True and I agree with you on that one. But, I am saying that as long as freedoms are allowed for people to create a new church that does not adhere to Catholic dogma, then there will always be more churches claiming to be entitled as the right one. For example: Mormonism being developed in United States and being protect and allowed to grow into the religion as of today (eventhough they were persecuted many times by other established christians, but still manage to survive by finding lands in the Virgin West territory that soon became Utah as one of the many places of their settlement).
I am not talking about a religion's right to exist, I am talking about what to call it. I think you missed the point there; it is not a matter of whether a church is true, or whether it is the only true church, but whether the term "Christian" can be applied to it.
Not a Catholic by the way. Just being realistic.
I honestly don't find it "realistic" to say that only Catholics can be considered Christian; doing so renders the word "Christian" essentially meaningless.
Jesus claim that Peter should build the first Church. So, therefore, he is the infallible leader and the beginning of the first Church of the Christian movement.
Except it is not explicit what he meant. Most Catholics take it to mean that he meant a specific religion (and that the religion he meant was Catholicism), most other Christians take it to mean all Chrsitendom in general. Heck, he could have been talking about a building for all we can say for certain.
(An aside: why, if he was presumably speaking Aramaic, would he use a figure of speech that only makes sense in Greek? But I digress.)
Tell me, who in the beginning scribed those historical records when Christianity became triumphant as the end-all and for-all of the people of the Roman Empire? Answer: Mainly Catholics (with some exception to the rare few who were pagans and other antiquadated Christian sects that died out).
Well, if you define "Christian" to mean "Catholic", you can then say that all early Christians were in fact Catholics. But then you get into a little circular reasoning. The Catholic Church may have been the first to claim historical continuity with early Christianity; that doesn't prove their claim.
(Also, Eastern Orthodoxy makes pretty much the same claims as Catholicism, and has about the same arguments to back them up. They usually get ignored in Western discussion. So are they Christian?)
Let me ask you a question: Inorder to restore something from its so-called original state, do you have to reform in order to achieve that goal? If you want to resort by saying that restore is not changing nor fixing, then by God, you are really confusing yourself of what "reform" really means.
Restoration, in this case, means ignoring everything that has happened since it got off track and restarting it from that point.
Sounds like reforming to the degree of erasing somethings, preserving other things, and creating new ones in replacing the things that was garbaged out.
Reform Reform Reform Reform. Should be your word of the day.
Well, we don't really see ourselves as fixing Christian doctrine and practice as it now exists; we base it on revelation, and don't take what already exists in maninstream Christianity as a starting point.
(Now, religious scholars may disagree, but I am talking about how we see ourselves, not how outsiders see us.)
Only if you limit yourself of describing the evolution of monotheistic religions as being something analogous to a tree.
It's a figure of speech.
At any rate, I cannot understand a word of what you are saying and really feel no need to explain why I consider myself a Christian to someone who is using such an . . . unusual definition in the first place.
In fact, from now on I suggest that every time you want to use the word "Christian", you just say "Catholic" instead. It will make things more clear.
