Posted on 04/05/2007 5:42:47 PM PDT by Utah Girl
Mitt Romney is riding high this week after his victory in "the first primary," which consists of raising cold, hard cash to compete: more than $20 million in the first quarter, $5 million more than his closest contender, Rudy "Lay off my wife!" Giuliani. John McCain came in a lackluster third with $12.5 million.
Romney's campaign benefited from two distinct donor networks, according to media accounts: Wall Street and Mormons. GOP front-runner Rudy, struggling with one of those weird media freak shows erupting around his wife, Judith (her alleged participation in future Cabinet meetings and former puppy killings), must be a little envious on both counts.
Why is it that all the Dem candidates are still married to their first spouse, while among the current crop of leading GOP contenders, the only guy with just one wife is the Mormon?
Truth is, I don't think this is just an accident. There's something about Mormons the rest of us ought to pay attention to: Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do much better than almost any other faith group at sustaining a marriage culture -- and they do this while participating fully and successfully in modern life. Utah is above the national average in both household income and the proportion of adults who are college graduates.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Thanks. I’ll take a look.
Placemarker
“On the other hand, perhaps it would have been better altogether to not have added anything at all as advised in Rev: 22:18!”
The words at the end of Revelation apply to the scroll that is Revelation. Revelation was probably not the last book of the Bible written. It was very probably written during hte persecutions by Nero (given that the numerical value of the name of Nero Caesar, first grand persecutor of Christians, is 666), which is to say BEFORE John - the author of Revelation - composed his Gospel. Revelation has been placed at the end of the Bible by some Christians as an arbitrary editing choice, because of its content. It was not the last book of the Bible composed, probably, and its words to add nothing refer to IT, not to the Bible itself.
“What was written in the Book of Acts, was the New Law, and you might do well to consider reading it (ACTS) more carefully before dispensing advice to folks about how to read the Bible.”
Acts, and the Bible itself, absolutely was not the new law. That is your tradition speaking, and nothing more than that.
There were no prostestant women then. Read what Visconte13 has written about that.
He has shredded any arguement that polygamy was from God.
I would suggest a great general textbook used in courses on the subject of Scripture, “General Introduction to the Bible,” by Norman Geisler and William Nix. It deals with questions and categories you raised on revelation, authorship, canonicity, authority, the dating of the writings, the eyewitness evidence, etc.
Also, out of print, “Battle for the Bible,” by Harold Lindsell, explaining the inerrancy battle in the 70s, and “Inerrancy,” edited by Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, the latter having excellent articles on the various issues and questions.
You also are confusing Law and Gospel in your interpretation of passages. I would suggest work from the Reformation on the subject, from Martin Luther, or Chemnitz, or more current is a classic, “Law and Gospel” by C.F.W. Walther. Once you get this topic right, you will start understanding what Jesus meant, what He taught, what the disciples taught, and Scripture starts becoming very clear. Modern evangelicalism has it mixed up, as does Catholicism, as does Mormonism, but the answers are out there from Scripture for those hungry for the truth of the Gospel of free salvation, pure grace offered solely through Jesus Christ’s works on our behalf, the mystery revealed in His inspired writings we have in our Bible!
IOW, if it is wrong to believe in the divinity of God and believe that God has power to bring about the deification of man, (his sons and daughters) then you have to throw out some Bible passages and early Christians such as Iraneus, Jerome, Clement of Alexandria, Justin Matryr etc.
Early Christian belief about the deification of man.
Restoring_the_Ancient_Church- From the end of Chapter 3
Deification - Deification in the Bible - Deification in Early Christianity - Objections to the LDS Doctrine -Objections Answered - The Deification of God
Yes, why else did Jesus go to preach to the spirits in prison between his crucifixion and resurection?
1 Peter 3:19, 4:6
Mormons believe Jesus was born on April 6. It is in the modern revelation of Doctrine and Covaenants but I can’t find the exact reference.
The book (out of print) 'The House of Israel" by Hyrum Andrus talks about it.
“You also are confusing Law and Gospel in your interpretation of passages. I would suggest work from the Reformation on the subject, from Martin Luther, or Chemnitz, or more current is a classic, “Law and Gospel” by C.F.W. Walther. Once you get this topic right, you will start understanding what Jesus meant, what He taught, what the disciples taught, and Scripture starts becoming very clear.”
