Why does God even allow Protestants to prophesy?

[Bohm_Bawerk]

And for anyone who says Protestants don’t have this gift, unfortunately, you’re mistaken. I know people whose lives have been saved by the prophesies of a very specific Protestant denomination.

My main issue is why God would even allow them to have this gift. If the Catholic Church is the one, true Church as it is reported to be, then technically, wouldn’t only Catholics have it? Sometimes I really can’t help but think God is irrational at times…

Thank you,
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk

 

[fermat]

While Catholicism has the fullness of the faith, other faiths have parts that are valid as well. If you are Baptist and you work to please Jesus and really want to do the will of the Father and to be a good disciple, there is merit in that.

At the end of the day, we are all God’s children. Everyone has a different road to Christ and it may take them different places. If this denomination you speak of leads people to Christ, great. We should also pray that they continue the journey to enjoy all Christ has to offer in His church.

 

[PiousTemplar]

Are you able to source some of these legitimate ‘prophesies’ that you say protestants have made?

 

[JamestheOlder]

While Catholicism has the fullness of the faith, other faiths have parts that are valid as well. If you are Baptist and you work to please Jesus and really want to do the will of the Father and to be a good disciple, there is merit in that.

At the end of the day, we are all God’s children. Everyone has a different road to Christ and it may take them different places. If this denomination you speak of leads people to Christ, great. We should also pray that they continue the journey to enjoy all Christ has to offer in His church.

Amen! Well said!

We, as Catholics, believe that people outside the Catholic Church can be filled with the grace of G-d (we call it actual grace). They are loved by Him, as He loves all people. He will use, for example, a Martin Luther King to call all of us to racial justice, and He will use theologians of many denominations to help others search for Him.

He is G-d of all!

 

[Nanabelle]

Are you able to source some of these legitimate ‘prophesies’ that you say protestants have made?

I’m new, so forgive me for asking such a basic question… When speaking of prophesy-do you mean of major events or just in general? I grew up as a Protestant and am curious what, if any difference there is by Catholic definition.

 

[Lady_Marchmain]

Catholics don’t prophesy except for a few rare saints and specially chosen people throughout history. Charasimatic Catholics may believe that they prophesy, and maybe they even do, it’s quite along the same lines as the protestant type, and just as impossible to “prove”.

The Church wisely advises that this is a dangerous area to take lightly. The line between a “prophecy” and an unconscious projection or even mental disturbance is pretty thin. The Church provides everything we need to live a holy life, including the Sacraments. Why rely on some layperson telling you he has a prophecy for you?!? I would rather trust prayer.

If a Catholic believes he or she has the “gift of prophecy” they should consult their priest.

 

[Nanabelle]

Catholics don’t prophesy except for a few rare saints and specially chosen people throughout history. Charasimatic Catholics may believe that they prophesy, and maybe they even do, it’s quite along the same lines as the protestant type, and just as impossible to “prove”.

.

Thank you. Until reading some posts here, I thought most definitions were the same and am learning not to jump to that conclusion… When I originally read the post, my conclusion was there was a belief that God would only have a closer relationship or speak with a Catholic… (I guess it was the title of the post that grabbed my attention…) Which I know isn’t the definition of prophesy, but wanted to ask before jumping to conclusions. I guess it’s silly as much as I’ve gone through over the last few years and telling my family and friends about converting… Sometimes I have a knee jerk Protestant defense~ lol!

 

[JerryS]

Does God only work through saints?

 

[GloriousOrder]

Does God only work through saints?

God works through every human being - perhaps even every sentient being, if others do exist. He calls every last, individual substance of thinking rational nature into communion with Himself, the total individuality, the fully-living nature. Our blessed Father in Heaven wants us all, and He will go to every length in time and space to call us. To say “God only works through the saints” can easily become an excuse to say “I am not a saint yet; therefore, God doesn’t want to work through me”. Even the saints didn’t think they were saints, but they still worked out their salvation by good and loving acts so they might become saints. God works through everything, because He is the Master of all.

