Then, unknowingly, you reject Christ. I shall pray for you FRiend.
I wrote, “I do reject the notion that the Roman Catholic Church is somehow the only legitimate expression of Christ’s Church.”
You responded, “Then, unknowingly, you reject Christ.”
There it is. You say that the Roman Catholic Church is the only legitimate expression of Christ’s Church. I appreciate that you don’t shy away from verbalizing what so many Roman Catholics refuse to admit: that the Roman Catholic faith considers Christians to be unsaved because they simply follow Christ as the Head of His Church.
Such arrogance is bewildering, big’ol_freeper. To say that I reject Christ because I follow Him undistracted by extra-biblical concepts about Mary et al. is something so twisted that I’d expect to hear it out of a Democrat’s mouth. I am so sorry that your faith in Christ alone is so weak that you feel faith in Him is not sufficient; I’m sorry to hear that you feel one is saved only through Christ ... PLUS something else: membership in the Church of Rome.
Just as Christ denounced the prevailing and intrenched branch of Judaism of His day, so He denounces the Roman Catholic Church of today. Your priests are modern day Pharisees, and what He said then is applicable now:
“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”
The truth is, Christ *is* sufficient. It was *Jesus* who died on the cross, not your particular institution. I trust in my Savior, not in the Roman institution. I am a member of the Church that Christ founded, not the Roman institution. And may Christ increase, and Rome decrease.