Posted on 01/05/2010 9:46:47 PM PST by the_conscience
It's not only that the Romanists make the most outrageous claims it's also the fact that the Romanists on this forum dominate the discussion in shrill terms.
I suggested to another Romanists that since Free Republic is ostensibly a forum dedicated to the preservation of the ideals of the founding of this country that those religions from which those ideals originally sprang should in some way be recognized in a way that acknowledges those contributions and CONSERVES that acknowledgment.
I'm happy that through Vatican II the Roman Church has moved towards our position. I'm also fine with Romanists being able to speak freely about their beliefs because that is one of the fundamental ideals. I received a freepmail from one of your co-religionists asking that I lock this thread because people were quitting Free Republic because of it. Since I'm not an Administrator on this site I have no authority to lock a thread and why would I want to quench free speech because some people can't accept the free speech of others in opposition to the ideal?
Frankly, if we want to conserve the ideals of the founding of this country then we better have a pretty good idea where those ideals came from and the basis of those ideals.
The Trinity was always there in the Old Testament. God's Spirit moving across the water. The man who told Joshua that He was the commander of God's army and Joshua worshiped(Joshua 5). The fiery furnance. The passing of God before Moses. On and on. All the Jews ever did was focus on God is one. They never went any further in their understanding of the nature of God for whatever reason (probably there was, at one time, geniune fear of God). The only thing the New Testament people did with the Trinity was to look at the Old Testament (and Christ) and come to a more fuller understanding of the nature of God based upon the scriptures.
We derivative critters can be no more than conduits which means an in-flow AND an out-flow are required.
Yes. He is the vine. We are the branches. We cannot do any good works without Him. And He promises that we will bear fruit to varying degrees.
This is one of the most blessed and powerful truths. If we throw ten bucks into an offering plate, it is simply because God has put it upon our hearts to put that ten bucks in. If someone gives a hundred bucks, it is simply because God laid it upon their heart. Perhaps their faith is stronger. Perhaps they have another reason-pure or not. It all comes from God. Whatever good works we achieve is not because we have grown in our faith but because He is gracious to allow us to do His good works.
If you understand this truth, then you'll understand that it doesn't matter what you do or who you are, God loves you just the way you are. And He may have you lead hundreds to His Son or you may hide in a cave like the 7,000 men who hid from Ahab (and who God said He hid). It doesn't matter. God is in control to bring about our good works which He has promised us-whatever they are. We just don't see them most of the time.
Just previous, Paul writes, “21 And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him”
Reconciliation came (now reconciled, past tense) “by his death”...not by any suffering of the church now. And his goal is “to present [us] holy and blameless and above reproach before him”.
But there is a lot of suffering that goes on, both to bring us to the image of Christ, which our flesh fights tooth and nail & painfully, and to bring the gospel to all who need to hear it - a part of the work of redemption.
So Paul is not saying his suffering buys anyone redemption or salvation, but that he is participating as one with Christ in bringing all the gospel and being conformed to Christ.
As you put it, and I’m certain Paul would strongly agree, “But I AM nuts for the life of Christ living in the redeemed so that they say, with Paul, now I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.”
As Paul goes on to say, “For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”
The death of Christ was sufficient for the forgiveness of all our sins. But salvation also refers to our sanctification (calling out from a sinful world), and that involves pain from us and others. And the proclaiming of the gospel likewise, as you point out, “And what Christ does on earth is suffer and die a lot.”
So we agree on a lot, and disagree on some. But our justification is past tense, while our sanctification is ongoing.
To add Col 1:29 - “For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”
“I toil”, yet it is “with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”
And please forgive me if I point out that it isn’t God only working, but Paul toiling, yet all the power for the toil comes from God. God includes us in his work.
bttt
But then your expressed belief system is that every Catholic only asks Mary for intercession...However, that has been proven time and again not to be accurate...
Some Catholics pray to Mary directly for salvation, grace, peace and any number of things that are only available from God...
I am as indignant as anyone when someone from another confession pretends to know that a Catholic praying to Mary is having idolatrous thoughts.
The problem here is who gets to define what idolatrous thoughts and worship are...You guys say it is your 'church' that gets to define...
Apparently there was a lot of confusion in your religion and different names had to be adapted to separate what even you had trouble with...Dulia, Hyper Dulia, SuperDuper Dulia, etc...For us on the outside, it's pretty simple...We worship God...We don't venerate, anyone...