False.
Jesus was clear. We don’t need the writings of other people, with an ideological axe to grind, writing 1500 years later in the middle of a religious war, to “help” us interpret what Jesus meant. We can read it and understand what he meant.
Unfortunately, what he meant demolishes a lot of traditions that have been built up around what people PREFER that he meant.
Anyway, the place to start, if one wants to understand the Bible is the Church. Jesus did not leave us a Bible. He left us a Church. The Apostles did not leave us a Bible - only 2 of the 12 wrote anything - they left us a Church. You start with the Church and the Sacraments. And that is all that is required to learn and do absolutely everything that one needs to know for Christian Salvation. Literacy is not required. Jesus was so enamored of the written word that he didn’t leave a single one. Why? Precisely because God knows full well that if you give men a text, they will do to it what the Jews did before, and what Protestants do now: they will become Pharisaic lawyers. That is why Jesus built his entire Church on oral actions and physical sacraments, without one single written word.
The Gospels and Epistles were written later. They are sauce on the stew, condiments. They allow one to go deeper and to learn history. But the Bible is totally unneccessary for Salvation. Jesus left a Church and Seven Sacraments. He did not leave a Bible dispensary. He did not leave one written word. Since he was God, presumably He knew what he was doing.
The Bible can only properly be understood as supporting documentation for the Church, a record of what the Church did, who did what, and why. It is a written tradition of the Church, and it has absolutely zero authority independent of the Church. It is, in fact, idolatry of the worst order to raise the Bible and make a graven image out of it in order to ATTACK the living Church and Sacraments which Jesus left. Jesus did not say his Holy Spirit would be with the Bible. There was no Bible in the time of the Apostles, or for another Century. Jesus said the Holy Spirit would be with the Church. He did not say God would look upon our faith in the Scriptures. HE said that God would look on the faith of the Church. What you think the Bible is, is in fact what Jesus made the Church to be. What you have made of the Bible is an idol.
The Bible will lead men away from God if it is read outside of the Teaching Authority of the Catholic Church, which is why men should be discouraged from reading it before they have been properly taught in the traditions of Peter and Paul and the Church. Within the cadre of the Sacred Tradition, of which the Bible is part, the Bible makes sense and completes the story. Outside of that cadre, the Bible read literally will lead men straightaway into idolatry, folly, error, sin and death. The Bible Alone, without the authority of the Church to explain it, held aloft as the word of God, is a deadly idol and an instrument of the Devil.
It is true, technically, to say that we have no written words from Jesus (we haven’t a plaster cast of that which He wrote upon the ground that convicted the hearts of those taking up stones to kill a woman accused of adultery). But to assert that He has not left us written words for our edification is inaccurate, brother.
If the Apostolic Succession means what we believe it means, then ‘holy men of God spake as they were moved’ and men such as Mark, Luke, and others accompanying the Apostles wrote down what was dictated. That is how we have what we firmly believe to be the words of our Savior written and collected for our edification ... not for our Salvation, for that is the work of the Holy Spirit upon our faithful yielding, but for our building up in the Spirit; ‘Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind’.
When I read the Pope's weekly homilies, thanks to the work of freeper ELS sharing them here at FR, I am reading what a man of God's choosing has written for my edification. Except for the Internet, I would have no contact with a Catholic each day, much less an audience with the Pope on any occasion. Yet his written messages are an enlightenment to my mind and soul because of the written word. His most recent message is on Origen, a most interesting homily.
You have mail.
“How would you or anyone else know what Jesus said had God not left the written testimony of the Apostles and their scribes, as a means to pass the Words of Our Lord to us without the misspeak of oral traditions?”
God did not write the Bible. The men who wrote the words wrote the Bible. The extent to which those words in fact are the words of God is a matter taken on faith. Reading the Bible, we see that Jesus left a Church, and some of the first clergy of the Church wrote things down. Many things were written down, but only some of those written things were ultimately accepted as the canon of the Bible, and it was the Church that selected what was in the Bible, and what was left out of the Bible. To the extent the Bible is a faithful compilation of the inspired works of men, it is only so because God inspired to Church to make the right choice, after many years of disagreement.
