If I was to let others do my thinking for me I would be all comfused. How would I know who to believe. I can read scripture today and it mean one thing, read it tommorow and it mean another. But how can I really know what that scripture means unless I wrote it.
That is precisely what you do. You let a group in a institution define scripture for you. The fact that pastorally, scripture can mean different things at different times, is its genius, and the very reason why some of us believe it to be inspired. That has nothing to do with the actual meaning. That is something that we uncover bit by bit over time. It is the work of well educated specialists. The Vatican employs a goodly number of them itself. It often doesn’t like what they produce.
Like I explained before. The Church was who actually WROTE the bible, they knew what they were saying. They are the only ones who know what they meant. I do not know what they meant. That is why we have the Pope he has teachings and understanding passed down frow word of mouth, and explained to him from true apostolic succession. When I said that the Church wrote the bible I did not mean it was not inspired by God. But God did not write the bible. The Church wrote it, and the church understands what it wrote. There is alot of words that we can take out of context. The Church can’t because it knows what it wrote, and what the message it was trying to relate to us. And not everything is wrote down, as you well know, so without the other writings and teachings of the Church its impossible to understand what is being said. Jesus did not tell his apostles to go out and write this down. He said to go and spread the word by mouth.
The RCC did not write the bible. It certainly didn’t write the OT, and there are few who know who in fact wrote any of it. The NT was written by various people, many of them unknown. They were believers or followers in “The Way”. They attempted to in some cases right down 1. eye witness events they themselves saw, and/or 2. the recollections of what eye witnesses saw, and/or 3. The collected sayings and oral tradition that was being taught locally by various believers.
Not everyone taught or believed the same things, as Paul’s letters so clearly attest. Each “church” existing usually in homes of the believers, was an island to itself. There was not a lot of consistency in what was taught, and Paul did his best to correct obvious errors. These writings were passed around, copied, and recopied for centuries.
Finally Constantine ordered that the church convene and settle on a canon. The reason was that there were so many writings out there, they were inconsistent, and there were lots of different things being taught. A small percentage of the entire number of bishops attended and discussed and argued about it. Some writings were included, others, excluded, some like Hebrews barely passed into the canon.
The church is no better position to understand it than anyone else who has studied these things. As I said, if that were the case, and it was all determined, then there would not be people at work in the Vatican doing this right now.
The Church came into formal existence long long after the writings were done, in fact, there were nothing but copies of copies of copies. If what you say is true, then the “Church” would no doubt have the originals of its “own” writings.
I know this is impossible for you to accept, since it means that you can’t live with certainty. But there is nothing certain in life, and those who try to create certainty about God and salvation are doomed to failure. It is faith, not proof, and God means for it to be faith. What you wish to do is what every personality of a fundamentalist inclination wants to do, create a religion with rules and “truth” such that there is nothing left to do but obey as best you can, and the end is assured. Security is a illusion. There is no such thing. There is only faith.
The Pope has the Power of the Holy Spirt to teach me. Can’t get no better than that!
If we are at liberty to make the text mean only what we want it to mean, why bother reading it in the first place ?