Inerrant Bible, fallible interpretation?

Private judgement
Because the Magisterium is an essential component of the Church and authorized by God, it must have corresponding authority and must be able to bind private judgments so that they do not go beyond certain bounds. Boundless private judgment is precisely the problem God set up the Magisterium to cure. There is simply no way to harmonize the existence of a divinely authorized Magisterium and an absolute right to private judgment.

There can and is a harmonization between the Magisterium and a limited right to private judgment, and this is what we find in the Catholic Church. Individual laymen and theologians can exercise their private judgment in reading the Scriptures all they want so long as they do not transgress what the Magisterium has settled. There is free reign for private judgment and opinion within the bounds of established Christian teaching. It is the crossing of these bounds that the Magisterium was set up to prevent.

This is the way in which the intellect of the individual is harmonized with the teaching authority of Christ, as exercised through his Church. God gave each individual a rational soul which, if it is not impeded, will enable him to learn, understand, and know the Scriptures and the teachings of Christ. This exercise of private interpretation is to be encouraged and fostered. People have been given a faculty by God, and they must be encouraged to fulfill the responsibility that comes along with that faculty.

But they were not given the faculty or the responsibility of building Christian theology from the ground up all by themselves. The average Christian was not given the responsibility to do this, nor the ability to do this. Not even the bishops who constitute the Magisterium have the responsibility or the ability to do this as individuals. Nor does even the pope himself have this responsibility or ability, since he is bound by all the previous decisions of the Magisterium. No one individual, since the day that public revelation stopped, has had the right or responsibility to decide all of the Christian faith for himself, not even the organs of the Magisterium God created.

Thus it is not the case that the Magisterium can simply decide what it wants people to teach and require them to believe that. The Magisterium itself is bound by its own prior infallible teachings and, while it can delve deeper into issues and add new clarity to them, it cannot deny what has once been infallibly settled (consequently, it never has). Thus, under the exercise of the divinely appointed teaching authority, Christian theology grows organically, not mutagenically. New depth, clarity, and context is added to what has been settled, but what has been settled remains settled, as was God's intention from the very beginning.

There is no room in the divine plan to have Christian theology periodically scrapped and reconstructed from the ground up. That is what generates the winds of doctrine the Magisterium is to combat. It is the Magisterium's task to see that Christian theology grows in a stable, orderly, and organic way.

There are not to be periodic "reboots" of Christian theology. If there were to be such, if the Church's theology could so degenerate that it periodically had be scrapped and reconstituted from nothing, then the Church would not be "the pillar and foundation of truth," as the New Testament declares it to be (1 Timothy 3:15), and the Magisterium could not fulfill its function of preventing the faithful from being blown about by every wind of doctrine. Believers could have no security that they were not living in one of the theologically corrupt times before a reboot; nor could they have any sense of doctrinal security during a reboot, when theology was hastily being reformulated; nor could they have any security after a reboot, since they would not know if theology—especially the theology in their denomination—had been reformulated in the right way.

The idea of periodic reboots to Christian theology, rather than slow, organic development into greater clarity and depth, robs the average believer, who is not a theologian, of any security his church is imparting to him the real teachings of Christ, thus making him vulnerable to competing teachings, and thus stopping God's appointed teachers of being able to fulfill their mission of anchoring the average believer so he will not be blown about by the winds of contrary doctrinal claims.

In fact, the attempted reboots of the past have been what has unleashed these winds, as when historic Christian theology is scrapped reformulated, people do not come to the same conclusions about how it is to be recast. Thus the Reformation issued a host of new sects—Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, and others.

And, of course, when people disagree about doctrines, some of them are going to be wrong, and heresies will be taught. When people attempt to reboot the system, heresy and schism are the inevitable consequences, just as system errors and corrupted files are the result of rebooting a computer while its software is still running. The program of the Christian Church must thus be allowed to play itself out to the end. Only in this manner can the accuracy of the results be guaranteed.

All you will do is reinvent the errors of the past that the program has already eliminated. Thus today we see heresies like Gnosticism, Arianism, Sabellianism, and polytheism reappearing in the guises of New Age Christianity, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Oneness Pentecostals, and the Mormons, all of which began as attempts to scrap historic Christian teaching and reboot the system.

 

The magesterium of the ONE TRUE CHURCH started by God at Sinai - the "Hebrew Nation Church" was in gross doctrinal error as seen in Mark 7.

