LOL. OK bro. I guess that sometimes you just have to jump up and jack slap someone, just to get their attention, and call a spade a spade.
Oh yes, being as this thread is about assurance. I have assurance of salvation. Some people may not like that. Oh well, such is life. I still have assurance.
:-)
The lizard kind or the Progressive kind???
Ooops!
I thought I read INSURANCE!
Carry on and stay calm.
Rats!
You may not get the commercials over there!
In the words of the excellent scholar Dr. Thomas M. Strouse, in his paper "Ye Are The Body Of Christ," Emmanuel Baptist Theological Journal, Vol. 1 No. 2. Fall 2005. p. 71-72:
"Although the Apostolic Fathers"--(Note: as defined today by the RCC)--"stood near the Apostles, this chronological proximity may have caused them to be unable to discern distinctive NT truth. . . . The Patristics, most of whom were unregenerate, considered the NT Scriptures to be the continuation of the OT with no distinctions concerning the people of God or His agency through which He ministers (i. e., the assembly of immersed believers; cf. Mt. 28:19-20; I Tim. 3:15). In failling to use the historical-grammatical (dispensational) hermeneutic to interpret Scripture, the Patristics superimposed the sacral society concept upon the NT. They looked tothe OT for the antiquuity of church leadership and for the meaning and mode of baptism. The sacral society concept is the state religion in a certain region, headed up by one leader, entered into by one means by all inhabitants, and defended by exterminating all dissidents. Constantine embraced the platonic catholicity of the Patristics to form the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), with its one head in the bishop of Rome, with its entrance by the baptism of infants, and with its persecution of all dissidents. This visible catholic ecclesiology, initiated by Ignatius and his ilk, propagated by Irenaeus and Cyprian, and popularized by Augustine, became the orthodox position for Christendom until the Reformation,"
(the bolded accentuations above are mine).
Bro MkXVII, There is only one valid stream of Christian doctrine, and that is the original one founded by Jesus of Nazareth, put in place in the local church at Jerusalem, and copied by other local churches throughout the Near East and Eastern Europe as the Apostles planted assemblies in their travels. And that is the doctrine of faith alone of Christ and faith of His true disciples in Him alone, transmitted by the infallible verbally inspired preserved Scripture alone, not of works or catholicuty, which is still alive today; and from which the insidious false stream of Romanism separated and propagated as shown above. It is a union of state and church, which is still the paradigm that the RCC would like to reunite and impose on the Americas today, but cannot yet due to our Constitutional constraints.
What you and others need to recognize is that Islam and its Hamas, al Qaeda, PLO, and ISIS flavors of the original religion reinvented by Mohammed are based on and only duplicate the very successful and murderous deadly strain of Platonized "Christianity" instituted by Constantine and Augustine, about 250 years before Mohammed's time. It is TC and others like him whose labors represent that stream of Hell-bent religion, that would, if possible, destroy the influence of true Evangelical Christianity wherever it crops up, including here on Free Republic.
Do you not think that the form of persecution of us--the Evangelical believers who do follow the practices of the first-century churches (which the Romanists do not)--would not turn deadly for us, except for the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that guarantees the separation of Church organizations from local, State, and Federal governments? that they would not be commingled?
To me, the historic "gospel" of the Romanist religion has not been shown to be one of peace, any more than that of Islam.
So beware, and take heed, lest those gospel-quenching efforts take root here. I do not believe that you and I will ever get those RCC perpetrators out of that religion and saved. Only God can do that. But let us resist it with full Scriptural backing, with accurate criticism and rejection, but seriously and without descending to the mocking and ad hominem argumentation which they always resort to when their other falsehoods peter out.
I suppose the mods are not going to like this, but it is so, Bro. So let us walk the line carefully, eh?
As in the old Evangelical Sunday School chorus:
"I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!"