And this places the problem of there being 9 books fewer in the Protestant Bible than the Catholic Bible in alarmingly sharp relief. The Church settled the canon of Scripture in 400 AD. Martin Luther said that 9 books were not Scripture. On what authority did he do that?
So it is not SIMPLY the case, as you suggest, that the Apostles and the Prophets wrote things down. (Actually, the only Apostles who met Jesus who ever wrote a word were Peter, John, James and Jude; perhaps Matthew. Mark, Luke, and Paul never saw Jesus do anything, and everything they wrote was based on oral tradition: hearing it from other apostles. Or, probably more correctly, Mark wrote down what Peter told him, Matthew and Luke used Mark as their source, and John, writing as an old man with a lifetime of reflection on events, wrote his Gospel reflecting back on the circumstances. Maybe.
Other men wrote things down. We have the Didache, from the apostles. We have the letters of Clement. We have the proto-evangelium of James. We have other letters. There is even a letter of greeting which may very well have been written by Jesus himself. But none of THAT is in the Bible at all. Why? Because someone made a cut of what was and was not canonical Scripture. It wasn’t God directly. It was the Bishops and Pope of the Catholic Church, hundreds of years after the fact. So, God was either with the Church, and that’s why you have the Bible. Or God was not with the Church, which is why the Church erred in including the 9 books that Luther and Protestants have deleted from the Bible. If the Church could err about those 9 books, then the Church could err on the Gospels and the Epistles as well.
One cannot simply assert the authority of the Bible, standing alone, because the Bible is a collection of Books, drawn from a wider corpus of books that were left out, some of which are still read as being inspired by God (such as the Letters of Clement). Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the ONLY texts ever inspired by God appear in the Bible. Actually, nowhere in the Bible does the word “Bible” appear, and at no time during the existence of Jesus or any of the Apostles was there such a thing as the specific collection of books WE call the Bible in existence. There were Scriptures, but there was no canon of them. The Catholics settled on their canon in the late 300s. The Jews settled on theirs about the same time. The Protestants settled on their canon in the 1500s. The three sets of texts cannot ALL be the inspired word of God. Either the Jews err badly by excluding the Deuterocanica and the New Testament, or the Protestants have mangled the word of God by editing it and deleting whole books of it, or the Catholics have violated the word of God by adding uninspired works to the Canon. Which is it?
The Bible cannot tell you, and does not tell you.
Only the human institutions of Church or Synagogue can answer that question, and whether its particular answer to the question is right or not is wholly dependent on whether or not the institution itself has the authority of God to make that call. Jesus didn’t leave a bible. He left a Church, and the Church handed on his traditions. Part of the tradition, assembled later, is included in the Bible. But only part of it. If that’s not true, then on what basis is there a Bible at all? Where did it come from? Why are 1 and 2 Clement not in the Bible?
“As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, we first have a faith that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him and that He came in the flesh to redeem us. THEN we vest faith in the words as recorded in the Gospels.”
That’s not really what I said.
What I said was that if you’re going to use the Bible, start with the Gospels first and focus on them for a long, long time before branching out to the rest. Read the Bible through the prism of Jesus.
But your attribution to me of this thought: “we first have a faith that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him and that He came in the flesh to redeem us. THEN we vest faith in the words” is interesting, but it’s not what I would say at all.
Everybody’s spiritual journey through this world is different. I will describe a bit of my own because it will explain precisely where I am coming from and will correct your misimpression, expressed above.
As I said elsewhere, I was baptized as an infant, and I believe that this sacred rite put a seal upon my soul, such that my soul recognized God and sought him out.
However, although baptized Catholic, I lived in an enviroment that was either frankly pagan or rather stridently Protestant. I preferred the pagans and the Jews over the Protestants, and I will tell you why. Christianity was urged on me, in frantic Baptist missionary tones, by well-meaning relatives, rather relentlessly over a number of years. “Are you ready to be SAVED, Steve?” I always found this to be an extremely embarrassing question. Now, my proselytizers said that this was because my soul was aware of its sin, and was reaching towards the light of Christ while the demons of my sinful nature were wrestling it back. But that was not true. I had no desire to embarrass these people, or get into a confrontation with them. The reason I was not ready to be “Saved” by them and there religion was because I found it utterly preposterous.
