Who are the Catholics: The Orthodox or The Romanists, or both?

Me

[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?

[Cronos]

Xzins: So, while the "actions" of "God's creatures" do not "determine" His decisions, that does not mean those actions are not "involved" in the deliberation that precedes His decisions. Foreknowledge prior to creation, and then creating anyway, IS IS IS, predestining.

Dr e: Ain't. Ain't. Ain't.


Ah, civilised debate....

First, there is no period of "deliberation" by God because that would imply there is a moment when God does not know the future, does not ordain the future and/or does not have control of the future. All of which denies the omniscience of God.

So, now an OPCer can put limitations on God's senses?

Second, the doctrine of election is grounded by the reality of total depravity (total inability.) Unless and until God regenerates the fallen sinner from a natural man to a spiritual man that man will remain lost and condemned in his sins.

Yes, total depravity -- that what God created is somehow "not good", belying the very start of The Bible.

Therefore it's God who determines which fallen men, all equally fallen and lost in trespass, will receive His grace through saving faith in his Son's work on the cross.

Yeah, when Christ said He came for all men, that was a lie, He came only for the elite

How can a man who is born to a comfortable, American family with love and education and opportunity possibly say he has the same "free will choice to believe" as the wretchedly poor, unloved orphan who's raised on the streets and steals to feed himself?

And yet, the chances are that the poor,unloved orphan will be more Christian than the rich Westerner. The poor orphan chooses to accept God's grace. Unless you fall for the Calvinist trap that because you have riches, you are in God's favor -- and if you don't have riches, you don't have God's favor.

[Cronos]

Real malefactors have been banned

Oh, do you remember the folks who believed that Anglo-Saxons are descended from the Lost Tribes and are actually the chosen Race?

[Dr. Eckleburg]

the organisation is approved by the Vatican, there is no indication that the BLOGsite was/is approved by the Vatican.

It's a Legion of Mary blog! The excerpts gave the position of the Legion of Mary.

Good grief. The pattern of debate by Roman Catholics around here borders on nonsense. It's a jabberwocky defense of their faith.

[blue-duncan]

“Wooooooo....I can feel the faith rushing to my face.”

Wrong direction. It’s the leg, the leg. Do you feel the tingle? Me thinks thou art in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.

But fear not nor dispair, it just so happens we have just received a shipment of atomizers filled with holy water from the Dead Sea area, passed and certified by an experienced much forgiven televangelist who personally garauntees that a spritser here and there will lift you out of the slough of despond. And it comes to you for only a cash or debit card contribution of $250.00 American.

If you send in your contribution in the next 30 minutes we will include an originally autographed copy of Bobby Bare’s single:

“Drop-kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life”

Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life,
End over end, neither left nor to right.
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights
Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.

Make me, Oh make me, Lord, more than I am
Make me a part of your master game plan
Free of the earthly tempestions below
I’ve got the will, Lord, if you’ve got the toe.

Bring on the brothers who’ve gone on before
Bring on the sisters who’ve knocked on your door.
Bring on those sainted relations of mine
And put them up front in the offensive

[Dr. Eckleburg]

Lol. I'm confident my good and dear FRiend and mentor, xzins, understood the "ain't."

I have no control over the mindless reactions of those looking for nettles where only roses bloom. .

[Cronos]

That is why men are responsible for their actions

Quite correct -- we are not puppets and cannot blame God for the evils that we ourselves do.

Good scripture : For we read in Acts, “1 At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of what was known as the Italian Cohort, 2 a devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms generously to the people, and prayed continually to God. 3 About the ninth hour of the day he saw clearly in a vision an angel of God come in and say to him, “Cornelius.” 4And he stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?” And he said to him, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God. 5And now send men to Joppa and bring one Simon who is called Peter.” In verse 44, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they were born again.

Another well explained sentence: Further, Ephesians 1 says, “13In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, 14who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.”

The order:

1) When you heard the word of truth (the gospel)
2) and believed in him,
3) you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.


as Paul says, all have received enough to be without excuse on Judgment Day.

[Cronos]

A Christian can do evil things but a unsaved person will never do things that pleases God.

But the latter just doesn't hold true in reality -- there are unsaved hindus, muslims, mormons etc. who do good things like helping the poor, saving people, etc.

[Cronos]

And why again does the Orthodox (supposedly, but not really) Presbyterian Cult (the OPC) worship Machen and Calvin? And ditto for the OPC sub-splits; the APC, BPC, EPC-Reformed etc.

