The
Dogma
Of Baptism
Upheld
& the
Lie of
‘Faith
Alone’
Cast Down
+ + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + +
Wherein
Protestant
Denial of the
Need
for Baptism & Other Good Works
In
Christ Is Revealed to Be a Diabolic Deception;
Along
With a Partial Defense of Saintly & Marian
Veneration,
& a Denunciation of ‘Sola Scriptura’,
Talmudic
Jews & Modernist Scholars, etc.
COMPOSED
& EDITED DECEMBER 2006 TO JUNE 2007.
MINOR
REVISIONS FEBRUARY 2008.
+ + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + +
“Go ye
into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that
believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be
condemned.” (Mark 16:15-16 DRC)
“Wherefore casting
away all uncleanness, and abundance of naughtiness, with meekness receive the
ingrafted word, which is able to save your souls. But be ye doers of the word,
and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if a man be a hearer of
the word, and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his own
countenance in a glass. For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently
forgot what manner of man he was. But he that hath looked into the perfect law
of liberty, and hath continued therein, not becoming a forgetful hearer, but a
doer of the work; this man shall be blessed in his deed.” (James 1:21-25
DRC)
“For you, brethren,
have been called unto liberty: only make not liberty an occasion to the flesh,
but by charity of the spirit serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in
one word: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ (Leviticus
19:18c) …Bear ye one another’s burdens; and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ… Be not deceived, God is not
mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. For he that soweth in the flesh, of the flesh also shall reap
corruption. But he that soweth in the spirit, of the
spirit shall reap life everlasting. And in doing good, let us not fail. For in
due time we shall reap, not failing. Therefore, whilst we have time, let us
work good to all men, but especially to those who are of the household of the
faith.” (Galatians 5:13-14, 6:2, 7-10 DRC)
“Behold, I come
quickly; and my reward is with me, to render to every man according to his
works. I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
Blessed are they that wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb: that they may
have a right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city.
Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and unchaste, and murderers, and servers of
idols, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie. I Jesus have sent my angel, to testify to you
these things in the churches.” (Apocalypse 22:12-16a DRC)
+ + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + +
Intended by the Author
of This Book
for the Greater
Glory of the Adorable Triune Catholic God,
for the Worship of
the Sacred Heart of King Jesus Christ of
for the Praise of
the Immaculate Heart of Queen Mary, the Blessed Ever-
Virgin Mother of
God,
unto the Protection
& Propagation of the Holy Roman Catholic Church &
Her Most
Precious Heavenly Dogmas,
and
under the Euphonious
Patronage of St. Cecilia, the Eloquent Patronage
of St. Catherine
of
Ven. Mariana de
Jesus Torres, Virgins &
Martyrs.
“Domine, non est
exaltatum cor meum, neque elati
sunt oculi mei. Neque ambulavi
in magnis, neque in mirabilibus super me. Si non humiliter sentiebam, sed exaltavi animam
meam; sicut ablactatus est
super matre sua, ita retributio in anima mea. Speret
St. Francis Xavier, Patron of Catholic
Missioners, and Ss. Catherine of Alexandria & Francis of Sales, Patrons of
Catholic Philosophers & Apologists, respectively, may you be pleased to
guide this arrow to its target, either unto eternal life or eternal death!
“Now thanks be to God, who always maketh us to
triumph in Christ Jesus, and manifesteth the odour of
his knowledge by us in every place. For we are the good odour of Christ unto
God, in them that are saved, and in them that perish. To the one indeed the
odour of death unto death: but to the others the odour of life unto
life.” (2 Corinthians 2:14-16b DRC)
St.
Francis of Assisi, Humble Seraph of the Incarnate God, and St. Dominic the
Preacher, Dogged Cherub of the Triune Deity, pray for your children that they
may not fail the test but suffer the malice of the wicked gladly and so gain
the Crown of Life!
+
+ + + +
Part One of The Dogma of Baptism Upheld & the Lie of
‘Faith Alone’ Cast Down (1 Letter Consisting of 1 Prefacing
Note & 23 Chapters)
+
+ + + +
A NOTE TO THE
READER:
I sent the letters which follow to my parents as a final
admonishment that they convert to the Catholic Church, abandoning the false
religion of a so-called ‘born again christianity’. They are final
because I don’t plan --- barring a sudden & miraculous show of good
will upon my parents’ part, or an urgent need to prevent the aforesaid
from spreading further deception --- to waste my effort on those who are
stubbornly blind in their rebellion, and because I have told them already many
a time, whether by letter or in person, the Saving Truth of Rome’s
Eternal Gospel. Should men heed neither God’s Catholic Church nor His
Sacred Scripture nor even reason itself, then “neither will they
believe, if one rise again from the dead.” (Luke 16:31c-d DRC, all
emphasis mine in this and other quotations from Sacred Scripture, unless
otherwise noted)
Please note, then (for there are some who will accuse me of
injustice), that I did not angrily demand anything from my parents immediately
after my conversion; I did not illogically expect them to convert without first
investigating carefully what I said. And I did not speak severely or stridently
to them to begin with. To the contrary, I was far too soft-spoken, kowtowing to
their prejudices and not wishing to provoke a fight. No, what led to these
letters --- ten years after I’d started converting --- was the
mere fact that I had converted. They couldn’t stand seeing me act
like a Catholic & couldn’t bear hearing me talk like a Catholic, all
the while they insisted on keeping me company. And although I wouldn’t go
out of the way to chide them for their heresy, disparaging remarks about the
Catholic Faith would slip from my mother’s mouth, usually in emails, and
sometimes a fiery tirade. Which in turn would force me to respond in defense of
the Faith. Sadly, neither she nor my father would ever grapple realistically
with Catholicism, they instead relying upon old Protestant fables & secular
biases. No amount of asking or explanations on my part could ever convince them
that they needed to take the hard evidence & good sense of the Church seriously… until these
letters. Yet even so they wouldn’t back down, admitting their wrongs
against God’s Catholic Religion. Hence my final stridency: they had
exhausted all other more pleasant & amiable approaches. Anything less was
to let them get away with murder --- murder both of Catholicism and of their
souls.
The first letter I present refutes the Protestant heresy, very
common nowadays, that baptism of water is in no way necessary to the reception
of everlasting life, and the still more prevalent lie that it is by ‘faith
alone’ that a man shall save his soul. In the shorter letter from me
immediately previous to the one that begins this offering, I focused on the
necessity of water baptism for entrance into Heaven. My mother, amongst other
heretical strategies, tried to respond by arguing that Jesus’ words in
John 3:5 about being “born of water” do not mean a baptism of water
but, rather, birth in the flesh from the womb of a woman. This is typical of
Evangelic Protestants, who arose in reaction against the liberal tendencies of
mainline Protestantism in the late 1800s; as a young boy I can remember asking
her about this phrase and getting told a similar thing. May God pardon my
mother since, even then at the tender age of eight years or less, she was
detaining my soul from grasping the truths of the Roman Faith. Ergo, my
rebuttal began from that point, using Sacred Scripture & solid reasoning to
show how all Protestants, whose ancestors revolted against Catholicism in the
early 1500s and attacked every good work as irrelevant to the attainment of
salvation, are not only anti-Catholic but are also necessarily --- and thus
consequently --- anti-Bible & anti-Christ. Examination of the ‘faith
alone’ heresy confirms the same.
I gravely exhort the reader of this book, especially those who bear
the name of Catholic, to take to heart what I have said in the paragraph above.
Too often during these apostate times, as well as in the centuries of laxity
since the Protestant Revolt that led to the Great Apostasy, it has been the naïve
assumption that most Protestants are of ‘good will’, being merely
‘innocently misled’ and certain to change their opinion of
Catholicism were they only able to know how wrong they have been. Such is not
the case.
Men do not end up by ‘accident’ where they are, and do
not reside in religious darkness through no fault of their own. God sees all
things and is in perfect control of all things; therefore, be a man of truly
good will, then God will see to it that such a man
receives whatever he needs in order to convert to the Catholic Faith before he
leaves his life on earth. Men who do not convert --- who live their whole lives
born, raised and dying in Protestant heresy --- are not simply
‘innocently ignorant’, they are culpably blind. My own conversion
and the countless heretics I knew prior to my conversion to the True Faith are
proof of this sad fact. Most Protestants are not of good will. They are
perniciously obstinate, content to remain in their evil lies.
Such men desperately need our prayers. But they also need to be
confronted by unabashed Catholics who are not afraid to live & speak the
Saving Truth before their eyes. The latter alone will not necessarily effect
many conversions; nonetheless, it will impress minds, preparing the fields for
later harvest in God’s own good time. So, then, Catholics, fathom the
wickedness of your foe. May these letters help you to do just that, forming
offensive strategies against their attacks. And should you, my dear reader, be
a heretic, then know that Catholics hold the Sword of Truth --- and that we
will use it against you, either unto your spiritual death or (which we vastly
prefer) unto your spiritual salvation.
That made clear, only a little more is left to preface. It being
unavoidably obvious that these letters are meant to refute my parents and this
being a concluding rebuke after years of testimony in their sight both by word
and in deed, I offer their texts for public perusal, for the Glory of the
Triune God of the Catholic Church, and for the conversion of souls to the same,
with only the following alterations or policies:
One, I have removed my parents’ given names to protect their
privacy.
Two, I haven’t included the overall texts of their letters
since they never intended them for publication, and since the responses are
often tediously heretical, endangering the soul who reads them, and not
necessary for understanding my rebuttals. The sole exceptions are brief quotes
from a few of their letters, especially near the end of this book.
Three, in several instances I have removed single paragraphs of
purely mundane or otherwise inconsequential significance, for the sake of flow
& clarification.
And, four, I have made a scattering of minor revisions --- mainly
typos corrected, with some phrases modified and a few paragraphs added, so as
to avoid wrong interpretations or needless scandal --- and especially to the epistle which
begins this book, it being the longest & most intricate.
Finally, concerning my use of the King James Version (KJV) and the
much more recent yet extremely popular New International Version (NIV) ---
being Protestant or Evangelic translations of the Bible --- let what I wrote
for the introduction to Catholic Ritual Defended also stand here:
“Incidentally, my relentless citation of Sacred Scripture is
not meant to champion the Bible as a final authority for one’s religious
beliefs, nor is my quoting from a Protestant translation meant to encourage
people to trust in that translation. While a priceless gift from Heaven, the
Bible saturates the text below because conservative Protestants claim to
respect its words. And I quote from the King James Version (KJV) because it is
a classic Protestant rendering and hence impossible for heretics to impugn when
it plainly upholds the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, I warn
everyone to beware of the many pernicious errors that fill heretical bibles
from one end to the other. The only good reason for trolling their pages is to
gather bait whereby souls might be fished into the Ark of Salvation, and then
only if thoroughly armed against the evil that lies coiled between their
covers.”
Whereupon I shortly thereafter closed with the following:
“May anything which is true or praiseworthy in this work be
attributed to the efforts of the Blessed Trinity. And may anything that is
false or blameworthy be laid firmly in accusation at my own wayward
feet.”
+ + + 1. Letter of 14 February 2007 + + +
+
+ + 1a. What Makes a Man a Man + + +
Dear Mother & Father,
If the phrase “born of water” (the KJV bible in John
3:5c, Jesus’ words) means “natural birth” (email of
January 24th, your words), then Jesus’ words in
John’s Gospel make no good sense. Because He very literally declares:
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be
born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
Now I ask you, when is a man not naturally born?
That is to say, when is a man ever not the product of
“natural birth”?
A human being is --- by definition ever since the miraculous making
of Adam’s body from the mud of this earth, not to mention the marvelous
formation of Eve’s flesh from his rib --- always born naturally
from the womb of a woman! Or, to put it differently, a man cannot ever
be a man unless he first inhabits a mother’s womb. Therefore, if Jesus by
His literal words intended to metaphorically communicate what you
claim is their hidden meaning, then Jesus actually said:
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be a man
and born of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
This phrasing is not only mindlessly repetitive but also stupidly
absurd. And yet it irrefutably results from your willful misinterpretation of
Sacred Scripture. Quoting the same verse from the NIV makes your heretical
error even more plain to see by putting Jesus’ literal words into
today’s language:
“I tell you the truth, unless a man is born of water
and the Spirit, he cannot enter the
Whereas, according to your willful misinterpretation, Jesus actually
said:
“I tell you the truth, unless a man is a man and born
of the Spirit, he cannot enter the
And again I ask… when is a man ever not a man?
When is it ever the case that a man could even be a man --- i.e., a physical
descendant of the first man, Adam --- when, in fact, he does not first
inhabit the womb of a woman, his mother? Every single man in existence,
since the beginning of time in the
Grasping this, we see how Jesus’ words become not only
mindlessly repetitive, misunderstood as you would have us misunderstand them,
but also stupidly absurd. For John 3:5 is a conditional statement. To
wit, a sentence that first sets up a condition to be met before a
particular result can either follow or fail to follow:
“…unless a man is born of water and the
Spirit [condition set up in order to be met], {then} he cannot
enter the
Consequently, how can this conditional statement make any
sense when, as your misinterpretation would have it, Jesus actually
meant to say:
“…unless a man is a man and
born of the Spirit [condition set up to be met], {then} he cannot
enter the
Yet again I ask, when is a man not ever a man? How
can one of the conditions that Jesus supposedly tells a man to meet --- that he
first be a man --- make any good sense to say to him when
Jesus’ listener, a man, is already that which he’s being
told that he must be in order to get what he desires? It’s
like telling a butterfly-destined type of caterpillar:
“…unless a caterpillar is a caterpillar
and transforms in the cocoon [condition], then you cannot become
a butterfly. [result]”
Or as if you told a fish:
“…unless a fish is a fish and
lives in water [condition], then you cannot swim.
[result]”
When is a caterpillar not ever a caterpillar? When is a fish not
ever a fish? A caterpillar is a caterpillar or else we would not call it a
caterpillar in the first place. Likewise, a fish is a fish or else we would not
call it a fish to begin with! To establish a category of things at the start of
a condition, as laid down initially in a conditional statement,
by calling a thing what it is, using its common name (whether that be the
category of a man, a caterpillar, a fish or what-have-you), is not then in part
distinguished further by the rest of a condition that you lay
down in the first half of the conditional statement, when the rest of
the condition contains only a repetition of what you have
already said about it.
Do you comprehend?
Jesus was laying down ground rules. He was telling all men via one
particular man --- in this case, Nicodemus --- what were the conditions for a
man to enter Heaven. Doing so, He established an initial category, the category
of ‘men’, wherein He says, “…unless a man…”
He then distinguishes a part of this larger category of all men by making
further conditions for certain obedient men to belong to a smaller category
within this much larger category. To wit, where He says, “…unless a
man [initially established larger category of all men] is born of
water and the Spirit… [further distinguished
smaller category of some men within this larger group of all men]”
Do you see?
