Posted on 06/02/2009 6:46:19 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
Good thing you don't get to make that decision.
The Catholic Church was the FIRST Church!
Read your Bible — Acts is a good place to start!
Right; that’s how I know that the Roman Catholic Church cannot have been the first church. Did you not recognize my citation? It was from the Bible.
It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the Word of God. It either validates, or invalidates a church’s claim to be a Christian church.
Rome denies the Gospel and preaches a false substitute. Ergo, it is not a Christian church.
You know, this isn’t news. I’ve explained it patiently a number of times - to you, I think.
But then you may recall nearly 500 years ago, Christians began waking up to Rome’s perversions, and pouring out from under its thralldom. You’re really not going to unscramble that egg by feigning surprise when a free Christian states the obvious.
Thus spake Danny-boy.
In turn, I say that Pope Danny-boy I denies the Gospel and preaches a false substitute. Ergo, Danny-boy's church (whatever it may be) is not a Christian Church.
Thus spake Bustard.
Take your pick.
We speak with absolutely equal (ie. zero) authority.
permit me to restate what I said in post 9:
If you fall overboard and the ship captain throws you a life preserver, who saved you? The captain or the life preserver? Obviously the captain. The life preserver has no power to throw itself--it is merely an agent, but it is a crucially important agent nonetheless. If the captain throws it, he means you to use it--he WILLS you to use it. And what fool, drowning in the water, would dare *refuse* to take hold of this thing, on the grounds that he wants to be saved by the Captain's hand and the Captain's hand alone?
You'll notice that while Christ often healed people with a mere word (the centurion's servant)...he often used earthly means and rituals to bring that healing about. He told one to go wash in the pool of Siloam. He rubbed spittle and mud in the eyes of the blind man. Now who heals? The mud, or Christ? Bathing in the pool of Siloam, or Christ?
Rather than ask where the sacraments fit in, as if they were superfluous, I'll turn it right around and say that if Christ willed to use the sacraments and their rituals for our salvation, what right does anyone have to abstain from them?
Let us have some honesty here. Catholics do not deny the Gospel, rather the Church disagrees with your private interpretation of it. If you knew anything about Catholic theology you would know that the Catholic Church takes the Gospel very seriously.
Read your Bible — Acts is a good place to start!
Was the "church" started at the YHvH commanded or Did the "church" exist earlier ? Using the LXX as a guide we see that the EkklesiaA study of the word "church", in the Koine Greek : Ekklesia.
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
Feast day of Shavuot (pentecost) as some say ?
is first used in Deuteronomy 4:10 NAsbU Deuteronomy 4:10 "Remember the day you stood before the LORD your God
Also see : Deu 4:10, Deu 9:10, Deu 18:16, Deu 23:3, Deu 23:4, Deu 23:9, Deu 31:30,
at Horeb, when the LORD said to me, 'Assemble the people to Me, that I may let
them hear My words so they may learn to fear Me all the days they live on
the earth, and that they may teach their children.'
Jos 9:2, Jda 20.2, Jda 21:5, Jda 21:8, Jdg 20:2 Jdg 21:5, Jdg 21:8, 1 Sa 17:47,
1 Sa 19:20, 1 Ki 8:14, 1 Ki 8:22, 1 Ki 8:55, 1 Ki 8:65, 1 Ch 13:2, 1 Ch 13:4, 1 Ch 28:2,
1 Ch 28:8
“If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema. (Gal 1:9)”
Good condemnation of the Protestant reformation.
That was extremely well put
If you actually honestly wanted to understand Catholic doctrine on these issues you’d see that indulgences have nothing to do with salvation
therefore, they have nothing to do with earning salvation by works.
Look, I’m going to help you out. You want to argue against indulgences? Then you have to go to ecclesiology, not soteriology.
And here Catholics and Protestants do differ. BUT IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SALVATION. IT HAS TO DO WITH THE NATURE OF THE CHURCH.
Indulgences have to do with church discipline. The issue is whether and in what way the Church gets involved when someone sins gravely against God.
We all agree (I hope) that when someone sins he must admit he sinned (repent) and ask God for forgiveness. God alone forgives sins. (When Jesus said “your sins are forgiven” and said it on his own authority, he was claiming to be God, which is why the Jewish leaders considered it blasphemy.)