"Teaching for DOCTRINE the commandments of MEN".

That same extreme in doctrinal error has been practiced by the RCC.

 

The RCC magesterium "put up with" and "fomented" the inquisition.

The RCC magesterium "put up with" and "fomented" Lateran IV's decision to "EXTERMINATE" those that opposed it!

The RCC magesterium gave us "purgatory".

The RCC magesterium gave us "Catholics killing Catholics" by the 100's of thousands as rival papal armies warred against each other.

The RCC magesterium gave us that group of popes that the Catholics call "The Wicked Popes"!

In Christ,

Bob

 

Private judgement
Protestantism itself, of course, began as an attempted theological reboot, and by incorporating into itself the principle of absolute private judgment, it infected itself with the oldest heresy of all, the one that goes back to the Garden and with which mankind was originally tempted—the principle of the individual ultimately deciding for himself what is right and what is not instead of trusting in God to provide this from without.

In his encyclical The Splendor of Truth, Pope John Paul II writes:
"In the Book of Genesis we read: 'The Lord God commanded the man, saying, "You may eat freely of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die"' (Genesis 2: 16-17). With this imagery, revelation teaches that the power to decide what is good and what is evil does not belong to man, but to God alone. The man is certainly free, inasmuch as he can understand and accept God's commands.

"And he possesses an extremely far-reaching freedom, since he can eat 'of every tree of the garden'. But his freedom is not unlimited: it must halt before the 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil', for it is called to accept the moral law given by God. In fact, human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfillment precisely in the acceptance of that law. God, who alone is good, knows perfectly what is good for man, and by virtue of his very love proposes this good to man in the commandments. God's law does not reduce, much less do away with human freedom; rather, it protects and promotes that freedom. In contrast, however, some present-day cultural tendencies have given rise to several currents of thought in ethics which center upon an alleged conflict between freedom and law" (Veritatis Splendor 35).

God gave Adam and Eve rational intellects which he expected them to use in the pursuit of truth, but he did not entrust them with the task of ultimately deciding what was right and wrong by themselves. He himself was to tell them what was right and wrong, and they were to then go and use their intellects within these bounds to apply God's teachings.

Yet they decided they wanted to be like God and have absolute authority over what they were to believe and do, and this was what shattered them and doomed billions of human beings to hell. It was the pertinacious assertion of one's own intellectual decision making faculties in the face of God that caused the human race to fall; it was the aspiration to an unlimited right to private judgment, to simply look at the evidence and decide for oneself.

This is the temptation of every rebellious human intellect, to prefer one's own judgments and interpretations to those God has authorized. Newman writes eloquently of this in the "General Reply to Kingsley" at the end of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and he explains the means that God has established to combat this original sin:

"Starting then with the being of God . . . I look out of myself into the world of men, and there I see a sight which fills me with unspeakable distress. . . . The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, full of 'lamentations and mourning and woe.'

"To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts . . . the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in the world'–all this is a vision to dizzy and appall...

"What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer that either there is no Creator or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from his presence. ... And so I argue about the world... since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.

"And now, supposing it were the blessed and loving will of the Creator to interfere in this anarchical condition of things, what are we to suppose would be the methods which might be necessarily or naturally involved in his purpose of mercy? ... I am... asking what must be the face-to-face antagonist, by which to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries.... I am not speaking here of right reason, but of reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen man...

"Experience proves surely that the Bible does not answer a purpose for which it was never intended. It may be [occasionally] the means of the conversion of individuals; but a book, after all, cannot make a stand against the while living intellect of man, and in this day it begins to testify, as regard to its own structure and contents, to the power of that universal solvent [of the skeptical intellect] which is so successfully acting upon religious establishments.

"Supposing then it to be the Will of the Creator to interfere in human affairs, and to make provisions for retaining in the world a knowledge of himself, so definite and distinct as to be proof against the energy of human skepticism, in such a case... there is nothing to surprise the mind if he should think fit to introduce a power into the world invested with the prerogative of infallibility in religious mattes. Such a provision would be a direct, immediate, active, and prompt means of withstanding the difficulty; it would be an instrument suited to the need; and when I find that this is the very claim of the Catholic Church, not only do I feel no difficulty in admitting the idea, but there is a fitness in it which recommends it to my mind. And thus I am brought to speak of the Church's infallibility, as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve religion in the world and to restrain that freedom of thought which of course in itself is one of our greatest gifts, and to rescue it from its own suicidal excesses....

