INDULGENCES

[Concretecamper]

3 hours ago, Billiards Ball said:

I understand, but Trent and other official church documents--along with all I've heard from Catholic friends and Catholic clergy now--says this free grace MUST be followed up by numerous works, especially Catholic works and sacraments, or the person becomes lost again.

I find the Bible instead teaches eternal assurance, eternal security, for anyone who makes a onetime transfer of trust (I cannot save myself, I can never perfect myself morally/stop sin via religion/religious works, so I transfer my trust to Christ).

The term Catholic works is confusing to me.  Might I suggest we both keep our prejudices at bay while we work through this.

3 hours ago, Billiards Ball said:

I cannot save myself

Neither can I or anyone else

3 hours ago, Billiards Ball said:

I can never perfect myself morally/stop sin via religion/religious works

You can however strive for perfection.  Through the grace of God you can better yourself.  You can continually make sin less frequent.  You can work out your salvation with fear and trembling (St Paul).  You can respond to His graces and be pleasing to Him.  You can judge others as you would like to be judged.  By responding to His grace, we change our inner person.

4 hours ago, Billiards Ball said:

so I transfer my trust to Christ).

As you should.  Without Christ and His sacrafice, we are all hopelessly lost.

 

I dont think the bible does teach eternal security.  St. Paul frequently write of "Hope".  The Gospels convey what will happen when the Master returns and finds unworthy severants.  As St James writes, we need faith and works.  His epistle nicely lays out the need of both faith and works.

[Concretecamper]

24 minutes ago, shiloh357 said:

Baptism and the Eucharist are not necessary for salvation

Wrong.  I know that within the last 100 years or so that this position has gained populatity, but it ain't true

 

Jesus said to them, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

 

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God

[Guest shiloh357]

5 hours ago, Concretecamper said:

Wrong.  I know that within the last 100 years or so that this position has gained populatity, but it ain't true

 

Jesus said to them, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

That comes from John 6 and is not talking about the Eucharist.   It is not something Jesus said at the Last Supper.  This verse is in a context that has nothing to do with Communion or the Eucharist, as neither have been established at that point. Jesus talking to disciples who have not yet accepted Him for who He is at that point.   There is no way that the context can have anything to do with communion.   

  Jesus had just fed the 5,000 with bread and fish and they were asking Jesus replicate that miracle.  Jesus was not interested in satisfying their carnal appetites.  The miracle that Jesus performed was meant to point them to Him as their spiritual food. 

Jesus is showing that He is the true bread from Heaven unlike the manna that Moses and Israel ate in the wilderness.  He is the spiritual bread from Heaven that gives eternal life. 

In Judaism, they use eating and drinking as euphemisms for the study of the Torah of Moses.   It is referred to as living water and it is likened to the fruit of the tree of life.   And so the Law of Moses is the food and drink of Torah observant Jew.  But Jesus said that they needed to eat and drink of HIM if they wanted eternal life.   The point is spiritual.  He is not saying that we need to cannibalize His biological flesh and blood.   Rather, the point is that we need to rely HIM as our source of eternal life.  Jesus was redirecting the spiritual euphemisms of eating and drinking toward a spiritual partaking of HIM  and that offended many of His disciples.   It offended them because the glaring implication is that Jesus is greater than Moses, greater than the Law and able to give eternal life and only God can grant eternal life and thus Jesus is claiming to be God and many of Jesus disciples were not able to accept Him as God and they rejected Him to follow Him no longer.

Quote

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God

That is not referring to baptism, as Christian baptism had not yet been established.  And Jesus was talking to a member of the Sanhedrin, not Christians.  Context is important.  And even if one demands that this is referring to the rite of baptism, the Roman Catholic rite of sprinkling isn't valid baptism.   Baptism is by immersion, not through sprinkling.   Baptism is required, but it is not required for salvation.  Baptism pertains to our fellowship and participation in the Kingdom, not to our salvation.

