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Bouvet – Quote:I think it is almost inconceivable that there isn’t a line of hands on heads in the current Catholic Church back to the original apostles.
Am I misunderstanding this comment? The Romans killed Peter and only several hundred years later did they dig him up (or someone buried in that mass grave) and rebury him beneath their new gleaming Christian city.
hawkgrrrl wrote:Bouvet –
Quote:I think it is almost inconceivable that there isn’t a line of hands on heads in the current Catholic Church back to the original apostles.
Am I misunderstanding this comment? The Romans killed Peter and only several hundred years later did they dig him up (or someone buried in that mass grave) and rebury him beneath their new gleaming Christian city.
I think it highly unlikely that every priesthood holder in the Church during Christ’s time was killed before passing the priesthood on to others who passed it on to others and so forth to the present day, most likely in the Catholic or Orthodox Churches or both.
Just as John the Baptist’s father Zachariah was a good man held the proper priesthood, but the Jewish faith in sum had become corrupt, so today some other threads of Christianity probably have the right keys and many good men hold them, but the tradition and belief has become corrupted.
I don’t understand why the total loss of keys matters to us (as it seems to greatly), because we have breakoffs from out Church who clearly have a legitimate priesthood line of authority but whose authority we don’t recognize.
Bouvet – I think you raise a very interesting point that bears further discussion. I’m not sure how to untangle the inability of the early church members to understand the basic theology Christ taught or to maintain an accurate depiction of it in their teachings and their link to God through priesthood keys. Within a very short time, the branches of the early Christian church were so divided that many didn’t even believe in the Resurrection. Some didn’t believe that Christ was the Son of God. These aren’t minor theological differences. Many had infused their own pagan or Hellenistic beliefs into the teachings of the church, and due to their geographical isolation, there was essentially no cohesion from branch to branch in a very short time. The Nicean council, which took place hundreds of years after Christ is the first major effort to get it straight what Christianity actually was, and their choices of what stayed in and what was dropped were not without bias and conflict.
Are priesthood keys all equal so long as there is a line of authority? I’m more in the camp that individual apostasy (not sin per se) leads to loss of priesthood keys, including in the case of Warren Jeffs and his ilk. I don’t generally think of priesthood keys when I think of the Great Apostasy, although I know some do.
Bouvet wrote:I don’t understand why the total loss of keys matters to us (as it seems to greatly), because we have breakoffs from out Church who clearly have a legitimate priesthood line of authority but whose authority we don’t recognize.
Nice twist. That’s an idea to chew on a bit. How do we say the Catholic Church lost keys lacking a physical transmission, and then say the mormon splinter groups lack keys. They can trace their line back to the same authorities as the mainstream LDS Church. In fact, most splinter (fundamentalist) mormon groups claim a more “authentic” and un-altered theology.
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