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 ...
Can't the same be said for the Roman Catholic? I have been in a lot of conversations over my time here and I have seen RC's do the same thing you complain about not only with the Scriptures, but with Tradition as well.
I asked this above but let me ask it again, will Divine Tradition or the Magisterium ever contradict the written Word of God?
They have faith in a Christ of their own making, which is the same as saying, they have faith in no Christ at all, but just in the figments of their own minds.
Every sin consists formally in aversion from God, as stated above. Hence the more a sin severs man from God, the graver it is. Now man is more than ever separated from God by unbelief, because he has not even true knowledge of God: and by false knowledge of God, man does not approach Him, but is severed from Him. Nor is it possible for one who has a false opinion of God, to know Him in any way at all, because the object of his opinion is not God. Therefore it is clear that the sin of unbelief is greater than any sin that occurs in the perversion of morals. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 10, Art. 3)
"You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing anymore but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men." (Matthew 5.13)
Of what use would it be for Catholics to become just another bunch of mushy "it doesn't really matter what a man believes so long as he is good and honest in public" types?
To soothe your consciences?
I just downloaded it. Excellent!
Are you going to see the extended releases of the first two films in the theater? I see they're doing a marathon showing of all three movies on 12/16!
Will you post them as you find them or will you post all after you complete you reading?
And those who say "there once was when he was not", and "before he was begotten he was not", and that he came to be from things that were not, or from another hypostasis, or substance, affirming that the Son of God is subject to change or alteration, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematises. (Condemnations of the Council of Nicea)
"The word of the Lord of the 318 Fathers at Nicea stands forever." (St. Athanasius)
"Rejoic[e] then in these successes and in the common peace and harmony and in the cutting off of all heresy ... Pray for us all that our decisions may remain secure through Almighty God and our Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, to whom is the glory for ever and ever. Amen." (The Letter of the Council of Nicea to the Egpytians)
Rather, you believe it does.
because God has instituted it to be sole possessor of the truth and no other.
Rather, you believe that God has done so.
I assent to this on faith and assert it to be what God asks me to do to believe in Him.
Yes, you've got it.
If you begin with the premise that those who do not believe as you do are liars, you will get nowhere. When you begin to see that others believe what they believe on faith, and assert it to be what they believe God asks of them... then you can begin dialogue.
We may quarrel over the disciplinary needs of the Church, but we are all brothers in the one true faith.
I asked this above but let me ask it again, will Divine Tradition or the Magisterium ever contradict the written Word of God?
Nope.
"But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed. It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God's most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls." (Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution "Dei Verbum")
Yes, exactly. I was wondering if someone would pick up on that.
I am a Baptist retired Army Chaplain, and I have never heard of Baptists who believe in the separation of Church and State. Can you cite documentation for this? I would be truly interested.
How uncharitable! ;-)
If it is in a city near me I will. I haven't been able to find a list of cities yet though.
Terry, does this sound at all familiar?
Maybe the Anglicans. But no evangelical believes this, nor any Calvinist, nor, for that matter, any traditional (as opposed to typical) Anglican.
It's simply dishonest.
I don't have anything offhand. I've always been taught that it was because of the Baptists, i.e. Roger Williams, that the Separation Clause made it into the Constitution.
Let me ping GW who probably has much more at hand about this subject than I do.
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