And then we find that God did a pretty good job of defining what worship is in the scriptures...Want an idol, statue, figurine of some being in heaven??? Don't make one...Got an idol, statue, figurine of someone in heaven??? Don't bow down to it...In fact, destroy all of them...Pretty simple...
So regardless of whether you guys think or don't think you are worshiping Mary, or a statue of her, to us on the outside it looks evil...To us it is a sin...And what does God say about evil???
1Th 5:22 Abstain from all appearance of evil.
What it comes down to is that you guys have been conditioned to believe that whatever it is you are doing with Mary and your Saints is not worship and it is not sin...God says otherwise...
I am trying to argue for a model which does not attribute anything to an individual human which he does not receive from Christ. I am holding on to the highly "unstable" or "dynamic" images of Pauline soteriology and ecclesiology. The reason we resort to images is that we know that sheer literal language ain't gonna convey what needs to be conveyed.
Our individuality as reborn members of Christ is not entirely lost. We are members, not "tissue." But our life, our purpose, is not of our selves but is exogenous, because we are members of the body, directed and given meaning, context, purpose, and effectiveness by the head.
But we are not "tissue"; we are members, and we have SOME self-distinction and appropriate self-consciousness, though it's not at all what we thought it was before we died.
Privileged to be grafted into the body, we are priviliged to suffer with our Head.
(sooner or later that old "eternity" problem is raised again, darn it.)
I guess we could say that "works must be done." They will not be your works or my works, but God working in us both to will and to do.
Bear with me here. I'm not trying to argue. I'm trying to present a scheme, a structure (which I happen to believe) but which takes seriously the language of death, rebirth, grafting, flesh, spirit, body, members. and so forth.
At the same time, because our Lord became a man and not a super-man, and because man is the thinking and willing animal (who since the Fall, left to his own devices thinks and wills poorly and perversely) I trying to give a "Scheme" or "model" that also includes a (dead and reborn) will -- otherwise it seems that we have to give up not our sins but our very humanity to be saved.
One image for our salvation, and a fine image it is, is that it is an entirely free ride, and all we must do is hand over the reins and sit back.
But our experience and our nature argue against that's being a totally adequate image.
-- OH, here's a wonderful thing:
I found in my years as a shepherd, that often a ewe had a harder time giving birth to a dead lamb than to a live. Though the lamb could hardly be said to have chosen to be born, his muscle tone and tension, his natural reactions to the stresses and pressures of birth amounted to what you might call an "involuntary cooperation."
That's gotta be a useful image.
Anyway I'm suggesting that in the member body imagery and in the diversity of gifts/one spirit language, one thing going on is the preservation of SOME kind of individuality or willing and purposing and doing while at the same time presenting the originating and controlling "work" of Christ operating in us through the Spirit.
It is by grace only that we are allowed and enable to share in the work of Christ. If it were any other way it would be a perversion of the gospel and an underestimation of the gravity of our Sin which requires both the death of the Redeemer and our own death (IN our Redeemer) to be dealt with.
Remember, I'm not going for a sale here, I'm trying to express a concept.
I'm also going to bed soon.
Now, does faith have anything to do with it? -- of course it does. It is by faith that we do those works. That is the context that you point out in so many words. Have faith, and you will do the works. But faith without works is dead -- it will not save anyone (James 2:24-26, Mt 7:21). Nowhere, except in Luther's fraudulent and now forgotten translation, does any part of the Romans teach that man is saved by faith alone. It teaches that faith is very important, that faith leads to salvation even of worst sinners, that without Christ we'd all be in Hell, all that. But it does not teach any different than that faith or not faith, the judgement is rendered by our works, to all.
the qualities Peter mention are NOT our justification, but develop after we are justified
Efter we are justified we are in heaven or hell, to late to develop anything. The good works that St. Peter enumerates are the path of spiritual growth whereby we cooperate with grace and free ourselves from sin, and the result is that our calling and election become sure. Nowhere does he say that the process stops after some imaginary rebirth, -- "born again" for the apostolic Church always has meant one thing, baptism, and surely a baptised baby has not made his calling an election sure. He simply has been born again, in Christ.
dicey to derive doctrine from parables
Careful. You are practicing hermeneutics again.... If it was good enough for Christ to teach me from parables, it is good enough for me to learn from parables. Besides since when Matthew 25:31ff a parable? It is simply a detailed account what Christ intends to do when He comes back. Where, do you think, St. Paul got his Romans 2:6-10, an AWANA class?
whoever does not believe is condemned already
Of course. Deny Christ's resurrection, laugh at our Lady, laugh at the Eucharist, and you are condemned already. It is easy to not beleive, that is the wide path. But what is it to believe? Come to my Church, I'll show you adult men on their knees, nuns and monks who gave up natural pleasures for something they cannot see or touch, overworked priests that look like the happiest people on earth, 20 centuries of civilization, bones of martyrs in the altar, lives transformed by grace, pew-wide families, hour long lines to the confessional... That is Faith, capital F.
