Do sacraments save?

[All Becomes New]

What about the apostles and prophets? They were fallible men yet wrote infallible truth. All truth is infallible, you know. Even you or I can type something infallible. For example, "God is love" and "Jesus saves".

Yes. And every single person in the Bible made mistakes except one man. That is what is infallible about the Bible.

 

[concretecamper]

he repented and believed that Jesus was the Messiah, he believed Jesus when others wouldn't believe He had a kingdom

You describe the Old Covenant

Jesus had yet to die and resurrect. The New Covenant therefore wasn't in place

 

[Xeno.of.athens]

Yes. And every single person in the Bible made mistakes except one man. That is what is infallible about the Bible.

When I was a lad, in my twenties, I started reading a Catholic Catechism called The Teaching of Christ - A Catholic Catechism for adults it helped me to see that the Catholic Church really is ancient, and apostolic, and true, with Jesus as its founder and saint Peter as his servant along with the other apostles and then the bishops through the ages down to our day, today.

 

[concretecamper]

Yes. And every single person in the Bible made mistakes except one man. That is what is infallible about the Bible.

In the early Church, fallible men chose which of the 100s of letter/epistles/books being read at the Divine Liturgy were inspired.

By consenting to the fact that the Bible is God Breathed, YOU are submitting to the judgement of these fallible men.

 

[All Becomes New]

In the early Church, fallible men chose which of the 100s of letter/epistles/books being read at the Divine Liturgy were inspired.

By consenting to the fact that the Bible is God Breathed, YOU are submitting to the judgement of these fallible men.

No one is writing scripture any longer as far as I know.

 

[Xeno.of.athens]

No one is writing scripture any longer as far as I know.

That is true; scripture is not written today, it's printed from old copies.

Yet God speaks to his people today, though the scriptures, and through the magisterium, and through sacred tradition.

 

[concretecamper]

No one is writing scripture any longer as far as I know.

You are correct. But you didn't address my comment. I'll ask you a direct question.

Do you accept the infallible decision of fallible men when choosing which books (300 years AFTER the latest book was written) were inspired text?

 

[Jamdoc]

You describe the Old Covenant

Jesus had yet to die and resurrect. The New Covenant therefore wasn't in place

1. The old covenant was with animal sacrifices and works if you believe those were salvific (which really they weren't, they were illustrations of Christ's death, and if you read Romans 4 and Hebrews 11, it's always been faith that saved)

2. The new covenant was established at the last supper, and the promises Jesus made regarding just believing in Him being how you got saved were repeated by Paul all throughout his epistles most explicitly but Peter and John also taught salvation by faith. James taught salvation by faith but questioned if your faith was real if you didn't live out your faith through works is all.

 

[Jamdoc]

You are correct. But you didn't address my comment. I'll ask you a direct question.

Do you accept the infallible decision of fallible men when choosing which books (300 years AFTER the latest book was written) were inspired text?

to be honest I do not consider the selection process infallible, because for the old testament they just took what Christ Rejecting Jews determined to be inspired, and I wonder, with how much 1 Enoch and some of Ezra's other books were referenced by Jesus and the Apostles if those shouldn't have been considered scripture as well. They're old testament so the decision of which to include was handled by someone other than Christians. But because they were not selected and faithfully preserved, error may have crept into the versions that did survive, so while yes the dead sea scrolls contain fragments of 1 Enoch it's not necessarily the same 1 Enoch that you can find today word for word. So historically a book of Enoch may have been Inspired but corrupted over time because of not being selected by Jewish authorities which the list the Jewish authorities claimed were scripture were just directly ported over to the councils that decided what was scripture. If that makes sense.

 

[concretecamper]

1. The old covenant was with animal sacrifices and works if you believe those were salvific (which really they weren't, they were illustrations of Christ's death, and if you read Romans 4 and Hebrews 11, it's always been faith that saved)

That was part of it.

