Posted on 12/31/2015 4:29:48 PM PST by NYer
January 1 is the Solemnity (Holy Day) of Mary, Mother of God. To call Mary the “Mother of God” must not be understood as a claim for Mary’s motherhood of divinity itself, but in the sense that Mary was mother of Jesus, who is truly God. The Council of Ephesus in 431—long before the schisms with the Eastern churches and the Protestants—proclaimed “Mother of God” a theologically correct title for Mary.
Yea yet they still believe I Tradition the Majisterium Mary as the Mother of God the Real Presence and not Sola Fide or Sola Scriptura. Go figure. Those heretics Novelties are your problem.
I read English not Protestant gibberish.
Actually since what we call Catholicism refers to an system that is a result of a process of continued deformation then these so-called church "fathers" themselves evidenced this, with some (as they were not uniform in all their beliefs, or all supportive of RC doctrines) sometimes sounding like they held Scripture as supreme and other times invoking traditional norms (including errant interpretations of Scripture) as the basis for True doctrine or practice. The latter resulted in an accretion of errors becoming perpetuated.
The Douay-Rheims Bible is the CATHOLIC Bible, translated by the CATHOLIC church.
And you still consider it *Protestant gibberish*?
Is that YOPIOS?
Or your own personal interpretation of your church. Whichever one that happens to be?
I guess you are confusing them with the facts.
16 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife: because it is the nakedness of thy brother.
Search the Scriptures: there is no contradiction as the latter refers to adultery which only occurs while the other spouse is alive:
For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man. (Romans 7:2-3)
You mean Christ didn’t name it the Roman Catholic Church to distinguish it from Protestants on the Cross???? Shocker. Your argument makes no sense.
But what is the basis for your assurance of truth? It seems that the RC argument is that an assuredly (if conditionally) infallible magisterium is essential for determination and assurance of Truth (including writings and men being of God) and to fulfill promises of Divine presence, providence of Truth, and preservation of faith, and authority. (Jn. 14:16,26; 15:26; 16:13; Mt. 16:18; Lk. 10:16)
And that being the historical instruments and stewards of Divine revelation (oral and written) means that Rome is that assuredly infallible magisterium. Thus any who knowingly dissent from the latter must be in rebellion to God.
Does this fairly represent what you hold to or in what way does it differ?
Those aren’t different “faiths”.
No your interpretation is Protestant Gibberish. Nothing in that passage contradicts Catholic doctrine no matter how much you wish it would.
No, i mean Christ did not begin a church which is basically invisible in the NT. Which church, as manifested in Scripture,
1. Was not based upon the premise of ensured perpetual magisterial infallibility of office as per Rome, which has presumed to infallibly declare that she is and will perpetually be infallible whenever she speaks in accordance with her infallibly defined (scope and subject-based) formula, which renders her declaration that she is infallible, to be infallible, as well as all else she accordingly declares.
2. Never promised or taught ensured perpetual magisterial infallibility was essential for preservation of truth, including writings to be discerned and established as Scripture, and for assurance of faith, and that historical descent as the stewards of Scripture means that such possessed ensured infallibility.
3. Never was a church that manifested the Lord's supper as being the central means of grace, around which all else revolved, it being “the source and summit of the Christian faith” in which “the work of our redemption is accomplished,” by which one received spiritual life in themselves by consuming human flesh, so that without which eating one cannot have eternal life (as per RC literalism, of Jn. 6:53,54). In contrast to believing the gospel by which one is regenerated, (Acts 10:43-47; 15:7-9; Eph. 1:13) and desiring the milk (1Pt. 2:2) and then the “strong meat” (Heb. 5:12-14) of the word of God, being “nourished” (1Tim. 4:6) by hearing the word of God and letting it dwell in them, (Col. 3:16) by which word (Scriptures) man is to live by, (Mt. 4:4) as Christ lived by the Father, (Jn. 6:57) doing His will being His “meat.” (Jn. 4:34) And with the Lord's supper, which is only manifestly described once in the life of the church, focusing on the church being the body of Christ in showing the Lord sacrificial death by that communal meal.
4. Never had any pastors titled "priests" as they did not engage in any unique sacrificial function, that of turning bread into human flesh and dispensing it to the people, or even dispensing bread as their primary ordained function, versus preaching the word. (2Tim. 4:2)
5. Never differentiated between bishops and elders, and with grand titles ("Most Reverend Eminence," “Very Reverend,” “Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord,” “His Eminence Cardinal,” “The Most Reverend the Archbishop,” etc.) or made themselves distinct by their ostentatious pompous garb. (Matthew 23:5-7) Or were all to be formally called “father” as that would require them to be spiritual fathers to all (Mt. 23:8-10 is a form of hyperbole, reproving the love of titles such as Catholicism examples, and “thinking of men above that which is written, and instead the Lord emphasizes the One Father of all who are born of the Spirit, whom He Himself worked to glorify).
