In Christ Alone (Happy reformation day)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExnTlIM5QgE ^ | Getty, Julian Keith; Townend, Stuart Richard;

[RnMomof7]

In Christ Alone lyrics

Songwriters: Getty, Julian Keith; Townend, Stuart Richard;

In Christ alone my hope is found He is my light, my strength, my song This Cornerstone, this solid ground Firm through the fiercest drought and storm

What heights of love, what depths of peace When fears are stilled, when strivings cease My Comforter, my All in All Here in the love of Christ I stand

In Christ alone, who took on flesh Fullness of God in helpless Babe This gift of love and righteousness Scorned by the ones He came to save

?Til on that cross as Jesus died The wrath of God was satisfied For every sin on Him was laid Here in the death of Christ I live, I live

There in the ground His body lay Light of the world by darkness slain Then bursting forth in glorious Day Up from the grave He rose again

And as He stands in victory Sin?s curse has lost its grip on me For I am His and He is mine Bought with the precious blood of Christ

[Gamecock]

I found out, is filled with exhortations to good works

Why should good works surprise you? We believe they are the result of our justification. We do good works out of gratitude.

[metmom]

The prohibition on eating blood is given in Acts 15 by the Church, and it has since been rescinded by the same Church.

Then which is the truth? Is eating blood OK with God or not?

If God says it's not, who's the church to say that it is?

This is where listening to tradition will get you, going against the clear teachings of God in Scripture.

I suppose that you have links the official pronouncement that the church made to say that they eating of blood was acceptable, after the apostles, who were contemporaries of Jesus said it wasn't?

What council or pope have the chutzpah to override the decisions of those early church fathers? For that matter since you claim that Peter chaired that meeting, who had the chutzpah to over ride Peter's decision? Where was it recorded that it was allegedly rescinded and why was it allegedly rescinded?

This seems too familiar. It's all too much like the *Joseph had children by a previous marriage* kind of rationalization to explain how those ignorant Jews couldn't get straight what they meant by Jesus brothers and sisters.

The Law specifically forbade the eating of blood. Jesus, who had to perfectly fulfill the Law to be the spotless sacrificial lamb, could not have eaten blood at the Last Supper, therefore when He said the cup was his blood, He was either lying or He meant it figuratively, that it was symbolic because the whole Passover meal was symbolic.

[metmom]

The only thing pertaining to salvation is faith in Christ alone for salvation. That cannot be changed or amended.

The church cannot change what is sin and what is not. God established that Himself. The church claiming that it has that power is usurping God’s authority and putting itself above God.

What blasphemy.

[metmom]

Interestingly, a typical Protestant sermon, I found out, is filled with exhortations to good works; how they combine that with their "faith alone" dogma is a mystery.

Simply because the good works honor and glorify God and are instrumental in leading others to Him. We do it for much the same reasons Christ did His good works.

We don't do them to earn salvation or to help earn salvation. We do them to please the Father who loves us and gave us salvation and as a witness to an hurting and dying and unbelieving world to His power to redeem. We show the ability of good to overcome evil.

We show our love for Him by being obedient but that does not earn us salvation or help us earn salvation. God saved us. We responded with obedience out of love and gratitude.

[metmom]

Our good works are a natural outpouring of the Father’s life within us.

It’s almost like a true Christian can’t help themselves because they have the Spirit of God living in them and it just kind of oozes out of them.

We do good works because it is now our nature to do good works.

[boatbums]

Really? So, then you are saying only "insane" people will doubt that this imaginary "something" is real?

I think you are probably tickled to death at every opportunity we give you to twist words, but I was speaking of the concept that we have what is called a soul or spirit a "life force" or whatever you want to call it and it is what makes us us. It is gone at death. It is what I referred to as existing but is not something which can be seen, or proved, for that matter. It just IS. You boldly claim you only believe in what you can see or detect but I think you would agree that you cannot see your own soul and yet you believe you have one.

To take my example further, you cannot touch or see emotions such as love or joy, hate or anger, but you surely can admit that they are real and are experienced by the human species pretty much identically from person to person. That was kinda my point. We all exercise faith of some kind every moment of our lives. Some don't like to call it that, but it is, nonetheless.

[count-your-change]

“The prohibition on eating blood is given in Acts 15 by the Church, and it has since been rescinded by the same Church.”

Really? When?

[boatbums]

The concept of Trinity has to do with how we see the divine Hypostases, namely as one God, co-eternal, and co-equal. In John's presentation, the Spirit is subordinated to both the Father and the Son, who is himself subordinated to the Father. That is not orthodox Trinity no matter how you turn it around.

Just my two-cents on this. We believe in the co-eternal and co-equal one God in three persons precisely because we know there is only one God. There are not three gods but one, only God. He exists in three persons - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. John's gospel makes it clear that Jesus himself claimed to be the I AM which is the personal name Almighty God told to Abraham and Moses. The religious leaders at the time even took up stones to kill him for daring to say so. What you may be missing is that even though they are all equal and one, they have a kind of hierarchy in purpose. Scripture says the Son proceeds from the Father. Jesus said he does nothing but what the Father gives him to do. Jesus said he would send the Spirit to us to indwell us to empower our lives and to illuminate truth.