"At first, the initial doctrine of the infallible teacher must be an emphatic protest against the existing state of mankind. Man had rebelled against his Maker. It was this that caused the divine interposition [to begin with], and to proclaim it must be the first act of the divinely-accredited messenger. The Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest. She must have no terms with it; if she would be true to her Master, she must ban and anathematize it" (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1900 Longmans edition, 240-246).

 

The Jewish "Magesterium" in Mark 7 were in fact using "private interpretation" to invent "the commandments of men" and "teach them as doctrine" as they claimed "this did not violate God's Word".

But Christ shows in Mark 7 how that "private interpretation" of that magesterium of the ONE TRUE CHURCH started by God at Sinai - had led them into sin and error.

Luke shows how the Bereans using Holy Spirit guided interpretation are free to DENY their OWN magesterium, deny their own church traditions and validate-TEST the teaching the Apostle Paul.

THIS IS PURE "sola-scriptura" modeled for the saints who read and accept the NT!

How appropriate that the "Protesting Catholics" breaking away from the "system of wicked popes" and "indulgences" and "millions of Catholics at war with each other via rival pope battles" should have upheld the Word of God over the vain traditions of man!!

How facinating that they too could "deny the man made traditions of their own magesterium" to embrace the Word of God anew!

In Christ,

Bob

 

Adam and Eve were confronted with the "Word of God" saying NOT to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God did not simply "leave it to Adam to IMAGINE such a rule".

God "spoke" to Moses and from that we have the first 5 books of the Bible. But in Exodus 20 God "spoke" to ALL ISRAEL just as God "spoke" to Adam - literally.

But just as in Eden Satan came to challenge God's own Spoken Word - so "today" !

 

Yeah, every cult out there uses that "Adam and Even in the Garden", routine to try to prove that their peculiar doctrine is the truth that God commands, and Satan leads us to question. The issue you do not address is whether your group is not the one playing Satan's role in questioning the truth in the first place. God never told any of us that He has one single 'magisterium', and that we could know which one it was by it simply being the oldest. You take a handful of references of "tradition" or "pillar and ground of truth" in the NT and build your whole claim on that, but have never dealt with the fact that this tradition was not a separate body of teachings or clarifications of teachings separate from what was written.
If the problem is man's sin and rebellion, then the solution is not entrusting those same race of "men" with some secret truth, let alone that which they can add to or "clarify" as time goes on. You try to silence "man" when he questions your leaders, forgetting they are men too.

This is getting tiring now, as you are not discussing any of this stuff with us, or evenacknowledging our reponses, but only adding more and more blocks of this propaganda. That "I'm not forcing you to read it" line you used earlier won't work. If you want to debate these writings with us, then debate: but this board (with its limited bandwidth) was not put up here for people to be propagandizing their religious group's rhetoric.

 

Private judgement
Unfortunately, what Protestantism has done is to enshrine rebellious, fallen, private judgment as a dogma of the faith, and the consequences of it are manifest. It doesn't work! The World Christian Encyclopedia (Oxford University Press,) estimates that there are over 33,000+ denominations in existence at present, and the overwhelming majority of them—all but a handful—have been created in the last 500 years and are Protestant denominations. That is the fruit of the doctrine of private judgment.

We are able to see, from our vantage point 500 years after the Reformation, the devastating consequences of this doctrine, how it acts like a hammer to pound and shatter churches into smaller and smaller pieces over time. However, the people of the time should have been able to foresee these consequences, and in fact they did foresee them. The Catholics of the period openly predicted the chaos which has now blossomed in the Christian world, and the Reformers themselves saw what would happen. The Reformers therefore took steps to mitigate the situation and slow the number of denominations being started.

They only went to the doctrine of private judgment because all of Christian history was against them, and so they had to find a way of shucking all of Christian history and leaving only their own Bible interpretations standing. They then immediately prohibited their followers from exercising the same private judgment that they insisted on for themselves.

 

Private judgement
Typically, when they started out and were in politically precarious positions, they preached the free exercise of private judgment and its corollary, tolerance of others' public exercise of private judgment. However, once their own positions were consolidated and they saw the chaos that the public exercise of private judgment led to, they backed off of the principle and tried to reign it in. Historian Will Durant writes:

"It is instructive to observe how Luther moved from tolerance to dogma as his power and certainty grew. Among [the 95 Theses was the proposition] that 'to burn heretics is against the will of the Holy Spirit.' In the Open Letter to the Christian Nobility (1520) Luther ordained 'every man a priest,' with the right to interpret the Bible according to his private judgment and individual light; and added, 'We should vanquish heretics with books, not with burning.' … [But] Luther should have never grown old. Already in 1522 he was outpapaling the popes. 'I do not admit,' he wrote, 'that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even the angels. He who does not receive my doctrine cannot be saved'" (Durant, The Story of Civilization, volume 6 ["The Reformation"], 420-2).

