(September 26, 2015 at 7:00 am)pocaracas Wrote:(September 25, 2015 at 5:04 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Essentially the same that we see today and for this reason: Jesus founded an infallible Church which existed long BEFORE the NT was written or formally canonized. So, even without it, the Oral Tradition of the Church would be sufficient to pass along the core message just as it was long before the invention of the printing press.
However, if you are asking whether there are any doctrines that would be missing as a result of removing specific books from the Bible, again, I say that because the writings of the NT were a reflection of what the Church was preaching and teaching orally (ie, baptism of infants, confession of sins to a priest, the real presence in the Eucharist, etc.), everything that we have today was present in the Early Church before inscripturation.
IOW, the NT authors captured on paper what the Church was already preaching; they did not add to what the Church already knew.
yeah... but there were several alleged bishops/priests preaching a slightly different message, on several places.
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how can we tell that the true teachings of Jesus are the ones preached by the catholic church?
The notion of the trinity comes well after the fact - would this view still be held, if the roman christians hadn't accepted Paul's teachings?
And yes, I know I'm mixing a bunch of stuff into one bag, but, like you know so well, it's a broad subject.
Simple enough, poca.
The bishops who disagreed with one another held councils to consider these matters. After much discussion and debate, some ideas were identified as orthodox and others were judged heretical.
It isn't like Rubio, Cruz, Trump and Bush all espousing slightly different variations of a "conservative" message that you can pick and choose from. In the case of theology, some things are right and some things are wrong. Others are uncertain and left as open questions.
When Arius put forth his ideas, Athanasius stood against him. It took awhile, but Athanasius' views ultimately carried the day.
