Roman
Catholicism teaches that scripture must be read in the light of Church
teaching. Protestantism teaches you must
decide for yourself what scripture is teaching.
Protestantism takes this stance because it holds that the Bible alone
has authority in religion. It denies the
Catholic claim that the Church is infallible and has authority equal to the
Bible.
Instead
of the Bible being interpreted for you by the pope and his cronies, the
Protestant faith believes that you have to read it and interpret it yourself in
the light of divine guidance. If the
Bible is the only authority in faith and morals like that faith asserts then it
follows that every person has a duty to go straight to the book to learn about
God and his will and to take nobody else’s word for anything. Protestantism uses scholars to understand the
Bible but they say this is not a denial of private interpretation. God helps people understand his word and one
can benefit from what God tells other people.
If you agree with them, you are simply making their interpretation your
own and it is still private interpretation.
It
is more rational to do what Protestantism does and take the scholars into
account instead of just letting the pope and the Roman curia tell you what to
think about the Bible as if they were infallible psychics.
If
the Bible is the only authority then each person is to read it for themselves
for it says it can be understood by anyone with the help of the Holy Spirit (2
Timothy 3:16, 17). To listen to another
interpreter instead of studying it on your own would be making that person the
supreme authority – which is also disobedient to God who warns that we must be
careful for there are so many wolves in sheepskins about (Matthew 7:15).
The
Bible itself says that certain portions of it are difficult to understand and
have led some astray. 2 Peter
Catholics
argue that the obscurity of portions of the Bible and Peter’s declaration that
no prophecy is a matter of one’s own interpretation (2 Peter
Protestants
retort that they do not believe that one has the right to interpret scripture
any way they wish. One must read everything
in context and in the light of what the rest of scripture teaches and be open
to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Private interpretation means learning from God what the Bible means. God has the power to tell you what an obscure
passage means. If you misunderstand or
have a different interpretation from somebody else that is your resistance to
the Holy Spirit so it is humanity that causes divisions and not God. If the Catholics are honest, even if the
Church is the authorised interpreter, the Church has changed many of the old
interpretations because of new discoveries and new evidence which would
indicate that the Church has no more power to understand the Bible than anybody
else has. This would indicate that the
Bible is not inspired at all when it can be obscure and confusing and when you
need to be very clever to prove to yourself that it never contradicts itself
and fits archaeology. You have to make
sure that the book is the word of God before you have the right to believe in
it for God said that he comes first and that he himself is the meaning of life.
The
sects which disagree on the interpretation of the Bible can be said to be
guilty of resisting the Holy Spirit. The
schisms and arguments would not disprove private interpretation for people are
reluctant to submit to God. The Catholic
Church believes that God speaks to you and guides you directly when you read
the Bible with a holy and open heart as much as Protestants do. The only difference is that the Catholic is
to ignore the guidance if it conflicts with the pope and Protestants ignore it
if it contradicts the Bible and commonsense (the latter to a small
extent). There is much disagreement in
the Catholic Church over Bible interpretation and it is so unfair that it condemns
other religions for doing what it does itself and says it disproves private
interpretation. If it disproves it and
Protestantism then it disproves it in Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholicism
too.
Since
sinners can’t do real good for Jesus said bad fruit comes from bad trees. The good work of a sinner means, “I do this
good not because it is good but because it just suits me for I am not giving up
my sins. I want my cake and to eat it
though I can’t do that”. The Bible says
the saved always do some good works which only they are capable of. It follows that every saved person will have
the power to do the best good work, give God’s light to others. So, if anybody who is saved does not agree
with the real meaning of the word of God then that person is insincere and a
fraud. The saved who believe themselves
to be sincere cannot associate with those who differ from them on a religious
level for that is making truth equal to error.
You would have to know the Bible teaching on salvation before you could
be saved for the Bible has to speak of salvation to you. To listen to a minister or whatever is not
listening to God. Thus, the popular
Protestant notion that a Roman Catholic can be a saved person in spite of being
in a satanic Church is seriously mistaken.
Protestants
hold that the obscure parts are just badly expressed by the author and when
that happens God makes sure what he is putting into their heads is expressed
clearly somewhere else in the Bible. How
can an infallible interpreter be needed when the Catholic Church has only
interpreted seven texts? Moreover, the
Church says that this infallible interpretation does not involve psychic powers
but she has to research the ordinary way and the conclusion is preserved against
error. So when that is the way it goes
about it why should the Church be granted a monopoly on Bible teaching?