To view it in this way it looks like: Father to Son to Holy Spirit in an order, not of dominance but in purpose. As an example we are told that the wife submits to the husband who submits to God. But in another place we are told that we are all one in Christ whether male or female, bound or free, Jew or Gentile. The husband is equal to his wife in the view of God, but there is an order.

Like I said, it's my two-cents. It hardly can explain in a few sentences the majesty of God and the full understanding of it all will be, I believe, reserved until we have the "mind of Christ" and will finally be able to understand the magnitude of it.

[boatbums]

Western Christians need to learn humility. A step in that direction will be to accept that they don't need to know everything!

I have never had a problem with admitting that I didn't understand everything that I knew about something. ;o)

[boatbums]

To which I would add that the confusion and erroneous conflation of concepts is "inevitable" without at a minimum, access to Holy Tradition and at best, HT combined with a knowledge of biblical Greek.

Interesting section I found when searching for ANY word in Greek found in the NT for "sacrament":

It's from refbible.com

Int. Standard Bible Encyclopedia

SACRAMENTS

sak'-ra-ments:

1. The Term:

The word "sacrament" comes from the Latin sacramentum, which in the classical period of the language was used in two chief senses:

(1) as a legal term to denote the sum of money deposited by two parties to a suit which was forfeited by the loser and appropriated to sacred uses;

(2) as a military term to designate the oath of obedience taken by newly enlisted soldiers.

Whether referring to an oath of obedience or to something set apart for a sacred purpose, it is evident that sacramentum would readily lend itself to describe such ordinances as Baptism and the Lord's Supper. In the Greek New Testament, however, there is no word nor even any general idea corresponding to "sacrament," nor does the earliest history of Christianity afford any trace of the application of the term to certain rites of the church. Pliny (circa 112 A.D.) describes the Christians of Bithynia as "binding themselves by a sacramentum to commit no kind of crime" (Epistles x.97), but scholars are now pretty generally agreed that Pliny here uses the word in its old Roman sense of an oath or solemn obligation, so that its occurrence in this passage is nothing more than an interesting coincidence.

It is in the writings of Tertullian (end of 2nd and beginning of 3rd century) that we find the first evidence of the adoption of the word as a technical term to designate Baptism, the Lord's Supper, and other rites of the Christian church. This Christian adoption of sacramentum may have been partly occasioned by the evident analogies which the word suggests with Baptism and the Lord's Supper; but what appears to have chiefly determined its history in this direction was the fact that in the Old Latin versions (as afterward in the Vulgate) it had been employed to translate the Greek musterion, "a mystery" (e.g. Ephesians 5:32 1 Timothy 3:16; Revelation 1:20; Revelation 17:7)-an association of ideas which was greatly fostered in the early church by the rapidly growing tendency to an assimilation of Christian worship with the mystery-practices of the Greek-Roman world.

2. Nature and Number:

Though especially employed to denote Baptism and the Lord's Supper, the name "sacraments" was for long used so loosely and vaguely that it was applied to facts and doctrines of Christianity as well as to its symbolic rites. Augustine's definition of a sacrament as "the visible form of an invisible grace" so far limited its application. But we see how widely even a definition like this might be stretched when we find Hugo of Victor (12th century) enumerating as many as 30 sacraments that had been recognized in the church. The Council of Trent was more exact when it declared that visible forms are sacraments only when they represent an invisible grace and become its channels, and when it sought further to delimit the sacramental area by reenacting (1547) a decision of the Council of Florence (1439), in which for the first time the authority of the church was given to a suggestion of Peter Lombard (12th century) and other schoolmen that the number of the sacraments should be fixed at seven, namely, Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Orders, and Matrimony-a suggestion which was supported by certain fanciful analogies designed to show that seven was a sacred number.

The divergence of the Protestant churches from this definition and scheme was based on the fact that these proceeded on no settled principles. The notion that there are seven sacraments has no New Testament authority, and must be described as purely arbitrary; while the definition of a sacrament is still so vague that anything but an arbitrary selection of particulars is impossible. It is perfectly arbitrary, for example, to place Baptism and the Lord's Supper, which were instituted by Christ as ordinances of the church, in the same category with marriage, which rests not on His appointment but on a natural relationship between the sexes that is as old as the human race. While, therefore, the Reformers retained the term "sacrament" as a convenient one to express the general idea that has to be drawn from the characteristics of the rites classed together under this name, they found the distinguishing marks of sacraments.

[kosta50]

If Holy tradition is used as a standard, then anything goes

That would be true if we take the Holy Tradition to mean anything, which it doesn't. If you want to learn more here is a good summary of the Church Tradition (Orthodox view) this as well as this article.

