Posted on 06/10/2021 3:56:41 PM PDT by MurphsLaw
The Protestants, on the other hand, began splitting up almost immediately after the beginning of the Reformation.
My earlier comments regarding the fracturing within the Church were not to imply that the Catholic Church is no different than all the Protestant sects, of which there are more in number than the sands on the world's beaches it seems.
It was just to rue the present condition. I think the reason for so much difference of opinion within the Church is due to the twin dogmas of "apostolic succession" and "no change in Church teaching". We are put in a bind where we have to believe that what is now being taught is somehow compatible with long held teachings, or that we lost apostolic succession with the election of John XXIII.
There is a group who believes that as long as there is a placeholder "pope" that apostolic succession is retained and we can "recognize and resist", i.e. count the recent "popes" as Popes while disagreeing with their redefinitions and sacrilegious acts. This to me appears to be too clever by half.
There are a number of important choices that one must make when one decides to join up with a group. If you work for a corporation that was perfectly normal, but then decides to get woke, do you speak up and risk getting fired, stay quiet, or just quit and put you and your family at financial risk? Especially if every other firm in your industry has simultaneously gone woke.
When you decide to join a particular church, similar choices have to be made. If your church starts veering toward heresy do you speak up and risk being separated, not just from the church, but from all of the individuals who may be close friends and family? Do you stay quiet and hope the course will be corrected? Or do you leave and go to yet another church which may also be heading in the wrong direction?
The easiest choice seems to be to call yourself a believer and emphasize your "personal relationship with Christ". This way you never have to worry about dealing with heresy. After all you know exactly which Bible is the best. You know exactly how to properly read those parts that have confounded theologians for millennia. You know exactly which doctrines, not specifically called out in the Bible, are ones you have to believe. Yes you can join up with fellowships, but you'll make sure to have one foot out the door in case the members fall short of your perfect understanding of God's Will.
Even better you don't even have to claim that it's your opinion or your will. You can put it all on God and the Holy Spirit. After all, you were born again in Christ and now are guided by the Holy Spirit. Anything you do is no longer your will, but God's will. You may occasionally sin, but that's OK because Jesus will see to it that you get back on track in a timely fashion.
There is a lot of dissension now on Free Republic, not of a religious nature, but of a political one. There is a big question of what does it now mean to be an American. Is there such a thing as an American, or has the term been taken over by political heretics? When talking about RINOs, there are some that say if we really want to be accurate we should call conservatives the RINOs, because the "heart and soul" (if there is one) of the Republican Party today is Romney and his ilk. Do we speak up at the next Republican Caucus and risk being silenced? Do we stay quiet and hope that sanity returns? Or do we leave and join another party or just become independents?
I notice similar traits in those who are individual believers free of any particular organized religion, and those who are Independent and free of any particular political party. They are so much more smarter than the rest of us. They see through all the facades. They will make their own decisions and support who they want regardless of affiliation.
Similar are those who have decided that America is Done (Put a fork in her!) and are busy moving to some remote part of Tennessee to prep for the next civil war. They no longer "identify as American". They are just poor schlumps stuck on a piece of land currently called the USA which may or may not last out the century or even the decade. They just need to find a safe place for themselves and their closest of kin.
Humans are social people. We can be dazzled by the individualism that we claim makes America special, but we also need to be members of larger organizations and fight to keep those organizations from rotting out.
If the only thing left is Big Government, Large Corporations, and "rugged individuals" (more like "ragged individuals") then we should know which of the three groups is going to get the short end of the stick, or the large end shoved up their butts.
Winter here now.14 to 15 degrees Celsius here most days.😬
In 8 years here, I don’t think I have ever seen the temperature get below 78° F. (26 C) EVERYDAY.
“If they are a baptized Catholic they are still a Catholic, just not an active and practicing Catholic.”
So the baptism affects their dna?
“If they are a baptized Catholic they are still a Catholic, just not an active and practicing Catholic.”
So the baptism affects their dna?
It’s called the Wuhan immersion…..
Haha.
Too bad it didn’t work out that way.
You say that an awful lot. I wonder if you realize what you are admitting.
You are essentially admitting that you have no organic connection with the ancient and "original" chrstianity but are, like an archeologist or paleontologist, trying to scientifically reconstruct the long lost one true religion by referring to evidence. What if you have made a mistake? What if you have added a bone from some other animal to the neck of a giant lizard (theoretically, as I reject evolution altogether)?
First of all, any "one true religion" that fell so totally that it has to be reconstructed scientifically centuries later in this manner was never "true" to begin with.
Secondly, the first chrstians had no "acts through revelation" to consult. They had no "new testament," and even if they did they would be too expensive for everyone to own one (Zondervan and Thomas Nelson not having been around back then). Until it was written down and canonized, every single uniquely chrstian doctrine was extra-Biblical, even if only temporarily. This also shows the absurdity of the often-made claim that "the apostles themselves could only teach in accordance with ['old testament'] scripture." If that were true, no "new testament" book would have ever been written! Oh, and the scripture that the Bereans searched was also the "old testament."
Thirdly, as I often point out, you are pretending that Roman Catholicism is the only ancient form of chrstianity to develop into "baptized heathenism," and it was all because of Constantine. The Armenian church became the official established church in Armenia twelve years before Constantine legalized chrstianity. They aren't (and weren't) scripture-only Protestants. What about the Ethiopians? Did Constantine introduce "baptized heathenism" to Ethiopia? Despite its long subservience to the Coptic Church of Egypt, the Ethiopian Church has always been fairly isolated and idiosyncratic. Do you really think that every Ethiopian chrstian was a "born from above, scripture only" chrstian until 313 when Constantine snapped his fingers, magically transforming all those ancient Southern Baptists into monks??? It's a matter of historical record that what we now call monasticism began in Egypt before Constantine came along, though doubtless you will deny this for dogmatic reasons. What about the Syrians, who are ethnoculturally the closest to the Jews of ancient Israel? They were never Protestants (or proto-Protestants).
