Oh, you could?
How much less could you care?
Which all goes to show that facts are irrelevant to Catholics.
daniel, don't confuse him with the facts. His mind is made up.
Posted on 09/11/2014 12:08:50 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
There are one billion Roman Catholics worldwide, one billion people who are subject to the Pope’s authority. How, one might ask, did all of this happen? The answer, I believe, is far more complex and untidy than Catholics have argued. First, I will give a brief explanation of what the Catholic position is, and then, second, I will suggest what I think actually took place.
The Catholic Explanation
The traditional Catholic understanding is that Jesus said that it was upon Peter the church was to be built (Matt. 16:18−19; see also John 21:15−17; Luke 22:32). Following this, Peter spent a quarter of a century in Rome as its founder and bishop, and his authority was recognized among the earliest churches; this authority was handed down to his successors. Indeed, the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) re-affirmed this understanding. Apostolic authority has been handed on to the apostles’ successors even as Peter’s supreme apostolic power has been handed on to each of his successors in Rome.
The problem with this explanation, however, is that there is no evidence to sustain it. The best explanation of Matthew 16:18–19 is that the church will be built, not on an ecclesiastical position, but on Peter’s confession regarding Christ’s divinity. Correlative to this understanding is the fact that there is no biblical evidence to support the view that Peter spent a long time in the church in Rome as its leader. The Book of Acts is silent about this; it is not to be found in Peter’s own letters; and Paul makes no mention of it, which is strange if, indeed, Peter was in Rome early on since at the end of Paul’s letter to the Romans, he greets many people by name. And the argument that Peter’s authority was universally recognized among the early churches is contradicted by the facts. It is true that Irenaeus, in the second century, did say that the church was founded by “the blessed apostles,” Peter and Paul, as did Eusebius in the fourth century, and by the fifth century, Jerome did claim that it was founded by Peter whom he calls “the prince of the apostles.” However, on the other side of the equation are some contradictory facts. Ignatius, for example, en route to his martyrdom, wrote letters to the bishops of the dominant churches of the day, but he spoke of Rome’s prominence only in moral, not ecclesiastical, terms. At about the same time early in the second century, the Shepherd of Hermas, a small work written in Rome, spoke only of its “rulers” and “the elders” who presided over it. There was, apparently, no dominant bishop at that time. Not only so, but in the second and third centuries, there were numerous instances of church leaders resisting claims from leaders in Rome to ecclesiastical authority in settling disputes.
It is, in fact, more plausible to think that the emergence of the Roman pontiff to power and prominence happened by natural circumstance rather than divine appointment. This took place in two stages. First, it was the church in Rome that emerged to prominence and only then, as part of its eminence, did its leader begin to stand out. The Catholic church has inverted these facts by suggesting that apostolic power and authority, indeed, Peter’s preeminent power and authority, established the Roman bishop whereas, in fact, the Roman bishopric’s growing ecclesiastical prestige derived, not from Peter, but from the church in Rome.
The Actual Explanation
In the beginning, the church in Rome was just one church among many in the Roman empire but natural events conspired to change this. Jerusalem had been the original “home base” of the faith, but in a.d. 70, the army of Titus destroyed it and that left Christianity without its center. It was not unnatural for people in the empire to begin to look to the church in Rome since this city was its political capital. All roads in that ancient world did, indeed, lead to Rome, and many of them, of course, were traveled by Christian missionaries. It is also the case that the Roman church, in the early centuries, developed a reputation for moral and doctrinal probity and, for these reasons, warranted respect. Its growing eminence, therefore, seems to have come about in part because it was warranted and also, in part, because it was able to bask in some of the reflected splendor of the imperial city.
Heresies had abounded from the start, but in the third-century, churches began to take up a new defensive posture against them. Would it not be the case, Tertullian argued, that churches founded by the apostles would have a secure footing for their claims to authenticity, in contrast to potentially heretical churches? This argument buttressed the growing claims to preeminence of the Roman church. However, it is interesting to note that in the middle of this century, Cyprian in North Africa argued that the words, “You are Peter …” were not a charter for the papacy but, in fact, applied to all bishops. Furthermore, at the third Council of Carthage in 256, he asserted that the Roman bishop should not attempt to be a “bishop of bishops” and exercise “tyrannical” powers.
