Ignored Sermons In Todays World

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Source; Anonymous

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.”--2 Tim 4:3-4

“The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”—Shakespeare

“Sola Scriptura is not found in Scripture, it constitutes a contradiction in terms.”—Thomas J. Kleist

“The Bible was never meant to be the sole and self-sufficient guide to God’s revelation. For Christ left a Church, one that traces her ascent back to the Apostles, to be nothing less than the direct continuation of His work on earth.”—Leonard Cheshire

“While Catholics believe the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and that it is true, one cannot take individual biblical passages or quotes and say each one is literally true. It is possible to understand the Sacred scriptures as the word of God only by looking at the Bible as a whole. It is not possible to apply the criterion of inspiration or of absolute truth in a mechanical way, extrapolating a single phrase or expression.”—Pope Benedict XV

“God was incarnate as a man, not a book. There is an absolute need for a living authority.”—Robert Hugh Benson

“Neither should those passages be neglected which the Fathers have understood in an allegorical or figurative sense, more specially when such interpretation is justified by the literal.”—Providentissimus Deus

 

Those who consider the Bible as purely myth and outdated without any application to today’s world are misguided, possibly ignorant of the Bible. and in many cases, deceitful. As St. Augustine pointed, “They love the truth when she shines on them and hate her when she rebukes them." Yet, they ironically claim, absolutley, to hold the truth by denying that there are absolute truths. They push the idea that science is the only truth and yet deny science when it does not suit their desires, as in the cases of transgenderism, sexuality, and abortion to name justa few. Which merely confirms what Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) said: “It is not Christians who oppose the world, but rather the world which opposes itself to them when the truth about God, about Christ and about man is proclaimed. The world waxes indignant when sin and grace are called by their names.”

While proclaiming science as the only truth--and at the same time denying so many of its truths--they overlook the fact that science has not disproved the existence of God. In fact, the deeper scientists study the world and the universe, the more obvious it becomes that there had to be a “first cause” that put the whole universe into being. That first cause had to be outside the whole thing and the only explanation is an intelligent omnipresent being: God! The statistics of random effects are so miniscule as to be impossible. Consequently, there are more scientists who believe in a first cause being than do not.

However,  many want to deny God because they see the darkness of humanity everywhere they turn. Yet, these are the same people who insist that freedom means they can do whatever they please, regardless of how it affects others. They totally misconstrue the meaning of “free will” and the fact that God so wants our love returned to him freely, that he will not mess with that freedom of our wills. They want what that old clique warned about, that: "You cannot have your cake and eat it too."

"And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.” -Romans 1:18-32)

But Christianity as the guide for a  sound, moral, flourishing indivual life and society is not limited to simply using the Bible.  John Henry Newman years ago proved the necessary emergence of the Papacy and the Magisterium from early Christianity, in his treatise and essay on the development of Christian doctrine. A religion based on a book –even a book as great as the Bible – generates anything but clarity and consistency. There are many conflicting interpretations of the Bible. And the Bible is incapable of arbitrating between them. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus recognized this and appears to have matched his parables to the intellectual level of his listeners and explained everything to the apostles in private. As Jesus told the apostles in John 16:12-12: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.”

One of the greatest temptations for Christians is to deduce specific manifestations from a general belief in divine providence. Once literal biblicism takes hold, all imaginable acts of cruelty, moral, social, and political find their warrant somewhere in scripture.

Catholicism and the Church offers a coherent alternative. The doctrines of the Catholic Church became fully conscious, formally stated, only after being called into question. The apostles did not provide a detailed exposition of every aspect of their faith, rather their writings were an embryo or seed subject to gradual unfolding, analogous to human life from conception to old age.  Christianity employs reason to illuminate divine mysteries but control those speculations by recourse to the revealed word in Scripture. Since the church herself had determine the canonical text of the scripture it is impossible to set the Bible over the church. The Catholic Church, which codified the Bible in the 4th century, is based not only in the Bible but also on a tradition of reasoned discourse from which a final authority has been established. Those unifying principles do not stem from the personal morality of those who temporarily hold the reigns of office but from the objective authority given to the episcopacy by Christ and transmitted through the ages.

