I just first want to say that I really appreciate you taking the time to post this to me. I have prayerfully sat with it to find as much as I can from it. Thank you very much for providing this information and insight.
“We are charged by God to make the best use of His gifts…Otherwise we will be thrown into the outer darkness.”
“After she has received God’s Grace, those works are what she will be Judged on.”
“Jesus does not say that one may sit on one’s backside and find salvation. He says that these will go off to eternal punishment.”
“I do not know what God has tasked any man to do.” “The Holy Spirit guides.”
“If people would listen to that quiet voice, then they would have at least a clue.”
“All I believe is that if one does not follow one’s tasks, then God will Judge us accordingly.”
“[If not for] serving your fellow man… what is your purpose here on earth?”
What I see here is that God gives you an unknown number of unknown tasks to do, and if you do not do them He will damn you, even though you are a Christian. To know if you have done all the tasks you are to do you listen to the Holy Spirit.
“...Peter was the first among equals of the Apostles.”
“Interesting, since Jesus is talking specifically to Peter and not the other Apostles.”
“The laying on of hands to choose the next office holders occurs throughout Acts and the Epistles.”
I can understand now where the Peter facination came from.
“...those who do not understand the Gospel of Christ are obviously not Christian.”
“It is only for the clergy who have been instructed.”
“The hubris of personal interpretation gets in the way of serving God.”
What I see here is that agreeing with the clergy, who have been instructed by previous clergy, is required by God or He will damn you.
“If you claim that God dictated the Bible, then the Bible itself calls you wrong. Luke and Revelation are most explicit. The letters from the bishops to their flocks are also not God-breathed. They are letters from men to men.”
What I see here is that the Words of Christ are the only God-breathed part of the Bible. Everything else is uninspired.
“Do you think of Jesus as a mere man?”
Christ is a mere man, and He is also God.
***I just first want to say that I really appreciate you taking the time to post this to me. I have prayerfully sat with it to find as much as I can from it. Thank you very much for providing this information and insight.***
I do my best in my own clumsy way; I have irritated as many people as I have express gratitude. It is not my intent to offend; yet I sometimes do so.
***What I see here is that God gives you an unknown number of unknown tasks to do, and if you do not do them He will damn you, even though you are a Christian. To know if you have done all the tasks you are to do you listen to the Holy Spirit.***
Well, let’s take that point for point.
God gives us tasks, just as He did the stewards, sure. But these are not the only things that we must do. I believe that God gives us opportunities all around us. Let us say that on a fine Saturday, you may have an opportunity to serve in the local soup kitchen, you may also have an opportunity to drive some old folks to a state park for an outing, and you may have the opportunity to cut your church’s grass and trim the bushes.
I don’t believe that it necessarily matters which one you do as long as you do it with joy in your heart, rather than huddling on a barstool in the local speakeasy until closing time instead. 1 Corinithians 13:
13
5 So faith, hope, charity remain, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
You may ask yourself how charitable are you? That little monologue on helping others does not lend itself to providing evidence of Christian charity.
***“...Peter was the first among equals of the Apostles.”
“Interesting, since Jesus is talking specifically to Peter and not the other Apostles.”
“The laying on of hands to choose the next office holders occurs throughout Acts and the Epistles.”
I can understand now where the Peter facination came from.***
Read through the Gospels and Acts and separate out all the references to Peter and you may be surprised at the prominence and the special attention paid to him by Jesus and the deference by the other Apostles.
***“...those who do not understand the Gospel of Christ are obviously not Christian.”
“It is only for the clergy who have been instructed.”
“The hubris of personal interpretation gets in the way of serving God.”
What I see here is that agreeing with the clergy, who have been instructed by previous clergy, is required by God or He will damn you.***
We do not believe that God damns any man; we believe that He confirms their decision. With that said, we have 2000 years of watching people drift away from Christ through personal interpretations of their own. We have the words of Paul that say that the Church (not individual men, not Scripture) is the foundation and pillar of truth. We have Christ that instructs men to go to the Church. We have Acts that tells us of the eunuch that cannot understand Scripture until the Church gives that understanding to him.
The best of individual men who spurn the Church’s interpretation doom themselves. Where is Nestorius? Where is Origen? Where is Montanus? Where is Tertullian?
***“If you claim that God dictated the Bible, then the Bible itself calls you wrong. Luke and Revelation are most explicit. The letters from the bishops to their flocks are also not God-breathed. They are letters from men to men.”
What I see here is that the Words of Christ are the only God-breathed part of the Bible. Everything else is uninspired.***
Never said that. The Word of God is Jesus; the word of God is Scripture. The problem is that while God may have breathed the words, it is fallible men that have taken it down. How do you explain the four different stories of Resurrection Sunday if God dictated every word and the four Gospel writers were instruments only?
No. They were inspired to write, but inspiration means just that. Inspired or moved to do something. It does not mean transcript.
***“Do you think of Jesus as a mere man?”
Christ is a mere man, and He is also God.***
One must be very careful else one may easily turn down the wrong road. I will quote the Catechism:
III. TRUE GOD AND TRUE MAN
464 The unique and altogether singular event of the Incarnation of the Son of God does not mean that Jesus Christ is part God and part man, nor does it imply that he is the result of a confused mixture of the divine and the human. He became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man.
During the first centuries, the Church had to defend and clarify this truth of faith against the heresies that falsified it.
465 The first heresies denied not so much Christ’s divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism). From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of God’s Son “come in the flesh”.87 But already in the third century, the Church in a council at Antioch had to affirm against Paul of Samosata that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption. The first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is “begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father”, and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God “came to be from things that were not” and that he was “from another substance” than that of the Father.88
466 The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God’s Son. Opposing this heresy, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council, at Ephesus in 431, confessed “that the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became man.”89 Christ’s humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception. For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb: “Mother of God, not that the nature of the Word or his divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh.”90
467 The Monophysites affirmed that the human nature had ceased to exist as such in Christ when the divine person of God’s Son assumed it. Faced with this heresy, the fourth ecumenical council, at Chalcedon in 451, confessed:
Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; “like us in all things but sin”. He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God.91
We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis.92
468 After the Council of Chalcedon, some made of Christ’s human nature a kind of personal subject. Against them, the fifth ecumenical council, at Constantinople in 553, confessed that “there is but one hypostasis [or person], which is our Lord Jesus Christ, one of the Trinity.”93 Thus everything in Christ’s human nature is to be attributed to his divine person as its proper subject, not only his miracles but also his sufferings and even his death: “He who was crucified in the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ, is true God, Lord of glory, and one of the Holy Trinity.”94
469 The Church thus confesses that Jesus is inseparably true God and true man. He is truly the Son of God who, without ceasing to be God and Lord, became a man and our brother:
“What he was, he remained and what he was not, he assumed”, sings the Roman Liturgy.95 And the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom proclaims and sings: “O only-begotten Son and Word of God, immortal being, you who deigned for our salvation to become incarnate of the holy Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary, you who without change became man and were crucified, O Christ our God, you who by your death have crushed death, you who are one of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit, save us!”96
Jesus is not mere in any sense of the word. :)