What IS MATT 16:18 REALLY TEACHING ?

concretecamper said:

Paul isn't saying here that the Bible is all that is needed. Try again.

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So what else other than the information regarding salvation from Jesus, John and Paul is needed?

Ceallaigh said:

So what else other than the information regarding salvation from Jesus, John and Paul is needed?

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Reminds me of a first grade argument, I know you are but what am I. Next

Ceallaigh said:

I asked you what Jesus, John and Paul left out in their writings that details what's necessary for salvation. If they didn't leave anything out, then the only conclusion is what a person needs to know about how to become saved is contained within the Bible.

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This is something we can explore after we conclude whether or not the Bible teaches that the Bible is all that is needed for salvation. One step at a time.

I suspect you want to jump right to this question since you have no real response to my challenge. But let's finish step 1

concretecamper said:

Reminds me of a first grade argument, I know you are but what am I. Next

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All snark, no substance.

Obviously there is nothing that Jesus, John and Paul left out regarding what's needed for salvation, therefore the information contained in the Bible is sufficient to lead one to salvation.

concretecamper said:

This is something we can explore after we conclude whether or not the Bible teaches that the Bible is all that is needed for salvation. One step at a time.

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You're harping on how something was said rather than what was being conveyed.

concretecamper said:

I suspect you want to jump right to this question since you have no real response to my challenge. But let's finish step 1

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What the Bible teaches about salvation is all that one needs to achieve salvation. If you disagree with that, then please explain what else is needed outside of what's written about salvation in scripture.

Or you could just keep taking it back to step 1 by saying "What Bible teaches about salvation is all that one needs to achieve salvation" isn't a verse found in the Bible.

Ceallaigh said:

Or you could just keep taking it back to step 1 by saying "What Bible teaches about salvation is all that one needs to achieve salvation" isn't a verse found in the Bible.

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All I'm trying to do is get you to admit that this idea is man made. Come on, it's like AA, one has to admit that one has a problem first before one can get on the road to recovery.

Ceallaigh said:

What the Bible teaches about salvation is all that one needs to achieve salvation. If you disagree with that, then please explain what else is needed outside of what's written about salvation in scripture.

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I follow the Bible. I don't add to it or take anything away from it.

Jesus told us to listen to something. It wasn't the Bible. We can explore that once I get your agreement that your idea at hand is man made.

Ceallaigh said:

Obviously

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Maybe, maybe not, but that is not the issue. You conclude there isn't. That's fine. But it is how YOU approach the scriptures, not how the scriptures tell us to approach them.

concretecamper said:

When I get you to finally admit that what is being debated here (That the Bible is the only thing needed for salvation) is man made doctrine, we can than go on to another topic of your choice

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The debate moved to salvation and whether the scriptures alone are sufficient to lay out the plan wrought through Jesus. They can. I have never heard the above (statement) called doctrine. Second, this is simply a debate, one not needs to give the impression of superiority, that they must control the debate..."when I finally get you to admit".. "No your wrong"..etc. (pointing a shaky finger)
We are all here to learn and grow. I admit, I have been smug at times in my life, sure I was right..but it more or less came with hard lessons and costly opportunities. But salvation is not something that we let pride get in the way of. I have left churches because my pride got in the way, and some because they did not stand behind what the Scriptures teach.
The Scriptures do not thunder out the idea that what the disciples taught was different than what Jesus taught concerning salvation.Just the opposite..their tradition was to teach and preach what Jesus taught, His gospel, His Word.We have these teaching in Scripture,they can be found. Sure there were councils mentioned...but the debate was over leftover old covenant rituals and ordinances pointing to the true shedding of blood and tearing of the flesh..which was fulfilled in Christ on the cross. They were simply moving from type to anti-type.
The Scriptures are sufficient to teach about salvation, and the Holy Spirit will make sure and explain it clearly when one decides there are ready to learn and accept what the Scriptures really say.

Ceallaigh said:

I've asked others in the past if there's some secret whispered "pass it down" sort of system and was told no.

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Unfortunately, that’s an appeal to unqualified authority, a logical fallacy, unless you identify these unnamed “others.” Now, I don’t care if you like the answer I gave or not, but its validity is not dependent on how well it conforms to the expectations sown by unnamed others, whose scholarly credentials I do not know, but whose opinion clashes with the entire academic and ecumenical understanding of the early church and is consistent rather only with the opinions of certain Restorationist theologians.

