Once again we are treated to an outstanding example of shallow Bible Christianity. This is a necessary concomitant of the curse of Protestantism that has unleashed a mudslide of beliefs in which allows for a draw on the congregations of Joel Osteen, Billy Graham, David Koresh, the Moonies, and the rest of the rot including every self-ordained neighborhood pastor.
This superficial thinking that comes from an absence of serious theological study is evident in metmom saying that because Mary was chosen the Mother of God....”therefore God doesn’t love the rest of us,” as much!
“therefore”? Seriously? Are we here in kindergarten logic? This is the kind of foolish reasoning that would get one kicked out of class in elementary introduction to either logic or theology.
Maybe you need to remove all of Exodus out of the books in the Bible with God’s favor clearly shown again and again. But then again more directly,
in the King James version of Luke 1:28 we have this:
“And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, you that are highly favored, the Lord is with you: blessed are you among women.” or the Douay-Rheims Bible version: “And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.”
The evil of Protestantism has spawned the likes of John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gene Robinson and the like, along with heretical nonsense such as the Jesus Seminar. For decades men (and women) like Spong and Borg made quite a name for themselves by rejecting the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, His atoning death and resurrection, every miracle recorded in the New Testament, and so on. These are all different variants of Protestant theology among the 30,000 other contradictory versions. You get to crack open the pages of the Bible assembled under infallible Petrine authority under Pope Damasus at the Synod of Rome in A.D. 382, and later, at the regional councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419) and have the audacity to offer “your” own definitive interpretation of the word of God.
But don’t tell this to Protestants. Their heresy begins in 1517, some eleven centuries after the adoption of the canonical texts, and followed by saints, martyrs, and stigmatists in accordance with the written and unwritten Word of Christ as reflected in sacred tradition, custom, and ritual.
Apparently, they, along with the early Church Fathers were all mistaken in their understandings of the word of God.
Over and over again, what we keep getting here is sophomoric interpretations on a cascade of scriptural citations let loose by followers of a heresy without any of the coherence of the great theologians of Augustine, Aquinas, Newman or Benedict.
Challenging Bible Christians to the soaring heights of theological discourse is perhaps not fair. But surely it must come as a surprise when they cannot even assimilate the scholarly work of their own leading Protestant scholars who wrote, taught, and preached and were educated in Evangelical colleges, and then converted to Catholicism.
Its hard to beat the candid assessments of Dr. David A. Anders who was born, raised, and educated as an Evangelical.
“By the time I finished my Ph.D., I had completely revised my understanding of the Catholic Church. I saw that her sacramental doctrine, her view of salvation, her veneration of Mary and the saints, and her claims to authority were all grounded in Scripture, in the oldest traditions, and in the plain teaching of Christ and the apostles.
I also realized that Protestantism was a confused mass of inconsistencies and tortured logic. Not only was Protestant doctrine untrue, it bred contention, and could not even remain unchanged.”
Maybe Elise, metmom etc all need to spend some serious study time before embarrassing themselves with the commentary they offer. In a sense they are no different than Al Sharptons, and Rev. Jeremiah Wrights who might also pluck a few scriptural quotations to support their scriptural interpretations.