So by your logic pray tell me who has it right? Rev. Moon? David Koresh, Mormons? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Joel Osteen? Billy Graham? Rev. Schuller? Jim Jones? Rev. Wright? They all “read” and “teach” from Scripture, don’t they? Assume they all read from the “same” Bible.
Yet they all “teach” from a Bible whose books were put together using decades of historical, scholarly, and theological research guided by the oral tradition, custom, ritual, and Divine inspiration as to what books should be properly included and excluded by the early Church Fathers. That divinely inspired interpretation (Petrine authority) suddenly stopped by your logic. At what point(s) and why? Oh, because “you” like the rest above suddenly disagreed by what the Church teaches even though the Church used the same methods it used before for selecting the Word of God.
So why did this authority end at these later points? What makes “you” (meaning all of you, and all 35, 000 sects of Protestantism) think that somehow the early Church Fathers got it all right during the first several decades before the Bible was put together? Why don’t you extrapolate interpretative error back in time and argue,Oh, the Church failed to include this book or that one?
Your arguments are both inherently contradictory and utterly implausible. This is why serious theologians who have studied scriptural interpretation from Augustine to Aquinas to Newman to Benedict XVI after whom university theological chairs and colleges have been named treat your reasoning as childish, uninformed, and a form of street interpretation like what TD Jakes and Rev. Moons and others do. It’s simply laughable.
This is laughable not only to a large constellation of Catholic theologians but also to such eminent Protestant and Anglican theologians of the likes of Henry Newman of the Oxford University Movement, Richard Neuhaus, America’s foremost Lutheran scholar, author, and professor, and Francis Beckwith who as President of the Evangelical Theological Society, all converted to Catholicism.
These are only a small handful of the hundreds of brilliant minds who did so and they all subscribe to ONE truth and ONE teaching authority through the end of time. This ends all debate.
Fools still keep searching for the “truth” by each one offering “their” own interpretation like any of the Billy Graham-David Koresh-Joel Osteen- Rev Moon group mentioned above. They cater to “Oprah-type” audiences for whom serious intellectual inquiry is beyond their pay grade.
Here is a list of notable minds who converted to Catholicism. Apparently, by your lights they were all ‘wrong” or “misguided” or failed to appreciate the “literal” text that you keep throwing around from time to time taken from here and there from books put together by the Church and lived by its saints and martyrs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Catholicism
With the same type of corruption's, twists, and additions as the Catholic Church yes they do.
And they all have one thing in common...They change the words of scripture or they ignore them, sometimes because they don't understand them and sometimes because they don't like them...
Many of the scriptures in the Pauline Epistles and elsewhere are Kriptonite to your scholars...
Same with some of your 35,000 Protestant denominations...They just don't like what the bible says in some places...