6. Never required clerical celibacy as the norm, (1Tim. 3:17) which presumes all such have that gift, (1Cor. 7:7) or otherwise manifested that celibacy was the norm among apostles and pastors, or had vowed to be so. (1Cor. 9:4; Titus 1:5,6)
7. Never taught that Peter was the "rock" of Mt. 16:18 upon which the church is built, interpreting Mt. 16:18, rather than upon the rock of the faith confessed by Peter, thus Christ Himself. (For in contrast to Peter, that the LORD Jesus is the Rock (“petra”) or "stone" (“lithos,” and which denotes a large rock in Mk. 16:4) upon which the church is built is one of the most abundantly confirmed doctrines in the Bible (petra: Rm. 9:33; 1Cor. 10:4; 1Pet. 2:8; cf. Lk. 6:48; 1Cor. 3:11; lithos: Mat. 21:42; Mk.12:10-11; Lk. 20:17-18; Act. 4:11; Rm. 9:33; Eph. 2:20; cf. Dt. 32:4, Is. 28:16) including by Peter himself. (1Pt. 2:4-8) Rome's current catechism attempts to have Peter himself as the rock as well, but also affirms: “On the rock of this faith confessed by St Peter, Christ build his Church,” (pt. 1, sec. 2, cp. 2, para. 424) which understanding some of the so-called “church fathers” concur with.)
8. Never taught or exampled that all the churches were to look to Peter as the bishop of Rome, as the first of a line of supreme heads reigning over all the churches, and having the last word in questions affecting the whole Church.
9. Never recorded or taught any apostolic successors (like for James: Acts 12:1,2) after Judas who was to maintain the original 12: Rv. 21:14) or elected any apostolic successors by voting, versus casting lots (no politics). (Acts 1:15ff)
10. Never recorded or manifested (not by conjecture) sprinkling or baptism without repentant personal faith, that being the stated requirement for baptism. (Acts 2:38; 8:36-38)
11. Never preached a gospel of salvation which begins with becoming good enough inside (formally justified due to infused interior charity), via sprinkling (RC "baptism") in recognition of proxy faith, and which thus usually ends with becoming good enough again to enter Heaven via suffering in purgatory, commencing at death.
12. Never supported or made laws that restricted personal reading of Scripture by laity (contrary to Chrysostom), if able and available, sometimes even outlawing it when it was.
13. Never used the sword of men to deal with its theological dissenters.
14. Never taught that the deity Muslims worship (who is not as an "unknown god") is the same as theirs.
15. Never had a separate class of believers called “saints.”
16. Never prayed to anyone in Heaven but the Lord, or were instructed to (i.e. "our Mother who art in Heaven") who were able to hear and respond to virtually unlimited prayers addressed to them (a uniquely Divine attribute in Scripture).
17. Never recorded a women who never sinned, and was a perpetual virgin despite being married (contrary to the normal description of marriage, as in leaving and sexually cleaving) and who would be bodily assumed to Heaven and exalted (officially or with implicit sanction) as
• an almost almighty demigoddess to whom "Jesus owes His Precious Blood" to,
• whose [Mary] merits we are saved by,
• who "had to suffer, as He did, all the consequences of sin,"
• and was bodily assumed into Heaven, which is a fact (unsubstantiated in Scripture or even early Tradition) because the Roman church says it is, and "was elevated to a certain affinity with the Heavenly Father,"
• and whose power now "is all but unlimited,"
• for indeed she "seems to have the same power as God,"
• "surpassing in power all the angels and saints in Heaven,"
• so that "the Holy Spirit acts only by the Most Blessed Virgin, his Spouse."
• and that “sometimes salvation is quicker if we remember Mary's name then if we invoked the name of the Lord Jesus,"
• for indeed saints have "but one advocate," and that is Mary, who "alone art truly loving and solicitous for our salvation,"
• Moreover, "there is no grace which Mary cannot dispose of as her own, which is not given to her for this purpose,"
• and who has "authority over the angels and the blessed in heaven,"
• including "assigning to saints the thrones made vacant by the apostate angels,"
• whom the good angels "unceasingly call out to," greeting her "countless times each day with 'Hail, Mary,' while prostrating themselves before her, begging her as a favour to honour them with one of her requests,"
• and who (obviously) cannot "be honored to excess,"
• and who is (obviously) the glory of Catholic people, whose "honor and dignity surpass the whole of creation." Sources and more.
They have different doctrinal positions.
That’s certainly enough for Catholics to label Protestants as different and condemn them as showing the *weakness* of sola Scriptura.
But it’s OK when Catholics have different significant doctrinal positions on issues? It’s all the same faith then?
