But.. your KJV says there are those that are righteous. St. Luke 1:5-6:
"THERE was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth.
And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless."
Mary is physically dead now or should be.
So? Are you saying that she isn't in Heaven?
I'll try to summarize how I understand the difference between the Catholic and Protestant conceptions of the "redemption." For Protestants G-d and man are "joined" only at the person of J*sus and no where else. With Catholics and Orthodox J*sus is like the corner of the paper towel placed in a spill of water . . . contact begins there and then spreads from the corner throughout the towel (the Eastern Orthodox are quite up front about the fact that chr*stianity is not so much about the "redemption" as it is the theosis ("defiication") of man. Put another way, to Protestants the "redemption" of J*sus is vicarious while to Catholics and Orthodox it is participatory. Every human being is a potential participant in the work of J*sus. This is why Catholics "offer up" their own sufferings. They join with those of J*sus. J*sus was the beginning and the point of initial contact but the work of the saints are also redemptive when they are "united" with those of J*sus. Protestantism regards J*sus death on the cross as absolutely and totally vicarious (the Eastern Orthodox, who of course are more "authentic" than the Catholics, don't even accept J*sus crucifixion as an atoning sacrifice for sin).
Similar distinctions apply to what it means to be "saved" in Catholic and Protestant parlance. For the latter an individual becomes "saved" when he "accepts J*sus as his savior" (ie, accepts the absolutely vicarious death of J*sus on the cross on his behalf). For Catholicism/Orthodoxy objective salvation refers to mankind as a while rather than individuals. The human race was redeemed corporately, but the fate of every single individual born into the world is still very much in doubt. This is why they call J*sus their "savior" even as they ask him to "save" them. He is their savior insomuch as they are part of the corporately redeemed human race. Individually, they walk a tightrope over the flames of Hell from the moment they are born until the day they die. Yet they don't understand the appeal of "once saved always saved" Protestantism. They can understand every religion on earth except that of the Bible Belt.
It is because the human race has been redeemed but no individual can be in life that they "preach Protestantism to the Jews but preach Judaism to the Protestants." The Jews are implicitly denying the "redemption of the human race as a unit" by continuing to observe the Torah (which was supposedly a mere "foreshadowing of the gospel), so towards Judaism Catholicism seems to adopt a "J*sus only," "all your works are in vain," "doctrines and commandments of men" attitude. They tell Jews that by observing Biblical commandments that ceased to be relevant at a certain point they are "missing the point." They tell them that observing Biblical commandments and performing Biblical rituals are vain and superfluous and "of none effect." Therefore Catholic preaching aimed at Jews (or, in our days, Catholic apologetics against Judaism) sounds very Protestant. J*sus alone saves and "the Law" is of none effect.
However from the Catholic perspective Protestants have fallen into the "opposite error." Protestants don't recognize that only the human race as a unit was objectively saved and that each human being faces a life of struggle to be individually saved (which will be certain only when life is over). So Catholic preaching or apologetics aimed at Protestantism sounds "Jewish." Protestants are "antinomians," they are "presumptive" in their belief that J*sus has already saved them without any effort on their own part. J*sus established a church and endowed it with the "means of salvation" and Protestants who insist on a direct pipeline from G-d that bypasses this are (as are the Jews who keep "the Old Law") "missing the point." Yes, J*sus has saved the human race. But he saves individuals via lives of fasting, prayer, repentance, good deeds, and chr*stian ritual and ceremonial. This is why Catholicism sounds so "Jewish" to Protestants and why Protestant arguments against Catholicism merely echo Paul's teachings against the Torah, though Catholics who continue to insist on the utter vanity of "the Old Law" never seem able to realize this. (By the way, Eastern Orthodoxy is quite upfront with the idea that J*sus alone does not save an individual, but that it is a cooperative effort of both J*sus and the individual. They call this synergeia).
I wish Catholics would put themselves in the shoes of their Fundamentalist Protestant oppnents for just a moment and try to understand that to them Catholicism seems like utter hypocrisy, insisting on the "fulfillment" and non-necessity of Biblical law and ritual while insisting on the necessity of post-Biblical law and ritual, derived largely from paganism. If Paul (Protestants reason) inveighed against the laws and rituals which were commanded from the very Mouth of G-d to Moses, then how much the more so (`al 'achat kammah vekhammah) must his words apply to post-Biblical laws and rituals which were not spoken by the Mouth of G-d but which were adopted little by little from the pagan cultures being converted?
