Why are you repeating what was just refuted? Do you think this is Catholic answers where th faithful drink up propaganda like water? Once again, "Angels and elders offering up prayers before the judgments of the last days in memorial (Rev. 5:8 and 8:3,4; f. Lv. 2:2,15,16; 24:7; Num. 5:15) is not a continuous postal service, and does not constitute praying to them, or the ability to hear all prayer from Heaven, which is unique to God."
"Praise the Lord, you his angels, you mighty ones who do his bidding, who obey his word." (Psalm 103:20-21)
This is rich, using poetic language goes a long away, for now we can pray to fire and snow, etc.:
"Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his dominion: bless the Lord, O my soul. (Psalms 103:22) "
Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps: Fire, and hail; snow, and vapour; stormy wind fulfilling his word: Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars: Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl: (Psalms 148:7-10)
Don't you Catholics realize that the more you desperately try to contrive examples for what the Holy Spirit incongruously did not do with a most common basic practice then you are an argument against being Catholic to us?
You are begging the question, since you have not demonstrated that requesting prayers from created beings is inconsistent with Scriptural principles (in contrast to cannibalism).
Wrong. First, the mere absence of a clear prohibition does not justify teaching something as a doctrine, esp. when it is such a basic practice yet for which there is zero actual examples amid approx 200 prayers, and only God is shown addressed in prayer and in instruction on it, and alone is shown able to hear and respond to all prayer from Heaven. And in the light of what Scripture thus teaches on prayer then it is inconsistent in principle, in which only God is shown addressed in prayer to Heaven, possessing a position and power that belongs to Him in the holy of holies in Heaven. To whom (not ascended saints) the Spirit says believers have access with boldness into by the sinless shed blood of Jesus, (Heb. 10:1) who is the only heavenly intercessor btwn God and man. (1Tim. 2:5)
Nor are we to think of men above that which is written, (1Co. 4:6) who are nowhere shown addressed in prayer to Heaven and able to hear and respond to all such. Thus to make prayers to created beings in Heaven is both foreign to Scripture and contrary to it in principle to what is teaches of God's Divine prerogative, position and power.
Your entire argument pivots around an equation of worship and prayer which is the opposite of what Catholicism explicitly teaches--you are attacking a straw man.
Wrong. First, what Catholicism explicitly teaches is that one can engage in such adulation that is never seen given to any created being, but is only given to God, but which they imagine is not worship based upon semantics , that since they do not call it "Latreia" then it is not worship.
Secondly, regardless of whether one accepts it as part of worship or not, only God is addressed in prayer to Heaven, to whom alone the the Spirit of God directs people to pray to in Heaven, and prays to Himself within believers, while Christ is the only heavenly intercessor named btwn God and man. (1Tim. 2:5)
So your faith is dependent on archaeologists, who are created beings.
Which would prove what? Again, we are all dependent on others, from the webmaster on FR to the Hebrew scribes who copied the sacred texts which the NT church invoked in establishing its truth claims. But being used as an instrument of God simply does not mean that whatever such otherwise said is Truth, which is what distinguishes wholly inspirit Scripture from the instruments such as who copied it, etc. Thus your argument fails here also.
Do you really believe that SS means only Scripture is to be used and is wholly formally sufficient, which thus excludes even reasoning?
That is its implication, and there are prominent Protestant theologians who have taken it in that direction--never entirely consistently, because you can't avoid using reason--which is why the Catholic Church teaches that faith is in harmony with reason.
It is a reasonable faith, and which reason Scripture appeals to, which can make even what would normally seem unreasonable to be reasonable, but the idea that SS means only Scripture is to be used and is wholly formally sufficient, which thus excludes even reasoning is absurd, and basically is a strawman, and which utterly fails to counter what I myself said about the position of Scripture.
Which is mere an argument by assertion for something you cannot show, and the Old Roman Creed does not do it, but Caths have no problem making doctrines out of what is not seen.
I did show you. You can easily compare what's in the Old Roman Creed with what's in the NT and see Paul quoting versions of it. You can also compare Justin Martyr's description of Christian worship with the Catholic and Eastern churches' Mass service, and what the Didache teaches with the Catechism's moral teachings.
Nonsense. You simply cannot show/prove that the oral (versus in word) traditions Paul preached was this, or concerning such a thing as the nature of a women's head covering. Nor can I show/prove that these oral (versus in word) traditions were subsequently written, but i can show that this was the norm for any revelation called the "word of God/the Lord."
But i do understand why this is so important to Catholics, for faced the utter absence of Catholic distinctives in the inspired record of the NT church all they need to do is say these were part of amorphous "oral tradition," out of which they can channel binding beliefs that are not in Scripture and are even lacking in early testimony of history .
