I don’t think this article can honestly be seen as “Catholic-bashing” - though I’m sure some will think so regardless.
Are you kidding?
It doesn't paint Catholicism as all rainbows and ponies.
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Posted on 06/21/2018 9:48:25 PM PDT by boatbums
Over the years, I’ve had several Catholic friends and converts ask why I ultimately didn’t convert to their denomination. During my first two years of college, I spent a significant amount of time with Catholics, including at the (then?) US Opus Dei headquarters in NYC. I attended these gatherings with a good friend, who eventually decided to convert from Evangelicalism. I came close to converting, but ultimately decided against it. This has surprised some Catholics. I suspect this is because the standard narrative is that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, are crossing the Tiber in great droves.
Statistically, the narrative isn’t quite so neat: in recent years, Catholicism has lost millions of adherents, most of these converting to a kind of nonreligious spiritualism/secularism or to Protestantism, while millions more Protestants remain Protestant. For every one person who converts to Catholicism, about six leave the church.
Still, the notion that Catholicism is attracting large numbers of Protestant converts, with no movement in the other direction, can create the impression that there is something irresistible about Catholicism to anyone who studies it. My reasons for remaining Protestant haven’t changed a great deal, although they have become more refined, especially since seminary. I would like to share some of them here.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
**Since I don’t have a problem with issuing “private judgment,”**
Is the author equating himself to Jesus Christ?
In my opinion, yes.
Judgment belongs to God alone!
Christ took a cup of wine at the Last Supper — not juice!
Follow the Bible.
Since I don’t have a problem with issuing “private judgment,”
I don`t either so i will just ask, what difference does it make if you are a member of the Mother harlot or her daughters.
Prayers for your gall bladder pain. Hope medical procedures are in place.
God bless.
You are both talking about rituals, correct? Like a High Mass?
Please don’t confuse those rituals with Holy Tradition — scripture that was passed person to person before it was written down.
I know lots of Roman Catholics who I know are born again Christians, and there are many Priests who are also born again.
Most of these individuals do not believe the Pope is infallible, and disagree with many of the Pope’s proclamations; especially the current one.
Milk does not equal simplicity.
Meat does not equal complexity.
Salvation, the Gospel of Grace, is simple. It alone saves.
Maybe reading Cardinal Newman allows converts some measure of intellectual peace when comparing the first three centuries of the early church’s views on, say, ecumenicism and what is taught by the modern Magisterium. Development is a powerful notion that can erase apparent or actual contradictions. But as a Protestant, I see no reason to appeal to something like Newman’s sense of doctrinal development, and so what is claimed as development really looks, from the outside, like a set of socially and politically conditioned deviations and contradictions from the earlier deposit of faith.
Yup.
In the time I spent considering conversion to Catholicism, every single apologetics book, essay or article recommended to me was written by a lay Catholic. Why aren’t the bishops engaged in apologetics? Aren’t they the authoritative teachers within Catholicism? If so, why would I trust the exegetical, theological, and philosophical arguments put forth by lay Catholics who have no direct oversight or approval of bishops? To trust these arguments would be to trade one set of private interpretations for another.
A fish always rots from the head down, doesn't it?
This is downstream of another problem. As a Protestant, I have two basic options when informing my study of the Bible. The first is consulting scholars who think the text is inspired and more or less inerrant. This comes with arguments or assumptions about the nature and quality of the Bible’s authorship: Matthew really did write Matthew, the disciples’s memory of Jesus’s teachings is entirely or almost entirely accurate, Jesus really did make accurate prophecies, he really did miracles as described, and so forth.
The other option is consulting scholars who doubt or actively disbelieve all of the above propositions. They approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion. They doubt Matthew wrote Matthew. They doubt Jesus said and taught everything ascribed to him. Many claim that Jesus’s teachings were issued as a fallible man: given perhaps as a (mostly) good man, but certainly not as a divinely inspired God-man.
When it comes to Catholicism, most or all of the NT Catholic scholars I’m aware of fall somewhere in the second camp. Why would I follow a denomination that approves of or passes over scholars within its own ranks that seem to deny or doubt the reliability and authority of the Bible on such a regular basis? Consider, for example, how the NAB and the USCCB hedge on Pauline authorship. If Paul didn’t author some of the letters purported to be his, that raises questions about their inspiration and, therefore, divine authority.
