#1. You are not paying attention to your own RC authorities here.
You keep saying this, but do not explain which authorities.
#2. Elijah did not die - that is a big "difference" in the death of Elijah and Mary. Mary did die.
Which is exactly what I said. Please read carefully.
#1. Scads and scads of Baptist churches in the 1950's. Claiming that they did not exist then does not help your case.
I apologize. I misread the date.
#3. If the NT first century church was "chatting up" the assumption of Mary with all the "flying apostles" as described in the RC document above - why no mention of it?
A thought for you. ALL the miracles that Jesus performed would definitely have been talked about by everyone, also, but even Scriptures says that they were not all written in the Bible.
Notice in that - we have a reference to the Acts 2 argument made about Christ's body.
What does this have to do with anything?
You just gotta love the myths of Catholicism when you read that stuff.
Your readiness to label everything that doesn't have a Bible chapter and verse after it is scary. I hope you are not normally this rash and narrow-minded. You cannot say that all Catholic historical documents are heretical because it doesn't say it in the Bible. You paint with a very big brush of which I'm not sure you are qualified to handle. If I was as blind as you I could paint you with that brush, too. Anybody can label, but it takes talent and support to make a point.
Any religion that requires baptism for salvation is working their way to heaven--a works salvation.
Please explain John 3:5 then.
The Christian belief that baptism is necessary for salvation is so unshakable that even the Protestant Martin Luther affirmed the necessity of baptism. He wrote: "Baptism is no human plaything but is instituted by God himself. Moreover, it is solemnly and strictly commanded that we must be baptized or we shall not be saved. We are not to regard it as an indifferent matter, then, like putting on a new red coat. It is of the greatest importance that we regard baptism as excellent, glorious, and exalted" (Large Catechism 4:6).
Yet Christians have also always realized that the necessity of water baptism is a normative rather than an absolute necessity. There are exceptions to water baptism: It is possible to be saved through "baptism of blood," martyrdom for Christ, or through "baptism of desire", that is, a conscious or even unconscious desire for baptism.
Thus the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "Those who die for the faith, those who are catechumens, and all those who, without knowing of the Church but acting under the inspiration of grace, seek God sincerely and strive to fulfill his will, are saved even if they have not been baptized" (CCC 1281; the salvation of unbaptized infants is also possible under this system; cf. CCC 1260–1, 1283).
And if baptism isn't necessary and inportant I would like to know why
you baptize nd why your church is named after John the Baptist.
Any religion that believes in a doctrine like purgatory, where you have to be once more cleansed from your sins believes in a works salvation--the work of Christ was insufficient.
Fundamentalists may be fond of saying the Catholic Church "invented" the doctrine of purgatory to make money, but they have difficulty saying just when. Most professional anti-Catholics—the ones who make their living attacking "Romanism"—seem to place the blame on Pope Gregory the Great, who reigned from A.D. 590–604.
But that hardly accounts for the request of Monica, mother of Augustine, who asked her son, in the fourth century, to remember her soul in his Masses. This would make no sense if she thought her soul would not benefit from prayers, as would be the case if she were in hell or in the full glory of heaven.
Nor does ascribing the doctrine to Gregory explain the graffiti in the catacombs, where Christians during the persecutions of the first three centuries recorded prayers for the dead. Indeed, some of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, like the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity (both written during the second century), refer to the Christian practice of praying for the dead. Such prayers would have been offered only if Christians believed in purgatory, even if they did not use that name for it. (See Catholic Answers’ Fathers Know Best tract The Existence of Purgatory for quotations from these and other early Christian sources.)
And since you are so big on "why wasn't it written down?"...
A study of the history of doctrines indicates that Christians in the first centuries were up in arms (sometimes quite literally) if anyone suggested the least change in beliefs. They were extremely conservative people who tested a doctrine’s truth by asking, Was this believed by our ancestors? Was it handed on from the apostles? Surely belief in purgatory would be considered a great change, if it had not been believed from the first—so where are the records of protests?
They don’t exist. There is no hint at all, in the oldest writings available to us (or in later ones, for that matter), that "true believers" in the immediate post-apostolic years spoke of purgatory as a novel doctrine. They must have understood that the oral teaching of the apostles, what Catholics call tradition, and the Bible not only failed to contradict the doctrine, but, in fact, confirmed it.
It is no wonder, then, that those who deny the existence of purgatory tend to touch upon only briefly the history of the belief. They prefer to claim that the Bible speaks only of heaven and hell. Wrong. It speaks plainly of a third condition, commonly called the limbo of the Fathers, where the just who had died before the redemption were waiting for heaven to be opened to them. After his death and before his resurrection, Christ visited those experiencing the limbo of the Fathers and preached to them the good news that heaven would now be opened to them (1 Pet. 3:19). These people thus were not in heaven, but neither were they experiencing the torments of hell.
Some have speculated that the limbo of the Fathers is the same as purgatory. This may or may not be the case. However, even if the limbo of the Fathers is not purgatory, its existence shows that a temporary, intermediate state is not contrary to Scripture. Look at it this way. If the limbo of the Fathers was purgatory, then this one verse directly teaches the existence of purgatory. If the limbo of the Fathers was a different temporary state, then the Bible at least says such a state can exist. It proves there can be more than just heaven and hell.
