"A competent religious guide must be clear and intelligible to all, so that everyone may fully understand the true meaning of the instructions it contains. Is the Bible a book intelligible to all? Far from it; it is full of obscurities and difficulties not only for the illiterate, but even for the learned...The Fathers of the Church, though many of them spent their whole lives in the study of the Scriptures, are unanimous in pronouncing the Bible a book full of knotty difficulties." -The Faith of Our Fathers
3 comments:
Carrie, what is your point with these posts? Is it your contention that the Bible is very easy to understand?
“All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice, that the man of God may be perfect, furnished to every good work.” —2 Timothy 3:16-17
Scripture is good, but that don't mean that one can decide for himself what it does and does not say, 'cause some of it just ain't all that clear.
"in which are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction." (2 Peter 3:16)
St. Augustine says: "For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church." (Against the fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus, Ch.5 #6)
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Lecture IV, #33: " Now these the divinely-inspired Scriptures of both the Old and the New Testament teach us. For the God of the two Testaments is One, Who in the Old Testament foretold the Christ Who appeared in the New; Who by the Law and the Prophets led us to Christ's school."
St, Cyril of Jerusalem, Lecture IV, # 35: "Study earnestly these only which we read openly in the Church. Far wiser and more pious than yourself were the Apostles, and the bishops of old time, the presidents of the Church who handed down these books. Being therefore a child of the Church, trench thou not upon its statutes. And of the Old Testament, as we have said, study the two and twenty books, which, if you are desirous of learning..."
Fourth Lateran Council, Can. 10: "Among other things that pertain to the salvation of the Christian people, the food of the word of God is above all necessary, because as the body is nourished by material food, so is the soul nourished by spiritual food, since "not in bread alone doth man live but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God"
Pope Pius IX, Vatican I: “If anyone shall not accept the entire books of Sacred Scripture with all their divisions, just as the Sacred Synod of Trent has enumerated them, as canonical and sacred, or denies that they have been inspired by God: let him be anathema.” (Can. 4 on Revelation)
St. Francis De Sales (c. +1602): “And if you consider closely how the Council [of Trent] compares Traditions with the Scriptures you will see that it does not receive a Tradition contrary to Scripture: for it receives Tradition and Scripture with equal honor, because both the one and the other are most sweet and pure streams, which spring from one same mouth of our Lord, as from a living fountain of wisdom, and therefore cannot be contrary, but are of the same taste and quality…” (The Catholic Controversy, p. 245.)
How many verses of the Bible has Rome "infallibly" interpreted - leaving absolutely no room for any other interpretation?
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