Posted on 08/27/2010 11:45:13 AM PDT by Hank Kerchief
It is markedly different from knowing that God will forgive a contrite heart.
Presumption is the red headed step sister of despair.
Good thing most Christians I know don’t believe that.
Didn’t St. Paul say, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
So, was St. Paul an “alter Christus”?
For an interesting book on the English language see The Story of English, the companion volume to the PBS series of the same name.
Psalm 123
A song of ascents.
1 I lift up my eyes to you,
to you whose throne is in heaven.
2 As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the LORD our God,
till he shows us his mercy.
3 Have mercy on us, O LORD, have mercy on us,
for we have endured much contempt.
4 We have endured much ridicule from the proud,
much contempt from the arrogant.
I thought I would share this psalm with my FRiends, since there seems to be a lot of arrogance in the Calvinist posts.
I guess it just got lost in translation. ;o)
Romans 6:1-6
1What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?
2By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?
3Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
4We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
5If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.
6For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin
Superior to the greek originals?
I will readily but sadly admit that there are many people claiming the title of Catholic who, in complete disregard for what the Church teaches, live their lives as if they were impeccable (incapable of sinning). Now, we Catholics could define sin as willful opposition to the knowable Will of God, indeed that's my working definition at least.
Now it seems to me based on what I've observed that there are an awful lot of "Reformed" (oh... btw: "reformed"... does anyone have any respect for whatever it is that calls itself "Reformed" Judaism? If you want to know what Jews believe do you go to a "Reformed" Jew or an Orthodox Jew? I see parallels with Christianity, but that really is a digression.) Anyhow I've observed that there are an awful lot of "Reformed" Christians who give every appearance, in theory and in practice, that they could (and do) go on sinning without repenting and because they've "said the magic words" of the sinner's prayer they are home free.
Every once in a while when confronted with that someone will say "Well they're insane and I/we don't believe that" and I say: Fine, then stop blaming Catholicism for people who don't take what the Church teaches seriously. More often than not though people will mount some sort of defense that Reformed Christians really do believe that way. One woman used an elaborate example of a parent who would never stop loving a child even if the child turned his back on his parents. My first thought was "yeah get back to me on that when you find out just how gay your son really is".
My second and more theologically pertinent, less snarky thought is that for a creature consumed with the love of self, Heaven will be hell. Sometimes someone will raise a very vague notion that there will be some sort of punishment (one person said God would give a "Whupping") due to sin but that a person who has said the sinner's prayer will still enter Heaven. Whenever I ask "oh you mean sort of like purgatory?" there's this sort of deer in headlights thing that happens and "oh my gosh, look at the time, I have to be in Prague by noon yesterday!"
Did you know the Catholic Church teaches that if you are sorry for offending God because you love God that God forgives you immediately? Furthermore if a person has the intention to confess sacramentally and dies before fulfilling that intention God doesn't condemn based on a technicality. For the sake of brevity (hah) I've left some gaping holes in this paragraph but the fact remains that's the case.
What blew my mind was the idea of Guaranteed Salvation being a Catholic principle when we don't even have terms like "eternal security" or "Once saved always saved". The idea that one could "continue my sinful life and still be saved" is absolutely foreign to Catholicism and my own experience tells me that if someone wants "guaranteed salvation" that permits the continuation of a sinful life one needs to go sign up for Calvinism because we have no tickets for that particular ride.
Exactly. And the pagans didn't have it. Have you ever heard of anything in any form of paganism comparable to, say, the raging theological debates about the nature of the Trinity or the Incarnation? Just didn't happen. Even Judaism was never and is not credal in that sense.
Can anyone really love God with his whole heart, with his whole soul, with his whole strength and with his whole mind? Is failure sufficient excuse to dismiss the commandment? Surely, if Christ had added, "but you can't, so don't even bother to try," the evangelist would have added it. And the two commandments are intimately connected: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"
If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.
Does this mean faith is impossible, so we're exempt? Even allowing for Semitic hyperbole, it's a pretty high bar!
Thanks for stating it so clearly! :)
For 1800 years, Catholics believed Mary was assumed into heaven. It wasn't formalized until Pope Pius XII. But way back in the very early church it was believed and taught.
To which you responded:
Wrong. It was a recent and impious speculation that turned into RC doctrine just over a century ago.Perhaps you can explain why the Orthodox also celebrate it as the Dormition of the Theotokos? The Schism was in the 12th century.
Perhaps you can explain some of this "recent" artwork:
"Assumption of the Virgin" by Carracci, 1590
"Assumption of the Virgin" by Carracci, 1600-01
"The Assumption of the Virgin" by Botticini, 1475-76
"Assumption of the Virgin Mary" by Peter Paul Rubens, 1626
"Assumption of the Virgin" by Titian, 1516-18
"Assumption of the Virgin" by Correggio, 1526-30
More big talk.
Prove that Constantine added anything to Christianity, much less pagan things.
Why muddy up the question in the first sentence with the highly debatable charge in the second? How does this further discourse?
It worries me that you would be so familiar with "those banned sites" as to immediately know when something posted is "nearly word for word" the same.
Worried, but not surprised. I'm guessing you've spent a lot of time at those banned sites.
We are all familiar with the content of those sites because the content has been posted here, albeit unattributed, by anti-Catholics for years. It is useful to know the source, it helps characterize the post and the poster. They are not half as clever as they think they are.
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.