www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West The Roman Catholic Church is not the One True Church

Opps.. sorry everyone. I was seing red last night. Hard headed is not from Archbiship Sheen.

I admit there is plenty of speculation on my part.

I would be intereted an an Orthdox intepretation of that passage. Does anybody know of one? Is the RC the only one?

-ray

Are we just going to accept the old positions and agree to disagee? Everyone re-entrenched without re-examining these things? Close our minds and not even try? Afraid for a new look.

In many cases I guess so.

Just this sort of thing irritates me about Infalability .. the way to be .. the thing to do .. is to be 'right'. The right church. The right theology. The right quotes. Being 'right' is elevated to that which saves you and damns your brother as a fool in your own mind.

This is not the way.

What have we done!

"Love one another" has been removed and "get it right" has been put in its place.

Whatever is right with Infalibility - it also has this side effect ... division, disagreement entrenched and masurading as holiness. Chritianity has become a study. A test of intellect. For some of us - for too many of us.

-ray

Today I am going to probably be thinking about how the "Primacy of being right" has been the cause of all Christian division down through the ages. I am going to be asking God ... "Jesus - is that what you wanted - for us to be - right? Heaven depends upon intellectual powers?" Being right is a replacement for living by conscience?

Of course I do know the answer to that question.

See you all next week when my own peace returns.
-ray

Well, there can be no replacement for truth. Of course charity and living by conscience is of high significance, but without being properly informed this may not be enough. If I have the wrong ideas about a given theology, I may believe that homosexuality is ok and be acting within my consciene and chritably but actually harming myself and others. I know it is painful when subjects are so complex and dividing, and I feel the difficulty of that as well, but we still need to do our best to search for truth and live in charity.
However, while not endorsing any sort of intellectual suicide, I personally think that joining an apostolic church means that we are free to some extent to have personal opinion (where it does not disagree with that of our church, or is not defined) but we are also called to be faithful to the theology clearly laid out by those above us or tradition or Bishops or magisterium or creeds or wherever else they come from. If you are Catholic then you are called to accept the Catholic views entirely as much as you can. Now that may leave you some room to interpret passages differently, or look for alternative ways to explain or understand a doctrine, but you are not free to deny the doctrine exists or say we should change it outright. Fact is that we believe the faith can not change but only that deeper understandings may develop and disciplines may alter. But as the faithful we can not just pick and choose how we want to see things or how we wish passages should b einterpreted. Just as an Orthodox Christian is not free to believe exactly in what Catholics believe about the pope (I hope someday we rreach a mutual agreement about what should be believed) a Catholic is not free to deny infallibility or insinuate that the keys are not uniquely given to Peter (and the other apostles as well, but uniquely Peter).
It is good for us to investigate the theology and see what is there, but it seems to me like a lot of people want to decide what they perosnally want to believe instead of accepting the faith as it is handed down and work on being faithgul to it. I think this is what will frustrate you most. If we focus on obedience more than intellectual 'being righ and figuring things out' that we wil be happy. Is there no room for dialogue and debate? Sure there is.We need to hash these things out. But I think as members of churches who have satrong existing ideas about these doctrines we need to be careful in not going too far beyond what has been laid out for us and seek more to better understand or clarify what we believe than to change it or find something new.

I meant nothing as an insult. I apologize if you are offended.
Please PM me about concerns about specific "insults."

Please provide a citation on Archbishop Sheen. I suspect you took it out of context. I can easily admit that Peter was hard headed but to say that the name Peter was a friendly nickname for hardheaded is something very different.
I forgot to mention your unusual use of Ecclessia to mean the government of the church. Ecclessia means assembly. I admit that Jesus was building the government of the church on Peter but also the whole assembly as well. Jesus made Peter prime minister as in Isaiah.

Ray,

I think you've struck an important note here.

I have often reflected on the fact that Revelation 2:6 states, "But you have this in your favor: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate." Here Our Lord is focusing not on teaching but on works. While it is certainly true that right teaching will produce right works and wrong teaching wrong works, it is likewise true that the works are ultimately the proof of the teaching.

In fact, we could paraphrase James 2:18b to read: "Demonstrate your doctrine to me without works, and I will demonstrate my doctrine to you from my works." While partisans of both Catholic and Orthodox communions will be quick to point out some very excellent and holy works (=fruits) that can be attributed to their respective members, that only serves to prove the point: like it or not, neither side has a monopoly on God's grace!

Both sides staunchly contend that there can only be one true, visible Church, and that other Church bodies are at best 'defective in some way.' How about recognizing that the crack runs right through the heart of the Church, and that we're all guilty of the sin of disunity--in direct defiance of Our Lord's prayer in John 17:20-23:
Note also that the purpose of this unity will be to serve as a sign unto the world--we can't have this kind of unity without being changed as a result, and that change will make us what we were supposed to be as Christians in the first place!


Peace,
Deacon Richard

(P.S. Does this make me a "Zoghbian?"--I guess so!)

I have thought about the view presented above quite a lot lately and here is my question:

"How do you have real unity, without the union of the mind?"

