Who founded your denomination?????

[rod_of_iron]

ralphinal:

If God is not a Trinity, then Jesus prayed to himself in the Garden and in the desert.

Exactly! If Jesus and God are the same being, then God (on Earth) would be praying to Himself (in heaven). If not, the two would have to be separate beings, as the Mormons believe. Your example here is exactly the same one that the Mormons use to prove that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are three separate beings. Nowhere in the Bible is there a reference to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit being separate persons of one being. This idea was totally made up by humans in their attempt to understand God.

ralphinal:

IF God is not a Trinity, then who spoke at Christ’s Baptism and the Transfiguration (“This is my Son” not “This is me”).

God in the spirit spoke from heaven as God in the flesh was being baptized, followed by God in the form of a dove landing upon the shoulder of God in the flesh. But all three were God. They were not three separate persons. I just do not understand the conflict.

Trinity literally means: “the state of being three”. This is what the Mormons believe. They believe that there are three beings in the Godhead.

I believe in a God who is one, not three. He is a multitasker. He can be the Father in heaven and the Son on the Earth at the same time, because time cannot and does not restrict Him. But this does not make Him a multi-personality God. He is one being and one person. The Jews knew this well. They know that there is only one God. But when the Catholic church tries to present a multi-personality God (i.e. a God in more than one person) to them, the Jews must quickly reject this, because this is not the God that had been revealed to them.

(continued …)

 

[rod_of_iron]

ralphinal:

In the end, CAtholics beleive that we are the Church founded by Christ. We are the Church of the Upper Room.

Sure you believe this. But if the Catholic church cannot sufficiently prove it, that is all it is – a belief. I believe that my church is the true church that Jesus founded. If I declare that to you, you demand proof. But yet, you can declare the same statement without providing proof, and I am supposed to belief your claim. If I need proof, then you do also.

ralphinal:

The Orthodox groups that left knew what they were leaving, but had reasons to.

Why are the Eastern Orthodox churches wrong and the Roman Catholic church correct? Just because the Roman church declares it so? If this is all truth hinges on, we must acknowledge that the Roman Catholic church is making a self-serving and biased decision. I believe that the Eastern Orthodox church has as legitimate of a claim to being the church that Jesus founded as does the Roman Catholic church.

ralphinal:

The Reformers left for a variety of reasons, many misguided.

Martin Luther was outraged by the Catholic church’s practice of selling indulgences to those members who wanted to sin. Was Luther’s decision to leave the church misguided when the practice in the church was to cover sins with the exchange of filthy lucre? Luther was tired of the corruption in the Catholic church and its granting of licenses to sin.

ralphinal:

Politics factored greatly in the growth of Protestantism, not faith.

In no church was politics a greater factor than in the Roman Catholic church. You are the pot calling the kettle black with your last statement.

ralphinal:

Many people will not accept the Truth, and I will pray for them.

You are one of the ones who will not accept the truth, yet I will continue to present it.

 

[cazayoux]

Shibboleth:

So are you saying that because God created the Jewish religion and that they are the first and have not fallen that they cannot be wrong? Why would God mislead his original Church? Why would God make the Pope infallable but not the decendants of Moses?

Before Christ, God’s promise to his people was qualified by their actions .
1 Chronicles 28:6-7
“…if he perseveres in keeping my commandments and decrees as he keeps them now”

 

[rod_of_iron]

reggie:

I think it should be painfully obvious by now that some people will not accept truth even when it is so clear.

I know what you mean. I have found that to be very true with Catholics.

reggie:

Those who reject the Catholic Church cannot give one solid historical record to indicate that it is not the church begun on Pentecost Sunday and yet they strive to do so by twisting Scripture interpretation to suit their own purposes.

How does someone give proof that something did not happen? What would that proof look like? Proof can only be found if something did happen. The proof for no pencil having been on a desk looks exactly like the proof for no notebook having been on that desk. In both cases, all I can see is an empty desk. I cannot prove what was not on the desk. But yet, this is what you are asking me to do.

The burden of proof is upon you who claims that something did happen, not upon me who claims that something did not happen. If you must ask me to prove that something did not happen, it suggests that you cannot prove it did happen. The easiest way for you to prove that Jesus founded the Catholic church is for you to provide evidence from that timeframe that shows it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

reggie:

Once again, it proves that more than the Bible is needed to understand the events of 2000 years ago. The Magisterium, Tradition and the Word(symbolic of the Trinity?) work together to guide us and we should be ever grateful that it is our gift to believe.

The Magisterium? According to the dictionary, the magisterium is “the authority to teach religious doctrine.” But it does not say that this authority must come from God. Anyone can give you authority, but that authority is worthless unless it is given by God. Joseph Smith was visited by Jesus, and then later by Peter, James, and John, who laid their hands upon Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, thus giving them the authority to teach religious doctrine. Where is it written that Peter passed on this authority to the Catholic church?

What exactly is this Tradition you speak of? Why didn’t Jesus speak of this future Sacred Tradition while He was on Earth?

As for the Word, how is it symbolic to the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity?

(continued …)

 

[rod_of_iron]

reggie:

Throughout the OT, God changed the name of those He would use to lead His people, He did it with Abraham and Isaac and so it should be no surprise that He did it once again with Peter, and I might add, only with Peter.

God didn’t change the name of Abraham to something else. Instead, God added His own name to the name of Abram. God took His name, “Yah”, and inserted it into the middle of Abram’s name. God did the same with Abraham’s wife. Her name was Sarah, and God added “Yah” to her name to make it “Sariah”. (“iah” is equivalent to “yah”.) You will find God’s name in the names of many of the prophets, such as Elijah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Nehemiah, etc. (The “jah” in Elijah is also equivalent to “yah”, because a “j” was pronounced as a “y”.)

But why was Abram’s name changed? Because of the covenant he entered into with God. The mutual giving of your name to the other is part of making a covenant. But what covenant did Peter make with God? Why isn’t the name of God, namely “Yah”, found in the name “Cephas”? Your comparison seems to fall short.

reggie:

To think that the Church would be so clever and diabolical as to withhold the remains of Mary so that it could later claim her assumption is beyond insane and paranoid.

When one looks back at the corrupt an evil popes that the Catholic church has had in the past, I would not doubt for one second that the church would be above being so clever and diabolical. All it takes is for one pope to declare that Mary’s body cannot be found and that she apparently was taken up into heaven. When everyone believes it, because of their almost blind trust in the pope, a doctrine is formed.

reggie:

That is why we trust the Magisterium, why leaders are needed in the Church.

You are satisfied with depending upon men for your salvation. I will only depend upon God for mine.

reggie:

Doctrine was not always clearly understood, once again, the implicit and explicit concepts in the Bible.

This is why we must all depend upon the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. The Bible has no command from Christ to depend on the Catholic church to lead us into all truth. I will trust the Bible and depend on the Holy Spirit for the truth, not a church.

(continued …)

 

[rod_of_iron]

reggie:

The Church precedes the Bible, it is the defender and protector of the Bible and it is most definitely the Church of the Bible.

The Catholic church precedes the Old Testament? That is quite a claim. Why are no popes spoken of in the Old Testament? For the church to precede the Bible, it must precede the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. Also, the Old Testament speaks of the Jewish religion, not Catholicism. Does the Catholic church believe it is the continuation of the Jewish religion, or a substitute for it?

reggie:

If you would dispute that you must dispute the Bible and then your religion has no founder at all because outside of the Church and the Bible there would be no lasting memory of Jesus.

This statement makes no sense whatsoever. If I dispute your claim, I am disputing the Bible? The Bible does not support your claim. Yet, you imply that if I do not dispute your claim, that my religion has a founder. How does my religion having a founder depend upon your claim? This statement of yours is confusing.

As for there being no lasting memory of Jesus without the Catholic church and the Bible, I declare this assertion false. God is able to make the truth known to us however and whenever He desires. If the Bible had gone into oblivion, God would have brought forth new records. But God will bring forth new records anyway. When God brought forth the Book of Mormon, He brought forth a further record of Jesus Christ. This record was written by the inhabitants of a land on the opposite side of the Earth. God yet has more records to bring forth, but the revealing of them is dependent upon our level of faith. If we will not receive all that God has already revealed to us, why would He reveal any more to us?

reggie:

Where oh where are those golden tablets when you need them?

Oh, they are in safekeeping. The original documents for the books of the Bible are probably with them.

 

[reggie]

ROI you say there is not proof, I say that the unbroken line of bishops for nearly 2000 years serves as proof. Each bishop is ordained by a sitting bishop and has been since the Apostles. I may not know the lineage of each bishop, but it is there for any who would care to research it. Peter entered a new covenant with Jesus, that was to feed His Sheep. I think the passages regarding this are perfectly clear and show that Jesus was giving Peter a mission, just as God had done in the OT with Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah etc…The OT prohets were merely messengers for God, and foretold Jesus and the new covenant. The NT is the fulfillment of the OT and so in a way the continuation of the Jewish Faith. If you are familiar with the Catholic Mass, you know the elements of the Jewish priesthood there. The difference is that Jesus was the only perfect and acceptable sacrifice for the atonement of sin. I did not mean to say that God could not have made known the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in another way. What I was trying to say (apparently badly) is that the Church has done so through the Bible and Tradition along with the writings of early Christians, also protected and handed on through the church. This could not have been done without the Hand of God, and I maintain that He continues to use the church to spread and defend the faith. You cannot dispute that the Bible as we know it came through the church, you cannot dispute that it was the church who painstakingly copied and preserved it throughout the centuries. Why is this so? Because God has chosen it to be so. I also maintain that as Jesus is the Head of the Church and existed before everything else, including the OT, then the church through Him also existed outside of our grasp of time but within His own. Once again, instead of providing anything to support your claim, you use the tired old arguements about the popes, Luther and indulgences. Hey, you forgot the Inquisition and Galileo and Joan of Arc and on and on and on. These are not credible to disprove the Church and its existence for 2000 years. I notice that you don’t mention that Luther still believed in the greatest part of the Church, the Eucharist, he still loved Mary and many of the practices of the church. He just fell into the same trap that so many have, that He alone knew the Bible and its message and all the rest of the church, for more than 1500 years was wrong.

 

[reggie]

Okay, here’s something else that gets me going. You say, I trust the Holy Spirit and the Bible and there is no command in the Bible to trust the Catholic Church. What is with people like you? You depend on the Bible and yet it is the Catholic Church who served to protect it, copy it and hand it down. Do you even realize how conradictory that is. Do you see the totally inane logic in that? If the Bible is the inspired word of God, and as such it is to be believed in matters of faith then it must also be believed that the ones to whom it has been trusted to preserve it should also be believed. Would the Church have recorded and handed down a work that was so opposite to it’s own teaching? Would the Church have protected and cherished a work that disputed it’s very existence? You are like the secularists who would now say the the Founding Fathers did not intend this to be a Christian nation even when their own correspondence supports the opposite. God entrusted the church with the written account of Jesus. It cannot be disputed, It is known history, it is a fact. The lineage and unbroken links are there. YOu cannot provide one single fact to support otherwise. That is just twisted logic to say “how can I prove something that did not happen”. You sound so well educated and then you come across with all this garbage that is just not logical or substantive. You have a little knowledge and yet instead of using it to learn and support the truth, you use it to try to tear down what cannot be torn down. It is there, It is true, It is unchangeable, it is the Church. If these golden tablets exist, where are they? I know that the Bible exists because MY Church the church of Jesus Christ with the Grace and Goodness of God has seen that it is still here today. I know that the early writings and manuscripts existed because the Church of Jesus Christ through the Grace and Goodness of God has them in their possession.( what is left of them). And that church of Jesus Christ is the Catholic church, a pilgram church filled with sinners made clean by the Blood of the Lamb. Sanctified by the Sacrifice of Jesus. Built upon the blood of martyrs, and made holy by the one true Savior, Jesus. I haven’t seen or heard one thing from you to disprove this or to support your claim that Jesus, Peter, Paul and John laid hands on Joseph Smith. I have only his word and that cannot be trusted. As for me and my family, we will follow Jesus and His church, the Catholic Church.

 

[Delgadoajj]

Amen and ditto!!! Well said.

Jorge.

 

[ralphinal]

Rod_of_Iron,

You state that your non-Trinitarian church is the true church, yet you give us no name, no websites, no real information. Are you lukewarm, as in Revelation, or mearly unsure that your own church can withstand critical scrutiny?

Bishops ordained by three men who were already ordained as Bishops to be sure the line is preserved. History itself shows only one form of CHristianity for nearly 10 centuries. Early writers and historians declairing the fact. All of this means nothing. Please, show us the Truth. I guess the next thing you will say is that the Catholic Church obliterated all proof of other churches as part of an x-files worthy conspeiricy.

 

[Kevan]

rod of iron:

God didn’t change the name of Abraham to something else. Instead, God added His own name to the name of Abram. God took His name, “Yah”, and inserted it into the middle of Abram’s name. God did the same with Abraham’s wife. Her name was Sarah, and God added “Yah” to her name to make it “Sariah”. (“iah” is equivalent to “yah”.)

Stick with English, Rod. Your “Hebrew” is even worse than your theology.

 

[rod_of_iron]

Kevan:

Stick with English, Rod. Your “Hebrew” is even worse than your theology.

My Hebrew? What wrong with my Hebrew? Instead of making a snide remark to insult me, why not try to refute my claim linguistically? Anyone can insult, but not everyone can respond intelligently. Show me that you are capable of the latter.

 

[darcee]

From JewishEncyclopedia.com

The original and proper form of this name seems to be either “Abram” or “Abiram” (I Kings, xvi. 34; Deut. xi. 6), with the meaning, “my Father [or my God] is exalted.” The form “Abraham” yields no sense in Hebrew, and is probably only a graphic variation of “Abram,” the h being simply a letter, indicating a preceding vowel, a; but popular tradition explains it “father of a multitude” (ab hamon), given as a new name on the occasion of a turning-point in the patriarch’s career (Gen. xvii. 5). The name is personal, not tribal; it appears as a personal name in Babylonia in the time of Apil-Sin (about 2320 B.C.; Meissner, “Beiträge zum Altbabylonischen Privatrecht,” No. 111), and is not employed in the Old Testament in an ethnical sense (for example, it is not so employed in Micah, vii. 20, nor in Isa. xli. 8).

-D

 

[Kevan]

rod of iron:

My Hebrew? What wrong with my Hebrew? .

It isn’t Hebrew at all; it’s linguistic nonsense. Hopefully you didn’t make it up yourself. If not, you need to know that your sources are abysmally ignorant and you shouldn’t put faith in them. That’s a major source of heresy.

 

[rod_of_iron]

Kevan:

It isn’t Hebrew at all; it’s linguistic nonsense. Hopefully you didn’t make it up yourself. If not, you need to know that your sources are abysmally ignorant and you shouldn’t put faith in them. That’s a major source of heresy.

So, you are a linguist?

What is ignorant about an infix being added to a word? Are you saying that infixes are not a part of Hebrew? If you are, you are showing your ignorance.

An “h” is one of the 4 consonant vowels found in Ancient Hebrew. A consonant vowel could be added to a root as a prefix, suffix, or infix. In the word “Abraham”, the “h” is infixed into the root “Abram” to form the new word. My claim is that this “h” and the preceding “a” is part of God’s name that was added to Abram’s name when Abram made the covenant with God. God likewise added Abraham’s name to His name with this covenant. This is why God is known as the God of Abraham. He is also known as the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob because of the covenants He made with each of them.

Hopefully, I cleared up your confusion.

