"Necessary for salvation" is itself a sleazy Protestant "dodge" invented in order to remove faith from people's lives. A Catholic believer would never ask that. According to Catholic belief, one can live a life of dissipation, wake up, confess it, take the Holy Eucharist and die a saved man. That one did "everything necessary" for salvation. According to Protestant belief, even less, he only has to walk up to a minister no one appointed sqeeze out a tear and profess something with Jesus Christ personal Lord and savior in it, and bingo, done, and he does not even have to stay away from sin afterwards. Mind you, I am not diparaging late life conversions, but I am disparaging that idea of minimalism. The Protestant project has always been, -- "what part of the Body of Christ can we amputate and still call ourselves Christians?"
A Catholic believer believes the entire faith, Christ, and Mary, and the saints, and everything. He knows the faith from the source of that knowledge, the Church that preserved it. That doesn't mean there are no degrees of importance, but the desire is to get it in full as best is possible, not to get something easy, preferably in a pill form and rush off to work. Our faith is a building with interlocking parts. Your faith is a stake in the ground where the building is supposed to stand. The building itself is never there.
when it comes to your phrase, ‘I believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church,’ which is from the Nicene rather than the Apostles’ Creed, you mean to say that you believe in the Church similarly to the way you believe in God. [...] But the Creed does not say that. [...] I believe in the holy Christian/Catholic Church just as I believe in the Communion of Saints, just as I believe in the forgiveness of sins, just as I believe in the resurrection of the body, just as I believe in the life everlasting. I can see none of them. They are not tangible, subject to discovery by my natural senses.
And God is (now that Christ is in Heaven) tangible to our senses? The Church is not God. It is someone who preserved for me the knowledge of God. The Church, moreover, is the visible Church it has books open to my senses, buildings, clergy, bells and smells, all these are visibly present to give me Christianity. God became tangible, vulnerable flesh because He wanted to. God gave us a visible Church because He wanted to. I take her and I believe her witness. You can take her too.
You have, in effect, driven millions away from the Creed in your arrogance
The Western Church does bear the blame for the scandal and the tragedy of Protestantism, but believing the Holy Scripture as written and the Creed as formulated is not part of the blame. Also, we allowed Protestantism to happen and we shall heal it, glory be to God.
Well, annalex, your first two paragraphs are so full of false caricatures that there is no room for anything else. It must be very comforting for you as a Catholic to have as your enemies people so stupid, false, and hypocritical.
Then, in your third paragraph, you wrote: “And God is (now that Christ is in Heaven) tangible to our senses?” I read and reread what I wrote trying to figure out what the impetus for this question might have been, and thus what it might mean. I’m sorry, I don’t get it.
Well, I am left with only the Holy Scriptures and the historic Creeds of the Holy, Christian Church. And you possess holy mother church and all her caricatures, excuse me, her “interlocking” caricatures, of what God’s Word says. You offer me the choice: “You can take her too.” Thank you. But offered the choice of taking or leaving her. I will leave her, especially as she is pictured by you.
While generalizations are often valid, and Protestantism has its general characteristics as does Catholicism, yet the former is not one particular Church, in the above generalization is far from uniform and is actually more of a recent declension, which is part of taking on form of the world and which is exists, which Catholicism knows of itself. The reformers overall preached repentance and an enduring faith that would bear fruit as salvific*, and today there exists basically three camps within Protestantism.
The first camp is that of liberal, institutionalized churches in which there is little emphasis upon the authority of the Bible, with little strong preaching and heartfelt worship, and the need for salvation is not pressed upon the hearers, and perfunctory professions substituting for such. Catholicism also overall suffers from this type of religion.
The second camp is basically that of churches which may emphasize the Bible and the need for salvation, some fundamentalist types of which may have high standards for Christian conduct while others more appeal to the flesh, but they both preach a gospel in which salvation is not that of faith out of a broken heart and contrite spirit, which God promises to save (Ps. 34:18) and looks to, (Is. 66:2), but instead emphasizes faith in the promise of eternal life bt faith in Christ, largely divorcing faith in Christ as Savior from Jesus is Lord, the latter of which the sinner is to confess in receiving the former. (Rm. 10:9,10)
This does not mean a sinner stops sinning to come to Christ, but as those who do come to Christ are choosing light over darkness, (Jn. 3:19-21) so those who come to Christ to be saved from their sins are those which have a basic change of heart, from darkness the light, which shall be manifest in works which correspond to repentance, “things which accompany salvation,” (Heb. 6:9) according to the light they have.
The third camp are churches which largely preached this, which range from fundamentalist type churches to holiness Pentecostals, which recognize that repentance is implicit in leading on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Protesting against the current spiritual declension into easy believism, the popular fundamentalist preacher John MacArthur states,
The gospel in vogue today holds forth a false hope to sinners. It promises them that they can have eternal life yet continue to live in rebellion against God. Indeed, it encourages people to claim Jesus as Savior yet defer until later the commitment to obey Him as Lord. It promises salvation from hell but not necessarily freedom from iniquity. It offers false security to people who revel in the sins of the flesh and spurn the way of holiness. By separating faith from faithfulness, it teaches that intellectual assent is as valid as a wholehearted obedience to the truth.
Thus the good news of Christ has given way to the bad news of an insidious easy-believism that makes no moral demands on the lives of sinners. It is not the same message Jesus proclaimed.
One must be careful here, as it is possible to go to the other extreme of making conversion to Christ something that only persons who have sufficient character can be saved by, requiring them to be able to turn from all sins before they are saved, or not taking into account that growth in grace is related to the different degrees of grace of person has realized, and to whomsoever much is given much is required. (Lk. 16:48)
The gospel preaching in the book of Acts called souls to repentance, but it was a basic repentance of faith, recognizing Jesus is Lord and trusting in the salvation out of which transformed life results. But it is the gospel of least resistance, and is least difficult to preach, which does not work to convict men of sin, righteousness and judgment and which brings them to appreciate mercy, that marks the latter days we are in.