No other church does these things. All the other churches say weak things like “Your relationship with God is between you and God.” The weak, splinter churches can’t get out of a position of authority fast enough. They have deferred on all the most important issues of the day. They don’t *want* to be in authority.

Now, go read where the part of the Gospels where Jesus says he is going to create a Church and the gates of Hell will not withstand it. Does that sound like a wimpy institution to you?

You wrote in response to Nathan: “1 or more of the 3 camps (Protestant, Catholic, Mormon) are incorrect. All 3 believe the consequences to be catastrophic, fatal, terrible, and awful.

I can not set aside my beliefs on the topic of why we’re here, what we should do, and what happens when we die. I believe them to be too important. Setting them aside would be a disservice to a friend.

I imagine this to be part of Devin’s goals – to push the issues.”

Yes it is! I want us to recognize the fact that, though we all say we are following the Holy Spirit (and I do believe all of us are trying to, according to our faith and understanding), we all believe different things–to varying degrees–about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Church, what books are in the Bible, and so on.

Usually we don’t consider these differences in depth and seek to get to the heart of them because it is hard. It causes disagreements amongst people who are friends, and that can be uncomfortable. But God does not call us to be comfortable but to seek Him and live by the truth, and so I think it is imperative that we explore these matters.

Jeff, you referenced the content of the Bible as the standard by which you judge what is right and wrong, and I understand why this is so; the Bible is the word of God. However, as I mentioned above, my Bible, what I claim to be the inspired words of God Himself, has 73 books in it, and your Bible, which you also claim to be the inspired words of God, has 66 books in it. Something went wrong at some point in the past for us to both be Christians striving to follow God’s truth in the Bible and yet we don’t agree on what exactly makes up the Bible!

You mentioned Satan in your post, Jeff, and how much he hates us and wants us to be deceived. I would submit that Satan would love it if he could get a significant portion of Christians to either reject 7 of God’s inspired books or to accept 7 books not inspired by God. Clearly, God inspired certain books and did not inspire others, and He clearly would only go to the trouble of inspiring books if He wanted us, His children, to read them, take them to heart, and live by them. So the fact that we do not agree on which of the books make up the Bible means that someone against God is at work–the Evil One; I think you would agree.

The other thing I would mention is that, when you say “the Bible”, you actually mean “your interpretation of the Bible”. We think that the Bible is clear on many things, yet we differ on important matters of the faith like whether God washes away sin in baptism, whether there is a sacrament called confirmation, whether God instituted the sacrament of holy orders (the ministerial priesthood) and whether He gave authority to his apostles and their successors to forgive sins (cf. John 20, “Receive the Holy Spirit: whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained”).

It is true that your and my interpretations of the Bible are quite similar in many important areas, but what about President Barack Obama’s interpretation? He claims to be a Christian and has quoted the Bible in speeches; he goes to a Protestant church and takes his family. I bet he would say he strives to live by the Bible, too. But we know that it is his own interpretation of the Bible, which differs from ours on most important moral issues; by what authority do we say that his interpretation is wrong? Or that Jeremiah Wright, the Protestant pastor who was his spiritual director, is wrong?

My point is that the premise: “God ordained it so that the Holy Spirit inspires a person to be able to pick up the Bible and accurately interpret it to discern the truth on matters of the faith and of morals” is false. God could have ordained it that way, but He did not, and the proof is in the myriad schisms we have in the world today, each claiming that “they” have most accurately interpreted God’s truth in the Bible.

Instead, He must have done it differently. I propose that God gave us His Church to be the pillar and bulwark of the truth and that He ordained the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth, as Christ promised, through and in union with His Church. It was this way in the beginning, when Christ gave His apostles authority, and then those apostles, very simply, transmitted their God-given authority to their successors, by God’s grace and power.

I don’t think that it would be appropriate to describe Mormon beliefs using this language. Any failure does not, of course, lie with the Holy Spirit but with men. The Holy Spirit was available to them after the day of Pentecost. The Lord will not force men to follow Him. The apostasy occurred because the church of Christ was rejected by men not because of any deficiency of the Holy Spirit.”