I realize that my beliefs and my experiences have made me very "anti-Catholic," but Catholics never seem to have the slightest bit of compassion for people who simply cannot understand the cults of Mary and the saints. This is foreign to them; do you understand that? They've been praying to G-d all their lives and have never felt the slightest need to pray to another heavenly being. Is it any wonder they don't understand you? It is considerably harder convincing a person who has been praying to lesser beings that he may also pray to G-d than it is to convince someone who is accustomed to pray to G-d that he may also pray to lesser heavenly beings!
It is very hard for me not to notice that just as Catholicism prefers post-Biblical rituals to Biblical ones, so it also seems to prefer post-Biblical stories to Biblical ones. Have you not the slightest sympathy with someone who is being told that Adam and Noah are "unimportant" or "symbols whose actual existence has been disproved by science) when your own religion is full of illiterate bumpkins (not in America, but elsewhere) who may believe that St. George slew a dragon, St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, Mary appeared to an Aztec peasant, and made the sun dance in Portugal? Can't you see the utter and flaming hypocrisy of such a stand, real or perceived?
I do not intend to advocate for sola scriptura, since I do not subscribe to it myself. But I notice that when Protestants quote Biblical texts to justify beliefs you Catholics and Orthodox seldom if ever quote verses back to justify your positions. Bible quotes are met invariably by such things as "well, it's our Bible!" or "we had it first!" or "you're just a stupid fundie, what do you know?" I have read a zillion times about how your monks preserved the "Protestant" Bible by copying it. Yet the fact remains that you, the co-religionists and spiritual descendants of those monks, are much more likely to doubt the events described by the text and to attack belief in them. Can you imagine what this looks like to sincere Fundamentalists? They get the idea that the minute an Oral Tradition is admitted the Documentary Hypothesis comes loping right in. And who can blame them? The Catholic world is full of apologeticists who see Biblical inerrancy as identical to sola scriptura and who invoke the "errors of the Bible" and its alleged origin in ancient Mesopotamian and Canaanite paganism (allegedly edited and redacted by St. J. St. E, St. P, and St. D) in order to refute sola scriptura and "soul competency." Orthodox Judaism has always had an Oral Tradition, but it has never had to stoop to such arguments! But the fact is that "orthodox" Roman Catholics seem to have adopted the Biblical theories of liberal Protestants in order to justify the existence of the "magisterium" (never mind that liberal Protestants are no friendlier to an authoritative oral tradition than are literalist ones!).
Good grief, people! This time I'm not engaging in name-calling! I'm trying to get you to look at a few things from someone else's perspective! You can do that, right? You can understand "lesbian and gay persons," moslems, and everyone else in the world. Can't you do that with "simple-minded Protestant literalists" or are they less human than everyone else?
One thing Catholicism does seem to have in common with islam and all other ancient (and therefore "respectable") religions is that they seem to be plugged into a pre-factual, pre-literal, pre-rational Jungian/Freudian subsconscious full of archtypes and symbols. Fundamentalist Protestants deal with facts. When anyone other than a Fundamentalist Protestant invokes the sin of Adam, Noah's Ark, or even J*sus on the cross one can never be entirely certain if he is talking about these as facts or as (to quote Frank Sheed, who was an evolutionist and higher critic himself) "events all the truer for never having happened." You seem to gravitate to universal symbols rather than Biblical "facts" (other than on the "real presence," which I know for a fact many Catholics poke fun at when there are no "literalist Protestants" around to infuriate with hypocritical inconsistency). Fundamentalist Protestants mean what they say. Everyone else says "G-d is too big" and make religion so profoundly symbolic that it turns into one big Uncle Remus story.
Wideawake, can I get a witness???
NYer, you constantly invoke the "wisdom of the Eastern churches." Do you think I'm going to ask you if you believe Adam was a real person? I know what you'd say. Easterners are even more plugged into a primal, non-factual Jungian subconscious than "rationalistic" Westerners.
Orthodox Judaism cannot exist without the Oral Torah for reasons even the most literalistic "redneck" can understand. The Written Torah has no vowels or punctuation and the Oral Torah supplies these. The Written Torah could not be copied and kept in existence without the voluminous laws which have existed since Moses but which are written down nowhere in the Torah itself. And I don't know of anyone who claims that he could take a King James Bible and build a Tabernacle and conduct a Biblical sacrifice. (What are the details? What is the incense composed of?) But Catholics and Orthodox chr*stians can't say any of this. Instead they seem to respond to the concerns of Protestants with smgness, superiority, and utter hogwash ("We wrote it, so you should trust us when we tell you not to belive it!")!
DANGIT, y'all! Can you see none of this???