Posted on 09/06/2017 7:04:56 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
MANY 'churches' do this as well.
Have our FR Catholics got a dog in this fight?
Ah; you are wondering; too!
Divide and Conquer has ALWAYS worked.
"Did GOD really say...?
I'm in the boonies and will be looking for a church.
I am a member of a Wesleyan church on the eastside of Indianapolis.
We will be shutting down in October.
After a growth spurt 20 years ago; the younger folks that were in church went to school; got married; and moved away from the area.
Us older folks have been dying off; and there seems to be none in the neighborhood that are willing to come worship with us.
However; 5 years ago a black congregation has ALSO been worshipping in our building and a smaller Hispanic only as well.
The original builders and sustainers of the church have fallen below critical mass; financially; and cannot continue. The problem is now in headquarter's hands.
I wonder what % Protestants are ex-Catholics??
Thanks although identifying as a Cath is not necessarily the same as claiming allegiance to Roman Catholicism, since self ID Caths abound with dissent from official teaching, while a lot of Baptists are liberal.
Yes, but the implications of baptism are quite different. Baptists do not include infants as Biblical candidates for water baptism. Paedobaptism is a feature of the churches using some form of The Apostles Creed as a statement of faith. The old Roman creed did not include belief in catholicism, while the present form does. Catholicism thus includes not only Romanists, but Anglicans, Episcopals, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc who also subscribe to the Apostles Creed. That creed is never cited in any Baptist assembly because of its acceptance and submission to government external to the local assembly, AFIK.
But thanks for your note, which is quite correct as it stands.
It sonds like you're not aware that most protestants are catholics, just not Roman Catholics. Any church form that subscribes to the Apostles' Creed is essentially catholic, not a believer in the autonomy of the local assembly.
Baptists and other non-denominational local churches are not Protestants.
I've met a LOT of fundamental evangelical Christians who are not Protestants, those who have firmly rejected the Romanism catholic religion. Many of them are pastors or missionaries of the Baptist or Darbyite brethren ilk. Many of them are former Protestants, like me, also.
Those are to some degree Catholic as regards her distinctives, never having come out of Babylon as much as we should, and they also tend to be more liberal than evangelicals.
who also subscribe to the Apostles Creed
I think you have this confused with the Nicene Creed which mentions baptism for the forgiveness of sins, which the Apostles Creed does not, while "catholic" should be understood as the universal body of Christ:
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
Orthodox Christianity Sees Slow but Constant Wave of Growth from Conversions
No, I did not confuse the Apostles' Creed with the Nicene Creed. Very specifically, the early church formulation did not smack of catholicity, and the word "catholic: was not a part of the earliest "Old Roman Creed" (click here).
The propagation of the Way of Christ in the first days was thero;ugh the formation of local independent autonomous assemblies of believers each governed by a plurality of elders as appointed by the first and only apostle/prophets, which office was discontinued un their deaths. Catholicity was not a part of the universal Gospel.
The concept of catholicity in government was present in the beliefs of a very few prominent teachers like Irenaeus of Antioch, but not put into practice until it was instituted by Augustine, creating a statist church headed by Constantine and administered by his selected bishops.
hundreds of years after Jesus' death.
According to the Bible there is only one univresal church, and it is located in Heaven, not on earth, as the Romanists would have it.
Believers congregating locally, joined by profession of faith and immersion of the believer in the rite of water baptism, and reporting directly to its Creator, Savior, and Lord without any intermediary layer of government exterior to the locally appointed members of the assembly, is the form that the true Christianity has taken from the beginning. It has never united with the Catholicism of Augustine, Roman or Greek, and has remained independent of those always.
Have I made that position clear? That is the stance of Baptists everywhere, and withut question differentiates them from the Roman Catholic and non-Roman Catholics of whom the Protestant Reformers comprise a part.
I've observed that Catholics that come to faith in Christ alone for salvation make fantastic Christians. They appreciate the grace of God and His gift, after years of guilt and the hamster wheel of works.
". . . Irenaeus Ignatius of Antioch . . ."
(my memory was faulty on this point, sorry)
Thank you! I had actually not been aware of that. Short Scriptural and simple, though a faithful Cath would say they believe it, it is what they add to it that is a problem.
The propagation of the Way of Christ in the first days was thero;ugh the formation of local independent autonomous assemblies of believers each governed by a plurality of elders as appointed by the first and only apostle/prophets, which office was discontinued un their deaths.
Though under the apostles they and the elders provided a Scriptural central magisterial function as seen in Acts 15, but which is not what Catholicism foisted upon souls or seduced them with.
The concept of catholicity in government was present in the beliefs of a very few prominent teachers like Irenaeus of Antioch, but not put into practice until it was instituted by Augustine, creating a statist church headed by Constantine and administered by his selected bishops.
Paul Johnson, educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, author of over 40 books and a conservative popular historian, finds,
The Church was now a great and numerous force in the empire, attracting men of wealth and high education, inevitably, then, there occurred a change of emphasis from purely practical development in response to need, to the deliberate thinking out of policy. This expressed itself in two ways: the attempt to turn Christianity into a philosophical and political system, and the development of controlling devices to prevent this intellectualization of the faith from destroying it. The twin process began to operate in the early and middle decades of the third century, with Origen epitomizing the first element and Cyprian the second.
