them, and many of the points you raised I’d already refuted in the posts you didn’t respond to. However, I realize I’m very prolific and you’re responding to a lot of people, so I’m not objecting at all. Just telling you why I didn’t respond.
Also, I felt that you appear very hardened. You told me before that you wished the Catholics were right about there being infallible councils, but they just aren’t. That’s logical. Catholicism, the way Christianity was practiced from the beginning, is extremely beautiful. But if you can’t accept it, you can’t accept it. So there’s little point in my arguing.
But I do want to respond to the following part of your post that just came up.
Only if i have good reason to believe its true or its not that significant.
You know, the problem with this kind of statement you keep making is that it shows you assert
yourself to be your final authority.
You are the judge of traditions and scripture interpretations. It’s not like you’re standing next to Jesus, listening to His interpretations and then obeying them, like the apostles were (and they taught their successors to adhere to their interpretations). Instead, you’re looking backward and asserting
yourself as your final authority, rather than Jesus or the Bible, for you interpret the Bible (so you, rather than it, is the final authority) and you deny the interpretations of both that the apostles and their successors handed down (Sacred Tradition). Your doctrine is Me-Centered. Not God-Centered. Because you are the final authority in selecting it, not God.
I know you don’t believe the Magesterium’s councils infallibly present God’s voice, so you don’t believe Catholics are in a better position. You believe Christianity is necessarily Me-Centered, by which I mean that each human being individually is the final authority in all matters of doctrine. Each individual personally has the authority to interpret the Bible as he pleases and select what Tradition, if any, he will believe. Thus everyone, in this doctrine of Me, is the final authority. Because the councils also just represent human opinions- possibly in error and sometimes not correctly guided. Christianity thus boils down to an essentially human religion, one in which each person takes the place of our absent Lord in determining true doctrine, and there is no solid way to know what is what (over 30,000 denominations).
This is the terrible failure of Reformation thought, and it is the reason for all the subjectivism inherent in the Protestant belief system. It is no coincidence that the Reformation’s doctrine came at the tail end of the Renaissance’s Humanism. Humanism is Me-Centered, the glorification of Man, and the Reformation takes that a step further, declaring that we will become like gods, distinguishing between good and evil
for ourselves rather than relying in faith on the authority representative of God that Christians previously (in the time of the New Testament writings too- its origin is in the Gospels and its practice is all over Acts) had always relied on as the provider of their doctrine.
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