While I believe most Protestants are well-meaning and doing their best to seek God, the approach as a whole is logically unjustifiable. For example, Protestants will often derive their theology from the Bible and/or use their personal interpretation of specific Bible verses in order to attack various aspects of the Church. I agree that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God and that no Church Tradition should ever contradict it. The problem for a Protestant is that every time you refer to the Bible, or use the name of a specific Gospel account such as "John" or "Mark," you are appealing to the Tradition and authority of the Church, without which you wouldn't have a Bible (or know who wrote most of the New Testament in the first place). This is easy to demonstrate simply by studying the development of the canon of Scripture, specifically over the first 350 years or so of Christianity. The Bible did not drop out of the sky, the way some Muslims act like the Koran did, as one coherent unit with no debate as to what was canon or what was not. There wasn't even the idea of a "Biblical canon" until the mid-second century, in response to the heretic Marcion creating his own version of "Scripture."No they are not. Reformed Presbyterianism (not mainline Presbyterianism) is by far the most consistent theology in Christendom. I've read many of the original sources, studied a fair amount of church history, and am strongly settled in the theology of the Reformation and it is rare that I can find RC or EO who address the issues fairly. I probably will not read a book solely for this purpose but would be willing to hear some of the core arguments.
The "Scripture alone" approach thus retroactively makes un-saved every single person who lived before there was a canon of Scripture, including all of the Apostles and their immediate disciples and students. The other major problem with the "Scripture alone" approach is that the Bible refutes it internally, describing the Church as "the pillar and ground of truth" in 1 Timothy 3:15 and giving equal authority to both written and oral teachings in 2 Thessalonians 2:15. There were 20 years of Church before the first letter of the New Testament was even written - and nearly 70 years of Church before its final book was written - so clearly appealing to "Scripture alone" is not something the Apostles were doing or teaching. It would be nonsensical to teach that the "only source of Truth" was something that didn't exist yet. Instead they preached Christ from the Old Testament, which did exist, to prove He was the prophesied Messiah. You can find some of their sermons recorded in "Demonstration Of The Apostolic Preaching" by St. Irenaeus. They also taught the precise ways of worshipping, fasting, and how to conduct Holy Baptism which you can find in both the "Didache" and in terms of how services work, in the First Apology of St. Justin Martyr. Lastly, you can find the Apostolic teaching on ecclesiology and the Holy Eucharist in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, such as St. Ignatius of Antioch, whose priests and teachers were the Apostles themselves.
Ultimately, as I indicated in the first paragraph, Protestants cannot justify their belief that the Bible is authoritative without either using circular reasoning (ie, "the Word of God is authoritative because it is the Word of God") or appealing to interior personal experience (ie, "I just know it is" somehow). 99% of Protestants, if not more, have never even asked themselves these sorts of questions - and many of them cannot even understand what it means to "justify their presupposition that the Bible is authoritative." About half the time I ask, I get a response to something else because the person I asked cannot comprehend the chain of thought.
Churches with Apostolic Succession can easily justify our presupposition in the Bible's authority: "I believe the Bible is authoritative because the Church that Christ planted declared it so." No need for logical fallacies or complicated word games. Thus you can see that, from several different angles, Protestantism as a system is incoherent and unjustifiable regardless of the genuine seeking of its adherents - whom I am not judging, as it is not my place to do so - and the fullness of the Truth does not reside in groups that have only parts of it. It resides fully in one place and one place only: the Church that Jesus built and which produced, compiled, and canonized the Bible in the first place.
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