We all agree, I hope, that someone who says he’s sorry but doesn’t act like he’s sorry isn’t really sorry. By their fruits ye shall know them, Jesus said. We know repentant sinners by their fruits—whether they live a life of Christian holiness, whether they strive to repair the damage done by their sin to themselves and anyone else affected by their sins. Someone who says to God that he’s sorry he sinned but then wants to act as if his sin never happened, as if there’s no damage done to himself and usually also to others, isn’t really sorry and God can’t forgive someone who’s not repentant. Agreed?
Now for the sticky part. Does the Church play any role in the repairing of the damage by the sinner to the sinner and to others affected by his sin? Or is it ENTIRELY between God and the sinner?
Catholics say the Church does have a role to play and that Christ himself in Scripture authorized this role. Christ, being God and the forgiver of sins by His own authority, explicitly delegated that authority to the twelve apostles, which means, to the Church because he explicitly chose and set up those twelve apostles, with Peter as the key to their unity, to be the governors and leaders of his visible, earthly, historical Church. He remains the Head of His Body but all heads may legitimately delegate authority. When he said, “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven, whose sins you do not forgive are not forgiven” he was delegating the authority to forgive sins without in any way denying that the authority to forgive sins belongs to Him. When someone with legitimate authority delegates, he does not destroy his own authority because only by having authority may he legitimately delegate authority.
Since the authority of bishops (priests have authority to govern the forgiveness process by delegation from bishops, not by themselves) in the process of God forgiving the sins of repentant sinners includes also the authority to judge whether the sinner is really repentant and since true repentance is demonstrated by acts of prayer and love of God and neighbor (prayer is an act of love of God), the Church in her Christ-authorized leadership governs the “repair” process. That repair process is the “temporal penalty” or, in shorthand, the “penance” that the sinner agrees to carry out—after his sin HAS BEEN TOTALLY FORGIVEN BY CHRIST THROUGH CHRIST’S DELEGATED GOVERNORS.
Carrying out the penance demonstrates that one truly was sorry for offending God. It does not affect one’s eternal salvation as far as the sin one confessed is concerned. But if one does not amend one’s life after confessing one’s sin, does not carry out the penance one agreed to, one is now, as it were, spitting in God’s face all over again, sinning all over again, and in a worse way because one claimed to be sorry but isn’t living like one is sorry.
TO CONCLUDE: Your quarrel with us Catholics is here—you probably don’t believe that Christ authorized the Church to be governed by the apostles and their successors. You probably interpret the verses (repeated by Jesus explicitly in the Gospels) about binding and loosing sins as authorizations to priests and bishops to have a role in the repair process after God forgives our sins and frees us by the power of the Cross from eternal damnation. You probably don’t agree that Christ authorized the apostles and their delegates to have a role in the process of repentance and forgiveness from damnation.
But you probably do agree that a repair process after forgiveness, even in human relations, is part of the overall process. You just don’t agree, probably, that the Church has any role in this—you probably think the whole business: repentance, forgiveness, repair, is between the sinner and God alone.
The only problem is that Protestants from Luther through Wesley to the Mennonites until very recently did see a role for the Church in church discipline. So if you believe it’s TOTALLY between the sinner and God, you are in a very small minority of the entire history of Christianity.
But Luther and Calvin and other Protestants did disagree about the exact role of the Church in the process. Catholics believe one of the most specific authorizations by Christ anywhere in the Bible gave authority to govern this process to His apostles and they then delegated it to their successors and to priests—with Christ’s ongoing Holy Spirit approval for the delegation. Luther and Calvin did not agree with that, though Luther retained a role for confession to pastors. (Anglicans retained the whole apostles-bishops-priests business, including confession as a sacrament.)
Where do indulgences fit in this?
If you were to grant that Jesus authorized the Church to govern the process of forgiveness and repair, then you might just recognize that the process would reasonably include penance acts to be done after being forgiven. In the early Church, at the time of Tertullian and Augustine and other great Christians that even you Protestants admire (I hope), years of prayer as a penitent at the door of the Church and of being barred from receiving Communion were assigned by bishops for grave sins like adultery or apostasy (denying Christ under persecution).
