We clearly have very different definitions of Christianity. I can find no room for fusion of man's philosophy and God's perfect Word in a plain reading of the Bible
What about Romans 1:20, which proves that truths about God can be learned and known by looking at nature, at created things, which are other-than-Scripture?
And where does it say "plainly" in Scripture that only what is written in Scripture can be known about God? Has not what I've said about Scripture's own words about the "extra-Scriptural" traditions proven that things can be known about God that are not explicitly written down in Scripture?
Hislop's charges against the foundation of the Catholic rituals are not superficial or related only to the trappings and decorations.
I just finished reading a book by the veritable genius, Catherine Pickstock, on the sublimity of the form and structure of the Catholic liturgy. Hislop would be hard pressed to convince me this is something "essentially pagan."
We are to suppose that these "smart people" were hunted down and killed and the historical records controlled accordingly
That's ridiculous. The Church needed only to sic its Doctors like Augustine and Aquinas on the heretics in order to convert the masses - their ideas and arguments were sufficient (the very nature of argument suggests an appeal to reason, by the way, and is not reducible to simply quoting Scripture without elaboration as sola scriptura would require). Heretics were only killed when they claimed to be within the Church but did not submit to the Church - like the conversos during the Inquisition. This was not about killing people who didagreed, but uprooting subversive who claimed to agree and submit to Chrust's Church, but did not. The Church does not have a deep history of polemics against heretics because she "hunted down and killed" all the "true Christians".
Why would the Catholic church suppress and oppose the plain reading of the Scriptures by the layman if the system of ritual was compatible with the teachings in the Old and New Testaments?
The religious wars are complex, and are certainly not reducible to a "hunting down" of "wrongthinkers." The Church has her doctrine, which she is more than capable of defending with words; and then she has her property and temporal means, which she has often defended with the same means (force) that were used to deprive her.
We are called to be Bereans. I listen to men read and teach the Scriptures.
Where does Scripture advocate for this over a submission to an Apostolic exegesis or hermeneutic?
I don't set any man's interpretarion and tradition above what I can plainly read.
Scripture speaks often of the guiding interpretative role that a tradition can play, like with Philip and the eunuch.
How can all being be good when the Scripture tells us that, no man is good, and that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked? Claiming that "all being is good" is a central tenet of the gnostic hermeticism of Babylon. It's contradictory to a plain reading of the Bible and yet your tradition leads you to adopt it.
God is Being; nothing could be unless He sustained it, created it, and loved it. Would you accuse God of sustaining, creating, or loving evil?
"No man is good" means precisely what i am saying - that without God there is no good. It is not as if God made man and now man possesses some good independent of God. That's impossible, since unless creatures "participated" in God's being, they could not be at all. Man's nature is Falken, and so he is wicked and has a deceitful heart - but God's grace can save us from this. But grace does not accomplish this by creating a new man who is good; it does so by perfecting the existing man, since "grace perfects nature" as Aquinas says.
Claiming that "all being is good" is a central tenet of the gnostic hermeticism of Babylon.
I don't think is a central tenet of that tradition, but even if it were, what I said before would make this no problem, since "all Truth belongs to Christ."
As Jesus proclaimed on the cross it is a finished work and it does not need man's philosophy to interpret or change it.
Yet what is any argument if not the application of man's philosophy to Scripture to aid in understanding? The very fact that you have posted words here other than merely Scriprure quotes proves that more than Scripture is being drawn upon. If Scripture requires no interpretation, it could have only one possible reading - which is so plainly false and plainly disproven by what Scripture itself says that I cannot take that seriously.
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