Sure looks like the object of worship is Mary.shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua
Posted on 05/03/2008 4:38:34 PM PDT by NYer
Scripture, our Evangelical friends tell us, is the inerrant Word of God. Quite right, the Catholic replies; but how do you know this to be true?
It's not an easy question for Protestants, because, having jettisoned Tradition and the Church, they have no objective authority for the claims they make for Scripture. There is no list of canonical books anywhere in the Bible, nor does any book (with the exception of St. John's Apocalypse) claim to be inspired. So, how does a "Bible Christian" know the Bible is the Word of God?
If he wants to avoid a train of thought that will lead him into the Catholic Church, he has just one way of responding: With circular arguments pointing to himself (or Luther or the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries or some other party not mentioned in the Bible) as an infallible authority telling him that it is so. Such arguments would have perplexed a first or second century Christian, most of whom never saw a Bible.
Christ founded a teaching Church. So far as we know, he himself never wrote a word (except on sand). Nor did he commission the Apostles to write anything. In due course, some Apostles (and non-Apostles) composed the twenty-seven books which comprise the New Testament. Most of these documents are ad hoc; they are addressed to specific problems that arose in the early Church, and none claim to present the whole of Christian revelation. It's doubtful that St. Paul even suspected that his short letter to Philemon begging pardon for a renegade slave would some day be read as Holy Scripture.
Who, then, decided that it was Scripture? The Catholic Church. And it took several centuries to do so. It was not until the Council of Carthage (397) and a subsequent decree by Pope Innocent I that Christendom had a fixed New Testament canon. Prior to that date, scores of spurious gospels and "apostolic" writings were floating around the Mediterranean basin: the Gospel of Thomas, the "Shepherd" of Hermas, St. Paul's Letter to the Laodiceans, and so forth. Moreover, some texts later judged to be inspired, such as the Letter to the Hebrews, were controverted. It was the Magisterium, guided by the Holy Spirit, which separated the wheat from the chaff.
But, according to Protestants, the Catholic Church was corrupt and idolatrous by the fourth century and so had lost whatever authority it originally had. On what basis, then, do they accept the canon of the New Testament? Luther and Calvin were both fuzzy on the subject. Luther dropped seven books from the Old Testament, the so-called Apocrypha in the Protestant Bible; his pretext for doing so was that orthodox Jews had done it at the synod of Jamnia around 100 A. D.; but that synod was explicitly anti-Christian, and so its decisions about Scripture make an odd benchmark for Christians.
Luther's real motive was to get rid of Second Maccabees, which teaches the doctrine of Purgatory. He also wanted to drop the Letter of James, which he called "an epistle of straw," because it flatly contradicts the idea of salvation by "faith alone" apart from good works. He was restrained by more cautious Reformers. Instead, he mistranslated numerous New Testament passages, most notoriously Romans 3:28, to buttress his polemical position.
The Protestant teaching that the Bible is the sole spiritual authority--sola scriptura --is nowhere to be found in the Bible. St. Paul wrote to Timothy that Scripture is "useful" (which is an understatemtn), but neither he nor anyone else in the early Church taught sola scriptura. And, in fact, nobody believed it until the Reformation. Newman called the idea that God would let fifteen hundred years pass before revealing that the bible was the sole teaching authority for Christians an "intolerable paradox."
Newman also wrote: "It is antecedently unreasonable to Bsuppose that a book so complex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the outcome of so many minds, times, and places, should be given us from above without the safeguard of some authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of the case, interpret itself...." And, indeed, once they had set aside the teaching authority of the Church, the Reformers began to argue about key Scriptural passages. Luther and Zwingli, for example, disagreed vehemently about what Christ meant by the words, "This is my Body."
St. Augustine, usually Luther's guide and mentor, ought to have the last word about sola scriptura: "But for the authority of the Church, I would not believe the Gospel."
I find nothing, as I have stated. I trust that God's Word is true. It is you that 'finds' innocence in youth, within the confines of your own knowledge, and of your own judgment, making exceptions where none exist, and gainsaying the clear word of Scripture. That is a caution.
