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To: Responsibility2nd; fwdude
OK. Sure. What book of the Bible is Hilary of Poitiers in?

He's discussing the 19th chapter of John's Gospel. Isn't that what was requested?

If one closes one's eyes to 2,000 years of Church teaching and tradition, if one pretends it doesn't exist, then one can quite happily pick up a Bible and draw any number of conclusions about what Scripture says or doesn't say. That's the whole problem.

It's difficult to get this point across to disciples of modern American congregationalism, completely adrift as it is, on a sea of individualism and subjectivism. It has severed all connections with the Church's Apostolic roots and is largely reliant on personal, circumstantial and arbitrary reading of Scripture. I think we're familiar with the argument that those who followed in the footsteps of the Apostles in the early centuries of the Church, didn't really get it and it's only in the latter days that we've finally come to understand the Gospel. That's dangerous thinking.

To scorn the words of Doctors of the Church such as Augustine, Athanasius and Jerome, is unwise in the extreme.

39 posted on 05/31/2011 12:39:45 PM PDT by marshmallow ("A country which kills its own children has no future" -Mother Teresa of Calcutta)
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To: marshmallow
Very good post!

I like to think of the protestant mindset on Scripture as autonomous individualism. Whatever I think the Bible says, that's what it says.

True, they may gather around a pastor who gives them instruction on what HE thinks the Bible says. There are thousands of denominational differences as a result, and untold differences of opinion by individual pastors. The believer claims the Holy Spirit teaches him personally to know what the truths of Scripture are, yet how can God lead so many people to form so many different conclusions?

Doctrinal chaos. I wonder who's really behind that?

60 posted on 05/31/2011 1:03:16 PM PDT by Deo volente (God willing, America will survive this Obamination.)
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