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Old_Scholar
Guest
I guess what you are really saying is that you don’t know of any Scriptures that support the Trinity???
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teadough
Guest
Old Scholar
By chance do you know where your new signature quote from Reagan comes from?
‘If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation goneunder.’ - Ronald Reagan
By chance do you know where your new signature quote from Reagan comes from?
‘If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation goneunder.’ - Ronald Reagan
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Gottle_of_Geer
Guest
No, I’m not saying that in the least. I am very definitely saying that where a Catholic sees a Biblical witness to this sublime Reality, a heretic or schismatic or cultist will see three gods, or a created Christ, or an impersonal force, or a god who is nothing but “an exalted man” - or some other such thing 
But if you don’t accept the witness of the Church to the Deity of Christ & to His Birth from her who is therefore not less than the Mother of God - why should you accept the same witness when she witnesses to the Reality that is the Blessed Trinity ? If a lesser truth is not believed, why should a truth that is utterly beyond all human knowing be believed. We can at least say of the the Word that He appeared on earth among men, & that men saw, & knew touched Him - but no man has seen the Most Holy Trinity.So what good would it do to quote the NT ? If it is not believed when it speaks of Mary, who is no more than a creature - what makes it credible when it speaks of the Uncreated & Eternal & Most Holy Trinity
?Belief is impossible if one is not willing to believe - to choose between believing & not believing, cannot be done by proxy. Only God can give us the desire to believe what He reveals, & with it the heavenly assistance we need in order to believe. It is utterly & totally impossible to do either - let alone both ! - in any other way. All the arguments & quotations in the world are useless, & maybe worse than useless, otherwise. They would puff up our intellects without feeding our hearts - & that would be ruinous. But St. Paul says it all far better than I can, in his description of love in 1 Corinthians 13; for those words of his describe Christ.
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cfrancis
Guest
Like his letter to the Laodicaeans (Col 4:16) or his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 5:9)?
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epostle
Guest
Genesis 1
[26] Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
[27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
The doctrine of the Trinity is encapsulated in Matthew 28:19, where Jesus instructs the apostles: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name (SINGULAR) of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
The parallelism of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is not unique to Matthew’s Gospel, but appears elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g., 2 Cor. 13:14, Heb. 9:14), as well as in the writings of the earliest Christians, who clearly understood them in the sense that we do today—that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three divine persons who are one divine being (God).
http://www.catholic.com/library/Trinity.asp
The human family is the closest analogy that mankind will ever come to concretely understanding the Blessed Trinity.
catholic-legate.com/articles/antitrinity.html
We believe in the development of doctrine. You do not. Take the Council of Chalcedon and its definition of the Hypostatic Union of Christ as an example. If St. Irenaeus (200 years earlier) stated something which disagrees with Chalcedon, that is no big deal, since we believe that the question of Jesus’ two natures was not fully explored and defined by the Church until Chalcedon concluded the matter in 451. You, however, cannot accept this, since …if the entire orthodox Christian Faith is recorded statically in the Bible … then you must maintain that Christ’s Hypostatic Union (His being both fully-God and fully-man) is taught clearly and unambiguously in Scripture itself, and that this was always recognized by orthodox Christians.
Therefore, you must apply this same principle to all the tenets of your faith. Given your Sola Scriptura position, you must be able to show that your comprehensive reading of the Bible was shared by someone else in ancient times (who achieved the same results as you). …Or rather you must concede that your interpretation of Scripture is totally subjective and non-repeatable throughout history. We don’t need to show this. But you do.
…Or else Sola Scriptura doesn’t work as an objective rule of faith.For the 100th time, Old Scholar, the 1st century Christians had no New Testament. This man-made theory that only New Testament books were circulated among the churches and every believer automatically knew they were inspired is totally false. It is one doctrine of yours you have no evidence to support. The Church formally recognized and proved which books were inspired and made them canon so they could be called divine writings when read in the churches, and it took 300 years to finish the job! That is a historical fact proven in later councils, which you reject anyway. And the Bereans “searched the scriptures” to see how Paul’s oral preaching complimented them, which you also reject.
