[This is to bring an end to the discussion had here, where the wordcount is too limited]
I believe that God wants His faithful to know what is true, which of His doctrines are essential to accept. Being essential, He also wants all of His faithful to be united in their adherence to these doctrines. I therefore believe that He has provided some way/mechanism to make this teaching clear and to keep it consistent (because truth must be consistent).
a) Protestantism, writ large, as it stands now has no such mechanism. It has no consistent, reliable way of determining which doctrines are essential to the Christian faith. Protestants can make a general appeal to following their heart, reading the Bible, looking at the early church, or interpreting history, but even these appeals lead to further disagreement. As a result, the various Protestant denominations and disagree about everything, including what is essential; whether Jesus is divine, to whether you can lose salvation, to whether contraception is wrong… and so on.
Therefore, according to this position, the church is something in disarray, left without any mechanism to reliably ensure that it has consistent doctrines for people to follow. As a result, the Protestant “church” has neither consistent teaching nor moral practice.
b) Catholicism doesn’t have its problem. According to this model, God did indeed give His Church such a mechanism to ensure that there is a consistent body of teaching about the body of doctrines, including what is essential to faith, and what is or is not sin.
Yes, humans are fallible, which means that individuals in the Church can err in their practise of religion, but God nonetheless provides a stable pillar to ensure that His follows profess one faith with that consistency which is the mark of truth. That pillar is the magisterium of the Church which, despite human fallibility, has remained consistent in its teaching on faith and morals for over 2000 years. In this time, if any Christian was ever unsure about what the Christian faith was or what morality is, they could always appeal to this magisterium and get an objective answer.
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