Posted by annalex to 353FMG; AlaskaErik; Alex Murphy; Antoninus; ArrogantBustard; CTK YKC; DogwoodSouth; ... annalex, please explain why you are pinging me to these anti-Protestant threads, when I have never asked you to ping me (except to inform me when you talk about me behind my back) - and when I appear to be the only Protestant that you are continually pinging...
See here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Please remove me from your pinglists hereon, unless you would like me to exchange pings with you, specifically and personally, to some of my own threads that I believe you will find enlightening. I will happily return the favor, if you'd like!
Wow! So many excellent quotes:
At one stage my elder sister, a very committed evangelical with somewhat flexible denominational affiliations, chided me with becoming "obsessed" with trying to find a "true Church." "Does it really matter?" she would ask. Well, yes it did.
I began to suspect that an emphasis on logic, rather than on research, might expedite an answer to my prayers for guidance.
Catholicism, as I came to discover, has a quite positive approach to our natural reasoning powers, and traditionally has its future priests study philosophy for years before they even begin theology. But I came from a religious milieu where this outlook was not encouraged, and was often even discouraged
Thus, with my awakening interest in logical analysis as a test of religious truth, I was naturally led to ask whether this illogicality in the practice of the Reformers was, perhaps, accompanied by illogicality at the more fundamental level of their theory. As a good Protestant I had been brought up to hold as sacred the basic methodological principle of the Reformation: that the Bible alone contains all the truth that God has revealed for our salvation.
It follows that Proposition Bthe very foundation of all Protestant Christianityis neither found in Scripture nor can be deduced from Scripture in any way.
The schizoid history of Protestantism itself bears witness to the original inner contradiction which marked its conception and birth. Conservative Protestants have maintained the original insistence on the Bible as the unique infallible source of revealed truth, at the price of logical incoherence. Liberals on the other hand have escaped the incoherence while maintaining the claim to "private interpretation" over against that of Popes and Councils, but at the price of abandoning the Reformers insistence on an infallible Bible.