The most damning refutation of this naive belief in an "original" born again, "scripture only" chrstianity is the chrstians of Kerala on the southwest coast of India. They were supposedly converted by Thomas in the year 52 and for hundreds of years were geographically cut off from other chrstians. When they were first discovered in 1499 or 1599 this "pristine" apostolic chrstianity was not Protestant--it was Nestorian. The Nestorian church was never under the authority of the Roman Empire and had declared itself independent from the other churches at a fairly early date. So Constantine never had anything to do with them. They are similar to Protestants in only three ways: they do not use images, they don't have monks (for historical and not dogmatic reasons as they had monks at first), and they do not call Mary the "mother of g*d" (the only ancient church that doesn't do so). Other than that they have the priesthood, "the holy sacrifice," the sacraments, the set liturgical prayers, the liturgical calendar full of holidays and feast days, etc. Do you honestly believe that Constantine ruled over southeastern India? Or how about Chinese Turkestan, to which the Nestorian church once reached?
When one sees that every single ancient chrstian tradition is part of this and no traces of an "ancient Protestant church" have ever been found. Add to this that the "baptized heathens" Constantine initially made peace with were the same people who had been persecuted and in hiding, and that after Constantine there was another brief period of persecution during which they had to go hiding again, the claim that there is some sort of "trail of blood" tracing born-again Protestantism to the original chrstians is shown to be a total fantasy, cooked up because born-again Protestant theology (about which I'll not go into at this time) insists that insists that it simply must have due to its unique doctrines on sin and in how G-d deals with it.
I do not write all this to defend the ancient churches. Many many points and critiques born-again Protestantism makes against them are spot-on, though the extrapolation that the original chrstians relied only on canonized scripture is an unnecessary exaggeration. Nor do I claim that these ancient churches are identical to the original "first century chrstians." The whole story of chrstianity doesn't hold water in that there is indeed some sort of discontinuity between the original Jewish chrstians (who were probably Torah observant) and the chrstianity that developed historically (my belief is that the new religion declared the original religion heretical, and therefore is not in any sense a continuation of it).
I point this out to show that ultimately chrstianity has no leg to stand on, and there was already a true scriptural religion going all the way back to Mt. Sinai who's written scripture was governed by strict laws to ensure it would be identical to the Original Scroll.
Unfortunately you reject Judaism for the same reason you reject historical chrstianity--namely your beliefs about sin and how G-d deals with it. I know this won't make a dent in your thinking, but perhaps someone else will read it and think about it.
One day I really must explicate this unique soteriology of born-again Protestantism, but I've been at the keyboard a long time. G-d willing, I will do that some time in the future.
The mark of the Baptism is there FOREVER!
** man made rules and regulations**
That speaks to man-made religions — not the Catholic Church which Jesus Christ founded on the apostles, the first Bishops.
How old is your church? Was it founded by a man or by Jesus Christ, fully divine and fully human — the second person of the Trinity?
He's accurate enough to be a LDS Living Prophet®!
The Protestants, on the other hand, began splitting up almost immediately after the beginning of the Reformation.
I guess this makes a difference; somehow.
Care to elaborate?
Genesis 2: 8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food;**** the tree of life**** also in the midst of the garden, and the ***tree of knowledge of good and evil.****
Does the Hebrew elaborate on who these symbolic ‘trees’ literally are???
And What is the Hebrew word for the slithering Serpent, judged to death by the time Isaiah and Ezekiel took to pen.
Genesis 3:
14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
*****15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.****
16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Some people actually know what the Heavenly Father gave Moses to pen and it sure was NOT in an apple orchard ... course another prophet had some things to say about ‘naughty’ figs ... Wonder why Christ commanded ... ‘Learn the parable of the ‘fig’ tree...
Non-cult members would disagree
"The easiest choice seems to be to call yourself a believer and emphasize your "personal relationship with Christ". This way you never have to worry about dealing with heresy. After all you know exactly which Bible is the best. You know exactly how to properly read those parts that have confounded theologians for millennia. You know exactly which doctrines, not specifically called out in the Bible, are ones you have to believe. Yes you can join up with fellowships, but you'll make sure to have one foot out the door in case the members fall short of your perfect understanding of God's Will."
No, that is only the reaction of a few, if too many, whose real issue is rejection of authority, while most leave in search of more spiritually fulfilling communities along with and within certain doctrinal boundaries, and which is the primary reasons Catholic converts to evangelical faith say they became the latter. I myself have been part of a devout RC family, to being a weekly Mass-going Catholic on my own after becoming manifestly born again thru an evangelical type (Biblical) conversion, during which I served as a CCD teacher and lector for some time, and later was discipled in a fundamental, doctrine-intensive Baptist church for some years back, but prefer Pentecostal-type ministry (but not most of modern music), and thus refer to myself as a "Bapticostal," and find evangelical fellowship with those who seek to do evangelical ministry of like basic faith. somewhat akin to political indepedane
"Humans are social people. We can be dazzled by the individualism that we claim makes America special, but we also need to be members of larger organizations and fight to keep those organizations from rotting out."
Well, I am wary of larger organizations but btwn that and individualistic survivalists there is community with those of humble heart and good will.
Well, glory to God for what is good, though "older" at 69 may be true, yet wiser is not necessarily so! Thank God for mercy.
Meaning my posts most often need more proof reading and refinements, but typing is taking even more time than ever, yet God can multiply the seed sown, praise the Lord.
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