In the technical terminology of ‘set theory’, Jesus
first establishes a larger set and then distinguishes a smaller set within this
larger set. To wit, He first talks about all men and then makes it clear
how only men that are “born of water and the Spirit”
can belong to a smaller group of men within that larger group of men --- a
subset within a set. The larger set is thus already established, by
obvious definition of what a ‘man’ really is, to consist of
those who are naturally born, i.e., of those who come from the womb of a
woman. The subset therefore cannot be distinguished as a unique
subset within this larger set unless it exacts further conditions
from its members that consequently separate them in a unique way as a subset
from the members of the larger set out of which they are drawn. Talking
about “natural birth” --- exiting from the womb of a woman --- does
not do this. Because all men already are, by definition in the first place,
past inhabitants of a woman’s womb, being naturally born. What then makes
the smaller group of men out of all men total any different from this larger
group of all men by describing the smaller group as ‘naturally
born’ when, in fact, all men are naturally born and the smaller group of
men, taken as belonging to the much larger group of all men, is already rightly
described as such?
How can this make any good sense of Jesus’ words in John 3:5?
It doesn’t!
But does this seem complicated?
It’s not.
It’s extremely simple. The only reason it sounds
complicated is that your heretical prejudices twist the verse into saying what
it does not mean, what Jesus never intended His simple and straightforward
words here to complicatedly and awkwardly signify. As a result, I have to get
very tedious and intricate to make plain what is already obvious! Yet we need
not rely on my lengthy explanation. Jesus’ own words are sufficient. For
what does He say to Nicodemus right before John 3:5?
+
+ + 1b. The Second Birth
+ + +
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born
again, he cannot see the
To which Nicodemus responds with barely suppressed derision:
“How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter
the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?”
(John 3:4b-c KJV)
The NIV translates his sarcastic disbelief a little more easily for
modern minds to see:
“How can a man be born when he is old? …
Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb
to be born!” (John 3:4 NIV)
Note carefully Jesus’ words and Nicodemus’ response.
Jesus was talking about being born again --- and not about a
first birth, which is the natural birth of a man exiting his mother’s
womb. The proof of this, as if any were needed, is in Nicodemus’ derision
of the very idea of a man entering “a second time into his mother’s
womb to be born…” (John 3:4 NIV) A derision that Jesus does not in
factual substance --- in contrast to the human sentiment of Nicodemus’
response --- refute but allows to stand. Therefore, Jesus could not have
been referring to a first or ‘natural birth’ in John 3:5
since he makes quite clear immediately after John 3:5 how it is the second
or ‘supernatural birth’ that He is talking about. Namely, where He
says:
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is
born of the Spirit is spirit.” (John 3:6 KJV)
Consequently, how can He at all, even if only in part, have been
talking about a man being born the first time in flesh via a natural
birth by saying “except a man be born of water and of the
Spirit” (John 3:5c KJV), when, in fact, He’s already made plain in
John 3:3 --- prior to John 3:5 --- that it’s being born again
that He speaks of, and when --- after John 3:5 --- He makes it plain
once more that it’s not flesh He’s been talking about, but, rather,
that it’s being born the second time in spirit via a
supernatural birth which He’s announcing? How, then, can Jesus have
meant “born of water” to mean, metaphorically, ‘natural
birth’, when all of this is very simply, sensibly & literally evident
in the Bible?
Furthermore, should you take John 3:6 above and try to have it
‘chastise’ Catholics for teaching water baptism as necessary unto a
man’s salvation, saying it makes being “born again” (John
3:3c KJV) into a birth “of the flesh” (John 3:6a KJV) by having
this second birth refer to something of a physical nature rather than of a
‘spiritual’ nature, then know that you play with a double-edged
sword, slicing yourself just as easily as you would suppose yourself to slice
me. Think about it:
If Jesus meant, when He said “That which is born of the flesh
is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit…” (John
3:6 KJV), to condemn any and all flesh, or the use of any and all flesh, or any
and all earthly things, period, in the procurement of Salvation, then what in
the world are you doing by daring to teach that the Blood of Jesus
has anything to do with Salvation? Was not His Blood a mere physical
thing of the flesh, obtained by becoming a lowly man upon the earth?
Or what are you doing by daring to teach that the Death of His Body
upon the Cross --- His Flesh dying in excruciating agony --- had
anything to do with obtaining Salvation? Was not His Flesh, His Human Body, a
mere physical thing, both arisen from the earth via the Holy Womb of His
Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and then also residing on the earth eating,
drinking and otherwise partaking of mere physical things until His Bodily
Ascension into Heaven forty days after His Bodily Resurrection from the
tomb?
Do you espy the rank hypocrisy in your position?
To think that you dare to condemn Catholicism, which is the Faith
of Jesus Christ & His Apostles from the first century till the end of the
world, when you and your diabolical & filthy heresy do espouse the very
same thing, in principle, as being necessary unto a man’s salvation! How most
foully wicked of you.
Per your imaginations, were you to be consistent in your
misinterpretation of John 3:6, then God should never have been born like
a man, never lived upon the earth like a man, never
done all of the everyday things that men do, never suffered bodily
as a man, never died bodily crucified as a man, and never
bodily resurrected or bodily ascended into the heavens above as a man.
All of these things are utterly pointless if, as you claim out of your
imaginations, privately interpreting the Bible to mean whatever in the world
you want it to mean, physical flesh and earthly things are completely
irrelevant to God’s Sovereign Design to save ‘spiritually’
without regard to the things of this earth.
Instead, God should have remained a Spirit, choosing to speak to
men only invisibly through their hearts in an undeniable way that all men could
agree upon, and deigning to forgive them merely by their being sorry enough for
their sins, no ridiculous and useless (as blinded minds might see it) sacrifice
of flesh or blood being necessary in any way at all for the attainment of
salvation --- for let us remember that it is He Who decides what is sin and
what is necessary for its forgiveness, not some standard that exists apart from
and above Him, which somehow commands His submission to it --- not to mention
there being no need for a reprehensible and appalling torture of flesh both
prior to and during some sort of crucifixion. In this way, His Gift of
Salvation would have been purely ‘spiritual’ and not
flabbergastingly ‘natural’ or ‘earthly’
or ‘fleshly’.
Nor should you pretend that baptism of water is but a
‘work’, opposed to ‘faith’ or ‘belief’ and
thus not worthy in God’s Sight of being a requirement for the reception
of salvation. For it is semantics we indulge here, the attainment of salvation
achieved --- thinks the ‘born again believer’ like yourself --- by believing
in the historical Protestant ‘gospel’. The mere act of
belief therefore attains this Salvation from God, according to
‘bible believing christians’.
Ergo, we see how we may accuse the Protestant himself of practicing
a ‘gospel of works’. For a ‘work’ is simply what
someone ‘does’. And what is ‘believing’ if
not something we ‘do’? As the Jews asked, “What
shall we do, that we might work the works of God?”
And Christ replied, “This is the work of God, that ye believe
on him whom he hath sent.” (John 6:28b-c, 29b-c KJV) Believing is
thus a work. It is what you do to the
exclusion of all else in order to be ‘saved’; it is what you must
accomplish (think you) on your part in order for the Creator to uphold His
end of the deal. As a result, what you really mean to condemn when you
castigate a ‘gospel of works’ is a Gospel which demands certain overt
physical actions to please God. This, you dare to say, is wrong.
But, of course, you say wrongly. For not only have we what Jesus
said in John 6:29 to refute you --- God not condemning the idea of works
being made necessary by Him, in some way, to receive salvation, He instead
highlighting the fact of how belief is itself a work --- yet we have the
very simple and obvious fact that a man must first believe that
God has made baptism of water necessary unto salvation before he will even
begin to take baptism of water very seriously. And the proof of this is as plain
as day… for when have ‘born again christians’ like yourselves
ever either emphatically taught or urgently demanded that your children or one
of your new converts gets baptized as soon as is reasonably possible?
Never, my dear mother & father!
And I should know, having been brought up by you and participated
in Protestant congregations all my life until I was 33 years old. Never did
either you or any of them --- or myself before I converted to the One True
Faith of Roman Catholicism --- take water baptism very seriously. It was just
an ‘option’, a thing kind of good to do since, indeed, Jesus did
say to do it, but in no way urgent or critical. And why?
Because it is not necessary --- say you --- for the
reception of salvation.
Yet who are you to say anything regarding religion
when you have no legs to stand on? You say you rely on your
bibles, nonetheless, it is not your bibles that you rely upon.
Rather, it is your opinion of what your bibles say upon which you
rely. Yet who are you and what is your opinion
worth? Are you infallible? Or is any so-called ‘born again
christian’, to whom you may look for leadership, infallible?
No? Then how do you, and how does anyone in your religion, guarantee
knowledge of the Saving Truth, the whole Saving Truth, and nothing
but the Saving Truth, without any possibility of being wrong?
How do I know I won’t end up in Hell if I follow you and your private
interpretation of the Bible? Why isn’t my
interpretation of the Bible to be preferred instead? Or do you just pick and
choose, as you feel like it, what you’ll believe and how you’ll
interpret verses? Because, my dear parents, that’s what it comes down to.
That you choose based upon your purely personal whims ---
mere desires subject to the winds & tides of this life as men trace a
laborious path about the earth, shaping & persuading one another, the
baleful but invisible influence of innumerable demons throughout the world
stinging them into all sorts of religious lies and other iniquities --- what
you will believe and what you will not, or how you will interpret your bible
and how you will not.
In the meantime, and as we have already shown when it comes to the
baptism of water, your belief and your interpretation fly squarely in the face
of both the text of the Bible and also good sense itself. Jesus’ words
are stark. They are so obvious as to be able to reach out and poke the reader
in the eye. Never did Jesus use the phrase “born of water” in any
other passage to metaphorically refer to ‘natural birth’. Nor is
this phrase, to my knowledge, anywhere in Sacred Scripture ever used to refer
metaphorically to the exiting of a man from the womb of a woman. And, as if
that weren’t enough, never, as far as I know, has this phrase ever been
used by Jews, or by people anywhere on earth, to speak metaphorically of being
born naturally in the body from a mother’s womb. The phrase is, instead,
for the very first time anywhere, used here to describe a new kind of birth.
Birth not of flesh but of spirit. A rebirth that, contrary
to all the merely natural expectations held by most people living on earth in
their flesh corrupted by Adam’s Original Sin, flows forth from simple
water applied rightly to a man according to the Express Commandment &
Sovereign Will of the Almighty God.
To wit, that the Almighty Creator --- Who made Heaven & earth,
and all that exists, out of nothing by the Sovereign Word & Divine Spirit
of His Being --- sees fit, in His Mighty Power that is not bound by a
man’s carnal wishes or prejudices, to infuse spirit into the man that
humbly seeks to know, humbly resolves to believe and humbly carries out in
obedience His Commandment to be baptized in water so that he may be born
again supernaturally to gain what he could never have attained only
by birth the first time naturally. A humility of seeking,
believing & obedience much akin to the eventual obedience & humility of
Naaman, the Syrian captain afflicted by leprosy. Who,
seeking a cure in the land of Israel, was at first furious with Elisha the Prophet
for telling him to do such a simple and mundane thing as washing himself in the
little known water of the puny Jordan River in order to cleanse his leprosy.
+
+ + 1c. A Lesson for the Earthly Minded + + +
“And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, ‘Go
and wash in the
My dear parents, you are like the haughty and unbelieving Naaman. You want some ‘great’ and
‘spiritual’ means for achieving salvation, a doorway into Heaven
that requires nothing of you other than to remain in your religious Syria,
bathing in the rivers to which you are accustomed. Or, if you must travel,
departing from your former religion into the religion of another to which you
are not accustomed --- namely, Catholicism, which you despise --- then you seek
for a sufficiently ‘great’ and ‘spiritual’ sign or
wonder, a bit of theatricality that would demonstrate to you, in your earthly-mindedness,
how powerful the Catholic Faith is in the things of God. When, to the contrary,
all God tells you, as revealed in your very own bibles, is to believe and obey
all that He has commanded, beginning with baptism of water, such a simple and
mundane thing.
Your arrogant derision and worldly unbelief are palpable. Like
Nicodemus, the learned and worldly priest, you react with barely contained
scorn:
“How can a man be born when he is old? …
Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb
to be born!” (John 3:4 NIV)
And we can empathize a little bit with Nicodemus. After all, how could
a man be born “a second time”, physically crawling as a big, huge,
grown-up body back “into his mother’s womb” to be “born
again”? This is, humanly speaking, impossible. It is, under normal
circumstances, entirely ridiculous. Hence Nicodemus’ unbelief.
Nevertheless, neither Nicodemus nor you are thereby excused for unbelief. As
Jesus chided him:
“Art thou a master of
And He stated further:
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, we speak that we do know,
and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness. If I
have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe,
if I tell you of heavenly things?” (John 3:11-12 KJV)
The point is, dear mother & father, that your uncomprehending
derision of Jesus’ teaching on the necessity of baptism of water in order
to be saved is identical to, in principle, Nicodemus’ uncomprehending
derision of the same. Because water is but an earthly thing, and
Jesus’ teachings --- His doctrines --- about how men on earth are to
attain unto the Hope of Heaven, are “earthly things” since
they apply to men who are still on earth. Yet if you “receive
not” His witness regarding these things, then “how shall ye
believe” whenever you may hear what He said to men regarding “heavenly
things?”
For His words concerning the ‘earthly thing’ of
baptism in water are stark:
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he
cannot enter into the
Perfectly clear. Two things
required in order to “enter into the
Exclude either one of the two conditions, and a man cannot get into
Heaven… which is why being “born of water” is joined
grammatically, and thus logically, to “of the Spirit”
by the connective conjunction word, “and”. The two together
are required as conditions to get the result of entering Heaven --- both
“water” and “Spirit”.
Which makes still more of a mockery of your misinterpretation of
John 3:5. Because if Jesus merely subtly meant by His very literal words that solely
being born of the Spirit is necessary for Salvation, then not only are His
literal words in John 3:5 both mindlessly repetitious and stupidly absurd, but
He should not have said:
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot
enter into the
Rather, He should have said:
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
And Jesus should not have said:
“He that believeth and is baptized shall be
saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:16 KJV)
Instead, He should have said:
“He that believeth shall be saved; but he that
believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:16 RAMV --- Revised Archaic
Mother Version)
And Peter should not have said:
“Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the
name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift
of the Holy Ghost.” (Acts 2:38b-d KJV)
Rather, He should have said:
“Repent, and believeth every one of you in the
name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift
of the Holy Ghost.” (Acts 2:38b-d RAMV --- Revised Archaic Mother
Version)
And Peter also should not have said:
“For Christ… preached unto the spirits in prison; which
sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the
days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls
were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism
doth also now save us…” (1 Peter 3:18a, 19b-21a KJV)
Instead, He should have said:
“For Christ… preached unto the spirits in prison; which
sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the
days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls
were saved by belief. The like figure whereunto even belief
doth also now save us…” (1 Peter 3:18a, 19b-21a RAMV ---
Revised Archaic Mother Version)
And Jesus as well should not have said:
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching
them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and,
lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the
world. Amen.” (Matthew 28:19-20 KJV)
To the contrary, He should have said:
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, teaching
them to say a sinner’s prayer and believe in me and just ask me into
their hearts: and, lo, I am with you alway, even
unto the end of the world. Amen.” (Matthew 28:19-20 RAMV --- Revised
Archaic Mother Version)
Now, my dear parents, neither Jesus nor Peter said any of these
things… did they? In blatant contrast to the imaginary --- but wholly
accurate representation of what you want to believe is true ---
verses of the Revised Archaic Mother Version (RAMV) of the Bible, both Jesus
& Peter said, quite plainly, that which is opposite to what you want
to believe is true, being that which is actually true irregardless of
what you merely want to believe. Put another way, you twist the words of
your very own bibles to fit your preconceived Protestant, Evangelic &
Charismatic notions --- indeed, your traditions of men! --- ideas that are in direct
contradiction to what Jesus & Peter did most actually, literally
and obviously declare in Sacred Scripture.
