*****What? So now eating his flesh and blood isn’t really enough to gain eternal life after all? It’s works?****
Holy Communion unites us with Jesus and with each other and imparts to us His grace, the grace we need to be true followers of Christ. It is not just the motion/action but a true reception of Him that is an aid in our journey on the path of life. Jesus said if we abide in Him, He will abide in us and in John 6:54-59 He tells us that if we eat His flesh and drink His blood we will abide in Him and have eternal life because of Him, just as He has life because of the Father.
****We’re told that people have to be baptized to be saved and that if you’re baptized, you’re saved. Except when you’re not. ****
Baptism if the moment when we become children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ, but it is the start of our journey not the end all and be all.
****How many hoops to Catholics think they have to jump through to earn eternal life?****
What you call hoops, Catholics call the commands of Christ. And no one earns eternal life, it is freely given.
****The old Law couldn’t be kept, and what Catholics consider the new works that Jesus established cannot be kept either.****
So, no one can feed the poor, visit the sick and imprisoned, forgive others, cloth the naked, care for the widow and the orphan?
It must be a dreary Christianity which you live.
God and Jesus give us grace. Period. The Catholic idea that grace comes through physical elements has zero Scriptural support. It limits God's acting in the life of the believer.
What gives us life is the Spirit.
Baptism if the moment when we become children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ, but it is the start of our journey not the end all and be all.
So baptism saves except that it doesn't. If baptism saves people, then God is in the business of sending His children to hell if they're not good enough. What kind of father would send his own children to hell?
What you call hoops, Catholics call the commands of Christ. And no one earns eternal life, it is freely given.
Then why do Catholics teach that one must be baptized, take communion, do works of righteousness, like feeding the hungry and caring for the poor?
Why do they quote James that faith without works is dead?
If salvation is a gift freely given, it's freely given, not earned, not deserved, not nothing.
Catholics cannot have it both ways.
They cannot claim that its a gift freely given and then put conditions on it. That is not forgiveness. If there are conditions on it then it's not a gift and it's not freely given. It's earned. It's wages due for service given.
So, no one can feed the poor, visit the sick and imprisoned, forgive others, cloth the naked, care for the widow and the orphan?
The question is nonsense. It doesn't even make sense.
It must be a dreary Christianity which you live.
On the contrary, the dreary religion is what I left behind with all it's rules and regulations and do's and don't's that Catholicism imposes on its followers.
For freedom Christ has set us free. We are free to serve Him as He directs us, to do the good works that He prepared in advance for us to walk in. (Ephesians 2)
Catholics love to imply that non-Catholics don't do good works because they don't need to for salvation but that is a mischaracterization of what non-Catholics say and demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the role of works in the life of the believer.
Catholicism teaches that those works must be done as part of earning salvation. That it is done for the sake of the believer, for what he can get out of it, ie eternal life.
True believers do the works to glorify God, to share the love of Christ with a hurting, lost, and dying world, to validate their claims to faith, to minister to others with not thought of return or what they've getting out of it.
It's a totally different mindset than the one that looks at those works as something that will benefit the person doing the works.
Catholics and Protests both believe folks are saved by grace.
It appears that we differ in agreeing just what ‘grace’ means.
We Protestants tend to think that how we are KEPT differs as well.
We believe we are KEPT by grace; while Catholicism seems to require works to be KEPT.