What a pathetic display of shallow Bible Christianity, and no wonder Protestantism and all its conflicting brands today make for exhibit one of a caricature. No need to show the conflicting scriptural interpretations of Joel Osteen, or the vapid rot of Billy Graham, Rick Warren; Jimmy Swaggart, Benny Hinn, David Koresh; Jim Jones; Rev. Jeremiah Wright, or this or that First “Whatever” or every other kind of idiotic interpretations offered by every self appointed neighborhood foursquare church pastor.
Instead we have folks like ealgone tells Catholics to “go read John;” editor-surveyor, talks about “Yeshua remnant” (whatever the hell that means) and poor GGpaC4DumpedTea tries to rescue his his prior observations by trying to make it appear profound by by the qualifier ’as the Holy Spirit leads’. Wow; there must be thousands of “Holy Spirits” here given the 30,000 or so branches of Protestantism that began to divide and subdivide and continue to subdivide ever since it washed ashore some eleven centuries after the Holy Spirit guided the early Church Fathers in the Synod of Rome in AD 382 to infallibly assembled the canonical texts deemed authentic under Petrine authority.
This is not the Holy Spirit that hopscotches from one brach of a tree to another. Apparently hundreds of churches belonging to the mainline Episcopalian and Protestant Churches had the Holy Spirit with them until they began to ordain married gay and lesbian pastors.
It is precisely because of such shallow rubbish that every major Lutheran and and Protestant theologian have abandoned this drivel and converted to Catholicism. No less than America’s pre-eminent Lutheran theologian and scholar, Rev. Richard Neuhaus, not only abandoned Protestantism and converted to Catholicism, he said that in Catholicism he found “the fullest expression of the Christ.”
The brilliant Protestant and historian of Christianity, Dr. David Anders who tried to prove Catholicism wrong, ended up converting and said this:
“I thought there could be no better preparation for assaulting the Catholic Church and winning converts than to thoroughly understand the minds of the great leaders of our faith — Martin Luther and John Calvin”
So we know how that turned out.
But that’s not all, (this would make Iscool take refuge under his bed for tossing out incoherent scriptural interpretations), Francis J. Beckwith, a “born-again” evangelical, a tenured professor at Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Tex, was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, an association of 4,300 Protestant theologians resigned and joined the Catholic Church calling to account the inherent contradictions of Protestant belief with the scripture and the traditions and practice of the early disciples of Christ.
And if this is not enough, I offer you all, Ulf Ekman, the founder of Scandinavia’s biggest Bible-based school and church, with a congregation of some 4000 individuals, converted to Catholicism because after a whole lifetime of study his theological inquiry confirmed for him the indispensability of the Catholic sacraments.
Now lets not go into the realm of Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, or Benedict. Shallow Bible Christian who can barely keep afloat in the shallow waters of Bible-based theology would drown upon encountering the first wave of the insights of these theological giants. We have already seen the nonsense about “Yeshua remnant,” and the rest of this pool.
Then we have GGpaC4DumpedTea tell us:
“When Jesus refers to the church He is referring to the collective body of His followers, His body (bride). The ecclesia, the ‘called out’ ones. And yes, this is the universal church, lower case ‘c’.”
Wow? What profundity! Apparently, the “collective body” can hold different “truths” with each justifying their absurdity by saying these have interpreted for themselves scripture “ for edification and for instruction, as the Holy Spirit leads.”
Some Holy Spirt we have here who led followers of David Koresh and Jim Jones to their ghastly deaths for following what “they” believed were authentic interpretations of scripture no more than a Billy Graham or a Rev. All Shaprton or a First AME or a First Whatever claim to usurp the authoritative teaching of the Church in its Credo and Magisterium.
Finally, as all theologians (except for those Protestants stranded in the pews) we must end where we began, ONE Church, teaching ONE infallible truth, for ALL times.
What was truly said in in the year 110 A.D. is true just as today. Barely fifteen years after the book of Revelation was written, while on his way to his execution, St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote:
“Where the bishop is present, there let the congregation gather, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic church”. The Church believes that when the bishops speak as teachers, Christ speaks; for he said to them: “He who hears you, hears me; and he who rejects you, rejects me” (Lk 10, 16).
No need for any “Yeshua remnant” or any rot. No need for remnant when you have the gigantic mustard tree of the Catholic Church with its branches spread across to all part of the world, and which alone holds in its belief the Living Christ as John 6:53 confirms “Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.”
This is why the wild and lifeless mushrooms of Protestantism have begun to decay and wither away and rot as married gays and lesbian pastors now occupy the pulpit of mainline Protestant denominations. Led, by the Holy Spirit? Methinks not.