End of sentence.
+
+ + 1d. Water of Holy Obedience, Spirit of True Belief + + +
So, then, let us dispense with your nonsense about real Catholics
thinking it is ‘baptism alone’ that saves a man. The Roman Catholic
Church since the AD 30s has never taught this, nor have I ever proclaimed such a
silly thing to you. Au contraire, the Catholic Faith infallibly insists --- and
I obediently follow Her words, they being the words of Her Lord, King Jesus
Christ of Nazareth, spoken by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth (John
14:16-17, 15:26-27), through Her, the Church, “…the house of God,
which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the
truth…” (1 Timothy 3:15 KJV) --- that a man gains the Hope of
Salvation by both believing in all that Jesus has commanded to be
taught through His Body, the Catholic Church, and by being
baptized in water.
Period.
Ergo why Jesus said:
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit,
he cannot enter into the
For to be “born of water” is to be baptized correctly
in water, and to be born “of the Spirit” is to believe everything
that this “Spirit” --- Who is the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of
truth” (John 14:17a, 15:26c KJV) --- teaches us through His Roman
Catholic Church, which alone is Jesus’ Body, being “the pillar and
ground of the truth.” (1 Timothy 3:15d
KJV) The two together are necessary unto the Hope of Salvation, both
of them decreed by the Sovereign Creator as indispensable to a man for him to
enter His Kingdom.
Ergo why Jesus also said:
“He that believeth and is baptized shall
be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:16 KJV)
For to “believeth” is to believe everything that
Jesus, Who is “the way, the truth, and the life”
(John 14:6b KJV), via the Holy Spirit, Who is the “Spirit of truth”
(John 14:17a, 15:26c KJV), through His Singular Body, the Roman Catholic
Church, which is “the pillar and ground of the truth”
(1 Timothy 3:15d KJV), teaches unto men for them to have infallible certainty
about how to save their souls, evading the lies of a wily Devil and the
tomfoolery of ignorant, obstinate, constantly dividing & perpetually
rebellious men. Meanwhile, to be “baptized” is to be baptized in
water, just as Jesus commanded, where He said, letting men know that baptism
is one of many things out of “all things whatsoever” (Matthew
28:20a KJV) that He most explicitly commands men to do:
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you:
and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of
the world. Amen.” (Matthew 28:19-20 KJV)
And just as Jesus Himself gave the example to do, as you passingly
acknowledge in section six of your January 24th email, by Himself
receiving baptism of water at the hands of John the Baptist:
“In those days came John the Baptist… But when he saw
many… come to his baptism, he said unto them, ‘I indeed baptize
you with water unto repentance…’ Then cometh Jesus from
Galilee to
And just as Jesus through His disciples practiced baptism of
water, proving it was not only John the Baptist who did so, and that the
Baptism which Jesus commanded men to receive was not merely a metaphorical kind
of ‘baptism of fire’ or ‘of spirit’, as modern minds
might see it, but was both a baptism of the Holy Spirit and also quite
actually, concretely, literally & objectively a baptism of water
as well:
“When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that
Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John (though
Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), he left Judaea, and
departed again into
A literal baptism of water proven by Jesus’ earliest
disciples, too, in that they very obviously understood His command to baptize
all nations (Matthew 28:19-20) to mean baptizing them in water, and not
just baptizing either figuratively or literally in the Holy Spirit, as they
inarguably demonstrated by baptizing disciples in water as soon
as was reasonably possible. E.g., Philip and the eunuch:
“And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain
water: and the eunuch said, ‘See, here is water; what doth
hinder me to be baptized?’ And Philip said, ‘If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest.’
And… they went down both into the water, both Philip and the
eunuch; and he baptized him.” (Acts 8:36-38 KJV)
And elsewhere Peter and the centurion when the latter --- both by
faith in all of the doctrines of Jesus & His Apostles, and as
evidence that the Creator intended Gentiles, also, to find Hope of Salvation by
entering into His Son’s Body, the Catholic Church --- received the
Holy Spirit, causing Peter to order him immediately baptized in water,
too:
“While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on
all them which heard the word. And they of the circumcision which believed were
astonished, as many as came with Peter, because that on the Gentiles also was
poured out the gift of the Holy Ghost… Then answered Peter, ‘Can
any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized,
which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?’ And he commanded
them to be baptized in the name of the Lord.” (Acts 10:44-45,
46c-48a KJV)
And Paul as well, who recounted his baptism, clearly
inferring the natural cleansing power of earthly water when by the
Sovereign Will of God it is miraculously empowered by Him to cleanse a man
supernaturally, at the hands of Ananias, by
saying:
“And one Ananias, a devout man
according to the law, having a good report of all the Jews which dwelt
there, came unto me, and stood, and said unto me, ‘Brother Saul, receive
thy sight… And now why tarriest thou? Arise,
and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the
name of the Lord.” (Acts 22:12-13c, 16 KJV)
Ergo then why Peter said, too:
“Repent, and be baptized every one of
you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive
the gift of the Holy Ghost.” (Acts 2:38b-d KJV)
+
+ + 1e. Keeping the Commandments + + +
For what shall a man “[r]epent”
of, except that he has sinned? And what is sin, except to break the
commandments? And what has God commanded of all men, if not to obey the Ten
Commandments that are encompassed in Jesus’ two greatest commandments?
Wherein He said:
“‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.’ This is
the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it,
‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ On these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew
22:37-40 KJV)
Yet how shall a man love God with all of his heart, soul
& mind, except that he in his rational mind
both have reasonable knowledge of and wittingly choose to obey all
God’s Commandments? As Jesus said, and as I have now several times
repeated to you:
“If ye love me, keep my commandments... He that hath my commandments,
and keepeth them, he it is that loveth
me... If a man love me, he will keep my words... He that loveth
me not keepeth not my sayings...” (John 14:15,
21a, 23b, 24a KJV)
And as I said in my email to you on January 21st
regarding these words of Jesus:
“Examine these words carefully, dear father & mother. A
man must keep Jesus’ commandments in order to love
Him. Nay, more --- a man must have Jesus’ commandments in
the first place to even begin obeying them and hence love Him. To not keep
them, whether because one does not have them to start with or because one has
them but purposely rebels against them, is to hate Jesus.”
Furthermore, as I then noted Jesus saying as well:
“He that is not with me is against me: and he
that gathereth not with me scattereth.”
(Luke 11:23 KJV)
Indeed, the penalty for not having all of
Jesus’ commandments, or not obeying all of His commandments
in spite of having all of them, is, according to Jesus, the following:
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every
branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth
fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth
more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word [teachings &
commandments] which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and
I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except
it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in
me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: he that abideth
in me, and I in him, the same bringeth
forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not
in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men
gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned…
As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in
my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in
my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his
love.” (John 15:1-6, 9-10 KJV)
There it is, my dear parents. If you don’t
“abide” in Jesus --- whether for not obeying His Commandments at
some point in time even after entering His Roman Catholic Body and unhappily
dying in this rebellion, or for never entering His Body, the Catholic Church,
in the first place because you didn’t seek for all His Catholic
Commandments --- then you cannot “abide” in the love of Jesus. He
will hate you. Dare to continue in this perilous state of existence, eventually
dying in it, then you are like one that is “cast forth as a branch”
and “cast… into the fire” where you are “burned.”
(John 15:6 KJV)
In a word, you die forever in the Fire of Hell!
For how is it a man loves the Almighty Creator with all his heart,
all his soul, and all his mind, therein obeying the “first and great
commandment”? (Matthew 22:38 KJV) Is not the second greatest commandment,
according to Jesus, to “love thy neighbor as thyself”? (Matthew
22:39b KJV) And is not this second greatest commandment a summing up of the
last seven (or, as Protestants would have it, the last six) of the Ten
Commandments? Does not the Apostle Paul confirm this wherein he says:
“Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he
that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
For this, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ (Deuteronomy 5:18),
‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Deuteronomy 5:17), ‘Thou shalt not
steal’ (Deuteronomy 5:19), ‘Thou shalt not bear false
witness’ (Deuteronomy 5:20), ‘Thou shalt not covet’
(Deuteronomy 5:21); and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly
comprehended in this saying, namely, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself’. (Leviticus 19:18c) Love worketh
no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”
(Romans 13:8-10 KJV)
Ah, so Paul does not denounce the Law as Protestants
like yourselves would like to think, and it is not simply Jesus
Himself who ‘fulfills the Law’ for you as you would also
like to think. It is real Christians themselves who do so by obeying the
commandments, loving their neighbors as themselves. And if the last seven
(or six, as Protestants would have it) of the Ten Commandments are summed up in
what Jesus said is the second greatest commandment --- Paul having
listed them carefully in the paragraph right above for the sake of the
Catholics in Rome to read --- then what are we to conclude comprises the “first
and great commandment” (Matthew 22:38 KJV), wherein Jesus said,
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind” (Matthew 22:37b-d KJV, Jesus quoting from
Deuteronomy 6:5), unless it be the first three (or, as
Protestants would have it, the first four) of the Ten Commandments?
Accordingly, where God says:
“I am the Lord thy God… Thou shalt have none other
gods before me. Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness
of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that
is in the waters beneath the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them,
nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity
of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them
that hate me, and shewing mercy unto thousands of
them that love me and keep my commandments. Thou shalt not take the name of
the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath
commanded thee. Six days thou shalt labour, and
do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath
of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor
thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine
ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy
manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou
wast a servant in the
Does not the Almighty Creator here forbid false gods and false
religions, being neither true gods nor religions that He commanded, and He
forbidding the idolatry of paganism; does He not forbid using His Name for no
good reason; and does He not forbid working wrongly in earthly labor on that
day of the week He tells men to set aside as holy unto Him and to the Religion
that He commanded men to both believe and to practice?
Consequently, when Peter told the first converts in Jerusalem on
the Day of Pentecost that they should, “Repent, and be
baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of
sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38b-d
KJV), he did so meaning that they should not only eschew the breaking of the
last seven of the Ten Commandments --- which are the commandments of morality,
being how men are to love their neighbors like themselves --- but he did
so meaning that they should also eschew the breaking of the first three of the
Ten Commandments. In other words, the commandments of religion, being
how men are to love the Almighty Creator of Everything That Exists with all
of their hearts, souls and minds!
Nevertheless, the men he spoke to being apparently devout Jews who
were come to
By not paying sufficient heed to, and thus not believing in, all
that Jesus Christ, their Messiah, had spent three busy years teaching and
commanding throughout all their villages and cities, laying the groundwork for
the New Covenant Church & Law, they instead murdering Him upon the Cross
and carrying on with their Old Covenant ceremonies & sacrifices as if the
Sacrifice of Jesus had never occurred, and thus as if He had never fulfilled
the Old Covenant or begun the liturgical ceremonies and regular observance of
His Sacrifice in the New Covenant!
That’s how.
And if you are confused by, or have a beef with, what I have just stated
in the bold-typed paragraph above, then you had better get to business and
finally read the article I have sent to you repeatedly (assuming you
haven’t done so already), the one entitled Catholic Ritual Defended:
How Even a Protestant Bible Shows Catholic Ritual & Liturgy to Be Exactly
What God Has Commanded in the Worship of His True Church Everywhere in Heaven
& on Earth for All Eternity. Because this article reveals --- from your
very own bibles! --- how my assertion isn’t just completely reasonable
based on what I’ve shown thus far in this email, but totally inarguable
from the ironclad evidence of your bibles themselves. Then, when you have read
it carefully unto a complete comprehension, please be industrious enough to
talk to me intelligently and honest enough to acknowledge where you have been
wrong about Catholicism.
+
+ + 1f. Exactly Where the Rebels Rebel + + +
Notwithstanding, let us not get sidetracked. Because we are seeing
why Peter exhorted the Jews in
Repent, because the Jews who still pretended to be under the Old
Covenant, while denying Christ, formed a false religion. Hence, they had to
denounce their rejection of Christ and their now disobedient attachment to Old
Covenant practices (disobedient because they thought such things could still
save them), practices superseded by the Covenant that is New and thus become,
via this supersession and the perversion of their bad manmade traditions, a false
& apostate religion in the wake of Jesus’ ascension into Heaven and
the Holy Spirit’s descent upon the 120 disciples gathered in the upper
room. In short, they had to let go of the superseded Old in order to believe in
the superseding New! That is to say, to believe in all of the teachings &
commandments of the New Covenant Religion. These teachings & commandments
are the infallible doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church --- She being
“the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15d KJV)
and Her Pope supernaturally prevented by the “Spirit of truth”
(John 14:17a, 15:26c KJV) from officially teaching anything false apart from
the teachings of Jesus & His Apostles, He Who is “the way, the
truth, and the life” (John 14:6b KJV) --- infallible because only in
this way can the Church be guaranteed to stand against the destructive lies and
ploys of the Devil, who seeks always to murder the Saving Truth. A God-given
indestructibility that cannot be your Protestantism since Protestants cannot,
and have not ever for the 490 years of their ever-splintering existence, been
able to agree fully on anything except for this: that they each of them hate
and detest what God’s One & Only Roman Catholic Church infallibly
teaches in order for a man to save his immortal soul.