They always hailed the Bible. Well, I made several game tries at the Bible. Like any other book, I picked it up and started reading. Before I reached the age of ten I tried, but found the English of the old King James Version to be too stilted, strange and archaic to be comprehensible. As a teenager, I tried again valiantly, and this time I was able to actually penetrate what the thing said.
I did not get past Genesis. What I was reading was absolutely ridiculous. The world created in six days? Man created out of clay? Woman being created from the rib of a man? Mount Everest and the rest of the world covered with rainwater and all of the animals, from llamas to aardvarks to panda bears to polar bears to koalas and kangaroos all in pairs, two by two, on a boat built by primitive men (funny that those animals don’t all live in a spread-out pattern from Mt. Ararat, isn’t it). A 6000 year old world? All flute players descended from one man, while all blacksmiths are descended from another. A tower being built to heaven that God tears down and scatters languages? The earth formed in a bubble in the middle of the surrounding water (that’s why the sky is blue!). These are fun stories. They’re like Greek myths. Trouble was, I was supposed to believe that these things were literally true, because this was, after all, the Bible, and the Bible was, I was told, the Word of God, and literally true. What utter BS! The first time I started to read the Bible, I got to the end of the Noah’s Ark story and sat it down and said “This is not true. I am not going to waste my time on this crap. How can anybody in his right mind believe this? What about DINOSAURS for God’s sake? Hello? McFly?”
So, my first effort to approach God the way I was told by my earnest Christian relatives, through the Bible, failed because the Bible we had was an archaic King James Version with its strange language that is confusing and essentially incomprehensible to anybody before he has had some classes in Shakespeare. And the second time the approach failed because Genesis is full of myths that did not happen. Man descended from primates. The earth is billions of years old. There may have been an “Adam” and an “Eve” in the sense that there was indeed a first human or breeding pair, but their parents were some sort of hominid apelike creature. Man was not formed out of a hunk of clay and woman was not formed out of a rib. There were worldwide floods at the end of the last Ice Age, sure, but there was never a world-covering flood, there was never a Noah’s Ark, all of mankind was never reduced to eight people on a boat with all the animals of the world. Everybody who is a blacksmith is not descended of one guy. These things are myths. Also, there was death in the world long before there were men or women, and human beings did not evolve immortal and only start to die when the first and only man and woman ate a piece of fruit from a tree. There was no talking snake. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a hundred million years before mankind, and they died. Death is a natural process that did not come into the Earth because of anything men did. Genesis is false. Factually untrue. The stories it tells about the creation of the world did not happen. Not even colorably. It is a book of Jewish myths of Creation. It is as true as the Greek myths of the creation of the world, which is to say: not. If Christianity rides on the LITERAL truth of every God-breathed word of the Bible, and Genesis 1 and 2, et al, must be taken as literally true verbatim, then Christianity is false because the Bible is patently false. The Genesis story of the Creation of the World is false in every detail. We know this through the fossil record. We know this through the geological record. It’s not even debatable.
But THAT was the test of faith that was put to me right at the outset of the Bible. I have to completely eliminate the rational, intelligent, scientific mind God gave me and believe a bunch of Jewish fairy tales. That was what I was made to understand is required to believe Christ, for that is “Scripture Alone.” Ergo, my second reading of the Bible taught me I could not possibly be a Christian, because Christians are ridiculous people who literally believe in Santa Claus. But I still talked to God, because that seal of Baptism was in my soul. God was nature, the REAL forces that REALLY built the world, and caused dinosaurs and man to evolve over eons. And God still really is nature, or the intelligence that sets nature in order and makes it run. But to know God, the REAL God, I went to my physics book and my chemistry book, my biology book and my astronomy and botany books. That is reality. Whatever set those laws running is God. God was obvious or not. Whether God was CONSCIOUS or not was a debatable point (after all, I am conscious, and I am part of nature, so to the extent that God is what drives nature, God is, empirically speaking, AT LEAST as conscious as we are, clearly). But the whole Christian God or Jewish God? Fails utterly right in the first two chapters of Genesis. They are factually false. If one is required to believe them as written, literally, because they are in the Bible, then I can never be a Christian, because I refuse to lie to myself, and I know those things are not true. Sure, they were not lies when written. They were myths of people who didn’t know any better. But TODAY we do know better, or I do at any rate, and for ME to say I believed in the Genesis story would be a lie. I do not. I cannot. It is obviously a myth. It even contradicts itself. (My evangelizers insisted that the bible CANNOT contradict itself, but it does within the first few sentences. Genesis 1 says the birds were all made on the fifth day, before man. Genesis 2 says the birds were made after man and specifically for man. That is a conflict. It compounds the lies, and is indeed lying to my face to assert, in the face of that textual fact, that the Bible doesn’t conflict with itself. It does from the start. So, here I had a text which ITSELF was telling stories that are patently false, and it is not even INTERNALLY consistent in its falsehoods. The Bible destroyed any possibility of faith for me for a good while. Read as ancient literature, Genesis is really interesting. Read as literal fact, Genesis is ridiculous, and for me to deny my very mind and pretend that I really believed it would both render me a liar and render me ridiculous.
