Posted on 04/10/2015 4:15:28 PM PDT by RnMomof7
ping
.
The bible does warn about “quarrels about words.” But again one of those deep scholars might say this doesn’t mean what it seems to say...
Anyhow, be careful about raising strawmen.
And yes, relationship is where it starts. Be careful about twisting the words of people who emphasize this fact into some kind of seeming assertion that the bible does not matter. For “God has made all things beautiful in their time.”
I can personally vouch that one can study the bible for decades and nothing seems to happen until the relationship begins to click in earnest. All that study will prove to be exceedingly helpful as preparation, but it might as well have been in a foreign language until the basis for putting it into practice has been established. “Ah, this is what God means.” You see it with your heart, not just your head.
Thanks for the ping, Rn;) In the same vein, we cannot be approved as workmen for God unless we study and rightly divide His word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15). He promises us that we will not be ashamed if we do so.
“Left that other site” has excellent Bible studies with pictures every day on the “Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem” thread. It is posted in the morning. I always make sure to catch up even if it means going back for several days. Right now the thread is going through characters of the Bible and the pictures really add to the study.
It seems to me, as a Catholic, we need to turn our conscience over to God the Father and Jesus Christ... That’s it, no bible studies, no translations no nothing. It then becomes automatic.
Your comment sounds nice, but that is not what God says in 2 Tim. 2:15. He tells you what He desires in order that we will not be ashamed workmen for Him. Study and rightly divide His word of truth.
How is one "conscience" informed?
How does one know who God is without knowing Him through His word?
Through the Holly Spirit...
Without belief in the Holy Eucharist what difference does this all make?
Just what kind of "relationship" does one have with a stranger?
Anyone can have a "relationship" with a god of his own making... that is different than having a relationship with the God of the bible....
How does one even know who the Holy Spirit is ?
There is a spirit of deception.. men love gods of their own makings
Ummm a prime example of deception..
We Catholics understand that no amount of elaboration appears sufficient for folks like you. You either wear blinders, or refuse to accept the proof, or are unable to comprehend the writings of your very own leading Lutheran theologians and Episcopalians who converted to Catholicism. You ask what the sacred traditions of the Church? ALL what the Church does as part of its liturgical and ritual practices, and beliefs in communion with Christ, the saints, and its martyrs.
No one is saying that the the leading of the Holy Spirit is absurd. Rather, because of the diverse and often contradictory beliefs of Protestants and Episcopalians, each cannot claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit. That would make the Holy Spirit a contradiction unto itself.
Surely, the congregations of Joel Osteen, Jimmy Swaggart; Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Billy Graham, and hundreds of your neighborhood local Foursquare Churches cannot each claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
To deny the Eucharist, you will have to REFUTE:
1. Scripture itself. John 6:53
2. The sacred oral tradition, the very tradition that was used to cross check and cross reference the books in the Bible that were infallibly assembled as authentic by the Catholic Church. So if you doubt the oral tradition, you must doubt the fact-checking sources for the Bible, and consequently the accuracy of the Bible itself. You cannot have it both ways by accepting the Bible as authentic and un-tether its infallibility from the sacred oral tradition.
3. The beliefs and practices of the early disciples of Christ before the Bible was assembled in the early fourth century which the Church continues to this day in the administration of the Sacraments of the Church and its forms of adoration and veneration.
4. The beliefs of saints, martyrs, and stigmatists who believed that the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Holy Eucharist is at the very center of Christian belief and this is why the Tabernacle was at the center of all Catholic Churches and worship and was so for FIFTEEN CENTURIES (AND CONTINUES TO BE) before the curse of Protestantism in 1517 (especially now with their mainline denominations using scriptural warrant to ordain gay, lesbian, and coming soon, transgender pastors) washed ashore spreading, what the great essayist Hillaire Belloc called, a cluster of heresies.
5. The explicit writings of the early Church fathers.
This would include St. Irenaeus of Lyons, an early Church Father and Doctor of the Church
https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/library_article/541/Eucharist_as_Pledge_of_Resurrection_St._Irenaeus.html
In fact, the real presence of the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist (transubstantiation), also known as Mass or the Lords Supper, was taken for granted in the early Church.
Written by St. Irenaeus about 185 AD, this excerpt in the link above makes clear the Churchs realistic interpretation of the Eucharist as the risen body of Christ.
6. The brilliant Catholic theologians after whom colleges and universities have been named.
7. The pre-eminent Episcopalian and Lutheran theologians who have converted to Catholicism such as Rev. Richard Neuhaus who wrote he found the fullest expression of Christ in the Catholic Church. (However, Bible
Christians tell us the Holy Spirit rather than having led them to the ONE truth, instead deserted them and the Holy Spirit is somehow, somewhere else, perhaps dwelling among some Protestant sects but we dont know for sure which sect it is: Joel Osteens or Jeremiah Wrights)
The resurrection is not some simple belief of a dead man coming to life.
Pope Benedict XVI (the theological Einstein of our times) captured this brilliant in the following passage. In the middle volume of his triptych, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI tried to describe those Resurrection-changes in history and nature (which are, of course, ultimately indescribable) like this:
Christs Resurrection . . . is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here . . . [and think of] the Resurrection as something akin to a radical evolutionary leap, in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence. Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality.
The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, spirit and blood have a place within God. . . . Even if man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its space, its bodiliness, in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind.
This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Pauls prison letters (cf. Colossians 1.1223 and Ephesians 1. 323) that speak of the cosmic body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christs transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are therefore able to live definitively in the fullness of indestructible life. . .
[Thus] Jesuss Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point. . . . [An] ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.
You can now see why without the living body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, the Resurrection has no meaning.
I
ndeed, deny this belief, and Protestantism is no different than a Hindu whose reading of the Upanishads and the Bhaghavad Gita tells him of an afterlife, or Buddhist beliefs in Bodhisattvas who as enlightened beings have put off entering paradise in order to help others attain enlightenment.
In a word, such beliefs are in the end of matters of faith but they are as moribund as the reality of only the dead.
In the Eucharist, Catholics have the Living Body and Blood of Christ as He Himself promised during His time on earth and the Last Supper.
yea we get it "sola ecclesia"
About halfway through the first paragraph I remembered gearing R.C. Sproul reading this text on his radio program.
Thank you.
“There is a spirit of deception.. men love gods of their own makings”
that’s crazy talk...
Other than your ability to make bad decisions, why is this an example of deception??
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