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Locked on 04/24/2022 5:40:39 AM PDT by Religion Moderator, reason:
Childishness |
Posted on 03/06/2022 11:16:06 AM PST by CharlesOConnell
A man commits a serious crime, then he gets released. He has "paid his debt to society". But wait a minute, he's only ready for the half-way house. He's unlikely to get a prestigious job in his new prison suit coat, or any job at all; he has civil impediments, he can't vote or hold certain offices. His crime was serious enough that he won't be presumed to have been completely rehabilitated until he performs a notable service to society, or at least spends many years on the straight and narrow, so that his crime can be truly overlooked or forgotten.
In Catholic faith, your "debt to society" is paid by Jesus Christ on Calvary. It's called "eternal punishment", without Christ it keeps you from going to heaven. Supposing that you do take advantage of His sacrifice, you're truly sorry, have a firm purpose of amendment, if you relapse, you go again for forgiveness (to the Sacrament of Confession).
But your sin leaves a strong trace at another layer of impurity called "temporal punishment due to sin", like the civil impediments facing the half-way house prisoner. Because "nothing impure can enter heaven", there is a place or a state, a condition of purification to render you fit for heaven after Christ has finally saved you from hell. The Catholic Church calls it purgatory.
(Where is it in the bible? Where is the word Trinity in the bible? Where does it say that you only need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? Many valid principles aren't stated explicitly in the bible, but it does say to "hold fast to the traditions you have learned, whether by word or by letter", because much of the Gospel wasn't written down, as Jesus only wrote in the sand, the majority of the Gospel was taught from word to ear to people who couldn't afford expensive books, the exceptions were what tended to get written down. But the implication that there is a purgatory, is contained in the bible--see the comments.)
The ex-con can receive a pardon or commutation of his probation from a Governor, if he performs some heroic deed, saving numerous lives, or, like Chuck Colson, performs a long-lasting, valuable community service helping numerous people who can't help themselves.
In the Catholic Church there are 2 ways for the residual, temporal effects due to sin to be expiated: suffering in this life, or after life, undergoing purifying suffering along with other people who will finally be saved, but have to suffer for long without the vision of God--that is what causes them their pain.
Their suffering isn't meritorious enough to grant their release, the saints in heaven and those on earth suffering and practicing virtue can pray for the suffering souls in purgatory. In no way is their release by slow transfer of suffering or practice of virtue, "buying heaven". It's a long, excruciating process.
How the misunderstanding arose that Catholics think they can buy their way into heaven, is involved with history more than 500 years old. For a millennium of Christendom between roughly 410 and 1410, there was a Medieval civilization with harmony between faith and government.
Many small farmers would cluster around the manor house of a military lord who would protect them, in exchange for a certain fixed obligation of labor and agricultural produce. In most cases, those "serfs" had much more leisure than factory workers of the industrial revolution; there were a large number of holy days without work, and except for planting and harvesting, there were long stretches of idle time.
Another large sector of the economy surrounded monasteries, where the monks developed most of the farming practices that stabilized the serfs and their manorial lords. The monks who worked those monastic lands were sworn to poverty, so that monasteries built up large accumulations of economic value over decades and centuries of labor.
At the beginning, when lands were being cleared and put into production there weren't prominent town fairs ruled by merchants and bankers. Money wasn't used for sustenance, not even much barter occurred, life was mostly agrarian.
Charity was woven into the economy of monasteries. It was estimated that you only need travel 12 miles in medieval England between monasteries, where you could get a meal and minimal lodging for free, based on need. And the charity was also spiritual, including the ancient Catholic principle of prayer for the dead, which is biblical. (See "prayer for the dead" in the original King James Bible in the comment.)
There were foundations and benefices for praying for the dead, that allowed a person of means to support monasteries' charitable works, and in proportional response the monks would pray for the souls of the donors.