You are welcome to prove your point upon the Word, at which time I will happily cede my position. But until I see it in the Holy Texts, I can do nothing other than stand firm.
Bless (Praise) the Holy NAME of G-d !
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua
( (peace(rest) in the Holy NAME of Yah'shua( Jesus))
Then perhaps in light of First Corinthians 11:26-30 and explain how exactly one can be “unworthy” of a mere “symbol”? How can you be “guilty” of the Body and Blood of the Lord if there is no Real Presence?
Pssst! Hey! You're not supposed to tell 'em that until after they've signed over their assets.
Darn, the cat's out of the bag! Priests are directed to turn their backs on the objects of our idolatry and wehen we say,"Don't pray TO statues," what we mean is, "Go ahead, and if you have a goat, why not sacrifice it -- couldn't hurt."
Sure looks like the object of worship is Mary.shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua
I'm prepared to be edumicated.
After looking at the pictures of the beautiful church, and it is beautiful, something ocurred to me...
If a large group of Catholics became stranded on an island, or were forced into the ‘wilderness’ somehow, how would you be able to worship???
Would your religion fall apart until you were able to build a church and collect all of it’s aids to worship???
So was Judas. So was Herod. So was the Roman soldier with the spear. [...]
A good point.
Really though, instead of having something so large that you can only us it at your mountain top monk retreat, don't you think that it would be useful to have something that you can take with you to Bible studies, marriage retreats, study and fellowship with other rcc at places that are not your home, and maybe even a mass....if expositional teaching was part of mass??
Thanks Mr. Gutenberg (no, not Steve).
sorry. don’t take turns with people who can’t face reality.
If a large group of Catholics became stranded on an island, or were forced into the ‘wilderness’ somehow, how would you be able to worship???
Would your religion fall apart until you were able to build a church and collect all of it’s aids to worship???
Of course Catholics would be able to worship.
But what does this have to do with the church pictured in 1380?
Of course it would. I said I'm shopping around.
....if expositional teaching was part of mass??
It is and always has been.
“So if you said the same thing only used Black for Catholic and White for Protestant, it wouldn’t be bigotry? Even if “true?””
In this case. I WAS black...Saw it. Observed it. It’s true. And it is indicitive of the product of the rcc. A lot of Protestant churchs are equally as bad, but we’re talking about your rcc here, now.
Was Christ a bigot when He said, “by their fruit you shall know them?” Was the Lord a bigot when He stated that out of the mouth proceeds the contents of the heart?
Thanks Mr. Gutenberg (no, not Steve).
baruch HaShem, that He chose Tyndale and Gutenburg to do His Divine Will !
And yet Mary is not the object of worship.
In my 30+ wasted years in the rcc, attending masses, going to catholic school, attending catechism....
I have come in contact with MANY friends, their families, my family, my in-laws family....and in only 2 exceptions have I seen ANY evidence of a people living for Christ.
Thank you!
IF...and I do mean IF, Christ has chosen to regenrate you within the rcc, then I along with the angles praise His work in you.
If you mean the RCC, you are wrong.
...Anglicans are among the many today who laud Tyndale as the "father of the English Bible." But it was their own founder, King Henry VIII, who in 1531 declared that, "the translation of the Scripture corrupted by William Tyndale should be utterly expelled, rejected, and put away out of the hands of the people."
So troublesome did Tyndale's Bible prove to be that in 1543 — after his break with Rome — Henry VIII again decreed that "all manner of books of the Old and New Testament in English, being of the crafty, false, and untrue translation of Tyndale . . . shall be clearly and utterly abolished, extinguished, and forbidden to be kept or used in this realm."
Ultimately, it was the secular authorities who proved to be the end for Tyndale. He was arrested and tried (and sentenced to die) in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1536. His translation of the Bible was heretical because it contained heretical ideas — not because the act of translation was heretical in and of itself. In fact, the Catholic Church would produce a translation of the Bible into English a few years later (the Douay-Rheims version, whose New Testament was released in 1582 and whose Old Testament was released in 1609).
http://www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=4749
The only reason to thank Tyndale is to express gratitude for his flawed anti-Catholic mistranslation of Scripture.
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