Lev 20:27 "A man or woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads." NIV (What does this mean? It means someone who is talking to the SOULS of the dead.)

A medium is someone who communes with the dead. Dead being defined above.

You say they aren't dead...their souls live. I'm not disagreeing...in essence a medium communes with the souls of the dead, they sure aren't diggin up the bodies and talking to rotting ears or in the case of the older "saints" the dust.

You are playing with words. But even your way, someone who communes with souls, is still considered a medium by definition and therefore detestable to God.

Talk around it all you want Lula. The souls in heaven have rotting bodies down here. (Except for the ones the Lord has "taken.") Communing with them is expressly forbidden by God and yet its a friggin tradition in the denomination so "sure" they are the church.

When I stand before God ya know one thing I am pretty sure I won't hear?

"T why didn't you pray to my mom more?"

I'm heading out. Short road trip. I'll be baaaaaaack.

Yes, I'd also say CON ARTIST.

I don't subscribe to this belief, nor do I know any Biblically educated Christian who does so.

How many Catholics pray to Mary Lula? She's got her own friggin prayer!

You take a fringe group of Christians and want to define all non-Catholics that way...nice diversion tactic.

Not working.

NOooooooooo we don't need ANY reformers to tell us this is wrong. Read Jesus' own words....this is how you pray...."Our Father which art in heaven.." Matthew 6. Nowhere in scripture does it say we are to pay to anyone other than God. Jesus gave us a beautiful example of intercessory prayer in John 17. He also said...anything asked in my name will be done. So there you have it...no need to go plead with dead people Lula.

Sorry but you are very deceived on this one.

As far as Saints....I thought we already established that Saints are those "IN CHRIST?" You don't have to be dead to be a saint. Paul wrote to the Saints

"To the church of God, that is in Corinth to those sanctified IN CHRIST, Jesus called to be SAINTS together with all those who in EVERY PLACE call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours." 1 Cor 1:2


"To all those IN Rome who are loved by God and called to be Saints." Rom 1:7
"To the church of God that is at Corinth with all the SAINTS who are in the whole of Achaia." 2 Cor 1:1

"To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus." Eph 1:1

Now you MAY speak and pray to dead people...but I'm gonna tell you bluntly Lula....Paul was NOT writing to dead people.

This has nothing to do with Protestant scorn but all to do with Catholic dogma.

Yes, but they died again. They did not go up with Christ. They were raised to life as was Lazarus. Do you know why? Because Christ was on the cross when this happened. He is the first fruit. Not these others. That means he was the first to get a glorified body. These others lived like Lazarus to die again. Nowhere do we see they went up with Christ. Acts 1 is pretty clear. He went up alone.



No, actually it wasn't....it was truthful. It's actually harder.

For you...go to Mass, do your pentence and partake of the Eucharist and you're good for another week. That's not what the bible teaches....."all that we do is to glorify Christ" in every waking moment of our day. It's not about doing works. It's much more than that.

Well where does Grace come from? It's God who is the dispenser of Grace right? So it's not Mary just being full of it all by herself.

Notice it says that she was "blessed AMONG women." It didn't say ABOVE. It said among. She was endowed with Grace which is "charitoo."

Now here's the kicker....ready for this Lula?

In Eph 1:6 this is also used of believers where it says ALL BELIEVERS in Christ also are said to be filled with grace. In Romans it says we have abundant grace. It means to be right before God. Mary was right before God. So aren't all believers who put their trust in God. They are given grace.

"To the praise of the glory of HIS GRACE (cheritoo) wherein he has made us accepted in the beloved."

Grace comes from God and ALL BELIEVERS are endowed with his grace.

Also as a side note....notice that when the Pentecost came (birth of the church) all the 120 people assembled (including Mary) were praying. Who were they praying to? It doesn't look like they were praying to Mary. She was in the group with the rest of them praying to Christ together of one accord.

I agree with Tova. Lula you have not shown us anything in scripture that can back up your assertion. CC tradition is not always based on scripture Lula.



Not really. You kept throwing CC dogma at me and forced me to answer you...like I said way back and I did truthfully. Paganism and the early church beliefs got mixed in together when Satan signed up for church membership.