The
Catholic Church says that if private interpretation is God’s law then why can’t
you judge books not to belong to your canon and drop them out? The Christian reply to this is that if you
are really open to the Holy Spirit you will not do that for he will tell you he
wrote the books through human authors. The
Catholic Church will then respond to this by saying that every sect disagrees
with the next and asking how do we know which one is being guided by the
Spirit? But the Catholic Church itself
says that faith in the Catholic Church has to be communicated privately to each
individual by the Spirit in order for faith to appear. So what difference does it make? It isn’t teaching anything different in that
from the sects. We see that the Church
is surreptitiously claiming that the Holy Spirit should only be believed to be
communicating grace to you if you are inclined to become or stay a
Catholic. If the Holy Spirit is thought
to guide those who are truly open to him, to the religion that is the truth, it
is unfair to point to the disagreements among those who claim to follow him as
evidence that private interpretation is bad news.
Catholics
say you have to see the Bible as reliable and that its doctrine makes sense and
then see that it speaks of an infallible Church and that leads you to the
Catholic Church and to believe it when it says 72 books belong in the Bible and
are without error (Catholicism and Fundamentalism, page 126, 127). This all involves private interpretation for
you have to see these things for yourself.
You have to invoke the Holy Spirit to help you. The Protestant doctrine of private
interpretation is rejected though it is the foundation of the Catholic religion
too! The Church has to hide its belief
in it for the principle automatically gives you the right to form your own
Church if you reach different conclusions from the Catholic Church and are
convinced that you are open to the Spirit who wants you to take this
action. That it is hid at all shows that
Catholicism is too fond of power.
The
answer to people who say that Private Interpretation is wrong for there were
few Bibles before printing came in is that God meant the word to be read to the
people.
The
Bible is its own infallible interpreter.
The Bible says that it can be understood without another infallible
interpreter (Nehemiah 8:7, 12; 2 Corinthians
The
Bible commands the Church to be united (1 Corinthians
It
is not just the Christian who can interpret the Bible by the guidance of
God. The unsaved can do this too for
they cannot turn to Jesus for salvation unless God speaks to their hearts in
his telepathic way. God might speak even
to people he has predestined to damnation but the Bible says that the unsaved
cannot understand the things of God.
The
Bible and Christian history that the heart is deceitful above all else so you
can think you are saved and not be. So,
it would be arrogant and proud to claim to be able to interpret the Bible by
divine power if only true Christians could do it.
The
Roman Catholic Church believes that tradition and the Bible are both the word of
God and tradition must be used to find out what the Bible is about. The pope and the bishops have to interpret
the Bible for you using this other source of revelation. The injustice of this is plain in the fact
that the earliest traditions of the Church all taught that the Old Testament
Law was full of symbolism and was not literally true - a form of interpretation
that the Church vehemently rejects. For
example, the commandment God gave Abraham to get physically circumcised was
taken as saying get spiritually not physically circumcised. It was really twisting the whole book. The Epistle of Barnabas, which was considered
part of the Bible by many early Christians, and the Epistle of Diognetus were
the two most anti literal would-be scriptures.
Tradition to a Catholic just means whatever is in the early days of the
Church that agrees with the pope and the Church.
How
could a Church that does not even know if its doctrines like the Immaculate Conception
– to pick one out of many – are Tradition or not be infallible when it says the
Immaculate Conception is true? A
doctrine has to be Tradition or equal to Scripture if not better than it to be
infallible. And it can’t be better for
the Church never said that though it treated it as better.
Roman
doctrine says, “All our doctrines are true including those that are not taught
in scripture for they have come down to us from the apostles in the form of
tradition. They have come from those who
knew what the Bible was all about and what agreed with it.”
Protestant
critics of Catholicism are more anxious than they should be to show that
Catholic doctrines originated long after apostolic times. But it doesn’t really matter when they
started. Why?
A
doctrine could easily have been made up by some old fraud a week after or even
before the last of the apostles died and then attributed to an apostle so no
matter how early a tradition is it is no good for there is no guarantee that it
originated with an apostle and the Bible predicts great opposition to the truth
even from inside the Church. It shows
that it is risky to depend on tradition and that God would not want you to.
