Monday, March 08, 2004
I've been reading "The Essential Catholic Catechism" every night. It's an excellent book, and points to the first major difference I've found between the Methodist and the Catholic: When I studied to join the Methodist Church, we talked about the Bible and that's just about it. Catholics study the Bible AND "The Tradition" of the church. Catholics don't think that the Bible is the be-all and end-all of Faith. Jesus lived with and taught the apostles for three years and came back after death to teach them some more... much more teaching than can be fit into the Bible. So, the Bible is important, to say the least, but so is Tradition. Both the Bible and the Tradition are God's revealed Word. So where Protestants often pick at the Bible and make it mean what they want, the Catholic must take the Bible passage in conjuction with the living history of the Christian church as a whole... it's not so easy to twist the Word of God for modern causes in the Catholic Church.