See, even in the garden we can see how he took God's word and mixed a concoction of his own words in with it and then went to Eve with his new theology. It had enough truth in it for her to believe it. Sorry to say, but I believe it's the same with the CC. It's got truth...yes. But it also has error based on years and years of tradition. So the tradition has mixed in with the truth and the Catholics have been following it ever since.

So everytime you throw truth at me, we're ok. But when you start with the dogma and tradition, I can't buy it neither can Tova. You have to go outside of scripture to own this. I'm not willing to do this and by the looks of what Tova has written she doesn't either.

and you know that Lula....we've talked about this many times.

KFC POSTS:

Protestants deny doctrines as the Communion of the Saints, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Sacred Tradition because the Reformers denied them first along with 5 of the 7 Sacraments, as well as the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass all of which Christ Himself instituted. You are only repeating the contradictions of your Protestant forefathers which you are programmed without let up.

Protestants are in error, but that word has vanished from their vocablulary regarding themselves, they think error is found only in Catholicism. You are all wedded to the idea that your own beliefs, which from one church to the other contradict each other, are true. Protestantism consists wholly of denials of and substitutes for revealed truth. As noted above, the Protestant is necessarily restricted to declaring what he does NOT believe, erroneously identifying his own thoughts with divinely revealed truths.

And I don't wish to impugn, even by implicaton, your or Tova7's sincerity. You are victims of a hoax. And there is a vast difference between being sincere and being correct. And the good, sincere Protestant is simply wrong. Christ told His followers "to hear the Church" which He gave them, not hear the myraid of churches established after the Protestant revolt from Catholicism. The Catholic Church and only the Catholic Church has the whole truth, along with everything we need for our salvation, ie the 7 Sacraments and the Holy Mass, and those outside her do not. Whatever is true in Protestantism, the Reformers brought from the Church when they left. Whatever is peculiar to Protestantism, ie justification by faith alone, sola scripture, once saved always saved, is false as they are of Luther and the other Reformers, not of Christ.




This tells me you have no idea what Sacred Tradition is. Tradition is yet another Protestant denial. They deny Tradition becasue of Luther's doctrine of Sola Scriptura which says that God's written Revelation, the Holy Bible is the only source of faith. Just as Christ promised, the Holy Spirit guides the Church. He too inspired the Sacred Scriptures so one can't contradict the other. Scripture was written for the Chruch, but as Scriputre says itself explicitly, it is not a complete account of all Christ's teachings,, and so there must be another source of faith, namely Sacred Tradition. It is through rejecting Tradition and leaving every person to interpret the Bible for himself that Protestantism has resulted in such a multiplicity of contradictory sects, and that the Holy Bible is less respected, less used, and less understood in the world today.

Sacred Tradition is contained in early Chruch history, in the decrees of early Councils, in liturgies, in the Book of Acts, in the writings of the early Chruch DOctors and Fathers. The Catholic Chruch gives men through Scripture and Tradition the whole of God's teaching, its meaning, and a guarantee of its authenticity.

So, like it or not, believe it or not, Revelation is the whole of that which God has revealed to man. "For prophecy came not by the will of man at any time: but the holy men of God spoke, inspired by the Holy Ghost." 2St.Peter 1:21. The Holy Bible is written Revelation; Sacred Tradition is unwritten Revelation.

St.John advised us of this when he wrote in the last passage 21:25, "But there are also many things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."

The customs, beliefs and practices of the Church born on the First Pentecost in 33AD are the customs, beliefs and practices of the Church today. The Chruch in the New Testament, that of Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Peter and Paul, James and Jude, Timothy and Titus, the Church of the Fathers, Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Augustine, and the Chruch of today are all the same Church, the one known to the whole world as the Catholic Church.

Yes, all sanctifying Grace comes only from God.

God created the Blessed Virgin Mary "full of grace". Since she would become the vessel of His only begotten Son, she was born without Original Sin.

This is known as the Immaculate COnception another doctrine that the Reformers rejected.

KFC POSTS

Well, I wouldn't describe it as you have here, but close enough and after all this it feels good to agree with you on something!

DR has Eph. 1:6 put another way..." Unto the praise of the glory of His grace, in which he hath graced us in his beloved Son.

