“Interpretation of Scripture has nothing to do with innate intelligence”
Wrong. Again. God gave us reason because He wants us to use it. He does not give us all the same ability to reason. This is to teach those with less intelligence to follow, and those with more intelligence to be shepherds rather than tyrants.
“and everything to do with the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.”
If you only knew what that meant.
Many Protestants seem to think that if they are happy with an interpretation of the Scripture, the Holy Spirit must have guided them.
When the Holy Spirit guides you, it is unmistakable. It is a small taste of Pentecost. You are transfixed, incapable of turning away. You don’t read the page and dig for the meaning; the meaning leaps off the page at you and lights you up. It is, in short, a miracle, and one that most people never experience. And when I say most people, I mean maybe one in a million ever experiences anything like it.
“Spiritual matters CANNOT be understood in the least without His work.”
Wrong again. Even unbelievers can understand a great deal—*if* they receive a correct explanation. Some of the Scriptures are rather transparent. Others mean something utterly other than what a superficial reading would imply.
The Catholic Church is the only source of a two-thousand-year-long study of what the Scriptures mean, and the only source that has been in existence long enough for a substantial portion of its interpretation to have been received directly from the Holy Spirit—a page here, a parable there, down the centuries.
Everywhere that a Protestant interpretation differs from the Catholic, the odds are unimaginably long that the Protestant interpretation is wrong, or at least incomplete.
“1 Corinthians 18-31...“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
I just mentioned scriptures that mean something utterly other than what a superficial reading would imply.
Bingo.
Do you think you understand that scripture? One can see from the way you tried to use it here that you don’t.
You even include the passage that shows you misunderstand: “Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.”
That is what the Catholic Church has. The passage is not discussing people like Aquinas or Augustine. It’s talking about “the rulers of this age,” and of this one.
“The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.”
I am afraid even to ask what you think that means, and what license you believe it gives you to reject and contradict the work of the brightest and holiest men of the past twenty centuries.
“The arrogant person judges all things, but is himself above the fray."
The carnal mind of the followers of the Catholic religion is simply stunning.