Thus in 1529, Luther wrote:

"No one is to be compelled to profess the faith, but no one must be allowed to injure it. Let our opponents give their objections and hear our answers. If they are thus converted, well and good; if not, let them hold their tongues and believe what they please…. In order to avoid trouble we should not, if possible, suffer contrary teachings in the same state. Even unbelievers should be forced to obey he Ten Commandments, attend church, and outwardly conform" (Letter of August 26, 1529 to Jos. Metsch).

Now that Luther's own position had been secured, he was able to survey the anarchy caused by the principle he had used to rise to power—the public exercise of private judgment—and he was put in the same paradoxical position as a modern Protestant pastor, needing to preach private judgment to validate his own teaching, yet needing to prohibit the public exercise of private judgment to hold off the forces of chaos and keep the group together. Durant writes:

"Luther now agreed with the Catholic Church that 'Christians require certainty, definite dogmas, and a sure Word of God which they can trust to live and die by.' As the Church in the early centuries of Christianity, divided and weakened by a growing multiplicity of ferocious sects, had felt compelled to define her creed and expel all dissidents, so now Luther, dismayed by he variety of quarrelsome sects that had sprouted from the seed of private judgment, passed step by step from toleration to dogmatism. "All men now presume to criticize the Gospel,' he complained; 'almost every old doting fool or prating sophist must, forsooth, be a doctor of divinity.' Stung by Catholic taunts that he had let loose a dissovent anarchy of creeds and morals, he concluded, with the Church, that social order required some cloture to debate, some recognized authority to serve as 'an anchor of faith.' … Sebastian Franck thought there was more freedom of speech and belief among the Turks than in the Lutheran states, and Leo Jud, the Zwinglian, joined Carlstadt in calling Luther another pope" (ibid., 423).

But everyone knows that Luther was a man of fierce temper. Surely this was responsible for his attitude and made him unique among the Reformers in his inconsistency with regard to private judgment. Right?

"Other reformers rivaled or surpassed Luther in hounding heresy. Bucer of Strasbourg urged the civil authorities in Protestant states to extirpate all who professed a 'false' religion; such men, he said, are worse than murderers; even their wives and children and cattle should be destroyed. The comparatively gentle Melanchthon accepted the chairmanship of the secular inquisition that suppressed the Anabaptists in Germany with imprisonment and death. 'Why should we pity such men more than God does?' he asked… He recommended that the rejection of infant baptism, or of original sin, or of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, should be punished as capital crimes. He insisted on the death penalty for a sectarian who thought that heathens might be saved, or for another who doubted that belief in Christ as the Redeemer could change a naturally sinful into a righteous man. He applauded… the execution of Servetus. He asked the state to compel all the people to attend Protestant religious services regularly. He demanded the suppression of all books that opposed or hindered Lutheran teachings; so the writings of Zwingli and his followers were formally placed on the index of forbidden books in Wittenberg" (ibid., 423-4).

Yes, but we are still talking about the Lutheran thread of the Reformation. Surely the detached, intellectual Calvinists were better.

"The new clergy… became under Calvin more powerful than any priesthood since ancient Israel. The real law of a Christian state, said Calvin, must be the Bible; the clergy are the proper interpreters of that law; civil governments are subject to that law, and must enforce it as so interpreted….

"No one was to be excused from Protestant services on the plea of having a different or private religious creed; Calvin was as thorough as any pope in rejecting individualism of belief; this greatest legislator of Protestantism completely repudiated the principle of private judgment with which the new religion had begun. He had seen the fragmentation of the Reformation into a hundred sects, and foresaw more; in Geneva he would have none of them. There a body of learned divines would formulate an authoritative creed; those Genevans who could not accept it would have to seek other habitats. Persistent absence from Protestant services, or continued refusal to take the Eucharist, was a punishable offense. Heresy again became [both] an insult to God and treason to the state and was to be punished with death…. Between 1542 and 1564 fifty-eight persons were put to death [in the city of Geneva], and seventy-six were banished, for violating the new code. Here, as elsewhere, witchcraft was a capital crime; in one year, on the advice of [Calvin's] Consistory, fourteen alleged witches were sent to the stake on the charge that they had persuaded Satan to afflict Geneva with plague" (ibid., 472-3).

