Originally posted by Gold Dragon:
What part of free and undeserving is different from our use of the word grace?
The Catholic Church is a church full of contradictions even in its own catechism. Grace is not free. It must come through the sacraments. Obviously if the means of grace comes through the sacraments, then it is of works. Baptism, for example, is not a work of God, but of man. In order to obtain grace you must be baptized. You must work for it. That is not free. It involves the work of baptism, or the work of confirmation, or the work of holy matrimony, etc. Grace comes through the works of the sacraments which the Catholic Church sets forth. They contradict themselves. They say one thing and practice another. They redefine words in order to confuse the "laity," so-called.
Originally posted by DHK:
Church grace only comes through the seven sacraments.
They believe in justification through grace and sanctification through the sacraments.
That is a false statement. Salvation is through the new birth (just as we teach). But the new birth is redefined to mean baptism. Baptism is a work. Thus salvation is by works. Salvation is not a one-time act of being justified by faith as taught in Rom.5:1 and other Scripture. It is that ongoing process of Sanctification that you refer to. A mortal sin can cause one to lose their salvation. Thus the definition of eternal life is changed. Eternal no longer means eternal and Christ is found to be a liar, when he promises the believer "I give unto you eternal life."
Catholics believe that faith and works are necessary for justification before God.
That is not true. Catholics believe that justification is a completely gratuitous gift from God. As the Council of Trent declared, “None of those things which precede justification – whether faith or works – merit the grace itself of justification. For, if it be a grace, it is not now by works, otherwise, as the same Apostle says, grace is no more grace.”1 In fact, the Council went so far as to say, “If any one says that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema.”2 Good works play a role in the Christian life only after a person is justified. As the Bible says, “[W]e are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10).
The one passage of Scriputre that the Catholics hate are those two verses that precede the verse you just quoted:
Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace are ye saved
through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the
gift of God:
Not of works, lest any man should boast.
Catholics detest the teaching of this verse. If you don't believe me, look up any previous thread where Catholics have posted in this forum. Salvation is by faith alone, and not of works as taught in this passage. Notice how only verse ten was referred to in the quote that you gave. The teaching of this verse is completely ignored because the RCC does not believe it. They believe that salvation is by works.
Again the problem is that the Catholics speak out of both sides of their mouth. Find the catechism on the web. I am sure you know where it is. Then do a search in it for "baptism" and one for "new birth," and see what you find. Salvation is by works, according to the Catholic Church.
Originally posted by DHK:
According to the Catholic Church, being born again is being baptized--another heresy. It is the water that gives the grace to be saved, as if water had some magical power to transfer saving power to the individual power. This is all superstition and man-made religion. The same concept is shown in their man-made concept of transubstantiation.
The mysteries of both Baptism and Communion/Eucharist are matters of differences of interpretation based on scripture. Even within Protestant groups, there are many various interpretations of those passages.
These are not mysteries. These are not problems of interpretation. Evangelical Christians of all stripes and colors have the same "interpretation" for these same doctrines. It is the Catholic Church that differs, and tries to divide evangelical Christians where there is no division. Pitiful!
You say within "Protestantism" there are many various interpretations.
Not really. There are very few different interpretations. And the ones that are different usually are in those churches that have gone liberal, and are no longer evangelical. Thus you are comparing apples with oranges.
Originally posted by DHK:
Prayer is worship. Prayer to Mary is worship. As long as the Catholics pray to Mary they worship her, and they commit idolatry.
It is wrong to pray to Mary and the other dead saints, because the Bible says there is only one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.
The phrase “praying to the saints” is probably an unfortunate one, because in contemporary usage the word “pray” has come to refer only to that form of worship by which we praise God and humbly petition Him. Catholics certainly do not pray to the saints in that sense. However, the word “pray” has an older, now archaic meaning. It used to mean simply “ask,” whether the object of the request was God or a person. For example, in the King James translation of Acts 27:34, Paul says to some sailors, “Wherefore I pray you to take some meat.” In other words, “I ask you to eat some meat.” There are literally hundreds of examples of the word “pray” used in this manner in the King James Bible:
The phrase “praying to the saints” reflects this older usage, and it simply means “asking them for their prayers on our behalf.” Asking the saints to pray for us does not violate the unique mediatorship of Jesus any more than asking our friends to pray for us does.
#1. It is wrong to pray to Mary or any other dead person. Mary is a dead person.
#2. Your arguments about the Old English or other usages of the word "pray" are moot. The New Testament was written in Greek, not in the KJV. Prayer is to beseech God. Prayer is to worship God. Worship is due only to God, and the Catholics worship Mary. Please don't tell me that they don't or I will post a whole slate of prayers to Mary that do nothing but worship and adore Mary, even beseechng Mary, rather than Christ as a mediatrix to the Father. She is the Queen of Heaven. She is adored and worshipped continuously. She has the quality of omnipresence, an attribute given only to God. For she is able to hear all the prayers of all the Catholics in all the world, at the same time. She has been elevated to a status of God. There is even a faction within the Catholic Church that are pressing to make her a fourth member of the trinity.
I guess they don't know how to count.
Any prayer to any person is worship. Worship of any person other than God is idolatry. That is plain and simple.
#3. The problem here is again: the Catholic Church redifines words: prayer, worship, in order that it will fit their theology.
#4. We do not define theology by Roman Catholic definitions; we define our theology by Biblical definitions, and by the Bible which never changes. The Catholic Church alwasy changes; the Bible never.
#5. Notice that you yourself have taken great pains to redefine what prayer is. In the Bible it is not so. Stick with the Bible, not with RCC definitions.
DHK
