Choice of Denomination

[ONE WHO WISHES TO LOVE GOD]

This to me makes no sense at all because even they say it is a mystery that can not be understood and also the word trinity it self is equally uninspired since you do not have God nor Jesus not even the Apostles use this word in the describing the nature of God

The apostles never used the word "automobile," either, but I'm fairly sure those exist. You should know that the argument of silence is considered the weakest form of argument.

Just because a term for something doesn't come into existence until later, does not mean that the thing the term describes did not exist. For instance, "what was the largest mountain before Mount Everest was discovered?" It was that same mountain, though no one had a name for it!

See this is what i mean about smoke and mirrors first of your sinasisum is not needed and your exsample is apples to oranges Further more the argument of silence is the point that it seems you are not understanding I believe where God does not speak neither you nor I get to fill in the blanks so I posed my questions because although i dont believe that God is three persons I do believe in Jesus as the Son of God and my only means of salvation

but like so many I have asked what you really get is an attitude a vain attempt to brow beat one by treating them like they are stupid so as to scare them into submision...well guess what it dont fly with me. and another thing i didnt start the issue of the trinity in this discusion however i may end it. I hope some one more mature than you will be willing to help me with my questions since if i am wrong i wont scriptures not some ones fanicfull interpetations or illustrations.

[Iryssa]

*sigh* so we're reduced to personal attacks...Merry Christmas to you too, then. I see there is no point in me arguing further. Forgive me if I got testy, but that tends to happen when people try to dethrone my God, Jesus Christ, the Lord.

[ONE WHO WISHES TO LOVE GOD]

*sigh* so we're reduced to personal attacks...Merry Christmas to you too, then. I see there is no point in me arguing further. Forgive me if I got testy, but that tends to happen when people try to dethrone my God, Jesus Christ, the Lord.

look i am not making any personal attacks but your the one that stared out rude further more i was seeking answers not an argument. I get testy when others try to say that I am not Christain because i do not believe in man made interpitations or doctrines. And whom is there that is willing to stake his eternal salvation on Judging me as not a Christian

However all the same I do forgive you and may love of Jesus always be in both of our hearts

Peace to you Iryssa and a MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU

[MrSealedEternal]

Mr. SE,

I completely agree. The Roman Catholic church is now becoming more openly accepting of the Protestant churches and are now, under direction from Rome, working with the Protestant churches in many concerns including the homeless conditions here in Hawaii. This is NOT by chance, it is exactly as you were stating, the pope wants the churches back together but I do not feel that it is for a godly purpose. Through my studies of Revelation and the "end times" I have come to firmly believe that the Antichrist will come out of the Roman Catholic church, I do not believe, as many do, that the pope will be the Antichrist, but he will be envolved in some way with the church of Rome. He will not be able to effectively do this until the churches are working closer together, overlooking each others "faults" as the pope has called them. For the leaders of the world to trust the Antichrist as he ascends into his powerful position he will need the support of more than just one church. If the churches continue the ecumenical movement this could give way to this happening.

A few of the "Protestant" churches are now back in communion with Rome. A denomination that I was previously a member of was approached with this a few years ago and they firmly turned them down. They wanted to "forgive the transgressions which caused the separation of the churches". The pope seems to be really interested in reuniting the churches all of the sudden. A lot of things are coming together which all must be fulfilled before Armageddon. We must be very careful with this philosophy of

[Pax]

Mr. SE,

I completely agree. The Roman Catholic church is now becoming more openly accepting of the Protestant churches and are now, under direction from Rome, working with the Protestant churches in many concerns including the homeless conditions here in Hawaii. This is NOT by chance, it is exactly as you were stating, the pope wants the churches back together but I do not feel that it is for a godly purpose. Through my studies of Revelation and the "end times" I have come to firmly believe that the Antichrist will come out of the Roman Catholic church, I do not believe, as many do, that the pope will be the Antichrist, but he will be envolved in some way with the church of Rome. He will not be able to effectively do this until the churches are working closer together, overlooking each others "faults" as the pope has called them. For the leaders of the world to trust the Antichrist as he ascends into his powerful position he will need the support of more than just one church. If the churches continue the ecumenical movement this could give way to this happening.

