Is the Bible God's Word? (Do you believe the Bible is the only word of God?)

I belong to the church of Jesus Christ.

That's pretty vague. Does your church have a name?

To which "true" christianity are you referring?

Are you referring to those that claim baptism for infants?

Are you referring to those that claim against baptism for infants?

Ok, I'll remove the snake handlers from the list.

Now surely you can tell me which side of "true christianity" I should join.

Or don't they cover that at UTLM?

That's pretty vague. Does your church have a name?

It has been called The Way at other times Nazarenes and other the Called Out, the Gathering or Assembly, some others call us the Bride. We have been called by the house or city we meet in. We are called the Church of the Firstborn and the Body. But the Church of Jesus Christ pretty well sums it all up.

Now surely you can tell me which side of "true christianity" I should join. Or don't they cover that at UTLM?

Well, you will be closer to "true Christianity" at UTLM than you will at FARM/FAIR, et al.

BTW, I'm looking for one of those Nephite lands tours - I hear they are unreal.

****BTW, still waiting to hear where all of the artifacts from the bom era are located at - should be enough to fill multiple museums. ***

Maybe he is a follower of Prophet Gladden Bishop.(Gladdenites)

He claimed to posess...

the golden plates from which Smith translated the Book of Mormon;
the Urim and Thummim, which assisted Smith in translation;
the breastplate of Moroni;
the Liahona, an artifact from the Book of Mormon;
the sword of Laban;
a small silver “Crown of Israel” representing the Aaronic priesthood; and
a larger gold “Crown of Glory” representing the Melchizedek priesthood.

Brigham Young basicly told Gladen Bishop to not let the gates of Utah hit him in the behind when he leaves,—if he wanted to leave alive.
Brigham Young just couldn’t stand competition.

No where does it say that the Church, run by fallen men, will always do what is right or always teach the truth. They do fail regularly - sometimes catastrophically - and each new generation seems to fail in a major way.

First of all, yes, the men who compose the Church are fallen. But, despite the fallenness of these men, revelation history prevails, as can be seen going all the way back to the beginning of time. Look how fallible were Abraham, Jacob, Moses and David, for example, and yet God worked through them to realize his divine purpose for man. The men were fallen, but Our Lord working through these men is inerrant. Such is the case with the Church. The men who compose the Church are fallen, but the Church remains inerrant and protected by the Holy Spirit, as Christ promised. This is Biblical, as I have demonstrated, and I don't think it can be disputed Biblically without contradiction.

As far as the Biblical basis for the inerrancy of the Church teachings, see New Advent:

Merely remarking for the present that the texts in which Christ promised infallible guidance especially to Peter and his successors in the primacy might be appealed to here as possessing an a fortiori value, it will suffice to consider the classical texts usually employed in the general proof of the Church's infallibility; and of these the principal are:

Matthew 28:18-20;
Matthew 16:18;
John 14, 15, and 16;
I Timothy 3:14-15; and
Acts 15:28 sq.
Matthew 28:18-20

In Matthew 28:18-20, we have Christ's solemn commission to the Apostles delivered shortly before His Ascension: "All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world." In Mark 16:15-16, the same commission is given more briefly with the added promise of salvation to believers and the threat of damnation for unbelievers; "Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be condemned."

Now it cannot be denied by anyone who admits that Christ established a visible Church at all, and endowed it with any kind of effective teaching authority, that this commission, with all it implies, was given not only to the Apostles personally for their own lifetime, but to their successors to the end of time, "even to the consummation of the world". And assuming that it was the omniscient Son of God Who spoke these words, with a full and clear realization of the import which, in conjunction with His other promises, they were calculated to convey to the Apostles and to all simple and sincere believers to the end of time, the only reasonable interpretation to put upon them is that they contain the promise of infallible guidance in doctrinal teaching made to the Apostolic College in the first instance and then to the hierarchical college that was to succeed it.

In the first place it was not without reason that Christ prefaced His commission by appealing to the fullness of power He Himself had received: "All power is given to me", etc. This is evidently intended to emphasize the extraordinary character and extent of the authority He is communicating to His Church -- an authority, it is implied, which He could not personally communicate were not He Himself omnipotent. Hence the promise that follows cannot reasonably be understood of ordinary natural providential guidance, but must refer to a very special supernatural assistance.