Already in the New Testament period, persecution was a reality, but in the centuries that followed, the church suffered intensely because of the animosities and apprehensions of successive emperors. In the fourth century, however, the unimaginable happened. Emperor Constantine, prior to a pivotal battle, saw a vision and turned to Christianity. The church, which had lived a lonely existence on the “outside” up to this time, now enjoyed an unexpected imperial embrace. As a result, from this point on, the distinction between appropriate ecclesiastical demeanor and worldly pretensions to pomp and power were increasingly lost. In the Middle Ages, the distinction disappeared entirely. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory brazenly exploited this by asserting that the “care of the whole church” had been placed in the hands of Peter and his successors in Rome. Yet even at this late date, such a claim did not pass unchallenged. Those in the east, whose center was in Constantinople, resented universal claims like this, and, in fact, this difference of opinion was never settled. In 1054, after a series of disputes, the Great Schism between the eastern and western churches began. Eastern Orthodoxy began to go its own way, separated from Roman jurisdiction, and this remains a breach that has been mostly unhealed.
The pope’s emergence to a position of great power and authority was, then, long in the making. Just how far the popes had traveled away from New Testament ideas about church life was brutally exposed by Erasmus at the time of the Reformation. Pope Julius II had just died when, in 1517, Erasmus penned his Julius Exclusus. He pictured this pope entering heaven where, to his amazement, he was not recognized by Peter! Erasmus’ point was simply that the popes had become rich, pretentious, worldly, and everything but apostolic. However, he should have made his point even more radically. It was not just papal behavior that Peter would not have recognized as his own, but papal pretensions to universal authority as well.
Oh, you could?
How much less could you care?
Which all goes to show that facts are irrelevant to Catholics.
daniel, don't confuse him with the facts. His mind is made up.
If it's deference to Rome then it's deference to Rome's bishop, because the bishop was the head of the Church in Rome. Go read the Fathers again and see if any of them give you any leeway to separate the Church's authority from the bishop. The bishop was and is the local head of the church. Do nothing without your bishop, Ignatius says.
And you are taking exactly the wrong lesson from the Quartodeciman controversy. The result is less important to Papal primacy than the claim. What happened? The bishops went nuts..."besought him to consider the things of peace, and of neighborly unity and love." They "sharply rebuked" Victor. Irenaeus said Victor *should not* in charity excommunicate the East...as if Victor was abusing his power. Oh but wait....what power would that be? The power that you and others are saying he didn't have to begin with.
See the point? I could declare tomorrow that the churches of California are all excommunicate. There wouldn't be a controversy about it, and the bishops of California wouldn't be writing in protest, because I am a doofus behind a keyboard who has no authority in the matter. I would be ignored and laughed at and there's the end of it. But if the POPE did it--or even the bishops of New York or Baltimore who have an honorific primacy in the US--then you bet your bippy there'd be a flurry kicked up.
The Quartodeciman controversy was a controversy at all because the bishop of Rome asserted an authority over the Churches of the East--an authority that you are trying to tell me no one in the first few centuries had any inkling of.
Whether Victor had that authority or not--HE seems to think he did, and that shoots a big fat hole in the idea that the early Church was absent such ideas.
We have copies of these texts in Coptic, Syriac, and Ge'ez that Rome never even knew about and that have been discovered only in the last few centuries.
I assume by "Clementine forgeries" you are talking about the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions? Here's the thing about those...even Eusebius knew they were not authentic:
And now some have only the other day brought forward other wordy and lengthy compositions as being Clement's, containing dialogues of Peter and Appion, of which there is absolutely no mention in the ancients."You will find the least reliable ancient documents have a tradition about their unreliability attached to them.
It is.
I find the manic insistence against a binding religious authority to be repugnant to the Word of God and good common sense.
About consistent substantiated research by multiple agencies that testify to the fruit of Rome being that of liberalism, which disturbs your fantasy of elitist Rome. What,
The Catholic Church believes
is Scripturally seen in what it does and effects, and no amount of pushing propagation of pronouncements will ever change that. Again.
There are many protestant churches that are allowing homosexual “marriages” and take no stance on abortion
Which again is an irrelevant red herring, as this does not represent me, contrary to your fallacious charge , and these are not my "pals," contrary to your charge, nor do such share in evangelical contention for certain key Truths of the Reformation, typically beginning with their stance toward the position and nature of Scripture, but are critically aberrant, thus are not even truly Protestant, any more than you would allow those not in active submission to the pope as being Catholic.
If all the Catholic in name left the faith tomorrow, the ones that live the faith would still dwarf any protestant denomination in the United States.
Irrelevant, and a tactic you have tried before. Numbers do not constitute validity, as in fact the broad is the road that leads to damnation, and many there be that travel it, while a relative remnant shall be saved. And the number of liberal "in name only" Catholics outnumber the Catholics you consider faithful, while the majority of both are lost due the critically aberrant nature of the church they are faithful to.
In addition, it remains that those whom you dismiss as Catholics in name only (when not letting them escape from being Catholics due to being baptized), are treated as members in life and in death, even in the case of notorious impenitent proabortion prosodomy public figures. This is your church effectually testifying to what it overall believes in this regard, and thus they are yours and thus unlike me, you must own them due to your one true church identity.