Human words, which express human thought which dimly reflect the Word, must truly reflect the truth which exists in the Truth in person, Jesus Christ.

The Church, East and West, have always regarded what one thinks (which is a human activity--perhaps the most important human activity) as vitally important and hence the anathemas throughout history. It seems to me that the Catholic Church (of which I think St. James was a vital part) in its recent clarification has, it seems to me, acknowledged that while it does not have a monoply on grace, nonetheless, the fullness of grace and truth subsists in it and flows from it. That of course does not deny that it is full of sinners of whom I am the first. Nonetheless, it does point to the fact that the oneness which we seek truly exists within the Catholic Church in a way in which it does not in other Churches.

Patriarch Latham's comments don't seem to coincide with 2,000 years of normative, authoritative Catholic teaching. I'm unaware of any dogmatic changes that Pope John XXIII introduced here. In fact, the Second Vatican Council, as I understand it, restated authoritative teachings on both papal jurisdictional supremacy as well as papal infallibiilty.

Best,
Robster

I would say it is best to say that the Roman Catholic Church is part of the one true Church. Many other churches can claim to be the one true Church that is...part of it.

The One True Church must surely be made us of those Christians who follow a Christian life within the Apostolic structure Our Lord has given us and the universally accepted teaching that is derived from that structure through the action of Holy Spirit powerfully within the Councils of ther Church. Councils such as the Council of Jerusalem we read of in Acts. Christians furthest away from this God given structure must be furthest from the One True Church. This by no means to suggest that they do not have a great love for God who will give his tender love to all who call upon his Holy Name. However if we know the Apostolic Structure is that which God has given to us,then in love for him we will want to live within it. To those outside we will want to do all we can to bring them into this awesome relationship that God who is Father ,Son and Holy Spirit has given us.We will approach these Christians with great love and care and gently explain who relationship with God in the one true Church brings us his grace in the special way he has determined for us.

Thank you Father!

As a roman catholic priest I would not have expected such a nice "commercial" for the Orthodox Church!!!

I hate to say it but you do not present the church's teaching.
The One True church of Christ subsists in the Catholic church.
The Catholic church is the one true church and other churches and ecclessial communities have a share in some of the truth but no other church is it as much as the Catholic church.
The Catholic church has all the marks of the one true church.
We cannot say that The Catholic church is just a part of the one true church. The fullness of the one true church is in the Catholic church.

Sorry I can't figure out to insert the image. Some help here. The image is on my computer not on a website.

We have above an image with a transliteration and a translation.
First we have the Greek and underneath an English transliteration.
What is a transliteration? It is a literal translation of a word or phrase. It is not a translation but the first step in translating.
On the right hand side is the translation.

Yes the transliteration agrees with Kaliss. But the translation doesn�t.
What does that tell us? It tells us that the transliteration is not how it should be translated. Why shouldn�t it be translated that way?
It could be for several reasons: grammar, sense (meaning) or style.

What is important to note is that no one in 2000 years has submitted a bible with it translated as in the transliteration.

Here are some modern examples of transliterations.
Spanish:Ven.. Ya voy.
Transliteration: Come.. I am already going.
English translation: Come here. �I�m coming.

From the transliteration, I could make a case that the person is not coming at all but heading somewhere else and is on his way there now so can�t come.

Spanish: Se habla Espanol.
Transliteration: Spanish speaks itself.
Translation: Spanish is spoken here or We or I speak Spanish.
From the transliteration, I can make the fantastic case that no one is needed as a translator at all since everything is automatically translated in Spanish since Spanish speaks itself.

Neither of these transliterations hold water since they are very literal translations (transliterations) as anyone who has ever studied another language understands.

Conclusion: You can't do your reasoning from the transliteration.

lm,

Thank you for helping me to clear this up. I was not suggesting, as some have, a kind of unity in which we 'agree to disagree' on fundamental issues. My suggestion is that we begin our discussions from the premise that our disunity is indeed a "scandal" (as I believe JPII called it) and that, far from being at risk of sacrificing the integrity of divinely revealed Truth by pursuing the path of unity, we are actually keeping our presentation of that Truth distorted by not pursuing it.

In other words, true unity is both God's will for us and His gift. Did Jesus not say, "seek and ye shall find?" Our disunity has persisted through the centuries for a number of identifiable reasons, but one very important one has been a sense of certainty on both sides that "we" alone possess the full and perfect expression of the Truth as revealed by God, and if "they" fail to embrace it fully, it can only be due to malice on their part. Thus, we did not seek and did not find.

Is Papal Infallibility, for example, part of the integrity or part of the distortion? Is there a way we can express it that will be acceptable to all? ("All" here meaning both RC and EO faithful, not unbelievers.) Such questions can be answered if we start from the principles mentioned above and painstakingly evaluate the pro's and con's in light of them.

What will the answers be? I can't pretend to know. I do believe, however, that Divine Truth expressed in human words can very easily get "lost in the translation," and that a better expression can always be found (remember, we're talking about a God who is infinite).

As a Catholic, I cannot reject this statement off hand. However, my respect for the EOs is such that I can affirm it only with a certain reluctance.


Peace,
Deacon Richard