But then again, using a double standard is what I’ve come to expect from debating with Catholics.
Pretty much. Educate yourself and you’ll understand.
Great I’ll believe your points’ validity when you show me the inspired table of contents to the Bible.
Making baseless claims and pointing to a random and irrelevant Bible passages for support while ignoring directly contradictory passages (along with bibliolatry and heresy) is what I’ve come to expect from you guys.
Klaus Schatz [Jesuit Father theologian, professor of church history at the St. George’s Philosophical and Theological School in Frankfurt] in his work, “Papal Primacy ,” pp. 1-4, finds:
“New Testament scholars agree..., The further question whether there was any notion of an enduring office beyond Peter’s lifetime, if posed in purely historical terms, should probably be answered in the negative.
That is, if we ask whether the historical Jesus, in commissioning Peter, expected him to have successors, or whether the authority of the Gospel of Matthew, writing after Peter’s death, was aware that Peter and his commission survived in the leaders of the Roman community who succeeded him, the answer in both cases is probably 'no.”
If we ask in addition whether the primitive church was aware, after Peter’s death, that his authority had passed to the next bishop of Rome, or in other words that the head of the community at Rome was now the successor of Peter, the Church’s rock and hence the subject of the promise in Matthew 16:18-19, the question, put in those terms, must certainly be given a negative answer.” (page 1-2)
Cyprian regarded every bishop as the successor of Peter, holder of the keys to the kingdom of heaven and possessor of the power to bind and loose. For him, Peter embodied the original unity of the Church and the episcopal office, but in principle these were also present in every bishop. For Cyprian, responsibility for the whole Church and the solidarity of all bishops could also, if necessary, be turned against Rome." — Papal Primacy [Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1996], p. 20)
• Roman Catholic scholar William La Due (taught canon law at St. Francis Seminary and the Catholic University of America) on Cyprian:
....those who see in The Unity of the Catholic Church, in the light of his entire episcopal life, an articulation of the Roman primacy - as we have come to know it, or even as it has evolved especially from the latter fourth century on - are reading a meaning into Cyprian which is not there." (The Chair of Saint Peter: A History of the Papacy [Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1999], p. 39
• Catholic theologian and a Jesuit priest Francis Sullivan, in his work From Apostles to Bishops (New York: The Newman Press), examines possible mentions of “succession” from the first three centuries, and concludes from that study that,
“the episcopate [development of bishops] is a the fruit of a post New Testament development,” and cannot concur with those (interacting with Jones) who see little reason to doubt the notion that there was a single bishop in Rome through the middle of the second century:
Hence I stand with the majority of scholars who agree that one does not find evidence in the New Testament to support the theory that the apostles or their coworkers left [just] one person as “bishop” in charge of each local church...
“...the evidence both from the New Testament and from such writings as I Clement, the Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians and The Shepherd of Hennas favors the view that initially the presbyters in each church, as a college, possessed all the powers needed for effective ministry. This would mean that the apostles handed on what was transmissible of their mandate as an undifferentiated whole, in which the powers that would eventually be seen as episcopal were not yet distinguished from the rest. — Francis Sullivan, in his work From Apostles to Bishops , pp. 221,
The issue then becomes why and how the Roman papacy developed.
• Paul Johnson, educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, author of over 40 books and a conservative popular historian, finds,
The Church was now a great and numerous force in the empire, attracting men of wealth and high education, inevitably, then, there occurred a change of emphasis from purely practical development in response to need, to the deliberate thinking out of policy. This expressed itself in two ways: the attempt to turn Christianity into a philosophical and political system, and the development of controlling devices to prevent this intellectualization of the faith from destroying it. The twin process began to operate in the early and middle decades of the third century, with Origen epitomizing the first element and Cyprian the second...
With Cyprian, then, the freedom preached by Paul and based on the power of Christian truth was removed from the ordinary members of the Church, it was retained only by the bishops, through whom the Holy Spirit still worked, who were collectively delegated to represent the totality of Church members...With Bishop Cyprian, the analogy with secular government came to seem very close. But of course it lacked one element: the ‘emperor figure’ or supreme priest...
[Peter, according to Cyprian, was] the beneficiary of the famous ‘rock and keys’ text in Matthew. There is no evidence that Rome exploited this text to assert its primacy before about 250 - and then...Paul was eliminated from any connection with the Rome episcopate and the office was firmly attached to Peter alone...
