defconw,
You must remember what you are saying. You are saying that in order to spare feelings and be more comfortable, you are willing to rebel instead of letting God to use you in a way that He has commanded you to be used.
Feelings? Frustration? What are those compared to salvation? Do you think I like calling Catholics apostate and Mormons heretics? Don’t you think it would be easier to sit by watching FReepers stew in their heresy? I could be making friends and being nice, but to do so is against Scripture and my new heart.
I guess if you think feelings and frustration are more important than your fellow man, that to love your neighbor it is better that he go to hell than feel uncomfortable, then I would have to question your Christianity.
(Of course that is where some Catholics can come up and say, well the Pope said a virtuous man outside the faith can still come to Jesus without having been preached of the Gospel, so it is not necessary to do any preaching, which is humanistic bunk. As if virtue itself can be a replacement for faith...Thanks Vatican II!)
No Catholics have said that, at least none that I'm aware of on this board.
We don't have the authority to countermand the Savior's clear command anyway. If it were "not necessary to do any preaching" in any context, he would have said so.
You don't have to "spare feelings," but I would appreciate if you wouldn't distort what we say into something else. Twisting someone's words is not an act of love, and if everything you're doing is not done in love*, then you aren't acting in the Holy Spirit.
*"Love" == "a willed decision to seek the authentic good of another person". Not a warm-and-fuzzy.
Before Vatican II we thought that God might, in ways not known to us, reach into the soul of someone outside the Faith and bring him into the Kingdom. It's not (and if you'd read the deep and centuries old background of the statements before attacking them you'd know this) a matter of virtue substituting for faith. It's a matter of God's grace being beyond beyond our comprehension. I'm not saying this to persuade but to clarify what it is you are disagreeing with.
And this touches on the matter of being urgent in season and out of season and all that. I would say that the way some people on one side of the Protestant/Catholic divide approach others would be more accurately characterized as shoving people deeper into what is thought to be heretical stew than actually lifting them out.
If a politician begins his approach to me by saying something I know to be untrue, he makes it unlikely that I will give him enough time and trust to hear anything more he has to say. If a financial institution lies intentionally to gain my trust, and I know it's lying, you can bet I won't be giving them discretion over my money.
And if someone comes to me proclaiming what he says is ultimate truth and starts by saying something that is easily seen to be imprecise if not downright false, should I listen? He has been unfaithful in little in the very act of asking me to trust him in much!
I don't mean this to be offensive but to explain the frustration we're talking about. How can someone know our thinking is unchristian if he doesn't know what we think? How can we believe he knows our thinking is unchristian if he misrepresents our thinking and persistently shows that he doesn't understand it as we understand it.
If someone begins a protracted argument or just delivers an offhand negative remark about the Catholic Church and then says a lot of things about us that aren't true, I think we're going to conclude that he didn't study our htinking and determine we were wrong but rather he decided we are wrong and then went looking through our documents to find confirmation of the decision he'd already made. I'm not saying Don't evangelize, if you think or feel you are called to. I am saying it helps to know your market and to avoid starting our pitch by offending your target with inaccuracies.
Thank you Ottofire. I’m afraid most of our Catholic and Mormon freepers think we hate them, when it’s just the opposite.
Determining just who is the apostate or heretic is not hard in my mind. Oh and I do believe that you enjoy calling Catholics and Mormons names. For the record. I do believe that.