Posted on 09/30/2003 9:32:47 AM PDT by Fifthmark
Protestantism is founded on many lies: (1) That Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ did not create a visible, hierarchical Church. (2) That there is no authority given by Our Lord to the Pope and his bishops and priests to govern and to sanctify the faithful. (3) That each believer has an immediate and personal relationship with the Savior as soon as he makes a profession of faith on his lips and in his heart, therefore being perpetually justified before God. (4) Having been justified by faith alone, a believer has no need of an intermediary from a non-existent hierarchical priesthood to forgive him his sins. He is forgiven by God immediately when he asks forgiveness. (5) This state of justification is not earned by good works. While good works are laudable, especially to help unbelievers convert, they do not impute unto salvation. Salvation is the result of the profession of faith that justifies the sinner. (6) That grace is merely, in the words of Martin Luther, the snowflakes that cover up the "dungheap" that is man. (7) That there is only one source of Divine Revelation, Sacred Scripture. (8) That each individual is his own interpreter of Sacred Scripture. (9) That there is a strict separation of Church and State. Princes, to draw from Luther himself, may be Christians but it is not as a Christian that they ought to rule. These lies have permutated in thousands of different directions. However, they have sewn the fabric of the modern state and popular culture for nearly 500 years (I shudder to think how the Vatican is going to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther's posting his 95 theses on the church doors in Wittenberg fourteen years from now).
Here below are explanations of these lies and their multifaceted implications for the world in which we live:
(1-2) The contention that Our Lord did not create a visible, hierarchical church vitiates the need for a hierarchical, sacerdotal priesthood for the administration of the sacraments. It is a rejection of the entirety of the history of Christianity prior to the Sixteenth Century. It is a denial of the lesson taught us by Our Lord by means of His submission to His own creatures, Saint Joseph and the Blessed Mother, in the Holy Family of Nazareth that each of us is to live our entire lives under authority, starting with the authority of the Vicar of Christ and those bishops who are in full communion with him. The rejection of the visible, hierarchical church is founded on the prideful belief that we are able to govern ourselves without being directed by anyone else on earth. This contention would lead in due course to the rejection of any and all religious belief as necessary for individuals and for societies. Luther and Calvin paved the way for Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution that followed so closely the latter's deification of man.
(3-6) Baptism is merely symbolic of the Christian's desire to be associated with the Savior in the amorphous body known as the Church. What is determinative of the believer's relationship with Christ is his profession of faith. As the believer remains a reprobate sinner, all he can do is to seek forgiveness by confessing his sins privately to God. This gives the Protestant of the Lutheran strain the presumptuous sense that there is almost nothing he can do to lose his salvation once he has made his profession of faith in the Lord Jesus. There is thus no belief that a person can scale the heights of personal sanctity by means of sanctifying grace. It is impossible, as Luther projected from his own unwillingness to cooperate with sanctifying grace to overcome his battles with lust, for the believer to be anything other than a dungheap. Thus a Protestant can sin freely without for once considering that he has killed the life of sanctifying grace in his soul, thereby darkening his intellect and weakening the will and inclining himself all the more to sin-and all the more a vessel of disorder and injustice in the larger life of society.
(7-8) The rejection of a visible, hierarchical Church and the rejection of Apostolic Tradition as a source of Divine Revelation protected by that Church leads in both instances to theological relativism. Without an authoritative guide to interpret Divine Revelation, including Sacred Scripture, individual believers can come to mutually contradictory conclusions about the meaning of passages, the precise thing that has given rise to literally thousands of Protestant sects. And if a believer can reduce the Bible, which he believes is the sole source of Divine Revelation, to the level of individual interpretation, then there is nothing to prevent anyone from doing the same with all written documents, including the documents of a nation's founding. If the plain words of Scripture can be deconstructed of their meaning, it is easy to do so, say, with the words of a governmental constitution. Theological relativism paved the way for moral relativism. Moral relativism paved the way for the triumph of positivism and deconstructionism as normative in the realm of theology and that of law and popular culture.
(9) The overthrow of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ as it was exercised by His true Church in the Middle Ages by the Protestant concept of the separation of Church and State is what gave rise to royal absolutism in Europe in the immediate aftermath of Luther's handiwork. Indeed, as I have noted any number of times before, it is arguably the case that the conditions that bred resentment on the part of colonists in English America prior to 1776 might never have developed if England had remained a Catholic nation. The monarchy would have been subject in the Eighteenth Century to same constraints as it had in the Tenth or Eleventh Centuries, namely, that kings and queens would have continued to understand that the Church reserved unto herself the right to interpose herself in the event that rulers had done things-or proposed to do things-that were contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law and/or were injurious of the cause of the sanctification and salvation of the souls of their subjects. The overthrow of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ deposited power first of all in the hands of monarchs eager to be rid of the "interference" of the Church and ultimately in the hands of whoever happened to hold the reins of governmental power in the modern "democratic" state. Despotism has been the result in both cases
(Excerpt) Read more at seattlecatholic.com ...
