Posted on 01/05/2010 9:46:47 PM PST by the_conscience
I just witnessed a couple of Orthodox posters get kicked off a "Catholic Caucus" thread. I thought, despite their differences, they had a mutual understanding that each sect was considered "Catholic". Are not the Orthodox considered Catholic? Why do the Romanists get to monopolize the term "Catholic"?
I consider myself to be Catholic being a part of the universal church of Christ. Why should one sect be able to use a universal concept to identify themselves in a caucus thread while other Christian denominations need to use specific qualifiers to identify themselves in a caucus thread?
You will get no argument from me that each is a significant part or component of salvation. Nor will I argue that it is beyond God's power to grant salvation for any reason. However, our shared faith has a history of covenants between God and man. These covenants were a conditional agreement or promise that required specific actions of man in order for God to keep the promise. These actions are our works of faith or the manifestation of the "solas" in our thoughts and in our words, in what we have done and what we have failed to do. That the prior Covenants were broken is not in question. I do not believe that God would unilaterally break a promise, and know that man has a history of doing just that.
The New and Everlasting Covenant is not a pact between God and mankind as were the prior Covenants. It is a conditional pact between God and each of us individually requiring works of faith and sacraments. If we keep out pact we gain Salvation, if we break it Salvation will be lost.
Wow, so you live under the Law. How's that working for you?
So man was not made in Gods image?.. God is a spirit, so that scripture is not talking about our bodies
Amen!
A new heart
I always want go lead though ... I am still a work in progress ...”grin”
Sure you can, you'll just be more tired or chastened when you finally end up doing what you were going to do in the beginning.
“Really? Is that what all Protestants believe? That you will be judged by your good works and that will determine where you go?”
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No. The sentence says that we are justified (saved to eternal life) but works determine rewards in heaven.
BUMP!!!!
That's the point...You're reading the bible wrong...And you come up with a lot of false junk by reading it wrong...
What the non-Catholics here do is to show you, with the actual scripture where and why you are wrong...
We back up our doctrines with scripture...You back up your doctrines with your religious tradition...
And since you don't, and can't back yourself up with scripture, why try to do it??? You take a verse like Matt. 16:18 and create a religion out of it, when in every instance in the entire books of the scriptures, the rock is Jesus Christ...
But back to your point, Yes, Jesus' flesh was in a sinful state...Jesus did not lie, if you look at it that way...
1Pe 1:24 For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:
Rom 8:3 For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:
ALL flesh since Adam is corrupt...It has a proclivity to sin and it gets old and dies...Jesus started out as a baby, grew to a young man and would have died of old age had He not first been murdered...
Rom 8:4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
And Jesus was the Chief walker after the Spirit...
Rom 13:14 But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.
And that's exactly what Jesus did...Jesus says he was tempted in every way we are...That means with money, lust, power and every thing else under the sun...Jesus' flesh was obviously under the same curse as everyone else's...
So yes, in that sense, Jesus was correct when He said ALL have sinned...
Hebrews 7:22 By so much was Jesus made a surety of a better testament.
23And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death:
24But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood.
25Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.
26For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens;
27Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this he did once, when he offered up himself.
28For the law maketh men high priests which have infirmity; but the word of the oath, which was since the law, maketh the Son, who is consecrated for evermore.
So far so good, but I still have plenty of time to blow it.....(why do you think it is called judgment?
Believe me, if not Christ-— you will blow it
Well, it's not so very peculiar, this tradition thing, IMHO.
It is important to remember that it's a wee bit preposterous to presume that from very early on ALL the literate Catholics were scoundrels intent upon ignoring what they found in Scripture. They read the same words about tradition that we read. Two or three of them must have considered whether and how the paradosis of the Church fell under the condemnation that seems to be so indisputably clear to the Reformers.
It's always fun to be the guy or on the team of guys who just doped up what all those idiots couldn't or didn't see. I get suspicious of myself when I start thinking that way.
We're talking about people like Hillary of Poitiers (his memorial today) who were banished for defending the doctrine of the Trinity. YEAH they weren't blameless. But they weren't entirely doing this for kicks. Bishop was often a job with a short life expectancy. It wasn't all that comfortable, quiet, or healthy for Thomas a Becket. People got impoverished or killed for defending Catholicism as well as for attacking it.
One of the ways the Church got her secular power was beleaguered emperors didn't know whom else to ask to run stuff. There wasn't the great crowd of educated, thoughtful upper-middle class people upon whom emperors could draw for administrators, so they kind of hoped against hope that Christian leaders would be virtuous, sacrificial, and responsible in doing what they did.
NOW it seems preposterous for religious leaders to have secular power. But (at least until recently) we have taken for granted something like the Pax Romana, the general peace and order which made life something more than a brief, painful struggle for survival for the great mass of the people.
And maybe it seems sophistical or tendentious, but I think some of these guys really felt a responsibility to protect and to explain the Gospel. And it wasn't just back then but into the recent centuries where Dominicans and others were lining up to go to, say, Vietnam and China to be killed.
So there is a, um, tradition, sealed with martyrdom, of acting like Catholics. And this happened even when a lot of Catholics were acting like jerks. I only talk about Dominicans, 'cause it's what I know, but one reason the order was originally a mendicant and itinerant order was because Dominic (like Francis) was scandalized at the luxurious life of many clerics. But he happily distinguished between individual clerical corruption and the gospel he labored to protect and to spread.
So HE saw something in the paradosis/tradition itself which was worth preserving despite the things which would not only scandalize but maybe depress the heck out of us. And So did many others. At the same time that there are all the things that (mostly anti-Christian or at least anti papist conventicle) history books highlight about the Church, there are not only universities, hospitals, and friars arguing for the rights of non-Christian aborigines, but there are people who leave behind amazing records of love for Jesus and for the poor.
SURE those writings exhibit the things that non-Catholics disagree with. But what needs to be considered is that the same people who are writing beautifully about what it means that in Jesus God loves us with a human heart (hence the "Sacred Heart of Jesus" devotion.) It is at least as possible that the 'edifice' which preserved all the little paranoid bureaucrats and self-aggrandizing prelates CONTRIBUTED to the transmission of the Gospel as hindered it.
Yes there were and are dreadful failures. All Christians get the Adversary's special attention. What else should we expect than that, though he cannot prevail he would continue to attack and to try to peel off as many individuals as he can?
Wonderful things, incredible things, by humble individuals like little Margaret of Castello as well as by the folks who get into the history books have been sheltered and nurtured by the edifice and informed by the magicsterical. The wonder is that in the midst of this pile of manure, still wonderful roses bloomed.
Few dispute the manure. It's hard to understand how many fail to see the relationship between the manure and the roses.
Does "Do this in memory of me" ring a bell?
My works alone are not enough to gain Salvation but they are enough to lose t.
Or are you going to argue, there's nothing in the bible that says we can't?
Are you like the Roman, "almost persuaded?"
2 Timothy 1:12
For this reason I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day
The primary role of the Church is to educate and to nurture. That was the role God gave to the apostles and early bishops of the Church. That role it performed by our clergy.
Mormons want to convince us that an angel of light appeared and gave then "another gospel" when Paul says that we are not to believe it.
Catholics want us to believe that a priest who in effect becomes "another Christ" offers up a daily sacrifice,when Christ put an end to sacrifice, and when the bible tells us many false Christs will come, and when they tell you "lo, here is Christ and there is Christ, believe them not."
We know that we can't trust men to tell us the truth and we know we can't trust the devil, so we trust the written Word. that's where we're coming from.
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