Some clients struggle with many-branched threads like this. I was having a hard time tracking parts of it too.

If I were to smoke anything, I'd learn to smoke a pipe, but it's never interested me enough to try.

It depends on what principles you're looking for in the Bible. Science doesn't have much to say about theology.

The Bible is inspired but it was also written by humans in a human way, which means many parts of it likely came out of oral tradition and such like you describe.

My personal suspicion (and not Christian doctrine by any means) is that the flood narrative in Genesis and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah refer to ancient cataclysmic events that can be understood through a naturalistic lens. Other things, like the crossing of the Red Sea and the sun standing still for Joshua and the Israelites are more likely miracles as we would commonly recognize them.

Either way, God is at work throughout.

What do you mean by that?

I've never found the Bible and science to be incompatible. Personally, I find it evident that we live in an old, vast, and complex universe, as we've come to understand through scientific inquiry.

I also hold that God is the ground of all being, that He actively sustains all that is, and that He works in and through created things for the good of His creation.

I find both beliefs to be mutually compatible.

I would say I know God through what I've been taught, through what I've read in Scripture, and through personal experience.

There are also surprisingly few things the Catholic Church binds believers to hold as true. Much of the body of belief is subject to ongoing refinement over time.

I do love some good interfaith dialogue

There is a long history of Scriptural interpretation that deals with the question of how it ought to be taken. An argument like "the creation narrative in Genesis is literally false" doesn't really address what Christians claim about Scripture (depending on which schools of Christian thought you ask, anyway).

I don't think it is true that faith necessarily implies uncertainty. As I understand it, faith is a kind of spiritual perception granted by God. It is a different certainty than that which we obtain by experiencing things through our senses, but not, as far as I know, a belief in the face of inherent doubt.

I think it's also worth pointing out that cults defend their claims of certainty by attacking dissidents. An institution with legitimate truth claims would allow people to freely come to an understanding of that truth, which is indeed what the Church does.

This is probably where the finer points of the argument start to go beyond my present knowledge, but I can tell you how things look from my perspective.

If I have the choice between two churches, one of which claims to have privileged and certain access to the Truth, and another which claims to have access to the Truth, but without the same degree of certainty, I'm going to go with the former, so long as it can provide sufficient evidence to support that claim. The Roman Church's claim to magisterial authority, per se, is not in itself why I remain Catholic (I am a cradle Catholic), but the weight of evidence suggesting it is the church Christ founded makes me trust its claim to authority.

More broadly, I am convicted that there is an absolute truth out there to be known, even if it can be difficult to discover. I know some schools of thought doubt the possibility of epistemic certainty in and of itself, but I've never found those ultimately convincing.

So I hold that there's a truth to be known and that there is evidence pointing to the Catholic Church as the keeper of that truth, and so I trust its Tradition and Magisterium.

Does that get at what you're thinking of regarding epistemic certainty as a premise? Do you think it is not a justified premise?

Salvation, in the Catholic view, comes through God's free gift of faith to the soul, provided we willingly accept that gift and allow God's grace to work within us. That gift of faith is given in Baptism. So all baptized Christians have salvation open to them. The Church that Jesus founded, and its sacraments, is the privileged dispenser of additional grace which helps us along the way to cooperate with that gift of faith and allow God to do His work within us.

I don't want to completely concede the point. I think that without that unbroken line of tradition, you get thrown into a sea of epistemic uncertainty, because then at some point everyone is doing the same thing, reading the book and doing their best to interpret it in a vacuum.

The church that traces itself back to Christ Himself is on a different level, since it receives its Scriptural interpretation straight from the author. We would expect any church making that claim to teach with absolute authority, and we would judge the correctness of other faith communities by how closely they align with that main stem of tradition.

If no one can make that claim and back it up, then yes, I'd say that all Christian churches are fallible. But of course, I do think the Church of Rome correctly claims that unbroken succession.

Check the #christian #catholic and #biblestr tags to start.

I think I agree with most or all of what you said. Scripture is our primary baseline for truth, because that is the store of God's revelation.

Your point about needing resources to correctly interpret Scripture is well-taken. The next challenge that I can see, then, is discerning which faith communities are most likely to have the best interpretations to weigh against in your own faith journey.

The Catholic claim, of course, is that there has been a single unbroken instance of such community founded by Christ and continuing to the present day.

Someone posed the question the other day: "What is your favorite part about being Catholic?"

My first thought, and the one I've stuck with, is Scripture. I'm personally very moved by a powerful story, and the fact that Scripture tells a rich and coherent story across millennia and a diversity of human authors is incredibly compelling to me in my own faith.

Other #catholic and #christian folk out there, what are your favorite parts about being Christian?

nostr:nprofile1qqsf03c2gsmx5ef4c9zmxvlew04gdh7u94afnknp33qvv3c94kvwxgspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3xamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7tpvfkx2tn0wfnszxmhwden5te0vd58y6tnw3cxjmrv9ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5w28rcn I understand that a point of agreement for most (but certainly not all) Christian churches is the doctrines proclaimed by the early ecumenical councils. How do you understand those councils and their teachings in the light of this discussion around the sources of faith?

Catholics do like to have everything nailed down with precise distinctions. That's the main beef our Orthodox brethren have with us.

Catholics specifically (and I think all Christians broadly) love to live in tension between seemingly opposed claims. The Eucharist is really food but it's also really Jesus. The Bible is really written by humans in their own way, but it's also really the product of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We are really supposed to leave behind all they have in this world to follow Christ, but also the material world is really created good and is for our benefit.

It seems Protestants have their own flavor of tension with the nature of the church. Scripture is the source and end of the truths, but where does the canon of Scripture come from, and how can we be sure of its inerrancy?

I definitely missed the other thread.

The big question for me when I try to look at things from a Protestant lens is how you determine what the correct scriptures and correct traditions are. Protestants and Catholics disagree on what books should be included in the Bible. The chain of teaching and tradition on the Protestant side seems rather murky between the 3rd century AD and the Reformation.

Trusting inherited tradition and scripture depends on a long game of historical telephone, and I find that chain is more consistent through history within the Catholic Church.

How do you determine what Scriptural translations, books, and doctrines are trustworthy amid a confusion of historical and contemporary claims?