That might be your experience, but it is not mine. This is a Catholic forum, and I suspect that is why some of the conversations are as they are. I would just as vehemently disagree with a fellow protestant who proposed that only adult full immersion baptism was valid as I do with the interpretation here of what the church is. And on these very forums I have argued against those misguided protestants who have attacked the Catholic Church as being of the devil. Perhaps you just aren’t aware of these things because your scope of reference is limited.
As far as some of the individuals you mention above, while I didn’t know David Koresh, and have never even heard of Marshal Applegate, I can talk from personal knowledge about Jim Jones.
Jones happened to attend the same seminary that my father did. They were classmates, with my father a few years his senior. My father was serving as pastor of a Methodist Church and he came to my father interested in how he might receive an appointment as well. In our denomination there is a very deliberate process one must go through. The purpose of this process is all about discernment. To encourage personal discernment on the part of those who seek to enter ministry to affirm that they have a call and discernment on the part of the church to confirm that we recognize both the gifts and graces and right deportment and psychological temper to serve the church without hurting it. We are not perfect in this process, but I can report that Jim Jones failed the test. He then sought my father out again, trying to figure out a way around the system, and as I remember the story, my father plainly told him that what he needed to do was to deal with the internal demons that we recognized even then. Now, here is where the Catholic model of simply one single church administrative government would be nice. Because he had options, Jones simply shopped himself around till he found a denomination that would ordain him. And it must be recognized that he did a lot of good work at first. But those demons re-emerged, and though the church he was serving asked him to leaven, the system he was in allowed him to keep his ordination and he simply found a new church. There in time he would elevate himself to such a place of dominance that he would eventually wreak the havoc that made international news.
Would this never have happened within the Catholic system? Maybe not with Jim Jones. But the problem with Jones was not just theology. It was a psychological impairment, and there have certainly been many in every faith community that have go awry in these ways. That he found a system in which he did not have to answer to any higher authority than the congregation that he was able to sway with his personal charm and magantism and thereby rule with autocratic authority was a probelm. But any system that allows for autocratic authority to be vested in the hands of one person may fall victim to the problems of megalomania. And if one looks at the history of the Catholic Church I doubt that one will find it devoid of such occurances either.
Hello again
Grace Seeker,
Thank you for another excellent post.
That was an interesting story about your father. And, you’re absolutely right, I recently saw a documentary about Jim Jones on television and besides him being a mass-murderer; it is obvious that he did have some sort of serious psychological problem.
What about all of those people who have follow some of these bad leaders? Surely, many of those who followed him (Jim Jones) were well intended, albeit confused Christians and maybe others, who may have suffered from their own psychological problems.
It is these insane leaders, in these denominations who are often discussed but what about their victims, all of those who were duped in to following them? How do people like Jim Jones and David Koresh find followers? In some cases, isn’t possible that some of these victims, “prayed on it” prior to joining one of these denominations? In other cases, could it be, that based on their own personal interpretation of the Bible, they agreed with these horrible people? Or, were these victims suffering from their own psychological disorder?
You mentioned “discernment” in your post here. Why weren’t the victims of these leaders, able to discern correctly, when choosing a denomination or “Christian” leader?
Isn’t there an inherently dangerous problem with the Protestant, non-Catholic Christian doctrine, which allows for “Personal Interpretation of the Bible? A problem, were some falsely believe that they are, themselves, an infallible prophet and that “God called on them” to start another denomination?
Similarly, isn’t there an inherently dangerous problem with this Protestant doctrine, were some followers, come to falsely believe that they are infallible and that, “God called on them” to follow certain people, people who may have started one of these denominations?
If it wasn’t possible for people to interpret the Bible in error, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion here, on this thread, regarding “Homosexual Marriage”.
I would like to hear what you think.