A few of the "Protestant" churches are now back in communion with Rome. A denomination that I was previously a member of was approached with this a few years ago and they firmly turned them down. They wanted to "forgive the transgressions which caused the separation of the churches". The pope seems to be really interested in reuniting the churches all of the sudden. A lot of things are coming together which all must be fulfilled before Armageddon. We must be very careful with this philosophy of

[Guest glcorkern]

Hey, how are you doing christopher_john. I want you to know that you hit the nail on the head.

Philippians 2:12 says ( Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.) that plainly days that you are to work out your own salvation. No one else can do it for you. As for denomination.

there really is no denomiation there is only the Body of Christ. No one has it right or wrong.

John 3:16 says ( For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.) Jrsus said that no one comes to the Father except by me. My dad has a saying, "everyone is entitled to there own perfectly ridicilous opinion".

If you believe that Jesus is the son of God, and that he died on the cross for the remission of sin. Then you have nothing to worry about. Don't worru about denomination. Find someplace you are happy, and enjoy the fellowship.

thank you for listening to my thoughts.

glcorkern

[MrSealedEternal]

I have been watching this thread for some time deciding when I should write a response. Now would be the right time. This discussion of "which denomination" is fairly new to Christendom...............

Pax,

Inherent in your arguement is many false pretexts, which I will have to deal with before we can have a meaningful discussion on the topic. The first is your definition of "Church."

The word church comes from the old English and Germanic word kirke, (pronounced "keer - kay"), and which itself came from the Babylonian for the goddess Circe (pronounced "seer-say"). The goddess Circe was thought to be connected with the power of the sun, which is round, and thus the connection to Circe, a circle. In Anglo-Saxon history, the pagans worshipped the sun standing in a circle [kirke]. These pagan worshippers became known as the

[MrSealedEternal]

I have been watching this thread for some time deciding when I should write a response. Now would be the right time. This discussion of "which denomination" is fairly new to Christendom..........

The second issue I have is with your version of history. The idea that the RCC was at one time the true Church of Christ is based on the false RC definition of "church" as I have established. Christ's Church has always been those who were called out of the world by Christ, by faith in Him, through His Word. Throughout history millions of Christ's "ekklesia" have been murdered by the RCC.

The so-called "reformers" were Catholics, and aided in the persecution of the Anabaptists for "heresy" against the prevelant view of Sacramental salvation. The true Bible-believing Christians were murdered by the RCC and the so-called reformers. Luther, Calvin, and Knox were just wayward Catholics who also condoned the murder of the true saints of Christ's "ekklesia."

The true "ekklesia" has never been part of any institution, and institutionalized pseudo-christianity has always persecuted Christ's true saints.

The following is an excerpt from chapter 6 of A Woman Rides the Beast: The Roman Catholic Church and the Last Days, copyright 1994 by Dave Hunt, Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon 97402

DRUNK WITH THE MARTYR' BLOOD

John next notices that the woman is drunk--and not with an alcoholic beverage. She is drunk with "the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus..." (Revelation 17:6). The picture is a horrible one. It is not merely her hands that are red with this blood, but she is drunk with it! The slaughter of innocents who, for conscience' sake, would not yield to her totalitarian demands has so refused and exhilarated her that she reels in ecstasy.

One thinks immediately of the Inquisitions (Roman, Medieval, and Spanish) which for centuries held Europe in their terrible grip. In his History of the Inquisition, Canon Llorente, who was the Secretary to the Inquisition in Madrid from 1790-1792 and had access to the archives of all the tribunals, estimated that in Spain alone the number of condemned exceeded 3 million, with about 300,000 burned at the stake (R.W. Thompson, The Papacy and the Civil Power, New York, 1876, p. 82). A Catholic historian comments upon events leading up to the suppression of the Spanish Inquisition in 1809:

"When Napoleon conquered Spain in 1808, a Polish officer in his army, Colonel Lemanouski, reported that the Dominicans [in charge of the Inquisition] blockaded themselves in their monastery in Madrid. When Lemanouski's troops forced an entry, the inquisitions denied the existence of any torture chambers.