In the next place there is question particularly in this passage of doctrinal authority -- of authority to teach the Gospel to all men -- if Christ's promise to be with the Apostles and their successors to the end of time in carrying out this commission means that those whom they are to teach in His name and according to the plenitude of the power He has given them are bound to receive that teaching as if it were His own; in other words they are bound to accept it as infallible. Otherwise the perennial assistance promised would not really be efficacious for its purpose, and efficacious Divine assistance is what the expression used is clearly intended to signify. Supposing, as we do, that Christ actually delivered a definite body of revealed truth, to be taught to all men in all ages, and to be guarded from change or corruption by the living voice of His visible Church, it is idle to contend that this result could be accomplished effectively -- in other words that His promise could be effectively fulfilled unless that living voice can speak infallibly to every generation on any question that may arise affecting the substance of Christ's teaching.

Without infallibility there could be no finality regarding any one of the great truths which have been identified historically with the very essence of Christianity; and it is only with those who believe in historical Christianity that the question need be discussed. Take, for instance, the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation. If the early Church was not infallible in her definitions regarding these truths, what compelling reason can be alleged today against the right to revive the Sabellian, or the Arian, or the Macedonian, or the Apollinarian, or the Nestorian, or the Eutychian controversies, and to defend some interpretation of these mysteries which the Church has condemned as heretical?

One may not appeal to the inspired authority of the Scriptures, since for the fact of their inspiration the authority of the Church must be invoked, and unless she be infallible in deciding this one would be free to question the inspiration of any of the New Testament writings. Nor, abstracting from the question of inspiration, can it be fairly maintained, in face of the facts of history, that the work of interpreting scriptural teaching regarding these mysteries and several other points of doctrine that have been identified with the substance of historical Christianity is so easy as to do away with the need of a living voice to which, as to the voice of Christ Himself, all are bound to submit.

Unity of Faith was intended by Christ to be one of the distinctive notes of His Church, and the doctrinal authority He set up was intended by His Divine guidance and assistance to be really effective in maintaining this unity; but the history of the early heresies and of the Protestant sects proves clearly, what might indeed have been anticipated a priori, that nothing less than an infallible public authority capable of acting decisively whenever the need should rise and pronouncing an absolutely final and irreformable judgment, is really efficient for this purpose. Practically speaking the only alternative to infallibility is private judgment, and this after some centuries of trial has been found to lead inevitably to utter rationalism. If the early definitions of the Church were fallible, and therefore reformable, perhaps those are right who say today that they ought to be discarded as being actually erroneous or even pernicious, or at least that they ought to be re-interpreted in a way that substantially changes their original meaning; perhaps, indeed, there is no such thing as absolute truth in matters religious! How, for example, is a Modernist who takes up this position to be met except by insisting that definitive teaching is irreversible and unchangeable; that it remains true in its original sense for all time; in other words that it is infallible? For no one can reasonably hold that fallible doctrinal teaching is irreformable or deny the right of later generations to question the correctness of earlier fallible definitions and call for their revision or correction, or even for their total abandonment.

From these considerations we are justified in concluding that if Christ really intended His promise to be with His Church to be taken seriously, and if He was truly the Son of God, omniscient and omnipotent, knowing history in advance and able to control its course, then the Church is entitled to claim infallible doctrinal authority. This conclusion is confirmed by considering the awful sanction by which the Church's authority is supported: all who refuse to assent to her teaching are threatened with eternal damnation. This proves the value Christ Himself set upon His own teaching and upon the teaching of the Church commissioned to teach in His name; religious indifferentism is here reprobated in unmistakable terms.

Nor does such a sanction lose its significance in this connection because the same penalty is threatened for disobedience to fallible disciplinary laws or even in some cases for refusing to assent to doctrinal teaching that is admittedly fallible. Indeed, every mortal sin, according to Christ's teaching, is punishable with eternal damnation. But if one believes in the objectivity of eternal and immutable truth, he will find it difficult to reconcile with a worthy conception of the Divine attributes a command under penalty of damnation to give unqualified and irrevocable internal assent to a large body of professedly Divine doctrine the whole of which is possibly false. Nor is this difficulty satisfactorily met, as some have attempted to meet it, by calling attention to the fact that in the Catholic system internal assent is sometimes demanded, under pain of grievous sin, to doctrinal decisions that do not profess to be infallible. For, in the first place, the assent to be given in such cases is recognized as being not irrevocable and irreversible, like the assent required in the case of definitive and infallible teaching, but merely provisional; and in the next place, internal assent is obligatory only on those who can give it consistently with the claims of objective truth on their conscience -- this conscience, it is assumed, being directed by a spirit of generous loyalty to genuine Catholic principles.