The Holy Tradition is timeless and unchanging. It includes the scriptures, the patristics, the (seven) ecumenical or general councils as its major components, as well as the Symbol of Faith (in the West otherwise known as the Creed), the Divine Liturgy (going back some 17 centuries), and the canons of the Church. In other words what the Church did and what she believed all along, or simply how she lived out her faith.

By unchanging they don't mean that nothing ever changes (vestments, hymns, typikons, etc.) but the faith. The Eastern Church believes that what it believed today was believed yesterday and all the way back as far as the Church goes and that all that was believed was in harmony with its Holy Tradition.

[caww]

The why are Protestants relentlessly attacking the (catholic) Church for following traditions?

Jesus said...."You nullify the Word of God for the sake of your traditions. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: These people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are but rules taught by men." Matt.15

That's why....as well as:

"See to it that no one 'takes you captive' through hollow and deceptive philosophy which depends on human tradition and the basic pricnciples of this world....rather than on Christ". Col:2

"The reality however is found in Christ."

[Forest Keeper]

Renaissance is something quite antithetical to Protestantism, at least in its glorious Heaven-meets-Earth saints-filled celebratory art and architecture style.

Yes, I quite agree. I think Renaissance thinkers tried to reconcile or define the relationship between God and man as a function of man. By using man as the starting point to try to develop an all-encompassing "theory of everything" they were utterly doomed. I read in a book by Francis Schaeffer that Leonardo died a heart broken man because he was never able to come up with a unifying theory of God and man. His presuppositions put man at the center. We Reformers completely reject this approach since we emphasize God's sovereignty so much. Our starting point is always God.

[caww]

“The Bible can exist where there is no church building or assembly.... but the church cannot exist where there is no Bible.”

Remembering this from some time ago...someone stated it but I can’t remember who...much to ponder in that sentence.

[boatbums]

One cannot approach faith with reason and remain faithful. The Age or reason is the precursor of atheism and it is no coincidence that it was energized by the Protestant west.

I know it must be hard to bypass a chance to criticize "Protestants" but you should know that Thomas Paine (The author of Age of Reason) had this to say about religion in general:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. (At the beginning of Part I, Age of Reason)

So, would you please point me to where you get the idea that the Age of Reason was energized by the "Protestant" west? That Thomas Jefferson (a deist, most likely) encouraged him and convinced him to come to America after suffering persecution (and a lucky escape from execution) in France in 1794, does not mean he wasn't just as dismissive of Protestantism as Catholicism.

[kosta50]

I was speaking of the concept that we have what is called a soul or spirit a "life force" or whatever you want to call it and it is what makes us us

So, do flatworms have it too? What makes flatworms what they are? 

It is what I referred to as existing but is not something which can be seen, or proved, for that matter. It just IS.

How can you insist that something is if it cannot be proved?

You boldly claim you only believe in what you can see or detect but I think you would agree that you cannot see your own soul and yet you believe you have one.

I would I agree with the first part of that statement but NATO with the last, and never mind that it is an amazing attempt to read my mind too. How can I believe I have something if I don't know what "it" is?

you cannot touch or see emotions such as love or joy, hate or anger, but you surely can admit that they are real and are experienced by the human species pretty much identically from person to person

First of all you are talking about physiological states, manifested in a characteristic way, not some free-floating Platonic "entities." Second, take any two human beings and ask them to define them and they will have some things in common but they will also differ. So, to claim that love "exists" is rather silly, imo. We can say that we "love" such and such which means we have strong desire for something (food, person, activity, you name it), which is again a physiological state.

We all exercise faith of some kind every moment of our lives.

If by faith you mean an educated guess, I agree. If by faith you mean certainty, then I don't.

[boatbums]

One cannot approach faith with reason and remain faithful.

Isaiah 1:18
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

[Forest Keeper]

As you yourself appear to note, we are not far apart.

Amen to that, and thanks for your responses. It's a pleasure to learn some of the particulars of the Lutheran faith. We have much in common, which is good since I think Luther was one of the greatest Christian theologians of all time. :)

[boatbums]

Stocking up for the next round of lake effect snow. We’re looking at days of it..... again.....

I wish y'all could keep it up there. We had 13 degrees in Charlotte this AM. Brrrrrr. Stay warm. :o)

[boatbums]

So it is faith that erases the distinction between a Jew and a Gentile as either one can believe the same thing. It is the faith that they share that brings salvation to both Jew and Greek. But does it say that it is faith as opposed to good works of charity? Not at all: it goes on to say "But all do not obey the gospel" and later, "if thou abide in goodness, otherwise thou also shalt be cut off" (Rom 11:22). These two chapters teach what the Catholic Church teaches: that faith is necessary for salvation, but the faith must result in obedience of the gospel, -- the works.

Gosh, this sounds sooooo familiar... Tell me, if the "works of the Law" are not salvific, but the "works of charity" along with faith are, then you must also say that since "The Law" included the ten commandments, you must conclude that obeying the Ten Commandments is not necessary for salvation. Come to think of it, the last time we spoke about this, I never really got an answer. IS there one now?