How do protestants explain the time between Christ and the reformation?

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hope said:
Proof is the fact but you don’t verify that fact. I am still waiting for the list of unbiased historians or do you wish to retract that unsubstantiated statement.
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Did Catholicism change the day of worship from the Sabbath to the first day of the week? Did they change the law or did they think to change the law? They certainly have the tradition of worshiping on the 1st day of the week but did they change God’s law?

The council of Laodicea stated “Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ.”

First the emperor Constantine enforced Sunday in 321 AD. He said “On the venerable day of the Sun let all magistrates and people rest” It was the Sunday Legislation.

Close to 40 years later Catholicism at the council of Laodicea declared the above statement making Sunday worship official.

Did Jesus keep the Sabbath? Of course he performed miracles on the Sabbath but he recognized it nonetheless. Paul and the apostles kept the Sabbath. There are 80+ references in the New Testament regarding the Sabbath. There are 8 references to the first day of the week ((Matthew 28:1 Luke 23:50-56 through 24:1-3 Mark 16:1-4, 16:9-11 John 20:1, 20:19 1 Corinthians 16:1-3 Acts 20:7-11))
There is never a command to change the Holy Day, or a command for worship. It simply doesn’t exist. Preaching and breaking bread doesn’t make a day Holy. The Sabbath was made Holy by God, not man, and not Jews. The Sabbath was marked as being Holy long before the 1st Jew was born or Judaism was instituted.

By what authority did Catholicism think to change the Sabbath?

The Catechism says this:

By a tradition handed down from the apostles which took its origin from the very day of Christ’s Resurrection, the Church celebrates the Paschal mystery every seventh day, which day is appropriately called the Lord’s Day or Sunday. The day of Christ’s Resurrection is both the first day of the week, the memorial of the first day of creation, and the “eighth day,” on which Christ after his “rest” on the great Sabbath inaugurates the “day that the Lord has made,” the “day that knows no evening.”

Again, it’s the claimed tradition, yet there’s no command in scripture.

According to Catholicism itself, it claims that all Christians (who belong to the Church) must worship on the 1st day of the week instead of the Sabbath. History, and scripture, says man doesn’t have the power to change God’s laws.

Jesus himself said as much in Matthew 5
17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Jesus is the authority on all things, not Protestantism, not Catholicism, not traditionalism, or any other ism’s from man.
 
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TULIPed said:
Note the first sentence Steve. You’re a context guy. That paragraph is directed towards the Catholic faithful.
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🤣 that’s the way it starts out

And the context quickly changes to

Whosoever

That covers

EVERYONE
 
Steven - me thinks you’re trying to hard here my friend. If it applies to everyone, why have the first sentence? Not to mention that the whole paragraph is pointed directly at existing Catholics.
steve-b said:
He is not saved, however, who, though part of the body of the Church, does not persevere in charity. He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but, as it were, only in a “bodily” manner and not “in his heart.”(12*) All the Church’s children should remember that their exalted status is to be attributed not to their own merits but to the special grace of Christ.
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If you’re interpretation is correct - it’s a very poorly structured paragraph (which would be unusual, because your other foundational documents are really well written.) Plus - it would directly conflict with what’s written in UR. (As a Calvinist, I do love that last sentence though 🙂
 
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“I am now going to speak to everyone in the lifeboat…except when I’m not speaking to everyone in the lifeboat, and I’m speaking to everyone everyone.”
 
TULIPed said:
Steven - me thinks you’re trying to hard here my friend. If it applies to everyone, why have the first sentence? Not to mention that the whole paragraph is pointed directly at existing Catholics.
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:rofl:this is not the first time I’ve answered this objection.

The word “first” in the sentence merely points to Catholics first. That’s true

However

Look how the context changes

When it says

would refuse to enter, that is NOT speaking of Catholics. Those are NON Catholics
or to remain in it THAT is speaking of Catholics
steve-b said:
He is not saved, however, who, though part of the body of the Church, does not persevere in charity. He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but, as it were, only in a “bodily” manner and not “in his heart.”(12*) All the Church’s children should remember that their exalted status is to be attributed not to their own merits but to the special grace of Christ.
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TULIPed:
If you’re interpretation is correct - it’s a very poorly structure paragraph (which would be unusual, because your other foundational documents are really well written.) Plus - it would directly conflict with what’s written in UR.
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It was a direct quote. Here is the whole document http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_...s/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html we were discussing para 14
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TULIPed:
(As a Calvinist, I do love that last sentence though 🙂
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😃

As we were talking previously, Jesus is sooooo loving but He’s also tough.
 
