Stumbling Block for Protestants?

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I would see Paul as a step in the right direction towards the treatment of slaves as true human beings. Since then the Holy Spirit has led the Church further into the truth that human beings are created in the image of God and have inherent, God-given dignity.

Paul is inspired and moved by God to offer a more humane and Christlike view of slaves. We, meditating on Paul, can see that while slavery may have been permissible by the letter of the law, the spirit of the law has led us to emancipation.
Egg-zactly, Novo. 👍

Just insert “Church” every place you put “Paul”* in the above, and you have the Catholic response to slavery.

*Caveat: we do say that the Church is “assisted” by the HS, rather than “inspired”.
 
Egg-zactly, Novo. 👍

Just insert “Church” every place you put “Paul”* in the above, and you have the Catholic response to slavery.

*Caveat: we do say that the Church is “assisted” by the HS, rather than “inspired”.
I think there’s a slight difference. Paul didn’t encourage people to go out and enslave Muslims. Paul didn’t hand over the American continents to foreign sovereigns. Paul didn’t establish slavery as a penalty for certain crimes in canon law.
 
Why should she be infallible by nature?
No, not by nature. By logic and reason.
Why can’t I just think she is correct?
Again, if you believe that she never erred, over and over and over again, in discerning the canon of the NT, then the logical conclusion is, “I must believe that she has been protected from erring in this issue.”

It’s like you are saying, “Yes, female mammals make milk. Yes, cows make milk. But I am not saying that cows are mammals. Why can’t I just say that cows are animals that make milk?”
 
I think there’s a slight difference. Paul didn’t encourage people to go out and enslave Muslims. Paul didn’t hand over the American continents to foreign sovereigns. Paul didn’t establish slavery as a penalty for certain crimes in canon law.
This is the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

The Church has always been correct in her teachings. In her practice? Not so much. :nope:
 
Again, if you believe that she never erred, over and over and over again, in discerning the canon of the NT, then the logical conclusion is, "I must believe that she has been protected from erring in this issue.
That’s the potential fallacy of inductive reasoning.
 
This is the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

The Church has always been correct in her teachings. In her practice? Not so much. :nope:
But what about all those Papal encyclicals? They’re explicitly magisterial documents…
 
But what about all those Papal encyclicals? They’re explicitly magisterial documents…
Please cite the quote, and then the documents, that state:

Go out and enslave Muslims.
Slavery is a penalty for certain acts.

Incidentally, the charge that the Americas were given to foreign sovereigns is a non-issue. Political decisions by popes are not “magisterial”.
 
Powerthread.

I’m interested in the analysis of the above as well (stew’s post). It seems both situation’s core reference for us today is written history.

Interesting. Hope someone starts the V2 as the post limit is -]almost/-] upon us.
 
PR, would you mind doing this, please?
“I believe that Hebrews is inspired…because the Catholic Church told me it is inspired. There is no other way I could know this. No. other. way.

“The Catholic Church proclaimed this to be true at
-the Council of Rome in 382
-the Council of Hippo in 393
-the Councils of Carthage in 397 and 419
-the Council of Nicea II in 787
-the Council of Florence in 1442
-the Council of Trent in 1546”

“Unless I believe that these Councils made a big boo-boo and Hebrews is not inspired, and the Epistle of Barnabas is, then I must believe that the Catholic Church was protected from erring in all of the above councils.”

Therefore, the charism of infallibility has been given to the CC, at least as it applies to the 27 book canon of the NT. 🙂
 
How many times is the virgin birth mentioned in the gospels?
Twice. In Matthew and Luke. I almost listed it as something else for which the purely historical evidence is extremely weak, but I decided not to get into that unless someone brought it up. The problem is that Matthew and Luke tell almost completely different stories about Jesus’ birth. Still, that’s multiple independent attestation for the virginal conception, so relatively strong. Similar, in fact, to Peter’s name change.

Of course, the strength of evidence isn’t just about how many times it’s mentioned. But multiple attestation (which involves independent witnesses–if they clearly seem to be copying each other then they don’t really count separately) is one of the strongest, most generally accepted criteria for historicity.

Edwin
 
Was wondering if you could elaborate on this. Thanks!
The resurrection of Jesus is attested to in pretty much every NT book. It was obviously the basic proclamation of the earliest Christians. We know of no earlier, core teaching than this. The Gospel of Mark, while probably not an eyewitness account, was written at a time when eyewitnesses would still have been alive, and the claim that women were the first to find the empty tomb meets the “criterion of embarrassment” (it’s not something ancient people would be likely to make up, because women were not regarded as reliable witnesses). Paul’s independent and even earlier account in 1 Corinthians 15, which admittedly doesn’t mention an empty tomb and focuses instead on appearances (which are absent from what is probably the original form of Mark), cites eyewitnesses by name and claims that the majority of the 500 who all saw Jesus at once are still alive.

It’s not proof, but if this weren’t a miraculous event no one would seriously doubt it.

Of course, that’s a rather absurd supposition. Which, again, is why the spiral argument is so bad.

Edwin
 
You’re overreaching here, my friend…
The Church will certainly survive the “spiral argument.” But this has become accepted in online apologetics as the “Catholic” argument. Since it’s a terrible argument, this does the cause of Catholic truth no favors in the eyes of anyone with any understanding of how historical inquiry works.

Edwin
 
Why would that matter?
If you’re looking for historical evidence that Jesus founded a Church, it matters. I’m not saying that the word has to be mentioned. Certainly passages in Luke and John that speak of Peter “strengthening the brothers” and “feeding the sheep,” or of Jesus giving the apostles power to forgive sins, also count.

But given the immense importance of the term and concept “ecclesia” in Christian history, the fact that it doesn’t occur in three of the Gospels is pretty significant. It’s not like “Trinity,” which was a “technical term” that early Christians came up with to explain a paradoxical reality in which they had long believed. “Ecclesia” is a common word referring to an assembly of people. Indeed, the difficulty with “ecclesia” is to figure out just what the earliest sources mean by it, because it had such a general, “secular” meaning. So the fact that even this very basic term for an organized community doesn’t occur in Mark, Luke, or John causes many scholars to think that Jesus can’t have given any explicit indication of intending to form any such community. (I grant that the passages in Luke and John to which I referred above are counter-evidence, but the silence of Mark on anything like this is still very significant.)

Note: I’m not saying that Jesus didn’t found a Church. I’m saying that by purely historical evidence one cannot show with even reasonable probability that He did. To accept that Jesus founded a Church you have to accept the authority of the Church in the first place. Again, the spiral argument fails utterly.

Edwin
 
We know of no earlier, core teaching than this.
Interesting. How do you classify all those things Jesus taught that are in the bible while he walked the earth?

I would classify them as core, earlier, and as the foundation for confident belief in the resurrection.
 
Again, if you believe that she never erred, over and over and over again, in discerning the canon of the NT, then the logical conclusion is, “I must believe that she has been protected from erring in this issue.”
That’s quite the jump. Even a stopped clock is correct for two minutes per day. That Rome made any number of correct discernments is not at all proof of being “protected from error.”
 
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