One thing I have noticed about Roman Catholics is that they like to create a doctrine and the read it, retroactively, into the Bible.   They use the Bible to bolster their theology rather than allowing the Bible  to shape their theology.  

[Billiards Ball]

11 hours ago, Concretecamper said:

The term Catholic works is confusing to me.  Might I suggest we both keep our prejudices at bay while we work through this.

Neither can I or anyone else

You can however strive for perfection.  Through the grace of God you can better yourself.  You can continually make sin less frequent.  You can work out your salvation with fear and trembling (St Paul).  You can respond to His graces and be pleasing to Him.  You can judge others as you would like to be judged.  By responding to His grace, we change our inner person.

As you should.  Without Christ and His sacrafice, we are all hopelessly lost.

 

I dont think the bible does teach eternal security.  St. Paul frequently write of "Hope".  The Gospels convey what will happen when the Master returns and finds unworthy severants.  As St James writes, we need faith and works.  His epistle nicely lays out the need of both faith and works.

By "Catholic works" I meant sacraments and other works that are only for Catholics. Rome teaches, for example, that the Eucharist can help save time in purgatory, then withholds it from non-Catholics, therefore, I am condemned for my different beliefs to be in purgatory longer. But we can lay that aside and talk about more general works now.

I can strive for perfection as you wrote, but never achieve it through either religious practice or Holy Spirit sanctification, in other words, I can be a Christian a hundred years and still sin, so I need to be transformed.

The Bible teaches assurance. To help us understand, separate salvation (I trusted Christ in the past, not me, for salvation) and sanctification (the striving we're discussing). The hope Paul wrote of was Christ's return when He perfects all those who've trusted Him. Each born again Christian is predestined to be a child of God (chastised when sinning, growing when striving) and then predestined to be "conformed to Christ's sinless image" as in Romans.

James speaks of works, but note that in the famous passage in Chapter 2, he contrasts living, saving faith with dead, non-saving faith, not works. He does write "Can that faith save?" but does not write "Can those works save?" Rome teaches loss of salvation and works. The issues include:

1) Did Jesus die/atone for some sin or for all sin?

2) Is the test whether someone trusts Jesus or not, or whether they have works or not?

3) Is the good news "Jesus set us free from Hell" or "Jesus set us on a path to try really hard to miss Hell"?

Etc.

I move from a sinner without Christ to > Saved by Christ to > Growing in Christ to > Waiting on the Hope of Christ's Return to be transformed to perfect (morally) for Heaven

[Mike Mclees]

I think purgatory means that Jesus suffering on the cross satisfied only half our sins and purgatory is where we serve time for the other half. That's my take. 

[Willa]

The problem is that there is no purgatory in the Bible which says it is once to die and after that the judgement- hell.  Those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life have the Spirit so already have eternal life. 

It is blasphemy to think that Christ's atonement was insufficient.  We are either born again believers with the earnest of the Holy Spirit guaranteeing the blessings of Ephesians 1, or we are unbelievers who are rejecting God's offer of atonement.  There is no in between.  There are no second chances after death.

[John_Leung]

12 hours ago, Willa said:

The problem is that there is no purgatory in the Bible which says it is once to die and after that the judgement- hell.  Those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life have the Spirit so already have eternal life. 

It is blasphemy to think that Christ's atonement was insufficient.  We are either born again believers with the earnest of the Holy Spirit guaranteeing the blessings of Ephesians 1, or we are unbelievers who are rejecting God's offer of atonement.  There is no in between.  There are no second chances after death.

Yes, it's either Earth, heaven, or hell.  Indulgences were/are a cunning way for the Catholic church to raise funds and finance for new cathedrals, etc. by deceiving believers that their loved ones would be better off, etc.  I need to explain to my Catholic friend about the myth on purgatory and the truth about salvation, one-time sin sacrifice, repentance vs. confession, etc. It's sad how so many people are being deceived by the wrong teachings.