GRPL ping!
Why read past the statement that the Church considers “indulgences” necessary and sufficient for salvation?
Never in any of my old-school Catholic education was I taught or told this; they were nice, kind of like extra credit in school, but a side issue. Trust me, the modern Church would get as far away as possible from this practice as possible to suck up to Mainline Protestantism.
Who decided which books were Scripture and which were apocrypha, or even heresy? The Bible wasn’t handed to a prophet on a journey to Mecca, or a farmer’s son-in-law.
Apparently I forgot to put in a few in many links to other documents found in the article.
Please read from the original site, so as to be able to get these links,
Thanks,
Otto
bttt
To read later.
How can this be a GRPL ping when it is mostly about the Catholic Church?
I did not. I actually identified with the holy catholic church after leaving Romanism since I now truly understood the words of that ancient creed.
Thanks for the ping!
“40. Popes Leo XIII and Benedict XV make these statements: ‘When Mary offered herself completely to God together with her Son in the temple, she was already sharing with him the painful atonement on behalf of the human race....(at the foot of the cross) she was a co-worker with Christ in His expiation for mankind and she offered up her Son to the divine justice dying with him in her heart (Jucunda semper)....Thus she (Mary) suffered and all but died along with her Son suffering and dying-thus for the salvation of men she abdicated the rights of a mother toward her son, and insofar as it was hers to do, she immolated the Son to placate God’s justice, so that she herself may justly be said to have redeemed together with Christ the human race. (De Corredemptione; cited by Carol, ed., Mariology, 1:383, 37)”
If the RCC can’t get past the truth of the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross, I could never go back to Rome.
....And that goes for the Emergent Church heretics as well.
Don't forget the pitiful catechesis that practically all of them received in the immediate post VC2 era.
Karl Keating himself admits that the figure approaches hundreds of thousands who have left Rome for evangelical or fundamental Protestantism
Yep, that certainly is a "broad road," isn't it.
EXCELLENT! EXCELLENT! EXCELLENT!
imho terrible paragraphing but excellent content.
Hope to finish and comment later. Lots to do today.
Excellent article...The truth will set you free...
Well, once again, someone writes about his past in the Catholic Church as if to validate that he truly knows Catholicism, yet he acknowledges he left the Church in the state of woeful disobedience. Contrast that to the converts to Catholicism, who study history and the bible so thoroughly and zestfully that they can no longer remain Protestant.
The article seems fairly devoid of the usual slander… No mention of “worshipping saints.” But it’s main failing is that it tries to rifle through too many issues at once, and thereby addresses none of them uniquely well.
For instance, let’s look at the discussion of sola scriptura. The article compares its presence in the bible to that of ‘trinity.’ The absence of ‘trinity’ in the bible isn’t problematic because the definition of ‘trinity’ doesn’t demand that ‘trinity’ be explicitly stated in the bible.
Webster asserts, “The clearest token of the prestige enjoyed by [Scripture] is the fact that almost the entire theological effort of the Fathers, whether their aims were polemical or constructive, was expended upon what amounted to the exposition of the Bible.” Has Webster not read the Catholic Catechism? Every assertion is footnoted, if not to the bible, than to one of these Fathers, who in turn did, as Webster acknowledges, base his arguments on the bible. To assert that the Fathers based all their arguments on the scripture, is to assert that the Catholic Church does likewise.
The first thing many Protestants do is complain that Catholics misunderstand the meaning of ‘sola scriptura,’ defining it much more harshly than Protestants maintain. But Webster blows this assertion when he insists that Cyril of Jerusalem is arguing for Sola Scriptura, when, in fact, the Catholic Church whole-hearted affirms what Cyril teaches; If Sola Scriptura, indeed, merely meant that doctrine had to be based on scripture, then the Catholic Church would have readily affirmed it. The problem was that Luther was insisting that such doctrines as “purgatory,” and “propitiation” and the order of the mass were inherently untrue because the bible didn’t annunciate them; At the same time, the bible’s annunciation of purgatory and propitiation were so clearly spelled to Luther at the Council of Worms, that Luther had to justify excluding Revelations, Hebrews, 1-2-3 Peter, 2 Maccabees, the portion of Daniel concerning the Canticle in the Furnace, and Wisdom in order to maintain his assertions.
On the subject of the deuterocanonicals, Webster continues canards which were excusable on the grounds of ignorance at the time of Luther, but simply falsehoods today. Webster states, for instance, asserting that the deuterocanonical portions of Daniel were unknown to the Hebrews. Yet not only were these portions part of the GREEK canon at the time of Christ, they were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Indeed, the reason they weren’t known to Hebrews at the time of Luther was because they had been removed at the POST-CHRISTIAN council of Jamnia specifically because the Jews believed they helped lead to the sort of ideas that led to Christianity!
The misuse of Jerome’s writings are, sadly, quite typical of Webster’s arguments. One has to conclude that his “research” into the Fathers was either simply reading someone else’s proof-texting, or that, before embarking on his studies, he was so convinced by such proof-texting, he did not even truly consider what the Fathers actually wrote. How can one have independently studied Jerome, and not have read of how he calls those who say he denigrates the scriptural status of the deuterocanonicals, “fools and slanderers”?
And the wildly unfounded suppositions he makes would be breathtaking! Many presume falsely that ecumenical councils indicate when doctrines were first settled, whereas the opposite is frequently true: that the doctrines existed but were never challenged until the events which the councils were called to address. But Webster actually deliberately leads people to this conclusion: “The first general council of the Western church to dogmatically decree the Apocrypha to be part of the canon and therefore to be accorded the status of Scripture was the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century. This was done contrary to the universal practice of the Jews and the church up to that time.” To misinterpret comments of certain Fathers to say that they held the deuterocanonicals to be non-scriptural is perhaps reasonable in the light of so much existing misinformation; to assert that holding them to be scriptural was contrary to the universal practice of the Church is preposterous.
I think you have to really credit any RC moved to leave. They are indoctrinated from very early on that if they leave the RCC they will be lost.
OOoooww! This is all complicated, not warm and fuzzy.
No comment.
Very interesting article. I’m becoming fascinated with the writings of the earliest church fathers (ie, prior to 100 AD) because in those writings are the thoughts of the people who knew Jesus themselves, and the thoughts of those who studied at their feet.
Just because something is long doesn’t mean that it is worth reading, especially not in this case.
He abandoned the real Body and Blood of Christ for personal Bible study and grape juice.