The Roman Church cannot
teach that tradition is a good enough authority on its own but only accept it
in so far as it concurs and sheds more light on Bible revelation. But this would mean that tradition would have
to be implied by scripture before it could be accepted. In that case, why have tradition when
common-sense would do?
The
Church admits that much tradition is nonsense and it takes the rest to be God’s
word. But when it is up to a man and
other men to decide which of its traditions are genuine the Roman Catholic ends
up in a pit of dishonesty. It is not
honest to argue that the pope and Church identify divine tradition and that
this tradition shows that they are of divine institution - it is the lie of
circular reasoning. There is just no
reason why anyone who holds that the pope and the Church are the authority
should start to doubt this.
The
Church censures all traditions that conflict with scripture (Radio Replies,
First Volume, page 125) so ones that do not are okay. But anyone can create doctrines that can be
said to be complimentary to and not contrary to scripture. For example, you can teach that the Virgin is
the fourth person of the Godhead for the Bible mentions three but does not say there
are only three. If the Bible was meant
to be interpreted by external material such as the teaching of a pope or an
alleged prophet or whatever then we can make it mean what we like to a
tremendous extent. For example, when
Jesus said that there was a rock he would build the Church on and you agree
with Catholic tradition that he thereby meant the pope your vision of the text
is coloured. You can’t let it speak for
itself. The Bible does not contain rules
for every moral question, rightly or wrongly, it says that armed with its general
guidance we can work out God’s will so it turns out that we don’t need them.
Tradition is superior to
the Bible in the Catholic Church no matter what it would have you believe. The Bible is interpreted by Tradition and
since the interpreter is more important than the interpreted Tradition is
superior. If Tradition is man-made the
result will be a Bible with perverted teachings.
When
you interpret a book in accordance with something else you are concealing its
true meaning. For example, if tradition
said the Bible meant that Jesus was only symbolically God then that would
destroy the Bible doctrine of his deity (assuming it teaches his deity like
Christendom says it does). In
Catholicism, tradition is above the Bible for it determines its meaning and the
When
Vatican
II claimed that tradition was not superior to the Bible for it and scripture are
to be accepted as being entitled to the same devotion (Dogmatic Constitution
on Divine Revelation, Chapter 2, Part 9) but that is a fib.
When
religion is full of doctrines that cannot be understood Roman Catholicism is
able to say what she likes to a great extent and call her contradictory
doctrines coherent truths that we cannot understand. She says that her understanding of truth
always needs improvement so this is her excuse.
She is able to reconcile any absurd traditions with the Bible as long as
she teaches the importance of mystery.
The
authority of Tradition presupposes the Church having the power to be infallible
not some of the time but all the time.
That is the only way Tradition can be safe so the pope and the
infallible councils are superior to both.
The pope is now superior to the councils for he must summon them and
decide who attends them. It makes one
wonder about the councils that were never convened by popes at all.
Catholics scoff at Private
Interpretation or the idea that the Bible is the only authority in religion,
because the Bible could not be read by the public until the invention of
printing which made Bibles more available.
Until then Bibles were hand-written and expensive and too valuable to be
handled by just anybody. But the
inaccessibility is not the Bible’s fault.
If the Bible alone rules then you can’t follow what anybody says about
it but must go to the book itself. If
the Church really believed that, she would make theologians of everybody so
that they could go to the magisterium or dogma-maker of the Church instead of
listening to people who do it for them to avoid people following
interpretations of the word of God rather than the word of God.
Obviously,
if this print argument against the Bible as the only rule of faith is right,
then these apostles who invented the principle of Bible alone did not expect
Christians to outnumber copies of the Bible.
They believed the Church would never end on earth so they must have
expected the end of the world to be just some years, or less, away. The Protestant revival of the Bible-only
doctrine would prove the dishonesty of the so-called reformers for they only
had to open their eyes to see that it was wrong. But the argument is wrong for Private
Interpretation applies to those who know the Bible and not just to those who
read it. Hearing the Bible read would
not stop you from interpreting it for yourself.
The Church always read the Bible to the people and quoted it in her
books. The argument that the people
could not have had no Bibles and so private interpretation had to be wrong is
dishonest.
