Oral Tradition

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by HankD:
&lt;&lt;Hank, are you saying that "soul liberty" is a first person telling a second person what that second person's innner intentions are, contrary to the disclaimers of the second person?&gt;&gt;

Yes, I suppose generally speaking it is because the Scriptures tell us:

Jeremiaiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

&lt;&lt;Soul liberty = judging others nonobservable inner intentions by outward observations? &gt;&gt;

You have added the word "judging" and in a sense you are correct because the same Jesus who said "judge not that ye be not judged" also said :

Matthew 7:20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

So then when we see someone doing something which appears to be a work of the flesh (such as what appears to be idolatry) then we have the right to go to our brother and speak our mind to try to help him/her to be a better Christian.

HankD<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Then according to the above, I may say without fear of repoach from anyone that a particular person hates Catholics inspite of what he says about it. I am free to make this "judgement" about him based on what he writes and what I perceive his attitude to be?

Like I pointed out before, Jesus said we are to love each other, so their dispute is with God not me, right?

[ January 29, 2002: Message edited by: trying2understand ]

 

T2U,
I do not hate Catholics, and never have. As I have posted many times, I was one for a good many years. Most of my extended family is Catholic, whom I pray for daily. It breaks my heart to know that their destiny, should they not change their minds, would be a lake of fire. I grieve over the blindness and darkness caused by sin and the false teaching of false religions. Right now I am in a nation where I have witnessed a woman casting money on the tomb of one her religious leaders thinking that that would help her gain merit with her god. I have seen those who call themselves Christian offer animals such as chickens and goats to an idol of Mary, sacrifice before it, worship before it. I have known Hindus to do the same thing before their own gods. There is no difference. Do I hate these people? Absolutely not. I would not be where I am, doing what I am doing, if I did. Here is a part of the world (not totally unlike America), that is cloaked in spiritual blindness and darkness. The light of the world is Jesus. When that light becomes so obscured that it cannot be seen, perhaps there was no light there in the first place. When one cannot tell the difference in some countries between Hinduism and Catholicism, whatever light that there may have been, it has become completely extinguished. In my opinion it was never there in the first place.

DHK

 

DHK,

My brother would never go to church because, "It's just full of hypocrites." Even when I told him that there was always room for one more, he wouldn't budge.

He looked at what some of the people did and the way they lived. He could never get past that.

He never saw the beauty of the teachings of the church. He never experienced the awe in realizing that the liturgy of the Mass draws all of its participants, throughout history, to share the same 'bread' which the Apostles shared at the Last Supper. How, in it, we are all brought to the foot of the Cross at Calvary and the celestial altar o Revelation.

He never got past his prejudice to learn what the Church teaches and has taught from the time of the Apostles. He never picked up a Catechism to see, for himself, what the Church teaches and what lies others had told him about Catholic practices and beliefs.

You remind me of him. Alas!

 

DHK,
Please, tell us about your years as a Catholic. Did you go to mass every Sunday? Did you go to religious education classes every week? Did your family have morning and evening prayers and spiritual reading together? Did you receive First Holy Communion? Were you confirmed? Were you married in the Catholic Church?

Pauline

 

Dear T2U,

you wrote...

&lt;&lt;Then according to the above, I may say without fear of reproach from anyone that a particular person hates Catholics in spite of what he says about it. I am free to make this "judgment" about him based on what he writes and what I perceive his attitude to be?&gt;&gt;

Yes one has that freedom to make "judgments". For the Christian there is also accountability to God and His Word. To level the charge of hate against another unjustly is a form of false witness just as much as one who brings an unjust charge of idolatry.
The "unjust" part is the difficulty.

&lt;&lt;Like I pointed out before, Jesus said we are to love each other, so their dispute is with God not me,
right?&gt;&gt;

And as was pointed out before, love includes rebuke. Comparing Scripture with Scripture, our rebukes should be motivated by the desire to correct our brother or sister of the error of their ways.
Our part is remedial while God's part is punitive.
When one rebukes and the recipient disagrees with the rebuke then obviously there is a stand off and possibly an escalation of emotions unless God intervenes.

