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Originally Posted by Hezzer  Origins are a big deal to me. I don't want rules and doctrines of men. I want someone to flip open the Bible and point me to some scriptures that show me why it is so. Not everything is addressed in in the Bible in black and white, but the principles therein help guide us to the right conclusions.
The apostle Paul, converted by Christ himself, showed balance and restraint in his presentation of celibacy and marriage. But he never made it a matter of faithfulness or unfaithfulness or any kind of requirement. It is, rather, a question of free choice.
Those man-made rules crept in much later, as predicted by him actually . . . 1 Timothy 4:1-3: 1 However, the inspired utterance says definitely that in later periods of time some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to misleading inspired utterances and teachings of demons, 2 by the hypocrisy of men who speak lies, marked in their conscience as with a branding iron; 3 forbidding to marry . . .
Jesus never admonished his apostles, disciples, etc. in a way to discourage them from marrying, nor did he set down any such guidelines. If remaining unmarried were what he wanted for overseers in the congregations, it would be down in writing - if not said by him then said by his apostles. Standards for overseers are found in the Bible, and that "rule" is not among them. (1 Timothy 3:2).
If the Catholic church wishes to make such rules, it is entirely their perogative, just like the FLDS promote the idea of polygamy. Neither is founded in the Bible, though. |
Hm. Well, as you said, there are many things that are not found in the Bible that Christians hold to be true. The Trinity, for one. The Bible itself isn't mentioned. The Apostles surely didn't know that some of the letters that they wrote would survive, in whole or in part...and that there would be those who said that--much less that those letters would end up being assembled into one book....and that then there would be those who said that if something wasn't mentioned in the Bible, it obviously wasn't meant to be...
As far as people being forced to not marry, I believe that your interpretation of that is incorrect. First of all, that verse is not referring to SOME people who FREELY choose not to marry, but instead, to EVERYONE, without regard to their feelings on the matter--that there would come a time when people--ALL PEOPLE--would not be allowed to marry. A man who believes he has a vocation to the priesthood, must be willing to sacrifice the possibility of marriage. Yes, it is a sacrifice. And actually, a man who doesn't feel like he would make a good husband or father, is generally discouraged from the priesthood. Sacrifice is a part and parcel of both married and celibate lives...
As far as Jesus not laying down laws regarding who could do what in the Church, well, frankly, we don't have everything Jesus said, written down in the Bible. We have the fragments of written material that lasted until those remnants were collected, and compiled, into what we call the Bible. The letters in the New Testament, for instance, are not all in one piece. Some parts, of the same books, are from different letters. A page here, a snippet there--sometimes, that was all that was left. And, again, the apostles used those letters (and other writings that later became known as the New Testament) to deal with individual issues in the congregations...not to give them each and every blow-by-blow detail of Christianity set in place. MUCH of the teaching in those early centuries was oral...as it was in EVERY facet of life then--most people couldn't read, so a book wasn't going to do a lot of good. Besides, why write down what was common knowledge?
I suspect you've never read what the Church fathers had to say on some of these subject. The Church fathers being those who were disciples of, and successors to the apostles themselves. Read up on those. They make alot of things clearer as to what the apostles themselves taught, in those earliest years of the Church.
Rachel