If
the Church kept the Bible from the people it is no disproof of private
interpretation for that was not what God intended and not his fault. Without printing the essential portions of
the Bible could have been written on stone in every diocese so that everybody
could read or have them read out.
“If God intended the Bible to be the sole rule
of Faith - as Faith is necessary for salvation and as God “wishes all men to be
saved, and to come to the knowledge of truth” -
His divine providence should have secured:
1st. That every man should have become possessed
of a Bible.
2nd. That every man should know that his was a
copy of the Bible.
3rd. That each one should be certain that he
rightly interpreted his Bible.
4th. That the adoption of the Bible, as the sole
Rule of Faith, should conduce to unity of Faith, purity of morals, and the
promotion of Divine Worship.
But
as the Providence of God has not secured any of these results, we legitimately
conclude that the Bible is not the Sole Rule of Faith, for all men could not
become possessed of a Bible” (page 15, 16, Lectures and Replies). But the same author would hypocritically
reject the argument, “If God meant all to be Christians he would have made sure
that all men at least heard of Christ.”
His Catholicism would tell him that God wants the whole world won for
Christ.
This
argument contradicts itself. He quotes
the Bible as saying that God wants all to know the truth. In that case, even if it is not enough on its
own everybody should and would have a copy if his first deduction is
correct. His objection does not work and
denies that the Bible has ANY authority at all.
Though books were cheap in the
The Catholic Church holds
that the Bible cannot be enough for you because you need another authority to
tell you that it is God’s word. Bible
Christians claim that reason and investigation does that but Catholics want you
to think it is the allegedly infallible Catholic Church though then they would say
that the Church reasoned its way to the belief it declared infallible. The second deduction is a lie for both sides
use reason. Or is the Archbishop saying
that since the Church has done the thinking for us we know the Bible is
true? That is wrong and dangerous. And the Bible forbids it for the Bible itself
is saying that we must come to it and see that it is the word of the Lord.
The
Catholic Church has infallibly interpreted only seven brief texts of the Bible
(page 8-9, How to Interpret the Bible).
The Catholic is as free as a Protestant with regard to the rest. The Church raises a storm about private interpretation
for nothing. What is the point of it
when there are only seven paltry texts that have been infallibly interpreted? It is wrong to say that if the Bible alone
were the authority we would have an infallible interpretation of it. You can make mistakes in interpreting the
interpretation so mistakes cannot be completely avoided. Therefore, the Bible could be the only
authority if mistakes about it are made.
And more so if it is up to God to help you interpret.
There
is one true and logical interpretation (naturally the simplest one) of the Bible
and if we do not find it we have not tried hard enough so it is laziness that
is to blame for error and church splits and not the Bible.
If
the Bible can’t be supreme authority because it led to disunity then it can’t
be an authority at all when the Catholic Church is full of schisms with each
group saying it is the true Church and that Catholicism is schismatic.
Unlike
Protestantism, Roman Catholicism does not derive its doctrines from the Bible
alone but from Tradition as well.
Tradition with a capital T is the word of God.
The
Catholic argument that since the Bible sometimes speaks well of tradition and
treats it as authoritive, tradition must be an additional authority to the
Bible is untenable because the Bible never says tradition is the other
authority. Those traditions might have
been divinely inspired and might have been incorporated into and enshrined in scripture
alone is they were. The Bible started
off as inspired traditions which were written down.
And
it may be true that there are inspired traditions outside the Bible but that
does not mean that we have to rely on them or are meant to. The Bible never tells us to listen to
tradition outside its teaching. It was
different to take tradition as the word of God during the apostles’ day for
they infallibly discerned the infallible ones but it is too risky to do so
now. The Bible is complete so there is
no need to.
If
a lot of important answers are left out of the Bible does that prove that
tradition is needed and complements the Bible?
It does not when the Bible does not tell us who has the accurate
tradition.
Jesus’
condemnation of tradition only forbids non-inspired tradition (Matthew 15) so
it is not proof that the Bible alone must be heeded. It does not prove that Catholic tradition is
bad or fraudulent either. But the Bible
warns that most people will tend towards apostasy and Jesus and the apostles
warned about heretics implying that even if tradition was accepted as a
parallel authority to the Bible it could not be depended on once the overseers,
the apostles, were gone. So the context
of Jesus’ condemnation strongly suggests that only tradition that ends up as
scripture should be followed.
