Posted on 07/18/2010 6:04:05 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
. . . without discerning the Body of Christ . . .
. . . the preciousness of who and what fellow believers are.
Great! Now, go stir up the Catholics about something, I’m trying to get this thread to 2000 posts! (semi j/k)
Late is a relative term. How many days would our exchange require twenty / fifty / five hundred years ago? Thank you for the time and the well stated comments. I'm going to reply to a couple of points, rather than each and every one, just to keep things from getting confusing. If there's something I omit, it's not an intentional dodge on my part.
The article leaps dramatically into a point of my argument: How does one trust the documentation which forms the history of the church ....(snip Because of this, I find most of church history to be unreliable.
How indeed to we trust (know how to know what we think we know?) Epistemology make my (sparse) hair hurt, sometimes. I seem to recall some wag once saying that history is just one "damned thing" after another. And, the "victors" write a great deal of the history. As I Southron, I am aware and sensitive of that fact.
Yet, a complete dismissal of church history because of suspected and even proved frauds is throwing out the baby with the bath water. When I first came to Christ (born again in my early twenties) I really felt that I had become a part of something much larger than myself - a family, if you will and just like I am interested in what my physical ancestors did, I was interested in what my spiritual ancestors did.
Perhaps, I am unusual in wanting that connection with the past, but I don't think so. Regardless, I could easily get detailed information about church history going back for maybe five hundred years, but the previous fifteen hundred - not so much.
For many years, I squelched my desire to know until other dissatisfaction brought it back to the table. So I began to at least consider that what little I had been told could possibly be wrong.
So, did my reading of, for example, the Canons of the Third Ecumenical Council make me abandon my sola belief and enter the Orthodox Church? No. It did not. I had many things that had to be reconciled before I could do that. But, an understanding of what happened there, why it happened and how it happened spoke not only to the "mere facts" but also to the way the church was conscious of itself as a continuation of what the what Christ established on this earth and was very vigilant to guard against the perversion of the truth.
Well. I said I would address a "couple" of your points and I get stuck on one. I don't know if my personal testimony is worth much, but there it is. I may do another post on another of your worthy points at a later time - especially "solo Christianity" (my words) - very interesting
not NEAR AS BADLY FRACTURED AND MANGLED AS THE COUNTLES PERMUTATIONS OF THE RC's under the Vatican umbrella.
WOW. It’s encouraging to see a blip of discernment in the arena.
There
WON’T BE
Any distinctions between former denominational groups and labeled clusters of believers.
Folks will either be Jesus’ flock trusting in Him and His Blood covering . . . or they won’t be in the fold.
Period.
The so called Apostolic church and all its demonically concocted tyrannical monopolistic exclusionist power-mongering distinctives will be dead, dusty, blown away history existing no more.
1999
bluntly, MSM cannot report science as they do not understand it. Can you see a normal journalist (there are honorable exceptions) try to explain a singularity?
I reject the Catholic tenants in your creed...
You'll have to be more specific...I really don't know what you're referring to...
All these are man-made, unlike the Apostolic Church which was God-made, taught through CHrist's teachings to His Apostles and nurtured by the Holy Spirit. Only by God's grace has it thrived through 2000 years. In the meanwhile, all heresies outside it have died, or will die.
The Large problem is: your religion doesn't at all resemble the one the Apostles spend a great deal of time speaking about...
It is your religion that makes the claim that IT is the religion of Jesus Christ but Jesus provides us with a far different picture...
The Catholic priest/author of the article at the beginning of this thread confirms that...
You forgot to add your popes...
That's the wonderful thing about God and the Bible...
God says to 'study the scriptres', and 'rightly divide the word of truth'...God says to search the scriptures to see if these things are so...God says prove all things...
The Scriptures are the only standard...NOT the councils of your religion...We don't go to your religion to prove all things...We go to the Holy words of God...
And like some in your list, your religion doesn't pass the Biblical muster...
Jesus already told us why He didn't correct these people...One is that He know they 'already' didn't believe...And the other you'll know when you find out why Jesus spoke in parables...
And I'd say a third reason is to weed out those who refuse to come into the Kingdom of God, the Spiritual Kingdom, who will not and can not understand the Spiritual things of God...
INDEED.
QUITE SO.
PRAISE GOD FOR HIS FAITHFULNESS TO LEAD US TO HIMSELF
AND OUT OF ALL THE SYSTEMS OF MAN.
IF this is a true account, what happened to this poor priest can also be explained in this way:
He had some areas of psychological difficulty or emotional immaturity that he, his family, his seminary and his mentors did not address.
He was a priest during the crazy, anything goes ‘60s and was not properly supervised.
He was not cut out for missionary ministry.
The devil knew his weaknesses and capitalized on them and he wasn’t strong enough to resist.
Sometimes the good seed falls on fertile soil and takes root but then withers or is carried away by birds.
I sense a desperately strong need for the absolute, unmitigated assurance that he is “saved” in his writing and that indicates to me that he may not have had a strong enough faith to trust in God’s love and mercy despite his sins- or that he may have issues with the sin of pride.
Former Irish? So what is he now? Scottish?
(project: find out if bait and bite share a root.)
Now the next thing is, how do we discern. You all will say, "Scripture interprets scripture."
Here's what I say: Fine, but who gets to say which verse, passage, book interprets and which IS interpreted?
No doubt you will say, "Same old tactics," to which I will respond, "If they work, why change 'em?"
But here is SVITW, an ardent proponent of dispensationalism. Are you all dispensationalists? DO you all think, as she does, that at some point for some folks works WILL 'count' toward salvation?
Somebody isn't "rightly dividing." How can I tell who is and who isn't? seriously.
My guess is that you would say, 'That's between the individual and God," am I right?
Maybe it is, but this individual, prayerfully, at personal cost, divided the best he could and came up a Catholic. And I'd like to think that I know better what I think and believe as a Catholic than those here who insist that they know better than I.
Well, gotta go clean up for my idolatries. I hope you get what I'm asking? How do I know which of you is right?
No time to proof.
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