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Please Spacejunkie, open your heart a bit.

Have you never wondered what this verse means? Hebrews 6:1 Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God,

WHAT Elementary Things????????? Someone fill me in! I re-read Hebrews and I discover that by the time of this writing, the Hebrew and Greek Followers of Jesus Christ know something they aren't putting in writing because "everyone alive then" knew the "elementary things."

WHO or What entity protected these Elementary Things for those who follow Christ in ages to come??? Where are the Elementary Things written down?

SpaceJunkie . . . they're kept in The Church. The Church which was formed in the Upper Room when Christ Jesus breathed on those there (the 12 plus the women and the 120 followers -- minus Judas). And like it or not, The Universal Church is the Holy Roman Catholic Church (including the 'other lung' The Orthodox Church).

I was brought up Lutheran, went to Parochial School, married a Lutheran Pastor. As a 28 year old, after divorcing the skirt chaser, I went on a Journey to find the Church which holds the Elementary Things mentioned in Hebrews. I ended up in Rome, with Peter. The Church holds the Keys to the Elementary Things . . . . Hallelujah and Amen.

These passages list the Bible Verses, you can check them out yourself.

Salvation:
(Greek soteria; Hebrew yeshu'ah).

Salvation has in Scriptural language the general meaning of liberation from straitened circumstances or from other evils, and of a translation into a state of freedom and security (1 Samuel 11:13; 14:45; 2 Samuel 23:10; 2 Kings 13:17). At times it expresses God's help against Israel's enemies, at other times, the Divine blessing bestowed on the produce of the soil (Isaiah 45:8). As sin is the greatest evil, being the root and source of all evil, Sacred Scripture uses the word "salvation" mainly in the sense of liberation of the human race or of individual man from sin and its consequences. We shall first consider the salvation of the human race, and then salvation as it is verified in the individual man Read the rest here: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13407a.htm

Christ as Mediator:

A mediator is one who brings estranged parties to an amicable agreement. In New Testament theology the term invariably implies that the estranged beings are God and man, and it is appropriated to Christ, the One Mediator. When special friends of God — angels, saints, holy men — plead our cause before God, they mediate "with Christ"; their mediation is only secondary and is better called intercession. Moses, howover, is the proper mediator of the Old Testament (Galatians 3:19-20).

Christ's saving work did not at once blot out every individual sin and transform every sinner into a saint, it only procured the means thereto. Personal sanctification is effected the special acts, partly Divine, partly human; it is secured by loving God, and man as the Saviour did. Christianus alter Christus: every Christian is another Christ, a son of God, an heir to the eternal Kingdom. Finally, in the fulness of time all things that are in heaven and on earth shall be re-established, restored, in God through Christ (Ephesians 1:9-10). The meaning of the promise is that the whole of creation, bound up together and perfected in christ as its Head, shall be led back in the most perfect manner to God, from whom sin had partly led it away. Christ is the Crown the Centre, and the Fountain of a new and higher order of things: "for all are yours; And you are Christ's; and Christ is God's." (1 Corinthians 3:22-23). Read the rest: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10118a.htm

The Blessed Virgin Mary:

The Blessed Virgin Mary is the mother of Jesus Christ, the mother of God.

In general, the theology and history of Mary the Mother of God follow the chronological order of their respective sources, i.e. the Old Testament, the New Testament, the early Christian and Jewish witnesses.

The Old Testament refers to Our Blessed Lady both in its prophecies and its types or figures.

In order to be sure of the typical sense, it must be revealed, i.e. it must come down to us through Scripture or tradition. Individual pious writers have developed copious analogies between certain data of the Old Testament and corresponding data of the New; however ingenious these developments may be, they do not prove that God really intended to convey the corresponding truths in the inspired text of the Old Testament. On the other hand, it must be kept in mind that not all truths contained in either Scripture or tradition have been explicitly proposed to the faithful as matters of belief by the explicit definition of the Church.

Mary in the Gospels

The reader of the Gospels is at first surprised to find so little about Mary; but this obscurity of Mary in the Gospels has been studied at length by Blessed Peter Canisius [17], Auguste Nicolas [18], Cardinal Newman [19], and Very Rev. J. Spencer Northcote [20]. In the commentary on the "Magnificat", published 1518, even Luther expresses the belief that the Gospels praise Mary sufficiently by calling her (eight times) the Mother of Jesus. In the following paragraphs we shall briefly group together what we know of Our Blessed Lady's life before the birth of her Divine Son, during the hidden life of Our Lord, during His public life and after His resurrection.