"The soldiers searched the monastery and discovered them under the floors. The chambers were full of prisoners, all naked, many insane. The French troops, used to cruelty and blood, could not stomach the sight. They emptied the torture-chambers, laid gunpowder to the monastery and blew the place up" (De Rosa, op. cit., p. 172).

To wring out confessions from these poor creatures, the Roman Catholic Church devised ingenious tortures so excruciating and barbarous that one is sickened by their recital. Church historian Bishop William Shaw Kerr writes:

"The most ghastly abomination of all was the system of torture. The accounts of it cold-blooded operations make one shudder at the capacity of human beings for cruelty. And it was decreed and regulated by the popes who claim to represent Christ on earth. ...

"Careful notes were taken not only of all that was confessed by the victim, but of his shrieks, cries, lamentations, broken interjections and appeals for mercy. The most moving things in the literature of the inquisition are not the accounts of their sufferings left by the victims but the sober memoranda kept by the officers of the tribunals. We are distressed and horrified just because their is no intention to shock us" (Kerr, op. cit., pp. 239-40).

The remnants of some of the chambers of horror remain in Europe and may be visited today. They stand as memorials to the zealous outworking of Roman Catholic dogmas which remain in force today, and to a Church which claims to be infallible and to this day justifies such barbarism. They are also memorials to the astonishing accuracy of John's vision in Revelation 17. In a book published in Spain in 1909, Emelio Martinez writes:

"To these three million victims [documented by Llorente] should be added the thousands of Jews and Moors deported from their homeland. ... In just one year, 1481, and just in Seville, the Holy Office [if inquisition] burned 2000 persons; the bones and effigies of another 2000 ... and another 16,000 were condemned to varying sentences" (Emelio Martinez, Recuerdos [Memoirs] de Antano, CLIE, 1909, pp. 105-06).

Peter de Rosa acknowledges that his own Catholic Church "was responsible for persecuting Jews, for the Inquisition, for slaughtering heretics by the thousand, for reintroducing torture in to Europe as part of the judicial process." Yet the Roman Catholic Church has never officially admitted that these practices were evil, nor has she apologized to the world or to any of the victims or their descendants. Nor could Pope John Paul II apologize today because "the doctrines responsible for those terrible things still underpin his position" (De Rosa, op. cit., pp. 20-21). Rome has not changed at heart no matter what sweet words she speaks when it serves her purpose.

MORE BLOOD THAN THE PAGANS

Pagans Rome made sport of throwing to the lions, burning and otherwise killing thousands of Christians and not a few Jews. Yet "Christian" Rome slaughtered many times that number of both Christians and Jews. Beside those victims of the Inquisition, there were Huguenots, Albigenses, Waldenses, and other Christians who were massacred, tortured, and burned at the stake by the hundreds of thousands simply because they refused to align themselves with the Roman Catholic Church and its corruption and heretical dogmas and practices. Out of conscience they tried to follow the teachings of Christ and the apostles independent of Rome, and for that crime they were maligned, hunted, imprisoned, tortured, and slain.

Why would Rome ever apologize for or even admit this holocaust? No one calls her to account today. Protestants have now forgotten the hundreds of thousands of people burned at the stake for embracing the simple gospel of Christ and refusing to bow to papal authority. Amazingly, Protestants are now embracing Rome as Christian while she insists that the "separated brethren" be reconciled to her on her unchangeable terms!

Many evangelical leaders are intent upon working with Roman Catholics to evangelize the world by the year 2000. They don't want to hear any "negative" reminders of the millions of people tortured and slain by the Church to which they now pay homage, or the fact that Rome has a false gospel of sacramental works.

"Christian" Rome slaughtered Jews by the thousands--far more than pagan Rome ever did. The land of Israel was seen as belonging to Roman Catholic Church, not to the Jews. In 1096 Pope Urban Ii inspired the first crusade to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims. With the cross on their shields and armor, the Crusaders massacred Jews across Europe on their way to the Holy Land. Almost their first act upon taking Jerusalem "for Holy Mother Church" was to herd all of the Jews into the synagogue and set it ablaze. These facts of history cannot be swept under the carpet of ecumenical togetherness as though they never happened.