Thus the Reformers were no more consistent in their application of sola scriptura than modern pastors are. The leader, the head guy, gets to use his private judgment in an unrestricted manner—in fact he has more private judgment than the Catholic Magisterium, which is bound by its own prior doctrinal teachings—but nobody else does. Thus in the area a given Reformer was able to seize religious control of through alliance with the state, only that Reformer's views were allowed. In Lutheran-controlled areas, people were not allowed to teach contrary to Lutheranism. In Calvinist-controlled Geneva, it was a civil crime punishable by banishment to publicly disagree with Calvin. When the Anabaptists seized control of the city of Munster, all residents were required to submit to re-baptism at the hands of the Anabaptists or be driven out of the city in the height of the German winter. And in England everyone was required by law to attend the Church of England and pay fines if they didn't, not to mention the hundreds of Catholic martyrs that Protestant rulers put to death in England, Wales, and Ireland.

The Reformers not only applied these measures to the Catholics from whom they had broken away, but against each other as well, as the histories of "Nonconformist" religious movements in England show. These eventually developed into the Congregationalists, Plymouth Brethren, Baptists, and Puritans. Remember how the Pilgrims fled to this country from England due to religious persecution? Catholics weren't persecuting anyone in England at the time; they were the chief among the persecuted. The Puritans came to America to flee Protestant religious persecution. And the Puritans only did so after their own religious-political takeover agenda had been thwarted in England.

 

Stan,

Is all this material original with you? (except of course for the quotes.)

I'm having a hard time making connections here.

 

Private judgement
In his work on ecclesiastical polity, the English divine Richard Hooker produced a remarkably insightful portrait of the Puritan movement and its relation to private judgment, which is here summarized by political historian Eric Voegelin:

"If a movement, like the Puritan, relies on the authority of a literary source [like the Bible], the leaders will then have to fashion 'the very notions and conceits of men's minds in such a sort' that the followers will automatically associate scriptural passages and terms with their doctrine, however ill founded the association may be, and that with equal automatism they will be blind to the content of Scripture that is incompatible with their doctrine. Next comes the decisive step in consolidating … 'the persuading of men credulous and overcapable of such pleasing errors, that it is the special illumination of the Holy Ghost, whereby they discern those things in the word, which others reading yet discern them not.' They will experience themselves as the elect; and this experience breeds 'high terms of separation between such and the rest of the world'; so that, as a consequence, mankind will be divided into the 'brethren' and the 'worldlings.'…

"Once a social environment of this type is organized, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to break it up by persuasion. 'Let any man of contrary opinion open his mouth to persuade them, they close up their ears, his reasons they weight not, all is answered with the rehearsal of the words of John: 'We are of God; he that knoweth God heareth us': as for the rest ye are of the world: for this world's pomp and vanity it is that ye speak, and the world, whose ye are, heareth you.' They are impermeable to argument and have their answers will drilled. Suggest to them that they are unable to judge in such matters, and they will answer, 'God hath chosen the simple.' Show them convincingly that they are talking nonsense, and you will hear 'Christ's own apostle was accounted mad.' Try the meekest warning of discipline, and they will be profuse on 'the cruelty of bloodthirsty men' and cast themselves in the role of 'innocently persecuted for the truth.' In brief: the attitude is psychologically iron-clad and beyond shaking by argument" (Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics [Chicago: University of Chicago, 1952], 135-137, citing Richard Hooker, Works, ed. Keble (7th ed.; Oxford, 1888) I:145-155).

