Replies

Could you please explain to me what the historical ancestry of the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Church has to do with God's plan of salvation?

This is only my opinion, but if Jesus established the church and said it would be around essentially forever, and since the only game in town was the RC church up until the 11th century (Othodox) and then up until the 16th century (Reformation), then for that to be true, whatever manifestations of the church that was around in those 500 years would have to be the true church.

As I'm RC, I'm trying to understand how many Protestant faithful can condemn the RC church as being somehow invalid, but yet participate in a church that essentiallly didn't exist for 3/4 of the time since Jesus' coming. I picked the Orthodox schism because its conveniently just before the crusades and first inquisition (usually used as examples to point out why the RC church can't be "the way"), then you have the Orthodox church sitting out there, pretty much doing what it was doing in the first millenium and basically ignored by the Reformation.

Seems to me, if Jesus really meant he would be with the church always, then either the RC or the Orthodox traditions (or both) must be valid, at least in the form they were in for the 500 years between the schism and the reformation.

AnalogReign's comments have been very helpful in understanding the Protestant position for me. I'm certainly not condemning Protestant beliefs, but one can trace a large portion of RC and Orthodox faith tradition nearly all the way back to Christ. It's not an accident. My observation is that anyone with a Bible can start a new flavor of Protestant Christianity and be accepted because there's no real authority absent one of the two historical churches. It seems a little fuzzy, as a Catholic looking over to the Protestant side. Satan is a pretty creative guy, and Catholics are quite aware of his meddling in the RC church. As a Protestant, how do you know what you're hearing is what Christ taught?

I mean, faith exists in the RC world too, but you can get som pretty divergent manifestations of it both within the RC church and taking all of Christendom as a whole. The RC and Orthodox churches can at least say they've made a pretty good effort of taking what Christ taught and preserving it through two millenia (no small task).

Certainly there's been stumbling, and continues to be. But comments that RC's should essentially abandon the church in favor of interpreting the Bible on their own? To me that's like attempting surgery by reading a copy of Gray's Anatomy. Sure, everything you need to know is in there, but wouldn't you be better off getting advice from someone who has studied surgery extensively? Yes, even trained surgeons make an occassional mistake, but most of the time, they're spot on. The RC church isn't perfect, but can you name any other organization with the historical, theological, philosophical and (believe it or not) scientific resources devloted to any subject, much less devoted to understanding the word?