Magazine: Growing Trend--Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

TheSacredPage.com ^ | August 6, 2010 | Michael Barber

[smvoice]

IT doesn’t matter what you want to call it. The believers will be gone..not dead, gone..

[presently no screen name]

Some will take YOU KNOWING The Truth as prideful. Why? Because THEY don’t know it.

They aren’t ‘free’ but caught up in bad teaching, works, rules - legalism.

[NYer]

Repent, Repent, Repent...That means turn to Jesus...No baptism is valid without turning to Jesus first...

At the time immediately following the Resurrection of Christ, the majority of individuals coming into the church were adults who could repent. However, these same individuals brought their children who were also baptized without a formal declaration of repentance.

Jesus baptizes with the Holy Ghost...NOT the Holy Ghost and water...Just the Holy Ghost as opposed to water...

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and [of] the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." - John 3:3-5

"Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we? And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord. Then prayed they him to tarry certain days." - Acts 10:47-48

[narses]

“I think scripture tells us how we can know the saved..”

Do tell, what are those excerpts you rely upon?

[Larry Lucido]

Not a Catholic here, but...

...do you have a list of the elect and the non-elect?

Unless and until you get one, might wanna hold off on declaring who is saved or not. I’m sure there are elect Catholics and (gasp!) non-elect Calvinists.

[Cronos]

Of course not -- that crown of thorns was reserved for our Lord. The pope is but a servant.

Isn't it, as our friend TheSitckMan says, a joy each time we receive Christ, have a personal relationship with Him in the Eucharist?

Marvellous! To have that fellowship with the Lord in His Church, the Apostolic and Catholic Church!

[Larry Lucido]

That said, I do agree that numbers mean zilch, zero, nada. Numbers are just numbers. Even Catholics agree with that, when one points out the number of Catholics who veer from Vatican teachings. Suddenly, it’s all about the faithful “remnant.” Might be best that all “sides” stop presuming to take attendance. It’s all meaningless.

[Larry Lucido]

Basically, if you’re on Mom’s ping list, you’re saved. :-)

[Cronos]

Oh, of course, the heresies that arise outside The Church will die out -- they don't last very long. like the heresies of Arianism, Montanism etc. -- they die out within 500 years. And the newer ones like the sub-sects that we see clubbed under the "evengelics" umbrella, seem to have lives shorter than a few years!

Hallelujah! All the heresies die out as they are not graced by the Holy Spirit

[metmom]

Is there no end to what a Catholic will twist to misrepresent a non-Catholic saying?

I said Salvation was wrong in that it’s ONLY Catholics who protest and/or pray outside abortion clinics. I know non-Catholics who do and know of one pastor who went to jail for it.

[Cronos]

Some will take YOU KNOWING The Truth as prideful. Why? Because THEY don’t know it.

Yes, Iscool, being a Gnostic is special. Good on you. Though to both of you, I prefer being a believer in Christ in Christ's Church, the One Holy CAtholic and Apostolic Church.

Come to Christ! Come for mass (it's still Sunday!) and worship Christ in fullness of grace of the Holy Spirit

[smvoice]

The One Billion Strong Little Flock.

That's what we are to believe.

[Cronos]

It depends — the OPC has the color-graphic 14-page excerpted Bible called “Hit them Catlicks wiv dese excerpts and deny if they get back to you”, or the black and white graphic, 12page simple English version.

[Cronos]

Oh, The God who, as you so quaintly put it "meets our idea" is the God who looks on us as His idea -- Christ. We come to Christ.

If you, however, wish to keep worshipping some other god in whichever group, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism etc., that's your business.

But remember, you can still come to Christ and worship Christ in fullness in His Church, the One Catholic and Apostolic CHurch. hallelujah!

[smvoice]

You have no idea how wrong you are, in the right way.

I saw a chart similar to that one time. Wiley Coyote had a plan to snare the Roadrunner. Of course, Wiley ended up with the ACME anvil on his head, and Roadrunner got the birdseed.

[Legatus]

IT doesn’t matter what you want to call it. The believers will be gone..not dead, gone..

