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I didn't realize those things were recent phenomena.ScaliaFan said:lying
law breaking
fornication
abortion
hatred
persecution of the godly..
not taking care of people .. victims of war
The devil rules
false beliefs like once saved always saved
i can't say i totally get this post of yourjunobet said:[SIZE=medium]Well, I think I kind of see your issue here. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]If a belief in “Once saved Always Saved” makes people think that they can do whatever they want with no concern for God and neighbour, because they’re saved anyway, so “who cares?”, that would indeed contribute to the world being in a rather bad state.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]But as I understand it – and please understand this as a friendly teasing caricature - the typical Calvinist constantly asks himself whether he is actually saved or whether he just thinks that he is saved and isn’t really saved. And when he tries to tell what he’s been predestined for, his only clue is Mt 7:16: “[/SIZE][SIZE=medium]You will recognize them by their fruits.” So he will try very very hard not to sin, so that his good fruits will reassure him that he is actually saved. Which may either contribute to a better state of the world or the contrary, depending on how well such a person can discern what is a sin against God and neighbour and what is not.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]I’m convinced that most people want to be good, be it for fear for their salvation or be it just for goodness’ sake. So apart from carnal temptations getting the better of us, the discernment of what is good and what is not, seems to be the main problem. In that we can only pray for Christ’s guidance.[/SIZE]
Sorry, but it seems you are not at all familiar with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. One of the late Pope John Paul II’s favourite theologians was Hans Urs von Balthasar, a notorious universalist. I’m not saying Catholics must be universalist, but they certainly can be. And if you ask my local Priest by God's grace they certainly can sin and still go to heaven, especially when they get their last confession and sacraments. Which is why Catholics tend to have the better parties.ScaliaFan said:i can't say i totally get this post of your
but if you believe you can sin and do no good works whatsoever and still make it to Heaven, you are under the influence of Satan
when someone asked Jesus what must he do to be saved, the first thing he said was Obey the commandments..
then he added something to the 10 Commandments, although it really wasn't an addition so much as a clarification of the 10 Cs
"Love your neighbor as yourself"
Love requires DOING things... See Mt 25:31-46... James 2:12
where it talks about ETERNAL punsihemnt for not helping your brethren who believe in Christ
and in 2015, approximately 1.2 million children were murderedRiver Jordan said:I didn't realize those things were recent phenomena.
Meanwhile, here's a different perspective: 11 reasons why 2015 was a great year for humanity
1) We got a lot closer to global, universal education
2) Extreme poverty dropped below 10% — the lowest rate ever
3) More people got connected to the internet than ever before
4) Millions of people gained access to finance for the first time
5) AIDS deaths came down for the 15th year in a row
6) Malaria death rates are at an all time low
7) Polio is about to be eradicated forever
8) Fewer people went hungry this year than ever before
9) More people have access to clean water
10) Child mortality plunged for the 43rd year in a row
11) We reached a tipping point in the fight against climate change
i never suggested waiting until Purgatory. In fact i would say do the opposite. The saints tell us that if we wait to do our purging here for later.. we will end up paying (metaphor) a million dollars for what we could have gotten for a pennyjunobet said:Sorry, but it seems you are not at all familiar with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. One of the late Pope John Paul II’s favourite theologians was Hans Urs von Balthasar, a notorious universalist. I’m not saying Catholics must be universalist, but they certainly can be. And if you ask my local Priest by God's grace they certainly can sin and still go to heaven, especially when they get their last confession and sacraments. Which is why Catholics tend to have the better parties.
But I totally agree with you that love requires doing things. The question that we must ask though is: which things? How do we love our neighbour best? I fear that in very many political issues you and me would come to very different answers to that question, And I may have more answers in common with Pope Francis.
So maybe we should do what the Catholic church actually suggests: follow the primacy of conscience and don’t wait for purgatory, but each work out our own salvation with fear and trembling in this life.
ScaliaFan said:i never suggested waiting until Purgatory. In fact i would say do the opposite. The saints tell us that if we wait to do our purging here for later.. we will end up paying (metaphor) a million dollars for what we could have gotten for a penny
I think it is Mt 18:23 that is about Purgatory, tho the word is not used.. and there are others.. 1 Cor 3:15.. Maccabees 12:44 which speaks of sacrificing and praying for the dead "that they be loosed from their sins" A lot of people forget that Christianity began with Judaism (bk of Maccabees was thrown out by Luther, but accepted by Catholics and some sects of the Jews).
Jesus did not throw out all of the OT as some noncatholics think.. In fact if you go by the Bible alone (i do not) you will find Jesus speaking VERY very little about changes He wanted to make from OT to New T
:mellow:
not really. Luther threw out the book of Maccabbees from the Bible.. and wanted to throw out James, Revelation and Hebrews and one other i can't recalljunobet said:Of course it takes a lot of imagination to find the Catholic concept of purgatory referenced in any bit of the Bible, Old or New Testament. But - putting my Lutheran reservations aside - I must say I actually quite like the metaphor of a cleansing fire for our souls.
So seeing that you respect your Catholic Saints, maybe you want to consider what Peter Chrysologus (“Doctor of Homilies”, c. 380 – c. 450 AD) had to say about Purgatory:
ScaliaFan said:not really. Luther threw out the book of Maccabbees from the Bible.. and wanted to throw out James, Revelation and Hebrews and one other i can't recall
the book of Maccabees tells us that the soldiers prayed for their dead lost in battle.. that "they may be loosed from their sins"
and you anticatholics... noncatholics thought it was all over at death. It was never so long ago
H. Richard,H. Richard said:Amazing !!!!
So most of the posters are sinless, right? They have made the choice to not sin in the flesh so that they can be righteous, right? Their work at being righteous will get them into heaven, right?