It happened at the close of the middle ages, that militarily strong nobles cast their eyes on the labor value accumulated by the poverty-sworn monks of the monasteries, which those nobles perceived as monetary wealth, especially where gold and jewels had been donated by the devout to adorn churches.
(Protestant writer William Cobbett wrote in his 1824 "A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland", an anecdote, that an incredibly valuable, hand illustrated bible was stripped of it's bejeweled, gold cover, the much more valuable hand-illumined manuscript, thrown in the mud and trampled by horses hooves by raiders suppressing the monasteries in Henry VIII's England.)
A new religion growing up around this seizure of monastic lands and valuables, that sought to discredit the Catholic Church, spread the black legend that the "sale of indulgences" was abusive. But this was very exceptional. Today the stipend of a Mass said for the dead is $10.
BTW, no less a ‘protestant’ than Paul The Apostle said we are no longer under the law. You can look it up! The law is no longer in effect to those who have been gifted The Righteousness of Christ in their newborn spirit. THAT is how unbounded The Grace of God in Christ IS.
To a born again believer, being separated from fellowship with God and His family members is dire indeed. Being removed from protection from the evil one IS a dire consequence for some who sin grievously. BUT they are not snatching themselves from the Hands of God, they are amassing suffering in this life.
Your purposed miss characterization is revealing of the spirit that is likely in you. No one has even hinted that there are no consequences for sin by a member of The Body of Christ. In fact Paul makes many assertions about the topic. A born again member of God's Family CANNOT escape the oversioght of the indwelling Holy Spirit, even if their behaviors are grieving Him, since He has stated He will never leave or forsake a born again one. BUT He sure can open you up for the torment from satan while you await your death or Rapture transformation. BTW, thank you for asking! I pray God's Spirit is using responses from me and others on this thread, to prick your conscience and urge you toward something marvelous.
BTW, I do not spend a significant time railing against the pedophile priesthood of your religion. I do bring it up when it applies to an aspect of priestly function, like infant baptism, confessional, rites and your Eucharist service.
When you Catholics assert that Jesus started your religion, you are mistaken. You are mistaken because you are not acquainted with the original and are reasoning from what the traditions of men have taught you to believe. Jesus began His Church, His Body of Believers based upon the profession made by Peter, the 'faith assertion', if you will. It is urged by the Spirit of God, accepted by the individual, and honored by God for the Glory of Jesus, not any ORG or priestly class. It is the individual who is born again, by faith focused upon Whom God sent to redeem our SPIRITS, not our behavior mechanisms. Most of what I observe in your religion is aimed at dealing with the behavior mechanism, not the spirit. Even your myths are aimed at the flesh. I am learned in the original and when a counterfeit raises before me I can discern that by the power orf the Spirit Who abides in me.
Your religion is a counterfeit Christianity, not the original. As an exhibit I give you the 'veneration of the Mother of Jesus': if Jesus had planned such a goddess-like role for His Mother, HE would have introduced men to that coming authority BEFORE ascending to the Father. Ore at least would have brought it up via Paul or Peter or James at the first council seen in Acts 15. He didn't and they didn't, and the entire mythology was added to your religion hundreds of years after the last Apostle was dead and gone so they would have no rebuke for it.
Your priestly class has fabricated that entire dogma, as a means to empower the priesthood and the ORG. And the fullness of the mythos has even had to wait for our age to be edited! It also has signs and wonders supporting the muythios, which your religion's leadership have exploited even as they knew the apparitions could not be the Blessed Mother of Jesus (Fatima anyone?). Satan's game is signs and lying wonders. Your religion feeds off of them.
Verse 21 is NOT a command for people to go to what you mislabel as Torah kindergarten.
It’s simply a statement of fact that it exists therefore there’s a basic level of knowledge of what Judaism is about.
Presuming it’s a command to Gentile believers to go to “torah kindergarten”, is twisting Scripture to support an already determined doctrine and doesn’t work that well at that.