Typical abuse of Scripture, for 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 does NOT teach purgatory, for it not only refers to the judgment seat of Christ, which does not take place until the Lord's return, (1Cor. 4:5; 2Tim. 4:1,8; Rev.11:18; Mt. 25:31-46; 1Pt. 1:7; 5:4) versus purgatory, which has souls suffering commencing upon death. This alone disqualifies I Corinthians 3 from referring Purgatory, while the suffering is that of the loss of rewards (with the Lord's displeasure), which one is saved despite of, not because of.
It's typical because that's how every early church commentator interpreted the passage--Jerome, Augustine, Origen, Cyprian, Ambrose, Gregory, Theodoret, Rupert.
And what is typical for Catholics is that they simply cannot or will not see what Scripture says if it refute them, and so they look to so-called "church father" who also got it it.
I repeat, 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 does NOT teach purgatory, for it not only refers to the judgment seat of Christ, which does not take place until the Lord's return, (1Cor. 4:5; 2Tim. 4:1,8; Rev.11:18; Mt. 25:31-46; 1Pt. 1:7; 5:4) versus purgatory, which has souls suffering commencing upon death. This alone disqualifies I Corinthians 3 from referring Purgatory, while the suffering is that of the loss of rewards (with the Lord's displeasure), which one is saved despite of, not because of.
Your own NAB commentators had enough sense to realize this when they state, "The text of 1 Cor 3:15 has sometimes been used to support the notion of purgatory, though it does not envisage this." - http://usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/3#54003015-1
And you meet a personal judgement of your deeds before the Final Judgement, as illustrated in the story of Lazarus and in Revelation where we see a distinction between the first and second deaths. Which as a support for purgatory is a logical fallacy, since mere similarity does not overcome the differences and translate into being the same thing. Moreover, the Final Judgement is only for the lost, and in which believers will be judges. (1Co. 6:3; Jude 1:15; Rv. 20:4)
"Loss of rewards" is part of what's going on there, but fire is also punitive. Certainly it is punitive, for as said, that of "suffer loss" of rewards as combustible workmanship is burned up and on grievously sees displeasure of the Lord whom He dishonored and could have glorified more, but the workmanship is not personal character defects which one is purified from in order to be with the Lord, whom He is actually already with, but instead it is what one built the church with. As shown, the context is people, those who build the church and the manner of material they build it with, upon Christ who is the foundation, and believers are "lively stones". Thus "If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are." (1 Corinthians 3:17)
The context also references Jerusalem temple worship and its heavenly archetype--see the reference to the "assembly" in the same passage. As for the verse itself, where do imperfect spirits go, if they're still waiting to enter Heaven?
That was explained, but once again it seems like you are not read thru all my responses. The only type of "purgatory" in Scripture was that of Abraham's bosum, which was not a place of purifying torments," but of comfort, awaiting the time when Christ would led them to Heaven, which is now called paradise. Its there in my response.
I apologize for not answering your reply in more detail, but I was up until 5 a.m. due to trying to keep up with this thread last night, and cannot repeat the same today. I will prayerfully ponder your points and review the links you have supplied. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
I sympathize. I am in my fifth day of the flue at age 64, and today i feel like i finally turned the corner. Thanks be to God.
I wish you a speedy recovery from the flu. I will catch up on your posts and do them more justice later. Please do realize that when you post so many long quotes and extensive links, it takes time to work through them all and address them adequately--I take them seriously so I take the time to look things up and pray over and review the Scriptures cited. I will mention that I did look at that Le Goff book on purgatory you cited last night and it was a useful reference--thank you for mentioning it. I will respond more later, God-willing.
Poetic or not, the Psalms are prayers, and the ones I quoted address angels directly, something you claimed does not happen in Scripture. Pointing out that other created beings are also addressed does not change the fact that angels are addressed. As for why other created beings are addressed, recall that the creation reflects the nature of its Creator (Romans 1:20), so that when the Pharisees tell Jesus to silence his disciples, he responds, "If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out," a theme we also see in the Psalms (19:1 for example). Since stones are not sentient beings, obviously this is meant metaphorically. But angels are sentient beings; and as several Scriptures indicate (including the ones cited above as well as 1 Corinthians 11:10), they are present during the Christian worship service.
This addresses some of what you say later in post, but you cite 1 Timothy 2:5, which I also want to address. Protestants like to cite this out of context to supposedly refute the idea that saints can intercede for us, but if you back up to verse 1 of that chapter, what is the context? Paul is asking Christians--created beings--to make "requests, prayers, intercession, and thanksgiving" for kings and authorities. This demonstrates that asking created beings for prayers was not seen by Paul as inconsistent with the idea of Christ as "one mediator". What he specifically means is that Christ is one mediator for "all men" (verse 6), not that we can't ask others to pray to this mediator for us.
