Oh… No… I do not consider myself to be novel or the source of any original thought. I do consider myself open minded, but only within the context that Jesus is the Lord and his story was written by the apostles in the books of the Bible.
I got that from my personal (admittedly flawed) interpretation of Matthew 7:15.
What was it that they defined marriage to be? And what was it before the church defined it?
If you find it political, then I suppose you find the examples of the Apostles finding the successor to Judas political as well? Is it not the same paradigm we use today?
Well, jswan, Christ did not come to be a teacher. He really taught nothing new.
There is another informaton: Early church history which you utterly deny or reject. If I wanted to know the background of Russia and I reject any written history about Russia,what other source would you use to learn?
Excellent!
My dear friend, perhaps your mind as not as open as you want it to be. I see that you want some kind of answer that we cannot give in the way you would understand.
A deal of congregationalist denominations still follow the Roman liturgical calendar even.
Then you believe that Jesus either lied or was incompetent or incapable of keeping His promises to remain with the Church ALWAYS, until the end of time (Mt 28:20), and that the Holy Sprit, assigned by Christ to be with the Church ALWAYS and to lead her to all truth ALWAYS (John 14:16-18, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7-15) also failed in His mission. God does not fail. You say the First and Third Persons of the Trinity failed. Christianity is therefore a fraud, by your definition.
I agree.
I disagree and for many reasons. Is the denomination you attend the same as the church Christ founded 2000 years ago? It cannot because it has a human founder or founders. Second, the premise: it is not the same church Christ founded, is irrelevant to history. Is the U.S. government today the same as it was in 1789? All living organism change,however,change does not mean Christ Church has changed doctrine,but moreover,certain disciplines change as deemed necessary to the times.
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Yes in matters of faith and morals,not behavior or attitudes.
Perhaps not to the educated Protestant but certainly to the ignorant Protestant.
Sorry I misspoke I meant Catholics have doctrine to go by… A lot of protestants just see the Bible as the sole thing to follow…This generalization is not respectful to Protestants, nor does it offer any demonstration of proof.
As Catholics, we also read the Bible and believe it to be true.
God bless you
Even that isn’t necessarily true. Lutherans clearly have doctrine to go by. We have a set of confessions - The Book of Concord. We also accept the early councils, and the three ancient Creeds. As a Lutheran I read scripture through that lens, just as Catholics read it through the lens of the Catholic Catechism and the teachings of the Magisterium.
I think what he’s trying to get at is the matter of an infallible source determining dogma and doctrine from an infallible source (the Bible) when it comes to semantics and counting grey hairs. Anglicans, Lutherans, etc, do claim a creed(s), but do not claim infallibility as the Catholic Church or Orthodox churches do in one mannerism or another. Thus, strictly speaking, both Catholic and catholic are immediate precepts of communion with Rome. Therefore, there is not a particular communion (Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, etc) within the Christian communion (baptized) as you see it. Rather, you are dealing with people, and not churches. Those baptized are brought into the mystical body of Christ through the grace of the sacrament, and thus they are indeed catholic (lower case “C”) regardless of creed. Rather than thinking of the Church as merely a visible institution, think of it as an invisible vessel of God’s grace. This is such that all grace from baptisms comes through the Catholic Church, regardless of denomination, just as water is poured through a pipe. In this way, the Church is an invisible institution. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but I don’t have much to fall into a rabbit hole too deep. Senior year of high school is killer, and I’d like to graduate first
Jesus commanded him to be baptized into the Church, and he was; his sight was not restored until after he had become a full member in good standing of the Church. He made no authoritative statements and wrote no letters to anyone until he had made himself known to the Apostles and been accepted by them, and appointed by them to various duties, including missionary work. He did nothing under his own authority; he was obedient to the Church in everything.
The Bible is not powerless, no, but an expression and reflection of the power and authority that the Church holds on Earth. I know it seems I contradicted my last statement, but hear me out: the Bible is authoritative on terms of the Church. I suppose a sufficient analogy could be a diamond and light. If you hold a diamond in your hand and look at it, it’s nothing special to look at. If you hold it up to the sun, it becomes something special. The diamond is not the sun, but it shares in the light of the sun. Likewise, the Bible is not the Church, but it reflects the authority of the Church. Not to be confused, I’m not saying that’s the point the Bible was compiled. It depicts the grand scheme of Salvation so that you don’t have to be a hard core theologian or scholar to understand the Jewish roots of the paschal sacrifice, the paschal mystery, and the Revelation (which is the mass itself). The Bible has authority because the Church (who has authority not by her own accord, but rather by commission of Jesus Christ) compiled the Bible. If Christ never founded a single, particular, and definite Church of his own, there would be no Bible to begin with. The Bible is a Catholic book, and it was meant to be used as such. If, for one reason or another, the Bible was handed by God down to man out of the sky, then we still lack an infallible interpreter of the Bible. If we don’t, we end up with Lutherans, baptists, and everyone in between. The problem with this is it leaves crucial points of moral interest up in the air. To name a few:
Firstly, welcome to the CAFs!
Yes.
Yes, but here’s the rub: the *only *way you know what accounts of Him are true (27 books of the NT) and what are apocryphal (i.e. Gospel of Thomas) is because of the Church–the Catholic Church.
lol