The Christian Vanguard

Here is my Amazon review for Surprised by Truth.

I've begun to write book reviews on Amazon. Here is my first one ! For Rome Sweet Home by Scott and Kimberly Hahn.

On April the 17th, Adrian Urias of the Christian Vanguard attended the Tilden Study Center, an intellectual and cultural stronghold for Catholic youth! It was a most wonderful experience and look forward to future meetings!

So I work at Costco. We have brief meetings together before we go out to the floor, and we were getting talked about us not being on top of things and the supervisors see us doing nothing. This one guy complains and says something like, "Well, I'm always friendly with the customers, but for like ten minutes, I'll slow down, and that's when the supervisors see me. Why didn't they see me then?" Our lead manager said that was irrelevant and that we always had a job to do, basically shutting him down. I thought of this story. A man is in court before the judge for running a red light. Would it make sense for the man to say to the judge, "I may have run the red light this once, but what about all the other times I ran green lights and stopped at red lights? I've been doing that for years! Why don't you focus on that instead?" No, it would not. That's what he's supposed to do anyways. So if it's not a valid excuse in court, it's n...

    There is no single person alive who taught me more about being a Christian than Ariana. This was, on her part, unintended. What I mean is, I have been in so many situations with Ariana where I was tempted to act one way, usually in my own selfish and cruel interest, but chose to do the Christian thing instead. There were many times where I also chose not to reflect Christ in my character, but I matured past that. Paradoxically, leaving her behind thus ending the friendship was perhaps the most Christ-like move in my life so far. To understand, maybe some background would be beneficial.     If you’re part of the ICOC, you’ll know what it means when I say that Ariana was my interest, and you’ll understand how serious it was when I tell you she was my first interest, catching my eye maybe two or three months into being a member of the ICOC and she stayed that way for four years. Basically, all my time in the ICOC, and then some. But for those not in the I...

I began to wrap up the intellectual fight. When I realized that what I had learned must turn into actions, I asked one of the shepherds of my Church to sit down with me. He wanted to know what our talk was going to be about, and I told him it was going to be about authority. 

After my exchange on Facebook, and private talks with other friends, I came to reject Sola Scriptura. I sent the following email to Sirico. This covers my more emotional side to the story. Rev. Sirico, Thank you very much for coming to Southern California on the 28th to speak. It is always a treat to hear you speak and it was really cool to finally meet you! Hopefully I can experience similar events again! During one of the breaks, we had a talk about Catholicism. I am a former Catholic (and former Marxist Atheist) and you presented to me an argument, what I perceived to be, contra sola scriptura. I've given it some thought and am keeping you updated, as you requested.

I had written this on my Facebook May 1st, 2012. Names have been changed. Most of what follows is a discussion on Sola Scriptura. Since then, two of my friends, Devin and Brian, do not hold to Sola Scriptura, but now hold a similar position I adopted soon after I had this conversation. More on that in a later post. Adrian: ...This same priest presented me with this challenge, and frankly, I was stumped. He said something like, "The church did not come from the Bible. The Bible came from the church. The Church canonized the Bible. This implies the power of the church." Thoughts? This is obviously an attack of Sola Scriptura.