But that seal on my soul, placed there at baptism, kept turning to God.
Late in High School, I tried again. I picked up the Bible again, as my proselytizing relatives and friends and caring televangelists insisted that I do, and I started reading again. I suspended disbelief as I read Genesis, determined to get past it. Exodus was more believable, and Numbers. The various dietary and other practices commanded by Leviticus and Deuteronomy seemed like a bunch of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but I kept on going.
And then I came to The Book of Genocide. In the story of Joshua, I read with revulsion how the Christian God ordered the genocide of a whole people, and how the Jews went about doing it and were righteous for having done so. I read to the end of the book, sat down the Bible and said: The Christian God, to the extent he exists at all, is in fact the Devil. Any being that orders the wanton destruction of all men, women and children simply because of their race and religion is a demon from hell, and nothing that I will EVER worship! Indeed, if the REAL God were like the genocidal maniac that one reads of in a literal first read of Joshua, then I hated him with every fiber of my being. I myself, fallible and weak though I knew (and know) myself to be, am infintely morally superior to the Hell demon genocidal Yahweh I first encountered on my first read of Joshua. And so I sat the Bible down again, convinced that (a) thanks to the falsehoods generalized in Genesis there was, in fact, no such God as the Christian God, and (b) fortunately there was no such God, because the genocidal Christian God described in Joshua, ordaining the slaughter of children etc, precisely conforms to the native concepts I had of the Devil: a relentless murdering bastard I would never, ever worship.
And thus ended forever any possible belief in the Christian God by way of the Bible. Three dips into that well, reading it from the beginning, convinced me that I did not want have anything to do with that strange cult of stupid demon-worshippers called Christians. Did they not believe in dinosaur bones? (A cousin explained that dinosaur bones were placed here by the Devil, to trick us into not believing the Word of God in Genesis. Horse manure. Genesis is false. Dinosaurs are real. Deal with reality. Get out of the fairy tales.) Did they not read Joshua and see the nature of the Hell demon they worship? Blech.
That was what going to “The Word of God” in the Bible taught me.
But the seal placed on my soul at baptism remained.
And so it was that in college, drawn to sing in the Catholic Choir because I like music and that was the way to express it, I decided to book some time with a Catholic Chaplain to go in and challenge him and beat him up about his silly religion. I could not, recall, really go for the jugular with my adolescent proselytizers - remember, they were friends and family - but I certainly could do it to some stranger no-name priest. So I went in very businesslike and sat down for my meeting with the priest. This was 1981, but I still remember his name: Father Condon. I explained that I was baptized a Catholic, but had not been brought up in the Church, that I had read parts of the Bible and realized that there was no way I could be a Christian, because it was false. He asked me what I meant. I said, ‘Well, just starting with Genesis and Adam and Eve...’ and expressed my disbelief in the whole business, the basic reality of evolution, and finishing up with a flourish: “...and because I have to believe THAT, I cannot be a Christian!”
To this day I remember his response. He smiled and said “Genesis tells us that God made the world and made us. Science tells us how he did it. We probably evolved from primates - that’s what we teach in the Catholic Schools - there is no conflict between science and the Church.”
I was flabbergasted, flummoxed, gobsmacked.
