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To: Salvation; MamaB
Then why did you write this if all those people were real people and wrote Letters, Gospels, Books of the Bible

Albert Einstein once once said you should make something as simple as you can but no simpler. The means by which God gave us Scripture is in one sense very simple. God moved in holy men to produce God-breathed Scripture.  See 2 Peter 1:21, 2 Tim 3:16, etc. I'm sure you've seen this discussed before.  So we say God is the Author because He is, and humans did the actual writing because they did.  Both things are true. We are talking about God here.  This is a miraculous book.  So to oversimplifying it by either ignoring either the human instrumentality or the divine origin is to wander into error.

As for your other post, where you wonder why we don't get how the book is Catholic in origin, allow me to attempt an explanation. I am not asking at this point that you agree.  But it would be nice if we could actually understand each other's position. In the first place, we don't see the Bible as Roman Catholic because it truly is not a product originated by Rome. God is the origin. Men were merely caretakers. It is fundamentally misleading to suggest to the novice or the unlearned that the Bible is a creation of Rome. To demonstrate this, consider that the larger portion of it, the Old Testament, although it was written by Israelites, does not have it's origin in Israel. Shocking statement, I know, but true, if you understand that the true, ultimate origin of the text is the Holy Spirit moving in the hearts and speaking through the pens of lawgivers and prophets. The humans in the equation were mere agents for the Principal, Who was God, and it is the Principal who gets credit for origination, not the agent.

Second, even if your primary reference point is the human authors, you would still have to say the bulk of the book is Jewish writing, therefore clearly not Roman Catholic. Yes, Israel was the caretaker for the law and the prophetic texts as they were produced over many centuries. But being caretaker did not make the Jewish magisterium infallible, or even good.  By Jesus' time, they had fallen into such corruption they were told to their face by Jesus they had become unsavable for having blasphemed the Holy Spirit. This shows that in principle, while it was certainly a privilege to be the caretaker, you can lose your job as caretaker by being unfaithful to what God has entrusted to you. So just as those Jewish caretakers could not claim a controlling "ownership" of the divine text, though they were for a time it's caretaker, so too no modern magisterium of any pedigree can claim ownership of what does not fundamentally belong to them, and if they are unfaithful, they can and will lose even their humble job of caretaker. Remember Revelation and those candlesticks being taken away for unfaithfulness.

Third, we have a major definitional problem. When did the [c]atholic eccelsia of Christ become the Roman Catholic Church? How do we measure that? If being "Roman Catholic" means adopting a number of doctrines and practices not found at all among the early [c]atholics, how can the Bible, which was all done being written before the end of the First Century, be the product of an entity that did not evolve into being until centuries later? In other words, the Roman Church in it's identifiably Roman form simply did not exist when the apostolic age closed and the Scriptures were already complete and in use among the Christian faithful. So how can the Bible be the product of a group that did not exist at the time the actual writing of it was done and over? It's not logical.

Now I know this goes up hard against some of your most treasured assumptions, but it's where we are coming from. I hope this helps you understand us a little better.

Peace,

SR


69 posted on 09/08/2014 11:34:29 PM PDT by Springfield Reformer (Winston Churchill: No Peace Till Victory!)
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To: Springfield Reformer
Peter would no doubt be horrified to have posthumously been labeled Pontifex Maximus, too, the titular head of the pagan religion of Imperial Rome that killed him. In the company of Caligula and Nero.
71 posted on 09/08/2014 11:41:49 PM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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