[Cronos]

If you had read the website you would see that the Roman Catholics who run the site said the Legion of Mary is approved by the Vatican.

That doesn't translate that
1.the BLOGsite and / or anything on the BLOGsite is approved by the Legion of Mary (it's a blog -- is it the official blog of the Legion of Mary --NO. Is it a blog of a member or is it a non-member putting up this blog?
2. the BLOGsite and / or anything on the BLOGsite is approved by the Vatican -- the Vatican doesn't go around approving every BLOG that a person who says they are Catholic posts. unlike the OPC with it's 200 members, The Church has a few more....

[Dr. Eckleburg]

just lazy (criticising the CCC but then admitting to never reading it or worse saying "too many pages -- who has the time"

Interesting. Where was this said? By whom?

Most likely it was said by a Roman Catholic about the Bible.

[Cronos]

Oooh, ooh, there's a BLOG there that shows that OPCers are really just Mormons but worship MAchen. That Blog says that it's part of the OPC, so it MUST be correct. If you doubt the veracity of the BLOGGers, your argument is with them, not me.

I can just post links to every BLOG I see and state it is an official OPC/Baptist/Presbyterian/Reformed etc. and if a OPCer/Baptist/Prebyterian/Reformed has a problem with my statement copied from the BLOG by a supposedly OPC/Baptist/... person, then that is your problem with the blogger, take it up with the Blogger, not me, I'm just posting links from crystallinks etc.

[Mad Dawg]

First of all it a gross sophistry to say that a website is approved by the Vatican when thee approval was given not to the site but to the group the produced it.

Second, it displays three sorts of lack of imagination.

The first is the garden variety paranoid fantasy that the Vatican is like the KGB building in spy novels, that hordes of priests and brothers and the occasional nun of ambiguous sexuality spend their days tapping phone calls, opening letters, perusing websites, journals, and periodicals and waiting to pounce on the least tinge of heterodoxy. This is all the more remarkable because there is ample evidence to the contrary. When the Bishop Of Richmond walked too near the line for a decade or more, he was read the riot act at his ad limina (q.v. - it would do you all good to spend a little more time in real research) and the Pope told him that he would have an assistant bishop appointed by the Pope to keep an eye on him. And Hunthausen of Seattle (I think) was spoken to severely. These guys were bishops, for crying out loud. Lay people are REALLY going to have to go way over the edge to get some attention. and the word "efficiency" is only used in proximity to the word "Vatican" by people reaching for laughs.

Second, most modern Protestants (and a lot of Catholics) think that all governments and quasi governments are run on the model of English common law and the nation state and the ones that aren't are run like the KGB in a Tom Clancy novel. The idea of a law promulgated as an ideal to which there will be numerous exceptions ("indults," etc.) and a state-like entity consisting of a relationship of loyalties among vast numbers of unique entities each with its own chaotic array of ill-defined but jealously maintained "rights and privileges" proper only to itself is almost inconceivable to them.

To tell you the truth it shocks me almost as much as it amuses me. A bunch of people say, "Oh yes, Father; oh NO, Father; CERTainly, Father," and then go off and do what they were going to do anyway. "'Father' wants a utility shed for the lawn mower," a lady on the parish council told me, "But I don't think we have the money."

What are you going to do?" I asked.

"Well, he made the mistake of asking me to look for a good prefab shed or a good proposal, so I'm just not going to do it. I won't report; he'll forget about it; we'll save the money." THAT's how things are done -- or aren't done, to be more precise.

And third is the lack of appreciation of an entirely different church culture, manner of speaking, and vocabulary. It is, strangely, the Protestants who seem to get all legalistic about about the words one uses. Sometimes it seems that for Protestants ALL language is academic theological language, and little is left over for enthusiasm and praise. One feels one ought to pray thus: Dear Lord of All, (provided that this lordship not be understood to conflict in any but the most important ways with our duty to the state, and provided further that we only address Jesus Christ as Lord in the sense used in Scripture and do not in anyway mean to compromise the obedient submission of the Son to the Father in the Holy Trinity) we pray (recognizing as hereinafter provided that this prayer was predestined by your ineffable Will and that nothing we undertake on our own can in anyway influence decisions you made before the worlds began) ...