Mary's Divine motherhood is based on the teaching of the Gospels, on the writings of the Fathers, and on the express definition of the Church. St. Matthew (1:25) testifies that Mary "brought forth her first-born son" and that He was called Jesus. According to St. John (1:15) Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Word Who assumed human nature in the womb of Mary. As Mary was truly the mother of Jesus, and as Jesus was truly God from the first moment of His conception, Mary is truly the mother of God. Even the earliest Fathers did not hesitate to draw this conclusion as may be seen in the writings of St. Ignatius [72], St. Irenaeus [73], and Tertullian [74]. The contention of Nestorius denying to Mary the title "Mother of God" [75] was followed by the teaching of the Council of Ephesus proclaiming Mary to be Theotokos in the true sense of the word. [76]

No one will suspect the early Christians of idolatry, as if they had paid supreme worship to Mary's pictures or name; but how are we to explain the phenomena enumerated, unless we suppose that the early Christians venerated Mary in a special way? [144]

Nor can this veneration be said to be a corruption introduced in later times. It has been seen that the earliest picture dates from the beginning of the second century, so that within the first fifty years after the death of St. John the veneration of Mary is proved to have flourished in the Church of Rome. Early writings

For the attitude of the Churches of Asia Minor and of Lyons we may appeal to the words of St. Irenaeus, a pupil of St. John's disciple Polycarp [145]; he calls Mary our most eminent advocate. St. Ignatius of Antioch, part of whose life reached back into apostolic times, wrote to the Ephesians (c. 18-19) in such a way as to connect the mysteries of Our Lord's life more closely with those of the Virgin Mary. For instance, the virginity of Mary, and her childbirth, are enumerated with Christ's death, as forming three mysteries unknown to the devil. The sub-apostolic author of the Epistle to Diognetus, writing to a pagan inquirer concerning the Christian mysteries, describes Mary as the great antithesis of Eve, and this idea of Our Lady occurs repeatedly in other writers even before the Council of Ephesus. We have repeatedly appealed to the words of St. Justin and Tertullian, both of whom wrote before the end of the second century.

As it is admitted that the praises of Mary grow with the growth of the Christian community, we may conclude in brief that the veneration of and devotion to Mary began even in the time of the Apostles.

More information here: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15464b.htm

Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary:

Devotion to Our Blessed Lady in its ultimate analysis must be regarded as a practical application of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. Seeing that this doctrine is not contained, at least explicitly in the earlier forms of the Apostles' Creed, there is perhaps no ground for surprise if we do not meet with any clear traces of the cultus of the Blessed Virgin in the first Christian centuries. The earliest unmistakable examples of the "worship" — we use the word of course in the relative sense — of the saints is connected with the veneration paid to the martyrs who gave their lives for the Faith. From the first century onwards, martyrdom was regarded as the surest sign of election. The martyrs, it was held, passed immediately into the presence of God. Over their tombs the Holy Sacrifice was offered (a practice which may possibly be alluded to in Revelation 6:9) while in the contemporary narrative of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp (c. 151) we have already mention of the "birthday", i.e. the annual commemoration, which the Christians might be expected to keep in his honour. This attitude of mind becomes still more explicit in Tertullian and St. Cyprian, and the stress laid upon the "satisfactory" character of the sufferings of the martyrs, emphasizing the view that by their death they could obtain graces and blessings for others, naturally and immediately led to their direct invocation.

The existence of the obscure sect of the Collyridians, whom St. Epiphanius (d. 403) denounces for their sacrificial offering of cakes to Mary, may fairly be held to prove that even before the Council of Ephesus there was a popular veneration for the Virgin Mother which threatened to run extravagant lengths. Hence Epiphanius laid down the rule: "Let Mary be held in honour. Let the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost be adored, but let no one adore Mary" (ten Marian medeis prosknueito). Nonetheless the same Epiphanius abounds in the praises of the Virgin Mother, and he believed that there was some mysterious dispensation with regard to her death implied in the words of Revelations 12:14: "And there were given to the woman two wings of a great eagle that she might fly into the desert unto her place." Certain it is, in any case, that such Fathers as St. Ambrose and St. Jerome, partly inspired with admiration for the ascetic ideals of a life of virginity and partly groping their way to a clearer understanding of all that was involved in the mystery of the Incarnation, began to speak of the Blessed Virgin as the model of all virtue and the ideal of sinlessness. Several striking passages of this kind have been collected.

* "In heaven", St. Ambrose tells us, "she leads the choirs of virgin souls; with her the consecrated virgins will one day be numbered."
* St. Jerome (Ep. xxxix, Migne, P.L., XXII, 472) already foreshadows that conception of Mary as mother of the human race which was to animate so powerfully the devotion of a later age.
* St. Augustine in a famous passage (De nat. et gratis, 36) proclaims Mary's unique privilege of sinlessness
* In St. Gregory Nazianzen's sermon on the martyr St. Cyprian (P.G., XXXV, 1181) we have an account of the maiden Justina, who invoked the Blessed Virgin to preserve her virginity.

More information here: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15459a.htm