And baptized, because only in this way, receiving Jesus’ New
Covenant baptism of water, could they wholly and adequately partake in the
teachings & commandments of the New by obeying that particular commandment
of the New Covenant that tells men to be baptized in water. In short, they had
to die with Jesus in baptism to the Old Law in order to be born again
with Him through baptism to the New Law! In this way men become new
creatures, rooted in Jesus Christ. As Paul says:
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new
creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are
become new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV)
This occurs, teaches Paul in another passage, by the shared
spiritual death with Jesus Christ in water baptism:
“Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into
Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore
we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ
was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should
walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4 KJV)
And Paul illustrates the God-ordained duality of belief and baptism
elsewhere:
“For ye are all the children of God by faith in
Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into
Christ have put on Christ.” (Galatians 3:26-27 KJV)
Put alternatively --- driving the point home past the traditions of
men that have blinded you and enslaved you all your lives, bound as you are by
the chains of false religion from your Protestant forebears --- belief and
baptism go together like two peas in a pod. God has made it so; it is He Who
commands it to be such. He both makes baptism in water miraculously and
supernaturally efficacious, effecting new life for the man born again into the
New Covenant Doctrine & Law of Christ, and makes it a new rule and precept
that men must be baptized in water, once they are prepared properly in New
Covenant Doctrine & Law of Christ, in order to someday receive the Promised
Life of Heaven, assuming that they persevere. Like Paul also said regarding
Jesus Christ, inerrantly inspired by the Holy Spirit as he wrote:
“In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made
without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the
circumcision of Christ: buried with him in baptism, wherein also
ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God,
who hath raised him from the dead.” (Colossians 2:11-12 KJV)
Again, perfect duality of both baptism and
belief required by God to be exercised together. One cannot exist without the
other in the Creator’s Economy of Salvation. For He has made, by His
Sovereign Decree, the two together to be necessary for attaining unto
the Hope of Salvation. Viz., a man must both believe correctly
(hold all of the teachings & commandments of Jesus’ Catholic Church) and
be baptized correctly (it being the first thing commanded by Jesus & His
Catholic Church to be obeyed so as to embark successfully upon the Ark of
Salvation, which is the Roman Catholic Church, attaining to the Port of
Heaven). This is how a man is born again, and this is why
I call your religion a so-called ‘born again christianity’, not
treating the name as if it really means what it purports to describe. Because,
plainly, your false religion does not hold to all the teachings &
commands of Jesus’ Catholic Church and does not administer baptism
of water rightly. You are not truly ‘born again’ and you are
not real ‘christians’. Whereby neither your baptism nor your
belief can work correctly, they being held incorrectly. For Christianity to be real
Christianity it must teach what Jesus taught --- all of it.
Likewise, for Christianity’s members to be good members, then they
must obey what He commanded --- everything. As Jesus said:
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching
them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded
you: and, lo, I am with you alway,
even unto the end of the world. Amen.” (Matthew 28:19-20 KJV)
Or as the NIV puts it into more contemporary lingo:
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and
teaching them to obey everything I have commanded
you. And surely I will be with you always, to the very end of the
age.” (Matthew 28:18b-20a NIV)
Not something you pay attention to --- is it, my dear parents? Obeying
Jesus’ commands? Taking heed to know everything He
commanded and taking them seriously lest you lose your souls to
the Fire of Neverending Hell for breaking something greater than the least of
the commandments, one of which is Jesus’ commandment to be baptized in
order to be saved? The much-ballyhooed ‘biblicalness’ of your
‘born again christianity’ evaporates like a mist in the newly-risen
sun at points like these… doesn’t it? Which is why, then, I very
rightly and piously mock you for stunts like this, the two of you pretending to
follow your bibles whilst ignoring their very literal words --- and their very
sensible meaning --- left-and-right throughout the precious text of Sacred
Scripture. After all, neither one of you wants to believe that God
requires both right belief and right baptism for salvation, despite what the
Bible very plainly says about them being necessary!
All the same and in spite of what you want to believe, this
is why, ergo, Peter says:
“For Christ… preached unto the spirits in
prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God
waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that
is, eight souls were saved by water. The like figure
whereunto even baptism doth also now save us…” (1
Peter 3:18a, 19b-21a KJV)
You didn’t even try to explain away this passage in your
email of January 24th, whether in section six where you addressed
water baptism or elsewhere. And no wonder, because the verses are absolutely
inexplicable and mysterious to so-called ‘born again christians’
like yourselves. By your way of thinking, shaped as it is by the manmade
traditions of Protestantism, the Apostle Peter should never in the world have
said such a thing! The water of baptism saving a man? Is he
kidding? The very idea sticks in your craw. For, typical Protestants that you
are and divided up against each other over endless variations on doctrines and
practices --- not to mention grudges and grievances resulting in untold numbers
of congregations and denominations splitting up over the centuries --- you are
nevertheless united on but one single thing:
That whatever Catholicism teaches, that’s what you
don’t want to believe in!
Not that any of you are now, or ever have been in the past five
centuries, very consistent in this united animosity toward the teachings of
Jesus & His Body, the Roman Catholic Church. After all, most of you still
accept the very important teaching that God is One Being and yet Three Persons
(even though none of you very well comprehend the Trinity in all of its nuances
and depths) and most of you still accept the less important tradition that
Jesus had long hair while residing upon the earth nearly 2000 years ago (a
tradition you won’t find anywhere stated in the Bible, but that
Protestants have nonetheless always believed, as evidenced in their paintings
of Jesus or in their Christmas pageants). Both the Doctrine of the Trinity and
the tradition of a long-haired Jesus have always been held by the Roman
Catholic Church since the first century.
But, of course, what unites Protestants --- a name the first Protestants
acquired in 1529 and which they accepted readily in the following century due
to it describing perfectly their position against the once-dominant Catholic
Church in Europe, they protesting the teachings of a Church that
unabashedly submitted to the Spirit-endowed bulwark of the Pope’s
official infallibility --- is an all-consuming hatred toward the responsibility
that every man has to actually obey what His Creator commands him
to do in order that he might save his immortal soul.
This Protestants will not tolerate.
They will do back flips, they will spin like whirling dervishes,
they’ll interpret and reinterpret countless passages of Sacred Scripture
(that is, when the usual ploy of not reading the Bible in the first place fails
to keep them in ignorance of what their bibles most literally and really say)
into pretzel-like absurdity, they will make God’s words mean whatever
they want them to mean… and in spite of what His words often clearly say,
most blatantly and manifestly opposed to their diabolic traditions of men.
+
+ + 1g. And Hence Why They Rebel Against Baptism + + +
This we have already demonstrated, both in the email you are now
reading and in many others that I have previously sent to you. You take very
obvious passages regarding the necessity of baptism in water, as spoken by
Jesus & Peter, twisting their very plain words like tortured pretzels into
meaningless absurdities. The verses from Mark’s Gospel are an especially
good example of this at this point in our debate. For Jesus says:
“He that believeth and is baptized shall
be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:16 KJV)
The words are simple and clear, my dear parents. Jesus
couldn’t have said it any more straightforwardly. He does not say,
“He that believeth shall be saved”; rather, He says, “He that
believeth and is baptized shall be saved…”
Plain as day.
And if He meant what you merely want to believe He meant to
say, then He should never have said what He said above,
mentioning in the first half of the sentence that it is baptism together
with belief which saves a man! Baptism has nothing to do
with it, according to you and your very fallible opinion. So what in the world
is Jesus doing, stating quite clearly in the first half of the verse that
baptism together with belief is what saves you? Per your heretical teaching,
Jesus should have said:
“He that believeth shall be saved; but he that
believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:16 RAMV --- Revised Archaic
Mother Version)
Yet what do you do? Oh, no, Jesus couldn’t possibly have meant
that! How do you know? Do you not claim to rely on your bibles for what you
believe, or, at least, to not ever contradict them? Then how can you take what
the Bible says seriously when you pick and choose at your own personal liberty,
according to your preconceived whims, what you will believe and what you will
not? How is it you have the audacity to privately interpret
according to the prejudices of your manmade traditions and yet still dare to
tell me, with a straight face, that your religious beliefs are
‘grounded’ in the Bible?
Grounded? Grounded? Grounded in what? The very term
means something firm and unshaken, unchangeable. Whereas you can make your
bible mean whatever you want it to mean, causing troublesome verses that
plainly don’t fit your preconceived notions to disappear with the wave of
an interpretive hand. And all because… you don’t want to
believe it. It has nothing to do with The Truth. You have no real desire
to know what is really true and what is not. All you have is a set of fallible
traditions of men, borne of the rebellious tumult in the 16th
century when certain bad or phony Catholics rejected the Religion that had been
handed down to them with God-given infallible certainty for 1500 years, and
also acquired through the 490 years since then as Protestant rabblerousers have
innovated here-and-there, adding willy-nilly as they please to a poisonously
concocted stew of doctrinal heresies.
Point in fact:
For how do you interpretively annihilate the passage just quoted
above from the Gospel of Mark? You can’t make Jesus not say what
he really did literally say in the first half of the sentence… that
would be going too far, even for your rebellious tastes. Nevertheless, His
words are problematic. You can’t just let them stand as they are,
understood at face value. That would mean a work is necessary for
salvation. That would mean you have to obey God to enter Heaven.
No, Jesus’ words in Mark 16:16a must be done away with!
Therefore, you turn to the second half of the sentence. Ah…
there you are. It only says “…but he that believeth not shall be
damned…” in that part of the verse. Nothing about baptism there.
Ah, that explains it, you want to think. Now you can ignore that ugly little
first half of the verse where Jesus says a shockingly ridiculous thing about
baptism being necessary to save a soul. Now you can explain it away, calming
the nerves of those few ‘born again christians’ who actually bother
to both read their bibles and try to take them at face-value without automatically
explaining everything away that doesn’t fit into your religion. Although
it’s always still there, sticking out like a sore thumb and positively
inexplicable as to why Jesus would choose to put things like He did, upholding
baptism of water as if it’s part of what a man needs to get into Heaven
--- and distressingly so since the Bible nowhere explicitly says that
baptism isn’t necessary for salvation but instead explicitly says
the opposite.
Shame upon you, mother & father!
Shame upon you for your complacent attitudes and your arrogant
hearts, daring to say you ‘serve’ Jesus when, in fact, you
won’t even treat His most simple and straightforward words here with
decency and respect. When, in fact, you have the gall to say He didn’t
mean what He starkly says and most obviously meant by them!
+
+ + 1h. Jesus in Mark 16:16 Simply Explained + + +
Has it never occurred to you --- seeing as how you’re neither
infallible nor have you ever said you are, apart from a brief moment at Camp Paradise
where you jested sarcastically, mother, in response to my tenaciously holding
you responsible for taking this very verse seriously and not tossing it to the
side --- that there could be a reasonable explanation for why Jesus mentioned
baptism in the first half of the verse while not in the latter half, the two
halves harmonizing with perfectly good sense and utter ease?
Then listen up and don’t axiomatically reject what you
don’t want to believe just because it isn’t to your preconceived tastes
and within your manmade traditions. Consider: what is baptism? Is it something
you have to do again and again? No, because neither Jesus nor His Apostles nor
any of the writers of the Bible make any explicit mention of it being
repeatable. Neither has the Roman Catholic Church ever taught in Her two
thousand year history that it must or can be repeated, nor has any early
Christian writer extra-biblically ever taught that it is so. To the contrary,
every mention of baptism, whether in the Bible or elsewhere, makes it clear, if
only inferentially, that baptism, once done correctly, is never to be done
again.
It is a one-time thing.
A good-willed adult comes to realize that he must do it, as part of
believing & obeying rightly, and therefore he prepares for it properly. He
studies all that he must know and believe in order to join with Jesus’
New Covenant Body, the Catholic Church. Then, fully prepared and penitent, he
takes the plunge --- no pun intended --- dying with Jesus Christ in water baptism
so that he might then have reasonable hope of living with Christ some day to
come after life on this earth and, provided he perseveres in all of
Jesus’ teachings & commandments from that point in time onward,
attaining to the promise of that wondrous hope when he dies a good death in the
state of grace.
The upshot?
A man only has to be baptized correctly once in his life.
Hence Jesus saying in the first half of His sentence, “He that believeth and
is baptized shall be saved…” Yet a man must believe
correctly from that point of baptism onward for the rest of his life.
Hence Jesus saying in the second half, “…but he that believeth
not shall be damned.”
Case closed, verse explained, with utter ease and perfectly good
sense and simplicity.
Whereas, to the hideous contrary, self-styled
‘bible-believing christians’ like yourselves must focus on the
latter half of the verse solely to the complete exclusion of the
baldfaced words and their very obvious meaning in the first half, having no way
to explain them being there and why they don’t mean what they clearly say
they mean… truly, despite Sacred Scripture nowhere in its text
saying that baptism does not save a man!
Who, then, believes the Bible?
The two of you, or me?
+
+ + 1i. Meanwhile, Peter Puzzles Protestants + + +
And Peter’s words are but ammunition all the more for the
Catholic side of things. Because he says, and I quote from your very own
translation of Sacred Scripture:
“For Christ… preached unto the spirits in
prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God
waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that
is, eight souls were saved by water. The like figure
whereunto even baptism doth also now save us…” (1
Peter 3:18a, 19b-21a KJV)
Again the duality of both belief and
baptism as necessary unto salvation. For not only does Peter mention the fact
that baptism saves him & his fellow Catholics, but mentions
at the start of the passage that Jesus preached to the spirits in prison who
had been disobedient while alive on earth just prior to the Great Flood. This
by itself is a needling puzzle to Protestants like yourselves who bother to
ponder it. Spirits in prison? Preaching to them? What in the world was Peter
talking about? Or, rather, who in the world --- and where in the world --- was
he talking about?
Naturally, well-instructed Catholics have no problem with this
passage. Why should we? The Bible is ours, entrusted to our Church by God
Almighty for its safe keeping and right interpretation. Catholicism comes from
Jesus Christ, having been started by Him and nurtured by His Apostles.
Consequently, nothing in the Bible is a true stumper for us. If something is
worth knowing, then we can know it. God guarantees it through His Roman
Catholic Church’s Holy Spirit-provided infallibility. Be it not worth
knowing, it still won’t bother us, it being something we can handle with
scholarly aplomb.
Meanwhile, Protestants are baffled. Most just skip over the passage.
The more academic types who grapple with it come up with contradictory
explanations --- no certainty to be found. And their difficulty stems from a
tiny little problem. Or, should I say, a great big problem that looks tiny to
them. Because they don’t want to believe God punishes them for anything
in the life to come. Once saved, always saved, as the saying goes. Say your
‘sinner’s prayer’, tell Jesus you’re sorry for your
sins, just ‘ask Him into your heart’ and voilá! It’s
smooth cruising into Heaven for you… nothing ever to suffer or pay for.
The Truth, though, is something very different. And whilst I
don’t have the luxury of time to go into all the biblical proofs for
Purgatory --- something over which you’d just wave a privately
interpretive hand to make go away, using pretzel-like logic and mental
gymnastics to avoid at all costs having to accept at good, sensible, face value
what the Bible says regarding the place of purgation after certain men die ---
the biblical passage here is supremely simple to explain when you know
Purgatory exists and how Salvation operated before Jesus came to the earth as a
Saviour some 2000 years ago.
Accordingly, then, understand that part of Hell within the earth is
a place of purgation, not eternal damnation --- and its outer edge once a place
of patiently expectant waiting. During the New Covenant, the purgative part is
where most Roman Catholics go who die in the state of grace (no mortal sin left
on their souls) but who have temporal (as opposed to eternal) debt left to pay.
Purgatory is where that debt is exacted. Upon finishing the debt, the soul thus
purged enjoys Heaven free of hindrances.
Prior to the New Covenant, Purgatory was much the same. The only
difference is that the souls entering its confines were not, strictly speaking,
Catholic. They were not because Jesus had not yet arrived on earth to start His
Body, the Catholic Church. As a result, souls entered its confines for failing
to practice rightly the True Religion thus far revealed by the Creator at that
point in time. Dying in mortal sin would still damn souls forever in the deeper
pits of Hell, and dying in the practice of false religion would certainly do
the same. However, the souls at the time just before the Great Flood were a
rather unique bunch. Because, as is the case now during the Great Apostasy when
almost no one is left who is a real Catholic and almost everyone is practicing
false religion, so was the case then. But Noah, as Peter tells us elsewhere,
not only built the
The True Religion, of course, as revealed thus far to men on earth
at that time.
Just about everybody rejected him, mocking his words and
disbelieving what he taught. They therefore stayed outside the confines of the
But then the Flood struck. And millions, perhaps billions, of souls
were trapped outside the
Thus, when Jesus died upon the Cross, His Soul descended into the
heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40) there to preach to the souls in prison. Some
of these in prison (though not the souls who died repentant in the Flood) had
finished any Purgatory due to them for their sins --- they were merely waiting
patiently in the Limbo of the Fathers (also known as the Bosom of Abraham) for
Jesus to come. Those souls still in Purgatory who had died penitent in the
Flood, though, were not. They suffered purgation for the temporal debt (as
opposed to eternal debt) of their sins, an enormous debt that had kept them in
spiritual chains and rightful torment for thousands of years. In either case
Jesus preached to all of these souls, whether suffering or not, in order to teach
to them all of the doctrines and all of the commandments of the
That, my dear mother & father, is the significance of the
passage from the third chapter of Peter’s second letter in Sacred
Scripture. In it Peter reveals how both belief (which flows from
having the True Religion preached to men) and baptism (which
follows on the heels of belief in every teaching & commandment of True
Religion, obedience the requirement if men are to begin the Narrow Path unto
Salvation at all) are necessary to enter Heaven.
+
+ + 1j. The Fantasy of ‘Faith Alone’ + + +
Unfortunately, this is where heretics like yourselves --- and such
as I once was --- get tripped up. Because, as I have previously noted, the
thing folks like you absolutely hate and detest beyond all means to describe
it, is the fact that God requires obedience from men in order for
them to receive salvation.
This drives you mad.
“Obedience is not necessary for salvation!” you
pontificate, sounding suspiciously as if you think you possess papal
infallibility. “Salvation is a free gift of God and nobody has to do
anything other than believe in Jesus in order to receive it!”
Yet you are not finished.
“To think otherwise is to be enslaved to the law,” you
will continue, still sounding suspiciously pope-like in your utter certainty.
“Jesus came to liberate men from the law, so that nobody ever needs to
try to be ‘good enough’ to enter heaven. In fact, it couldn’t
even have been done during the old testament! God just gave the law to them so
as to make perfectly clear how foolish people were to think that they could be
righteous enough to merit salvation.”
This despite the fact that by declaring such you have then
condemned untold numbers of saintly souls under the Old Covenant to what
amounts to having lived a life of worthless drudgery, their entire existence on
earth a ludicrous sham, and God some kind of sadistic prankster Who took an
odd, irrational and twisted pleasure out of making centuries upon centuries of
Israelites practice ‘dead works’ that availed them nothing and from
which they could derive no lasting good for themselves other than a rather
vague idea, maybe, that they were helping someone down the line to know how
stupid it is to practice the type of religion that they were doomed to practice
at God’s own behest.
“Law, no --- faith alone!” you chant, laying down the
law about no law while sounding suspiciously like a Roman Catholic in your
litany of perpetually repeated words and commandments. “Down with law and
good works as a way to get into Heaven! We live by faith alone.”
And therein lies the crux --- “faith alone.”
‘Faith alone’ is what you preach, infallibly certain in
your officially popish declaration regarding its absolutely inescapable
necessity for securing a man’s salvation.
There’s only one problem. Because you also tout
‘scripture alone’. Or, leastwise, that’s what your Protestant
ancestors did when first rebelling against God’s Catholic Church, trying
to justify their breaking away from His Singular Way to Salvation, the
“pillar and ground of the truth.” (1 Timothy
3:15d KJV) Yet just as it nowhere says in the Bible that it is the Bible alone
to which a man must turn as a ‘final authority’ to glean everything
he is supposed to believe and follow, so nowhere does it say in Sacred
Scripture that it is ‘faith alone’ that justifies or saves a
man into Heaven.
I repeat:
Nowhere does the Bible say that it is ‘faith alone’
that justifies or saves a man’s soul.
Period.
Go ahead. Meticulously scour your bibles, if you haven’t
already, upon this subject. And in the meantime, should you have amply verified
the accuracy of my bold statement, then stand quiet and listen. Because, once
again, we are confronted by hard evidence of how a Protestant does not take
seriously the Bible that he so loves to act like he takes seriously. And if the
Bible does not say that it is ‘faith alone’ that justifies
or saves a man, then where do you get off pretending that it is? Is not your
‘authority’ for believing what you believe supposed to be your
bibles? Then how dare you act for certain like it’s ‘faith alone’
that justifies or saves you when, in actual fact, the Bible says no such thing!
For instance, heretics of your ilk love to cite the following
verses, amongst others:
“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace
with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Romans 5:1 KJV)
And:
“…knowing that a man is not justified by the works of
the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in
Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not
by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be
justified.” (Galatians 2:16 KJV)
As well:
“But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God,
it is evident: for, ‘The just shall live by faith.’”
(Galatians 3:11 KJV, referring to Habakkuk 2:4)
Examine these verses carefully, my dear mother & father. You will
not find words of exclusion associated with the term “faith”
anywhere in their text --- e.g., words like ‘alone’,
‘only’, ‘solely’ or the like. Nowhere is the idea of
‘faith alone’ to be found in them. Whereas, if your manmade
teaching of ‘faith alone’ was everywhere --- or even
anywhere --- upheld in the text of Sacred Scripture, then the Bible ought to
actually say so. In other words, it ought to be explicit.
For instance, the first verse should say:
“Therefore being justified by faith alone, we
have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Romans 5:1
RAMV --- Revised Archaic Mother Version)
Or the second verse should say:
“…knowing that a man is not justified by the works of
the law, but by the faith alone of Jesus Christ, even we have
believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith alone
of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law
shall no flesh be justified.” (Galatians 2:16 RAMV --- Revised Archaic
Mother Version)
Or, better yet, the third verse should say:
“But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God,
it is evident: for, ‘The just shall live by faith alone.’”
(Galatians 3:11 RAMV --- Revised Archaic Mother Version)
But they don’t. And, I tell you, it is the same
throughout Sacred Scripture, in your very own bibles. Nowhere does the Bible
say that it is ‘faith alone’ to which we are to turn
in order to save our immortal souls.
+
+ + 1k. How to Pull a Rabbit Out of the Bible’s Hat + + +
As a matter of fact, if you’re going to play the game of
wielding the various wordings of certain verses to try to uphold your heretical
notion of being justified or saved by ‘faith alone’, then let us
realize that the exact phrasings and precise wordings of certain verses can
just as easily be used against you. For example:
“…that being justified by his grace, we should
be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” (Titus 3:7 KJV)
Aha… so according to this verse, justification is “by
his grace” --- faith not being anywhere mentioned within its text!
Why, the man possessed by an unreasoning passion to pump up ‘grace’
without any reference to another factor in the process, could go about touting
his discovery --- as found in his bible --- that it is grace and not
faith that justifies a man, so saving him. From there it’s just another
small little step for such a man in his prejudices to wind up declaring,
“I am justified and saved by grace alone and not by either faith
or works or any other thing!”
Or another example:
“Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we
shall be saved from wrath through him.” (Romans 5:9 KJV)
Oh, I see. According to this verse, justification is “by his blood”
--- neither faith nor works nor grace being anywhere mentioned in its words! Why,
the man possessed by an irrational animosity toward faith or works or grace and
gripped by an unreasoning passion to vaunt ‘blood’ without
reference to any other factor in the process, could go about proclaiming his
discovery --- as found in his bible --- that it is blood and not
faith or works or grace that justifies a man, so saving him. From there
it’s just another tiny step for such a man in his prejudices to wind up
declaring, “I am justified and saved by blood alone and not by
either faith or works or grace or any other thing!”
Or still another example:
“And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are
sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the
Spirit of our God.” (1 Corinthians 6:11 KJV)
Mmm, I get it. According to this verse,
justification is “by the Spirit” --- neither faith nor works nor
grace nor blood being anywhere mentioned in its phraseology! Why, the man
possessed by a senseless hatred of faith or works or grace or blood and gripped
by the talons of an unreasoning passion to laud ‘spirit’ without
reference to any other factor in the process, could go about announcing his
discovery --- as found in his bible --- that it is spirit and not
faith or works or grace or blood that justifies a man, so saving him. From
there it’s just another small step for such a man in his prejudices to
wind up pontificating like an imaginary ‘pope’, “I am
justified and saved by spirit alone and not by either faith or works or
grace or blood or any other thing!”
Do you perceive the foolishness in which you dwell by pretending
that it is ‘faith alone’ on which you depend, this fantasy
in turn resting upon the mirage of ‘scripture alone’ ---
neither of which can be found anywhere stated explicitly in the Bible?
Moreover, that your interpretation of certain verses, meant to uphold these
twin manmade traditions, is everywhere undercut by your constant inability to
agree with fellow ‘bible-believing christians’ on an untold number
of teachings --- not to mention your clash with me, a real Roman Catholic, who
interprets the verses quite differently --- all the while you will not come
straight out and insist that you are religiously infallible. Yet if not
infallible, then why should anyone believe your interpretation? Even your own
peers can’t see eye-to-eye with you on many beliefs! So who are you to
put on airs as if your belief in either ‘faith alone’ or
‘scripture alone’ couldn’t possibly be wrong… and
especially when neither of them can be found stated explicitly in your own bibles?
What if you’re wrong?
Or is that thought taboo?
But if it is taboo, then you do, indeed, think that you’re
infallible. Don’t you?
Oh, my dear parents, the darkness in which you grope! The eyes of
your mind are so blind that you can’t see straight enough to look into
the mirror of your souls and glimpse the gigantic tumor situated glaringly in
the midst of your own face. You are so bedimmed by hubris, by gargantuan pride,
that you can’t even admit the obvious… that you are not, and
can never be in your present circumstances, infallible.
Therefore, you must admit one more obvious thing, at the very least: that you
could, after all, be wrong about religion. That your beliefs are nothing
more than manmade traditions, being misinterpretations --- and even
wholesale fabrications --- of the Bible. That ‘faith alone’ is only
your opinion and nothing more… and not a very good one, at
that, the pages of your bible nowhere supporting its existence. What’s
more, that ‘scripture alone’ is also only your opinion
and nothing more… and a lousy opinion, too, since the ‘biblical
authority’ it tries to support can’t even be found supported in the
Bible. So whence your ‘authority’ for believing that
‘scripture alone’ is your ‘ultimate authority’?
Why, you’re not just imaginary little popes, pretending to be
infallible when it comes to religious beliefs. You’re imaginary little
‘gods’, pretending that whatever you say is true must be
true since your every word and inclination of your will is infinitely powerful
to create out of nothing and destroy into oblivion! Because never would a Pope
pretend he can pull a spiritual belief out of nowhere, teaching something as
true simply because it is his ‘opinion’ that it is true. Every Pope
bases his official teachings upon the unchanging groundwork of Sacred Scripture
& Sacred Tradition, the pair being the full repository of what Jesus &
His Apostles gave to His Body, the Roman Catholic Church, to preserve
undeformed until His Return at the end of our world. As a result, never does a
Pope pull out of thin air a dogmatic declaration, heedless of what’s been
taught unwaveringly since the first century nearly 2000 years ago. He does not
and cannot. He instead keeps it perpetually unchanged by the
Power of the Holy Spirit.
Whilst, in stark contrast, the first Protestants gleefully
destroyed that which they had been bequeathed as men raised
in the Catholic Church. Pulling a religious rabbit out of the hat, they like
immature children make-believed that they could see in the pages of the Bible
what men had not ever seen, as a practicing and unchanging whole, for fifteen
centuries. They reinterpreted --- against the united and unchanging voice of
biblical interpretation for fifteen centuries of orthodox Christians --- a
handful of passages into meaning what previous generations of Christians had
uniformly condemned as heinous corruptions of the True Faith, of the Roman
Catholic Religion that Jesus Himself had established on earth as His Very Own
Testimony & Body. Later Protestants like yourselves
have continued the innovation, baptism in water being but one of many examples.
An example, incidentally, that the very first Protestants did not
hold like you do. However, an example that naturally and sensibly follows when,
as all Protestants have insisted, works have nothing to do with the reception
of salvation in a Christian life. Later Protestants merely put into logical
practice what earliest Protestants had newly coined out of the imaginations of
their wayward hearts… ‘faith
alone’. Meanwhile, Protestants until this day refuse to face the
facts found even in their very own bibles, that God really does, after all,
require obedience to His Commandments and hence that, after all, the works
of a man’s life really are necessary, in conjunction with, and always
following on the heels of, that single faith which God infallibly declares unto
men, through His Infallible Church, is necessary to believe --- all of it
--- to have real Hope of Salvation. A faith that is not only an act of trust in
some sort of ‘niceness’ --- as if God only requires men to
‘trust’ that He will do nice things for them, not sending them to
Hell provided they’ve said something like a ‘sinner’s
prayer’ --- but is as well an act of trust in very definite
propositions, in that God declares very specific things that they
must believe are true, thereby gaining Hope of Salvation, provided they be
“…doers of the word, and not hearers only,
deceiving…” their
“…own selves.” (James 1:22 KJV)
+
+ + 1l. Dead Men’s Bones + + +
Bringing us to the devastating coup de grâce for you, dear
mother & father. For this writer of the Bible, James, delivers an
absolutely crushing blow to the Protestant heresy of ‘faith alone’.
Because not only have we seen that Sacred Scripture nowhere teaches this
manmade notion, it being nowhere explicitly stated that justification or
salvation is by ‘faith alone’; and not only have we seen how the
precise phrasings or exact wordings of various verses in your bibles can be
taken out of context to also mistakenly ‘prove’ the ideas of
justification by ‘grace alone’ or ‘blood alone’ or
‘spirit alone’ and not merely the fantasy of ‘faith alone’;
but we find now, in the plain words of your very own bibles, the distinct
opposite and thoroughly contrary thing said against what you believe, you who
claim to base the notion of ‘faith alone’ upon the Bible!
Accordingly, where the Holy Spirit-inspired writer of the Bible, James,
inerrantly declares:
“What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he
hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?
If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you
say unto them, ‘Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled’;
notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body;
what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is
dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, ‘Thou hast faith, and I
have works’: shew me thy faith without thy
works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.
Thou believest that there is one God; thou
doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou
know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? Was not
Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered
Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest thou
how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect? And
the scripture was fulfilled which saith, ‘Abraham believed God, and it
was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of
God.’ (Genesis 15:6) Ye see then how that by works a man is justified,
and not by faith only. Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works,
when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way?