And my soul leapt for joy.
The obstacle to my believing any of it at all, the literal words of Genesis in the Bible, were swept away. They do indeed say that, but you don’t have to believe that literally. You have to understand what God meant to teach by it.
Within a few weeks I was a catechumen. Within a few months I had made my first confession, then taken first communion, and was confirmed.
NOW I can read the Bible and understand it, because I am not bound to a rigid rule of every-word literalism. It is true, the God of Joshua is hard on the Canaanites. But he was no less hard on the Jews who killed the Canaanites: they’re all dead too. Nor will he be any less hard, in that respect, on any of us: nobody gets out of here alive. Even Jesus didn’t.
Without the Church, with just the Bible Alone, Christianity was impossible for me. Jesus is swell, but Genesis cannot be taken seriously, and the Yahweh of Joshua seems very like a monster, and not a loving God at all.
This is why I say, with conviction, that if one INSISTS on going about Christianity without the aid of the Sacraments and the Teaching Authority of the Church, then start with Jesus. The New Testament makes the claim he was God, so clearly whatever God had to say when he walked the Earth is of primordial importance. To me that’s obvious.
But suppose you read the Bible another way...suppose you read it the natural way.
First, you are going to run into text that claims that virtually all of the discoveries of four hundred years of modern science are false. Then you’re going to run into the history of panda bears, kangaroos and llamas on a boat with the only people in the world. And then you are going to run into Yahweh the genocide.
If you can disregard natural science, history and fundamental reality all in order to believe in the literal Bible, well, then it’s a religion for you. I cannot.
But I certainly can accept Genesis as a moral-teaching poem on creation. The Catholic Church does not bind me to a literal belief in the text of Genesis. My evangelizers did. God didn’t give me a scientific mind in order to ask me to kill it, like he asked Abraham to kill Isaac in Genesis (and for the record, if God appeared to me and asked me to kill my daughter, I would tell him to go to hell).
So, that is where I am coming from. I would not abandon all reason in order to enter the faith, because I would not have been able to do it had I wanted to (and I didn’t want to, and don’t, and won’t). I have been told by many people that I must take Genesis literally, because it is The Word of God, and Every Word is God breathed. I am polite to those people, but the truth is that theirs is a perscription for killing faith in ones such as me, not nurturing it.
I grew in understanding and came to much the same conclusion about the Bible that you did. I don’t believe everything in the Bible is absolutely literal. I do believe that the concepts as viewed by Hebraic peoples who lived in that particular period are passed on to us as they wrote them. But just as peoples once believed the earth was flat (it was true to their understanding) we now recognize as not correct from OUR understanding. And at some point in the future people will scoff at our ideas.
I didn’t come to these conclusions via the same path as you, or through any connection with the RC, but through experience and through searching. God enlightens us and brings us to him. He uses different tools in shaping us.
This is why I tell my testimony to Mormons. Perhaps I am mistaken, and they do understand Christ, Salvation, the Bible and God. I know that Mormonism does not necessarily lead one to that understanding. Catholicism does not necessarily lead to the understanding either, nor does Protestantism. God is the only one who can. We discover Him through the Bible, and/or through the Church. They are dependent upon each other. For if the Bible was not a necessary component and the Word also, then why do they both testify of the other?
For if the Bible Church was not a necessary component and the Word also, then why do they both testify of the other?
I was just correcting that very thing!
Great minds think alike!
“and the Word also,”
And here is the very CORE of my criticism of Bible-centered theology.
The Bible never describes itself as “the Word”!
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and the Word became Flesh.
The Word is God!
The Word is Jesus!
The Word is the Holy Spirit!
The Word is absolutely, emphatically, unquestionably NOT an image made of mashed up wood and cut plates (i.e.: a book, to wit: the Bible).
It is all fine for our traditions to hold up the Bible and say “This is the word of the Lord. Amen.”
But when we conflate that “word of the Lord” with “The Word” we are literally saying that the Bible is God! We are calling the Bible The Word, the Incarnate Word. Jesus is the walking Bible, and the Bible is Jesus in wood and ink.
And that is idolatry.
