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The ones Jesus quoted in the NT and wrote with His finger in stone at Sinai in the OT - the Ten Commandments.
Well there fella, I received the gospel as true, and then received His Spirit through prayer and by believing the word of God. I'd heard about the Reformation, but didn't know the doctrine. In fact, the Holy Spirit taught me from scripture for three years before I even went looking for a church and I visited a few including Holy Innocents RCC in Neptune, NJ, before settling a few years in a Baptist congregation a few blocks from home.
I am one with Catholics, but only those who have been born again of His Spirit. That doesn't come by way of sacrament and never did.
The sacrament of Matrimony was instituted by God in Gen. 1 before the Fall and remains sacred. Do you oppose that sacrament too?
I don't oppose sacraments. How can you oppose something which doesn't exist?The sacrament of Matrimony was instituted by God in Gen. 1 before the Fall and remains sacred. Do you oppose that sacrament too?
Please cite an example from Scripture where "water" is separated from "born again of His Spirit".
In its simplest terms, a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace.
To understand this, we need to think of a kiss. A kiss is both physical and spiritual. Through a kiss we give, not merely an invisible reality, nor yet a merely physical gesture without spiritual content, but a sort of combination: an incarnation of love. A kiss is both physical and spiritual, like a human being.
Now sacraments are the kisses of God. Through them God not only symbolizes His love, He enacts it. Something happens to us through sacraments. Something is given. Something of the “stuff” of God is poured (“infused” to use theological technobabble) into the human soul like water into a bucket. Thus, when the Church speaks of grace infused, She speaks of God himself as if He were made of “stuff.” In particular, She is recalling us to the language of the Creeds, which describe God himself as a substance when they say that the Three Persons of the Trinity, while distinct, are “one in being.” They are made of the same substance, the same “God stuff” if you will.
To many, this seems crude. But then Jesus never shied from “crude” images (like comparing God to a mother hen) if they got His point across. And this is for a very good reason: Jesus Himself is a physical image–the Physical Image–of the ultimate spiritual reality (Hebrews 1:3). He is God in human flesh (John 1:1). And as God in human flesh he both symbolized God and carried to us His very Life–like a sacrament.
Which this leads us directly back to the Catholic image of grace as a “substance.” For according to Scripture, the new life of grace is nothing other than the new life of God himself coming to dwell in a human personality. Thus, when the Catholic tradition describes the bestowal of grace as an “infusion” it is being thoroughly biblical, for it is relying directly on what our Lord himself said when He described the new life as “living water” welling up in the soul of the one who believes in him (John 7:38). Elsewhere, he put the same idea a bit differently and promised, “Anyone who loves me will be true to my word, and my Father will love him; we will come to him and make our dwelling place with him” (John 14:23). Or to use an even more shocking biblical image, grace is that “seed” which impregnates our souls with Christ as it impregnated the womb of Mary.
The idea, then, is that grace (that is, the very substance of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) is something which really enters into our being and radically alters it, generating new life. This is in contrast to the idea held by some Christians that grace is merely a sort of legal fiction by which sinners (who remain objectively bad) are simply declared legally “not guilty” and “covered with Christ’s righteousness as snow covers a dunghill.” To be sure, we are pardoned by the sacrifice of Christ, but this is the beginning, not the end of the Christian life. The rest of the story, which all believers live every day, is the fact that God causes us to “grow in him” to be changed by an increasing “infusion” of his grace into more and more areas of our being. We don’t merely stop being sinners and have the heavenly account books zeroed out so we can squeak into heaven. We start being saints and go from grace to grace and glory to glory.
But why then, since this is all image and metaphor, do we need physical sacraments? What good is all this water and oil and laying on of hands and bread and wine and smells and bells if they are only pointing us to the purely spiritual reality? Why not cut to the chase and avoid all this clumsy paraphernalia?
In a word, says the Church, because we are not disembodied angelic spirits. As God reminds us every time we use the restroom or make love or eat a sandwich, we are a peculiar combination of dreams and bones, part angel and part alley cat. So if sanctity is to really permeate our total being (body, soul and spirit, as Paul points out in 1 Thessalonians 5:23) it must be addressed to our total being. As the child said to his mother, curling up to her side during the lightning storm, he couldn’t just pray to God in his spirit because “I needed someone with skin on.” So do we. Thus, the grace of God is given to our entire being, not just the spiritual part, in the sacraments which are both physical and spiritual “means of grace.” We experience, not just a legal “not guilty,” not merely a divine attitude of “unmerited favor,” but a physical touch and, through it, power from the grace of God so that we may be like the Man (not the disembodied Ghost) Christ Jesus and love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind and strength: that is, with our total being.
For Jesus, the Word made flesh, is the Original Sacrament. He came to give us “life abundantly.” And that life comes to us, not merely in spirit, but “in spirit and in truth” through his very physical flesh, which He gives for the life of the world. (John 6:51).