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epostle
Guest
Another unbiblical doctrine of yours, OS, is that there would be no future, valid councils after the Council of Jerusalem in the Book of Acts. You rigidly adhere to this doctrine, partly because you reject development, yet you are totally unable to prove your doctrine by the Bible alone.
Another unbiblical doctrine of yours is that unless a doctrine is explicitly found in scriptures, it must be rejected. Look hard… this doctrine you rigidly adhere to is not found in scripture.
Scripture has always been the primary source for doctrine. The Early Church Fathers believed in the authority of Scripture. It is a Catholic Tradition. But you confuse the recognition of the authority of Scripture by the ECF as if they claimed scripture to be the sole authority. This is reading your agenda into the ECF. You have not one shred of evidence that ANYONE in the first few centuries of the Church read the Bible and got the same results as you, not counting heretics. Revelation is from God, relativism is from sola scriptura, and not from God.
The Hypostatic Union was not clearly defined until 451AD, so your ECF quotes are grossly out of context, and intellectually dishonest. You can’t understand any doctrinal development unless you understand what development means.
“By development of doctrine, we mean that some divinely revealed truth has become more deeply understood and more clearly perceived than it had been before. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ promised to send to teach us, the Church comes to see more deeply what she had always believed, and the resulting insights find expression in devotion of the faithful that may have been quite uncommon in the Church’s previous history. The whole spectrum of Christology and Mariology has witnessed such dogmatic progress…
Always implied in such progress is that, objectively, the revealed truth remains constant and unchanged. But through the light of the Holy Spirit, the subjective understanding of the truth becomes more clear, its meaning becomes more certain and its grasp by the believing mind becomes increasingly more firm.”
Development of Doctrine in the Catholic Church by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
therealpresence.org/eucharst/manual/section1/sec1_12a.pdf
Another unbiblical doctrine of yours is that unless a doctrine is explicitly found in scriptures, it must be rejected. Look hard… this doctrine you rigidly adhere to is not found in scripture.
Scripture has always been the primary source for doctrine. The Early Church Fathers believed in the authority of Scripture. It is a Catholic Tradition. But you confuse the recognition of the authority of Scripture by the ECF as if they claimed scripture to be the sole authority. This is reading your agenda into the ECF. You have not one shred of evidence that ANYONE in the first few centuries of the Church read the Bible and got the same results as you, not counting heretics. Revelation is from God, relativism is from sola scriptura, and not from God.
The Hypostatic Union was not clearly defined until 451AD, so your ECF quotes are grossly out of context, and intellectually dishonest. You can’t understand any doctrinal development unless you understand what development means.
“By development of doctrine, we mean that some divinely revealed truth has become more deeply understood and more clearly perceived than it had been before. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ promised to send to teach us, the Church comes to see more deeply what she had always believed, and the resulting insights find expression in devotion of the faithful that may have been quite uncommon in the Church’s previous history. The whole spectrum of Christology and Mariology has witnessed such dogmatic progress…
Always implied in such progress is that, objectively, the revealed truth remains constant and unchanged. But through the light of the Holy Spirit, the subjective understanding of the truth becomes more clear, its meaning becomes more certain and its grasp by the believing mind becomes increasingly more firm.”
