Featured The Mark is coming

Funny how you call returning to the biblical truth a heretical idea. The Catholic church was corrupt from the top down but you will defend it I am sure.
1] Turning from a false teaching [Catholic] to follow the truth [Bible] does not make one a heretic, rather, for those that died, it makes them martyrs.
2] Saying it was the state not the church that killed them is the same as Calvin claiming he did not kill those that disagreed with him. In both cases it is just a smoke screen that you hope will hide the ugly truth.

The fact that you would try to justify even one death at the hands of the church is disturbing. Do you think that all those that are outside of your Catholic church are heretic's?

 

For heaven sakes you guys just buried a Pope who quit over doctrinal differences and a lot of the church officials couldn't even agree on how to bury him. Don't give me that baloney. You guys do have enough central control and unity though to ensure that error introduced, instead of being fought over and corrected gets permanently imbedded and compounded like making a copy of a copy where eventually it is totally unreadable. There is exactly nothing handed down today that really came from the Apostles to the Catholic church. I don't know why a Baptist forum would give a platform for this kind of stuff. Is there a Catholic forum that reciprocates?

 

You need to check your theological base, it is not the Apostles. You have fallen for the idea that your leader sits in Peter's chair, just one of the many errors of your theology. Augustine is called a Saint of your church and yet he brought many pagan ideas into your church. Spend some time in research and stop believing all the bishops tell you.

Just look at some of the silly ideas that your popes have brought into your church, Infallibility of the pope, Mary worship, perpetual virginity of Mary, transubstantiation, purgatory, that one can be absolved of sin but some man [priest] to name but a few. Now you say that your church is the only one that has a true understanding of scripture so perhaps you can show us where we can find support in the bible for the above mentioned errors?

 

So what your saying is that since it was the catholic church that determined the cannon they get to read into it what they want. Using Augustine as a support for your view is questionable, he was a catholic so what would you expect him to say?

I note you did not address this "Just look at some of the silly ideas that your popes have brought into your church, Infallibility of the pope, Mary worship, perpetual virginity of Mary, transubstantiation, purgatory, that one can be absolved of sin but some man [priest] to name but a few. Now you say that your church is the only one that has a true understanding of scripture so perhaps you can show us where we can find support in the bible for the above mentioned errors?"

Your theology is faulty due to the fact that the foundation it is built, a misunderstanding of scripture, is faulty.

 

Your error is that you are trusting in some man [Augustine or Pope] to tell you what the bible says. You say you go back 1600 years whereas I go back to the bible, approx 2000 years.

I trust the canon of the bible but do not trust the many changes and additions that the RCC has made to the bible. As for your Popes. How did you put it "The Pope can define interpretation in line with Apostolic Tradition not against it." You admit that your ideas of the Mass, the Eucharist, Confession, papal Infallibility, belief in purgatory, the understanding of Mary, everything came from Augustine or what you would call Apostolic Tradition and not the bible. So what it comes down to is you are trusting in some man not the bible and therein lays the error of your RCC.

You seem to think that it was the RC church that determined which books should be included in the bible we have but what you overlook is that God is the author and He gets to decide that.


Many people wonder who decided which books should be placed in the Bible.

The simple answer is that God decided which books should be in the canon. He was the final determiner. J. 1. Packer writes:

The church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. God gave us gravity, by his work of creation, and similarly he gave us the New Testament canon, by inspiring the individual books that make it up (J. 1. Packer, God Speaks To Man, p. 81).​

Canonizing and Collecting
A distinction needs to be made between canonizing and collecting. No man or council can pronounce a work canonical or scriptural, yet man was responsible for collecting and preserving such works. F. F. Bruce writes:

One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect. The first ecclesiastical councils to classify the canonical books were both held in North Africa-at Hippo Regius in 393 and at Carthage in 397-but what these councils did was not to impose something new upon the Christian communities but to codify what was already the general practice of these communities (F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1960, p. 27).​

Hence the books we have as Scripture were inspired by God and recognized such by man.

 

@Cathode
Wait, what!? You stated:
"So really the Bible was an organic outgrowth of Catholic Tradition by preserving the scriptures in its own liturgy from the time of the Apostles."

