>>665435
I have never read anything that is less true.
Calvinism is literally all about God's will being sovereign above man's will. It is very explicit about no rules ever being able to save you, but that you need a personal relationship with Christ.
What you wrote applies to every other Christian denomination more than it does to Calvinism. Arminians/ Catholics/ Orthodox/ etc. believe you only have to follow a specific set of rules and God has to save you, but if you decide not to obey, well there is nothing God can do about that. They set man's will to obey God over God's will to save a man, and they set sacramentalism over seeking Christ.
>>665463
That's just a silly statement to make. You know that Catholics themselves are divided on doctrines as much as Protestant are. You have high ranking church officials in Europe advocate for the female priesthood, communion for Protestants, re-marriage, etc. Oh, and you have a pope that may or may not believe that hell exists.
To claim that the Catholic church somehow provides a united set of believes that everybody can hold to is just not true.
>>665480
>2
First of all, you could just as well find very well-known Christians that held non-Catholic believes at that time. Don't forget that the last Marian dogma was defined in the 1950s.
Secondly, there were people defending a fairly reformed view of scripture much longer than Augustine, see for example a man named Gottschalk in the 9th century who defended double predestination & God's sovereignty, and of course latter the Waldensians, John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, etc. were all opposed to Rome.
Thirdly, it's kind of difficult to defend your viewpoint if you know from previous examples that you most likely will go to jail, be tortured and die. The only way we even know anything the Waldensians believed comes from the records of the inquisition.
Lastly, one could just as well ask how you can believe that God would let his church full in such disrepair as the medieval Catholic church. Look at John XII, Benedict IX or Alexander VI. Do you really believe God would allow the "successor of Peter" to commit murder or have sex with a married woman? What about church offices being sold to the highest bidder, people that don't read Latin holding the mass, selling indulgences, etc.?Have at that point the gate's of hell not prevailed against it?
>4
Yes, I trust a man with the Holy Spirit reading the scriptures to discern the truth over the pope determining it with almost no recourse. Sola Scriptura > Sola Ecclesia
If the church can infallibly interpret scripture and infallibly say what is & is not tradition and what those traditions say, really the only thing determining any doctrine is the Catholic church.
So now you get to decide, do you trust an earthly authority that has held different believes in the past from what it does now, or do you believe the inerrant word of God? Keep in mind that Christ all throughout the gospel held people accountable for what was written in scripture and admonished them for adding the traditions of men to it.
Next, it is important to understand that no Protestant (except for Hyper-Calvinists which basically don't exist) believes that correct doctrine will save you. What saves you is God, not knowing the right creeds & confessions. On top of that, most prefer a local church government over a centralized authority hundreds of miles away. If the church I attend now were to allow female priests I could leave and go to a different church, if the Catholic church starts to allow female priests or changes other doctrines important to you, you either go sedevacantist or change your believes.
>5
Seems weird to hear a Catholic say that God's grace is sufficient. So, I don't need all the sacraments? This thing about "how you come about grace" makes little sense, because if you have to do something to receive grace, it is no longer grace.
To equate ἐκκλησία with your modern notion of what the English word "church" describes, seems like a pretty silly thing to do.
The last paragraph once again goes into the same nonsense about tradition (selected by the church, defined by the church) but I always laugh when Catholics try to lever apostolic succession. Apparently that successor to the apostles can be an unrepentant criminal (and therefore somebody not in a state of grace), can be anathematized by later Councils (see Honorius) and at one point there can be as many as 3 different successors to Peter one of which gets retroactively called the true Pope & the other Anti-pope were of course never popes to begin with (kind of like the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven).