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Abu
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No way, as benhur was quoted and is as confused as ever, now over conscience.
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Randy_Carson
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ben-
Eliakim got only one key because it was the literal, earthly key of the king whom he served.
Jesus is king of heaven and earth; consequently, Peter has keys to bind and loose in heaven and on earth.
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PRmerger
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Who says consciences should not be free?
I agree that we should follow our consciences, which could be seen, as you say, as “private interpretation”.
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rcwitness
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Conscience should guide us to freedom, but we are bound “in chains” to Christ.
Conscience is a gift which cant really lead us wrong. We, on the otherhand, can diminish our conscience through choosing our will over God’s.
Just like faith, our conscience must be nurtured and practiced. They are both gifts which enable us to do what is pleasing to our Father. To use either against obedience and submission to our leaders is attributing to them a rebellious and proud spirit and will.
We can observe, through our formed conscience and faith, bad behavior and false teaching in individual leaders. We can confront them with proper respect, and we can seek others in higher positions in order to convict them. But we must be able to submit to the concensus of our leaders who Teach what is orthodox.
Conscience is a gift which cant really lead us wrong. We, on the otherhand, can diminish our conscience through choosing our will over God’s.
Just like faith, our conscience must be nurtured and practiced. They are both gifts which enable us to do what is pleasing to our Father. To use either against obedience and submission to our leaders is attributing to them a rebellious and proud spirit and will.
We can observe, through our formed conscience and faith, bad behavior and false teaching in individual leaders. We can confront them with proper respect, and we can seek others in higher positions in order to convict them. But we must be able to submit to the concensus of our leaders who Teach what is orthodox.
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SAVINGRACE
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Benhur - what he^ said. Just opened the thread and saw Randy had already answered the question you asked me and with less words.
Thanks Randy.
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Peter_J
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Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of Luthero-Papalists or Presby-Papalists … though of course I’ve heard of Anglo-Papalists.
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benhur
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REPLY
Thank you Contarini. Your non-mousy reply to Jon still set that elephant a runnin.
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rcwitness
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Maybe cuz it’s off topic of the thread:shrug:
It’s touches on things that draw further from the OP. I’d love to address it, honestly. I appreciate it’s general concern.
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benhur
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Well half off or a third, for the thread started with, “If you don’t trust the authority of the Catholic Church,”. Certainly authority is guided by yielding to the Spirit and motivated by love as Edwin alludes to in response to Jon, not to mention the tie in to infallibility. All very pertinent to topic
Blessings.
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rcwitness
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Post 261
You are pitting examples of bad behavior and management against Teachings bound by the Church in doctrine.
I believe those who don’t accept Teaching of the Church and use it as an excuse to avoid personal responsibility in overcoming the bad behavior and practice of heterodoxy within the Church (laity and clergy) as part of the problem of overcoming the enemy of Jesus.
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benhur
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Nice try Randy, but I do not think one key is to bind and one key is to loose or one for heaven and one for earth figuratively, as it certainly wasn’t for Eliakim literally.
The binding/loosing is reciprocal upon one key. It is automatic cause and effect. When it is bound in one place it is bound in the other as in one ''mind".
Blessings
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Jon_S_1
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When everyone has the keys, as you seem to imply, then everyone just binds and looses what they want and create their own personal christianity that caters perfectly to their personal desires.
So we have a christianity of one and complete relativism and no truth. We have nothing objective any longer and each individual does whatever they want.
No wonder this idea is so popular…Satan’s lure of being the king of my own works under no authority but my own.
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benhur
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Well is private interpretation condoned ? I also read it ran in the Pius family of Popes (at least the 8th and 9th) of denouncing liberty of conscience. Of course I hope this is past history.Who says consciences should not be free?
Good. However, can it be your own ?
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rcwitness
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I have written something to the church; but Diot′rephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge my authority.10So if I come, I will bring up what he is doing, prating against me with evil words. And not content with that, he refuses himself to welcome the brethren, and also stops those who want to welcome them and puts them out of the church
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benhur
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On the contrary, it shows the falsity of ORAR, once right always right. It shows we can accept some of the things the CC got right, as in preserving Holy Scripture, and rejecting some of things the CC got wrong.
Partly agree, as those folks who wrongly say , “I do not step into a church, it is full of hypocrites”.
Partly disagree for at some point fruits , bad behavior, can be revealing. That is at some point it is telling, and you can’t just keep saying, “do as I say not as I do”. This also hurts the cause of the kingdom. As Ed pointed out , they shall (should) know us by our love.
Bad behavior and practices voids the positive of any heterodoxy, just as rebelliousness surely does .
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Contarini
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But you’re assuming a split between behavior and doctrine, and then berating us for failing to make it.
Make the case for the split.
I understand that this seems off-topic. However, the line of argument taken by Catholics on this thread forces the raising of this question. If the implicit argument is “you can’t know that the words of Jesus are true without accepting the authority of the Catholic Church as we define it” then my response is a relevant and necessary one.
Just to be clear: I believe in the indefectibility of the successors of St. Peter (i.e., the bishops of Rome, historically) and don’t have any insoluble objections to infallibility. My objection–heightened every time I try to become Catholic, as I did again this past year–is to the claim that doctrinal infallibility, narrowly and carefully defined (a broader and less careful definition is clearly unbelievable), is a sufficient basis for “trusting the Church to be led by the Spirit.”
To put it clearly: there are some obvious ways in which my evangelical Wesleyan tradition has listened to the Spirit’s guidance better than the post-Reformation “Roman Catholic Church” has. Maybe these ways have nothing to do with doctrine, though that seems unlikely. I am much more confident that any doctrinal shifts/developments that need to take place in the Roman Communion can take place without the Catholic Church radically abandoning its core commitments and changing its identity (which is basically what many Protestants would like to see). But when you move away from the narrow issue of infallibility in official dogma and make blanket claims about the Spirit’s guidance and our need to trust the Church, then the issues that I raised (and many other similar ones) become highly relevant. And it isn’t reasonable for you then to move back to the narrow definition and chide me for ignoring how narrow it is. I didn’t ignore that at all–I pointed it out. I did not say that the issues I raised contradicted infallibility. I said that infallibility in its tenable, official form is extremely narrow and does not provide grounds for a general confidence in the Spirit’s guidance of the Church in all the ways that are relevant at any given moment in the Church’s history. Long-term, yes. I am confident that Rome will never finally fall away and will always listen to the Spirit eventually. I am not confident that at any given cross-section of the Church’s history, Rome is listening to the Spirit in more effective and relevant ways than any given Christian community not in communion with Rome or any given dissenting Catholic censured by the Church. Historically, that is obviously false if the current stances and commitments of the Roman Communion are true. (I.e., if the Catechism is right in quoting Jerome’s maxim “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ” and calling for access to Scripture to be opened wide to the Christian faithful, then the Jansenists and Protestants were right and Pope Clement XI was wrong on that particular point. If the Holy Spirit does not and never did want heretics to be burned at the stake, then Luther was right and Leo X was wrong on that particular point. And so on.)
Edwin
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benhur
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then everything falls of the earth (the earth is flat!)? Everything falls apart ? And I say may all false paradigms fall.
Yes, the two extremes, 30,000 man made churches, or one large man made church? Would you not knock protestantism if it were one large church ?
Pure hyperbole due to paradigm restrictions.
That is certainly one of his enticements just as surely as the enticement to being ruler over all. Heterodoxy and non-heterodoxy have their challenges and time and purpose under the sun. Blessings to both.
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Denise1957
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Regarding ignorance of scripture, how is it that reading the bible is the only way to know scripture? Our Lord never told his Apostles to go out and distribute bibles for everyone to read. But the Church has strived to teach what our Lord taught through Church teaching. There have been many saints who did not read scripture, but they did understand what our Lord taught as necessary for salvation.
Regarding what Pope Leo said about it being wrong to say that the Holy Ghost is against the burning of heretics, well, I don’t know if that falls under the category of infallibility or not. Certainly at the time it was considered very dangerous for heretics to mislead the faithful. We can see the fruits of what the reformation caused in our society today, with the enactment of laws which go against Christian morality and decency.
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