What does it mean? It means that the great blessings we have received are all through Christ. It reveals the great extent of God's love..it's incredibel when you think about it. These blessings of sanctifying grace are totally unmerited by us. In one of his sermons, St.John Chrysostom points out, "that Paul does not say that this grace has been given to us for no purpose but that it has been given us to make us more pleasing and lovable in His eyes, now that we are purified of our sins."

This is true even more of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was the most pleasing and lovable in His eyes.She was abundantly blessed through Christ. This is difficult to understand and harder to explain.

[

ha!  Good one.  Well you're right.  If we stick to scripture...we're ok...it's when you HAVE to bring up that CC dogma that gets you into trouble......

Agree with you on this one as well.  We would do well to remember tho that God is not a respector of persons.  He looks at all of us as sons and daughters and he doesn't put one on a pedastal whether it be Abraham, David Paul, or Mary.  He's the father to all his children and he doesn't favor one over the other.  That's what I'm trying to tell you Lula. 

We all have different things asked of us.  We have a myriad of examples in scripture.  We have David a man after God's own heart....didn't say that about Mary.  Abraham was willing to kill his own son with his own hand.  Mary didn't do that.  Paul was the most afflicted persecuted man of all.....well Jeremiah had it pretty tough too....but Mary wasn't afflicted or persecuted like this.  Job was miserable and tested beyond measure......Mary wasn't given this lot. 

As I said earlier to Tova7, Protestants diminish the Blessed Mother most every opportunity. Here you do the same   

I said she was most pleasing and lovable to God, and you agreed...then launched right into the negatives...well we gotta remember God doesn't respect people and then the comment above. David did, but Mary didn't...Abraham did...but Mary didn't...Paul did...Mary wasn't...Job was miserable and tested...Mary wasn't ......


You say the Blessed Mother wasn't tested? I say she was pained beyond comprehension....Simeon prophecied that "her own soul a sword shall pierce" St.Luke 2.

Picture the scenes on the way of the Cross on Good Friday..."the mother of Jesus was there." You say she wasn't afflicted...I say endeavor to see and hear and feel what she was going through uniting herself with the Passion of her Divine Son who became the Lamb of God, for the Sacrifice at Calvary. Try to conceive the sorrow that penetrated her heart when her Son was so cruelly mocked, spit on, scourged, crowned with thorns, and made to carry His Cross, there when He was crucified and died.

LULA posts:

KFC POSTS: # 102

AD POSTS #110

AD, your inclusion of the word Pentecost here caught my eye and encouraged me to do some research using the Catholic Encyclopedia. I was curious how the Hebrew feast of Pentecost related to Acts 2:1-41 and the Church's celebration of the feast of Pentecost aka Whitsunday, if at all.

This is what I discovered and may be familiar to you and KFC.

Going way, way back the date of the harvest thanksgiving feast must have varied according to the conditions of the crops Ex. 23:16; 34:22. When the commemoration of the Passover was joined to the Feast of Unleavened Bread (massot) the date for the Feast of First Fruits was set 7 weeks after massot, thus the name Feast of Weeks Ex.34:22; Num 28:26; Dt.16:10 which explains your 7 weeks plus one, making it 50 days. Since the time that elapsed between the offering of the first fruits, (on the day after the Sabbath of the massot) and the day after the 7th Sabbath, was a period of 50 days, the Feast of Weeks was called the "fiftieth day" or Pentecost by the later Greek speaking Jews 2Machabees 12:31-32; Tobias 2:1.

According to Ex. 19:1, the Hebrews arrived in Sinai in the 3rd month after leaving Egypt. When the feasts of the Passover and of Unleavened Bread were combined and fixed in the middle of the 1st month, the following 7-week period until Pentecost would approximate the time between the Exodus and the arrival at Sinai.

A feast celebrated by Asa to renew the Covenant may have been the Pentecostal feast 2Chron. 15:10-12 but the first unequivacal testimony to this commemoration of the giving of the Law at pentecost is in the late noncanonical Book of Jubilees. Evidently, it was until the 2nd century that its connection with the Covenant was admitted by rabbis.

We know the First Pentecost was distinguised from the Hebrew Pentecost by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The connection between the two is the material harvest which the Hebrews celebrated so joyously became through GOd's providence, the symbol of the spiritual harvest which the Apostles began to reap on this day.