The Bible says this:
*2 Timothy 3:16-17*
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

The Bible is not Catholic tradition and interpretation via the Roman Church just as the Old Covenant was not the Jewish tradition and interpretation via the Rabbinic commentaries. It is the Jewish traditions and interpretation of Messiah that made it impossible for the scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees to believe that Jesus is the Promised One, the Messiah. It is the Roman Catholic traditions and interpretations of salvation that make it impossible for one to be saved by means of the sacraments. The Roman Catholic Church lost its way and no longer trusts the Bible, but instead it leans wholly upon its tradition as the means of salvation. It's tradition is not what the Bible teaches, just as the Jewish rabbinical traditions were not what the Old Covenant teaches.

 

I find it interesting that you would resort to Gnostic's to support your view.


Valentinus (also spelled Valentinius; c. AD 100 – c. 180) was the best known and, for a time, most successful early Christian Gnostic theologian.[1] He founded his school in Rome. According to Tertullian, Valentinus was a candidate for bishop but started his own group when another was chosen.[2]

Valentinus produced a variety of writings, but only fragments survive, largely those quoted in rebuttal arguments in the works of his opponents, not enough to reconstruct his system except in broad outline.[1] His doctrine is known only in the developed and modified form given to it by his disciples, the Valentinians.[1][3] He taught that there were three kinds of people, the spiritual, psychical, and material; and that only those of a spiritual nature received the gnosis (knowledge) that allowed them to return to the divine Pleroma, while those of a psychic nature (ordinary Christians) would attain a lesser or uncertain form of salvation, and that those of a material nature were doomed to perish.[1][4][5]

Valentinus had a large following, the Valentinians.[1][3] It later divided into an Eastern and a Western, or Italian, branch.[1] The Marcosians belonged to the Western branch.[1]

1. Cross, F. L.; Livingstone, E. A., eds. (2005). "Valentinus". The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd, Revised ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 1687–1688. ISBN 978-0-19-280290-3.
2. Adversus Valentinianos 4.
3. Dunn, James D. G. (2016). ""The Apostle of the Heretics": Paul, Valentinus, and Marcion". In Porter, Stanley E.; Yoon, David (eds.). Paul and Gnosis. Pauline Studies. Vol. 9. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. pp. 105–118. doi:10.1163/9789004316690_008. ISBN 978-90-04-31668-3. LCCN 2016009435. S2CID 171394481.
4. The Tripartite Tractate, §14
5. Irenaeus, Adversus Haeresies i. 6

Valentinianism was one of the major Gnostic Christian movements. Founded by Valentinus in the 2nd century AD, its influence spread widely, not just within Rome but also from Northwest Africa to Egypt through to Asia Minor and Syria in the East.[1] Later in the movement's history it broke into an Eastern and a Western school. Disciples of Valentinus continued to be active into the 4th century AD, after the Roman Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica (380 AD), which declared Nicene Christianity as the State church of the Roman Empire.[2]

The doctrine, practices and beliefs of Valentinus and the Gnostic movement that bore his name were condemned as heretical by proto-orthodox Christian leaders and scholars. Prominent Church Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome wrote against Gnosticism.

 

The question is not why were they removed but rather why would the RCC add those books.

The word apocrypha literally means “hidden away.” These writings are hidden for good reason. They are deemed theologically suspicious and even heretical by many. Jewish and Protestant circles flat out reject these writings as authoritative for the faith and practice of the church.

Jesus and the New Testament authors never directly quote the Apocrypha. Neither do they introduce it with labels that would suggest inspiration, such as “as it is written” or “as the Scripture says.”

Even though the Septuagint existed in New Testament times and was available to the New Testament writers (the Book of Hebrews quotes from the Septuagint), Jesus and the New Testament authors never directly quote the Apocrypha nor does the New Testament refer to any apocryphal books as part of Scripture.

