I appreciate learning a possible different ancient usage of the word “gate”. Will investigate in the future…
“Hateful as Hades’ Gate, to me, is the man who thinks one thing and says another.”
- Achilles, The Illiad, Book 9
I can definitively say that the ancient Church was dead by the time The Father and the Son appeared to Joseph Smith in the Spring of 1820. All of the NT verses only talk of it being on going or happening in the future.
Then you HAVE to admit you don’t know. We’re not talking about the supposed “restoration” date. We’re talking about the Great Apostasy. If you don’t know when it was completed, you don’t know if it really was completed at all.
An equally plausible explanation of NT verses on apostasy is that men tend to be sinful - as they simply
always have been. The struggle of righteousness against iniquity is as old as Cain and Abel. There is nothing given that necessitates the failure of God’s Holy Church anywhere in the text.
Only that it will continue to be under attack just as it always has been.
Don’t care. He is a false prophet and thus a champion of the armies of Satan. His victories are the victories of hell.
If his church is under scrutiny, you can’t use his quotes to defend it. They are also, inherently, under scrutiny.
Was the Church dead when the Apostles stopped providing guidance to the congregations? Why did the apostolic letters stop? The Church didn’t stop needing apostolic guidance.
The apostolic letters didn’t stop. The original apostles were dead so they couldn’t write any more. But you claim there were no letters from their successors? Of course there were.
Your fundamental approach to church guidance is wrong. The Church wasn’t to be led by documents. Otherwise Christ would have spent His life writing, then gone off to his Crucifixion.
Christ selected men to learn from Him and share his message after he ascended. As we see with Matthias replacing Judas, these men can pass on their authority. It continues to this very day.
Was the Church dead when infant baptism started? This practice is neither authorized nor described in the Bible. There are no historically recorded infant baptisms prior to 200AD.
Nonsense. Infants were being brought before the Christ in the beginning. Luke 18:15-17.
Entire households were converted Acts 16:33. These households included children and servants.
And as the NT wasn’t finished being written until JUST shy of 100AD, your suggestion that it fell into fundamental apostasy a mere 100 years later suggests that the god of the Mormons is so weak as to not be worthy of human worship. The Church that belongs to my God simply cannot fail. Its roots are the origin of the Earth and its branches are the present.
Was the Church dead when non-immersion baptisms started to be performed?
No, it was authorized by the Church. Baptism by affusion is mentioned in the Didache, which was written by the Church fathers only a few decades after the last epistle was written.
Was the Church dead when Communion was practiced by partaking of the host or drinking the wine or both? Scripture records that Communion consists of both an eating action and a drinking action, not one or the other or both.
newadvent.org/cathen/04175a.htm
Was the Church dead when Confirmation started to be performed with a single hand? The Bible talks of the laying on of hands.
You’re not serious on this one, are you? The implicit legalism is stunning. It assumes by “hands” we mean both hands of one participant. Not one hand from many participants - which would also be “hands”.
And it assumes that the Church does not have the authority to alter the disciplines it creates for itself (it does).
I could go on (celibate bishops and priests, 1054 schism, Council of Toulouse forbididng the laity to possess Bibles, etc.)
I wish you would. Bishops are celibate as a matter of discipline in the tradition of the apostles themselves - even though there are married priests in the Catholic church. The 1054 schism was over, dominantly, what the primacy of the Roman Pontiff meant, not over its existence. Orthodoxy has always held that the Roman seat was special in a way not shared by other seats. Toulouse forbid vernacular translations of the bible in a noble effort to limit confusion and outbreaks of heresy arising from individualistic interpretations of scripture. God transmits doctrine through his Church, not directly to you.
Were the verse to say “the sons of God gathered wearing tu-tus and drinking Cherry Coke, and Satan came among them”, no one could say definitely that Satan was not wearing a tu-tu and not drinking Cherry Coke.
You said “I disagree with your interpretation. Nowhere is this verse is it stated that Satan was not a son of God.” This is an argument from absence. You can use the same argument to say that Satan wears tu-tus and drinks Cherry Coke on the basis that it doesn’t say that he
doesn’t.
The text doesn’t call The Lord of Lies a “son”. It says:
Job 2:1 Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord.
Satan is presented as something other.
