The gospel is not: here is more grace so you can keep the law.
The gospel is not: Christ will approve of you if you do your part.
The gospel is: Christ has done it.
You Make Mary Cry...
Posted on 06/30/2017 4:43:54 PM PDT by Gamecock
The year 2017 is the year of Martin Luther—or at least it should be. Nearly 500 years ago on October 31, 1517, Luther nailed (or “mailed,” for some historians debate this point) his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church.
Even so, Luther didn’t become a full-fledged protestor of the church in that single moment. It took him about eight years (1513-1521) to challenge and hammer out a more robust understanding of the gospel.
Have you ever wondered what Martin Luther was reading during this crucial time in his life? Maybe I’m just a nerd, but I thought at least someone else might be interested in what Luther was reading during his slow, but steady, transition out of the medieval church and into the world of reformation.
Remember, Luther’s goal wasn’t to invent or start an entirely new church. His goal was to reform the church and call her to repentance and faith in the abiding Word of God.
Here are four books Martin Luther read that made him question everything:
1. The Psalms Luther spent time studying and lecturing through the Psalms in the Bible. He began to realize that the Bible teaches we are not generally sinful, we are totally sinful. Here, Luther had the beginnings of what theologians later would refer to as “total depravity,” meaning that we are sinful in our thoughts, words, and deeds.
2. Romans After that, Luther lectured through Paul’s letter to the Romans. He came across Romans 1:17, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” The last part of this verse is a direct quotation from Habakkuk 2:4.
Luther began to see something that he never saw before. He began to see the doctrine of imputation—that we are declared right before God not by our own righteousness, but by the righteousness of another. He began to understand that the righteousness of God that was such a terror to him as a priest (because it told him that he was unholy and unworthy), was actually the righteousness from God that told him he was holy and worthy. God gives this right standing by faith alone. It is a righteousness that is received as a gift and not earned.
3. Galatians It wasn’t until Luther started lecturing through Galatians that he began to realize that faith does not justify us before God. Faith is merely an instrument that God uses. Faith is a tool by which we embrace Jesus Christ as he is offered to us in the gospel.
Faith is, as John Murry once said, “extrospective.” It looks outward—not inward—to embrace the God who gives himself. In other words, faith is only an empty hand. It justifies because it grabs hold of the Jesus who justifies (Rom. 3:26).
4. Hebrews The last book that turned a medieval priest into a true Reformer was the letter to the Hebrews. Luther began to embrace an entirely different understanding of how the Old and New Testaments relate to one another. He realized that the law is not simply the Old Testament and the gospel is the New Testament, but that the gospel of God can be seen as preached throughout both Old and New Testaments.
The same Jesus of the same gospel was offered freely to both Jew and Gentile alike, throughout the whole Bible. Sure, there was a greater and fuller proclamation of that message, such that it went out to the whole world instead of only Israel and their close neighbors—but the gospel was preached nonetheless!
In short, reading and studying the Bible is what ultimately made Martin Luther “protest” the medieval church. Luther was convinced that the Bible was worth listening to. So this year we celebrate the anniversary of a “recovery of the bright light of the gospel.” To God alone be all the glory (Soli Deo Gloria).
But 'neither hot nor cold' persists.
Go figger...
Avoid the shiny objects.
You Make Mary Cry...
We are CORRECT!!!
Well now son; that there's mighty good advice!!
25 When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”
26 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”
28 Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”
29 Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
30 So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’[c]”
32 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
34 “Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
35 Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36 But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. 37 All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”
Not quite...
Mindreading would say, "You appear to know ..."; not "You don't appear to know...".
Even using the word 'appear'?
Which applies to the Assumption: which examples how Rome can "remember" something which is lacking actual warrant from where it should be found. Ratzinger states (emp. mine),
Before Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven was defined, all theological faculties in the world were consulted for their opinion. Our teachers' answer was emphatically negative. What here became evident was the one-sidedness, not only of the historical, but of the historicist method in theology. “Tradition” was identified with what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner, the patrologist from Wurzburg…had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the 5C; this doctrine, therefore, he argued, could not belong to the “apostolic tradition. And this was his conclusion, which my teachers at Munich shared.
How then can Rome make belief in the Assumption a binding doctrine? Why by claiming Rome can "remember" what early historical testimony "forgot:"
But if you conceive of “tradition” as the living process whereby the Holy Spirit introduces us to the fullness of truth and teaches us how to understand what previously we could still not grasp (cf. Jn 16:12-13), then subsequent “remembering” (cf. Jn 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it has not caught sight of previously and was already handed down in the original Word,” J. Ratzinger, Milestones (Ignatius, n.d.), 58-59.
But which is specious sophistry, for it abuses Jn. 16:4 which refers to remembering what Christ had already told them ("these things have I told you"), into remembering an event that was rejected as lacking the needed evidence that Christ told them of, and turns this wannabe historical event into something that was too hard to understand - "what previously we could still not grasp" and abuses 16:4,12-13, which refers to the Spirit guiding us into all Truth, into a carte blanche provision to effectively call things that were not as if they were, making a tradition that progressively developed into a something that a RC is mandated to believe, over 1700 years after it allegedly occurred.
What then is the basis for such required belief? Not the weight of evidential warrant like as with the resurrection of Christ an d His life, (cf. Lk. 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-3; 2:22; 17:31; 1Co. 15:1-8), but the novel and unScriptural premise of ensured perpetual magisterial infallibility:
“Still, fundamentalists ask, where is the proof from Scripture? Strictly, there is none. It was the Catholic Church that was commissioned by Christ to teach all nations and to teach them infallibly. The mere fact that the Church teaches the doctrine of the Assumption as definitely true is a guarantee that it is true.” — Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), p. 275.
Oh, I don’t know.
It seems to me that the repeated LIES to my FACE of what I believe, even after correcting the poster multiple times, would be a little more personal than demanding an apology for those falsehoods.
It’s hardly mind-reading to accuse a posted of lying when they persist in falsehood even after being informed of the truth, MULTIPLE TIMES. With citations, no less.
Not to mention the accusation of lying being a logical solution, because I informed the party in question about Lutheran theology, with citations directly from the Book of Concord, multiple times.
The equivalent would be an anti-Catholic poster continuing to post the Chick Tract about Catholicism and insisting on its truth, even after being shown the opposite.
I do not like seeing my faith libeled, especially after correction, and then being told I cannot accuse the poster who is doing it of lying.
The true Church is all those across the world who confess that Jesus is Lord and believed that God raised him from the dead.
Not some org based in Rome howling ‘WE WUZ FURST.’
Hey!
What did you COMPLETELY type in #81??
***
You can see a direct quote that forgot to get deleted in post 97.
Well then, stomp your widdle feet and demand action, Jackson!
Two points:
1: Then why do you continue to insist that Lutherans don’t teach good works, when I have shown repeatedly that we do?
2: I don’t see how it’s violating the guidelines to point out repeated falsehoods.
>> “Try reading Acts chapter 15. Is there anything in it that is not written by the fledgling Roman church??<<
There may be things therein written by the false Roman “church” but most of it was written by Yeshua’s Notzerim apostles to show new believers how to live while learning Torah, which could not be learned in a day.
All of Acts 15 is centered on bringing new believers into eventual compliance with Yehova’s commandments. The apostles had all of their lives to learn, but the mostly adult new believers obviously had a much steeper learning curve.
They also had the Pharisee pestilence trying to lay the unbearable burden of their false torah of takanot and ma’assim on them, and that is the core of what chapter 15 is all about: Ignore the Pharisee pestilence.
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