...There was in consequence a loss of spirituality or, as Paul would have put it, of freedom... -(A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson, pp. 51 -61,63. transcribed using OCR software)
The research of esteemed historian Peter Lampe* (Lutheran) also weighs against Rome:
The picture that finally emerges from Lampe’s analysis of surviving evidence is one he names ‘the fractionation of Roman Christianity’ (pp. 357–408). Not until the second half of the second century, under Anicetus, do we find compelling evidence for a monarchical episcopacy, and when it emerges, it is to manage relief shipments to dispersed Christians as well as social aid for the Roman poor (pp. 403–4). Before this period Roman Christians were ‘fractionated’ amongst dispersed house/tenement churches, each presided over by its own presbyter–bishop. This accounts for the evidence of social and theological diversity in second-century Roman Christianity, evidence of a degree of tolerance of theologically disparate groups without a single authority to regulate belief and practice, and the relatively late appearance of unambiguous representation of a single bishop over Rome. (Review of “Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries,” by Peter Lampe in Oxford’s Journal of Theological Studies, 2005)
Further deformation of the church was seen under Damasus 1 (366-384) who began his reign by employing a gang of thugs in seeking to secure his chair, which carried out a three-day massacre of his rivals supporters. Yet true to form, Rome made him a "saint."
• Upon Pope Liberius's death September 24 A.D. 366, violent disorders broke out over the choice of a successor. A group who had remained consistently loyal to Liberius immediately elected his deacon Ursinus in the Julian basilica and had him consecrated Bishop, but the rival faction of Felix's adherence elected Damasus, who did not hesitate to consolidate his claim by hiring a gang of thugs, storming the Julian Basilica in carrying out a three-day massacre of the Ursinians.
On Sunday, October 1 his partisans seized the Lateran Basilica, and he was there consecrated. He then sought the help of the city prefect (the first occasion of a Pope in enlisting the civil power against his adversaries), and he promptly expelled Ursinus and his followers from Rome. Mob violence continued until October 26, when Damasus's men attacked the Liberian Basilica, where the Ursinians had sought refuge; the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus reports that they left 137 dead on the field. Damasus was now secure on his throne; but the bishops of Italy were shocked by the reports they received, and his moral authority was weakened for several years....
Damasus was indefatigable in promoting the Roman primacy, frequently referring to Rome as 'the apostolic see' and ruling that the test of a creed's orthodoxy was its endorsement by the Pope.... This [false claim to] succession gave him a unique [presumptuous claim to] judicial power to bind and loose, and the assurance of this infused all his rulings on church discipline. — Kelly, J. N. D. (1989). The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 32 ,34;
• Eamon Duffy (Pontifical Historical Commission, Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and former President of Magdalene College) provides more on the Roman church becoming more like the empire in which it was found as a result of state adoption of (an already deformed) Christianity:
The conversion of Constatine had propelled the Bishops of Rome into the heart of the Roman establishment...They [bishops of Rome] set about [creating a Christian Rome] by building churches, converting the modest tituli (community church centres) into something grander, and creating new and more public foundations, though to begin with nothing that rivaled the great basilicas at the Lateran and St. Peter’s...
These churches were a mark of the upbeat confidence of post-Constantinian Christianity in Rome. The popes were potentates, and began to behave like it. Damasus perfectly embodied this growing grandeur. An urbane career cleric like his predecessor Liberius, at home in the wealthy salons of the city, he was also a ruthless power-broker, and he did not he did not hesitate to mobilize both the city police and [a hired mob of gravediggers with pickaxes] to back up his rule…
Self-consciously, the popes began to model their actions and their style as Christian leaders on the procedures of the Roman state. — Eamon Duffy “Saints and Sinners”, p. 37,38
More .
That was a good and informative read!
Where is the inspired table of contents sir?
First, that is irrational, as even if an atheist substantiated what i just did then you must be able to refute it. Holding to SS is not required in order to argue that certain things are not in Scripture, while if SS is to be an issue then you must show the alternative, that of sola ecclesia, more specifically sola roma, in which the church of Rome alone is the supreme and sufficient standard for faith and morals, infallibility defining what is Truth and providing it.
As regards SS, why would providing an inspired table of contents to the Bible (does Rome claim to do so?) be necessary anymore than showing the full number of the Gentiles that will enter the kingdom? Do you hold to the strawman of SS that means that everything the Christian needs to know must be explicitly stated in Scripture (thus excluding the condemnation of things as endocannibalism), versus being based on principal and with the sufficiency aspect of SS including what Scripture materially provides? And do you deny (as RCs do) that souls can assuredly discern what is of God, both men and writings, thus in principal providing for a canon? Or do you hold that,
People cannot discover the contents of revelation by their unaided powers of reason and observation. They have to be told by people who have received in from on high. - Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, "Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith, p. 72;
.the believer cannot believe in the Bible nor find in it the object of his faith until he has previously made an act of faith in the intermediary authorities..." - Catholic Encyclopedia>Tradition and Living Magisterium;
And thus an infallible magisterium is essential to assuredly know what is of God?
Answer me.
All the rites are substantially wrong, though there can be true believers in them.
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