She is dead. And that is not the point of Christianity. Do you not know scripture? Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: If men don't die, then Paul must have been smoking whacky weed or something. I suppose If they don't die, then the pope has a thing or two coming from an Apostle Paul that didn't turn his office over before death. The things you guys do to abuse language is unconscienable.
We most certainly do die. We may be raised later; but scripture says flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God. If you think you're body is going to heaven as it is right now, you have another thing coming. Once to die and then the judgement. Oh death, where is thy sting. Death still comes, it just has no athority over our spirits. So you can halt the symantic gymnastics. Oh wait, lets have a practical test of this, how many Catholic named saints would there be if Christians didn't bodily die - Zero. Oh, wait, thaaaaaat kind of death. Well...
The language of Ecclesiastes eliminates this by prfacing it's remarks on the dead by saying that righteous or not, the dead share the same fate. It is speaking of the Bodily dead. Not the spiritually dead. In effect, the passage says 'it is an evil among men that all share a common fate, that whether spiritually dead or spiritually alive, both will die in the flesh.' Knit pick that with your semantics. Once dead, they can have nothing more to do with the goings on here on earth. Go to, read. The citation is Ecclesiastes 9. Read the whole thing. Especially the warnings to do what you will for God while you live because he'll accept them now; but, when you die, you can't do anything more.. Ope what a giveaway.
How can you be "born apostate"? No one is born anything but human.
when actually we leave for the sake of our eternal salvation
That is a peculiar term for spending eternity with Satan shouting out to God "I will NEVER obey you!"
I'll be honest and say that I think Scott Hahn is a poster boy for catholicism, I don't know where the revenues for his books go (conversion may have been a smart move for him in more ways than one), I don't know his motives, and if he's had any negative experiences with his conversion, he isn't going to tell us about it. Other than that, he seems like an ok sort of person.
Sometimes I just put things on the back burner and they come together later.
What I'm wrestling with now are the church's historical attitudes about women. I started reading "Imitation of Christ" by a Kempis several years ago and when I got through a few pages, he said something negative about women and I closed the book and don't ever want to look at it again. That opened a real can of worms for me when I started learning about what some of the other male saints said about women. I always knew men pulled power trips over women but never saw it in the church before, probably because I knew my place and just accepted things the way they were. It hurt, if you care, and I don't understand how they went from accepting women in the early to church (but not quite as equals even then) to how they are changed later. Sadly, I suspect those attitudes linger today as evidenced by the way men argue and discuss on the net.
I got smacked down here, maybe I deserved it, maybe I didn't, so I went looking for a support group for leaving the church. Then I got interested in a thread about altar girls somewhere else and asked a question. Nobody wanted to look at it so I had to find the answer myself in the Catholic Encyclopedia. I learned long ago that if I wanted to know the answer to a question, try to find the source and figure it out for myself and not to listen to people.
Regarding the altar children, I raised the point that they aren't necessary for mass, so I that set me up for a real bruising by another chauvinistic catholic male.
I don't want to be a radical feminist, but I fear I have become a feminist and look at the church through their eyes. I wish they had been more loving towards women. That's why I don't want to listen to men trying to teach me, because of their bias and if I have the least suspicion they look down or talk down to me, I don't want anything to do with them.
So that's where things are. I have the unfortunate gift or curse of being able to see points of view from all sides. That's why I sympathize with protestants and catholics both when their beliefs are attacked.
Presently speaking, you don't have a clue about history.
Now the Church is called Catholic because it is throughout the world from one end of the earth to the other. And since the word Church is applied to different things ... the Creed states for the sake of security the article, "And in One Holy Catholic Church"; that you may avoid their (the heretics') wretched services and ever remain in the Holy Catholic Church in which you were regenerated. And if you are staying in any city, do not ask simply where the Lord's house is (for the sects of the profane also attempt to call their own places houses of the Lord,), nor merely where the Church is, but where is the Catholic Church. (St. Cyril of Jerusalem AD 340)
Under the apostles, you will say, no one was called Catholic. Granted! But, when, after the apostles, heresies had arisen and were attempting, under various names, to tear apart and divide the dove and the queen of God, did not the apostolic people require a special name to distinguish the unity of the people who were uncorrupted. ... Suppose this very day I entered a large city. When I had met Marcionites, Apollinarians, etc., who call themselves Christians, by what name should I know the congregation of my own people unless it were named Catholic? .... Christian is my name, but Catholic is my surname. The former gives me a name; the latter distinguishes me ... Wherefore our people, then named Catholic, are separated by this appellation from the heretical sects. (St. Pacian AD 370)
Hmmm ... AD 340, AD 370. Emperor Theodosius - didn't he come to power in AD 379? How could he give a proper name to the Church if it already clearly had one?
