05 Mar '16 15:45>
Originally posted by divegeesterIt is a peculiarly Protestant way of looking at Christianity, to take the Bible as the primary source whereby the will of God is made known to man.
No, I'm one of those people who, when offered a Cardinal's opinion when I asked for a scripture to back up a given statement, tends to question the claim.
But if you question the words of Bishops, (Orthodox) Patriarchs, and Cardinals, you cannot fall back on the authority of the Bible, because it was a body of such Cardinals who determined which scrolls to canonize and which scrolls to declare apocryphal. The Bible is only as inerrant as the Cardinals.
Furthermore, the Bible is a snapshot, frozen in time (at about 325 AD, Council of Nicea, when the canon was finalized). God's will for man is being continuously revealed through subsequent Ecumenical Councils. This is not merely the opinion of Cardinals--this is the principle known as Apostolic Succession and forms the primary mode through which God's continuing revelation is made known to man. The Bible is secondary to that, as proven by the fact that it was a council of bishops who defined what should go into the Bible in the first place.