When viewed in this way, it become apparent that sacramentality is not a “magical” Catholic thing. Rather, it is a Christian thing since
a) all Christians believe that the Holy Spirit was poured out on the earth through the veil of Christ’s very literal, very material, very human flesh (Hebrews 10:20) and
b) all Christians believe that the body, (not just the spirit) belongs to the Lord and is holy to him (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
Likewise, all Christians believe that the heaven and earth are full of God’s glory (and are intended to show forth that glory). Indeed, it becomes apparent that (when we aren’t talking about Catholic theology) even those Christians who find the idea of Catholic sacramentality magical see no difficulty at all with it in other areas. That is why a “Bible-believing Christian” feels no strangeness when he picks up a book (made of nothing more than paper, ink and glue as baptismal water is “only” water) and declares with perfect faith (as any Catholic would) that this mere creature is, in very truth, the Word of God that can bring us to salvation. The principle is exactly the same: God communicating his life through a physical book called the Bible and God communicating his life through the physical waters of baptism. The only difference is that in the former, his life is communicated verbally while in the latter it is communicated non-verbally. But both are sacramental for both draw their life from the spiritual Word made matter in Christ Jesus. That’s not magic. It’s just the way things have been ever since Bethlehem.
Is Sacramental Grace Magic? - Stumbling Toward Heaven
For Jesus, the Word made flesh, is the Original Sacrament.
In post #367, you said:
Okaaaaaayyyyy . . .
I think that the only grace I found in the RCC was an introduction to the words of Jesus Christ, they lead to me seek Him out in scripture. They gave me the desire to know Him and be like Him. I just didn't see any evidence of His presence in that church.
You need to stop blaming the Church for your parents' failure to lead you by example. It is impossible to receive Our Lord's Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity with the proper disposition, and not have a deep, intimate personal relationship with Jesus. If that never happened for you then you were a Catholic by inertia, and not by faith and practice.
If it's irrelevant to you then why all the absurd challenges??
That's highly subjective.
You view the CC through Protestant lenses and unfairly judge the CC accordingly. Ex-Catholics who become anti-Catholics has nothing to do with finding correct doctrines, it has everything to do with anti-Catholic Protestants feeding the ex-Catholic with lies and falsehoods, so they can turn the ex-Catholic into an ignorant anti-Catholic just like them. It's the same socialization process for racial prejudice. The New Anti-Catholicism the Last Acceptable Prejudice.
Catholics are not hung up about "born again" and ""saved" because we are born again in Baptism, like the Bible says. Having an emotional "born again" experience is all well and good. I applaud anyone who has a moral turn around, but an emotional experience is not "born again", it's not water and spirit, as Jesus clearly states in John 3:5. We take Paul seriously when he instructs us to "work out your salvation in fear and trembling." Do you?
Again, it is impossible to not have a personal relationship with Jesus and properly receive Holy Communion. You have little understanding of the history of Protestant beliefs. "Assurance of salvation" was invented by John Calvin in the 16th century. Catholics are assured of salvation by moral certitude the same as Protestants, but no Catholic can be 100% infallibly guaranteed salvation because the Bible doesn't teach that. Luther and Calvin, 2 pillars of Protestantism, baptized infants. Your question about infant baptism shows you have been thoroughly indoctrinated by post reformist rhetoric. Infant baptism was never a reformist issue but opposition to it came later, and only by a few Protestant sects.
I was involved in the Jesus Movement in the early '70's. I went to festivals and got albums signed by Keith Green and Larry Norman. A few short years later I had a release of the Holy Spirit and could pray in tongues. I discovered the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and found its prayer meetings to be deeper, richer and more orderly than any Pentecostal church I had attended. Once I gave a testimony in a Baptist church. I wanted to be with friends and attended numerous Bible studies and services for 30 years. I met many good, holy Protestants who couldn't be bothered with Catholic bashing. I happily returned to my roots; over time I learned that the Catholic Church is the true church founded by Jesus Christ and no other. It took me 50 years to understand that the Eucharistic Sacrifice at the Last Supper is one and the same sacrifice as the Crucifixion. A light went on when I realized that.
I think your problem lies in the idea that everybody needs to have a dramatic conversion testimony. This is NOT the case with those “born into” faith.
Yup, and so RCC doctrine sacrifices Christ at every single communion service to satisfy a transsubstantiation of the elements. In RCC ritual the work of the cross is never done, and when Jesus said "It is finished", He meant except every time "communion" is ministered by a priest.
No one is born into faith. We're born of flesh and blood and at God's election we are born again of Spirit.
That's NOT Catholic doctrine; it's a gross anti-Catholic insult and a total misrepresentation of the Mass. You are not aware you are professing a Lutheran falsehood. Luther was wrong, and so are you.
His word is truth, reformist misrepresentations that you assert does not define truth. Sadly, you are not even aware you are asserting reformist misrepresentations because you don't know the history of the doctrines you uphold.
We don't play at ritual and religion, and your reply to BofL has nothing to do with what he said. God saves and doesn't NEED our help, but out of profound respect for our free will, God seeks our cooperation with grace we already received. Our free will and God's desire that all be saved is something your private theology doesn't reconcile.
Difference between Catholic and Protestant.
OP ^
Catholics pray TO disembodied saints.
Protestants pray FOR bodily living saints.
Bunk, fantasy, superstition, institutionalized carnal thought and spiritual blindness.
