Which Apostolic Church do you belong to?

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This thread had a small clean up. As a reminder, the SOP includes:

Traditional Christians believe that the Church and associated Tradition - especially from the Apostolic / early Church - guide us even T. These traditions include sources such as church councils and creeds, writings of the early Church Fathers, testimony of the Lives of the Saints, classic confessions of the faith, etc​

That description includes churches such as Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, etc.
 
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The Liturgist

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Theres only one church

Indeed, and we all confess that in the Nicene Creed. However, in antiquity the question would have been “What local church do you belong to?” and in sense it still is, because a series of schisms which I think all of us in Traditional Theology deeply regret hath resulted in various local churches no longer being in communion with each other.

Thus, the local churches under the patriarchate of Rome in Western Europe became the Roman Catholic Church, and subsequently, a major portion of the church in modern day Czechia and Slovakia became the nucleus of the Moravian Church, the churches of the various Electorates of Northern Germany and of the Scandinavian Kingdoms became the nucleus of the Lutheranism, the Church of England became the nucleus of Anglicanism, while Calvinism originated in Geneva and spread elsewhere in Switzerland, Germany, and especially the Netherlands and Scotland, where it formed the nucleus of the Reformed and Presbyterian denominations.

In the East, meanwhile, the local churches of Constantinople, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Georgia, Russia, the Ukraine, Montenegro, Macedonia, Alaska and other lands became Eastern Orthodox. The Church of the East, headquartered in Seleucia-Cstesiphon, which a thousand years ago was the largest in size, both geographically and in terms of membership, remains the church of the Assyrians, who live predominantly in the Nineveh Plains, and in Kurdistan, East Syria and Iran, and represent the largest ethnoreligious group to speak Aramaic in the vernacular.

Also in Asia, Africa and the Caucasus Mountains we find the Oriental Orthodox, consisting of the Coptic, Armenian, Indian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Syriac Orthodox, who together with the Eastern Orthodox share the responsibility for bearing the torch of Christianity in the face of unspeakable tortures, human rights abuses, terrorist attacks and other forms of persecution, since the rise of Islam, in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Armenia (which recently lost a portion of its territory to the anti-Armenian regime of Azerbaijan) and even in Ethiopia, which is home to the largest number (40 million), but which has a significant Islamic population, and the Ethiopian Christians were not spared martyrdom at the hands of ISIS, Kyrie eleison. These churches for the most part have a close working relationship with their Eastern Orthodox counterparts in Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Sinai.

In India, there has in the capital been increased persecution of Christians by Hindus including the brutal rape of elderly nuns; to my knowledge this has not yet spread to the Malabar Coast, which is home to the St. Thomas Christians*, or Nasranis, as they are referred to by Hindus as a caste (since Hindus must put everyone in a caste), but the Christians in India should remain in our prayers. In Pakistan, the mostly Anglican Christians have experienced extreme persecution in recent years, and persecution is heating up in the People’s Republic of China.

*The Nasranis take their name, St. Thomas Christians, from the fact they were evangelized by St. Thomas the Apostle prior to his martyrdom in 53 AD, when an enraged Hindu rajah threw a javelin at him; interestingly this makes them nor only the third largest religion in India, with only Hinduism and Islam having more members, but also one of the most long-present, being both older and existing in India for much longer than either the Sikhs or the Muslims, and there are two Christianw for every Sikh or Jainist (indeed Sikhism is only around 600 years old, and only about 270 years old in its present form).
 
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Wayne Gabler

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Hot and cold.
Those 7 Churches cover 14 possible relationship a person can have with God, when God is defining them. The ones with a good relationship will be alive when the 7 vials have been poured out, the rest will die.
Zec:13:8-9:
And it shall come to pass,
that in all the land,
saith the LORD,
two parts therein shall be cut off and die;
but the third shall be left therein.
And I will bring the third part through the fire,
and will refine them as silver is refined,
and will try them as gold is tried:
they shall call on my name,
and I will hear them:
I will say,
It is my people:
and they shall say,
The LORD is my God.
 
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MarkRohfrietsch

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Hot and cold.
Those 7 Churches cover 14 possible relationship a person can have with God, when God is defining them. The ones with a good relationship will be alive when the 7 vials have been poured out, the rest will die.
Zec:13:8-9:
And it shall come to pass,
that in all the land,
saith the LORD,
two parts therein shall be cut off and die;
but the third shall be left therein.
And I will bring the third part through the fire,
and will refine them as silver is refined,
and will try them as gold is tried:
they shall call on my name,
and I will hear them:
I will say,
It is my people:
and they shall say,
The LORD is my God.
Another lesson that is to be learned from this is that of those 7 Churches, only the one at Mira (Izmir Turkey) remains. This is a caution to us all.
 