Development of Doctrine in the Catholic Church by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
therealpresence.org/eucharst/manual/section1/sec1_12a.pdf
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RobbyS
Guest
As Newman points our, the confusion arises from the debates of the 16th and 17th Century which in effect revived the contraversies settled by the Council. Subordinarianism was in effect revived by ignoring the process that had resulted in its repudiation by the Council. For it is not consistent with the central teaching of the Incarnation, which is that Jesus is what we ought to be, which is divine. By a means impossible to imagine He raises us to be like himself, divine. Yet as we become divine and are drawn to him, yet He remains always at a remove from us. I think that St. Thomas in talking about how reason approaches the knowledge of Him , yet asymtopically, nver intersecting event at a single point, so God’s grace draws us ever closer but Our Light, tho infinitely bright, remains only a reflection of His Glory. Even as we gaze upon Him, however, he merges into the Glory Cloud and we can only stare in amazement and delight in understanding finally what we are looking at. We ourselves,we poor creatures, therefore, are to become as glorious as the Being that Arius imagined Jesus to be. Therefore the subordinarian view is seen as hopelessly inadequate, a feeble approximation of the Truth.
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Old_Scholar
Guest
For the 100th time, the 1st century Christians had all the epistles of Paul, the Gospels and all the books that ended up in the New Testament except for Revelation. It was written abour 90 - 100 A.D. just before John died. I don’t doubt that some copies of it had been circulated already.Genesis 1
[26] Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
[27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
That’s very good. I agree that Genesis is the beginning of the doctrine.
The doctrine of the Trinity is encapsulated in Matthew 28:19, where Jesus instructs the apostles: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name (SINGULAR) of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
There are a great deal of theologians who believe the last sentence was added to this verse.
The parallelism of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is not unique to Matthew’s Gospel, but appears elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g., 2 Cor. 13:14, Heb. 9:14), as well as in the writings of the earliest Christians, who clearly understood them in the sense that we do today—that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three divine persons who are one divine being (God).
http://www.catholic.com/library/Trinity.asp
Corinthians is good but Hebrews doesn’t mention the Holy Ghost.
The human family is the closest analogy that mankind will ever come to concretely understanding the Blessed Trinity.
catholic-legate.com/articles/antitrinity.html
We believe in the development of doctrine. You do not. Take the Council of Chalcedon and its definition of the Hypostatic Union of Christ as an example. If St. Irenaeus (200 years earlier) stated something which disagrees with Chalcedon, that is no big deal, since we believe that the question of Jesus’ two natures was not fully explored and defined by the Church until Chalcedon concluded the matter in 451. You, however, cannot accept this, since …if the entire orthodox Christian Faith is recorded statically in the Bible … then you must maintain that Christ’s Hypostatic Union (His being both fully-God and fully-man) is taught clearly and unambiguously in Scripture itself, and that this was always recognized by orthodox Christians.
No I do not believe in the development of doctrine and the Roman Catholic Church does not say they believe in it either. It is their policy that the doctrine has to be supported by Scripture.
Therefore, you must apply this same principle to all the tenets of your faith. Given your Sola Scriptura position, you must be able to show that your comprehensive reading of the Bible was shared by someone else in ancient times (who achieved the same results as you). …Or rather you must concede that your interpretation of Scripture is totally subjective and non-repeatable throughout history. We don’t need to show this. But you do.
I can show you quotes from the early church fathers that said that if any doctrine or dogma can not be supported by Scripture then it is heresy.
For the 100th time, Old Scholar, the 1st century Christians had no New Testament. This man-made theory that only New Testament books were circulated among the churches and every believer automatically knew they were inspired is totally false. It is one doctrine of yours you have no evidence to support. The Church formally recognized and proved which books were inspired and made them canon so they could be called divine writings when read in the churches, and it took 300 years to finish the job! That is a historical fact proven in later councils, which you reject anyway. And the Bereans “searched the scriptures” to see how Paul’s oral preaching complimented them, which you also reject.
**I am glad to see someone finally find some Scriptures that show support for the Trinity.
And you shouldn’t say that I don’t believe in the Trinity. I have not said what I believe yet. I am trying to have a discussion.**
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Old_Scholar
Guest
Are you saying ther Holy Spirit is talking to the RCC today and giving them the truth?
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Old_Scholar
Guest
Do you believe that Christ was equal to God while He was on this earth?
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teadough
Guest
yes, it does.
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Old_Scholar
Guest
No, Hebrews 9:14 needs to be read more carefully.yes, it does.