(Joshua 2:3-4a, 15, 21b) For as the body without the spirit is dead, so
faith without works is dead also.” (James 2:14-26 KJV)
Oh, what a goldmine this is, both in
itself and in regard to smashing the manmade tradition of Protestants that it
is ‘faith alone’ that saves a man! Because what does James say, my
dear parents? After asking, “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a
man say he hath faith, and have not works?” (James 2:14a-c
KJV), he follows with another query, so answering his first question --- “Can
faith save him?” (James 2:14d KJV) The answer is…
no! It cannot! Faith all by itself, alone, cannot and will not ever save
anyone. Why? The solution is in the first question itself: because it does not “profit”.
In other words, it does neither God, nor you, nor anyone any good. Faith all
alone, by itself, is useless.
Yet he does not end there, with abstract theory. Going on, James
makes a practical application to real, concrete, physical life on earth in
flesh & blood. For what if a fellow Christian comes to a Catholic destitute
in hunger? Shall that man, who calls himself a real Catholic, send away his
fellow brother in the Church with nice-sounding words only, still starving?
What good does that man’s Catholic Faith do either God (Who commands His
children to love another, imitating Himself, Who loves all of His children in
the Church), or himself (who is supposed to do good works in Christ in order to
imitate Jesus and lay up treasure in Heaven for both his own self and for
others), or his brother (who is hungry and needs to be fed, instead ending up
scandalized that his fellow Catholic would allow him to starve to death without
help)? As James very succinctly puts it:
“Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being
alone.” (James 2:17 KJV)
Say again?
“Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead,
being alone.” (James 2:17 KJV)
Do you get it, my dear parents?
It’s right there, in your bibles! All you’ve got to do
is put two and two together to make four. James states, “Even so
faith… is dead, being alone.” (James 2:17a, c-d KJV) We repeat for
the sake of minds too blinded by prejudice to see clearly, rearranging the
words and putting a few to the side in order to make the message utterly clear
and unmistakable:
“…faith… alone… is
dead…” (James 2:17a, d, c KJV)
O ye of truncated and heretical faith! Take the beam of ‘dead
faith’ out of your own eye before you strain at an imaginary gnat
(Matthew 23:24) by trying to pharisaically pluck a mote of so-called
‘dead works’ out of the eye of a real Catholic! (Matthew 7:3-5) Wherefore
I make the condemnatory words of Jesus my own unto you:
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For
ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but
are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye
are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
Because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the
righteous, and say, ‘If we had been in the days of our fathers, we
would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Wherefore
ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which
killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye
serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the
damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets,
and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify;
and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from
city to city: that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon
the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom
ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, all
these things shall come upon this generation.” (Matthew 23:27-36
KJV)
You are Pharisees, dear mother & father. Much to your shock and
anger, I expose you to be the very thing you love to excoriate others for
supposedly being. For you pretend to be so very ‘pleasing’ to God,
when, in contradictory fact, you are most repellant and noxious to Him! You who
make-believe a kind of ‘imputed’ righteousness, claiming to rely on
the grace of Jesus by ‘faith alone’, are shown to be nothing but
practitioners of a dead faith, one which is both incorrect in and
of itself, having long ago rejected the reality of all of the teachings &
commandments that Jesus gave to men via His Roman Catholic Church, and is also
incorrect by rejecting the necessity of right works along with right faith in
order to receive salvation from the hands of the merciful & just God.
Woe to you, I say! For you may “outwardly appear righteous
unto men”, fooling them by the charade of a pleasant demeanor, social
charity and friendly banter --- as well as your use of many
‘christian’ words and a few ‘biblical’ references ---
but you “are within full of dead men’s bones, and of
all uncleanness.” For whatever your exact moral state (your keeping of
the last seven of the Ten Commandments, or lack thereof), you most definitely
and seriously break the first three of the Ten Commandments, God’s rules
regarding the True Religion, by refusing to either seek for His Catholic Faith
or, confronted by it, to humbly acknowledge its Saving Truth by doing penance
and learning to profess it. You arrogantly persist in your manifest heresies
despite a Catholic such as I, a prophet --- for that is what all real Catholics
are in the broadest sense, though I make no claim to be one in the strictest
and narrowest sense --- warning you repeatedly of your sins against True Faith.
You are hypocrites, pretending not only to be pleasing to God through an
‘imputed righteousness’, but also imagining yourselves to be the
kind of persons that would have welcomed and embraced the holy prophets of
ancient times during the Old Covenant, and have loyally followed after Jesus
& His Apostles whilst loudly lambasting the Pharisees & scribes during
the earliest part of the New Covenant. Whereas, in actual truth, your actions
today prove how you would have been the first to murder the holy Abel in the
field along with his heinous brother, Cain (Genesis 4:8), and the first to
throw a stone against holy Stephen, casting your cloak at the feet of an
approving Saul for him to watch. (Acts 7:57-8:1a)
Yet Saul, who later became known as the Apostle Paul, converted,
defending and propagating the Catholic Church that you so disdain and despise!
When will you do the same, dropping your wicked religious lie of ‘faith
alone’? For know you not, as James says, that “the devils also
believe, and tremble”? (James 2:19b KJV) How, then, can mere
‘belief’ do anyone any good? For if ‘faith alone’ would
save or justify a man, then why are the devils themselves, the demons of hell,
not saved and justified by their ‘faith alone’ in the existence of
the One True Creator? Indeed, the demons by now know that Jesus Christ is this
Creator’s Only Begotten Son & God Himself, having witnessed His
Crucifixion, Resurrection & Ascension into Heaven. Consequently, while they
cannot now see Him since they are not permitted to enter into Heaven, then why
aren’t they nevertheless justified and saved by their ‘faith
alone’ in Him and all that He taught, considering they very well know it
to be true and believe that it is so?
Do you see?
‘Belief’ all by itself --- even a correct and thorough
belief, being totally Catholic --- cannot justify or save a man. The demons are
proof of this. They know, they believe. Yet they are not thereby justified and
saved. They are not, because they have already lost the opportunity to be in
Heaven, having once been there and then fallen into disobedience. Indeed, the
Creator does not give fallen angels the chance at redemption that men have.
Notwithstanding, He judges them by the same standard that He judges men by, the
only difference being that men can have a fresh start, and that, once freshly
begun, a man can, while still alive on this earth in his right mind and capable
body, still perform necessary works of penance & virtue in God’s
Sight to temporally atone for the sins he commits after his
God-given fresh start… a fresh start found only through Catholic Faith
and initiated in the good work of baptism, God’s Power through these
waters literally washing away all debts temporal & eternal acquired by sin
until that instant.
But James continues to obliterate the notion of ‘faith
alone’, not resting there. For he says, opposing those who would
misinterpret the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans and Galatians just as the
Apostle Peter warned against (2 Peter 3:15b-17):
“But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without
works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works,
when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest
thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works
was faith made perfect? And the scripture was fulfilled which saith,
‘Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and
he was called the Friend of God.’” (James 2:20-23 KJV, quoting
Genesis 15:6)
O ye blind and stubborn souls! How can you see what the Apostle
James wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, right there in black and
white before your very eyes, and pretend to justify your false
‘justification’, wherein you say men are saved by ‘faith
alone’? Can you not see your heresy and peril? Because he says, straight
out, that Abraham was “justified by works” and not by
‘faith alone’!
Although, irony of ironies, we are afforded yet more evidence of
how an unstable man, such as all Protestants are, could run with this verse by
itself and come to the belief that justification is “by works”
--- neither faith nor grace nor blood nor spirit being anywhere mentioned in
its words! Why, the man possessed by an irrational animosity toward faith or
grace or blood or spirit, and gripped by an unreasoning passion to vaunt
‘works’ void of reference to any other factor in the process, could
go about touting his discovery --- as found in his bible --- that it is works
and not faith or grace or blood or spirit that justifies a man,
so saving him. From there it’s just another small little step for such a
man in his prejudices to wind up declaring, “I am justified and saved by
works alone and not by either faith or grace or blood or spirit or any
other thing!”
When, in truth, the reality is very different. For as you well know
(even though you do not know rightly, not understanding Paul’s
words that are “hard to be understood”, being souls who are
“unlearned and unstable” and so “wrest” his words into
meaning what they were never intended to mean, either by Paul himself or the
Holy Spirit (2 Peter 3:16b, c KJV)), Sacred Scripture elsewhere says:
“For if Abraham were justified by works, he
hath whereof to glory; but not before God. For what saith the scripture?
‘Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.’”
(Romans 4:2-3 KJV, quoting Genesis 15:6)
And also:
“‘Even as Abraham believed God, and it was
accounted to him for righteousness.’ (Genesis 15:6) Know ye
therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.
And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through
faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, ‘In thee
shall all nations be blessed.’ (Genesis 12:3) So then they which be of
faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.” (Galatians 3:6-9 KJV)
These are passages from the Bible that so-called ‘born again
christians’ like yourselves love to trumpet, thinking, in the darkness of
your minds, that they justify your heresy of ‘faith alone’. Yet
therein lies the problem for a Protestant… for does Paul anywhere plainly
say in these verses that a man is justified or saved by
‘faith alone’?
Of course not!
That part of things is made up out of the wicked minds of
“unlearned and unstable” men like yourselves who
“wrest” what Paul actually does say into something alien to his
intent and contrary to what God through him declares. (2 Peter 3:16c KJV) You
add words to the Bible by adding the word ‘alone’ to the word
“faith” in order to make the scripturally imaginary phrase &
idea of ‘faith alone’, and you subtract words from Sacred Scripture
by subtracting from the actual and intended meaning of its text, it never
having been the purpose of either Paul or the Holy Spirit in its words to deny
the efficacy of right works for receiving salvation! That is to say, both
faith and works are necessary to be saved.
+
+ + 1m. Two Things Needed to Justify a Man + + +
But do you doubt? Then heed the words of the Bible, which you claim
to revere:
“Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by
faith only.” (James 2:24 KJV)
We repeat for the sake of ears unwilling to listen and minds
unwilling to comprehend:
“Ye see then how that by works a man is justified,
and not by faith only.” (James 2:24 KJV)
The NIV paraphrases it into a lingo even easier for moderns to
comprehend:
“You see that a person is justified by what he does and
not by faith alone.” (James 2:24 NIV)
My dear parents, how much clearer does the Bible have to get? How
much plainer could the Holy Spirit be, speaking inerrantly through the mouth of
the Apostle James? And the rejoinder:
It could not get any clearer and plainer!
The words are simple, stark and easy to grasp. Were Sacred
Scripture to go any further, it could only get more lengthy, going into great
detail about how men are to be justified by both faith & works --- and not
merely by faith alone --- or it could anticipate religious lies which, at that
early time, were still to come, methodically and meticulously closing off every
loophole that later heretics might try to exploit by perverting what the Bible
says into something other than what it means. Howsoever, that’s not the purpose
of Sacred Scripture, is it? The Bible is neither a legal textbook nor a
systematic instruction manual. It is not the job of Sacred Scripture, all by
itself, to defend against heresy. Mangled by “unlearned and
unstable” men (2 Peter 3:16c KJV), how could it speak up on its own
behalf? That job --- the job of being a living, present & active voice,
interpreting and teaching the Bible as it is intended to be understood and
taught --- belongs to living, present & active men, members of, and especially
leaders in, God’s Catholic Church, which is why She is “…the
pillar and ground of the truth.” (1 Timothy 3:15d
KJV)
The conclusion is unavoidable, then. The Spirit through James makes
it plain. ‘Faith alone’ is wrong, dead wrong, being a
‘faith’ that, were it otherwise a rightly-held faith, keeping
almost all of the doctrines & commandments apart from this one point of
‘faith alone’, is nevertheless a dead faith, being a
lifeless corpse shorn of the works necessary to make it live & breathe and
thus incapable of saving or justifying anyone. This is why Paul tells the
Corinthian Catholics:
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have
not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all
knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove
mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I
bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned,
and have not charity, it profiteth me
nothing… And now abideth faith,
hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
(1 Corinthians 13:1-3, 13 KJV)
For while a man before conversion begins with the grace given to
him by God, next seeking for the faith that will bring him to salvation, he
must then --- when finally in possession of all that he needs to know &
believe --- obey what he believes in order to secure this salvation as a
reality in the life to come. In a word, it is not ‘faith alone’
that justifies or saves. Rather, it is Grace through Faith and
Works that ultimately will achieve the Salvation for which all men are
commanded to strive. Put even more specifically, it is by God’s
Supernatural Grace first, through His True Catholic Faith next, and with Lawful
Works ever following, that a man enters the
“For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth
any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh
by love.” (Galatians 5:6 KJV)
What do you know… again, faith all alone does not avail.
I.e., faith all by itself can achieve nothing. Instead, it must be a
“faith which worketh by love.”
Misunderstood by most modern minds, “love” here is just another way
of saying “charity”. Which in turn is a rather old-fashioned way of
talking about the special kind of love that God has for His chosen souls and
that they, likewise, have for Him or for each other. It is a love that
considers the welfare of another to be as important as --- or, in the case of a
chosen soul’s love for God, even more important than --- one’s own
welfare. Ergo Paul’s words cited earlier in the email:
“Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he
that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
For this, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ (Deuteronomy 5:18),
‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Deuteronomy 5:17), ‘Thou shalt not
steal’ (Deuteronomy 5:19), ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’
(Deuteronomy 5:20), ‘Thou shalt not covet’ (Deuteronomy 5:21); and
if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this
saying, namely, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’.
(Leviticus 19:18c) Love worketh no ill to his
neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”
(Romans 13:8-10 KJV)
Paul quoted five of the last seven of the Ten Commandments in this
passage (six of the last seven really, since the last one he cites, “Thou
shalt not covet”, encapsulates the final two of the last seven of the Ten
Commandments), demonstrating the necessity of obeying God’s Law in order
to please Him. These last seven commandments, which comprise right morality,
can be summed up with the statement, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself…” (Leviticus 19:18c, as found in Romans 13:9 KJV) In
obedience to them is a part of “faith that worketh
by love.”
Nonetheless, the last seven of the Ten Commandments are not the only
commandments. There are still the first three. And the first three are the first
for a reason --- because they are more important than the last seven. Which is
saying a lot since the last seven are also very important! The last seven, as
I’ve remarked before, tell men how to behave toward their fellow men,
their neighbors… right morality. Meanwhile, which I’ve said
before as well, the first three tell men how to behave toward God, our
Creator… right faith. The former can be summed up in the rule,
“Love your neighbor like yourself”, whilst the latter can be summed
up in the maxim, “Love God with all of your heart.”