2. The new covenant was established at the last supper, and the promises Jesus made regarding just believing in Him being how you got saved were repeated by Paul all throughout his epistles most explicitly but Peter and John also taught salvation by faith. James taught salvation by faith but questioned if your faith was real if you didn't live out your faith through works is all.

Paul disagrees with you

HEB 9:14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who by the Holy Ghost offered himself unspotted unto God, cleanse our conscience from dead works, to serve the living God?
9:15 And therefore he is the mediator of the new testament: that by means of his death for the redemption of those transgressions which were under the former testament, they that are called may receive the promise of eternal inheritance.
9:16 For where there is a testament the death of the testator must of necessity come in.
9:17 For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is as yet of no strength, whilst the testator liveth.

 

[concretecamper]

to be honest I do not consider the selection process infallible, because for the old testament they just took what Christ Rejecting Jews determined to be inspired, and I wonder, with how much 1 Enoch and some of Ezra's other books were referenced by Jesus and the Apostles if those shouldn't have been considered scripture as well. They're old testament so the decision of which to include was handled by someone other than Christians. But because they were not selected and faithfully preserved, error may have crept into the versions that did survive, so while yes the dead sea scrolls contain fragments of 1 Enoch it's not necessarily the same 1 Enoch that you can find today word for word. So historically a book of Enoch may have been Inspired but corrupted over time because of not being selected by Jewish authorities which the list the Jewish authorities claimed were scripture were just directly ported over to the councils that decided what was scripture. If that makes sense.

So you are uncertain whether or not all the books in the Bible are infallible?

 

[Jamdoc]

That was part of it.

Paul disagrees with you

HEB 9:14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who by the Holy Ghost offered himself unspotted unto God, cleanse our conscience from dead works, to serve the living God?
9:15 And therefore he is the mediator of the new testament: that by means of his death for the redemption of those transgressions which were under the former testament, they that are called may receive the promise of eternal inheritance.
9:16 For where there is a testament the death of the testator must of necessity come in.
9:17 For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is as yet of no strength, whilst the testator liveth.

Paul disagrees with you on the sacraments. Acts 16:32, Romans 10;9, Paul had more simple statements for salvation than anyone but Jesus Himself in the Gospel of John

 

[ViaCrucis]

Ok, I'll use the Bible's words. Maybe that can help us come to a concensus.

Let's start with John 1:12-13

But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (Jn 1:12–13)​

Children of God become God's "children" (synonyms would include "offspring" and "descendants") when they are "born" of God. Do you recognize that God makes people His children by giving birth to them? If not, what do you think Jn 1:12-13 is talking about?

Become children of God because we are regenerated, born again, given new life, adopted. All things Scripture says.

Descendants is a weird term here, but offspring is fine. We are God's children, His offspring, by His grace; because we have been made new in Christ. A new humanity has been birthed in us by the power of God, the humanity of Christ which we share by grace and receive through faith; and which we shall become in the resurrection of the dead.

God has become our Father because we have received sonship in Christ.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[Jamdoc]

So you are uncertain whether or not all the books in the Bible are infallible?

no the books we have are infallible, what I'm saying is there may have been more inspired texts that didn't make the cut in the Old Testament because they just took the list of what the Jews considered Inspired and used that. The Jews may have missed things.

Because they were left out, over time I think that those books may have had error come into them.

IE say that the book of Enoch that existed at the time of Christ, which Jesus and the apostles referenced (and Jude directly quoted) was Inspired, it contains a lot of new testament language and doctrine, and a ton of references to "the Elect One" referring to Messiah, referring to Jesus, and treating Him as God. Because of the doctrines of the Messiah actually being explicitly divine, the Jewish councils who decided which books were part of their old testament bible excluded the book of Enoch because obviously they don't believe that Messiah will be divine. The Catholic Church just took what the Jews considered to be Inspired for the Old Testament, and then selected texts from the apostolic age writings to be considered the New Testament, as a result a book from the Old Testament era that contains a lot of new testament doctrine and a lot about Jesus doesn't make the cut. It's not faithfully preserved, so what copies exist deteriorate and when it is copied it's not copied as scripture so error starts finding its way in.

