Posted on 09/21/2009 4:50:40 PM PDT by stfassisi
You are joking, aren’t you? God gave us His word, through men of old. The Church came after the inspiration, not before.
Absolutely not. Sorry. As a follower of Jesus Christ, it is HE, the living Word, whom I follow. And when I follow Him in the pages of Scripture, He leads me, oh blessed thought - by His Holy Spirit.
The Church is His body on this earth but is NOT my “dictator”. The Lord Jesus is my one and only King of Kings and Lord of Lords and His Word, Holy Scripture, is the ONLY authority to which I must bow.
Sola Scriptura
It means "universal" and it does not resemble anything protestant that was NOT borrowed from Catholicism first,dear friend
God, who, I'm POSITIVE inspired scripture
Imagine yourself in a court of law trying to prove that scripture is from God without any original autographs.
You would be laughed out of court
The only chance you would have is from the witnesses of the Catholic Church who says the Scriptures are from God,not from some protestant denominations 1500 plus years after
If a church's traditions contradict Scripture, I have to side with Scripture as being the authority.
So, I can assume, that when you use the term Catholic Church in your posts, you DO mean the Roman Catholic Church specifically?
So therefore, you believe, the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church that ever existed and ever will exist and any other faith that calls itself Christian is heresy? Just to be clear.
You're correct that God is gracious,omnipotent, and merciful,dear friend,but He could not create a church that failed and the ONLY church that is still standing since our Blessed Lord was crucified is the Catholic Church as our Lord has promised
They are one in the same
Here is a good explanation ,dear friend..
How Did the Catholic Church Get Her Name?
http://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/churb3.htm
by Kenneth D. Whitehead
Excerpt;
The Creed which we recite on Sundays and holy days speaks of one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. As everybody knows, however, the Church referred to in this Creed is more commonly called just the Catholic Church. It is not, by the way, properly called the Roman Catholic Church, but simply the Catholic Church.
The term Roman Catholic is not used by the Church herself; it is a relatively modern term, and one, moreover, that is confined largely to the English language. The English-speaking bishops at the First Vatican Council in 1870, in fact, conducted a vigorous and successful campaign to insure that the term Roman Catholic was nowhere included in any of the Council's official documents about the Church herself, and the term was not included.
Similarly, nowhere in the 16 documents of the Second Vatican Council will you find the term Roman Catholic. Pope Paul VI signed all the documents of the Second Vatican Council as “I, Paul. Bishop of the Catholic Church.” Simply that — Catholic Church. There are references to the Roman curia, the Roman missal, the Roman rite, etc., but when the adjective Roman is applied to the Church herself, it refers to the Diocese of Rome!
Cardinals, for example, are called cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, but that designation means that when they are named to be cardinals they have thereby become honorary clergy of the Holy Father's home diocese, the Diocese of Rome. Each cardinal is given a titular church in Rome, and when the cardinals participate in the election of a new pope. they are participating in a process that in ancient times was carried out by the clergy of the Diocese of Rome.
Although the Diocese of Rome is central to the Catholic Church, this does not mean that the Roman rite, or, as is sometimes said, the Latin rite, is co-terminus with the Church as a whole; that would mean neglecting the Byzantine, Chaldean, Maronite or other Oriental rites which are all very much part of the Catholic Church today, as in the past.
In our day, much greater emphasis has been given to these “non-Roman” rites of the Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council devoted a special document, Orientalium Ecclesiarum (Decree on Eastern Catholic Churches), to the Eastern rites which belong to the Catholic Church, and the new Catechism of the Catholic Church similarly gives considerable attention to the distinctive traditions and spirituality of these Eastern rites.
So the proper name for the universal Church is not the Roman Catholic Church. Far from it. That term caught on mostly in English-speaking countries; it was promoted mostly by Anglicans, supporters of the “branch theory” of the Church, namely, that the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of the creed was supposed to consist of three major branches, the Anglican, the Orthodox and the so-called Roman Catholic. It was to avoid that kind of interpretation that the English-speaking bishops at Vatican I succeeded in warning the Church away from ever using the term officially herself: It too easily could be misunderstood.
