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I know Catholics like to think that, but is it really true? The Nag Hammadi material seems to show that Christianity, or to prevent circular arguments let's call it Jesus-worship, covered a wide array of fairly divergent beliefs even before the end of the first century AD. Gnosticism, Catharism, Eastern Orthodoxy -- multidenominationalism is hardly a new thing.
And depending what's meant by "the world prevailing over the Church", surely the whole point of the Reformation was that worldliness (selling of indulgences, Borgia popes, etc) had prevailed over the Church at least enough to distort Christ's intentions, insofar as those intentions could be guessed from the available material?
Good points. Clearly there is a lot of discussion to be had in this area, and unfortunately I'm not very well versed in the history of the Catholic church. I do know that the Catholic church is not doing a lot of the things that the Protestants were against, and while it still regards itself as the one true Christian Church (of course), I do believe it is more recognizing of Protestants now than it was initially.
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A lot of Protestants, at least as Protestantism is practised in the UK, hold that Biblical support for doctrinal matters is necessary but not sufficient proof: in other words, that while God is divine and Christ was divine, the Bible is a human enterprise and thus potentially flawed,
Yes, there are multiple beliefs about how the bible is "inspired". But then a lot of this also comes down to how conservative or liberal a protestant church is. There are many churches today that hardly regard the bible at all. In Evangelicle churches the bible is genreally regarded as infallible, but the context elements such as the culture of the time, the author, etc. must be taken into account to truly understand it properly.
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.