A side note: We know from Scripture and Tradition that 50 days after Christ's Resurrection was the first Pentecost. That matches with our celebrating Easter Sunday (ahem...Resurrection Sunday )on March 23rd; 40 days later will celebrate Christ's Ascension on May 1 and then 10 days later, the Feast of Pentecost on Sunday May 11.

KFC POSTS:

Imputed?

You use "impute" twice...

I always understood we  inherited Original Sin, not that it was imputed upon us.

Your other use that Christ's perfection is imputed to us baffles me.

 

 

 

 

 

KFC POSTS:

I understand your larger point....

but wasn't Christ's entry into Jerusalem triumphant?  I think it was.

 

 

I don't think so really. Sure, he died for our sins and loosed us from the bondage of sin and death. That was a triumph. Yes...so you could look at it that way.

But he came for his own and his own rejected him and he wept. He was sad about that. But of course God foreknew this would all happen and because of the rejection of the Jewish Nation he turned to the Gentiles and that was a good day for us.

But I don't look at Good Friday as Good Friday. Where did that term originate? I mean there is good and not so good attached here. We beat him, scorned him, spit on him, mocked him and gave him sour vinegar to drink as we watched him die. That was good?

The resurrection part was the good part.

Imputed is in scripture. It's a term I hear quite often. It's like a banking term. Adams sin was imputed (added to our account) and Christ's righteousness also paid that account in full as his righteousness was imputed to our account.

"Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not IMPUTE sin." Rom 4:8

"And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness." Rom 4:22

See also, Rom 4:23, James 2:23, Rom 5:13, 2 Cor 5:19, Lev 17:4, 25, 19:19

Lula posts: #132

I also should have asked what the difference between Sanctifying Grace and Actual Grace.
It wasn't until you responed with this that I realized we still need to discuss...

KFC POSTS:

LULA POSTS # 143:

KFC POSTS #144

There are two passages from which it can be understood...Genesis 3: 15, where Christ and His mother are both spoken of as enemies of Satan and of sin: He absolutely sinless as the Son of God, and she sinless, as full of grace, by God's special prerogative and gift, and St.Luke 1:28.

Because I want to make my point by discussing sanctifying Grace, kecharitmoena vs charitoo, I'll focus on our Blessed Mother always being "full of grace".

Again, that the Blessed Mother Mary was born without Original Sin is found in St.Luke 1:28. The Angel Gabriel said, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee".
The phrase "full of grace" is a translation of the Greek word "kecharitimena". It expresses a characteristic quality or state of being in Mary. The Grace given to her is permanent and of a unique kind. "Kecharitimena" is a perfect passive participle of "charitoo", meaning to fill or endow with grace. And this is no small deal.

Since the term is in the perfect tense, it indicates that Mary was graced in the past with continuing effects in the present. So, the Grace Mary enjoyed was not a result of the angel's visit, it was from the beginning of her life from conception onward.

The Immaculate Conception means that Mary, whose conception was brought in the normal way between her father, St.Joachim and mother, St.Anne, was conceived without Original SIn or its stain...that's what immaculate means..without stain of sin.

God created Adam and Eve in a state of sanctfying grace..they were without sin. They committed Original Sin and were punished as are all of their descendents...Original Sin and its stain is a corrupt nature is transferred to us at our conception...so, in essence we are born deprived of sanctifying grace. The Blessed Mother Mary was preserved from these defects by GOd's grace...from the first instance of her existence, at her conception, she was in the state of sanctifying grace, she was "full of grace", and free from the corrupt nature Original Sin brings.

Now, the theology that behind all this is a bit thick to go through, but it's there. None of this contradicts Scripture.

This is what the Church infallibly teaches on this: "the doctrine which declares that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of ALmighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God, and therefore must be believed firmly and consistently by all the faithful." (Ineffablilis Deus).

I realize that you will most probably not accept this becasue the theology behind St.Luke 1:28 is based on Tradition.

And to that I would remind you that the Catholic Chruch was commissioned by Christ to teach all nations and to teach them infallibly--guided, as He promised, by the Holy Spirit until the end of the world St.John 14:26, 16:13. The mere fact that the Chruch teaches something is definitely true is a guarantee that it is true St.Matt. 28:18-20, St.Luke 10:16, 1Tim. 3:15.

I have no doubts that this is true as Christ told us to "hear the Church" St.Matt. 18:17 DRV...and that's what I'm doing.