The effect of Origen’s work was to create a new science, biblical theology, whereby every sentence in the scriptures was systematically explored for hidden [much prone to metaphorical] meanings, different layers of meanings, allegory and so forth.....
Cyprian [c. 200 – September 14, 258] came from a wealthy family with a tradition of public service to the empire; within two years of his conversion he was made a bishop. He had to face the practical problems of persecution, survival and defence against attack. His solution was to gather together the developing threads of ecclesiastical order and authority and weave them into a tight system of absolute control...the confession of faith, even the Bible itself lost their meaning if used outside the Church.
With Cyprian, then, the freedom preached by Paul and based on the power of Christian truth was removed from the ordinary members of the Church, it was retained only by the bishops, through whom the Holy Spirit still worked, who were collectively delegated to represent the totality of Church members...With Bishop Cyprian, the analogy with secular government came to seem very close. But of course it lacked one element: the ‘emperor figure’ or supreme priest...
[Peter, according to Cyprian, was] the beneficiary of the famous ‘rock and keys’ text in Matthew. There is no evidence that Rome exploited this text to assert its primacy before about 250 - and then...Paul was eliminated from any connection with the Rome episcopate and the office was firmly attached to Peter alone...
...There was in consequence a loss of spirituality or, as Paul would have put it, of freedom... -(A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson, pp. 51 -61,63. transcribed using OCR software)
deformation of the church was seen under Damasus 1 (366-384) who began his reign by employing a gang of thugs in seeking to secure his chair, which carried out a three-day massacre of his rivals supporters. Yet true to form, Rome made him a "saint."
• Upon Pope Liberius's death September 24 A.D. 366, violent disorders broke out over the choice of a successor. A group who had remained consistently loyal to Liberius immediately elected his deacon Ursinus in the Julian basilica and had him consecrated Bishop, but the rival faction of Felix's adherence elected Damasus, who did not hesitate to consolidate his claim by hiring a gang of thugs, storming the Julian Basilica in carrying out a three-day massacre of the Ursinians.
On Sunday, October 1 his partisans seized the Lateran Basilica, and he was there consecrated. He then sought the help of the city prefect (the first occasion of a Pope in enlisting the civil power against his adversaries), and he promptly expelled Ursinus and his followers from Rome. Mob violence continued until October 26, when Damasus's men attacked the Liberian Basilica, where the Ursinians had sought refuge; the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus reports that they left 137 dead on the field. Damasus was now secure on his throne; but the bishops of Italy were shocked by the reports they received, and his moral authority was weakened for several years....
Damasus was indefatigable in promoting the Roman primacy, frequently referring to Rome as 'the apostolic see' and ruling that the test of a creed's orthodoxy was its endorsement by the Pope.... This [false claim to] succession gave him a unique [presumptuous claim to] judicial power to bind and loose, and the assurance of this infused all his rulings on church discipline. — Kelly, J. N. D. (1989). The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 32 ,34;
• Eamon Duffy (Former president of Magdalene College and member of Pontifical Historical Commission, and current Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge) and provides more on the Roman church becoming more like the empire in which it was found as a result of state adoption of (an already deformed) Christianity:
The conversion of Constantine had propelled the Bishops of Rome into the heart of the Roman establishment...They [bishops of Rome] set about [creating a Christian Rome] by building churches, converting the modest tituli (community church centres) into something grander, and creating new and more public foundations, though to begin with nothing that rivaled the great basilicas at the Lateran and St. Peter’s...
These churches were a mark of the upbeat confidence of post-Constantinian Christianity in Rome. The popes were potentates, and began to behave like it. Damasus perfectly embodied this growing grandeur. An urbane career cleric like his predecessor Liberius, at home in the wealthy salons of the city, he was also a ruthless power-broker, and he did not he did not hesitate to mobilize both the city police and [a hired mob of gravediggers with pickaxes] to back up his rule…
Self-consciously, the popes began to model their actions and their style as Christian leaders on the procedures of the Roman state. — Eamon Duffy “Saints and Sinners”, p. 37,38
More by God's grace.
This is the closest I have found:
68% of those raised Roman Catholic still are Catholic (higher than the retention rates of individual Protestant denoms, but less than Jews at 76%). 15% are now Protestant (9% evangelical); 14% are unaffiliated. Pew forum, Faith in Flux (April 27, 2009) http://pewforum.org/uploadedfiles/Topics/Religious_Affiliation/fullreport.pdf
Excellent research. Too bad we have to rely on the purveyors of Romanism to get the details.
I clicked on the link you provided:
http://pewforum.org/uploadedfiles/Topics/Religious_Affiliation/fullreport.pdf
I got this result:
Page Not Found
The page you are looking for falls outside of the margin of error.
Yeah. If anyone includes links, one has to check them out, especially old citations, to see if they still work before posting the comment with them in it.
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