/lit/ - Literature

>>18823492
Sure. The most obvious epistemological intuition after accepting part 5) was to explore what the earliest Christians believed. We know what the evangelists recorded in the Gospels, we have the epistles of John, Peter, and James, and we know what St. Paul thought (which we know was also shared with the rest of the early church leadership, as when St. Peter calls Paul's letters "scripture" in his second epistle). From here, you are left with the obvious fact that there was an early church with presbyters and bishops, which had a hierarchical structure based upon the apostles, who they appointed, and their successors. Looking into the period after this (the ante-Nicene fathers, specifically the Apostolic Fathers), clearly reinforces this model of church hierarchy, such as in Clement of Rome's exhortation regarding the unlawfully deposed bishops.

The question, then, is, which ancient and apostolic church is the continuation of the one created in Matthew 16:18? The Protestants themselves admit they are not the ancient apostolic church, so that narrows down the choices by ~30,000+ denominations. The remaining live options are Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodoxy, the Church of the East and the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ethiopian Orthodox, and some other churches which the historical community would deem apostolic in origin.

After exploring the differences between these, it becomes clear that the deciding factor is whether one is in communion with the bishop of Rome as the marker of orthodoxy, as is clearly outlined by St. Irenaeus and St. Cyprian of Carthage (among many others). The issues like the Filioque come secondary to the fact that there is a clear and demonstrable belief in the necessity of communion with the bishop of Rome to be in the church of Christ, which is found extremely early, and by extremely authoritative fathers (like St. Irenaeus, who was only one person removed from St. John the Evangelist, and thus an extremely important witness to the apostolic Johannine tradition). I could probably elaborate on this point for hours, but in the end, it comes down to either believing that one of the other of the Russian or Greek national churches, which are in schism with one another, is the one true church of Christ, despite neither being in communion with the bishop of Rome.

The only logical choice was Catholicism, or a church in communion with the Catholic church. There are many other reasons why I came to this conclusion (eg. lack of ability for EO "church" to convene a council in the absence of an emperor or Pope, lack of agreement on critical teachings like divorce and remarriage and contraceptives, etc.), but this is quite a long post already.

Happy to elaborate on any of these points.