So over 1000 years later, the book we can find for Enoch, is now corrupted by over 1000 years of error.

Does that make sense? That because it wasn't selected to be in the bible it wasn't preserved properly and now something called by that name is loaded with error?

 

[All Becomes New]

Do you accept the infallible decision of fallible men when choosing which books (300 years AFTER the latest book was written) were inspired text?

I don't know, TBQH. If there would not have been a cannon, then we would still have the writings of the Apostles today. Whether we classify things in strict terms known as the "canon" (which is different depending on what tradition of Christianity you are) doesn't matter a whole lot all things considered. I will say that now that we have the canon, that it is authoritative. But we would probably just have more authoritative books without the council.

 

[NewLifeInChristJesus]

Become children of God because we are regenerated, born again, given new life, adopted. All things Scripture says.

Descendants is a weird term here, but offspring is fine. We are God's children, His offspring, by His grace; because we have been made new in Christ. A new humanity has been birthed in us by the power of God, the humanity of Christ which we share by grace and receive through faith; and which we shall become in the resurrection of the dead.

God has become our Father because we have received sonship in Christ.

-CryptoLutheran

I agree "descendants" is a bit odd, but I put it in there to reinforce the point that God literally gave birth to us spiritually.

I'm glad we agree on this important point, because there is no salvation without Jesus coming to live inside a person's heart, thus making him His child.

 

[ViaCrucis]

My Bible does say that you must be born again (in spirit), baptism by immersion is a ritual which symbolizes the childbirth process - newborn baby emerges from the amniotic fluid in the womb, and the first thing to do is a loud cry to draw in air, that’s what the word spirit literally means - breath. In the beginning the spirit of God hovered above the water, you emerge from the water, you draw in spirit. If you do it by pouring or sprinkling, you lose this element, that’s more like raining on your parade which does nothing but gets you wet.

The word baptism, in its essence, means washing. It is rooted in the Jewish practice of tevilah, ritual washing, especially the full immersion washing in a mikveh. Immersion was the normative mode of baptism in the early Church, and remains so in the Eastern Churches. But pouring has always been acceptable, because it was never about the amount of water and how much contact that water made with the body--it was about God's grace and the promise connected to that water (Ephesians 5:26), water and word.

In John chapter 3 after Jesus talks about the need of new birth, and mentions water and the Spirit, Jesus then says to Nicodemus, "You are a teacher of Israel [aka a rabbi], how do you not know this?"

Why did Jesus expect Nicodemus to understand what Jesus was talking about?

Because baptism has its roots in Jewish water-washing practices.

When John the Baptist was out there in the Jordan baptizing for the purpose of repentance, to call Israel to repentance in the anticipation and expectation of the Messiah's coming, he wasn't doing something unrecognizeable in the context of Judaism. Ritual washing was normative in Judaism. The meaning of what John was doing was unique--a call of repentance and Messianic expectation.

Even today "baptism", though Jews don't call it that because it's a Greek word to translate a Jewish concept and has explicitly Christian overtones which Jews don't associate with, is still a regular practice in Judaism. Most noteworthy is the role tevilah in a mikveh plays in conversion to Judaism.

In Judaism a convert, one going from being a non-Jew to becoming a Jew, undergoes a ritual washing in a mikveh that signifies a person's new life as a Jew--their former life as a non-Jew is in a sense washed away and now they are now a Jew, a member of the Covenant People, a child of Abraham, a child of Israel. Jewish sources say this.

And, as an aside, when a family converts to Judaism infants are included in this conversion, they are also washed in the mikveh because the child is being converted to Judaism as well (this is in addition to, of course, circumcision for men/boys).