Except, how are we to love God? What, concretely,
does this require of us? Is it merely a strong sentiment or pleasant feeling,
expressed once in awhile by noble-sounding hymns, catchy choruses or poignant
speeches by a favorite Protestant leader? Or an affection, as it were, for
Someone invisible, and thus impossible for us to see and touch, but that we
evince by rapturous ‘praise gatherings’, glossalalia, the raising
of hands into the air, and minutes on end of swaying back-and-forth to gentle,
melodic music? Or, perhaps, a loyal attachment to some passionate conviction,
such as social justice and the fight to save the lives of unborn babies?
Exactly what does it mean to love God?
We’ve grappled with this both pages ago and in previous
emails, the answer remaining always the same. As Jesus said:
“If ye love me, keep my commandments... He that
hath my commandments, and keepeth them,
he it is that loveth me... If a man love
me, he will keep my words... He that loveth me
not keepeth not my
sayings...” (John 14:15, 21a, 23b, 24a KJV)
Crystal clear, my dear parents, crystal clear. And to make it even
clearer, we quote once more the words of the Prophet Moses, who in turn simply transmitted,
straight across, the words of the Almighty Creator:
“I am the Lord thy God… Thou shalt have none
other gods before me. Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any
likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath,
or that is in the waters beneath the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself
unto them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation of them that hate me, and shewing mercy
unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. Thou shalt
not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not
hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Keep
the sabbath day to sanctify
it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any
work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy
maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy
stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may
rest as well as thou. And remember that thou wast a
servant in the
+
+ + 1n. A Very Brief Treatise on Saintly Veneration + + +
These are the first three of the Ten Commandments. Or, as
Protestants would have it, splitting the first commandment into two and
collapsing the last two commandments into one, the first four of the Ten
Commandments. They split the first commandment into two because they hate the veneration
of saints and their images. They suppose the forbidding of “any graven
image” to bolster their case, totally ignoring the fact that God
prohibited the worship of pagan idols as if they were ‘gods’ and not
the veneration of holy men or angels in Heaven as His most pleasing creatures
and servants. God Himself proves this, ordering the Israelites through Moses to
make statues of angels out of pure gold for the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy
of Holies where God made His Presence to dwell:
“And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work
shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat. And make one cherub on
the one end, and the other cherub on the other end: even of the mercy seat
shall ye make the cherubims on the two ends thereof. And the cherubims shall
stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings,
and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the
faces of the cherubims be. And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark;
and in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee. And there I
will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat,
from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all
things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of
Hardly consistent of God --- is it? --- to tell the Jews to
“…not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that
is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters
beneath the earth…” (Deuteronomy 5:8 KJV) when He then turns around
and tells them to make two golden images of angels from “heaven
above” to put over the
Neither can the prohibition to “not bow down thyself unto
them, nor serve them” (Deuteronomy 5:9a KJV) mean don’t kneel down
before images of saints, don’t honor them and don’t pray to them.
For what do we read about the God-fearing parents of Samson, who encountered an
angel that foretold his birth?
“And Manoah said unto the angel of
the Lord, ‘What is thy name, that when thy sayings come to pass we may
do thee honour?’ And the angel of the Lord said unto him,
‘Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it
is secret?’ So Manoah took a kid with a meat
offering, and offered it upon a rock unto the Lord: and the angel did
wondrously; and Manoah and his wife looked on. For it
came to pass, when the flame went up toward heaven from off the altar, that the
angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar. And Manoah
and his wife looked on it, and fell on their faces to the ground.”
(Judges 13:17-20 KJV)
Obviously, if the father, Manoah, told
the angel that he wanted to “do thee honour” while the angel did
not condemn him for this wish, saying only that his name “is
secret” (or, as the NIV has it, “wonderful” ---
Strong’s Concordance informing us that the Hebrew here translated can
mean either ‘secret’ or ‘wonderful’), then how can it
be wrong to “honour” angels or other celestial citizens, such as
saints, when this heavenly messenger made no attempt to forbid him? Seeing how
nefarious ‘born again christians’ like you like to think this
‘sin’ to be, would he not have sternly upbraided him? Or,
considering that Manoah did not at first realize that
the angel was an angel, would not the angel have at least said he was an angel
and hence not to be honored since that could (as Protestants want to think)
trespass upon the worship due only to God?
Moreover, did not “Manoah and his
wife” react with astonishment when “the angel of the Lord ascended
in the flame of the altar”? Does it not say that they “fell
on their faces to the ground”? (Judges 13:20d, c, e KJV) At this
point, reacting to the astonishing miracle, Manoah
did indeed know that he was an angel! For the Bible says:
“Then Manoah knew that he was an
angel of the Lord.” (Judges 13:21b KJV)
Consequently, this God-fearing man could not in the immediate wake
of the miracle have paid obeisance to the angel ignorantly, supposing him to be
God Himself. Yet neither the angel, nor God, nor the Bible, tells us that Manoah and his wife did wrongly. To the contrary, Sacred
Scripture records the fact for us to read till this day, the two of them
plainly portrayed as devout servants of the Almighty Creator & His One True
Religion of the Old Covenant. Wherefore I say to you, that if it was not wrong
for Manoah & his wife to do this during the Old
Covenant as recorded in your very own bibles, then how can it be wrong for
Catholics to do this during the New Covenant when they kneel down before
statues of saints or angels to pay them honor? How can this be forbidden when Manoah & his wife were not chastised for wishing to
honor the angel or for falling on their faces before him after the miracle, and
when God clearly does not condemn graven images for holy & virtuous
purposes but even commanded them to be made for use in His Own Tabernacle &
Temple?
But as for praying to saints & angels, I will not take that up
in detail now. This is become very long and I address the issue quite
thoroughly, exonerating the Catholic Church while condemning Protestant heresy,
in an article called Saintly Veneration Defended soon to be published.
For now, merely humble yourselves in the face of the evidence already
presented, daring no further to attack what you do not understand and do not
want to acknowledge --- that every aspect of the Catholic Faith is truly
biblical, contrary to Protestants, who are most vehemently, inexcusably &
embarrassingly unbiblical.
+
+ + 1o. Love, Obedience, Faith, Charity, Works + + +
Leading us back to our main train of thought. For if God through
Moses in Deuteronomy 5 repeats the Ten Commandments first formally stated by
Him to the Israelites in Exodus 20, then what is this but His way of telling us
how we are to love Him? For Jesus said, and I reiterate:
“If ye love me, keep my commandments... He that
hath my commandments, and keepeth them,
he it is that loveth me... If a man love
me, he will keep my words... He that loveth me
not keepeth not my
sayings...” (John 14:15, 21a, 23b, 24a KJV)
And if the first three of the Ten Commandments are how we are to
love God most directly --- in distinction from the last seven of the Ten
Commandments on how to love our fellow men, who are in the image of God, and
thus letting us love God indirectly --- being the commandments of faith,
i.e., right religion, and therefore the most important of them all, at the head
of the list, then what can loving God mean except that we are to hold
the correct faith & right religion, believing & obeying all that He has
commanded us, and as infallibly revealed through His Son’s Body, the
Roman Catholic Church, the Pillar & Ground of the Truth? (1
Timothy 3:15d)
As a result, this is a major clue to Paul’s import where he
says:
“And now abideth faith,
hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” (1 Corinthians
13:13 KJV)
Because “charity” is “love” writ large,
being Divine Love. And when he says, out of the three Theological Virtues of
Faith, Hope & Charity, that “the greatest of these is charity”,
he means, in the deepest sense, that “faith” is only worthwhile
inasmuch as men practice it correctly. Which is as much as to say, that men
must practice right religion, trusting in God’s Promise to reward men who
do so. And that such men must obey His first three commandments and thus prove
beyond all doubt that their love for Him is a love above all other loves,
loving Him with all of their hearts, all of their souls, all of their minds,
and with all of their strength. (Mark 12:30)
This, then, is Charity; this, then, is Love. And Charity is greater
than Faith. Not that Faith is inconsequential --- far from it. Rather, that,
for a man on earth, Charity arises out of Faith with Hope, and will someday
supersede them both, when, as Paul also says:
“Charity never faileth: but whether
there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be
tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish
away… For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now
I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1
Corinthians 13:8, 12 KJV)
For Faith cannot remain when the invisible is made visible. As Paul
says, too:
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1 KJV)
Yet a Catholic who has persevered unto Heaven has nothing left of
the Faith that he has not seen --- he sees God Face-to-face, and nothing is
left unseen that formerly he believed based upon God’s Testimony as given
infallibly to us through His Church. As Jesus said:
“Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast
believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have
believed.” (John 20:29b-e KJV)
Blessed is the man who believes, not yet having seen! Nevertheless,
blessed all the more is the man who, not having seen,
perseveres in the Catholic Faith, dying a good death, till he sees with his own
eyes what once he only believed because God’s Church infallibly taught
him that it was so and hence to be hoped for.
Nay, more: for blessed is the man who perseveres in Catholic Faith,
this faith working through charity by an ever more perfect obedience to the
commandments of right faith and right morality, proving he is the one who loves
God by keeping His commandments (John 14:15, 21a, 23b, 24a), he being of those
who are “…doers of the word, and not hearers only,
deceiving…” their “…own selves.” (James 1:22 KJV)
As James also declared for men to hear, exhorting us then to do:
“Likewise also was not Rahab the
harlot justified by works, when she had received the
messengers, and had sent them out another way?” (James 2:25 KJV)
Is it not inarguable, dear mother & father? Is there any point
in persisting in your stubbornness? Rahab --- a
whore, and thus a terrible sinner --- nevertheless did a good work by hiding
the Israelite spies and helping them to escape. She did so not in isolation
from everything else. That is to say, she did so not being justified in her
works alone, as if that’s all it took. Au contraire, she did so believing
in the God of the Israelite people, having heard about all His mighty miracles
on their behalf and the commandments He had them obey, she, too, longing to
enter their One True Religion and obey their Old Covenant Church. Which she
did, as Joshua 6:25 reveals, living amidst the Israelites as an Israelite, she
becoming one of the ancestors of Jesus Christ Himself. (Matthew 1:5) For by the
Power of the One True God through faith in works was she made whole, leaving
behind her former wickedness, although she, like many others prior to the New
Covenant, had to wait for her promised Divine Descendant to visit the Bosom of
Abraham when Jesus came to sacrifice Himself upon the earth.
+
+ + 1p. As Spirit Is to Flesh, So Works Are to Faith + + +
Yet we move on, examining the last verse of the passage we began
looking at some pages ago from the Apostle James’ letter. And he asserts
with sobering finality:
“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so
faith without works is dead also.” (James 2:26
KJV)
You don’t realize it, my dear parents, but this statement is
a death knell for your heresy. Subtly recessed from most minds whilst, once
brought forth, undeniably there, the point is powerful and annihilating.
Because what is your favorite complaint against Catholics concerning works?
That they are merely of the ‘flesh’, and thus not important, being
not ‘spiritual’. Certainly they can in no way propel a man unto a
hope of salvation (say you), no matter how good & virtuous in God’s
Sight according to the objective standard of His Commandments. Similarly
baptism of water, the subject of which began this email & its unabashedly
Catholic rebuttal. For you feign to ‘respect’ baptism, occasionally
troubling its waters (or so you suppose), while never passing up an opportunity
to jeer at its God-given ability to effect a man’s salvation. “That
which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is
spirit…” say you, errantly mimicking Jesus’ words. (John 3:6
KJV) You think by this to denigrate baptism of water into a thing of mere
‘flesh’ --- as opposed to what is of ‘spirit’ ---
jeering thereby all the more at its God-ordained power to lift a man, at the
first touch of its lifegiving waters to his forehead, into the Ark of Salvation
and thither, should he persist in obedience, unto the Port of Heaven.
There’s just one catch. Because you equate obedient works,
most of which are overt physical actions (think you) and of which water baptism
is the official beginning and a premiere example, to useless (say you in
contradiction to all of the evidence of Sacred Scripture) deeds of the
‘flesh’. Only, what does James say above?
“For as the body without the spirit is
dead, so faith without works is dead also.” (James
2:26 KJV)
Notice the perfect dualistic equivalence, mother & father ---
the spirit for the body is what works are for faith. We repeat:
The spirit is to the body what works
are to faith.
James makes this utterly plain. Therefore, when you deign to call
‘works’, or baptism, mere deeds of the ‘flesh’, the
Apostle James, speaking inerrantly at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the
text of Sacred Scripture and as revealed in your very own bibles, flat-out
contradicts you! After all, were your equating of works of obedience to deeds
of the flesh correct, then James should not have said:
“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so
faith without works is dead also.” (James 2:26 KJV)
Instead, he should have said:
“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so
works without faith is dead also.” (James 2:26 RAMV
--- Revised Archaic Mother Version)
Either the body = faith or the body = works. Which is it, dear
parents? And, much to your chagrin, it is the former --- the body
equals faith, not works! In other words, God via James shows how
works are equivalent to the spirit, and not to the body!
Do you see, then, how awry has been your whole life spent
religiously in castigating ‘dead works’? When, the whole time, you
should have been castigating a ‘dead faith’! Because that’s
what faith is, absent of works. Just as our flesh is dead without spirit to
enliven it, so our faith is dead without works to enliven it.
And what can dead flesh do, what can it achieve?
Nothing, except to rot in physical death until the general
judgment.
And what can a dead faith do, or what can it achieve?
Nothing, except to burn in spiritual death in the Pit of Hell
forevermore!
Your Protestant faith, my poor dear parents, is nought but a dead
faith. The point regarding the necessity of works unto salvation drives this
home in spades all by itself. Rejecting the necessity of obedient good works,
thinking to ‘free’ yourself from an imaginary ‘bondage’
to a so-called ‘empty’ religion, you waltz right into the trap of
the Devil, mouthing his lies and aping his rebellion. It is your
religion that is empty, void of any real obedience to God’s Commandments,
your ‘freedom’ that is bondage, enslaved as you are to the
sins of your Protestant forefathers, especially the sins of your heresies, which
are a breaking of the three first --- and most important --- of God’s Ten
Commandments, His Law given unto men for their salvation.
+
+ + 1q. “Be Ye Therefore Perfect” + + +
And don’t pretend it’s impossible to obey God. That is a
very typical Protestant canard. “We can’t obey the commandments. No
one can! The Old Testament Law proved this. That’s why it’s just
faith in Jesus.”
No, it’s not “just faith in Jesus.” It is
God’s grace through right faith --- believing all of His teachings &
all of His commandments to be both true and necessary --- and obedient works in
light of the same, that saves us. Nor is it ‘impossible’. For Jesus
said:
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in
heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48 KJV)
Or would God command men to do that which is impossible for them to
accomplish? Such a ‘god’ would be either cruel or irrational. The
real God is neither. Which is why, asked by His disciples how many would be
saved and they aghast at His answer concerning how hard it is for men to enter
Heaven, Jesus said:
“With men this is impossible; but with God all things are
possible.” (Matthew 19:26c-d KJV)
Which is why, then, Jesus also stressed the necessity of obedience
to God’s Law.