Phil and Phil.
What a coincidence.
An alter ego, perhaps?
Nor did the Jerusalem Council demand baptism for salvation.
A very, very serious oversight if baptism is what saves people.
Of course, if baptism saved someone, Christ died for nothing.
Then again, if Catholics really, truly believe that baptism saves people, then why are so many of them expecting to go to either purgatory or to hell?
And that doesn’t even begin to address the lifestyles most Catholics live. Talk about sinning presumptuously! I can’t count how many times I have heard the equivalent of the excuse for doing something wrong with “Well, the priest does it and since he’s going to heaven, I’ll be OK.”
IOW, baptism and communion do NOT save anyone.
Thank you for providing the most succinct case possible for proving Catholicism’s claims wrong.
Colossians 2:13-14 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.
God does not forgive only the first sin and then expect us to work off the rest. That is salvation by works.
Besides, the record of our sin debt was wiped clean. ALL of it.
If Jesus is your Judge, then you are not saved.
You are saved is Jesus is your Savior, and He has this to say……
John 3:16-17 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
John 12:47 And if any man hear my words, and keep them not, I do not judge him: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world
Believers? None concerning their salvation. Only their works will be judged to see if they endure, which is NOT the believer being judged to see if he endures.
Other judgments are mentioned for other categories of people.
So the bottom line for you then is that our actions DO matter... correct? Note I intentionally used the more palatable word "actions"- not works...
Certainly they do and nobody ever said they didn’t. What they don’t do is contribute or detract from a person’s salvation status. They neither keep the person saved or cause them to lose their salvation.
Now most non-Catholic theology I know of says you can commit ANY sin - even murder... and the forgiveness of Grace does not hold the dinner accountable (Thank You Martin)... this is NOT your belief then, correct?
That is not a correct assessment of non-Catholic theology. It# a typical Catholic misrepresentation of it, IOW, a Catholic strawman.
And now I'm thinking that has much to do with the variability in the non-denom thingy- which I am still working on to get back to you.
It should pose no difficulty for you at all to understand. Roman Catholicism has been in schism with the EO for over 1,000 years and you all consider them Catholic and “separated brethren” in spite of the fact that they hold to doctrinal positions that Rome has condemned as heresy and deserving of hell over. And those doctrinal differences are greater than the vast majority of Evangelical churches outside of obvious cults.
So the argument against the diversity of non-Catholic churches being an indicator of the weakness of “Protestantism “ falls very flat.
Not to mention that the alleged unity of doctrinal position and cohesion with in Catholicism does not exist. Catholics are not in lockstep agreement with Rome. There are essentially 1.2 billion personal interpretations of Catholicism.
Grace is getting something you do not deserve, it is by default unmerited.
Merited grace, what Catholicism clearly teaches by the admission of all FRoman Catholics here, is an oxymoron.
If it’s merited, it is not grace, its wages due for deeds performed.
Why is that? If one understands the theme of the progressively revealed Holy Writings, and God's foundational purpose of them, one can work through the particular situation that one is facing.
For instance, take the two individuals walking home on the first day of the week after the 33 A.D. Passover festival in Jerusalem, where they are leaving the scene that a Jewish man of great esteem was executed for political reasons, which they did hot understand, nor the strange outcome of it.
On their journey home they became involved with someone they did not recognize, but who was going the same way. He gained their confidence, and in it elicited a summary of the events that was perplexing them. His assessment of their presentation indicated that they were being inept in applying scriptural principles to their problem, then went on to get them onto the right track of thought by starting to show them what the overall theme of the holy writings were about:
"And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Lk. 24:27 AV)My FRiend, this is exactly where one starts. The Old Testament is not about the Mosaic Law, it is about the Lord and Savior of rotten humans. The theme of the Holy Writing, as much of them as one has, is that they are about Jesus as Lord and Messiah, and the coming on Earth as well as in Heaven, of His Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace.