1 Corinthians 4:6: if you'll look up commentators' discussion of the Greek for the phrase you quote as "above that which is written", you'll find that this is a rare phrase and scholars can only guess what it means. Citing it is weak support for any argument.
Your complaint about the latria/dulia/hyperdulia distinction being "semantics" ignores the fact that defining your terms is the basis of logical argument. You can only call Catholic Marian prayers "worship" by exporting your own definition of "worship" into Catholic teachings, which is fallacious, particularly since you are using a 21st-century definition rather than the one being used by the 1st-century NT documents and Augustine's 5th-century delineation of the latria/dulia/hyperdulia distinction. Nor is Augustine's distinction a merely semantic distinction, as he mentions it while discussing specific religious practices that were distinct and recognized as distinct by people of his time. Aquinas further developed this line of thought and addressed all the Scriptural objections Protestants typically make, centuries before Zwingli's followers came up with them.
Regarding Sola Scriptura: if you do not follow the many Protestants who see the principle as implying a contradiction between faith and reason--which includes Martin Luther (at times--he is not consistent on this in his writings), John Calvin, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, George Lindbeck and today's Yale Barthians, etc.)--then good, I'm glad you don't, and we may be able to find something to agree on. There are some Protestants who do not take this position and who see faith and reason as complementary, such as those coming out of the Scottish Common Sense Realism philosophical school that inspired Alexander Campbell and the nondenominational movement. I agree faith and reason are complementary, and the Catholic Church teaches this. However, this is the problem I was getting at: I do not see how you can justify reason using Scripture alone, since the rules of logic are not laid out in Scipture. They were first developed by Aristotle and they have since been refined by symbolic logic, which is the basis of the computers we are talking over. Moreover, the rules of exegesis are not laid out in Scripture, either. They were initially developed by the Jewish rabbis and by Greek interpreters of Homer. Likewise, archaeology is not a Scriptural discipline, nor is ancient history. So yes, Scripture and reason are compatible, but I don't see how you can demonstrate this compatibility by appealing to Scripture alone. You have to import knowledge from secular fields. And this can be a serious problem in apologetics when you're debating atheists who want to know what the rational basis of faith is and what the justification of Sola Scriptura is. I have been debating atheists for decades, which is why this is an issue I'm concerned with. I do see ways to resolve it, but not by using Sola Scriptura.
Oral tradition: on this, I will refer you to Yves Congar's book The Meaning of Tradition, where he summarizes the documentation for this (developed more extensively in his other work), and also debates a Protestant scholar named Oscar Cullman who tried to support a position similar to the one you're advancing. Cullman eventually was forced to concede that, "We, on the Protestant side, are beginning to understand the immense wealth that is contained in the writing of the Church Fathers and are beginning to rid ourselves of the strange conception of the Church's history that claims that, with the exception of a few sects, there was a total eclipse of the Gospel between the second and sixteenth centuries."
1 Corinthians 3:10-15: The Church Fathers interpreted this passage the way they did for good reasons. One is the fact that Paul is alluding to other Scriptural passages on this same theme, including one some Protestants mistakenly claim wasn't canonical for early Christians, Sirach 2:5, as well as others that are in the Protestant canon such as Zechariah 13:9, Malachi 4:1, Matthew 3:11-12, etc., none of which is talking about people being a foundation. Interpreting the passage the way you suggest is to ignore these related passages, as well as the fact Paul addresses his comments to "each one", and each Christian is not an evangelist in the sense that Paul was ("He gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists. . .": Ephesians 4:11). As for the NAB, the new version is an awful liberal translation that the U.S. bishops developed in coordination with Protestant advisors and adopted for ecumenical purposes, it has silly gender-neutral language and so forth and often does not reflect Catholic teaching. There are other approved Catholic translations that are much better; I actually prefer conservative Protestant translations over the NAB.
Regarding Abraham's bosom: in ancient Christian catacomb inscriptions, there are prayers that are specifically asking for the dearly departed to be taken into Abraham's bosom to be with Lazarus, indicating a belief in a Purgatorial realm distinct from Abraham's bosom itself. The language used is similar to that used in Catholic prayers for the dead, demonstrating that these are an ancient practice and not a late innovation.
I have tried to cover your main points here; if I have overlooked anything in the midst of responding to a long post, it is not intentional. There are a couple other shorter posts from you I see I need to reply to and then I may need to catch up on the rest of the thread another day.