>>You put your faith in your church and an old man on a gold throne. I put my faith in God and His Son, Jesus Christ.
You are artificially creating a dichotomy which does not exist in the Catholic mind.
If the Lord God told the Israelites to follow Moses through the desert, would it have been piety or impiety for some Isrealite leader to say "nuts to what Moses says, I only trust God"? Obedience to God or disobedience?
God works not only on an individual level, but on a corporate and institutional level as well.<<
Wow!
This is the best!!!
BUMP
I did a little further research yesterday, and it turns out this exact thing happened in Numbers 16 in Korah's (Cora's) rebellion:
"Now Korah, son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi, betook himself...to rise up against Moses, together with 250 Isrealites, chieftains of the community, chosen in the assembly, men of repute. They combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, "You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the Lord's congregation?"Moses rebukes them and replies among other things, "Truly he has advanced you and all your fellow Levites with you; yet you seek the priesthood too! Truly, it is against the Lord that you and all your company have banded together. For who is Aaron that you should rail against him?" (Num 16:11)
The Lord then opens the earth to swallow Korah, and fire destroys the 250 men while offering incense to God.
Defiance of legitimate religious authority appointed by God, is defiance of God Himself. Of course this text doesn't prove that the NT papacy falls into such a category, but certainly there is a precedent for the will of God being manifest through an earthly authority.