The Word IS a necessary component of the Church - it is the KEY component. But the Word is the Holy Spirit, which Jesus promised would be with the Church. The Bible is NOT the Word. It is, in fact, blasphemy to raise a graven image (for what is a book, but a series of images, formerly carved into metal, stamped onto a piece of wood - truly a graven image) and call it God, which is what calling the Bible “The Word” is.
The Bible Alone, without the Church, will lead you away from God, not to Him. The way it will do it, is by confusing your ways and tangling your feet. Without the instructive authority of those who have been specifically granted authority to teach, through the Apostolic Succession of the literal laying on of hands to make new clergy - precisely as Paul describes in detail in his Letter to Timothy - the individual has nothing but his own lights to guide him.
You mention the Holy Spirit. Yes, the Holy Spirit is there. But there are evil spirits there too, deceptive spirits, spirits who will lead individuals into reading what they want to see, into believing, with great joy, that the Bible tells them EXACTLY what they want to believe, and what they thought was true all along! This is the great joy of being without a “religion”. You can read the Bible yourself, and find that it perfectly corresponds to what you believe. Nobody will tell you “No”! Indeed, where you run into the hardest passages, strong spirits within you will smooth it over and make it appear so rational and right that this MEANS what you always thought! And you will praise the Holy Spirit and sing Hallelujah! to discover that what you thought was really right with God all along, and not what all those mean old doctrinaire Christians thought!
And in this, you will be very much deceived. For it is not ONLY the Holy Spirit that communicates with you and leads you. And no, you cannot readily tell the difference between the leadings of the good and the leadings of the evil. Every man needs an external standard to which he can compare. And no, the Bible read by his own lights under the leading of the Spirit CANNOT POSSIBLY BE that external standard, because it is chock full of contradictions. There is not one Spirit within us to lead us, but two: there is the Holy Spirit, and there is the Spirit of Satan. And no, the presence of the Holy Spirit NEVER drives Satan away from you permanently. Never. That which feels right can be very, very wrong, but if you have no standard but your own intepretation of the Bible to guide you, based on the good feeling that you get that the Spirit has led you, you have nothing on which you can be sure.
If it feels that good and wonderful, and yet is so estranged from Christianity in the Apostolic Succession, how do you know that it is not the Devil who has lead you far astray? That it feels wonderful emotionally and is so full of spirituality is hardly and answer. There are other things that feel just unbelievably good and yet which are bad for us.
Man cannot do it on his own. And reading a book as complex as the Bible, with no one to guide one but the Holy Spirit, won’t do it. Because when one reads the Bible alone, he is led by the Holy Spirit AND by the Devil, and the individual, alone, has absolutely no way at all to distinguish between the two.
Orthodoxy, true faith, was never, ever described by Jesus or practiced by the Apostles as a singular profession, of a man with a book alone with his prayers. It was the Lord’s Table: the eucharist. Public rites. Public association, and public reproof and correction. That is the faith Jesus founded.
If you are sure that you have found complete contentment in the Scriptures on your own, then you can be sure of only one thing: you have been led off the path into a thicket, which is nice and comfortable because that is what you WANT to believe, but it certainly is not in fact true, or inspired by God. Partly, yes, but wholly? No. God didn’t found a self-help group, he founded a Church, and he explicitly vested authority, to command, to judge, to bind, to instruct, upon SOME men, but not ALL men in the Church.
Start with your understanding of what “The Word” is. You think it’s the Bible. John tells you that the Word is God and Jesus. Do you think that the Bible is God? Do you worship the Bible? If the Bible is the Word, then you must not merely read it and respect it, you must worship it, for the Word is God, and the Word became flesh, and you must worship the Word. If you worship the Bible, then you commit bibliolatry. The Bible is the word of God, and contains the words of God. That’s true. To call it the Word, is to call it God. And that’s idolatry. The Bible is the word. It is not the Word. To understand the word, you have to have the Word, and Jesus said that the Word, the Holy Spirit, would dwell in the Church, and be wherever TWO or more of you (not one) are GATHERED in his name.
You and the Bible, can’t do it alone. Because it’s really you and the Bible and the Holy Spirit and the Devil, and you have no way, on your own, to faithfully and certainly discern between God and the Devil. Only an external standard can do that. You need a Church. You need a religion. That’s why Jesus made a Church and established an organized religion.
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