Posted on 01/14/2012 8:23:15 PM PST by bibletruth
In the present dispensation there is only ONE true Church, which is called the Body of Christ separate and distinct from the prophesied, earthly kingdom of Christ vested in redeemed National Israel as a called-out nation or church, assembly or congregation, above all other nations.
The problem I have with many Catholics is they expend more energy in defending the Catholic Church instead of Christ.
When the Serbs engaged in their version of merry mayhem and genocide, should their bishops have abandoned them? When the US, by its policies both intentional and unintentional, condemn millions of Middle Eastern / North African Christians to serfdom or death, do you think that the Church should abandon the US? What about all the Iron Curtain countries? Let's be consistent now.
I merely said that he ministered to his congregation.
Nice dodge.
Let's hear your cries for the Church to abandon the people of Cuba and Venezuela.
Nice try at deflection, you are completely out of your league on this topic there Sport.
The rest of your post doesn't even come close to addressing what I posted to you and is off topic. Where do I mention that the Vatican should abandon anyone? It effectively abandoned the Catholics that were also murdered at Jasenovac, Stepinac was an enabler.
Don't you think the Vatican should have condemned Stepinac for allowing his Catholic flock to murder nearly a million people including fellow Catholics or are you just one of those Catholic apologist drones that refuse to provide an honest answer?
The prayer in Matt 6:9 is to God the Father in heaven, not to a confessor which is considered a sacrament in the RCC since the 7th century, simply because they want to worship the authority of their church more than faith alone in Christ alone.
Eph 5:20 also stresses this point. The prayer is to God the Father through faith in Christ, not through faith in the authority of the RCC.
Now here is some wisdom. Just as we observe those who probably at sometime are believers, but have such a scarred soul, that they place Christ second to the authority of their church, thinking they are behaving properly and righteously by their own reasoning,...and just as the same thinking is used by many Judiazers, arguing well from their Scriptural studies, but turning away from Christ when presented directly to them,...likewise, we also will likely encounter similar temptations in the Millennium Reign.
The human condition is so scarred that it will take millennia to sort it out, for us to perform as He intended for us think, act, will, and remain in fellowship in all things.
Every man has the ability to forgive sins because they have already been redeemed at the Cross. The mechanism to forgive them depends upon faith alone in Christ alone.
The age of grace will be over before the Millennium. The church will leave this earth before the seven year tribulation begins. After that it will be Christ ruling and Satan will be bound for the time and he will have no influence.
I always wonder about the charge of Protestants truncating the RCC Canon, when the 27 books we accept as the NT came from Athanasius and Origen,....but I guess they also were dispensational pastors and not really Catholics. Real Catholics would never claim any other earlier Catholic actually listed those 27 books as their canon. /s ;^)
All of the arguments being posed by the Catholics here are over 1000 yrs old.
It seemed to begin circa 600AD.
At that time there were three main solutions to therr theological councils debating these doctrines, sometimes known as the three C’s.
1) Canon
2) Creed
3) Church(authority of the church)
First they established a Canon. Origen and Athanasius had already established the 27 books we generally use today as the Canon of NT Scripture.
The Creed had been adjusted a bit here and there over the centuries, but is fairly well accepted today as the Athenasius Creed.
The next problem facing the Western Church at that time were the threats of Barbarian and Pagan advances into northern Rome. There was a push to unify the Church and keep one organized authority, so regardless the refinements in doctrine, the theologic position gave more importance to unifying the authority of the Church over any other theological threats.
A good example of this are the 7 Sacraments, all of which have sound theological and Scriptural underpinnings, but each had a slight extra-biblical twist, which if developed without explicit guidance by God the Holy Spirit, could easily promote heresy more than Christian faith.
In nearly each of the sacraments, the RCC position chose to promote faith in the Authority of the RCC before faith in Christ alone by faith alone. The natural consequence is for the laity to be distracted away from faith in Christ, by first placing faith in the authority of the RCC.
Faith was first placed in the RCC ritual of baptism before having faith in Christ and receiving the baptism of God the Holy Spirit prior to faith in the Church. Again, the RCC version of the sacrament focuses first upon the Church and her authority before the grace of God. In order to receive the benefit, the believer would have to place faith first on the Church, before Christ.
The retort by the Church, is that God had given them that authority and by Papal Succession, only they could administer the sacrament.
The only problem with this reasoning is that the RCC had no more qualifications than any other believer to administer such an act. So whenever encountered, such a person would be labeled an enemy of the Church.
Agreed, but we still will have a lot to learn, and sin still occurs in the Millennium.
A false appeal to authority now!
You’re drowning in your own urine.
The books we keep are the ones that self affirm as a unit.
The ones we do not are clearly antichrist. Athanasius and Origen had a love for gnosticism and Nico Laitanism
Actually, that is YOUR interpretation. Dont tell others that their interpretation is wrong when that very interpretation has been in effect for almost 2000 years!!!!
Your interpretation only came about in the last 500 years maybe since the Protestant revolution....
So, I will take a 2000 year history over 500 any day...
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