Jericho, I agree with you; the idea that if one eats meat on a certain day, is going to hell, is not biblical. Nor is sola scriptura or sola fida, 2 things to which you subscribe, I think? This was something that bothered me a lot as a former on the fence protestant, but not enough to prevent me from belonging to the church founded by God. Who wouldn’t want to belong to the church founded by God, in spite of a discipline imposed by His church leaders that seems to disturb our sensibilities?
It was not a teaching of Jesus Christ or His apostles, or of the CC. It was a discipline that has to do with binding and loosing. Do you believe that any one church in the world today, as per Matthew, has the authority to bind and loose or has Matthew 16 and 18 been abrogated? A Christian who violated the apostolic teaching in Acts 15 sinned not because the eating of meat was wrong but because he disobeyed a commandment of the Church. I wonder what wolud have happened to those you disobey the apostles commandments and continued to eat food that was polluted by idols, anyway? The following biblical commandment imposed by the apostles, seems a bit harsh to me, and yet look what happened:
It’s about the binding and loosing given to Jesus’ church by Jesus. The reason Friday abstinence was imposed in the first place, back them, was very biblical, with the exception of the hell part. The Church recognized that, since meat is a major part of most meals served in most places, and since meat is usually the most valued or expensive part of a meal, abstinence from meat on Fridays is a good way for Christians to unite themselves more closely to the sufferings of their savior Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:16-17, 1 Pet. 2:21) by denying themselves something they enjoy. Abstinence from meat would have been a sacrifice which would have united them in penance and strengthened the solidarity of the Church through mild suffering. It’s also a good form of mortification, which disciplines the soul and strengthens its resistance to concupiscence. Paul practiced and recommended mortification: *“I drive my body and train it, for fear that after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.” *(1 Cor. 9:27) However, I do agree with you about the whole hell thing; it seems that they went overboard. Surely the CC leaders can overzealously and wrongly sanction a discipline, but they are protected from themselves by the power of the holy spirit, who is forever guiding them into all truth, from altering the teachings passed on to the apostles who then passed on those teachings and so on…Celibacy in the priesthood is an example of a discipline that could be altered by another Pope, but apostolic doctrine cannot be altered. God is unchangeable but church discipline is not.
, but regards sola scriptura, it is not a doctrine. In either case, if what Jericho states above is true, it’s apples and oranges, at least from a Lutheran perspective. I don’t believe many Lutherans, much less the Lutheran Church, claim that Catholics are hell-bound because they reject sola fide or sola scriptura.
