Let's look at Matthew 16:13-20:
14 They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets."
15 "But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?"
16 Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ,[b] the Son of the living God."
17 Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter,[c] and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades[d] will not overcome it.[e] 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be[f] bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be[g] loosed in heaven." 20 Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.
And if you look at the following verse 20 you can see that Jesus still has not changed subject because he is commanding them not to reveal that He is the Christ.
Jesus thus does not declare the primacy of Peter, but rather declares that his church will be built upon the foundation of the revelation of and confession of faith of Jesus as the Christ. The "rock" is our faith in Christ.
It is fitting that this was written by a lawyer. He sets forth all the evidences and then presents a judgement. Wonderfully done. Readers may decide if they subscribe to his analysis and conclusion. As for me, I found it quite compelling, since I have struggled with many of the questions he poses ever since realizing the degree of corruption present in the Protestant apparatus in the U.S. If both the Catholic and Protestant establishments have been corrupted at one time or another by political power, what does that say? Reichert is able to separate the issues of sin and error, and make a distinction between them. It’s illuminatiing, to put it mildly.
Ping
??? Yes, I would call that confusion alright! It is trying to put something that is of the spirit into an intellectual construct. I would call it a state of the heart, not of the mind.
I had come a long way in understanding, or trying to understand, justification and salvation from a Catholic perspective and my own uneasiness with the lack of passion for Christian unity among my Evangelical brothers.
There was a time when unity was a double edged sword. When you have the power to kill or torture those who believe differently than you, you can get a lot of people to confess whatever you tell them they must confess.
The Reformers began down that same error ridden road, but were quickly undone by their own principles. Forced unity is evil, which is why I have a lot more uneasiness with unity than I do with whatever number of divisions result from division that's a product of freedom of conscience.
It must be shown that the Church defected at some time, or over some period of time, from the original deposit of the faith.
Show me Gospel support for torturing and/or killing heretics or even signing off on the state doing it to maintain domestic tranquility. The Church did defect from the original deposit of the faith & I'm not sure She would have rediscovered Her true purpose if She hadn't had it forced on Her.
Why is it that Bible-reading Christians did not "reform" the early Church? If these early Christians could not comprehend the true gospel from reading the Bible in their own language at a time so close to the apostolic era, how is it that Protestants were suddenly able to do so some fifteen centuries later in translation and in a culture remote in time and space from the apostolic age?
People had ready access to Bibles in the early Church? what happened to the argument that Bibles weren't assembled until centuries later & then they were rare, expensive & most people couldn't read anyway?
It sounds like this fellow is on his way to becoming a Catholic!
**Ironically, it was the first pope—the apostle Peter—who pointed out the rather obvious fact that Scripture is not necessarily self-explanatory; it can be twisted by the unscrupulous to support virtually any theological position (2 Peter 3:16).**
No YOPIOS in the Catholic Church. We are guided in our interpretation of Holy Scripture by Scripture and my Holy Tradition — the mouth to mouth records that were passed down from the apostles to others verbally.
Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.
Like most Evangelicals, I had always understood this passage to refer to the growth of the Kingdom over time, as more believers were added to the fold. It surely means this, of course, but I came to see that it also alludes to the appearance of the Kingdom, to the fact that the Kingdom, as it grows, might look very different from the bare seed from which it sprang.
This man totally missed the mark on this parable. One only needs to go to Matthew's account and see that the "mustard tree" is right smack dab in the middle of describing apostasy. Right between "leaven" (never spoken of as good in the Bible) and the "tares". All three parables describe the Kingdom of Heaven. The mustard tree Jesus describes is not "big" because it is good or right. It is not right at all. It is not natural. It is WAY bigger than it is supposed to be. The "fowls" described in the parable only add to the evilness within.