 

[larryo]

“Denomination” ? it doesn’t seem right to call the Catholic Church a “denomination”… Rather it seems like it should be called “The Church” and the rest are “denominations”

Excellent and succinct point! Absolutely a reputation builder. THE one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church is the Catholic Church. All others are counterfeits to one extent or another.

 

[reggie]

ROI, I think it is safe to say that in the history of all churches, there is some who were not what we could characterize holy or concerned with the souls of men. That’s a given because we are all sinners, we all fall short of the Glory of God. That said, I wish to move on to some other points regarding your beliefs as constrasted to those of Catholics. First and, I think, foremost seems to be the doctrine of the Trinity. Someone once explained to me the Trinity in terms of an egg. There are three parts of an egg; the yolk, the white and the shell. Now each part of that egg is distinct and yet are essential in the make-up of the egg. The difference between that and the Trinity is that each part of an egg may be separated but within the Trinity, each part , Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot be separated. Where one is, so too are the others. When Jesus refers to himself as the Son and God as His Father, He is speaking in terms of His mortal flesh. God could not be the father of Him in Spiritual terms since Jesus was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God according to John in the first chapter of his gospel. John states that in the beginning was the word. That would seem to suggest that the Word was eternal as is God and therefore is God since only God is eternal. Jesus as Man was the perfection of God in Word and Deed. He suffered the same temptations, hunger, thirst etc that we all endure. His life was an example to us of the perfect Son of God. As we are adopted sons through the sacrifice of Jesus, we are called to imitate His perfection. Because we are not God, we cannot do this without His grace because only God is perfect. Do you see the perfection in this? The circle of logic fits neatly together and does not diminish in anyway, God as the Creator of All. Now the Holy Spirit is the life force(the giver of life) of the Trinity. If God is eternal so then must the Holy Spirit be, since God did not create His own life force. If then the Holy Spirit is eternal, then He must also be God since only God is eternal. As we know from the OT, there is only one God, for Jesus to be God and the Holy Spirit to be God it would have to mean that God is One with three distinct persons within.Now as for the Jews finding this to be a hard belief and contrary to their belief in one God, that is a valid arguement. But the Jews of the time were not concerned so much with that as they were with a conquering Savior. They were expecting their Messiah to come with a vengeance and free them from the Roman tyranny. As with all humans, fear was a big part of their rejection of the message of Jesus, especially after His ignoble death. It was not a part of God’s plan that all would believe. How do I know that? Because God does not force Himself on us or take away what He has given, namely our freel will. It is God’s plan that some day, all will know the truth and we will have to just trust in His divine plan not knowing when that day will come but holding fast to His promise that if we believe and follow His commandments, we will be with Him always.

 

[Kevan]

rod of iron:

So, you are a linguist?

I read Hebrew.

An “h” is one of the 4 consonant vowels found in Ancient Hebrew. A consonant vowel could be added to a root as a prefix, suffix, or infix.

That “h” is sometimes a consonantal vowel at the end of a word, but it is not so at the beginning or in the middle.

In the word “Abraham”, the “h” is infixed into the root “Abram” to form the new word. My claim is that this “h” and the preceding “a” is part of God’s name that was added to Abram’s name when Abram made the covenant with God.

Yes, and you made the same claim for the name “Sarah.” But in neither case do you have what you need.

Abram’s name was not changed to Ab-iah (which would probably signify “Yah is father”) or “Ab-ia-ram” (which I couldn’t suggest a meaning for). His name became Ab (father) raham (which the Bible interprets as “a multitude”). There’s nothing in the Hebrew to substantiate your theory.

Likewise, when you wrote Sarah’s name in your earlier post as “Sariah,” you simply rewrote her name as though it had “iah” in it. But it doesn’t. You don’t see it in English (Sarah) because it isn’t in the Hebrew, either.

And now I’d like to apologize for the tone of my earlier posts. I was unkind and there’s no excuse for it.

 

[darcee]

back to the original question…

How many people actually knoww who founded their sect?

-D

 

[RNRobert]

mark a:

Not to mention the fact that most of the reformers hated each other’s guts.

Yes, I understand Luther rejoiced when he heard Zwingli was killed.