I accept that Catholics don’t view what they do as idolatry, just as I accept that Catholics changed the Sabbath to Sunday. It doesn’t matter how many Catholic experts may be presented to tell me what Catholics believe. For my part, I evaluated the Scriptures and came to a different conclusion which regulates my private religious beliefs and practice.
Yes, "Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness."
Scripture is one source of divine Revelation, along with Sacred Tradition (2 Thes 2:16). But evaluating Scripture on our own is difficult, and can even be dangerous, as Scripture attests.
"There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures." (2 Peter 3:16).I've never found a passage in Scripture that tells us to evaluate Scripture on our own to infallibly determine Christian doctrine.
An evaluation of history and Scripture tells me otherwise.
The lives of the Apostles, the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' miracles, the miracles associated with the Catholic Church, and the correspondence of the characteristics of the Catholic Church with the Church described by Paul and Christ, all tell me that Christ is who He claimed to be, and that the Catholic Church is His Church.
Given that, I accept that the Biblical writings, written, preserved and canonized by Christ's Church, contain God's divinely inspired Word.
I can then go to Scripture and see that Scripture reinforces these conclusions, and not Sola Scriptura.
"He who listens to you listens to me, and he who rejects you rejects me" (Luke 10:16)"if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God's household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth." (1 Tim 3:15)
"If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven." (Mat 18:17)
theBuckwheat:
I understand you came to your own conclusion by reading the scriptures. That is fine and dandy. However, have you ever asked yourself the question, what if my conclusion is wrong? There are tons of theologians who read the same scriptures you read, and read them a heck of long time ago before either of us read them, and were instrumental in determining what the Church would recognize as the NT canon [guided by the Holy Spirit]. As for Sabbath changed to Sunday, or you Jewish? or Christian, Jesus, Christ, the 2nd person of the Most Holy Trinity, eternally begotten of God Father, True God and True man, who was incarnate of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, suffered died under Pontius Pilate, rose again from the dead on Sunday [The first day of the Week, which is accounted for in the Gospels]. The Acts of the Apostles, in several places, clearly indicates that the early Christian community celebrated Christ Resurrection ad the day when they gathered to break bread [celebrate the eucharist, Acts 2:20, Acts 20:7].