HankD

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Pauline:
DHK,
Please, tell us about your years as a Catholic. Did you go to mass every Sunday? Did you go to religious education classes every week? Did your family have morning and evening prayers and spiritual reading together? Did you receive First Holy Communion? Were you confirmed? Were you married in the Catholic Church?
Pauline<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I have posted my testimony on different threads here at various times before. I was a Catholic for twenty years, and always went to mass every Sunday. For a number of those years I was an altar boy. I can remember one year going to mass every day after school. We received religious education classes every week, and were made to study the catechism. Yes our family had some family prayer time. Of course, as a Catholic, I was confirmed and received my first communion.
I consider my family a devout Roman Catholic family. I prayed often the rosary, went through the stations of the cross. I still have some of the mass memorized in Latin from my days as an altar boy. I went on after that and was a lector in the church. My parents were sure, that at one point I was going to enter into the priesthood. I guess I did, since when I got saved, trusted Christ, and not the church for the forgiveness of my sins, He made me both a king and a priest (Rev.1:6). It just wasn’t the kind of priest they were thinking of.
I was not married in the Catholic Church. Thank God, He saved me before that time came.
I was twenty years in the Catholic Church, and never heard a clear presentation of the gospel even once.

One day someone on the campus university asked me two questions:
1. Do you believe the Bible is the Word of God? Although I had never studied the Bible, I still had a reverence for it. Of course it is the Word of God. Why wouldn’t it be! (I had studied catechisms and traditions of men, not the Bible).
2. If you were to die right now do you know for sure if you would go to heaven? No. I did not know. In fact if I committed a mortal sin, like missing mass on Sunday, got hit by truck and died before a priest had time to administer extreme unction, I would certainly go to hell (RC theology). No, there is no assurance of going to heaven in the Catholic Church.
3. He then asked me if he could show me from the Bible how I could know for sure that I could go to Heaven, and I allowed him.

He showed me that I was a sinner in need of a Saviour (Rom.3:23). I didn’t have to be convinced of that. I knew that I had sinned, and that many times over.
He showed me that the consequences of my sin was eternal separation from God (Rom.6:23). The wages of sin is death. A wage is something you earn; something you deserve, and I deserved to die—eternally. That’s what death meant in the Bible: separation from God. I would be eternally separated from God as a consequence of my sin.
He showed me that Christ paid the penalty that I could not pay. (Rom.5:8). He demonstrated his love toward me in that while I was yet a sinner he died for me. It was Christ that paid the penalty for my sin, not in part but the whole. I don’t have to pay a thing. I can’t. He paid it all. You don’t have to suffer in purgatory. That would be to deny His sufferings on the cross. You don’t have to work for a gift. That would be to deny what He wants to give you—the gift of eternal life.
He showed me what I had to do (Rom.10:13). I had to call upon the name of the Lord. That evening, I recognized that I was a sinner before God, my sin separating me (possibly for all eternity) from Him, and so I prayed, and received Jesus Christ as the Lord and Saviour of my life. I have never regretted it since. The person that led me to the Lord belonged to an inter-denominational organization that works on the campuses of universities, for which I am thankful for, but I cannot endorse their ecumenicity, and lack of standing on the truth. It was not until two years later that I made a clean break with the Catholic Church, by being baptized by immersion into a fundamental Baptist church.
It was during those two years that I studied my Bible on my own. I compared what the Catholic Church said to what the Bible said. I left the Catholic Church on my own, without another’s influence. The Catholic Church’s teaching is in direct conflict with the Bible. I had no other choice but to leave. “Come out from among them and be ye separate saith the Lord.”
DHK

 

Thanks, DHK,
I think your last line explains some of your feelings toward the Catholic Church. I had wondered why such strong animosity, when we Catholics who left Protestant churches don't have that animosity toward the churches we left.

At the same time, I can't figure out how you missed understanding the Catholic Faith. The fact that you didn't even understand about holy water and renewing our baptismal promises, which every second grader should know, tells me something was wrong. And the fact that you think we adore (worship - in your language) statues, the pope, etc, when the Catholic teaching absolutely forbids that -- adds to my bafflement about how you missed the true facts. And, over a twenty year period, long enough certainly for you to have learned the truths of the Faith. I'm wondering what the quality was of the teaching you received.

I don't believe that any person going through our RCIA classes will ever leave the Catholic Church over reading the bible, because we show them the Catholic Faith in the bible, along with tradition.

Thanks for posting your story.