Nor can the Vatican escape considerable responsibility for the Nazi Holocaust, which was thoroughly known to Pius XII in spite of his complete silence throughout the war on the most important of subjects (E.g. Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Hazi Germany, McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 300-04).

The involvement of Catholicism in the Holocaust will be examined later. Had the pope protested, as representatives of Jewish organizations and the Allied Powers begged him to do, he would have condemned his own church. The Facts are inescapable:

"In 1936, Bishop Berning of Osnabruch had talked with the Fuehrer for over an hour. Hitler assured his lordship there was no fundamental difference between National Socialism and the Catholic Church. Had not the church, he argued, looked on Jews as parasites and shut them in ghettos?

"`I am only doing,' he boasted, `What the church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively.' Being a Catholic himself, he told Berning, he told Berning, he `admired and wanted to promote Christianity.'" (De Rosa, op. cit., p. 5; Lewy, op. cit., p. 111).

There is, of course, another reason why the Roman Catholic Church has neither apologized for not represented of these crimes. How could she? The execution of heretics (including Jews) was decreed by "infallible" popes.

The Catholic Church herself claims to be infallible, and thus her doctrines could not be wrong.

[MrSealedEternal]

We now have 28,000 different Christian Churches around the world. All teaching similar things, but also some very different things. There is no better source than this site to prove my point. There are threads posted on here that debate Once Saved Always saved, The Rapture, the role of Homosexual within the Church, abortion, contraception, trinity, Baptism, divorce and the list goes on. It seems as though any person can pick up a Bible and become a minister and start his or her own church. However they want to interpret the Bible is what they are going to teach. I would ask any of you where is the truth??? Who has the authority to decided what is taught in a Church and what isn't??? Does this make any logical sense? No. The Catholic Church can trace it roots back to the time of Jesus Christ. The first Pope was Peter who walked with Jesus. The first time the word "Catholic" (which means universal) to address the only Christian Church, can be traced back around 300 hundred years after Jesus died on the cross.

And please read Mathew 16:18-19 in your Bible "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be losed in heaven."

Here we have Jesus Christ telling a mortal man that there will only be one Church on earth, and Peter will be the human head of this Church (remember whatever he bound of earth would be bound in heaven and whatever he loosed on earth will be loosed in heaven.) Why would Jesus give Peter this power? Very simply to guide his Church after Jesus is in heaven. There has to be a visible head on earth to guide Jesus' Church or else there will be slpintered off shoots all teaching elements of the truth, but not the fullness of the truth. This is what we have today.

The church that Christ said He would build, does not mean, an edifice of wood, stones, but an assembly, and congregation of men; and not a particular congregated church, but the elect of God, the general assembly and church of the first born who have been called out by God, whose names are written in heaven; and built on Christ who is the Rock of our salvation.

Isaiah 26:4 "Trust in the LORD forever, For in GOD the LORD, we have an everlasting Rock.

1Peter 2:4-8 And coming to Him as to a living stone which has been rejected by men, but is choice and precious in the sight of God, you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For this is contained in Scripture: "BEHOLD, I LAY IN ZION A CHOICE STONE, A PRECIOUS CORNER stone, AND HE WHO BELIEVES IN HIM WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED." This precious value, then, is for you who believe; but for those who disbelieve, "THE STONE WHICH THE BUILDERS REJECTED, THIS BECAME THE VERY CORNER stone," and, "A STONE OF STUMBLING AND A ROCK OF OFFENSE"; for they stumble because they are disobedient to the word, and to this doom they were also appointed.

Romans 9:33 just as it is written, "BEHOLD, I LAY IN ZION A STONE OF STUMBLING AND A ROCK OF OFFENSE, AND HE WHO BELIEVES IN HIM WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED."

The word

[vja4Him]

denominations differ from each other. In many of the denominations it was the "secondary issues" which caused the differences, but in a few it was the "primary issues" which should be the same in any Christian church.

honoring Sunday as the Sabbath Day

Doesn't the Bible say to not judge anyone concerning days of worship? Don't we worship on Sunday because of the resurrection?

Edited December 25, 2005 by vja4Him