However, whether one tribe or many in the kingdom, as regards the total number of conservatives, as we have the fairly standard figure of approx. 80 million Evangelicals (26% of a 313 million U.S. population) in America (though others range from have an est 60-100 million), versus we have the figure of approx. 75 million Catholics (not counting blacks would eliminate 6% of evangelicals (15% of blacks), and 5% of Catholics), and as the evangelical element is overall more conservative than weekly mass-going Catholics, then even eliminating the liberal element from both would not give Rome a higher number of conservative members.
A rational response meets irrational RC rhetoric.
“Hey, but what’s the big deal if Catholic priests are homosexuals or molest children?”
Percentage wise more sex crimes are done in protestant faiths that members of the Catholic clergy.
You want to see the stats? I’ve got em.
It is despicable you lumping all Catholic priests together and insinuating they are ACTIVE homosexuals. Does the rage and hatred have no end?
Is that any different than the rage and hatred in lumping all non-Catholic pastors into one *Billy Bob shyster* mold?
Nope.
You’re projecting too much.
I didn't say that. I said it is impossible to determine what is fake and what is not. Ergo, it (as a whole) cannot be used for provenance nor pedigree, as already we know that intrinsic and necessary dogma rely upon known fraud... Proof of the succession from Peter being one. After all, 'a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump', no? What then makes Rome any different from the Mormons, other than impressive age? How am I to trust her? On her own say-so? I think not. PROVE IT. But then, you can't.
We have copies of these texts in Coptic, Syriac, and Ge'ez that Rome never even knew about and that have been discovered only in the last few centuries.
How do you know what Rome knew about? Once a forgery has been generated and sent down the pipe, copied and translated just like any other... Now, all these centuries later, you wouldn't know the difference. The premise of the propaganda is already established.
What CAN be determined is that what is the Roman church today could not have sprung whole cloth from a sect of Judaism. Nor can it be said that if she did indeed come from Judaism, that she is true to her foundations. And the closer to Judaism one would try to cause that genesis of the Roman church to be, the more ludicrous it becomes. That at least, can be determined by comparative studies. Hence, there is most certainly a profound disconnect between the Roman church today, and the Carpenter from Nazareth.
[...] You will find the least reliable ancient documents have a tradition about their unreliability attached to them.
Yet that doesn't stop their being used, or more often, their progeny (documents bearing reference to the original fraud) being used as proofs. Go figger. But then, without them, you would have no proof at all.
Until the time comes that you can show me in the doctrine of the Catholic Church where abortion is allowed, homosexual “marriage” is allowed, and women preachers are allowed your copying and pasting means nothing. Laymen are sinners. Or are you aware of that? There are more devout Catholics that practice their faith than the largest protestant denomination in the United States. I suggest you start worrying about the protestant churches all over the country that should be ashamed to call themselves houses of worship.
...only God can be the true head, because only God can exert direct authority on every individual member by His Spirit. A highly structured authoritarian form of human hierarchy is at odds with this basic principle.
Would a loosely structured form be acceptable?
Of course God is the Head. The Church is the Body of Christ. I am unclear on how your idea of the direct authority of God on the believer works out. If I were called down for walking disorderly by one of your elders and my defense was "God told me to....", then what? I'll anticipate that you have some process that relies on an authority that supersedes the individual's autonomy and competence.
I won't get into the specifics on Peter. I will just say that the Orthodox view is that our Bishops preside in concert in love to guide the Church.
Likewise, I am not the guy who will enter into discussions of the Western Church's (Roman) various and sundry troubles. Not, that it's uninteresting to me; but, they have worthy defenders on this board and my participation requires a subtlety that demands more of me that I wish to strive for.
So whatever comes from apostolic authority as such is not the imposition of apostolic will or opinion, but by providence we can know it reflects the mind of God Himself, and we expect the leading of God's Spirit in the hearts of believers to be consistent with how He has providentially already led His foundation layers, the Apostles. And Protestants are already in agreement with this principle with respect to the apostles, who have had a unique role in establishing divine truth. See for example the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15.
I am not seeing the providential leadership in the fractured histories over the past half millennium. The first millennium does show us that the Church did use the authority model of Acts 15. Then came 1054. And 1522.
Which is all well and good until somebody brings out the snakes or starts passing around the poison bottle.
What of it? At least in the Protestant model, those things that aren't of YHWH can be rejected - That which isn't true dies on the vine from a lack of support. Look at the restructuring going on right now in the Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians... In each case, the liberalism that infects them is being discharged, and they are reforming and re-forming around their respective orthodoxies. That is a remarkable feat.