What is the evidence that the immediate successors of the apostles, whom we have recorded writings of, apostasized and that these second-generation Christians rejected the Church of Christ? I would be interested in hearing and reading the historical and theological basis for this assertion.

You wrote later: “Consistent with our beliefs as Mormons, the authority of Christ was restored in modern times. Consequently we have a responsibility to proclaim that to others- to do otherwise would be incredibly hypocritical. Incident to that, with that same divine authority, those missionaries have been called to proclaim and to teach with the authority of the Spirit. Theirs is not a mission to convince or persuade people to belief. Missionaries who are effective at their work do not engage in any arguments and rely on testimony and the power of that same Spirit to bear witness that it is true to the hearts of the listeners.

It is only by the personal witness of the Holy Spirit that a person can know that this doctrine is true. There are hosts of evidences both historical and theological that support this position, however, it would have been irrelevant when those missionaries were speaking just as it would be irrelevant (or even harmful) in this forum. All the evidence in the world isn’t proof. Proof comes from the Spirit and so that is what you have to have first.”

Whether Christ restored authority in modern times and gave it to the Mormon church is based on whether you believe that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God and also the prerequisite that the Church lost Christ’s authority in the first place at some point in history, which is the question that this blog page is hoping to explore. I agree that you as a Mormon must follow your conscience and beliefs in seeking to evangelize others; however, you also must endeavor to ensure your beliefs are true using faith and reason.

I would be interested in hearing the historical and theological evidences of the Mormon claims (as I mentioned in the above comment), which you alluded to but did not detail. It is vitally important to our discussion here, which is engaging both faith and reason, to learn what those are. Claiming that the way to come to believe that Mormonism is true is solely by the Holy Spirit personally witnessing it to you in your heart is a claim that can equally be made by Protestants and even by Catholics. But the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth, and our beliefs cannot all be true, for we believe in mutually exclusive things in crucial matters of faith, like the nature of God Himself. That is why we must also engage in our reason to examine the claims made by Mormons, Protestants, and Catholics. Through faith and reason we can find the truth; using only faith, we risk falling into error through fideism.

The fact that so many religions and ecclesial communities make reference to the “inner witness of the Spirit” is what makes the employment of our God-given reason not only valuable but essential to discerning which religion or community in their teachings, if any, is actually following the Holy Spirit without error. Otherwise we deadlock, each asserting the Holy Spirit told “me” the truth.

You wrote: “What truth does the Protestant church have? Why did this happen? Is your trust and faith in the Catholic Church or in the Jesus who paid for our sins on the cross?”

The Catholic Church believes that the Holy Spirit is alive in hundreds of millions of Protestant Christians throughout the world, in accordance with their valid baptisms, and He certainly works powerfully in their lives and even in the lives of those persons who have not yet heard the Gospel. This is in agreement with what you believe as far as God working in Catholic and Protestant believers lives, so we are not in disagreement here.

Is my faith and trust in Jesus Christ or in His spotless Bride, the Church, which is also His Mystical Body? It is in both because Christ has married His Church and cannot be divided from her. As we talked about, it is a “both-and” not “either-or”. Protestants and Catholics have different understandings of what the “Church” is, which I think leads to your comment about believing in Christ and not in the Church whereas I assert that it is both-and based on my understanding of what the Church is.

“I have the utmost respect for the faithful clergy of the Catholic church who compiled the writings into what we call the Bible. The fact that they conscientiously sought direction from the Lord is evidenced by the wise methodology they used in their selection process. The compilation that they produced has been incalculably valuable to the world. I do not, however, believe those clergy to be infallible. They used the best information they had to determine which of the manuscripts in circulation were authentic and inspired.”

My questions are: if you do not believe that the Christians who discerned which books were inspired by God and which were not did so with God’s divine guidance (or authority) such that they did so without erring, why do you believe that they got all of the books right, or even half of them?

I understand that the Mormon Bible is the 73 books discerned and chosen by the early Church bishops in the 300s minus the 7 deuterocanonical books removed by the reformers in the 16th century. The Great Apostasy was going on throughout this entire span, so on what basis do Mormons believe that, first, the fallible bishops who did not have the authority from God (or “priesthood”) got things mostly right and second that the Protestant reformers 1200 years later, still without the priesthood, got the rest of it right?