However, I am more concerned, in light of our previous difficulty communicating, by the fact that apparently you did not grasp what my answer actually was in an integrated concept, but more concerning than that is that you appear to be willing to deprecate first century Patristic sources, including material of direct Apostolic origin and the most ancient manuscripts we have, which is a contradiction to your earlier stated position regarding the early church.

Additionally, I feel compelled to remind you in light of the increasingly hostile tone of the emphasis St. Paul put on love and charity. I want to see a more charitable attitude in this thread towards other Christians. My goal is to be as loving as possible to other Christians, which is why I am willing to provide you with information to the best of my ability despite the fact that your response to me at times seems to be one of personal hostility. However, what I really want to do, what my actual objective is, in this thread, is to throw a safe suppressant onto the raging perennial conflagration that occurs as a result of the inevitable clash between Roman Catholics and Restorationist Protestants on this forum, by providing an objective third party perspective which agrees with either side where their position is consistent with the consensus of scholars working in the field and also the traditions of the Orthodox churches and the traditional liturgical Protestants.

There is, as I stated earlier, a common ground, one which I believe based on the liturgical texts which were the answer to your reply in terms of materials that actually exist in writing, between the doctrines of the Roman Catholics, the well known Restorationist and non-Denominational theologians of the present who subscribe to ideas such as premillenial dispensationalist, and also the rather less well known Assyrian Church of the East, and into this common ground one can fit the entirety of Orthodox theology and the entirety of traditional Liturgical Protestant theology (such as that of the Anglicans, Methodists and Lutherans).

And every church I just mentioned is threatened by the spread of the promotion of homosexual relationships, which I have repeatedly sought to demonstrate to you is of much greater importance than any of these minor doctrinal issues we are having such a fearsome argument about.

Rather than debating the minor differences in worship, or concerning the Theotokos, we really should be having a more fundamental debate concerning what I regard to be the extremely dangerous direction taken by Fiducia Supplicans towards a revisionist Roman Catholic theology in which their historic and important opposition to sodomy and homosexual perversion and their opposition to other issues of sexual morality such as abortion, which contributed to such a substantial extent in our recent victory over Roe v. Wade at the Supreem Court, is abrogated.

concretecamper said:

Finally something that is taught by the Bible

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Yes indeed, the fact that we agree on this is prove of the relative insignificance of the doctrinal differences which some people are content to make such an issue about.

concretecamper said:

It is pretty simple. A poster said that Bible is all that is needed for salvation. I simply asked where does the Bible teach that.

I've gotten paragraphs of gobble-dy-gook by you and others that don't answer my challenge.

I agree Scripture is needed. I agree Scripture is profitable. I agree Scripture is the Written Word of God. So please don't post pages of scripture that affirms these things yet fails to answer my question

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Indeed, I would make the same request @Ceallaigh - you seem to be arguing that we do not regard Scripture to be the written word of God (I specifically described it in a preceding post as the word of the Word, as a verbal icon of the incarnation of the Logos in Christ Jesus), or as being essential as a component in the economy of salvation.

So not only, in the case of Orthodoxy, are you putting forward arguments which needlessly conflate our theology with that of the Roman Catholic church, but you also are insistent upon arguments which are contrary to what Catholics and Orthodox Christians actually believe.

WilliamC said:

The Scriptures are sufficient to teach about salvation, and the Holy Spirit will make sure and explain it clearly when one decides there are ready to learn and accept what the Scriptures really say.

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Some Christians say water Baptism is required for salvation based on Scripture and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Some Christians say that water Baptism is not required for Salvation based on Scripture and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

As you can see, your statement lacks application in reality.

Something else is needed.

I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make it drink.

concretecamper said:

Some Christians say water Baptism is required for salvation based on Scripture and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Some Christians say that water Baptism is not required for Salvation based on Scripture and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

As you can see, your statement lacks application in reality.

Something else is needed.

I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make it drink.

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This post highlights a particular problem with such subjective claims, and underscores the fact that the only objective source of dogmatic and doctrinal interpretations of Scripture comes from Patristics. We can, through the field of Patristics, look at what the early church believed on an issue, for example, by reading the homilies of St. John Chrysostom, or the encyclopedic heresiological polemics of of St. Ireanaeus of Lyons, St. Epiphanius of Salamis and St. John Damascene (each of whom quoted the works of the preceding teachers, so St. John of Damascus quotes St. Epiphanius, who in turn in his earlier work quoted the still earlier work of St. Irenaeus of Lyons).

