Non-Catholic Christians,

The Protestant Church of Christ holds in its collective mind a conviction that the Catholic Church either intentionally violates Scripture or is oblivious to it. She does not and is not. Any Catholic dogmatic—not individualistic—violation your group perceives is rooted in its own poor understanding of the Scriptures and Christianity. So, as you read this chapter, please continue to ask yourself the kind of question I have raised several times throughout this book: Why do you believe your interpretation of the Bible is more credible than the Catholic Church’s interpretation of the Bible?  

Obviously, the Catholic Church of Christ regards the Scriptures as inspired—as God’s written word—or else there would be no New Testament Scriptures from which you could argue. The Bible’s self-evident holy status is only perceived as self-evident because the Catholic Church has, for centuries, literally and figuratively, held it on high, loved its every letter, and presented it as the word of God. The Protestant Church of Christ has accepted her product while pretending the New Testament was created and declared as Scripture by some Catholic-less force it has never been able to explain.

Therefore, there is little to defend, because only an antagonist could insist the Catholic Church of Christ is not guided, even slightly, by the Scriptures; and I hope you, my reader, can concede this fact. If she did not love them, and if she were not guided by them, they—the books of the New Testament—would not exist. She had in her power to abort them, to snuff them at their birth, or not to have written them at all! But she guarded them for the world. Like the Living Word, the Written Word has a physical mother.

 I will direct the focus of this chapter on the Rule of Faith: the manner in which both your group and the Catholic Church approach religion. I will illustrate how your Rule of Faith presupposes (relies on) the Catholic paradigm, and how your newer paradigm and accompanying Rule cannot determine the inspiration of the Christian canon (the Bible’s Table of Contents). I will then close this chapter by illustrating how your group’s best and most-often used proof-texts and arguments for sola Scriptura, when analyzed, are not supports for any “Bible-only” model, but are indeed proofs for the Catholic Church of Christ’s model, which accepts both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition as edges of the single word of God.