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Wayne Gabler

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Another lesson that is to be learned from this is that of those 7 Churches, only the one at Mira (Izmir Turkey) remains. This is a caution to us all.
They all expanded, every Gentile alive today has one of those relationships with God:
Re:1:7:
Behold,
he cometh with clouds;
and every eye shall see him,
and they also which pierced him:
and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him.
Even so,
Amen.
 
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MarkRohfrietsch

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They all expanded, every Gentile alive today has one of those relationships with God:
Re:1:7:
Behold,
he cometh with clouds;
and every eye shall see him,
and they also which pierced him:
and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him.
Even so,
Amen.
You missed my point, but OK.
 
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Wayne Gabler

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You missed my point, but OK.
I got your point, you think the Churches all died, there are about 2B Christians, with repented and repented people in every Congregation.
The names came from when the beloved Disciple started those Churches while the Apostles were in Jerusalem between 33AD and 70AD.
Ac:8:1:
And Saul was consenting unto his death.
And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem;
and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria,
except the apostles.

Philadelphia is supposed to be the rapture Church. The text points to them having a doctrine of salvation, what is missing is they can't find any scripture that clearly supports their concept.

'Every eye shall see Him' says all 7 Churches are very much alive on the day He returns. (the day He resurrects the two witnesses)
 
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Wayne Gabler

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Is that the same as Anglican or Episcopalian?
The Christian Reformation War was Northern European Christians against Romans:13 Christians:
Martin Luther
10 November 1483[2] – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, theologian, author, composer, former Augustinian friar,[3] and is best known as a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation and as the namesake of Lutheranism.

Luther was ordained to the priesthood in 1507. He came to reject several teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church; in particular, he disputed the view on indulgences.
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In 1501, at age 17, he entered the University of Erfurt, which he later described as a beerhouse and whorehouse.[18] He was made to wake at four every morning for what has been described as "a day of rote learning and often wearying spiritual exercises."[18] He received his master's degree in 1505.[19]

The funding he received was from profits of the Dutch Slave Trade:
Thirty Years' War - Danish Intervention 1626-1629 DOCUMENTARY
In the previous episode of our animated historical documentary series on the Thirty Years' War we have covered Bohemian Rebellion and the battle of the White Mountain between the Catholic and Protestant forces. This new episode will see Denmark under its king Christian IV joining the war on the Protestant side and fighting a 4-year campaign against the Catholic League and Holy Roman empire armies led by Johann Tilly and Albrecht von Wallenstein. The battles of Lutter and Stralsund represented the peak of this part of the Thirty Years' War.

Gustavus Adolphus - Breitenfeld 1631 - 30 YEARS' WAR DOCUMENTARY
Another episode in our animated historical documentary series on the Thirty Years' War and Gustavus Adolphus enters the field to fight for the Protestant cause. The Swedish King would fight against the Catholic commander Tilly at the battle of Breitenfeld

It can be promoted today that 500 years the Swiss Guards have been at the Vatican are Prison Guards rather than 'Body Guards'
 
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Paidiske

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Is that the same as Anglican or Episcopalian?
"Anglican" is the term used in most of the world for those belonging to the same communion as the Church of England (but outside England). In America, people belonging to that church are called Episcopalian, and "Anglican" in America often means belonging to a breakaway church not in communion with Canterbury, but with an Anglican history.
 
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The Liturgist

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Another lesson that is to be learned from this is that of those 7 Churches, only the one at Mira (Izmir Turkey) remains. This is a caution to us all.
Of course the reason they are mostly gone is they were located in Asia Minor, and specifically the Greco-Turkish forced population exchange after WWII, and more than that, the Islamist genocide against Armenian, Syriac/Assyrian and Pontic Greek Christians, which was arguably the prototype of and inspiration for the Holocaust.
 
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dzheremi

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Of course the reason they are mostly gone is they were located in Asia Minor, and specifically the Greco-Turkish forced population exchange after WWII, and more than that, the Islamist genocide against Armenian, Syriac/Assyrian and Pontic Greek Christians, which was arguably the prototype of and inspiration for the Holocaust.

Is it even really arguable that it was? I am blanking on the source right now, but I'm almost certain Hitler is recorded to have responded to concerns that his 'final solution' to the Jewish problem would cause conflict with the rest of the world by saying at least once something like "Who today remembers the slaughter of the Armenians?" (In other words, no it won't, people won't do anything about this, just like they didn't do anything when the Armenians were slaughtered en masse.)

I do know that Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who famously coined the term 'genocide' to describe the intentional killing of a specific people, was inspired to coin the term after learning about the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks, and specifically how no laws existed at that time to prosecute the Ottoman officials who perpetrated it.
 
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