And the most definitive material when it comes to the specific interpretations of scripture used by the early church can be found from reading the liturgical materials of the early church, which form the basis of the Byzantine, West Syriac, East Syriac, Alexandrian Greek, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Roman, Ambrosian, Mozarabic and Gallican liturgical rites. And indeed in the case of several of these liturgical traditions, since the Gallican liturgy was suppressed in the first millenium due to Charlemagne, early Gallican and related liturgical texts, such as those of the Mozarabic and Benevenetan Rites, are largely unaltered (no one modified the Mozarabic liturgical materials for many centuries, until after Vatican II, when bizarrely, I have heard some minor changes were made to the liturgical texts, although nothing like what occurred with the Roman Rite; the problem here is that i have not been able to find online the text of the Mozarabic service books so I can’t compare it, even though translating from the Latin and any vernacular Spanish translations of it would be trivial. It does seem strange however that a liturgy that is only routinely celebrated in one chapel of the Cathedral of Toledo and also in a nearby monastery would be subject to modification after Vatican II).

concretecamper said:

Where does the Bible teach that?

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concretecamper said:

Paul isn't saying here that the Bible is all that is needed. Try again.

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You've lost what the original comment was about. This was about how faith comes about and I posted Paul's words. You seemed to disagree with that's how faith comes. Which leads to the subject that what's in the Bible leads one on the path to salvation. The foundation found in the bible by the prophets, Christ's ministry and later the apostles with their letters leads one on the path to salvation -again Paul's words.
If you're suggesting anyone worships the Bible itself than you're are purposely evading the fact that we are stating what's in the Bible- old and new leads someone on the path salvation. We know it's Christ that does the saving. But you are only going to know Christ through his Word, his ministry, etc. And the disciples later on spread his word. You guys have to cling to your church, you think it's part of your salvation process, not realizing it's the body of Christ that's the church. His ministry forms that body that's brought on by the disciples/apostles. That's the foundation which was first started by the prophets.

It's pretty simple that you put the Bible secondary over what your church leaders tell you to do. We would rather not put that much confidence in men who are so far removed from what's even written. And still are changing things up to this day. Gods' Word will stay the same, man's won't. If Gods' word is not being taught how it was brought forth (nothing added) it's not a church to begin with.

concretecamper said:

When I get you to finally admit that what is being debated here

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I was debating a couple of different things, not sure about yourself since you had no clue with your earlier statement.

JulieB67 said:

You guys have to cling to your church, you think it's part of your salvation process, not realizing it's the body of Christ that's the church. His ministry forms that body that's brought on by the disciples/apostles. That's the foundation which was first started by the prophets

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I've said nothing about My Church

That could be your issue, your guarding against what the outcome could be and therefore lose focus on the topic at hand?

concretecamper said:

Maybe, maybe not, but that is not the issue. You conclude there isn't. That's fine. But it is how YOU approach the scriptures, not how the scriptures tell us to approach them.

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So how do the scriptures tell us to approach them?

concretecamper said:

All I'm trying to do is get you to admit that this idea is man made. Come on, it's like AA, one has to admit that one has a problem first before one can get on the road to recovery.

I follow the Bible. I don't add to it or take anything away from it.

Jesus told us to listen to something. It wasn't the Bible. We can explore that once I get your agreement that your idea at hand is man made.

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Now how do you know that Jesus told us to listen to the Holy Spirit? Ah yes, scripture.

Then why do you hold to extrabiblical dogma?

Most of man made doctrine is claimed to have come from the Holy Spirit. And usually for some reason the Holy Spirit waited centuries to reveal that extrabiblical doctrine and what to read into scripture that's not there.

Ceallaigh said:

So how do the scriptures tell us to approach them?

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Good question.

Speaking of the New Testament, I can't think of a single passage that tells me there should be 27 books and not 26 or 28. I cant think of a single passage that tells me the Gospel of Matthew is inspired text. I can't think of a single passage that tells us there should be only 4 Gospels and not 5.

Curious, isn't it?

concretecamper said:

I've said nothing about My Church

That could be your issue, your guarding against what the outcome could be and therefore lose focus on the topic at hand?

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JulieB67 obviously meant the Roman Catholic Church.