As the revelation of Christ was to be public and enduring it is eminently fitting that He should institute a visible teaching authority to maintain His mission until the consummation of the world. His guarantees to the Apostolate prevents His life giving blood from decaying on the barren wood.
Not only eminently fitting but absolutely necessary. There needs to be a visible teaching authority to make the faith public and visible, else the faith would only exist invisibly in just men's souls, and nobody would be able to tell in public who has the true faith and who has a corruption of it.
ReplyDeleteThe Protestants have no public and visible authority which is why they can never really tell who has the faith and who doesn't. I think this may be why Protestants have often insisted on loud and extravagant expressions of "faith"; they don't know what the faith is, so they just assume that the loudest and most passionate preacher is the most faithful and inspired. Really, every time a Protestant opens his mouth to preach the faith he is usurping authority that he does not have. Protestants believe that they are each individually enlightened by the Holy Spirit, which begs the question as to why the Holy Spirit would cause such awful disunity of belief among Protestants.
I struggle to believe how an honest man can be Protestant, except those raised in a Protestant sect who can't bring themselves to ask if their parents were wrong. The moment you ask, "who has the right to declare what is the doctrine of the faith?", is the moment that the entire Protestant experiment is blown away. It is ridiculous to believe that Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, and a thousand others each had the right to preach the faith, when they contradicted each other and often even themselves. Protestantism starts by reading the Bible, feeling "inspired", and then declaring yourself a prophet elected by God. There is a level of pride here that should make us tremble. Protestants often cannot tell the difference between the Holy Spirit and Satan, pleasurable feelings from the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.