Imnotspecial

Ask any of them and they all tell that they are the one - literally and/or according to the spirit.

EthnAlln

Ah, that takes me back to 1966, when I lived in Nashville, Tennessee. Every Sunday morning, the pastor of the Millersville Church of Christ had an hour on the air to spread his Campbellite doctrines. He was followed by Elder P.D. Harden of the Assembly of God, who kept offering to go over to Millersville and straighten out those poor misled CofC'ers, who were baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, whereas, Elder Harden knew that the name of the trinity was Jesus, as was stated in Acts. The discussion got quite heated. I was by then an atheist, as I am today, so I listened for the same reason people look at train wrecks.

The previous posts in this thread show that the question is unanswerable, since people don't agree on the routes by which God has revealed the kind of Church he wants. Catholics believe in Apostolic Succession and that little verse at the end of Mark's Gospel, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." According to my catechism, that meant "success in your journey," and to teach error on such an important matter would not be success. Therefore, Jesus was assuring them that the Church could not err in matters of faith. (The twists and turns of theological reasoning remain a marvel to behold. They fascinate me still.)

Even when you define "closest" to mean most in line with the Bible, you are effectively doing a linear regression on points that lie on a circle. You can get a "best fit", but the line is never going to be a good fit. On the one hand, you get Mark 16:16, telling you that a necessary condition for being saved is to believe and a sufficient condition is to believe and be baptized. On the other hand, you get Matthew 25:31--46 telling you that the necessary and sufficient condition for admission to heaven is to have practiced charity toward other people. Those positions aren't reconcilable. Since I don't believe there is any heaven to go to, it's all irrelevant to me personally, but I wish, if people are going to believe something irrational, they'd believe the Matthew version instead of the one in Mark.

Splarnst

As pointed out earlier, the Catholic Church doesn't claim to be constrained by one particular text. As a Catholic, the only reason I had to accept the authority of the Bible was the Church. It doesn't make sense to accept the inspiration of the text which wasn't even compiled until long after Jesus' death whereas the Church was (supposedly) founded during Jesus' lifetime. It would be like accepting a political party platform as authoritative and then questioning the party's authority by its own writings.

I have always and still do view asking whether a church was based on the Bible as putting the cart before the horse.

seebs

This is a very hard question to answer. By "reinterpretation", do you mean "interpretation contrary to what the people immediately before them thought it meant" or "interpretation contrary to what the authors meant" or something else? How do you determine what it is that the Bible "says" to determine whether someone is closely aligned with it?

To the best of my knowledge, nearly all Christian groups are very closely aligned with what they sincerely believe the Bible says. Obviously, they disagree about this...

steamer

I'm pretty sure its Fred Phelp's god hates fags group that most closely follow the words of the bible. I'm pretty sure that Jesus would have been one of them.

Dryhad

They closely follow the words of a single passage, which is in Exodus. I'm sure Jesus, friend of prostitutes and absolver of sins, would have been ostracised three ways to sunday by them.

steamer

Hehe, that is an amusing thought.

Wolfie

I think that's a tad hard on Jesus. He was the original hippy - he loved everyone, he trod the path of peace and he forgave everyone their sins.

*sigh*

Doomed from the outset, wasn't he.

River

ANS:


ESSENE NAZARENE

ELECTROGOD

Any one which does not deny that "god" was an immoral, murderous, lying megalomanic who approved of slavery, rape, genocide, evil and other unloving sorts of things.