Posted on 08/19/2017 9:38:22 PM PDT by 11th_VA
Muslims do not speak publicly against it and that is the problem.
Also the Pew polls show strong support for Sharia, definitely higher in the Islamic nations with least western influence.
Catholics have no need for a crazed possessed 16th Century German monk.
Catholics have no need for a crazed possessed 16th Century German monk.
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Now THIS I don’t know is against the rules or not, but this kind of language and the profanity from the poster all over this thread really is quite distressing.
He didn’t have delusion ba of the demonic? By his very own admissions he did. So yes I agree very distressing.
He didn’t have delusion ba of the demonic? By his very own admissions he did. So yes I agree very distressing.
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My my, what an angry reply from the man who spewed profanity at me when I dared to deliver him a mild challenge.
You will forgive me if derisive laughter is my only response to the tantrum-throwing you are doing on this thread.
Also, cite your sources, in context.
I would be a real jerk if I didn’t respond to your very good and informative post.
Was referring to the modern state of the world and how Luther started a long slide into the Godlessness that exists today.
When there is no central authority and everyone can set up shop for themselves, there is anarchy and eventually extinction.
What Luther started might have been an understandable reaction to abuses at the time, what he has wrought has a very real and negative impact on our current condition.
Europe is overrun and the Americas are under siege from the mozulm horde, the Church founded by Jesus has been weakened and has never recovered from the initial assault.
He was a married RC priest?
Along came Barack Hussein Obama who took up the task of Islamic counter reformation in America. He is even more evil than Usama bin Laden and his spawns, including ISIS.
Ya'll just stick with the crazy popes ya'll have.
But which as broadbrush is contrary to history and wrongly faults the Reformation, for the real problem was not dissent, nor is the solution medieval Rome, but Scripture not being supreme and leadership - and central leadership should be a goal, despite how Rome has ruined that concept - that is contrary to that of the NT church, or at least falls far from it.
The reality is that central authority can either be good or do much evil, and the latter is the case when that central authority presumes autocratic supreme power, even in which Scripture is only what the power says it is and means, which is what developed in Catholicism, and which thus required dissent based upon the only transcendent wholly inspired substantive body of Divine Revelation.
Likewise in Judaism, those who actually were in the seat of Moses presumed dissent from them could not be valid, rejecting an itinerant preacher in the wilderness, and thus the Christ, and preachers of Him, who reproved those who sat in Moses' seat, and established their claims Scriptural substantiation in word and in power.
And both men and writings of God were discerned and established as being so long before a church of Rome presumed it was essential for this.
Yet as cults manifest, autocratic supreme leadership can result in the greatest degree of unity, but which manner of unity is not Scriptural and is inferior to that which is the result of Scriptural attestation.
Thus while comprehensive doctrinal unity was ever a goal not realized, the basic unity of the early church was under leadership which looked to Scripture as supreme, and with the veracity of their preaching being subject to testing by Scripture (and not vice versa), and with spiritual Scriptural credentials the likes of what are lacking today. (2Cor. 6:4-10)
Thus although we should have central authority, that itself is not the answer, while under both the Catholic model of supreme authority ("The Church") and the evangelical one you have both unity and disunity.
Fo unless the authority is extremity cultic, what the respective supreme authorities say and mean can be subject to disagreement, as abundantly in seen in Catholicism. Meanwhile, despite denominational divisions, those who most strong hold to the most fundamental distinctive of the Reformation, that of the authority of Scripture as literally being the word of God, yet testify to being more unified in basic truths than those Rome counts and treats as members in life and in death. Thus for a long time such have been treated as enemies by both liberals and Catholics.
In addition, the very founding of America and its unity was much a result of the basic unity. For That believers of the Bible can live in overall harmony is testified to in the early days of the American experiment the famous French Catholic political thinker and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) best known for his two volume, "Democracy in America") attested,
Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. <
The sects that exist in the United States are innumerable. They all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man. Each sect adores the Deity in its own peculiar manner, but all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God...Moreover, all the sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same...
n the United States the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth...
The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live... Thus religious zeal is perpetually warmed in the United States by the fires of patriotism. These men do not act exclusively from a consideration of a future life; eternity is only one motive of their devotion to the cause. If you converse with these missionaries of Christian civilization, you will be surprised to hear them speak so often of the goods of this world, and to meet a politician where you expected to find a priest. (Democracy in America, [New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1851), pp. 331, 332, 335, 336-7, 337; http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/religion/ch1_17.htm)
And Benjamin Franklin also advertised,
And the Divine Being seems to have manifested His approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness by which the different sects treat each other, and by the remarkable prosperity with which He has been please to favor the whole country. (Benjamin Franklin, "Information to those who would Remove to America" In Franklin, Benjamin. The Bagatelles from Passy. Ed. Lopez, Claude A. New York: Eakins Press. 1967; http://mith.umd.edu//eada/html/display.php?docs=franklin_bagatelle4.xml. Also, John Gould Curtis, American history told by contemporaries .... Volume 3, p. 26)
Thus unity under autocratic supreme leadership is not Scriptural and is a problem, and under such when leadership goes South (or is absent) then so do those who are dependent on it (as today and see below). And such autocratic supreme leadership of men requires dissent based upon Scripture as supreme, and under which profound efficacious unity can be realized, despite tribal denominational divisions.
