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“Now, we all know Bible Christians are shallow and are ignorant of Church history.”

You shame your self with your condescending, self-righteous, ignorance of what ‘Bible Christians’ believe or know. You could be describing a multitude of Roman Catholic Priests now and down through the ages...they may have studied these things in Cemetery school, but are many still ignorant.

Down through the ages too many of the Catholic clergy strayed into the he’n’ and he’n’ lifestyle. And the ‘Church’ has glossed it over. You have ‘condemned’ the Anglicans and other non-Rome churches for gay and lesbian excesses, but condone it in the ‘Church’? I do not consider these churches as ‘Bible Christians’...certainly they are not practicing what the Word teaches.

Communion with my Lord and Savior requires no middleman. He is my mediator between God the Father and me. If my wife and I partake of His Body and His Blood, as we do often and did this morning, it is at the highest level, and not surpassed by the Eucharist. We do not need a Priest to ‘Transubstantiate’ the bread and the wine. We believe, having blessed it, as Jesus did with His disciples, it is, as He said, ‘this is my body’, ‘this is my blood’. And we covenant with Him.

Nothing condescending about anything written here. Surely if you dismiss with a wave of the hand the vast constellation of Catholic theologians from Augustine to Aquinas to Newman and Benedict (whose works are studied in the theological departments of all the great universities and colleges around the world) and Bible Christianity is even rebuffed your own pre-eminent Protestant theologians who decamped and converted to Catholicism, surely the “condescending” and “self-righteous” is on your part to say nothing of hubris. Over and over again, its Protestant and Lutheran theologians who have indicated how terribly shallow Bible Christianity is.

Bible Christians swim in the shallow end of the theological pool. When taken to the deep end their either drown or converted to Catholicism.

So now we have another dissing the works of St. Ignatius! These are among the early Church father who sifted through hundreds of scraps of written texts and cross-checked them against the oral tradition and finally declared under Petrine Authority, the authenticity of the canonical texts they chose to include in the Synod of Rome in AD 382.

I am sure you know the books in the Bible did to fall from the skies and re-assembled themselves in the order we find them.

These we the painstaking efforts of the early Catholic theologians. The infallible authority of the Church did not suddenly disappear into thin air ELEVEN centuries with the curse of Reformation in 1517. No wonder, the renowned essayist Hillaire Belloc wrote that”unlike other heresies, Protestantism spawned a cluster of heresies.” No one dared call him “ignorant of Bible Christianity.”

Today Bible Christianity ha been reduced to a caricature. Each person, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry gets to crack open the pages of the Bible authoritatively put together by Catholics and feel free to toss out scriptural quotes, ignore altogether the received sacred oral tradition (against which the written texts were silted) and then each according to “his” mind “authoritatively” interpret them in contradiction to what the Church Fathers and early disciples did. What an absurdity!

All you can do is dredge up the “personal lives” of priests and popes as misdirection to discuss matters of doctrine. Apparently, we Catholic have no stones left to throw on the personal lives of Protestant leaders and local pastors, adulterers, and murderers.

The rubbish you written “ Communion with my Lord and Savior requires no middleman,” is typical of shallow Bible Christians. Apparently, the great Lutheran theologians who converted to Catholicism were hoodwinked, and great intellectuals like GK Chesterton, and even our own Judge Bork, Justice Thomas, Laura Ingraham, and the Chief Rabbi of Rome (to name a few) who converted to Catholicism have all been misled. Maybe they could not read straightforward plain text!!! What shame!

Dr. Robert Webber who is recognized by many as the authority on worship renewal. He taught at Wheaton College for 32 years as Professor of Theology and has authored over 40 books. Dr. Webber had a “life changing experience” at a Catholic conference center when he decided to receive the Eucharist . His testimony is recorded in a book entitled Signs of Wonder. Following is part of his experience in his own words:

“Closing my eyes, I allowed my life in the church to pass before me. My prejudices rose up within me: What are you doing here? You never worshiped in a Catholic setting, let alone received the bread and the wine from a Catholic priest! Then I heard my Catholic friends speak of their love for Christ, pray with fervency, and express a real desire to know the Scriptures and live by its authority. Those memories said, ‘Go ahead. After all, there is only one Lord, one church, one faith, one baptism, one Holy Communion.’ In that moment, God broke through the walls I had allowed to separate me from my brothers and sisters of different denominations. I am convinced the prejudices we hold and the walls we build between ourselves and other communities of Christians actually block our experience of God’s presence in our lives. Our biases cut us off from the spiritual communion of the fullness of the body of Christ. God dwells in his church, and to reject a part of God’s church is to reject him. Furthermore, rejecting apart of God’s church keeps us from experiencing what the creed calls “the communion of the Saints.” When God broke down my walls, he brought me into richer fellowship with the body of Christ throughout the world. You might say I was surprised by joy! I had never had an experience like that in my life. In that Catholic chapel, a new worship experience had bumped up against that old prejudice of mine, and a new attitude was born. I had taken into myself the experience of another tradition, I had been in dialogue with another worship tradition, and I was surely the richer for it.”