It’s a pleasant fantasy to dream that RCC members would actually consider the points raised in your post number one thousand two hundred and fifty-nine, for their sake and the sake of this forum’s possible viability in the future.
It may take quite a long while to collate their sect’s official refutations of the questions posed. Regardless, I expect, the RCC responses will be excepted by most RCs who populate this forum.
Thank you for that post. You’re right about the time frame. Change occasionally comes quickly, but more often it takes a while. I reminisce about my years as a liberal. I certainly didn’t become a conservative over night. It took quite a while.
Something occurred to me in the course of this thread. I think the rubric would be, ‘Attitude toward Scripture.’
Resettozero, I don’t have to ask what is your attitude toward Scripture. I know what it is. You seek first to understand the text, and then to apply it. Since you believe in inspiration, you don’t see your role as one of challenging and second guessing God’s revealed word. You see Jesus as Lord and yourself as His servant. The servant doesn’t challenge the word of the master.
Then we have the other side of this debate. I can only give my perceptions, so for what they’re worth.
What I have seen is an attitude toward Scripture that casts it as an obstacle to be gotten around. For example, if the Scripture plainly says Jesus had brothers, then the reaction is, ‘How can this passage be neutralized/explained away/made to say something different?
Second example. The Lord’s own words say that the foundation on which He has built His church is feminine—petra. That being a fact, in a servant/master relationship, the question would be, ‘How can I align my doctrine and traditions with the inerrant word of God?’.
But what we actually see is a quest to get around a perceived obstacle. I.e.: the word as revealed contradicts denominational tradition. Therefore the need is to set aside the Scripture so that man-made tradition may continue unperturbed.
How scary is this?? We are called to be hearers and doers of the word, not judges/arbiters of it. How will the servant answer the Master, when He asks why His word was challenged?
It’s terrifying.
Hopefully changes will come. It may take time, but hopefully eventually it happens.
I had a suspicion this would be the case. RC teaching leaves the door open to the possibility that Paul wasn’t all, or even mostly, right when he challenged Peter’s shunning of gentile believers.
However did I manage to guess correctly? [And note that they somehow found a ‘Protestant’ to support their position—as if that makes it right. Smh.]
‘It’s not even certain that Paul was totally right and Peter completely wrong. The prominent Protestant scholar James D. G. Dunn wrote about this question (Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, London: SCM Press, 2nd edition, 1990, 253-254), and pointed out that because we have only Paul’s report, we can’t finally decide who was right and wrong.
Dunn thinks the internal evidence of the passage provides clues suggesting that even Paul himself didn’t think he was decisively correct, over against Peter:
“[I]f Paul had won, and if Peter had acknowledged the force of his argument, Paul would surely have noted this, just as he had strengthened his earlier position by noting the approval of the ‘pillar apostles’ in 2.7-10.”
Dunn even goes so far as to assert: “it is quite likely that Paul was defeated at Antioch, that the church as a whole at Antioch sided with Peter rather than with Paul” (italics his own). If this is true, then obviously, the incident would provide no disproof for the papacy at all. Dunn notes that Paul also seemed to “change his tune” later on:
“[I]t can hardly go unnoticed that Paul’s advice to such communities in I Cor. 8,10.23 – 11.1, and Rom. 14.1 – 15.6 (not to mention his own practice according to Acts 21.20-26) is more in line with the policy of Peter and Barnabas at Antioch than in accord with his own strongly worded principle in Gal. 1.11-14!”’
(I never heard of Dunn, btw, but from this excerpt he sounds like a lightweight.)
http://www.themichigancatholic.org/2016/04/pauls-rebuke-peter-prove-peter-wasnt-infallible/