However, a low view and lack of reverence of Scripture will result in anarchy and then dictatorial autocratic supreme leadership, which what the devil is working towards today in the post-Christian USA.
Thus what is needed is holding Scripture as supreme and leadership which reflect that, both of which is lacking today, thus believers must pray and preach better.
Europe is overrun and the Americas are under siege from the mozulm horde, the Church founded by Jesus has been weakened and has never recovered from the initial assault.
Rome saw worse problems before the Reformation:
• Cardinal Bellarmine:
"Some years before the rise of the Lutheran and Calvinistic heresy, according to the testimony of those who were then alive, there was almost an entire abandonment of equity in ecclesiastical judgments; in morals, no discipline; in sacred literature, no erudition; in divine things, no reverence; religion was almost extinct. (Concio XXVIII. Opp. Vi. 296- Colon 1617, in “A History of the Articles of Religion,” by Charles Hardwick, Cp. 1, p. 10,)
• The Avignon Papacy (1309-76) relocated the throne to France and was followed by the Western Schism (1378-1417), with three rival popes excommunicating each other and their sees. Referring to the schism of the 14th and 15th centuries, Cardinal Ratzinger observed,
"For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation; she had become questionable in her whole objective form--the true Church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution.
"It is against this background of a profoundly shaken ecclesial consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the Church, ultimately came to experience the Church, not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for the Church of Rome, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” trans. by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989) p.196). http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/06/13/whos-in-charge-here-the-illusions-of-church-infallibility/)
• Joseph Lortz, German Roman Catholic theologian:
“When Luther asserted that the pope of Rome was not the true successor of Saint Peter and that the Church could do without the Papacy, in his mind and in their essence these were new doctrines, but the distinctive element in them was not new and thus they struck a sympathetic resonance in the minds of many. Long before the Reformation itself, the unity of the Christian Church in the West had been severely undermined.” ("The Reformation: A Problem for Today” (Maryland: The Newman Press, 1964), “The Causes of the Reformation," pp. 35-37; .
What Luther and the other Reformers sought to do was actually reforming or returning the organized church back to its original Scriptural basis.
• Jaroslav Pelikan (Lutheran, later Eastern Orhodox), The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1959), also found:
“The reformers were catholic because they were spokesmen for an evangelical tradition in medieval catholicism, what Luther called "the succession of the faithful." The fountainhead of that tradition was Augustine (d. 430). His complex and far-reaching system of thought incorporated the catholic ideal of identity plus universality, and by its emphasis upon sin and grace it became the ancestor of Reformation theology. … All the reformers relied heavily upon Augustine. They pitted his evangelical theology against the authority of later church fathers and scholastics, and they used him to prove that they were not introducing novelties into the church, but defending the true faith of the church.”
“...To prepare books like the Magdeburg Centuries they combed the libraries and came up with a remarkable catalogue of protesting catholics and evangelical catholics, all to lend support to the insistence that the Protestant position was, in the best sense, a catholic position.
Additional support for this insistence comes from the attitude of the reformers toward the creeds and dogmas of the ancient catholic church. The reformers retained and cherished the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the two natures in Christ which had developed in the first five centuries of the church….”
“If we keep in mind how variegated medieval catholicism was, the legitimacy of the reformers' claim to catholicity becomes clear. (Pelikan, pp. 46-47)
"Substantiation for this understanding of the gospel came principally from the Scriptures, but whenever they could, the reformers also quoted the fathers of the catholic church. There was more to quote than their Roman opponents found comfortable." (Pelikan 48-49). More Here
I am an Evangelical Christian, having been raised Catholic and spending 18 years with the Episcopal Church before they went weird. I know some Assemblies of God missionaries who are working in Islamic countries, one in Jordan and one in Mali. They must not only be concerned with their own safety but with the safety of their converts for conversion means a possible death sentence. Additionally, I know a missionary family who used to belong to my church who are working in Berlin which, right now, posed its own set of concerns.
I have a feeling it will be BOTH...plus educational for those who need to learn some facts.
Of course you have NOTHING with which to prove your slanderous and ignorant assertions against Luther. So, no, there is a LOT to denying it.
Yes, the safety of their converts is a concern of them as well.
When they relate to us about those who get saved, they use code names for them. They do not use their real names.
NOT!
Riiiight...because the Roman Catholic church is such a bastion of liberty and free speech?!
NOT!
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Truly, an expertly thought out rebuttal.
What is this, the 90s?
Stop posting in the Religion Forum until you familiarize yourself with the guidelines posted on my profile page which you can access by clicking on my name at the bottom of this post.
I have had to remove several of your posts because they did not respect the guidelines.
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