Catholics
suppose that Isaiah 59:21 in which God says his word will be in the mouths of
his people forever is a prediction about the Catholic Church which teaches by
word of mouth and not only by a book.
Tradition is what is handed down by word of mouth and this verse is
supposed to teach the Catholic doctrine.
But if the word were to be in a book alone Isaiah would still have
written these words.
1
Peter 1:25 is supposed to prove that the Church will preach infallible
tradition, that is not in scripture, forever.
It is reasoned that it says that the word of God endures forever and
must be the preaching meaning the oral tradition of the Church for the New
Testament was far from finished. But if
the Church follows the Bible and this book is the only inspired authority used
the Church can still preach the word of God that endures forever. This verse gives no grounds for the notion of
tradition as endorsed in the Catholic Church.
And if some of the New Testament had been written and since there was an
Old Testament there is no need for imagining it means the Church teaching at
all.
John
The
apostle Paul declared that what would become the great apostasy had started (2
Thessalonians 2) so how could we trust tradition? Tradition was the only excuse the apostates
would have had for altering the faith. The
apostles claimed to have given the final revelation.
The
Bible predicts that most of the people calling themselves Christians would
abandon the faith one day and speaks of the awesome power of Satan to delude (2
Thessalonians 2:3 – it speaks of a “great falling away” or apostasy). It says that false teachings and fabricated
apostolic traditions were already being concocted while the apostles were alive
under the guidance of Satan (2 Thessalonians 2:1, 2). Obviously, even if a tradition could be
traced back to the lifetime of the apostles it does not mean that it is a
revelation of God. Catholicism
illogically assumes the reverse. The
Devil might have created the traditions Catholics speak of and the papacy.
In
Matthew 12 Jesus said that when demons are cast out and can find no home for
there is nobody left to possess they will go back to the man they have left and
if he is open to their influence they will take worse demons than themselves
with them to possess him and that will happen to Jesus’ evil generation. Generation is a general word that certainly indicates
that most or nearly all if not all will be taken over by evil. This implies firstly that oral tradition or what
isn’t in writing is dangerous and the demons have the knowledge and power to
pull off a seemingly foolproof deception and it implies that the New Testament
could well be a demonic fabrication and that only books you are 100% sure of
can be considered to be God’s word. But
no such books exist and Jesus really shot himself in the foot.
When
the Bible warns of a great apostasy and makes it clear that the world will be
generally involved – meaning the vast majority so it is practically the whole
world so even most Christians will be traitors though they might continue to
infest the Church. Church traditions are
most likely to be diabolical or fraudulent in origin and we have to avoid them.
Conclusion
We shouldn’t believe the claim of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to be equal in authority to scripture when it wants to be.
WORKS
CONSULTED
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS CATHOLICS ARE ASKING, Tony Coffey, Harvest House Publishers, Oregon ,2006
Catholicism
and Christianity, Cecil John Cadoux, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1928
Catholicism
and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press,
Encyclopaedia
of Bible Difficulties, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan,
Evangelical
Catholics, A New Phenomenon,
How
to Interpret the Bible, Fr Francis Cleary, SJ, Ligouri, Missouri,
1981
Lectures
and Replies, Thomas Carr, Archbishop of Melbourne,
Australian Catholic Truth Society, Melbourne,
1907
Lions
Concise Book of Christian Thought, Tony
Lane, Lyon, Herts, 1984
PAPAL SIN, STRUCTURES OF DECEIT, Garry Wills, Darton Longman and Todd, London, 2000
Reason
and Belief, Bland Blanschard, London,
George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974
Roman
Catholic Claims, Charles Gore, Longmans, London,
1894
Secrets
of Romanism, Joseph Zachello, Loizeaux Brothers,
The
Bible Does Not Say So, Rev Roberto Nisbet, Church Book Room Press,
The Church and
Infallibility, BC
Traditional
Doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church Examined, Rev CCJ Butlin, Protestant
Truth Society,
Vicars
of Christ, Peter de Rosa, Corgi,
Whatever
Happened to Heaven? Dave Hunt, Harvest House,
BIBLE
QUOTATIONS FROM:
The
Amplified Bible