Today in an era of widespread dissent in the Church, and of equally widespread confusion regarding what authentic Catholic identity is supposed to consist of, many loyal Catholics have recently taken to using the term Roman Catholic in order to affirm their understanding that the Catholic Church of the Sunday creed is the same Church that is united with the Vicar of Christ in Rome, the Pope. This understanding of theirs is correct, but such Catholics should nevertheless beware of using the term, not only because of its dubious origins in Anglican circles intending to suggest that there just might be some other Catholic Church around somewhere besides the Roman one: but also because it often still is used today to suggest that the Roman Catholic Church is something other and lesser than the Catholic Church of the creed. It is commonly used by some dissenting theologians, for example, who appear to be attempting to categorize the Roman Catholic Church as just another contemporary “Christian denomination”—not the body that is identical with the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of the creed.
The proper name of the Church, then, is the Catholic Church. It is not ever called “the Christian Church,” either. Although the prestigious Oxford University Press currently publishes a learned and rather useful reference book called “The Oxford Book of the Christian Church,” the fact is that there has never been a major entity in history called by that name; the Oxford University Press has adopted a misnomer, for the Church of Christ has never been called the Christian Church.
There is, of course, a Protestant denomination in the United States which does call itself by that name, but that particular denomination is hardly what the Oxford University Press had in mind when assigning to its reference book the title that it did. The assignment of the title in question appears to have been one more method, of which there have been so many down through history, of declining to admit that there is, in fact, one—and only one—entity existing in the world today to which the designation “the Catholic Church” in the Creed might possibly apply.
The entity in question, of course, is just that: the very visible, worldwide Catholic Church, in which the 263rd successor of the Apostle Peter, Pope John Paul II, teaches, governs and sanctifies, along with some 3,000 other bishops around the world, who are successors of the apostles of Jesus Christ.
As mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, it is true that the followers of Christ early became known as “Christians” (cf. Acts 11:26). The name Christian, however, was never commonly applied to the Church herself. In the New Testament itself, the Church is simply called “the Church.” There was only one. In that early time there were not yet any break-away bodies substantial enough to be rival claimants of the name and from which the Church might ever have to distinguish herself.
Very early in post-apostolic times, however. the Church did acquire a proper name—and precisely in order to distinguish herself from rival bodies which by then were already beginning to form. The name that the Church acquired when it became necessary for her to have a proper name was the name by which she has been known ever since-the Catholic Church.
The name appears in Christian literature for the first time around the end of the first century. By the time it was written down, it had certainly already been in use, for the indications are that everybody understood exactly what was meant by the name when it was written.
Around the year A.D. 107, a bishop, St. Ignatius of Antioch in the Near East, was arrested, brought to Rome by armed guards and eventually martyred there in the arena. In a farewell letter which this early bishop and martyr wrote to his fellow Christians in Smyrna (today Izmir in modern Turkey), he made the first written mention in history of “the Catholic Church.” He wrote, “Where the bishop is present, there is the Catholic Church” (To the Smyrnaeans 8:2). Thus, the second century of Christianity had scarcely begun when the name of the Catholic Church was already in use.
Thereafter, mention of the name became more and more frequent in the written record. It appears in the oldest written account we possess outside the New Testament of the martyrdom of a Christian for his faith, the “Martyrdom of St. Polycarp,” bishop of the same Church of Smyrna to which St. Ignatius of Antioch had written. St. Polycarp was martyred around 155, and the account of his sufferings dates back to that time. The narrator informs us that in his final prayers before giving up his life for Christ, St. Polycarp “remembered all who had met with him at any time, both small and great, both those with and those without renown, and the whole Catholic Church throughout the world.”
We know that St. Polycarp, at the time of his death in 155, had been a Christian for 86 years. He could not, therefore, have been born much later than 69 or 70. Yet it appears to have been a normal part of the vocabulary of a man of this era to be able to speak of “the whole Catholic Church throughout the world.”
The name had caught on, and no doubt for good reasons.
