“You’re making my point.”
Actually, no - assuming your point is identical to the article.
I’ve fellowshipped and worshipped in 6 main churches as we’ve moved around the country and a great many we’ve visited on trips. I’ve never met a single believer, nor a single church that believed that the people you list are the authority on interpreting the Scriptures. Thousands of believers in many states and one foreign country and not a single one matches up to the silly claims of the article.
It is, in short, silliness that is made up to make the Roman Catholic denomination sound better. Frankly, it appears to need all the help it can get these days, but still.
You would be better off gathering actual facts and thinking about them logically, before cutting and pasting trite articles.
“I’ve never met a single believer, nor a single church that believed that the people you list are the authority on interpreting the Scriptures.”
You’re mostly correct, I think, except for a few of the ones listed, as they were founders of cults, not mainline denominations (Charles Taze Russell founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example). Cults do hold to the teachings of men over the teachings of Scripture, which is one of the things that makes them a cult.
Of course, that is not true for the vast majority of Protestant churches, despite Catholic confusion over the matter. In fact, the Catholic church’s insistence on a strict adherence to its hierarchy’s doctrinal interpretation is closer to the practice of the cults than the mainline Protestant churches are. Both the Catholic church and the cults impose an interpretation of the totality of Scripture, claiming absolute authority and brooking no dispute or deviation. Mainline Protestant churches, on the other hand, generally only require assent to a few creeds and perhaps a short foundational document that sums up the most important doctrinal beliefs about the nature of God and salvation.
Now, what is interesting to me about this line of attack is how self-contradictory it is with other anti-protestant attack points. After all, we are constantly told that a weakness of protestantism is “everyone is allowed to personally interpret scripture”, and that this is bad because it causes us to have no uniformity of belief. It simply can’t be true that protestants are all freely interpreting Scripture on a whim, while we are also slavishly following the interpretations of some dead guy or another at the same time. I wish the anti-protestant brigade would clear up these conflicts among themselves, so I wouldn’t have to point them out for them.
Amen!
Similar experience. Recently retired from the Army 25 years.
Been deployed a lot so have attended chaplain services a good deal. My observations are such. You have the Roman Catholics and to some degree the Protestants who worship as they do attend one Mass service. Then the Lutherans and Reformed are the Main Line services. For many years all Protestant and Evangelicals attended that one service. For the past ten years there are offered Evangelical/Baptist services and in some cases a Gospel service for Pentecostals and Black churches.
It does depend on the Chaplains available. At least when I was last deployed there were a plethora of Evangelical and Baptist Chaplains and the Reformed joined in joyfully.
For Roman Catholics Mass was very difficult if you were not on a large FOB. The Catholic priests would travel much to various sites and if time permitting did a full mass or if not a communion service. The population of Catholic Army Chaplains is small.
But back to the point. Reformed, Baptist, Lutheran, Evangelical had no issues with fellowship and worship.