So then the conclusion is that we save ourselves by what we do, right?
It is a pity that most do not understand Romans 7 which describes the condition of a child of God. They completely miss the last two verse in that chapter. To the strawman builders I say this, Just as in Romans 7 no child of God """"WANTS to sin"""". But they do not lie to God about their sinful condition as the religious do. They know that the only way to get to heaven is the way Jesus told Paul. It is simple faith in the grace of God. For the slow at heart it means to place ALL your belief in, faith in, trust in, confidence in the work of Jesus on the cross where He shed His blood to pay for ALL the sins of the world. That means all the sins of the world have already been paid for. But saying this will bring about those who build strawmen that a child of God wants to sin.
These same self righteous people who build the strawman will say that if they sin they can repent and all will be paid for by their act of repentance. Their work of repentance is their get right with God repentance card. So they can sin all they want to and then pull out their repentance card and get it punched.
I am not against good works of charity and love. But those will not give a person righteousness and get a person into heaven. God has already said the a man's good works are as filthy rags.
Isa 64:6
6 But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away.
NKJV
i dont have much time right now, have read some of thisjunobet said:[SIZE=medium]I hope you did not get the impression that I’m anti-Catholic. Quite the contrary: some of the best Christians I know are devout Catholics.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]My point was that it is highly unlikely that you got many of your ideas on morals, hell and purgatory from the Old Testament. It’s the part of the Bible that needs a parental advisory sticker! If all one had to go on was the OT, one might easily get the impression that fornication, lying, divorce, abortion, infanticide and genocide are pretty much ok with God. And one would think that there’s a “sheol”, a realm of the dead, where both the good and the wicked go and where nothing much happens. Rather late in Judaism – and yes, I suppose that must have been at around the times of the Maccabean Revolt ([/SIZE][SIZE=medium]167 to 160 BC[/SIZE][SIZE=medium]) or a bit after – Pharisaic Judaism started to get the idea of a resurrection of the dead, based on merely two verses in the entire Tanach whilst the Sadducees thought the idea of an afterlife is absolutely nuts and sided with Ecclesiastes 9:5: "“For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.” . In this debate between Pharisees and Sadducees Jesus took the Pharisees’ side. Again see: http://biblehub.com/parallelgospels/The_Sadducees_Test_Jesus_about_the_Resurrection.htm. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]The reason that Luther did not include 1+2 Maccabees in his Canon is not that it may hint at purgatory and the selling of indulgences. The Luther Bible still has them as apokrypha. But being a conscientious scholar Luther translated the OT from the original Hebrew Tanach rather than from the translated Greek Septuagint, that the Catholic Latin Vulgata is translated from. And the Hebrew Tanach doesn’t have 1+2 Maccabees. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]And of course Protestants believe in the resurrection of the dead and eternal life for the very same reason Catholics do: they read the New Testament![/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]…[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Anyway, enough of my awful nit-picking and back to your opening post’s topic: [/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Despite the good points RiverJordan made, you and me seem to be in agreement that the world is in a rather bad state and that the love of Christ requires us to do something about it. What do you suggest we do?[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Just brainstorming my first suggestion would be buying fair trade products. There are some very good Catholic run fair trade shops over here in Germany. They started in the 80ies and lit a spark: by now every supermarket offers fair trade coffee, cocoa etc. You have to be careful of the labelling though, not all are really fair.[/SIZE]
one of our candidates, a front-runner says he is without sin.. or might as well say it.. said he didn't have to ask God for any forgiveness!junobet said:H. Richard,
I can’t say I’ve read the entire forum, but in this thread at least, I haven’t seen anybody claiming they are sinless.
Yeah, that was a big turnoff. I also imagine any revelation of impropriety would be used by the left. He isn't comfortable enough with being a Christian that he would quote or paraphrase scripture to show how all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God.ScaliaFan said:one of our candidates, a front-runner says he is without sin.. or might as well say it.. said he didn't have to ask God for any forgiveness!
[SIZE=medium]Point A was me feeling the smug need to correct your misunderstanding that the OT teaches the kind of proverbial fire and brimstone that you seem to want to preach. However angry its prophets could get, the authors of the OT did not have any notions of hell yet, let alone our notion of "family values".[/SIZE]ScaliaFan said:i dont have much time right now, have read some of this
but it is interesting.. when Noah entered the ark, it was wtih his 3 sons and their wives. They only had ONE wife each. Then there came Solomon with his 800 wives and concubines!!! Blow me away! How could God approve of such a thing.. and yet Jesus changed a lot of the OT ... said that anyone who divorces someone and marries another commits adultery... said that it was never intended t here be divorce, much less polygamy
In any case... i forgot something else i wanted to say... but the point is that obviously we cannot accept everything from the OT.. and of course the Catholic Church does not
so.. uh... I'm getting a little overhwlemed here... what is the main point?
You mean to tell me that all those on forums that teach "if a person sins they are lost" are not teaching law?junobet said:H. Richard,
I can’t say I’ve read the entire forum, but in this thread at least, I haven’t seen anybody claiming they are sinless.
Nor have I seen anybody claiming that helping an old Lady across the street etc. will get them any bonus points for a ticket to heaven.
I’m not quite sure how well versed ScaliaFan is in Catholic Doctrine, but both the Roman Catholic Church and my own Lutheran denomination believe that we are saved by grace alone and that none of our good deeds are our own merit, but the merit of Christ working in us. For a more detailed explanation see our churches “Joint Declaration On the Doctrine Of Justification”: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_31101999_cath-luth-joint-declaration_en.html