Rome, almost literally, has no such means. I don't know if the same holds true for all y'all, but considering a somewhat rigid hierarchy, I don't suppose it is anywhere near as facile as the Protestants. Rigidity is great at keeping heresy out, until it isn't - Then it is extraordinarily good at keeping heresy in.
It is the same old argument between the oak and the willow. Which one serves best to weather the storm is yet to be determined.
Ditto what Roamer_1 said. If you’re going to have church you’re going to have heresy because you’re going to have sin. Not that that’s a good thing, but it is a reality. 1 Cor 11:19 speaks both to this inevitability and to its purpose, to showcase the approval of those who remain true.
This goes back to our earlier discussion. Yes, I believe the loose network model is correct. The global Christian community needs a way to coordinate activity, support for brethren in need, discussion of new doctrinal challenges, etc.
But Acts 15 was apostolic authority at work, and we no longer have living apostles among us. And even as such it was not couched in the language of edict, but of sanctified wisdom. This is correlated to the loose network, because the ultimate decisional authority still rests with the local congregation. As Roamer says, if some local group decides to go down a path that leads to error, the remainder of the network is free to continue in the truth.
As for whether this affects the unity of faith, it is problematic to make that judgment based on incomplete data. Only God can possibly know all of those who belong to Him and to what degree they have been obedient to the truth and Christian love. Basing that judgment on the success of one or another human institution lends itself to carnal rather than spiritual criteria.
Hence, for most Protestants, I would venture to say we trust the big picture to God, and only worry about being faithful to Him in the things He has put in our charge. Did we kick the cat last night, or were we fighting some unpleasant truth in Gods word, or for undershepherds, are we leading the flock faithfully to Gods word, according to our best lights, are we listening to the Spirit of God, are we exampling charity, humility, faith, love, and all the other Christian virtues. Because if we are faithful in the small things He gives us, He will take care of the big picture. That’s not our job. No human organization can be a substitute for the work of God in the world at large. Such hubris is sure to be rewarded with failure in the end. He will not give His glory to another.
Peace,
SR
And that being the historical instruments and stewards of Divine revelation (oral and written) means that such is that assuredly infallible magisterium. Thus those who dissent from the latter are in rebellion to God. Which i assume is yours as well.
It is. I find the manic insistence against a binding religious authority to be repugnant to the Word of God and good common sens
Thank you for your honesty and willingness to confirm the foundational premise behind RC polemics, and note that you are not simply affirming the need for a binding religious authority, which would indeed be repugnant to the Word of God and good common sense, and which was not what i carefully articulated is the premise. But that of an assuredly infallible magisterium, which is essential for determination and assurance of Truth and that that being the instruments and stewards of Divine revelation means they are said magisterium.
However, in so doing you have effectively invalidated the NT church.
For the fact is that under the aforementioned premise for Rome's authority then 1st century souls should have submitted themselves to the Scribes and Pharisees who sat in the seat of Moses over Israel as the stewards of Holy Writ and the official teachers of it, (Rm. 3:2; 9:4; Mt. 23:2) having historical descent and being the inheritor of the promises of God. (Rm. 3:2; 9:4; Lv. 10:11; Dt. 4:31; 17:8-13; Num. 23:19,23; Is. 41:10, Ps. 89:33,34; Mal. 3:6)
And instead the church began in dissent from the historical magisterium, following preachers they rejected (like they did before them whom God raised up from without the magisterium to reprove it), one being a man in the desert who ate insects, and another being a itinerant preacher from Galilee.
But who reproved it by Scripture, including for teaching as doctrines mere tradition of the elders, (Mk. 7:3-16) and established His claims upon Scriptural substantiation, in text and in power, as did the apostles and early church. (Mt. 22:23-45; Lk. 24:27,44; Jn. 5:36,39; Acts 2:14-35; 4:33; 5:12; 15:6-21;17:2,11; 18:28; 28:23; Rm. 15:19; 2Cor. 12:12, etc.)
In addition, both men and writings of God were recognized as being so long before there was a church of Rome that would presume it was necessary for this. Which is why RCs constantly invoke "the Catholic church gave you the Bible, so it knows what it means" polemic.
Which specious premise is destroyed in the light of Scripture, while by your affirmation of the RC basis for determination of Truth then you have effectively nuked the NT church, but which in reality is that of your own church, as its basis for determination and assurance of Truth is foundationally contrary to how the NT church began.
Which does not translate into one bishop being the supreme exalted infallible head over all, and as the first in a like of such via formal descent, much less that this is what Scripture supports.
And in the light of your foundationally perverse basis for determining Truth, then debate on this should wait until that issue is settled, which the last post to you deals with, by God's grace.
That's what Catholics cannot fathom, that dissenting from the Catholic church or its magisterium does NOT equate to rebellion to God.
Put in simpler terms us farm boys would say that Catholic stuff is just a bunch of hog wash.
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