Thank you for your consideration.

I guess one question I would ask you is, if the Church never lost Christ’s authority but didn’t always exercise it, how do we know when the Church did and did not exercise it over the course of history? Specifically, how do we know if the Church exercised it in choosing the canon of Scripture in the 300s?

Secondly, now that there are many denominations with conflicting teachings on God, Christ, the canon of Scripture, etc., which of these still has the authority, if the Church never lost it? Some of them cannot have it if they teach false things about Christ.

One really cool thing that I like about the Catholic Church is that our weekly readings are consistent across the world. That is, a schedule is adhered to containing each Sunday’s readings (regardless of what country/language/etc that you’re in). We have A, B, C rotations on readings such that within 3 years, you will have at least heard the entire Bible (as long as you’re paying attention). Not that this should serve as an excuse for not reading the Bible regularly outside of Mass, but it definitely helps those with 2 babies.

From my understanding, Mormons do something similar with the Bible and the book of Mormon being consistent across churches.

This kind of thing helps out on vacations. It’s like you don’t need a DVR for Mass; the same show is on wherever you’re at.

@ DevMan (now “Devin Rose”?): Thanks for clarifying something that I’ve been curious about. I could not get a straight answer from my Protestant friends how it’s possible to have faith in the Bible itself and not on the authority that compiled it. The idea that the Church’s authority was withdrawn gradually from ~400 AD at least seems more rationale than “I don’t know”.

@ Jeff W: On Martin Luther, I have to say at least one positive thing about the revolution. There WAS a lot of corruption in the Church at that time. While I believe that God’s true inspiration was revealed through the ordinary and Sacred Magisterium nonetheless, I think it has a positive influence that the corruption was explicitly called out.

That being said, the idea that he knew better than the original councils that compiled that Bible based on his personal philosophies is a bit troubling to me. How can you accept part of what the council authoritatively decided (as a collective catholic church), but not the whole thing? How do you know that your 66 (right?) books are the right ones? At some point, it has to be faith – perhaps faith in God that He would not let his church be led astray. Luther’s denial of this authority was like removing a foundation on a building.

As some comments have reflected, many Catholics still try to do the same thing where they deny the authority of the Church in the interest of their own personal opinions. In my mind, these people are not really Catholic. I used to be a cafeteria Catholic, but it was through this questioning about the historic authority of the Catholic church that I realized it’s kind of an all or nothing thing. While not everything that a bishop or priest says is authoritative, when everybody gets together (the Magisterium), they are. “Where 2 are gathered…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infallibility_of_the_Church

@ Jeff W: Thank you for your comment! I have a few thoughts about this topic: A Catholic friend of ours brought one of her Protestant friends to Mass a week or so ago, and her friend was able to follow along and even make several responses at various points in the liturgy because, she explained, almost every part of the Mass was straight out of Scripture! I experienced this same familiarity when I was considering becoming Catholic; I recognized so much of the spoken content of the Mass because I was well-versed in Scripture.

Additionally, at every Mass there are two to three Bible readings, sometimes very lengthy, which was quite a bit more than the amount of Scripture read during my Baptist services. Oftentimes my Baptist pastor would spend 30 minutes on just one verse of Scripture! Of course he was applying it, interpreting it, etc., so it was very good, but the expectation was that you didn’t go to church expecting to hear much quantity of Scripture, if you will, but instead were expected to be reading it on your own.

That being said, I think that there is a significant lack of personal Scripture reading amongst Catholics. This has been changing for the better in the recent past, but it is a long way to go before we match our Protestant brothers in personal study of the Bible.

I have a baby who wants to help me type more right now, but in spite of his best efforts, his banging on the mouse buttons is not helping, so I will have to leave off any longer response until perhaps later.

Peace in Christ!

Perhaps my perception or understanding are wrong. I would appreciate hearing Devman’s perspective on this.

I was in a Catholic Church downtown by UT in December. In the backs of the seats were not Bibles, but some type of church readings and perhaps songs. The kind lady in front of me informed me that the Bibles were kept elsewhere.

It seems odd to me that one might not be expected to desire a Bible during a service at a church.