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And Becky, how do you know that your interpretation of God's Word is correct? No one comes to scripture without presuppositions, with out a grid through which they interpret scripture. You either listen to your Pastor or you read books from your favorite theologians, or you make yourself the judge of what is true. But all around you are sincere, Christ loving individuals and groups who are doing the very same thing but coming up with different interpretations of the same scriptures. They believe we are saved differently, they baptize differently (believers baptism, infant baptism, etc.), they believe we receive grace differently (sacraments vs ordinances)and have different moral beliefs. Not only are there about thirdy thousand denominations that cannot agree on the "plain meaning of scripture" they can't even agree withing their own denomination. I was a part of at least four different segments of the baptist denomination before I entered the Missionary denomination which is so divided among themselves that I don't even know how they call it a denomination. And they are all passionately in love with Christ and Sacred Scriture. They are all lead and taught by Greek and Hebrew scholars who read the same texts in the original and still see things differently. We all have a set of glasses we read scripture through. Which glasses are the right ones? I made the choice to seek out the original pair of glasses. My passion for those early months was to discover what the first Christians believed and practiced. I was convinced that they would have the purest message out there. The confusion of the protestant world was so obviously not what Christ has promised and was obviously a failure. What I discovered was that the Catechism of the Catholic Church read like a modern language version of the Early Church writings. The obvious differences between my own religious tradition and what the early Christians believed jumped right off the pages. There was no "once saved, always saved" mentality. There was no reliance on the Bible alone for authority, the Eucharist was known to be the Body and Blood of Christ and was so reverenced that not a drop or a crumb was to be lost. They were not Baptists, they were not Presbyterians, they were not anything I knew as a Protestant. They were blatantly Catholic.

There is a sense of automomy that comes from sola scriptura. You can simply choose to ignore things that do not fit into your theological box. You can flip your Bible open to your favorite Pauline epistle and graze in the comfortable words that seem to back up all your beliefs. I know, I spent 43 years that way. I blocked out the gospels because they were from "another dispensation." I blocked out all passages that talk about enduring to the end because that was not necessary anyway, God would handle it. There were whole chunks of scriture that simply did not fit or that had to be "read through" one of my presupposition. I affectionately call them "weknows" now. I would read read James 2:24 and tell myself, "yeah, but we know . . . " and move on unchallenged by the truth I didn't want to see there. See we can trade Bible verses for the rest of our lives and never get anywhere. The point is, what has been believed from the beginning? What Church has the authority to interpret the Bible?

See, Becky, after what I have seen, I am either a Catholic or an athiest. Jesus Christ promised to lead His Church into all truth. He gave His Apostles, especially Peter, the power to bind and loose which from a Jewish perspective means the ability to teach with authority. If He lost control somehow through pagan corruption or political infiltration or any of the other accusations against the purity of the Church, then He failed. Calvinist trust God to make sure they endure to the end (P=Preservation of the Saints) but they deny that Christ can do the very same thing for His Church that received His promise of protection. So if He failed, Becky, then He is not God and we all die in our sins, so eat, drink and be merry!

Becky, I am a Catholic and Jesus NEVER fails.