The term “catholic” simply means “universal,” and when employing it in those early days, St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Polycarp of Smyrna were referring to the Church that was already “everywhere,” as distinguished from whatever sects, schisms or splinter groups might have grown up here and there, in opposition to the Catholic Church.
How Did the Catholic Church Get Her Name?”
The Catholic church is a woman?
My Mother-—The Church
http://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/churc2.htm
The Word became Incarnate in the womb of Mary through the power of the Holy Spirit. This Divine Mystery is constantly reenacted as the Eternal Word is mirrored more and more perfectly in the Bride of Christ as she gives Jesus to her children in the Eucharist, heals their wounds in Confession, ennobles their love through the Sacrament of Marriage, makes mere men priests of God through Ordination and sons of God in Baptism, enriches them with gifts in Confirmation and then lightens their burden on their journey home through Anointing.
The Church is a Mother because she is a Bride who is forever bringing forth children of light, pillars of holiness, sources of inspiration, challengers of truth, and defenders of the Faith.
Yes, she has structures, laws, treasures, authority and human frailties mixed with Divine power, but we must look at the whole Church and not just part of her. What son of an earthly mother tells his friends that his mother is nothing but an ugly skeleton covered over with muscle and skin? What kind of son picks apart every fault and weakness in his mother and broadcasts it to everyone willing to listen? A child who concentrates only on the authority a mother has to correct and punish and refuses to see the deep love and concern behind the reproaches, leads an unbalanced existence a life of self-pity and childish peeves.
It is difficult to understand a child who criticizes the art treasures of his parents while partaking of the beauty of those treasures whenever he pleases. This would be especially true if those treasures were available for the poorest of the poor to see and enjoy. Would he be happier if all the treasures in the Church were sold to private collectors and hidden forever from the eyes of the poor? It is amazing how our human nature manages to concoct such tailor-made excuses to cover our antipathies for the Church. Many children hate their parents because they are corrected and directed by them and so it is with Holy Mother Church. When she speaks about the necessity for high morals, deep faith and self-control, human nature rebels and she becomes the mean step-mother the domineering parent, the epitome of archaic ideals. Then it is that foolproof reasons are created to explain their rebellion and make them feel justified. The garments of love, loyalty and humility are replaced with the hard steel of pride and the acid ice of arrogance. No gentle persuasion can penetrate this coat of steel, for these misguided people mistake themselves for knights in shining armor, championing the cause of the misunderstood and misrepresented.
A true child of this God-given Mother is not one who is blind to her faults, weaknesses and wounds, but one who is discerning enough to see her need for improvement for healing for greater zeal and for generosity; loving enough to see her virtues, grace, truth and power and zealous enough to do something positive to help rather than something negative to destroy.
We pride ourselves on building up those in despair, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and giving a cup of cold water to the thirsty. Why do we not render these same services to the Church? Does she not desire that her children thirst for the living water of holiness? Does she not look for her children to bear the fruits of the Spirit? Does she not feel the nakedness of her children as they are despoiled of Faith, Hope and Love by the spirit of this world? Does she not longingly wait for those who have left to return to the Father's house? Is her heart not broken as she sees so many of her children exposing their souls to the danger of hell? What anguish tears at her heart as so many refuse the healing balm of Confession or the angelic food of the Eucharist?
What madness possesses our minds and souls, blinds our senses, and hardens our hearts toward so good a Mother? We pride ourselves on our maturity, freedom and intelligence and then proceed to act like spoiled children who have been refused the privilege of playing with fire. We use our souls and our future like a game of Russian Roulette —pulling every trigger of presumption, pride and arrogance to see what happens! Unfortunately, like those who play the game, there is no turning back if one loses.