If a person was close to death and still in year 2 of a 5-year penance for murder, for instance, he could be indulged of the remaining 3 years. Indulgences involve solely the Church (through her leaders) remitting something the Church had assigned under Christ’s authorization in the first place, remitting it not just on a whim but on one’s deathbed. Over time, the remittance was granted on other occasions—outbursts of prayer accompanied by a visit to a holy shrine etc. (But only if one had first reconciled oneself with Christ via the Church as one part of one’s visit to the shrine. Visiting a shrine while aware of sin in one’s life and not being repentant doesn’t help repair the wound left behind by previous sin. To this day, indulgences only apply if one has first “rededicated one’s life to Christ” [to use your language] by confessing all one’s sins [to use our language] and gotten right with Christ by the power of his death on the Cross [to use our common shared language]).
There, I’ve showed you where your own best arguments against our indulgences have to come from. They have to come from our very real disagreements over the nature of the Church, over the interpretation of the “whose sins you bind are bound, loosed are loosed” passages. I think our Catholic and Orthodox interpretation of these passages is correct, that the plain sense of what Jesus says means that he authorizes the Church to govern the forgiveness and repair process. You probably disagree. But the burden of proof is on you to show that these passages don’t mean what they prima facie mean.
I think I get it! Thanks!
Certainly people assembled before that historic assembly in the Upper Room at Pentecost. However, Christ used future tense when he said “I will build My Church” in Matthew 16.
**What matters is the Word of God. **
Which came first? The Church or the Bible?
You know as well as I do, that the Church came first. The one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.
You are in error, and we are trying to correct you.
You said — You know as well as I do, that the Church came first. The one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.
—
No, actually it’s the Word of God that came first.
We’ve had the progressive revelation of the Word of God for several thousand years before the church ever came around.
Before there was ever a church, Jesus referred to the Word of God, as the authority, and that it spoke about Him.
It’s called a “progressive” revelation, because God has revealed His Word, in progressive stages, starting long before the church was ever there, and ending it with the Book of Revelation (again being revealed progressively), as the closing of that Word.
Or...
The little story I tell my kids.
A boy was prone to lying. His father wanted to help him overcome it.
He told his son to drive a nail into a fence every time he lied. The boy could then see how many times he did it.
After a while the boy saw the nails, was sorry and began to lie less and less. Finally, one day he didn’t put in a single nail. He ran to he father with the good news.
The father patted him on the head and smiled. “Good!” he said, “Now every time you want to lie but tell the truth, remove one nail.”
The boy was pleased and soon removed all the nails.
The father smiled at his son. “So what do you see on the fence?”
“Holes” said the son.
“Yes. And even though your sins are forgiven, the damage remains.”
An indulgence fills the holes. (well, my kids get it)
The capital city of Italy is doing a very naughty thing.
But the Catholic Church does not deny the Gospel, so your assertion is false.
Parts of it.
But she didn't say "parts of the Bible."
She said "the Bible," the entire assembled canon, all 73 books.
Christ the Word preexisted all creation, including written scripture, and the Old Testament preexisted the Christian Church. However, if you wish to argue doctrine from the scripture, such as this silly article attempts to do, you need the complete Canon of Scripture and that includes the New Testament, a product of the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church.
Do you think Jesus is building a different church than YHvH ? Is Jesus a different g-d than YHvH ? Yes it is future tense.
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
NAU Matthew 16:18 "I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.
Jesus based and verified His claim as Messiah of Israel on only (what we call) the Old Testament scriptures, as the Word of God, as none of the New Testament was there.
The only Word of God that Jesus had was that “Old Testament”...
What we have now is 66 books of the Bible, as the book of Revelation closed out God’s Word.
So, for Jesus, it wasn’t “part” — but was the Word of God, which He said would be fulfilled completely, in all that it said (and it hasn’t yet been all fulfilled).
The Millennial Kingdom of God, on this earth, with Israel at the head of the nations, and with Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, ruling from Jerusalem, seated on the earthly Throne of David — still has not been fulfilled yet, and we can expect that to be fulfilled as Jesus said it would all be fulfilled and nothing would be changed until it was all completed.
[ for information on the books of the Bible, look at post #12 ]
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.