GASP! Certainly no Christian church would do such a thing! < sarc>
Let's not forget trotting out REAL dead bodies, praying to them and lighting candles, etc...
Posted on 08/27/2010 11:45:13 AM PDT by Hank Kerchief
Good question. A worship space, whether intentionally or unintentionally, tells something about the builders' belief. If the builders truly value what they believe, then they will build accordingly.
There are exceptions to this, of course, in situations where the faithful are under persecution, but otherwise, a bare structure and/or ugly structure built for worship will convey the message, whether intentional or not, that the believers do not value what they believe.
Well, that's one (erroneous) way of interpreting that.
There is NO WHERE in Iscool’s post where he condemned Mary to hell as you say in your post. And then your posts go on to speak of downfalls, diversity of opinion, and a narrow gate???
REMEMBER, JESUS IS THE WAY - the ONLY WAY.
Jesus answered, “I am THE WAY and THE TRUTH and THE LIFE. NO ONE comes to the Father EXCEPT through ME.
Do you see Mary mentioned in that Scripture? Now YOU think, again, about the NARROW GATE and HEAR and OBEY.
The body of Christ is not held together by church affiliation...it is held together by the Holy Spirit with Christ as the ruling Head over the body of believers.
ABSOLUTELY INDEED.
Keep YOUR focus on the things of God! Wandering from it produces posts like yours.
Me thinks this is an attempt to get off the Book and material posted about Mary...a very sensitive issue to catholics as we have seen. Change the subject works well.
You are correct about this taking a turn long ago...religious threads of this length always take on a life of there own and expected...that’s what makes them interesting as well.
The Holy Roman Empire had nothing to do with the Roman Empire.Charlemagne was a Frankish (French) king who was crowned emperor by the pope because the pope wanted to have some control over him. For the next thousand years the relationship between the various popes and emperors (they were actually the Austrian and Spanish royal family) ranged from luke-warm to downright hostile.
In the 8th century, after the rise of Islam had weakened the Byzantine Empire and the Lombards had renewed their pressure in Italy, the popes finally sought support from the Frankish rulers of the West and received (754) from the Frankish king Pepin The Short the Italian territory later known as the Papal States. With the crowning (800) by Leo III of Charlemagne, first of the Carolingian emperors, the papacy also gained his protection.
By the late 9th century, however, the Carolingian empire had disintegrated, the imperial government in Italy was powerless, and the bishopric of Rome had fallen under the domination of the nobles. Once again the papacy sought aid from the north, and in 962, Pope John XII crowned the German king Otto I emperor. In this revived empire, soon called the Holy Roman Empire, the pope theoretically was the spiritual head, and the emperor the temporal head. The relationship between temporal and spiritual authority, however, was to be a continuing arena of contention. Initially, the emperors were dominant and the papacy stagnated. The emperors themselves, however, set the papacy on the road to recovery. In 1046, Emperor Henry III deposed three rival claimants to the papal office and proceeded to appoint, in turn, three successors. With the appointment in 1049 of Leo IX, the third of these, the movement of church reform, which had been gathering momentum in Burgundy and Lorraine, finally came to Rome. It found there in Leo and in a series of distinguished successors the type of unified central leadership it had previously lacked.
With the papacy taking the leadership in reform, the second great phase in the process of its rise to prominence began, one that extended from the mid 11th to the mid 13th century. It was distinguished, first, by Gregory VII's bold attack after 1075 on the traditional practices whereby the emperor had controlled appointments to the higher church offices, an attack that spawned the protracted civil and ecclesiastical strife in Germany and Italy known as the Investiture Controversy. It was distinguished, second, by Urban II's launching in 1095 of the Crusades, which, in an attempt to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim domination, marshaled under papal leadership the aggressive energies of the European nobility. Both these efforts, although ultimately unsuccessful, greatly enhanced papal prestige in the 12th and 13th centuries. Such powerful popes as Alexander III (r. 1159 - 81), Innocent III (r. 1198 - 1216), Gregory IX (r. 1227 - 41), and Innocent IV (r. 1243 - 54) wielded a primacy over the church that attempted to vindicate a jurisdictional supremacy over emperors and kings in temporal and spiritual affairs.
This last attempt proved to be abortive. If Innocent IV triumphed over Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, a mere half - century later Boniface VIII (r. 1294 - 1303) fell victim to the hostility of the French king Philip IV. In 1309, Pope Clement V left Rome and took up residence in Avignon, the beginning of the so - called Babylonian Captivity (1309 - 78), during which all the popes were French, lived in Avignon, and were subject to French influence, until Gregory XI returned the papacy to Rome. During the 13th and 14th centuries, therefore, papal authority over the universal church was exercised increasingly at the sufferance of national rulers and local princes of Europe. This fact became dismally clear during the Great Schism of the West (1378 - 1418), when two, and later three, rival claimants disputed for the papal office, dividing the church into rival "obediences"; in their desperate attempts to win support, the claimants opened the way to the exploitation of ecclesiastical resources for dynastic and political ends.
http://mb-soft.com/believe/txc/papacy.htm
GASP! Certainly no Christian church would do such a thing! < sarc>
Let's not forget trotting out REAL dead bodies, praying to them and lighting candles, etc...
THANKS.
I AGREE ENTIRELY.
Yes..they do rather look like museums...but they have been so for centuries...it is their look.
And they think of me as
STRANGE!
Obviously only GOD knows the quality of our worship does it really matter what others think? The example Jesus gave us of the guy who came to worship and made a big show of it and the poor widow comes to mind.
This isn't limited to any particular church, but it seems the more expansive the church the more the statement being made is "look at us". There are pastors who have held services in fields before men have gone into battle I suspect those in attendance were pretty sincere in their worship.
Fascinating, but the Papal States had NOTHING to do with the Holy Roman Empire.
Separation of church and State condemned!!
Separation of Church and state is a LEFTIST belief. It is the notion that Christian moral teachings should have no place in the making of laws -- it has NOTHING to do with the Catholic Church trying to force Catholicism on non-Catholics. If you don't believe me, look around at what groups are always pushing "separation of Church and state" as their slogan.
Nevertheless, thank you for demonstrating my point. Above all all this thread has shown how otherwise intelligent people can be so easily duped by the evil agenda of an atheist so long as that atheist uses a few catch phrases.
How do you know? Can you peer into their hearts?
There are pastors who have held services in fields before men have gone into battle I suspect those in attendance were pretty sincere in their worship.
That is a legitimate point and would fall into the exceptions I mentioned earlier.
Why does grandiose, beautiful, architecture have anything to do with real worship?
To tell you the truth, I don't really know. The pictures I posted were not of a Catholic church, in fact they were of a Protestant church. More to the point, they are of the church where the Reformation began. Many of those depicted in the statues, stained glass and paintings are not even people from Scripture, they are Protestants.
What’s that picture about?
The old Roman empire and the Roman Catholic church share a lot of similarities. The Vatican is built on some ancient site of pagan worship, there’s obelisks there today, which is a pagan symbol of some of Baal’s anatomy-——the empire when it conquered other nations left all of its practices in place, and demanded tribute or taxes. Catholicism is the same— leave all the idols,re-name them Christian ones, or make up new ones— send money
Too true.
I commend you on your ability to cut and paste, but the fact still remains that the relationship between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire was often quite violent (Google “Sack of Rome”).
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