If the intellectual leaders of Catholicism have a fairly low view of Scripture,
And they do.
that directly undermines the lay Catholic apologists who appeal to the Bible as if it actually teaches what Jesus and Paul really said. Who am I to believe? The Catholic scholar who questions whether half the Pauline corpus was really written by Paul or the lay Catholic apologist who argues assuming traditional authorship? If I take Catholicism at face value, then I would have to believe the intellectual over the lay apologist. And that would mean there’s no reason to take the lay apologists seriously if their arguments appeal to suspect passages written by someone pretending to be Jesus or Paul.
Furthermore, in the American context, any form of Protestantism that takes the Bible “literally,” is basically despised. In all the important circles, there is enormous social pressure to hide one’s identity as a bigoted, backwards, intellectually inferior, uneducated, and politically conservative Evangelical Protestant.
EXACTLY. Catholicism (and Orthodoxy, and Black Fundamentalism, and islam, and "indigenous" shamanisms) are all perfectly respectable. Only Clem and Buford are despised. It is this social prejudice against rural American "white trash" that is responsible for this absolute 180 degree turn in what was once chrstian belief. So why should "conservative" Catholicism be seen as any less of an enemy as the rest of the redneck-hating cultural elite? What makes its elitism somehow "different?" Most converts are probably self-hating WASPs anyway.
The only way this article could possibly be improved would be to dismiss the "new testament" and call for universal acceptance of the Noahide Laws. But for what is written here, it's about the best I've ever read.
I can't wait to read all the responses from FR Catholics about how their Church has always believed in evolution/higher criticism/etc. and these beliefs are identical to those of Jerome.
Identifying the reading and interpreting of the Bible as “Protestant” even affected the study of Scripture. Until the twentieth Century, it was only Protestants who actively embraced Scripture study. That changed after 1943 when Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. This not only allowed Catholics to study Scripture, it encouraged them to do so. And with Catholics studying Scripture and teaching other Catholics about what they were studying, familiarity with Scripture grew.http://www.usccb.org/bible/understanding-the-bible/study-materials/articles/changes-in-catholic-attitudes-toward-bible-readings.cfm
Ironically this only made things worse. At least before then most Catholics at least implicitly believed the bible even if they had no idea what it said. Divino Afflante Spiritu initiated the irreverent, modernizing, higher critical method of Biblical interpretation into mainstream Catholicism. Now that Catholics read they bible, they no longer believe it.
They were better off before.
its easy to be a Protestant....easy....you just do what you feel....
like Unitarians...make your own rules up as you go...
I'm not a good, practicing Catholic but at least at one time we had values and rules and moral authority...
If the Catholic church has fallen into a rudderless entity, the protestants have fallen further, much further..
No one ever told anybody in my large Catholic family nor the large Catholic grammar school and HS and nursing school I attended to not read the bible...
I don’t think this article can honestly be seen as “Catholic-bashing” - though I’m sure some will think so regardless.
Are you kidding?
It doesn't paint Catholicism as all rainbows and ponies.
wow...and this is not Catholic bashing?...again, and again...
perhaps all Catholic freepers should be asked to leave FR?..yes?...since we're no worthy....
anyone know of a good patriotic site where Catholics are accepted?
What difference does it make what a book of myths and fables says about anything?
Does the "correct version" have to have higher critical commentary?
Though we have seen the denomination that claims to have never changed
That would be the Orthodox.
Nope. They've changed too. They buy the whole modernist unit when it comes to the bible.
Man, us rednecks must really be terrible people to inspire such universal hatred and revulsion. Is it because we talk funny?
They've also been encouraged to regard it as a book of fairy tales.
They were better off before.
Funny thing....when your fellow Roman Catholics post articles, comments, etc saying non-Roman Catholics are heretics, etc....we don't run to the mods and complain of "bashing".
Roman Catholics on the other hand have, do and will continue to do so.
If the open forums are to rough for you perhaps you should stay in the caucus protected threads. You will be relatively safe there until you disagree with one of your fellow Roman Catholics.
Any questions?
Yes. Did you read the original article?
All the sources you cite practice "historical criticism" of the bible, which is loaded down with rationalist, modernizing assumptions.
Do you believe the events narrated in Genesis 1-11 actually happened?
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