Voegelin also notes the measures such a mindset must take to protect its interpretations:
"In order to make the scriptural camouflage effective, the selections from Scripture, as well as the interpretation put upon them, had to be standardized. Real freedom of scriptural interpretation for everybody according to his preferences and state of education would have resulted in the chaotic conditions which characterized the early years of the Reformation; moreover, if one interpretation was admitted to be as good as another, there was no case against the tradition of the church, which, after all, was based on an interpretation of Scripture, too. From this dilemma between chaos and tradition emerged the first device, that is, the systematic formulation of the new doctrine in scriptural terms, as it was provided by Calvin's Institutes. A work of this type would serve the double purpose of a guide to the right reading of Scripture and of an authentic formulation of truth that would make recourse to earlier literature unnecessary.… A man who can write such a [work], a man who can break with the intellectual tradition of mankind because he believes in the faith that a new truth and a new world begin with him, must be in a peculiar pneumopathological state. Hooker, who was supremely conscious of tradition, had a fine sensitiveness for this twist of mind. In his cautiously subdued characterization of Calvin he opened with the sober statement: 'His bringing up was in the study of civil law'; he then [said] with some malice: 'Divine knowledge he gathered, not by hearing or reading so much, as by teaching others'; and he concluded on the devastating sentence: 'For, though thousands were debtors to him, as touching knowledge in that kind; yet he [was debtor] to none but only to God, the author of the most blessed fountain, the Book of Life, and the admirable dexterity of wit' (Voegelin, 138-9, citing Hooker, 127ff).

"The second device for preventing embarrassing criticism is a necessary supplement to the first one. … From contemporary experience with totalitarian movements it is well known that the [first] device is fairly foolproof because it can reckon [on] the voluntary censorship of the adherent; the faithful member of a movement will not touch literature that is apt to argue against, or show disrespect for, his cherished beliefs. Nevertheless, the number of the faithful may remain small, and expansion and political success will be seriously hampered, if the truth of the … movement is permanently exposed to effective criticism from various quarters. This handicap can be reduced, and practically eliminate, by putting a taboo on the instruments of critique; a person who uses the tabooed instruments will be socially boycotted and, if possible, exposed to political defamation. The taboo on the instruments of critique was used, indeed, with superb effectiveness by [these] movements whenever they reached a measure of political success. Concretely, in the wake of the Reformation, the taboo had to fall on classic philosophy and scholastic theology; and, since under these two heads came the major and certainly the decisive part of Western intellectual culture, this culture was ruined to the extent to which the taboo became effective. In fact, the destruction went so deep that Western society has never completely recovered form the blow" (Voegelin, 140-141).

So the Reformers were well aware that the universal solvent of private judgment could not be let out of the bottle, no matter how much they publicly preached that it was the right of each and every Christian to wield this absolute right. All that "Here I stand, the Word of God compels me, I can do no other" stuff had to be interpreted narrowly. "I can do not other" meant "I can do no other." It did not mean you could do something other if you felt the word of God were compelling you. You had to do what I said because I—the leader—was the one the Word of God had compelled, and thus the whole era of Protestant religious laws, and the era of the competing Protestant Magisteriums, was ushered in.

 

mmmmmm

I love being ignored

 

He ignores everybody. (except to occasionally tell someone he's not forcing them to read it). He basically is just pontificating this stuff, (pardon the pun) and apparently can't defend it in debate. To answer your question, it is probably all copied from ETWN, or at least that's what someone else on another thread had found.

Anyway, all of Christian history was against the Catholics as well, because it showed that the single "magisterium" way became highly corrupt, and plummeted the entire Western world into the Dark Ages. So yes, the Reformers came out against this promoting SS, and then became as popes themselves. Once again, power corrupts. That is human nature. In fact, they were only following in the footsteps of the Mother magisterium they came out of. If it "didn't work" for them, and cause chaos, then it wasn't right when the earlier magisterium did all those things (stake burnings, demanding everyone convert, etc), simply because they were the first organization. Once again, they started the mess. Runaway schism was inevitable, eventually. Try to stifle human nature through suppression or oppression, and you end up with a worse backlash. Stop arguing to reconstruct the corrupt system that started all this in the first place!

 

what's the answer you ask?
i admit i know nothing compared to some. but to others i know some.

inerrant bible. period.
---
fallible interpretation. false teaching.
---

now you ask why i say that.
it is prophesied that the bible would be read in many languages. (i dont have the scripture right in front of me)
so. that being the case. it has been. if it is fallible. it is not the word of God. period.

God can use anybody... anybody to translate into whatever language - into whatever culture - into whatever letter's or numbers - so that all may understand.

so one translation says bubble bath and the other says bath of bubbles.
fallible translation?

 

what other answer would there be?

throw it out and provide the infallible interpretation

 

One reason that more people don't teach from the original languages is that it would force them to examine and discard many long-held doctrines.

It would not eliminate differences and splits, but it would certainly reduce them.

 

you can get rid of long-held doctrines without the original languages even.

 

Now we're finally getting somewhere.