Replies

Thank you for finally concedng my point. Now that you have admitted that I, Chris a.k.a kerryusama04, is right and you and the rest of your merry band of Catholics are wrong. Now that it has been established in your mind that the Church swapped to Sabbath for Sunday, it is not incumbent upon me to do aything but to say:

I told you so.

Now, tell me, if Church is not bound by the 10 Commandments, how does the Church get off using scripture as its source of supposed "authority". How can a church say that one scripture gives it power to bind and loose, while blatantly breaking God's Commandments and teaching others to do so? We have now arrived at the foundation of my original post. Why would a Catholic read the Bible at all if the Catholic Church can pick and choose which parts it wishes to adhere to?

This is why I didn't take your bait. Magisterium answered you very clearly and the only way you could respond so snidely is to have completely ignored what he (and others on this thread) have endeavored to teach you. You are a petulent child.

Once again I ask you: Why do you deny to the Church today the same authority it rightly exercised in denying circumcision at the Council of Jerusalem? Circumcision and Sabbath observance are both signs of the old covenant.

You would do well to actually read my response to you first, before you smugly claim my concession. There is little evidence that you did this.

Tell me, by what precedent, and by what authority, did the Apostles act as they did in Acts 15 at the Council of Jerusalem? They had no precedent whatsoever, as they were directly running counter to the Jewish law in their pronouncements. The authority came from God, as they prayed for it and were responsible for exercising it as the power was granted to them by Christ.

And so it is with this issue of the Sabbath. Clearly, they were changing the day of worship in common to Sunday, in spite of the Jewish precedent. Nevertheless, they had the authority to do so (see Matthew 16:18 and Matthew 18:18). The instance where this decision occured is not recorded in Scripture, or do you actually suppose that *every* decision of the Apostles for the 70 years of their existence on earth (to the death of St. John) is recorded from Acts to Revelation? Nevertheless, Acts 20:7, at least, makes it clear that St. Paul had no objection to worship on Sunday, and there is ample evidence that, by the early second Century, it had become a universal practice.

Your position seems to be that if something is not specifically recorded in the New Testament, then is didn’t happen. That is a remarkably odd position to take: that *all* of the history, teaching and development of the Church in the Apostolic Era (AD33 to AD 100) was fully documented between Acts 1:1 and Revelation 22:21, which take up a scant 127 pages in my RSV-CE Bible!

My mileage most definitely varies with that, and I and my fellow Catholics understand how the Tradition and magisterial teaching of the Church fill-in the gaps. You complain that there is no direct order from God to change worship days, and, because you can cite no real authority other than yourself to interpret Scripture, you cannot even see how Acts 20:7 and other passages point to decisions made by the Church that were themselves not recorded in the New Testament, but flew under the radar of Scriptural testimony. To take your logic to extremes, one could suppose that the Apostle John never died, since the fact of his death is not recorded in Scripture. I’ll leave it to you to see the flaws inherent in that argument, and extrapolate the lessons adhering to that onto your favorite topic: Sunday worship vs. sabbath worship.