And I’m sure “40,000” heresies didn’t just suddenly appear in 1520 either. People were plenty scared to go against the church in any way or be perceived to go against it because the punishment was much more severe than it is today.
But prayer has been a means to communicate with God even before this “telephone line” existed?Of course I pray. Prayer is made possible by Christ on the Cross, which gives the graces of the Sacraments, which provides the “telephone line” by which we can pray.
No it would not. Scripture is not God. Scripture is not an authority.
Wrong again. The “meaning of those words” is subject to OUR understanding of them. Sometimes Scripture is perfectly clear - like most of the OT commandments, social and dietary laws. The NT is written entirely differently. It does not use affirmative language (yes/no; thou shalt not), but instead is FILLED with descriptiveProtestants have a number of interpretations of what this means and they have had 500 years to settle the matter and remain divided. language that REQUIRES an interpretation. For example, John 3:5: Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit." What, exactly, does being born of water and Spirit mean??? The truth is that you can’t know that you know what it means.
I dont question the author, I question the recipients!
So, Martin Luther starts talking about sola fide and sola scriptura, and suddenly, within a single decade, five heresies pop into existence (despite this fear of the Church that had apparently been keeping them down to a rate of one per century, up to that point), and from those five, dozens more spring up over the next fifty years, to the point where even Martin Luther, just before his death, is complaining that every milk maid and plough boy is reading the Bible and starting up his or her own religion.
Yes, of course - but we understand the answers to our prayers by means of the Tradition in which we live.
So scripture is God breathed, yet God is not the ultimate authority of His own scripture?
I don’t think you’re giving the Scriptures enough credit. I’d say there’s quite a bit more clarity beyond just just the Levitical laws. Are some passages and verses difficult to understand? Of course! There are lots! But the Bible is a big book and I don’t consider those to be the majority of it.
Wise. As we all should.
Well, I’m not going to play a “let’s count heresies” game. The source of this tangent was from my statement…So, Martin Luther starts talking about sola fide and sola scriptura, and suddenly, within a single decade, five heresies pop into existence (despite this fear of the Church that had apparently been keeping them down to a rate of one per century, up to that point), and from those five, dozens more spring up over the next fifty years, to the point where even Martin Luther, just before his death, is complaining that every milk maid and plough boy is reading the Bible and starting up his or her own religion.
What changed, if the idea of Sola Scriptura was not the responsible agent?
These are irrelevant speculations that don’t even begin to justify the plethora of theology that emerged from the Reformation. The fact of the matter is that sola scriptura causes a division in our understanding of what God is saying to us through Scripture. That is a fact.
Thank you - this is the essence of my point.
Name even one heresy that came about by declaring something as truth that isn’t based on some kind of misunderstanding of something from the Bible?
By all expected objective standards, your claim seems entirely reasonable. The problem, and it is a very big problem for your position, is that “all kinds of heresy” haven’t developed in the Catholic Church.* History - that is to say, the historically verifiable facts - shows the Catholic Church of every century to be largely unchanged in its theology. That is exactly the opposite of what we would expect. It is this unexpected but undeniable consistency of the Catholic Church that leads many to reconsider whether there is something else at play here: namely, could it be that the Catholic Church is, in fact, protected by the HS from heresy just as it claims?
I could easily do that but I don’t think that is going to be a productive direction for this conversation because then we’re going to go back and forth on whether specific things are heresy or not—and we both know in the end that we’re going to disagree just as much as we did at the beginning.Name even one heresy that came about by declaring something as truth that isn’t based on some kind of misunderstanding of something from the Bible?
I respect your belief in that. I do believe, however, that there are heresies in the Catholic Church. You will disagree with me and I absolutely respect your position in that regard. I’m not going to name any because that’s a road that won’t lead us to anywhere.
Why not focus on all three? How do you determine there is one more important than the other two? Why aren’t all three equally important?
True. But you wouldn’t know they are canonical without the authority of the Catholic Church telling you so.
Tina, in the case of Pope Innocent I’s infallible declaration of the Canon of the New Testament in about 405 AD, after receiving the findings of the Bishops who had met in the Councils of Hippo, Carthage, and Rome, God was certainly not working “independently of the institutional Roman Catholic Church”; not only did He use the Catholic Bishops to make the Canon known to the Pope and to the Church, but He used the Pope’s charism of infallibility to make the New Testament known to the whole world.
Here is another protestant’s definition of SS on another thread…"It’s the claim that “all (God’s revelations or words)” of it is in scripture (formal and material sufficiency), but that the contents of scripture do not contain all the words of Jesus and the apostles.
[Protestants also killed “heretics” who were Catholic or not reformed enough. In fact the Protestants started all of the European wars of religion. ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European wars of religion)
Sure He is. But you are not God.
No it doesn’t because you can’t separate God from the Catholic Church.