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Jesus was not talking about the whole of Oral tradition in Judaism or Christianity there. Goodness! He was condemning things in particular that the Pharisees were doing that made God’s word void. We can know that your personal interpretation of that passage is wrong because St. Paul said ““I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2). And “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us“ (Thessalonians 2:15) …I’m curious how are you able to reconcile your interpretation with the fact that the Gospels reference Jewish oral tradition more than a few times?

I don’t need to know what you believe to peg the age of your “traditions” because you are definitely not mainline Christian, Catholic or Orthodox. Based on what you “don’t” believe, you are a fundamentalist, evangelical, or some such similar that has your own version of “traditions” that have no roots in apostolic or even original reformer teaching.
 
ReadTheBible said:
The angel is meeting the woman who is to give birth to the Messiah. Nothing about his choice of words is shocking.
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The shocking thing is that “full of grace” here is used as a title or name if you look at the Greek context. Why is Mary so uniquely full of grace that it is her title? And I might note that “highly favored daughter” is not an accurate translation.
 
Your post reads like a Seventh Day Adventist tract. It is inaccurate though. In Acts Paul celebrates the Lord’s Supper on the first day of the week and we have preserved actual early Christian writings from well before Constantine that detail the Lords day being the day of worship for Christians. The Didache was written not long after Christ’s death and details it. St. Ignatius wrote about this in on around 110AD and the Epistle of Barnabas mentions it as well.

From the Didache: Assemble on the Lord’s Day, and break bread and offer the Eucharist; but first make confession of your faults, so that your sacrifice may be a pure one. [The Didache 14:1] …written in the 1st century.
 
ReadTheBible said:
Close to 40 years later Catholicism at the council of Laodicea declared the above statement making Sunday worship official.
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I feel it’s worth pointing out here that councils only affirm things that are already well known, sometimes things are affirmed only because someone had been teaching heresy on the subject. They had been celebrating the Lords day from the very beginning.
 
ReadTheBible said:
Did Catholicism change the day of worship from the Sabbath to the first day of the week? Did they change the law or did they think to change the law? They certainly have the tradition of worshiping on the 1st day of the week but did they change God’s law?
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I thought you read the bible right there they worshiped on the Day of the Lord. Those were Catholics although they were first called the Way and then Christians.
They certainly have the tradition of worshiping on the 1st day of the week but did they change God’s law?
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Yes with the authority of the Keys that Jesus gave them. You really should study what giving the keys meant. You obviously do not know what it was to break break. Paul preaches on Sunday. Jesus did not rise on the Sabbath and you are wrong it does make the day Holy. You want to ignore what breaking of the bread means. Paul and the Apostles went to preach Jesus not to keep the Sabbath. Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath. It is a misinterpretation of Scripture that it exist before the Jews. It didn’t. Sabbath means seventh day. Civilizations did not always count the days as we do now. They were not always named the same.
By what authority did Catholicism think to change the Sabbath?
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Jesus when He gave Peter the keys which you do not understand what that meant.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.**
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I love that word -till/until. It is probably the most misused word. It means up to a certain time, look it up in a dictionary. Up to when is Jesus talking? When the law is fulfilled.
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, “It is finished.” And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.

31
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If this were not so you would still not be able to eat bacon among other things forbidden. Peter’s vision confirmed this.
Jesus gave His authority to His Church specifically to Peter.
 
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steve-b said:
would refuse to enter, that is NOT speaking of Catholics. Those are NON Catholics
or to remain in it THAT is speaking of Catholics
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So at first, for the whole paragraph, it’s to Catholics (because it says - well - “this is to Catholics”). Then, for one part of a sentence (in the same paragraph), it’s focused on non-Catholics, then it’s all about Catholics again for the rest of the paragraph? Which entirely negates the first part of the document which says:

“For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect.”

And the best part is the whole document is about ecumenism - and yet we tell everyone to shove off if you’re not part of us.

Ok - fair enough. And you said you didn’t have to be a genius to figure this stuff out?

Just out of curiosity, why do you think they didn’t just say that in the part that dealt with non-Catholics, instead of including it in the part that does? For example:

“For men who believe in Christ, and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church, even though this communion is imperfect, and by imperfect we mean non-existent.”

See - now THAT makes sense to me. But then again, I’m exceedingly dull. Just ask my wife.
 