Here, Jesus puts that principle to work in developing their acceptance of His Gospel, for which Scripture exists to make known; that is, to show God's plan for saving citizens for that Kingdom from as many of fallen, inherently depraved sinners, descendants of the human that He had created for unceasing fellowship with Him and together with that the joy of just being.
God had--out of that vast population--eliminated most of them, and restarted the world again with just a few individuals acceptable to Him, with the same few rules for behavior that the gentiles acceptable into an organized assembly of spirit-reborn constituents ought adhere. Those four rules left standing were to set boundaries for their conduct. What else could one want?
Of course, up to the Cross-death of Jesus, there were only two kinds of humans in the world, for which God had interposed a fence, and why?
Well that was because once again, with sin and death in the world, a force implicit as influencing the behavior of the numerous descendants of Noah and his family, they pretty much all refused to be bounded by those four rules, superseding and going beyond them, eh?
So God decided to separate out, by a certain choice of a particular strain of DNA, a family, the descendants of Jacob, whom Gd repurposed as Israel, to be His Self-supervised selection of a nation of humans, but giving them a body of Law, to which they were expected to obey. One of those pre-Law requirements was circumcision of all males, a rite of entry into a special relationship with God, supposedly performed on one just after birth.
Actually, that system of rules simply could not be uniformly be carried through for any inherently depraved human, and so it was a great burden for any individual, tribe, or whole nation to follow and please The God Who had imposed it. But God had an approximate yearly solution for this burden, to be executed once a year, on a special Day, and it involved blood sacrifices of innocent animals taking the place of guilty humans whose bloody death for sinning was their sentence for even one error of disobeying God or His Law.
However, if even only one human could be born without indwelling sin in its flesh, and from infancy could live through unto fully mature physical and spiritual adulthood without making even one mistake, that individual could be recognized by the Judge to live forever.
But one possibility then had to be faced: if that person was to be slaughtered to pay for ALL human sinning as a consequence due them all, by that perfected person finishing a perfect life so far, could be an acceptable substitute for any one of them who would accept that change of blame, the painful wrathful torture, and death to be put on another, who wold bestow his eternal life on the human who would gratefully exchange hi/her own eternal suffering for it.
Here's the deal: Jesus did live that life, and his placement on the cross and suffering there being a part of the punishment of torture and death due to someone guilty, when all of the Law had been perfectly observed, that sacrificed human could know the the righteous demands of the God-imposed Law had been completely satisfied, and then from the completion legitimately proclaim to all present both temporally and spiritually, not only to the God of Heaven but also the observing god of this world, that:
"Tετελεσται!"
(That is, "the task stands completed, never to be done again, with ongoing eternal consequences. Furthermore, the Law being fulfilled once and for all time, it is annulled for any living human that allows me to represent him/her before You, the Righteous Judge of All")
That is the solution to the dilemma, my FRiend. Jesus, Savior, Lord, and Kin is The Word Personified, and He is the Purpose of it:
the meaning of "Yehoshua" is "Salvation," and the Gospel based on Hm is: "Jesus saves!"For both Gentile and the new group of humans other than Jews and Gentiles is the Body of Regenerated Servants of Jesus the Messiah and Lord (= true Christians) saved by their trust in /him.
While...
Catholic theology I know of says you can commit ANY* sin - even murder... and you CAN be forgiven of it.
Is this not correct?
*('cept that blasphemy against the Holy Ghost thing)
That is, of course, if you have a Catholic priest do the forgiving stuff first: correct?
Oh; and say a LOT of those Hail Marys and Our Fathers as well...
Correct. That is NOT our belief.
We 'believe' what John wrote that some angel told him: ... the books were opened...
Note that even a cursory reading of John’s words above leaves no room for purgatory in the timeline of events.
You are correct.
Only UNBELIEF.
(Be careful what qualifiers you use.)
Read the angel's message one more time...
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