In that atmosphere, were I to assent for one minute to play the game, I could never sing the "O lumen," to Dominic, since I would have to include so many footnotes about how even though I am calling Dominic the light of the Church I know that Jesus is the light from light from which all other light proceeds..... By the time I got done assuring theological immunity from any charge of heresy I would have lost the enthusiasm and probably forgotten what I was going to say.

I call Mary my life, sweetness, and hope, and I know what I mean. If you don't, that's a shame, but I'm not going to stop singing love songs to Mary or Dominic on that account.

A lot of what we say is simply not undertaken with the principle goal of avoiding scandalizing the Protestants or anybody else who enters the conversation with a firm intent to be scandalized. A lot is not strictly speaking theological.

I was at a lecture last night which was resolutely, intently, and demandingly theological, and toward the end there was some language which might have been mistaken for devotional, about the miracle of faith which is not the Divine gift of a disposition or act of mind and will but the Divine gift of the Divine self.

A lot of the cultural differences have to do with a different way of looking at things. I am always uncomfortable with calling anything Mary does "dispensing," since to me that calls to mind the image of a candy-bar or gum-ball machine. But the Incarnation took place in and through Mary and her assent, compelled by Calvin or urged by Arminius or in some other way, was involved. And with or without blood and pain, she brought forth the savior.

To us every pregnancy and birth is a miracle. Every mother, child and husband is an instance of the operation of Divine grace. This family, this pregnancy and birth are certainly not LESS important than any other, and as I thank my wife for 'giving' me my daughter, I will eagerly thank Mary for 'giving' me Christ and all that came with him. On my daughter's birthday my gratitude to my wife is renewed. Shall I be less grateful to the mother of my Savior? Was there really a pregnancy or birth, was there ever a mother more worthy of gratitude?

So, yes, I get that the Marian dogma are a problem. I get that the intercession of the Saints is a problem. But this goes on at such length, there is such savoring of the problem, such an enthusiastic waving of the doctrinal bloody shirt that the whole thing begins to seem a little artificial, a little game-like to me after the umpteenth time I've seen the same gleeful horror at our detestable enormities.

And that leads me to close this rant with this thought: I started by saying there was a lack of imagination. But I wonder if it is more an unwillingness to exercise the imagination, since understanding would be so much less thrilling than the delicious revulsion so often indulged in at the expense not only of comity but of reason.

[Cronos]

It's a BLOG by someone who says they're from Legion of Mary. The excerpts gave what the BLOG states the position of the Legion of Mary.

And the main point was that the original inference was that the BLOG was an OFFICIAL VAtican website -- which is a false statement. The BLOG is not an official Catholic website, the BLOG is NOT an official Vatican website, the BLOG is not an official Legion of Mary webpage (the official Legio Mariae webpage is http://www.legion-of-mary.ie/)

your BLOG link is none of these -- there is no proof that it is even an official blog of the Legion, nor whether it is by a real Legion of Mary member.

So, tomorrow, we create a blog about the OPC and state that it eats eggs sunny side up, does that make it official OPC doctrine (of course, since you have only about 200 cult members in the OPC, it's easy to keep track)?

[Cronos]

I have no control over the mindless reactions of those looking for nettles where only roses bloom. .

So does the OPC teach one to make roses bloom? OPC the cult now run by Sathya Sai Baba -- successor to "Saint/demi-god" Machen?

[Cronos]

Interesting. Where was this said? By whom?

Keep up, read posts 6000 to 6800. The Orthodox Presbyterian Cult may not mandate reading every line of the Gospel of Machen, but you would find posts in the forum if you go through the tons of posts here. Does the Gospel of Machen, as read in the OPC, superseed The Bible or is it just like the Moroni chronicles?

And how long have you been part of this OPC, if I might ask? It is a century old cult, but still small (except if you consider the Sathya Sai Baba angle).

[MarkBsnr]

If you have received saving faith in Christ, Mark, guess what? You're part of the elect; the children of God; the sheep of Jesus Christ.

Therein lies much of our difference, Dr. E. Who make up the elect? Is it the elect of Calvin wherein the select few are chosen and the rest are hell bound reprobates? Or is it the elect of the real interpretation of Paul (since you guys do not admit Jesus) wherein:

1 Timothy 2: 3 This is good and pleasing to God our savior, 4 who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God. There is also one mediator between God and the human race, Christ Jesus, himself human, 6 who gave himself as ransom for all.

God wills everyone to be saved and Jesus gave Himself as ransom for all men. Who are the elect?