This argument here is that the offering of Christ is superior to the offerings of the old covenant because the blood of a man is measured more than the blood of an animal. And we know that Christ was actually more than a mere man; the holy and perfect God-man Himself.
Animals were sacrificed without their consent but Christ consented to be the victim for our sins. Christ offered Himself whereas animals were offered by others. This offering of Christ was by the purpose and consent of the eternal Spirit, not the Holy Spirit as sometimes understood, but it was the pre-existent, eternally divine Spirit of Christ Himself which existed before the world began and was conjoined with his human nature while here on earth.
The author of Hebrews is telling us that the animal sacrifices sanctified the flesh, thereby doing the work expected of their function and since that is true, how much more should we expect from the blood of Christ to present an achievement of a clean conscience toward God.
Hebrews speaks of the human conscience and the fact that it is similar to the utility of a watch which is synchronized with the correct time but it is not the watch that determines this but the movement of the Sun in relation to the earth that determines correctness and it is susceptible to errors, just as a man’s conscience can have many faults.
Further in Hebrews, the author writes of the conscience in great detail.
To read this verse as pertaining to the Holy Ghost is in error.
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teadough
Guest
Explain Luke 23:46"Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”; and when he had said this he breathed his last."
And Heb 8-10
Heb8The Holy Spirit was showing by this that the way into the Most Holy Place had not yet been disclosed as long as the first tabernacle was still standing. 9This is an illustration for the present time, indicating that the gifts and sacrifices being offered were not able to clear the conscience of the worshiper. 10They are only a matter of food and drink and various ceremonial washings—external regulations applying until the time of the new order.
Study Covenants more. Once you have an understanding of covenants then you can understand the John6.
And Heb 8-10
Heb8The Holy Spirit was showing by this that the way into the Most Holy Place had not yet been disclosed as long as the first tabernacle was still standing. 9This is an illustration for the present time, indicating that the gifts and sacrifices being offered were not able to clear the conscience of the worshiper. 10They are only a matter of food and drink and various ceremonial washings—external regulations applying until the time of the new order.
Study Covenants more. Once you have an understanding of covenants then you can understand the John6.
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teadough
Guest
Heb4:15For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.
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savedsinner
Guest
If Old Scolar or others are interested in learning more about covenants then they might be interested in listening to: Scott Hahn’s Our Fathers Plan
( The first session of this program really covers the meaning of covenants.)
Or
Reading his book “A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture”
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teadough
Guest
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JOE_OBERR
Guest
The doctrine of the Trinity was defined the same way the canon of the bible was defined, by the Catholic Church Jesus instituted, the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Tim 3:15). After all the bible doesn’t define its canonical books. Nowhere does the bible teach us what books out of the 250 plus that were considered inspired in the New Testament were actually inspired. It took the Catholic councils and the Pope in the late 4th century to define the canon of the bible.
That is because the Gospel Jesus taught the apostles is a living word. And only the apostles were commissioned by Jesus to preach it. Later some of them wrote only certain elements of the preached word. Only those that hear the Gospel, the oral word of God, believe it and are baptized will be saved (Mk 16:15-16).
Nowhere does Jesus say you will be saved by reading the bible. That is a tradition of men. And we must avoid the tradition of men if we want to be saved. We must put our faith in Jesus who said to listen to the apostles and the Church he founded.
Just curious, if the bible doesn’t define itself, by what logic do you state that any other doctrine of the Catholic Church should/must be found in scripture?
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Old_Scholar
Guest
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Old_Scholar
Guest
**Are you making the claim that the apostles made certain statements that people heard, that were not written down, and Catholic doctrine is supported by those statements?
Unless I am mistaken, the Roman Catholic Church still makes the claim that all their doctrines and dogmas can be supported by Scripture. What are you trying to say? Are you making a claim that there is Scripture that is not written down?**
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Old_Scholar
Guest
Actually Scripture is quite clear about covenants.
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