When ya'll gain some credibility, you can come on back!
Presently speaking, you don't have a clue about history.
Now the Church is called Catholic because it is throughout the world from one end of the earth to the other. And since the word Church is applied to different things ... the Creed states for the sake of security the article, "And in One Holy Catholic Church"; that you may avoid their (the heretics') wretched services and ever remain in the Holy Catholic Church in which you were regenerated. And if you are staying in any city, do not ask simply where the Lord's house is (for the sects of the profane also attempt to call their own places houses of the Lord,), nor merely where the Church is, but where is the Catholic Church. (St. Cyril of Jerusalem AD 340)
Under the apostles, you will say, no one was called Catholic. Granted! But, when, after the apostles, heresies had arisen and were attempting, under various names, to tear apart and divide the dove and the queen of God, did not the apostolic people require a special name to distinguish the unity of the people who were uncorrupted. ... Suppose this very day I entered a large city. When I had met Marcionites, Apollinarians, etc., who call themselves Christians, by what name should I know the congregation of my own people unless it were named Catholic? .... Christian is my name, but Catholic is my surname. The former gives me a name; the latter distinguishes me ... Wherefore our people, then named Catholic, are separated by this appellation from the heretical sects. (St. Pacian AD 370)
Hmmm ... AD 340, AD 370. Emperor Theodosius - didn't he come to power in AD 379? How could he give a proper name to the Church if it already clearly had one?
When y'all gain some credibility, you can come on back!
If half the people posting here today weren't reactionary and illogical in their approach to so-called "Christianity," perhaps the peace of Christ might truly be with them.
Well, one can certainly detect the peace of Christ in you. In fact, your Christlikeness is breathtaking.
Recall that the sin of Satan was also pride.
Aaiiiggghhh! Blasphemy! Disgusting, craven Nestorian heresy! Is this what you truely believe, each and every one of you?
It was not the sinless man Jesus who saved us, but the Son of God in the flesh. No one but the Son of God could make a perfect sacrifice to God the Father. If a perfect man (or woman) could save us, than every aborted child is a savior!
Aaaaiiiiggghhhh! How can you be so clueless?
10. The divine scripture says Christ became "the high priest and apostle of our confession"; he offered himself to God the Father in an odour of sweetness for our sake. If anyone, therefore, says that it was not the very Word from God who became our high priest and apostle, when he became flesh and a man like us, but as it were another who was separate from him, in particular a man from a woman, or if anyone says that he offered the sacrifice also for himself and not rather for us alone (for he who knew no sin needed no offering), let him be anathema.12. If anyone does not confess that the Word of God suffered in the flesh and was crucified in the flesh and tasted death in the flesh and became the first born of the dead, although as God he is life and life-giving, let him be anathema. (Council of Ephesus, 12 Anathemas)
10. If anyone does not confess his belief that our lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified in his human flesh, is truly God and the Lord of glory and one of the members of the holy Trinity: let him be anathema. (2nd Council of Constaninople, 14 Anathemas)
Mary like all of fallen mankind need a savior
Jesus saved her by the Immaculate Conception. He made her sinless. She didn't do it on her own.
The Son of God, being one of the Holy Trinity, was able to save souls prior to His incarnation as Jesus the Christ. You know, men like Abraham, Daniel, Noah, etc.
The fruit of Catholicism - billions of souls in heaven, a worldwide network of charitable institutions and houses of education, the preservation of learning through the ages, etc.
The fruit of Calvinism - poverty, materialism, cut-throat competition, wars, errors, blasphemies, selfishness, millions in hell, etc.
Christ didn't put an end to dying and that's what would have to happen for anything in Ecclesiastes 9 to be set aside. Christ didn't die to save your body, he died to save your soul. Pay attention in class. Paul said flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom. Any of this sinking in. Like I said, your semantics can't get past it. It says that the righteous and the evil man both die - period. It doesn't bicker about where they go after dying, it merely states a fact - they all die. It then states that once dead, they can't have anything more to do with the goings on here. Even Jesus didn't violate that. He rose again before he was seen on earth again - meaning he was bodily living. Bodily living. I know you have to play the verbal games to decieve; but, then, in so doing, you give away who your master is. You will die. If you are Christian, your spirit and soul may live on; but your body will die. And Hebrews proclaims as much. A new testament document, sir.
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