ZackInTheBox

Ron, I grew up militantly atheistic. I had a radical conversion to Christ in college. I read the (Protestant) bible cover to cover, multiple times. I was baptized in my early 20s in a Southern Baptist church. I did Bible studies, was discipled, mentored, studied, etc. etc. I kept reading the Bible. I also began to ask: who were the people who discerned which books God had inspired, and thus belonged in the Bible? I would encourage you to ask yourself that question. Do not accept pat answers. With sola scriptura, the bible ALONE is the sole infallible rule of faith. Where then, does an infallible table of contents come from? The answer is, it doesn't. There's no such thing in the Protestant world, hence Sproul's awful "fallible collection of infallible books." The idea that Ron in the 21st century has a better shot at interpreting the Bible than does St. Clement, contemporary and friend of the Apostles, in the first century, is ludicrous. I would trust St. Clement, and St. Ignatius, and St. Irenaeus, over what you think any time. If you are that familiar with St. Irenaeus, then I don't need to quote to you what he wrote about the successors of the Apostles and the bishop of Rome. Succession and Tradition are two sides of the same coin. St. Irenaeus asserted that the true Church is defined by a visible, historical lineage of bishops who directly succeeded the Apostles, contrasting this with Gnostic claims of secret, spiritual knowledge. The sad thing is, a Protestant can just argue forever that their interpretation of the Bible is the right one. That's what all Protestants have done, and do, for the past 500 years. It is simply NOT the way that God designed His Church, not the way that He designed truth to be preserved and transmitted. Your best course of action is to, in humility, study the claims of the Catholic Church, pray for wisdom, pray that your biases are revealed, and then become Catholic.