Böhm-Bawerk, the holy Lord of Heaven and Earth and infinity and eternity is full of grace, truth, beauty, glory, majesty, and power forever. He gives freely to those who ask. St. Gregory the Great asked what Jesus meant by “Anything you ask in my Name: it shall be given to you”. That Pope was initially confused by such an open-ended promise, but he realised that Jesus literally was speaking of His Holy Name: “Ie-sus” - “God Saves”. If we ask our Lord Jesus Christ anything in THE NAME OF SALVATION and GOOD EDIFICATION of SOULS, we will be granted it. We are to beg Him, our brother in manhood and our Lord in divinity, for all things that will help us ascend to our true homeland.

If those protties who prophesied did so to the right edification, salvation, and holiness of souls, then it was of God. If those protties who prophesied did so in greed, deception, or any sort of self-aggrandisement, it was of Hell. You have to be able to distinguish between real prophecies (of God), prophesies-in-retrospect (an abstract ‘prophesy’ is interpreted after the fact), self-fulfilling prophesies (would have happened anyway), and prophesies whose ends were planned out from the beginning by the “prophet” (deceit). Most prophesies today fall into the latter three categories, especially since they’re just so stupid and small-minded that they have no bearing on any human soul anyway. God does not give the power of prophesy just so we can fiddle about, just as He does not give the gift of tongues so we can mumble gibberish while flailing about on the floor.

 

[styrgwillidar]

You have to be able to distinguish between real prophecies (of God), prophesies-in-retrospect (an abstract ‘prophesy’ is interpreted after the fact), self-fulfilling prophesies (would have happened anyway), and prophesies whose ends were planned out from the beginning by the “prophet” (deceit).

Not to mention prophesies which are simply guess work, or the tendency to remember the correct prophesies while discarding the misses. (I.E. a lot of known psychics have no better than random chance success with their predictions yet are considered psychic.)

Also, the human tendency to make things fit, i.e. many of Nostradamus’s predictions have been cited as being fulfilled by multiple events. Personality tests demonstrates the same thing. If you give someone the wrong results they are just as likely to state that the result is a good match for them as they do when given the ‘correct’ result. Or horoscopes, fortune cookies etc.- people are geared/wired to see patterns and connections, this falls into the prophesy after the fact that Glorious Order points out, people tend to make the generic prediction fit the specific incidents which follow.

So, as Glorious Order is pointing out, it’s very hard to determine genuine prophesy. Many folks want to believe and will ignore evidence to the contrary, and only see things which reinforce the belief.

 

[Lief_Erikson]

And for anyone who says Protestants don’t have this gift, unfortunately, you’re mistaken. I know people whose lives have been saved by the prophesies of a very specific Protestant denomination.

My main issue is why God would even allow them to have this gift. If the Catholic Church is the one, true Church as it is reported to be, then technically, wouldn’t only Catholics have it? Sometimes I really can’t help but think God is irrational at times…

Thank you,
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk

Dear Bohm,

God can and does give His gifts to whosoever He chooses. Remember that in the Old Testament, He spoke prophetically even through Balaam, an extremely wicked pagan man who wanted Israel destroyed.

Numbers 23

7
1 Then Balaam gave voice to his oracle: From Aram has Balak brought me here, Moab’s king, from the Eastern Mountains: “Come and lay a curse for me on Jacob, come and denounce Israel.”
8
How can I curse whom God has not cursed? How denounce whom the LORD has not denounced?
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2 For from the top of the crags I see him, from the heights I behold him. Here is a people that lives apart and does not reckon itself among the nations.
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3 Who has ever counted the dust of Jacob, or numbered Israel’s wind-borne particles? May I die the death of the just, may my descendants be as many as theirs!
11
“What have you done to me?” cried Balak to Balaam. “It was to curse my foes that I brought you here; instead, you have even blessed them.”
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Balaam replied, “Is it not what the LORD puts in my mouth that I must repeat with care?”

Balaam prophesied and blessed Israel when he wanted to curse it, because the Spirit of the Lord worked through him. Yet Balaam was condemned as an extremely evil man, in the Bible. The Scriptures show that Balaam attempted to curse Israel, and failing that, he determined that God would punish His people if they fell into sin. So he introduced many Midianite women into the camp and they had sexual intercourse with the men, corrupting many. Therefore God punished Israel. But Balaam himself was later killed, through the judgment of God, for his wicked deeds.

God’s decisions can appear irrational to us because we don’t understand them. However, His intelligence is so much greater than ours, it should be extremely intuitive to us to accept that with His vastly superior knowledge, He will make many decisions that we wouldn’t have made, and that don’t make sense to us, because we don’t understand them. Yet He does! If we could understand everything He did, He would be no more intelligent than we are.