To take a particular example, if Galileo who happened to be right while the ecclesiastical tribunal which condemned him was wrong, had really possessed convincing scientific evidence in favour of the heliocentric theory, he would have been justified in refusing his internal assent to the opposite theory, provided that in doing so he observed with thorough loyalty all the conditions involved in the duty of external obedience. Finally it should be observed that fallible provisional teaching, as such, derives its binding force principally from the fact that it emanates from an authority which is competent, if need be, to convert it into infallible definitive teaching. Without infallibility in the background it would be difficult to establish theoretically the obligation of yielding internal assent to the Church's provisional decisions.

Matthew 16:18

In Matthew 16:18, we have the promise that "the gates of hell shall not prevail" against the Church that is to be built on the rock; and this also, we maintain, implies the assurance of the Church's infallibility in the exercise of her teaching office. Such a promise, of course, must be understood with limitations according to the nature of the matter to which it is applied. As applied to sanctity, for example, which is essentially a personal and individual affair, it does not mean that every member of the Church or of her hierarchy is necessarily a saint, but merely that the Church, as whole, will be conspicuous among other things for the holiness of life of her members. As applied to doctrine, however -- always assuming, as we do, that Christ delivered a body of doctrine the preservation of which in its literal truth was to be one of the chief duties of the Church -- it would be a mockery to contend that such a promise is compatible with the supposition that the Church has possibly erred in perhaps the bulk of her dogmatic definitions, and that throughout the whole of her history she has been threatening men with eternal damnation in Christ's name for refusing to believe doctrines that are probably false and were never taught by Christ Himself. Could this be the case, would it not be clear that the gates of hell can prevail and probably have prevailed most signally against the Church?

John 14-16

In Christ's discourse to the Apostles at the Last Supper several passages occur which clearly imply the promise of infallibility: "I will ask the Father, and he shall give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you forever. The spirit of truth . . . he shall abide with you, and shall be in you" (John 14:16, 17). "But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you" (ibid. 26). "But when he, the spirit of truth, is come, he will teach you all truth (John 16:13). And the same promise is renewed immediately before the Ascension (Acts 1:8). Now what does the promise of this perennial and efficacious presence and assistance of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of truth, mean in connection with doctrinal authority, except that the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity is made responsible for what the Apostles and their successors may define to be part of Christ's teaching? But insofar as the Holy Ghost is responsible for Church teaching, that teaching is necessarily infallible: what the Spirit of truth guarantees cannot be false.

1 Timothy 3:15

In I Timothy 3:15, St. Paul speaks of "the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth"; and this description would be something worse than mere exaggeration if it had been intended to apply to a fallible Church; it would be a false and misleading description. That St. Paul, however, meant it to be taken for sober and literal truth is abundantly proved by what he insists upon so strongly elsewhere, namely, the strictly Divine authority of the Gospel which he and the other Apostles preached, and which it was the mission of their successors to go on preaching without change or corruption to the end of time. "When you had received of us", he writes to the Thessalonians, "the word of the hearing of God, you received it not as the word of men, but (as it is indeed) the word of God, who worketh in you that have believed" (1 Thessalonians 2:13). The Gospel, he tells the Corinthians, is intended to bring "into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). Indeed, so fixed and irreformable is the doctrine that has been taught that the Galatians (1:8) are warned to anathematize any one, even an angel from heaven, who should preach to them a Gospel other than that which St. Paul had preached. Nor was this attitude -- which is intelligible only on the supposition that the Apostolic College was infallible -- peculiar to St. Paul. The other Apostles and apostolic writers were equally strong in anathematizing those who preached another Christianity than that which the Apostles had preached (cf. 2 Peter 2:1 sqq.; 1 John 4:1 sqq.; 2 John 7 sqq.; Jude 4); and St. Paul makes it clear that it was not to any personal or private views of his own that he claimed to make every understanding captive, but to the Gospel which Christ had delivered to the Apostolic body. When his own authority as an Apostle was challenged, his defense was that he had seen the risen Saviour and received his mission directly from Him, and that his Gospel was in complete agreement with that of the other Apostles (see, v.g., Galatians 2:2-9<).