Even the Roman Catholic Church did not officially recognize the Apocrypha as belonging in the Bible until the Council of Trent in A.D. 1546. This was Catholicism’s response to the Reformation

 

Even a cursory reading of the New Testament will reveal that the Catholic Church does not have its origin in the teachings of Jesus or His apostles. In the New Testament, there is no mention of the papacy, worship/adoration of Mary (or the immaculate conception of Mary, the perpetual virginity of Mary, the assumption of Mary, or Mary as co-redemptrix and mediatrix), petitioning saints in heaven for their prayers, apostolic succession, the ordinances of the church functioning as sacraments, infant baptism, confession of sin to a priest, purgatory, indulgences, or the equal authority of church tradition and Scripture. So, if the origin of the Catholic Church is not in the teachings of Jesus and His apostles, as recorded in the New Testament, what is the true origin of the Catholic Church?

For the first 280 years of Christian history, Christianity was banned by the Roman Empire, and Christians were terribly persecuted. This changed after the “conversion” of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Constantine provided religious toleration with the Edict of Milan in AD 313, effectively lifting the ban on Christianity. Later, in AD 325, Constantine called the Council of Nicea in an attempt to unify Christianity. Constantine envisioned Christianity as a religion that could unite the Roman Empire, which at that time was beginning to fragment and divide. While this may have seemed to be a positive development for the Christian church, the results were anything but positive. Just as Constantine refused to fully embrace the Christian faith but continued many of his pagan beliefs and practices, so the Christian church that Constantine and his successors promoted progressively became a mixture of true Christianity and Roman paganism.

Following are a few examples:

Most Roman Catholic beliefs and practices regarding Mary are completely absent from the Bible. Where did those beliefs come from? The Roman Catholic view of Mary has far more in common with the Isis mother-goddess religion of Egypt than it does with anything taught in the New Testament. Interestingly, the first hints of Catholic Mariology occur in the writings of Origen, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, which happened to be the focal point of Isis worship.

The Lord’s Supper being a consumption of the literal body and blood of Jesus is not taught in the Bible. The idea that bread and wine are miraculously transformed into the literal body and blood of Jesus (transubstantiation) is not biblical. However, several ancient pagan religions, including Mithraism, which was very popular in the Roman Empire, had some form of “theophagy” (the eating of one’s god) as a ritualistic practice.

Roman Catholicism has “saints” one can pray to in order to gain a particular blessing. For example, Saint Gianna Beretta Molla is the patron saint of fertility. Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of animals. There are multiple patron saints of healing and comfort. Nowhere is even a hint of this taught in Scripture. Just as the Roman pantheon of gods had a god of love, a god of peace, a god of war, a god of strength, a god of wisdom, etc., so the Catholic Church has a saint who is “in charge” over each of these and many other categories. Many Roman cities had a god specific to the city, and the Catholic Church provided “patron saints” for cities as well.

The idea that the Roman bishop is the vicar of Christ, the supreme leader of the Christian Church, is utterly foreign to the Word of God. The supremacy of the Roman bishop (the papacy) was created with the support of the Roman emperors. While most other bishops (and Christians) resisted the idea of the Roman bishop being supreme, the Roman bishop eventually rose to supremacy, again, due to the power and influence of the Roman emperors. After the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed, the popes took on the title that had previously belonged to the Roman emperors—Pontifex Maximus.

Many more examples could be given. These four should suffice in demonstrating the origin of the Catholic Church. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church denies the pagan origin of its beliefs and practices. The Catholic Church disguises its pagan beliefs under layers of complicated theology and church tradition. Recognizing that many of its beliefs and practices are utterly foreign to Scripture, the Catholic Church is forced to deny the authority and sufficiency of Scripture.

The origin of the Catholic Church is the tragic compromise of Christianity with the pagan religions that surrounded it. Instead of proclaiming the gospel and converting the pagans, the Catholic Church “Christianized” the pagan religions and “paganized” Christianity. By blurring the differences and erasing the distinctions, the Catholic Church made itself attractive to the idolatrous people of the Roman Empire. One result was the Catholic Church becoming the supreme religion in the Roman world for centuries. However, another result was the most dominant form of Christianity apostatizing from the true gospel of Jesus Christ and the true proclamation of God’s Word.

What is the origin of the Roman Catholic Church? | GotQuestions.org

 

No. Holy Scriptures were Holy Scriptures when they were written. And the original recipients knew the human writers. ". . . For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. . . ."