* * * * *
“So I now say to you: you are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church.” (Matt. 16;18) Jesus had just asked the apostles who men thought He was. It was a good question and we see Jesus listening for their answer. It was Simon who said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus responded quickly. He told all the apostles that the Father had revealed this secret to Simon and then for the first time in history, an ordinary everyday word that meant “rock” became a name - Peter. Jesus promised us that this Church would last till the end of time and all hell would not prevail against it. The Church was then as it is now, an assembly of faithful followers of Jesus as Lord. As Jesus appointed Peter head, the other apostles looked to him from that moment as the one who had the responsibility of this assembly of people the Church. It was Peter whom Jesus asked to feed His sheep and lambs Peter who was given the keys of the kingdom to bind and loose, Peter who boldly preached to the crowds on Pentecost, Peter who punished Ananias and Sapphira for their deceit, Peter who made the final decision as to circumcision, Peter whom Paul sought out to assure himself that what he taught was correct.
There was a special deference for Peter among the apostles and we see this at the Resurrection. John was much younger than Peter. He arrived at the tomb before him, but waited — waited until Peter arrived and entered first. This deference is even more pronounced when we consider Peter had denied Jesus, had fallen deeply on a personal level. His human weaknesses had, for a fearful moment overtaken him and he was less than a leader should be. John, however, saw something in Peter that human weakness could not diminish and that was authority. That authority was given by the Father and only the Father could take it away. Peter's personal faults were something between him and God, but at that moment John saw the Vicar of Christ and only that Vicar would go into the tomb to assure himself and all ages after him that the Christ had truly risen.
As it was then, so it is now it is the prerogative of his successor to pronounce other mysteries of God to the people in order to assure that assembly of the truths God reveals.
After the Resurrection Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, the holy women and the disciples going to Emmaus, but the credibility gap disappeared only when the disciples heard the eleven assembled together declare, “Yes, it is true. The Lord has risen and has appeared to Peter.” (Luke 24:34) The greatest mystery of Faith in the Christian religion was declared by the Eleven with Peter as their leader. Peter, who had special light from the Father to declare the Messiahship of Jesus, declared the Resurrection of Jesus because he had seen Him. There was no question about Peter's special gifts from God. He was set aside to declare the mysteries of God and the will of God to the assembly. This was a gift from the Father to Peter and was not dependent upon Peter's holiness, personality, temperament or character. He had his weakness, but when He spoke as one with special authority—it was the Lord speaking.
When Ananias and Sapphira lied to Peter about their sale of property, Peter said to them, “How can Satan have so possessed you that you should lie to the Holy Spirit...IT is not to men that you have lied but to God.”(Acts. 5:3,4) A strange statement from a man who just recently committed a greater sin by denying he knew Jesus. Was the one who was forgiven much unable to forgive or understand a moment of weakness? Or was it that Peter was not speaking as a man, but as Peter the Rock -the Leader? In that capacity he was the Vicar of Christ. In this light then Peter could rightly say that Ananias lied to the Spirit. Yes, we must ask ourselves the question, “Do those who hate the Church know they are only hating themselves, for the Church is the Assembly of people and they are part of the human race - the soul of the Church? In hating the Vicar of Christ do they not mock the spirit of Christ as He guides His people?
Those who reject the Virgin Birth do so not because it is miraculous but because they reject Jesus as the Christ. For if he is who the Church says He is, then the manner of his birth is something minor. But they reject the Resurrection. They are left with explaining away the impact that he has had on history and continues to have. That is, because his Body, the Church, will not die despite all the would inflicted on it.
That is (more) complete nonsense...
The Levites were chosen by God to be the copiers and caretakers of the OT scriptures...(That's one of the reasons why your mythical Septuagint is just that...It was NOT written by Levites...)
The NT was written on very fragile material but yet, 2000 years later, there are thousands upon thousands of manuscripts, whole and in part that survived...And these are the vast majority of manuscripts extant that agree with each other over 95% of the time...And they don't belong to your church...
History shows that your church has destroyed these manuscripts whenever it could get it's hands on them...
No, God gave His Word to particular men and women, who shared it with the community at large.
You're making this up...
Does the author seriously believe this?
Dear brother ,you ought to spend your time doing something other than guessing at Christian history.
Pray for an hour each day....you will find more truth in that rather than posting here on free republic and believing God is leading you to lie about history.
I have told you many,many times not to post me again
Fortunately, there is church history that is NOT Catholic church history...And it doesn't agree much with Catholic history...
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