Acts 15:28

Finally, the consciousness of corporate infallibility is clearly signified in the expression used by the assembled Apostles in the decree of the Council of Jerusalem: "It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, to lay no further burden upon you", etc. (Acts 15:28). It is true that the specific points here dealt with are chiefly disciplinary rather than dogmatic, and that no claim to infallibility is made in regard to purely disciplinary questions as such; but behind, and independent of, disciplinary details there was the broad and most important dogmatic question to be decided, whether Christians, according to Christ's teaching, were bound to observe the Old Law in its integrity, as orthodox Jews of the time observed it. This was the main issue at stake, and in deciding it the Apostles claimed to speak in the name and with the authority of the Holy Ghost. Would men who did not believe that Christ's promises assured them of an infallible Divine guidance have presumed to speak in this way? And could they, in so believing, have misunderstood the Master's meaning?

Reference: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07790a.htm

The MORMON doctrine is that the immediate rule of faith for the MORMON is the teaching authority of the Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter-day Saints--an authority to teach and interpret both Scripture and Tradition that ONLY the LDS Organization, based in SLC, has.

LOL. The Mormon Church is a very recent invention and a heretical movement that is contrary to Sacred Tradition. In contrast, the Catholic Church has an unbroken line of authority going all the way back to the Apostles. No other Church can make that claim. Peter IS the rock, and his grave is literally the rock upon which the Vatican is built. Who else can make that claim? How more obvious can it be?

Do you believe the Bible is the only word of God?

It's His only published history book and guide to life.

God speaks to us on a regular basis, the issue is more about who's listening, who hears, who obeys, who believes.

bd,
All great passages, and I share with you the marvel of what
Christ has done for the Church and particularly for believers.

However, we will have to disagree as to the applicability
of these passages to the argument you are attempting to
make here.

I could go through each (as I’ve done previously) and share
why I disagree with your approach to each. It would risk
annoying you and in the end, it seems you are committed
to the RC view of those passages anyway, so I wonder at
whether it would be fruitful. I don’t spend time in discussion
to simply pass the time.

I hasten to add, you have a wonderful spirit within your
posts that I appreciate. Perhaps one day we will (miraculously)
meet in Italy for that espresso and open the Word of God
together. I have the distinct impression we would be friends,
despite our differing Church affiliations.

Thank you,
ampu

>>>It has been called The Way at other times Nazarenes and other the Called Out, the Gathering or Assembly, some others call us the Bride. We have been called by the house or city we meet in. We are called the Church of the Firstborn and the Body. But the Church of Jesus Christ pretty well sums it all up.

AMEN and AMEN. We belong to the same Christian Church - the only
one.

And it pretty clearly, unequivocally, is not the “Church of Jesus Christ” of latter day Ain’ts...

A.A.C.

Brigham Young basicly told Gladen Bishop to not let the gates of Utah hit him in the behind when he leaves,—if he wanted to leave alive. Brigham Young just couldn’t stand competition.

Well, at least he got out alive, the Morrisonites weren't so lucky.

AMEN and AMEN. We belong to the same Christian Church - the only one.

True Christians know who we are, doesn't matter if we meet in a house, a warehouse or a cathedral.

And it pretty clearly, unequivocally, is not the “Church of Jesus Christ” of latter day Ain’ts...

ROTFL!

The obvious implication is that the Bible is NOT sufficient in itself as a teacher of Christian doctrine.

I guess we'll have to disagree.

Also required is an authority to instruct the reader in the proper interpretation.

I guess we'll have to disagree.

Any objective witness would attest that you took my quote out of context. I will have to leave it at that.

And the REST of the verses YOU posted: were THEY in context?

I ask however that you do not take my quotes out of context, and trust you will do so. Otherwise, of course I will have to call you on it.

I explained myself: why are you miffed?

So, by believeing all that you've posted here, Christ drank His OWN blood and ate His OWN flesh with the disciples; right?

Please clarify.

I 'clarify' nothing, for the Word speaks for itself.

Peter IS the rock...

Please clarify, for Scripture points out otherwise.

I enjoyed the discussion with you, and am impressed with your warmth and loving spirit. We can agree to disagree, and who knows? Would love to share an expresso with you in the beautiful city of Rome and maybe tour the Vatican.

God bless.