So when Jesus says to Nicodemus, "Why don't you understand this?" it's because Nicodemus, a rabbi, was not ignorant of what Jesus was saying. At least he shouldn't have been. So there is an open question of whether Nicodemus was genuinely confused or simply being stubborn.

So Christian Baptism, instituted by Jesus Christ, is the specific application of water in the form of a washing--a baptism--but with a new and distinctively Christian and Christocentric meaning. "Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them" means that the Church is commanded to baptize for the purpose of welcoming people into the life of Christ and His Church, as disciples of Jesus who are to be trained and taught the things of Christ, "teaching them all which I have said".

The meaning of this Christian Baptism is then expressly taught throughout the writings of the New Testament:

St. Peter says, "Repent and be baptized, all of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38), that is a promise connected to Christian Baptism.

St. Paul says, "All of us who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into His death" that by baptism we have been buried with Christ and raised with Christ. Romans 6:3-4

Paul, again, says that all who were baptized into Christ "have put on Christ" Galatians 3:27

Peter in his first epistle writes that the saving of Noah and his family through the flood by the ark prefigured baptism, baptism is the antitype--the fulfillment of the type of the water of the flood and the rescue through the flood--and thus "baptism which now saves you". How can water save us? It can't, but it's not cleaning dirt from the body Peter reminds us, but the cleansing of our conscience because we are made new in and with God by the resurrection of Jesus. That's what we receive in baptism, a clean conscience, a new conscience, a new self in relation to God that is empowered by the Risen Christ, His resurrected life is now the life which sustains us, and which we received in/with the waters of baptism.

Hyperfocusing on the mode of baptism is just legalism. It's not the quantity of water that matters. It's the grace and power of God, who by His word--right there connected with the water of baptism--makes us new people in Jesus Christ.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[ViaCrucis]

I agree "descendants" is a bit odd, but I put it in there to reinforce the point that God literally gave birth to us spiritually.

I'm glad we agree on this important point, because there is no salvation without Jesus coming to live inside a person's heart, thus making him His child.

This is a bit of an aside, but while I am not completely against the language of being a child of Christ, I feel that this language can be confusing because it is unusual rather than standard. When it comes to regeneration we have become children of the Father and siblings to Jesus Christ by grace. Remembering that Jesus is the only-begotten of the Father; the Father only has one monogenes, and that's Jesus, who alone is begotten of the Father, being God of God, the Eternal Son of the Father. We, by grace, are God's children, thus we have sonship with Christ by grace because we are in Christ and Christ is in us by the Spirit.

In the sense that we could be said to be children of Christ it is in a different sense, for obviously Jesus is not the Father, He is the Son of the Father. And so Christ our God and Lord is not our Father. And that is important to maintain for the sake of proper triadology--a proper understanding of the Holy Trinity.

And so to say that Christ lives in our hearts and we are therefore His child is not language I want to outright reject, but think needs a much more robust clarification; because Christ in us and we in Christ makes His Father our Father. And we are children of the Father. So it can be triadologically confusing; but insofar as Christ is our King, our Lord, our Shepherd, he is symbolically paternal toward us, in the same way that He says He, symbolically, is like a mother hen who wishes to protect Jerusalem under the wing.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[Valletta]

The Catholic Church is not fallible due to any questionable dogma, it has lost its influence and authority due to, I hate to bring this up, the child molestation scandal, the compromise on homosexuality and many other PR crisis. That's considered as taking the Lord's name in vain, for which it will be held accountable (Ex. 20:7).

Jesus is infallible, and so are his teachings passed down through the Apostles and popes. Inside and outside of the Church on earth the wheat will not be separated from the tare until Judgment Day. But we have God's promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church.

 

[concretecamper]

Paul disagrees with you on the sacraments. Acts 16:32, Romans 10;9, Paul had more simple statements for salvation than anyone but Jesus Himself in the Gospel of John

Too funny, change the subject