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Protestants can’t explain the gap between Biblical times and the founding of their church, except in one of three ways:

(1) Realize the gap is a serious question—why would God let the Church supposedly fall away for over a millennium?—then pray over it and sincerely study it… study the Bible, study Church history (comparing and contrasting sources), question the centuries of Anglophone bias and bigotry against Catholicism. (Discover things like the Byzantine Empire—if Rome corrupted everything, why did the Orthodox break off 500 years before Luther and yet keep everything but the Pope? They knew (WERE) Greek, Luther didn’t, so it wasn’t because of some dark age when no one could read the Bible!) Eventually, the person will come to the Newman realization that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”

(2) Explain the gap by resorting to Calvinist double predestination (which says there is no free will so God created everyone during the gap for the express purpose of going straight to hell), which raises an intractable problem of evil by making God the author of sin and thus the direct cause of the world’s evil. They either aren’t aware of what they have done or so prideful that they would rather deny God’s goodness and love than reconsider their position.

They then send their kids to college believing God directly wills evil, and said kids encounter secular professors who convince them of the next logical step: atheism. Repeat for a few generations and the result is the horribly apostate modern world.

But what’s even worse is…
(3) Perpetuate the gap. You better believe there’s a gap. And for millennia, there was a great apostasy, and everyone got it wrong until… ME! I don’t care about all those billions of people who lived and died between then and now. All that matters is Jesus… and ME!

This kind of person usually bases themselves on some quote-unquote obvious perversion of the so-called true Gospel—some essential Catholic doctrine that they blame for rejecting the Catholic Church and everyone else who accepts it. Sometimes it’s the Trinity, sometimes it’s Sunday worship, but 99.9% of the time… it’s Mary. (Just look at this thread.) And there’s a reason for that.
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Classic apologists like Karl Keating used to say that this kind of person is their own Pope. Actually, that’s not quite right. They are their own Mary. What does “me and Jesus” really mean? That they are the ones who gave birth to Christ again after centuries of “heresy” and “corruption.” So they believe that: THEY are the Spouse of the Holy Spirit. THEY are the Woman in Genesis 3:15 that is at the same enmity (sinlessness) with the devil as Jesus is (Eve obviously wasn’t). THEY are the queen clothed in gold taken up to the King in Psalm 45. THEY are the Woman crowned in Heaven in Rev 12. THEY are the gate the Messiah passes through in Ezekiel 44:1-3, which is shut so no one else may enter (but they probably aren’t perpetual virgins…). THEY became the Immaculate Conception once they “got saved.” And so, deep down in their heart of hearts, they believe THEY belong on Mary’s throne at the right hand of Christ. (And of course, Romans 3:23 doesn’t apply to them, but it’s because they say so and not because they read on and see that Paul says “no one searches for God” right after he says that “all have sinned,” so he can’t be talking about Mary or even himself as both of them obviously found Him!)

Of course, there’s some really big sin behind this mindset. Sometimes it’s just pride, but sometimes it’s racism/ancestral bigotry, and often it’s some marital or sexual sin. As long as the person refuses to repent, it’s very hard to convince them to reconsider. Today, thanks to the Web, Catholic Answers and so many other apostolates, and all the secular sources who have no bias in favor of the Catholic Church, it’s very easy for anyone to find out the truth. But they choose not to.

And, as with the Calvinist, this person passes on to their children a completely unreasonable and indefensible faith. But unlike the Calvinist, this person’s faith is completely subjective; they cannot objectively justify their what they believe from science, philosophy, reason, natural law, etc., all of which they must also spurn. If you’ve ever wondered how we got Roe v. Wade, or why Mainline Protestantism (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans etc.) fell so quickly to the modern secular agenda… now you know. Unlike the Calvinist, they or their children may stay nominally Christian—without believing that there is a God.

I’m speaking from personal experience. I was one of the Protestant college students who was (3), then became (2), and finally (1). Those of us who survived through it all loved Jesus enough to endure, and the challenges to our faith drove us to do what we were told: to search the Scriptures. Then we found verses like 1 Timothy 2:3-4 which compelled us to reject Calvinism (2), and others like 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 on the Eucharist which caused us to reject (3). We then realized we had no choice but to defy the culture, our prejudices, and even our parents… and become Catholic. We had to suffer so much, we made so many mistakes… but we made it home. Thank God… thank Our Lady… but I wish no one else has to walk this path that we did.
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