Pauline

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Pauline:

At the same time, I can't figure out how you missed understanding the Catholic Faith. The fact that you didn't even understand about holy water and renewing our baptismal promises, which every second grader should know, tells me something was wrong. And the fact that you think we adore (worship - in your language) statues, the pope, etc, when the Catholic teaching absolutely forbids that -- adds to my bafflement about how you missed the true facts. And, over a twenty year period, long enough certainly for you to have learned the truths of the Faith. I'm wondering what the quality was of the teaching you received.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Perception and reality are two different things. A person caught up in a cult or false religion perceives what he thinks to be true because that is what he has been taught by his religious leaders, and because it has been ingrained in him not to think any other way. This is true of every cult, most world religions, and Roman Catholicism. I meet Muslims who tell me that Christians believe, that in order for God to have a son (Jesus), He must have had a wife, therefore Christians believe God has a wife. That is what some Muslims believe about Christianity. That is their perception. It is not the truth, but it is their perception based on what their false teachers have been teaching them most of their lives. I am well acquainted with such things having lived in an Islamic country. Roman Catholicism is no different. If I were to ask my extended family, “Do you worship idols?” Of course the answer would be an emphatic “No!” If you were to ask me if I thought that my family worshipped idols, I would say “yes,” because they are Catholics, blinded to the truth of God’s Word. Their false teachers (the priests) have taught them from infancy that bowing down in front of a statue and praying before that statue is not idolatry. So, that is what their perception is. Their perception of idolatry is what the Hindus do, not realizing that they do the very same thing. They just deny it, but in REALITY it is still idolatry.
My perception of praying before images as a Catholic was not as one committing idolatry. But in reality that is what I was doing. Face reality. Study the Scriptures. What does the Word of God say? It says that you shall not make any graven images and you shall not bow down before them. What is so hard to understand about that? When you do that (bowing down in front of a graven image), you are committing an act of worship; that is why it is forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God. Him only shalt thou worship. That act of worship (bowing before a graven image), God calls idolatry! Catholics don’t like that name-tag, but it’s time to take a “reality-check.”
DHK

 

DHK,
I can see that your own beliefs are so narrow that you don't take essential points, such as "intention" into consideration on the subject of worship.

You are very wrong in your judgments and it must be hard on your Catholic relatives for you to judge them so.

We do know who we adore (worship). It is the Almighty God, Creator of the earth. And no one else. I can see you do not want that to be the truth. I don't understand why. It grieves me that any Christian is guilty of so much mis-judgment of other Christians.
But I can also see you don't want to look at the facts that go against your views.

You continue in my prayers,

Pauline

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by DHK:


Perception and reality are two different things.
DHK<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, and you stand them on their head. It would appear, that to you, your perception is reality.

Why are you such a legalist?

Don't you know that God looks at the heart?

Be careful, DHK, if you think that you are saved because you live by the law, you will be judged by the law.

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: trying2understand ]

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Ps104_33:


Your average "run of the mill" go to mass once a month and confession once a year Catholic are the norm. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Actually, Psalm, my experience, which is probably a little more first hand than yours, is that there are basiclly two types of Catholics... "the faithful" and the "in name only".

Faithful Catholics attend Mass every Sunday and make Confession every couple of months or more frequently.

The in name only are a bit more like you describe: Mass at Christmas and Easter, confession probably not even once a year.

Of course, there are a lot of Bible only Christians who make it to service less frequently than every Sunday too.

The Baptists that I know, have little or no problem with not attending service if they are on vacation or have a sports game or such. It's not a sin to them, so what's the big deal (to them)?

Faithful Catholics make a point of attending Mass even when on vacation or traveling. My wife and I travel a lot and I always plan air travel around Mass schedules. It fact, a very memorable experience for me was Mass in Mexico last Easter. I do not speak Spanish but understood what was being said (except the sermon) because the Mass is the Mass in any language.

Ron

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: trying2understand ]

 

T2U,
I am not a legalist; I am a Biblicist. I follow the Bible. We are saved through grace by faith, contrary to what the Catholic Church teaches. It is they who teaches that you must keep the law, not I. It is the Catholic Church that continues to teach that salvation comes by keeping the Ten Commandments and doing good. That is salvation by works, legalism, living by the law. I am sorry that you are so confused.
I am saved by grace, by faith alone in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. I know if I died right now I would go straight to Heaven. I have a twofold assurance of that. One, Scripture has given me the promise of eternal life: “He that has the Son has life; He that has not the Son has not life.” I have the Son—I have eternal life. Second, The Holy Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I am a child of God (Rom.8:16). Not every one has that witness. Only a true child of God does, and can testify of it. Does God’s Spirit bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God? How do you know?

