Do We Follow The Early Church? | Highlight

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they want to say, we aren't really trying to retrieve the early Church. And in a sense, they're correct, because I don't want to retrieve the mess at Corinth, okay, which continued in Corinth, as we see in in verse

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Clement. What I want is the apostolic witness. Right.

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That is the issue, and in a sense, Rome agrees with that, they just simply say that the apostolic witness is not limited to Scripture.

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You have sacred Scripture as the overarched, sacred tradition is the overarching banner, you have the written element of that, and you have the oral element of that.

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And that's where the issue is, is there's this oral element, and our argument is, you simply cannot demonstrate in any way, shape, or form that what you have defined on the basis of tradition was actually delivered by the

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Apostles to the first generation of It's just not possible. And so that's where everything becomes discombobulated between the two, but the point is that the

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Reformation, they were not saying, we're gonna start something new. You've messed things up so badly, we're gonna start something new. They weren't saying that.

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They're saying, these accretions, these additions have taken place over time, where you get a, maybe a, you know, someone trying to do something good, but they go off track, and then that gets built upon by the next person, built upon by the next person, and pretty soon, you're in the next county, as far as away from apostolic truth is concerned.

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And so there has to be a mechanism of correcting that kind of thing, and once you make the

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Church the infallible interpreter of both the Bible and tradition, there's no way of correcting the

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Church any longer, because the Church now becomes itself infallible. But this is very, very important, because I don't know about how many you've talked to, but I just have lost count of how many people

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I've talked to who said, well, once I started reading early Church Fathers, that's when I found out I needed to become a

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Catholic, because they were Catholics like me, and all the rest of this stuff, and I'm like, what exactly were you reading? What exactly were you listening to?

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What's the, what do you do about this? And I just point out one place, and they're so uncomfortable when they encounter just how variegated and how wide the opinions were.

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And I'm like, okay, so if this becomes your authority, if this becomes the lens through which you read

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Scripture, no wonder you're gonna deny the perspicuity of Scripture. Why do Roman Catholics and Protestants, Roman Catholics and the

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Reformed, need to sort of mutually have a certain feeling of frustration with the

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Fathers? I feel it, and I've seen it with Roman Catholics I've engaged with. Frustration they will have, where you'll look at a person, and we've already said this, you go, that's amazing, that sounds just like Jesus, it sounds just like Paul, and then you watch them on the next page, face plant.

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You're like, that's frustrating. And the Roman Catholic has to, if they have integrity, if they have honesty, they have to say they feel the same frustration.

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That these fallible, uninspired men, yeah, they say the stuff that I like, and then they face plant. But dogmatically, they have to believe,

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Saddus Cognium said long time ago, the teachings on the papacy are the constant, ancient faith of the

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Church. They've been told, this is what we've taught all along. It's not, and that's why

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I've said, and I think I said this... And it can be demonstrated that it's not. And I said this, I think I said this on my program yesterday,

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I said, I have for years said, show me a single bishop at the

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Council of Nicaea. First Ecumenical Council, important topic, Nicene Creed, all the rest of that stuff.

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Show me a single bishop at the Nicene Council that believed what a modern Roman Catholic has to believe,

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De Fide, by faith, as in dogma. And they can't, because there's nobody there that believed what a modern

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Roman Catholic has to believe. Now, there were variances even amongst them, but the point is that the men who gave us the

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Nicene Creed did not believe in the bodily assumption of Mary, and immaculate conception, and papal infallibility.

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If they believed in papal infallibility, why were they even getting together? It doesn't make any sense. And the whole idea that, well, the

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Nicene Council could only have been accepted if the Pope approved it, that's rubbish, that is pure anachronism.

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So they have to massage the data. And that's why

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I've said, hey, when I teach Church History, I can let the early Church Fathers be the early Church Fathers. Just be honest about it. Just be who they were.

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I don't have a system saying to me, you need to make them all into your mirror images back then, or your entire system is actually false.

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And that's the point. Having the integrity to say, they're frustrating. An honest Roman Catholic and an honest

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Reformed person should say that. It's frustrating. It's frustrating because there's moments of great glory and moments of great big face plants.