8For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works
Eph. 2 is often misunderstood as to what the "it" is. The "it" is not salvation -- "it" has grammatically to refer to a noun, -- "it" is grace. Which is exactly Catholic teaching: you are saved by grace alone, through both faith and works, as the next verse makes sure, -- the verse you omit to make the erroneous point. Here is the entire passage:
8 For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God; 9 Not of works, that no man may glory. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus in good works, which God hath prepared that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2)
We should walk in them.
There are many passages in the Scripture that call for greater faith. There are many passages in the Scripture that call for sincere works of love. That is because works cannot be separated from faith. Luther tried, see where it got his followers: mega churches, prosperity "gospel", massive loss of faith, pathetic disunity on foundational doctrine. The Reformation has to salvage what has not been lost and return to the Church, fast.
[2 Tim. 2:10] teaches we need the prayers of the righteous ones to be saved?
That passage, and most directly, Col 1:24 teaches that the suffering of a saint can be salvific to others. It does not use the word "merit" but the implication is that the suffering done in imitation of Christ transfers to others, like a treasure accumulated by one can be made available to someone else.
None of us knows as much about the other guys position as we think we do.
to try to lay Washington's or Jefferson's thought at the feet of Calvin is to try no mean thing. To ignore some of the work on the natural rights of man done in the 16th century by Dominicans and others is to ignore a critical aspect of the development of political thought in the 2nd millennium. We were advocating for the rights of individuals and of unchristian nations before the Reformation had its wheels up.
Everyone knows, or thinks he knows, the dark side of the Inquisition. What is less known is that many (regrettably not all) of the Inquisitors were known for scrupulous attention to due process, as that was understood in those days.
As for "shrill", I am not competent to judge or comment.
OK. That is as bland as Barnes (if that were the whole idea, St. Paul is a bad writer) but unobjectionable.
Papists, however, gather from this that the saints are redeemers, because they shed their blood for the expiation of sins.
Really? We also, I take it, offer the Eucharist in the name of saints?
For someone who wasted his life "reforming" the Church, Calvin could get out more.
My view of this verse without consulting a commentary is that while Paul realized his 'thorn in the flesh' was something God refused to remedy, and that Paul had to work his hind end off to make ends meet, and got beaten constantly, and spent a lot of time in jail, that his suffering was nothing compared to what Jesus suffered nor the glory that would follow...In fact, Jesus had been quite merciful to Paul, in Paul's view and Paul saw his cup as half full as opposed to half empty...
And the suffering Paul encounterd for the church's sake was counted for joy...
TILT!
Wrong. Not me. Nobody conditioned me that way. Nobody. My entire experience growing up in and out of Church was against this idea. I was "conditioned" as you were, to think of it as wrong, superstitious, and idolatrous. NOBODY in my seminary was open to any kind of Marian devotion.
Then I began to read the Bible and to think.
MarySecretary...So good to hear from you...I knew you’d get back eventually...
I never met one. When I do, I'll tell them how it really works.
who gets to define what idolatrous thoughts and worship are
Why, the thinker of the thought and the worshipper of the worship get to do that.
Don't bow down to it
To Her. See above.
Which Christ???
There is but one Christ.
Remove that, and you have no Bible left. Hermeneutics, dontcha know.
lol
Where did I say anything about a zero sum game?
I’m happy to acknowledge the work of ancient Romanists towards natural rights. But there was a Reformation, ya know, and out of that Reformation grew what we know as natural rights. The Romanists finally came along kicking and screaming (and many still are).
I’m not convinced that the chest-thumping of Romanists is going to conserve those natural rights.
No no no no.
YOU say God says otherwise.
And yet again you are wrong.
I’m happy to acknowledge the work of ancient Romanists towards natural rights.
Ancient? I'm dealing with the 16th century. That would be the century of the Reformation! Luther was "ancient"? That would be when de las Casas and other Catholics were developing the theory of natural rights and international law.
But there was a Reformation, ya know, and out of that Reformation grew what we know as natural rights. The Romanists finally came along kicking and screaming (and many still are).
Okay. You guys have your historical myths. Remember, I'm a convert. I used to believe that stuff too. Then I began to do research. Now I know better.
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