As Pope Benedict XVI said: “Scripture requires exegesis, and it requires the context of the community in which it came to birth and in which it is lived… Christianity does not simply represent a religion of the book in the classical sense…The word of God can never be simply equated with the letter of the text.”

 

Pius XII reminded Catholics that, while the Bible was divinely inspired, it was written through human agencies, making Church scholarship crucial in such things as archaeological discoveries, the precise meaning of words, and the historical context in which biblical events occurred. The Scriptures were both divine and human in their authorship, and human error could enter in on matters that were not salvific, Making the Bible interpreted not by the individual but by the ecclesial community guided by the Holy Spirit. No pope has ever made a solemn doctrinal declaration without consulting the bishops; most such declarations have been made by councils.

It was Pope Puis XII who said about the Catholic faith that it must safeguard “…the genuine validity of human knowledge, the unshakable metaphysical principles of sufficient reason, causality and finality, and finally the mind’s ability to attain certain and unchangeable truth.” In Providentissimus Deus, Pope Leo XIII showed that sound reasoning is found in Catholicism by carefully observing the rule so wisely laid down by St. Augustine--not to depart from the literal and obvious, except only where reason makes it untenable or necessary. Valid logical practices however place the onus of proof in disputing a truth on the contending otherwise party. Objective truth is not to be determined by opinion, majority or otherwise.

 

With that understanding, it’s true that the language of the Bible is deliberately metaphorical or allegorical. All Scripture was written primarily for an entire people, and secondarily for the whole human race, across all-time; consequently its contents were necessarily adapted, as far as possible, to the understanding of timeless masses. It’s object is not to convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination. The human, divinely inspired authors, to convey their doctrine by arousing the imagination, were compelled to adapt themselves to the capacities and predispositions of the current mind. Even Jesus accommodated himself to the comprehension of the people and most often taught by simple parables. Do we really believe that Jesus, the true master of the universe, was so simple-minded? The Bible interpreted literally is full of errors, contradictions and obvious impossibilities.

 

Yet, Sola Scriptura (meaning Scripture alone) is a fine principle if the Scriptures are simply and certifiably the textus receptus of the Holy Spirit and it answers therein exhausts all possible questions. One of the primary reasons for the New Testament was to enable believers to know the true apostolic legacy, that even though God’s person is love, God’s will is Truth, and that to uphold and proclaim the Truth is to do God’s will. But the New Testament does not answer all questions, it is itself the product of the Catholic Church, the Church that had the obligation to proclaim that which was the Truth about the Jesus Christ of history and reject or correct that which was not.  The student of history knows that the Church, even its infancy, has been obligated to make some sharp distinctions about the Truth, the whole meaning and purpose of God’s work in Jesus Christ.

Since the time of Origen (around 200AD) the majority of Christian theologians have held that the Bible is properly interpreted on a number of different levels – literal as well as metaphorical. Literalism, however, is not the way the Catholic Church approaches its dogma, especially when it comes from Catholicism’s primary guidebook, the Bible. Science takes precedence when it is certain. Catholic interpretations of the Bible (as the St’s. Ambrose and Augustine(1) taught and Christ had established) never depended on the Bible having to be taken literally.  Encyclicals, aided by the office of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, for instance, guide Catholics. The Biblical Interpretation in the Church, issued by the Church in 1993, pointed out that a literal or fundamentalist approach to the Bible is not adequate. It stated that although God uses human language inerrantly, and Jesus did not try to get people’s attention by making false statements and calling it poetic license, God and Jesus also use that language in ways that are flexible.

 

“Scripture only indirectly attests to certain Catholic doctrine. Not every Catholic doctrine is explicit in the Bible. Without knowledgeable translation and understanding the Bible becomes a Pandora’s Box” as Cardinal Newman said. In fact Catholicism is a complex composition of the Bible, dogma, history, practice, inheritance, divine empowerment and deep philosophical heritage. The very first Pope made the same identical point, implicitly warning that sometimes Christians are tempted to pretend that life really isn’t complex. The problem of reconciling faith with reason is not one of theological obscurantism vs. observable fact but literal interpretation of the Bible. And as Father R. Simon has pointed out, apparent Biblical anomalies reinforce the view that the safest approach to Christianity is not through fundamentalism but through the teachings of the Church. Without the Church religion becomes a subjective experience and therefore at strong risk of grave intellectual disadvantage from the resultant dumbing down of its substance. For example, some of the more obvious problems with a literal reading of the Bible would find that God believed the world was flat, that Moses wrote Pentateuch after he was dead, the sun revolved around the Earth, that there is 2 different stories of creation in Genesis and that Jesus’ divinity was problematic.