1 Corinthians 15: 20 7 8 But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 9 For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead came also through a human being. 22 For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, 23 but each one in proper order: Christ the firstfruits; then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ;

All shall be brought to life in Christ.

Romans 5: 12 4 Therefore, just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned 5 -- 13 for up to the time of the law, sin was in the world, though sin is not accounted when there is no law. 14 But death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin after the pattern of the trespass of Adam, who is the type of the one who was to come. 15 But the gift is not like the transgression. For if by that one person's transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one person Jesus Christ overflow for the many. 16 And the gift is not like the result of the one person's sinning. For after one sin there was the judgment that brought condemnation; but the gift, after many transgressions, brought acquittal. 17 For if, by the transgression of one person, death came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one person Jesus Christ. 18 In conclusion, just as through one transgression condemnation came upon all, so through one righteous act acquittal and life came to all.

Acquittal and life comes to all. Your elect, Dr. E. is all of mankind. Not a gaggle of third grade girls.

God came for all men, not a self serving elite.

[MarkBsnr]

“They are not wrong to look and attempt to understand; they are wrong to prefer Scripture over God.”

False division. Scripture is God-breathed. The breath of God reveals who God is and gives us life. God’s revelation isn’t limited to scripture...my horses and dogs regularly are used by God to teach me things - but scripture is trustworthy and authoritative.

Agreed that Scripture is trustworthy (to the extent that the Church has preserved it) and authoritative (to the extent that the Church has preserved it). What does God-breathed mean to you? Where does Scripture claim sola?

“Faith is the important operant here, not the Scriptures. Salvation is through faith, not through Scriptures.”

You miss the point. No one claims I can toss a bible at someone and make them a Christian...unless he is elect, but that is another argument. ;>)

But the scriptures reveal Christ, unless one hardens one’s heart to God.

There are many that claim that the Scriptures are God. Maybe not in so many words, but they claim that Scriptures are the WORD. John 1 makes it clear who the WORD is. The revelation of Christ is in Scriptures. There simply is not sola. And there certainly is not a substitution of the Bible for Jesus.

“I have had conversation with many here who believe that seal means a ziplock baggie in which the individual is placed on their limo ride.” I haven’t thought much about it. A seal authenticates the document as coming from someone, so I assume it means the Holy Spirit is our proof that it is God working in us. You can have intellectual assent to the Gospel, but if there is no fruit of the Spirit, then it is just intellectual - no salvation from that.

In our baptism, we were sealed by the Holy Spirit. A mark was put upon us - the promise of adoption into the True Vine. That is all. We can tear that seal off and discard it.

I could speculate more, but if I don’t know my own mind, why bother you with a dribble of incoherent thought? And of course, I’ve NEVER done that to you before.... ;>)

Dribblings from your incoherent mind, sir, are worth significantly more than cogent thought from many of the participants on this thread. No smiley.

[wmfights]

And unless one understands God opens up the hearts and mind, a Christian will go crazy trying to figure out what they're doing wrong. I know from personal experience.

I think everyone who has tried to witness has encountered this phenomenon. My point being that unless God gives them ears to hear, as simple as salvation is, they just won't believe. If we have the free will to decide who would say no to salvation when all you have to do is believe.

[MarkBsnr]

Then Warfield has the brains of a doorknob.

You're just saying that because it's true. "Further, Warfield is saying that not only CAN God control us, but that He WILL control us. For if He did not, if He gave away what He alone made, then He could no longer claim that this is HIS universe, etc."

OK, maybe Warfield doesn't even have the brains of a doorknob. If God doesn't force us to do every little thing, if God doesn't force us to commit sin, then God is not in control of the universe?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Exactly. The Reformed God is one that mandates every thing and every happening and every action and every inaction. Pretty small and insecure God - reminds me of the pagan gods like Jupiter and Odin. Jealous and either in control like an all powerful child or killing with reckless abandon.

Last but not least, gratuitous horse picture...Mia thinking she's the Boss:

Like the headgear. Are you really sleepriding or are you just bored by Calvinist claptrap?

[Natural Law]

"The Muslims are excluded because the God of Abraham IS our Trinitarian God and includes Christ. "I and the Father are one"."

Sorry, but your logic falls short. For you to be right there would have to be more than one god, which there isn't. Muslims are called to Salvation by God and a plan for Salvation exists for them. Muslims worship and describe God incorrectly but they cannot escape being salvageable children of God.