You missed Psalm 104’s point entirely. Yes faithful Catholic’s attend mass faithfully, and may do so wherever they are—just like I did. But may I add this very politely: So What!!
You can attend mass all of your life faithfully and be biblically ignorant, as I was. The Catholic Church does not encourage the study of the Bible, and it never did. It puts its traditions of men more important then the Word of God, exactly what Christ condemned. That is why the Church Fathers are so highly esteemed among Catholics—not for their doctrine, but for their traditions. An ignorant Catholic remains ignorant still. Learn a little bit from your own Scott Hahn who himself said that the Catholic Church was full of baptized pagans.

Pauline, my views are as narrow as the Bible and as wide as the Bible; as open as the Bible and as closed as the Bible. I follow the Bible in my views and beliefs not the traditions of men or the Catholic Church. I have quoted plenty of Scripture on this thread, and you have answered none of it. Your only answer seems to be that you feel sorry for me. I don’t need pity Pauline. I am rejoicing in my Lord, knowing that my sins are forgiven and I am on my way to heaven. I’ve been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. My sins, past, present, and future, are all forgiven. I have been given the gift of eternal life, never to be taken away again. I don’t need anybody’s pity. What for? I glory in the Lord my Saviour.
Pity, pity, pity! Is that all you can answer to Scripture? “It grieves me…” “You continue in my prayers…” “I can see that…” Answer the Scripture Pauline. Never mind demeaning the character and making judgement calls about how wrong I am with my family. "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, neither the power of God." They that worship idols worship demons. I fear for you.

Answer: Exodus 20: 1-4 These first commandments of God, Please explain!
Answer: In Esther why Mordecai would never bow down to Haman as a sign of respect, even when every one else would.
Answer: Why Peter rebuked Cornelius, and commanded him to rise up, after he bowed down before him.
Answer: Why the angel rebuked John for bowing down before him, saying, “See thou do it not!”

The most indefensible case that you have is when you cannot answer the Scripture, and thus you resort to name-calling, hate mongering, innuendoes, etc. And that is what I have seen in most of the responses (not just yours Pauline).
Deal with Scripture.
DHK

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by DHK:
T2U,

You missed Psalm 104’s point entirely. Yes faithful Catholic’s attend mass faithfully, and may do so wherever they are—just like I did. But may I add this very politely: So What!!
You can attend mass all of your life faithfully and be biblically ignorant, as I was. The Catholic Church does not encourage the study of the Bible, and it never did. It puts its traditions of men more important then the Word of God, exactly what Christ condemned. That is why the Church Fathers are so highly esteemed among Catholics—not for their doctrine, but for their traditions. An ignorant Catholic remains ignorant still. Learn a little bit from your own Scott Hahn who himself said that the Catholic Church was full of baptized pagans.
DHK<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think that this is evidence that you see what you choose to see only.

I hope that Psalm will see your response and mine and clarify for both of us, which of us is better understanding the point of that particular post of his.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by DHK:

Never mind demeaning the character and making judgement calls about how wrong DHK<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Again, I must ask...

The K in DHK wouldn't stand for kettle would it?

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by DHK:
The Holy Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I am a child of God (Rom.8:16).
DHK<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Well, it may seem that way to you anyway.

Don't forget about that perception/reality thing though.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by trying2understand:


Again, I must ask...

The K in DHK wouldn't stand for kettle would it? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Still never heard of a Bible, have you?
Deal with Scripture

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by trying2understand:


Well, it may seem that way to you anyway.
Don't forget about that perception/reality thing though. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

You are still afraid to give direct answers to Scripture??

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by DHK:


You are still afraid to give direct answers to Scripture??<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

The problem is, you don't ask questions. You simply blast people. You make judgements about the state of their soul and spritual life and thow a bunch of verses out as though that makes your judgement of others correct.

How about an actual question, that doesn't first require you personally attacking someone, and then at least a half-hearted attempt on your part to engage in a discussion, rather than a DHK mud-sling-fest.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by trying2understand:

The problem is, you don't ask questions. You simply blast people. You make judgements about the state of their soul and spritual life and thow a bunch of verses out as though that makes your judgement of others correct.
How about an actual question, that doesn't first require you personally attacking someone, and then at least a half-hearted attempt on your part to engage in a discussion, rather than a DHK mud-sling-fest.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I direct you to your own posts. I am not the one slinging mud. Example: "The K in DHK wouldn't stand for..." Go back and read my recent posts. I referred you to four passages of Scriptures, asked four direct questions? You avoided them. Why? I asked you personally a direct question according to Scripture. You avoid it. Why? Why are you afraid of Scripture?
DHK