Well I do believe I've just been hit with "don't confuse me with the facts". What you were supposed to say was something along the lines of "argh, touche'".

I hope for the death of heresies and the conversion of heretics, not the death of heretics and the conversion of heresies.

Anyhow, "But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be."

Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

So are you looking to be taken or left behind?

[Cronos]

Good on that pastor — which denomination did he come from and does that denomination oppose all forms of birth control from contraceptives to abortion. The Church does.

[ansel12]

No you are ignoring reality and remain hung up on personal tribal chauvinism and are ignoring the conservative political concerns that can end abortion and liberalism, it isn’t about Protestants being 100% conservative, or Catholics being 100% liberal. It is childish to play that kind of nonsense. To sound like a conservative political activist, then look at American politics and voters, and try to figure out how to break the Democratic party’s death grip on such a large and important voting block as the members of the Catholic church.

When a Catholic majority joins with the Protestant majority prolife conservatives always win, in every single case that it happens. If only 48% of Catholics had voted prolife Republican in 2000, joining the 56% of Protestants that voted Republican, then the race would have been clean and simple, not the near death experience that it was.

Disregarding the irreversible damage of the past that is too late to fix, imagine what the future of America would be like if the majority of Catholics started consistently voting prolife conservative, and the Democrats knew that they had permanently lost their Catholic base, things would change dramatically.

This is about what is wrong with Catholicism that leads the majority of his members to take away the message to vote as liberal, proabortion Democrats, on the flip side what is it about non-Catholic Christianity that leads the majority of them to vote as conservative, pro life Republicans?

How can we deal with these millions of new liberal Catholic democrat immigrants if we don’t know the answer to why Catholicism is making them liberals?

We know that no group can be 100%, but in the political world a solid majority would do.

[Cronos]

oh, yes, like this one for the Prebyterians in the US



It is no wonder that Scot McKnight's "From Wheaton to Rome: Why Evangelicals Become Roman Catholic." as referenced in this article points out trends and patterns among those who have converted from Evangelicalism to Catholicism.

Most converts from Evangelicalism, according to this book experience "a desire for transcendance"

This desire for transcendence usually takes four forms:
(1) a desire for certainty;
(2) a desire for history;
(3) a desire for unity; and
(4) a desire for authority.

(1) Certainty This desire for full knowledge of truth spurs many converts to The Church to reject what they consider to be the "doctrinal mayhem" and "choose-your-own-church syndrome". They have a desire for knowledge that they believe is possible within Catholicism but not within Protestantism.

(2) History McKnight observes that many feel a "historical disenfranchisement" with Protestantism and want to be connected to the entire history of the Christian church and not just the period since the Reformation.

(3) Unity Most converts are disturbed by the divisions and countless denominations within Protestantism. McKnight quotes Peter Cram who

describes Protestantism as "one long, continuous line of protesters protesting against their fellow protesters, generating thousands of denominations, para-churches, and 'free churches,' which are simply one-church denominations."

Converts instead look to the unity of the Roman Catholic Church.

(4)Authority
Converts are disturbed by either 1. the lack of authority in the denominations or authority vested in a pastor with no real credentials (see David Koresh) besides charisma. And in both these cases there is no tie back, the group of the pastor dies with the pastor. They prefer the authority of Christ as vested by Him in His apostles.


One of the converts David Currie says

"I see my decision [to convert to RC] as a natural outgrowth of my Evangelical commitment."

or Stephen K Ray,

I "read' my way back to the Catholic Church. When I started reading books about what the church actually taught, I was forced to give up many mischaracterizations of her teachings. Indeed, I was struck by the sheer depths of the historical, and biblical arguments in favor of the Catholic faith.

This is a pretty impartial book in the sense that McKnight does not evaluate the validity or give his own opinion on which is better, he just notes down the reasons given, with none of his own opinion added, so it is interesting as a statistician's question WHY?

Of course, we can debate the validity of this, but the fact is that the split-split is a problem stated by ex-Evang's

[smvoice]

That describes the Second Coming of Christ, when one would want to be left. "He who endures to the end.." and all that.

The heresies and heretics remain during the Tribulation. Until they are destroyed, both, on Day of the Lord.