Sometimes Protestants object that Jesus told the thief on the cross that, on the very day the two of them died, they would be together in paradise (Luke 23:43), which they read as a denial of purgatory. However, the argument backfires and actually supports purgatory by proving the existence of a state other than heaven and hell, since Jesus did not go to heaven on the day he died. Peter tells us that he "went and preached to the spirits in prison" (1 Pet. 3:19), and, after his resurrection, Christ himself declared: "I have not yet ascended to the Father" (John 20:17). Thus at that time paradise was located in some third state besides heaven and besides hell.
Fundamentalists claim, as an article in Jimmy Swaggart’s magazine, The Evangelist, put it, that "Scripture clearly reveals that all the demands of divine justice on the sinner have been completely fulfilled in Jesus Christ. It also reveals that Christ has totally redeemed, or purchased back, that which was lost. The advocates of a purgatory (and the necessity of prayer for the dead) say, in effect, that the redemption of Christ was incomplete. . . . It has all been done for us by Jesus Christ, there is nothing to be added or done by man."
It is entirely correct to say that Christ accomplished all of our salvation for us on the cross. But that does not settle the question of how this redemption is applied to us. Scripture reveals that it is applied to us over the course of time through, among other things, the process of sanctification through which the Christian is made holy. Sanctification involves suffering (Rom. 5:3–5), and purgatory is the final stage of sanctification that some of us need to undergo before we enter heaven. Purgatory is the final phase of Christ’s applying to us the purifying redemption that he accomplished for us by his death on the cross.
The Fundamentalist resistance to the biblical doctrine of purgatory presumes there is a contradiction between Christ’s redeeming us on the cross and the process by which we are sanctified. There isn’t. And a Fundamentalist cannot say that suffering in the final stage of sanctification conflicts with the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement without saying that suffering in the early stages of sanctification also presents a similar conflict. The Fundamentalist has it backward: Our suffering in sanctification does not take away from the cross. Rather, the cross produces our sanctification, which results in our suffering, because "[f]or the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness" (Heb. 12:11).
I just did. Read the above. The gospel is a belief in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and accepting that sacrifice by faith and faith alone. There are not works involved. The Catholics don't believe in the gospel; they have a religion of works.
Actually, contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church does preach the death burial and resurrection of Jesus. And we accept this on faith, but if you read your history, Martin Luther is the culprit who "coined" the phrase 'faith alone'. It has been proved he inserted that himself during his Protestant butchering of the Bible, th the extent that a lot of translations today have removed it.
He has all this extra garbage added on that he calls Oral Tradition--things that are totally indefensible by the Bible.
I think I would enjoy seeing you try to pull this off the other way around. Grab a scientist and try to prove the Bible without using science. It can't be done. Faith is required to enter heaven from belief in Christ, but God was not so dumb as to leave a book for us to follow without anything else to back it up.
You bow down in front of her statue.
So you're saying that, back in the day, when someone kneeled before the king they were WORSHIPPING him? No, I don't think so.
According to the Catholic Church, but not according the Bible. When Gideon set up an ephod, the whole of Israel went an "whoring" after it. They worshiped it. It became a snare and an idol to them. They adored it. It was a material thing producing reverential attitude and causing idolatry. That is exactly what happens in the RCC.
Actually, my quote was not taken from anything remotely Catholic, but the very book you tried to use against me just a page ago. Please knock off the inept attitude of using something in your favor and then bashing me in the knees with it when I do. It's demeaning to both of us.
Are you making this up as you go along? Mary was a sinner just like me. No better; no worse. We are equal in God's sight. Now she is dead. So now you have a reverential attitude for a dead person--give me a break. Or, now you have a reverential attitude for a dead person's statue whom you adore and worship. Give me another break! Mary does not symbolize the presence of God. That is heresy. Do I symbolize the presence of God to you? Then why would Mary. Mary is no better than I. Am I a legitimate aid to devotion? Than why should Mary be? She was a sinner saved by grace--as I am. The major difference between her and I--She is dead; I am alive.
Acstually the differences between you and Mary are very stark. Mary bore Jesus Christ in a sinless state. You have not. Mary did her best to immulate Christ. You do not. Mary had a Christ-like attitude. You do not.
And to to take the "all men are equal in God's eyes" arguement so far out of context is laughable. By your definition, God favored Charles Manson the same He did John the Baptist.
And please quit telling me what I believe. You can't understand it yourself when I put it in the simplest terms for you, so please don't try to read your Baptist-tainted version of it back to me. Catholics do not worship Mary. I proved that already, WITH YOUR SOURCE!
You haven't successfully done anything yet. It is the usual term for worshiping God. We will use the term as it is usually used.
Thsi si flat-out ignorance. Why would you ALWAYS use a word ONE way when it has TW
R MORE meanings? No matter how often one of them is used?? That's like saying we are only going to use the would "lie" to mean a falsehood and never as someone laying down. GOOD GRIEF!!!! I'll tell you why you want to only use it one way! Because the other meanings don't suit your purposes and completely nullify any argument you could possibly make on this subject. I will continue to use every word in all of it's meanings until hell freezes over and pigs fly through the air.
No, using the Catholic definition of tradition, we don't have any tradition that have developed in less than 24 years.
PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY. I MADE IT BIG FOR YOU.
TIME IS NOT A FACTOR IN TRADITION IF THE TRADITION NEVER CHANGES, WHICH IS THE CASE SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