With regard to Protestants, these are often true lovers of God. He loves to give them gifts, just as He loves to give gifts to His children in the Catholic Church. There is no partiality, with God. He loves everyone on Earth and gives them all gifts of various kinds (some supernatural), with love.

Yet God reserves His greatest gifts for Catholic saints. Most of the mystical signs surrounding the saints, such as incorruptibility, bilocations, eucharistic fasts (eating and drinking nothing but the Eucharist for years), stigmata, levitations and flights, ecstasies, the odor of sanctity, and their more extreme miracles, are unparalleled in Protestantism. On the other hand, the gifts God has allowed various Protestants to manifest, such as gifts of gifts of knowledge, prophecies, speaking in tongues, and healings, are very present in the Catholic Church as well. In the lives of the saints, they are usually far more common than they are among Protestants who experience these gifts.

The chief reason the Catholic saints have many more supernatural events take place through their lives is that they are closer to God than just about anyone. They are humbler, so He can give them more without it making them proud. They are also very loving, so they will use these gifts in the best ways.

God can and does use miracles in specific ways to confirm the truth of the Catholic faith, though. Eucharistic Miracles, for example, are not explainable except by accepting the truth of the Catholic faith. Also, sometimes He has worked great miracles through our missionaries in foreign countries, such as St. Francis Xavier, to prove to pagans that our religion is true.

 

[Lief_Erikson]

Bohm, sometimes, God will also use healings and such to confirm the ministries of Protestants as well, because in Protestantism, there is often a huge amount of love and union with God, even though there are many errors in Protestantism as well. There also are many true doctrines in Protestantism. Therefore, God can draw people closer to Himself sometimes in Protestantism, too.

Sometimes, a person will actually come closer to God by leaving Catholicism, because they were in a part of the Catholic world that is not vigorous in its faith and does not teach the Catholic laity or seek to draw them closer to God. Maybe it gives poor catechesis. Sometimes a Catholic has experienced only a pretty secular Catholicism, and then they encounter a vibrant and loving community of Protestants who have kept many of the true doctrines of Catholicism (such as about the nature and identity of Christ, and the importance of our coming to know and love Him personally). The Catholic, whose faith never meant much to him, encounters this group and sees many true doctrines and much living, vital faith, and he is drawn to it. He thus is drawn closer to real Catholicism (the true doctrines being lived among the Protestants he’s met) than he was as a Catholic.

He converts to Protestantism and accepts the errors along with the truths. The truths, such as the doctrines of Christ and necessity of our relationship with Him, were all inherited by Protestants from the Catholic faith. Yet they weren’t taught well in the community this relatively secular Catholic, or weak Catholic, was brought up in. Therefore the Catholic fell away from the Catholic faith easily, but only in appearance. For in reality, he has just fallen in love with critical truths of the Catholic faith that the Protestants taught him how to love, whereas the Catholics around him treated them as dry or not worth thinking about, if they ever spoke of them at all. Therefore this Catholic is drawing closer to Catholicism by abandoning it for Protestantism. This is bringing him closer to the Heart of God, to the fullness of truth that is in Him. For he is coming to love the deep and beautiful elements of Catholicism that he has “discovered” in Protestantism, which he wasn’t taught before or which didn’t matter to him before, because it was all stale and not practiced or lived. This “fallen away Catholic” is therefore closer to God in his new life in Protestantism. Perhaps one day, he will find that in the faith he left, everything he now treasures is there, along with many more treasures that the errors of Protestantism cause him not to appreciate or accept. But if not, he may still very well get to Heaven.

If God provided miracles or prophecies through these Protestants, this may have helped the Catholic to convert to Protestantism. Yet simultaneously, through his conversion to Protestantism, he was actually drawing closer to the heart of Catholicism, for he was coming to love those parts of the Catholic faith that he encountered in Protestantism. He is thus converting by loving Catholicism, and his union with God is true.

If Catholics won’t live their faith, God may take some of these secular Catholics to a place where they will live it much better, even if that place is outside of the fullness of the Church. For even if the Protestants only offer part of the full package of the faith that God wants for everyone, it is better for a person to love those parts and live them (even outside the Church’s visible boundaries) than to have the fullness but not live it at all.