 

Without the Church the Bible is wax that can be twisted by demagogues to say anything(2), which when beyond the Catholic Church, entrusted to protect the unchanging deposit of faith, becomes the chaos and turmoil of irreligion. Even the New Testament is not the foundation of the Catholic Church, or even its operating manual. The Church precedes it, having existed at least 20 years before the New Testament was written. As Paul Johnson stated: "...the writers of the Gospels could not always remember Christ's teachings, accurately or coherently and they were not trained orators or indeed educated people." Christ's authority was given to men, not to a collated New Testament. He and his Apostles left few records, most were oral rather than written.  Therefore, the Church defines doctrine by more than Sola Scriptura.  Or as Matthew 5 states, it is to: “Be Salt [preserve & prevent decay] and Light [provide the ‘way’].”

Latern IV and Vatican I both expressed that Catholics are not required to believe everything was created in the same instant, at the very beginning. This nontrivial distinction allows a Catholic to believe that God’s creative work has been in process ever since time began, therefore allowing both reason and religion to exist compatibly. Those who find fault with Catholicism so often mistakenly think that it is nonsense. The intellectual error they make is to confuse the difference between a standard, which is good, with a failure in application, which is failure of the individual or group to meet or keep it; with its implementation mechanism, the human being, rather than with the instructions. Scientism leaves no room for the critique offered by broader judgment. As a result, many think that what is possible is therefore acceptable. As Pope John Paul II has said, philosophy without science is subject to error and superstition but science without a moral philosophy is subject to idolatry and false absolutes.

 

John Henry Newman believed in what he called the “illative sense”—numerous particular insights that eventually coalesced, not into iron certitude but into a high degree of probability.  That everything essential to the faith was present embryonically in the gospel, but many elements emerged only gradually. All such development had to be an organic growth from the original seed, harmonizing with previous expressions of the faith. That view coincided with the principle of lasting consistent truths.

 

The real world exists, is ordered, is intelligible and includes causality; created beings have a nature and a telos. This is not only the true Catholic approach but also the necessary approach to reality, as Murray S. Daw elaborated. When the Bible and tradition are set aside, Christianity inevitably crumbles into personal opinions, which are virtually infinite. That way  we not only make up our own rules, we can become our own God.

 

“Science and technology have developed many of the instruments vital to totalitarian control and have thus contributed not only to new means of fighting, exploiting and tyrannizing one another, to external destruction but to also destruction of that of the inner realm of human freedom whereby people experience their autonomy and moral worth.”---Reed Davis

 

“In Christianity (whose scriptures are a complex bewildering compound of allegory and fact) above all other religions, there is an absolute connection between faith and reason…reason reinforced the faith…any interference with the truth is immoral. This was the message of St. Paul.”—Paul Johnson

"The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea...We should seek rather to honor the piety and understanding embodied in it.”—George Santayana 

“Our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom giving him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the arrogant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures."- 2 Pet. 3: 15-16.

 

1. St Augustine, in his On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, warned against scriptural literalism, particularly treating as statements of fact passages that are meant to be taken symbolically, especially in the face of discoveries by natural sciences about the natural world.

 

2. Taking a verse alone without considering the prerequisites is called "versification." In other words, we take what we like out of the Bible and use it to dictate how we will live our lives. For example, take the Sermon on the Mount. It is not simply a matter of what Jesus said: "Ask and it will be given to you." We also have to be willing to do two things he said prior. The first is; "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”-- Matthew 22:37 This means being completely devoted to God and not doing those things not of God. The second is: "Love your neighbor as yourself.” --Matthew 22:39). In other words, do not ask for or do things that will hurt your neighbor.