“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the
prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one
tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever
therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall
teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but
whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great
in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, that except your righteousness
shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in
no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-20 KJV)
We have looked at this passage now many a time. Never yet have you
come up with a satisfactory answer to its plain and clear words. Truly, you had
never even attempted to explain it away until your most recent letter. An
explanation that falls utterly flat, Jesus not only stating quite clearly how
nothing in God’s Law shall pass “till heaven and earth pass”
--- He making the assertion concrete (rather than abstract,
metaphorically laid onto the shoulders of Jesus & His Sacrifice, as you
would like to pretend is the case) by insisting, quite plainly, on how
“whosoever therefore shall break one of the least of these
commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least
in the kingdom of heaven” --- but after this passage then going on to
demonstrate, for the remainder of the verses in chapter five, how men teach a
very modest degree of ‘obedience’ to God’s Commandments while
God requires a much higher degree of obedience altogether, far beyond
what men dare to teach! E.g., where Jesus says:
“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time,
‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ (Deuteronomy 5:18): but I say unto
you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust
after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
(Matthew 5:27-28 KJV)
Which of you and your ‘born again christian’ peers
takes this seriously, dear parents? And this is not even one of the “least
commandments” (Matthew 5:19a KJV), as is clear from the Old Testament, it
being a sin on this earth punishable by death!
“And the man that committeth adultery
with another man’s wife, even he that committeth
adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress
shall surely be put to death.” (Leviticus 20:10 KJV)
This and like admonishments in Matthew 5 then lead to the
adjuration we perused above at the end of the chapter:
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48 KJV)
But would you still persist in your contumacy that it is not
possible for men to learn to obey God’s Commandments unto perfection and
salvation, thereby pleasing Him? Then hear the words of God spoken through the
Apostle Paul, your favorite biblical writer since you misinterpret him (2 Peter
3:15b-17) in your “private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20c KJV) to
imaginarily ‘uphold’ your heresy of ‘faith alone’. [See
your email on 24 January 2007, section 4, for your most recent approbation of,
thus evidence that you adhere to, ‘faith alone’.]
“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is
common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be
tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make
a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” (1
Corinthians 10:13 KJV)
It’s right there, dear parents! Smack dab in the middle of
your bibles. God promises men, who are obedient to Him by entering the Catholic
Church, to make certain that they are not tempted beyond their ability to
endure but that they will, by the Triune Catholic God’s help, be able to
resist and do the right thing --- no exceptions admitted. Consequently I ask
you:
Seeing that this is true (and you must admit it is true, given that
it is plainly stated in your bible) --- and seeing as how you like to think
your ‘born again christian’ heresy is correct, however wrong it
actually is --- then where do you get the nerve to say it’s impossible
to be perfect? Not only has God commanded men to be perfect, He not
saying to do what it is not possible to do, but God through the Apostle Paul assures
us that it is always possible to escape temptation and so accomplish
the right thing, obeying the commandments!
The challenge, then, is not to ‘just believe’ in Jesus
(meaning, by your deformed theology, that a ‘born again christian’
should simply trust, all the time without fail, that Jesus will never let him
go to Hell or suffer something bad while still here on this earth regardless of
what he does or does not do), but to believe rightly and obey perfectly.
This is the goal that a real Christian (read: Roman Catholic) sets his eyes
upon to achieve. Not solely in his own strength --- indeed, not in his own
strength ultimately at all, so critical is humility to the attainment of
salvation --- but using what strength God by grace has given him in order for
him to cooperate freely with God in all that he does and hence believe rightly
and come to obey perfectly until, and especially at, death,
gaining salvation.
+
+ + 1r. The Inescapable Conclusion + + +
The flip side is also true. That is to say, just as a man can
cooperate freely with grace to practice right faith and right morality and so
receive salvation, he can also like a stubborn mule or wicked sheep wander off
completely, to his utter destruction. For men on earth in the realm of time
have been granted the gift of free will, together with a responsibility to use
this free will correctly. Extremely Calvinistic Protestants deny the real
existence of a man’s free will. Whereas self-styled ‘born again
christians’ like yourselves deny the real existence of a true
responsibility to use this free will properly. Not utterly, for even you admit
the need to behave morally and hence the necessity of punishment in this life.
No, you deny the existence of responsibility for your salvation. Because
whether you go to the logical extreme that is to be drawn from the idea of
‘faith alone’, thinking it impossible for a man to ‘lose his
salvation’ after saying a ‘sinner’s prayer’ --- or
whether you are somewhere in between, supposing it possible for a man to deny
your false christ and so end up in Hell --- you nonetheless presume, in most
cases if not all, that a man cannot possibly effect the outcome of his eternal
fate by either obeying or disobeying God’s Commandments. A situation
that, were it true, makes a mockery of every single commandment, every single
admonishment to obey a commandment, and every single warning about what will
happen to a man should he not obey a commandment, that has ever been recorded
in Sacred Scripture.
Think about it, my dear mother & father. Because it
doesn’t take too much effort to recognize the implications:
If God does not require obedience to his commandments in order for
a man to save his soul, and if all it takes is ‘just believing’ in
Jesus like you say (although we ignore for the moment the inconsistency in your
thinking that believing is not a ‘work’ or ‘obedience’),
then nothing a man does or says from that moment onward of ‘just
believing’ in Jesus (apart from, perhaps --- and depending on what kind
of ‘born again christian’ you are, exactly --- to stop
‘believing’ in Him by renouncing your ‘born again
christian’ faith) could possibly effect the ultimate outcome of his
eternal fate. He is going to Heaven, guaranteed, no matter what.
What, then, convinces him to be a good man, aside from him
just happening to want to do what the commandments say?
Put differently, how can this man possibly be made to obey
the commandments if his temptation to do the contrary is too strong, or his
will to resist is too weak, and the inclination of his mind is to do whatever
he wants, come what may the consequences?
Eternally speaking, there are no consequences for him!
Such a man has nothing to fear from an Almighty God, his immortal
soul guaranteed entrance into Heaven no matter what he does upon this earth, or
how horrid and repeated his sins are to the very instant of his death. Such a
man, be he depraved enough, can sin willfully to the highest degree, heedless
in his passions since there is no eternal punishment for him to fear for giving
into them.
As a matter of fact, given that this is the case, then why does God
even bother commanding anything to begin with? What’s the use? He’s
going to let you into Heaven anyhow, He considers you ‘covered’ by
Jesus’ Sanctity, He’s taken care of everything already, so
what’s there left to worry about? Why should He take offense when you
sin? You can hardly help it, it can’t outweigh Jesus’ Sacrifice,
and you’re ‘perfect’ in His Sight due to the
‘imputation’ of His Son’s Righteousness onto you… so
what’s the big deal? Why try to be good? Other than that being bad
might get someone mad at you, making things difficult --- what’s the
point? Ergo, provided no one gets in your way, then be as bad as you want
to be… ’cause it’s never going to make you lose Heaven!
Believe it or not, this is essentially what the first Protestant,
Martin Luther, taught. Examine the writings of his own words should you doubt
me. In many ways he took Protestant principles to their logical conclusion
(although his devotion to liturgy and respect for baptism, amongst other
things, would have made you very uncomfortable). Later Protestants jettisoned
some of his more extreme conclusions, although there is always someone
somewhere who espouses them since they do logically follow from common
theological ground that all Protestants share, whether they know it or not.
But don’t think that the two of you are exempt from this
example, my dear parents, just because you may suppose yourselves to be very
‘moral’ & ‘obedient’ to the last seven of the Ten
Commandments despite your eschewal of obedience as necessary for salvation. For
you most definitely, inarguably, irrefutably & obstinately disobey the
first three of the Ten Commandments irregardless of how you do or do
not obey the last seven. These first three commandments, the ones regarding
right faith & correct religion, you most willfully break, stubbornly
ignoring biblical & historical facts all over the place about how God has
made Roman Catholicism to be the One Single Religion that we must believe &
obey in order to save our souls!
Period.
So, then, we see that you are most certainly wicked rebels against
God & His Commandments, as of yet evincing no true love for Him during your
now lengthy earthly lives. Wherefore I say to you:
Stop wasting your time!
Take heed of your peril, seize the mercy of God as evidenced in the
fact that He has not yet required your souls to appear before His dread
tribunal to answer for your foul deeds of false religion or other immorality,
and seek entrance into the only haven that He has provided from the Deluge of
His Wrath for our sins, the Ark of His Son’s Body, the Roman Catholic
Church.
+
+ + 1s. Lawless + +
+
“But the Apostle Paul has told us that we are to be free from
the law!” you might protest, still pretending to be biblical.
To which I say, he has said nothing of the kind. This ought
to be abundantly manifest, based upon all of the good plain sense and solid
biblical facts that we have mustered thus far. Yet if you need more proof ---
and assuming you’ll cooperate with a good will unto hope of real salvation
for your soul --- then consider:
Left to your own devices, having to try to figure the Bible out as
you see fit according to your own “private interpretation” (2 Peter
1:20c KJV), then Paul’s injunction against the law is necessarily an
injunction against all law regardless. I.e., in no way can a
man’s salvation be had by any other way than that it doesn’t
involve obeying commandments. Not that you don’t try to obey any
commandments, merely that your failure or success at obeying them has no bearing
on the ‘security’ of your eternal salvation. But, then, if
that’s the case, then why does the Bible so often mention obeying
commandments?
“Ah,” say you, “because we’re born again
and now that we have the Spirit then we’re able to do what we
couldn’t do before, to obey the commandments.” The implication
being, of course, that God only keeps the commandments around because a man
only becomes really or significantly capable of obeying them after he’s
been ‘born again’ and because it does make God happy that a man do so,
something the man should want to do now that he’s able to do it,
especially if he’s been ‘filled with the spirit’. Although,
when you think about it, that’s a really strange and completely
inconsistent thing to say, seeing as how you will never admit that it’s
possible to be perfect --- and despite Jesus ordering His disciples to “Be
ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in
heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48 KJV) Why insist that
perfection isn’t possible when you’ve got the “Spirit”
(say you) to help you? Are you not ‘born again’? Or is all of this
just phony doubletalk that means nothing, spinning a man in spiritual circles
till his head explodes?
Which, when you ponder it, is why heretics like you usually
don’t like to think about these things very deeply. How can you when to
do so will tie you up in pretzels, unable to explain anything clearly or
consistently?
Going on, and overlooking the inconsistency just highlighted, we
find heretics like you left grappling with an even bigger and more fatal
inconsistency. Because you can try to explain away all of the times the
Bible mentions obedience to the commandments by saying it’s meant for
‘born again’ people who have ‘the spirit’ and are thus
able to overcome sin… but you can’t explain away all the
times the Bible makes it clear that obedience to the commandments is necessary
to enter Heaven. For instance:
“And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to
give every man according as his work shall be. I am Alpha
and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed are they that
do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of
life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without
[outside] are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and
idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. I Jesus have sent mine angel to
testify unto you these things in the churches.” (Revelation 22:12-16a
KJV, annotation added)
Pretty blunt stuff, my dear parents. And this is just one passage
out of dozens upon dozens upon dozens of passages, several of which we’ve
already looked at. What are you going to do, throw your bibles away?
You’re going to have to if you dare to peek at them and yet won’t
give up your nonsense about it being ‘faith alone’ that saves you!
Because if you’ve got it right, then Jesus could hardly have done a worse
job communicating that heretical principle of yours than by what He said in the
passage just above. In fact, if your nonsense of ‘faith alone’ is
correct, then he should not have said:
“And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to
give every man according as his work shall be. I am
Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed are
they that do his commandments, that they may have right
to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.
For without [outside] are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers,
and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth
and maketh a lie. I Jesus have sent mine
angel to testify unto you these things in the churches.” (Revelation
22:12-16a KJV, annotation added)
Instead, He should have said:
“And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to
give every man according as his faith shall be. I
am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed
are they that believe, that they may have right to the
tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For
without [outside] are unbelievers, persons without faith, those who
aren’t born again, and whosoever doesn’t just believe in me, not
having asked me into his heart. I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify
unto you these things in the churches.” (Revelation 22:12-16a RAMV ---
Revised Archaic Mother Version, annotation added)
Is it getting through to you yet, mother & father?
Simply put, your heretical interpretation regarding ‘faith
alone’ cannot be sensibly reconciled with all of those verses
throughout Sacred Scripture which plainly speak of a man’s obedience to
God’s Commandments playing a critical role in whether or not he receives
the Gift of Eternal Life. Hence, should you nonsensically insist on
interpreting Paul’s words in Romans, Galatians, Colossians or wherever to
mean ‘faith alone’ is how a man enters Heaven, then you are left in
a dead end alley --- literally, left holding a dead faith ---
with nowhere to reasonably go. You are lawless and must either ignore most of
your bible or throw away your entire bible. There is no in-between.
+
+ + 1t. Paul Fights Jewish Fables + + +
Whereas, in stark contrast, Roman Catholics have no problem with
Paul’s words. We not only take seriously all the times the Bible tells us
obedience to commandments are crucial to receiving everlasting salvation, but
we can easily interpret Paul’s words about faith vs. law to mean nothing
other than what the Catholic Church has always declared, infallibly, since the
very first century with Jesus & His Apostles.
To wit, Paul’s words regarding the law in Romans, Galatians
or other epistles, refer to the Old Covenant Law. Specifically, to that
part of the Old Covenant Law which pertains to animal sacrifices and their
accompanying rituals or ceremonies. Once Jesus finished His Eternal
Sacrifice upon the Cross, however, then --- appropriate though they were for their
times according to the Will of God --- these animal sacrifices & their
ceremonial rituals were superseded shortly thereafter not only by Jesus’
Sacrifice on the Cross but also by the ceremonies & rituals that He
& His Apostles established for the propagation of the New Covenant
Law.
This is all spelled out pretty clearly in the Catholic Ritual
Defended article that I have sent you several times over, your very own
bibles revealed to uphold the practices of the Catholic Church. You need to
read it.
In the meantime, we now have the key to understanding how Paul can
seem to exhort justification by faith on the one hand whilst appearing to
denigrate justification by works on the other hand. Because it is not
justification by faith alone that he is exhorting, and it is not
justification by works sum total that he is denigrating. Rather,
it is justification by the Faith of the New Covenant that he exhorts ---
while not excluding justification by the New Covenant Works as well ---
and it is justification by the Works of the Old Covenant that he
denigrates, particularly any of the animal sacrifices & their
accompanying ceremonies or rituals.
We see this demonstrated in his recurring mention of circumcision,
which was the God-given ritual that initiated a man into the
“Now there were in the church that was at
In
“But when Peter was come to
The Judaizers were put on the defensive after
The Apostle Peter, while not falling for the lie of Judaism,
nevertheless capitulated to the pressure of Jewish Christians who had recently
arrived from
Consequently, Paul’s injunction against “the works of
the law” (Galatians 2:16a KJV) is an injunction against abiding by the
ceremonial rituals of the Old Covenant Law, such as getting circumcised or
circumcised Jews separating off from uncircumcised Gentiles due to the
latter’s ceremonial ‘uncleanness’. Rituals that could not
apply during the New Covenant. For in the New Covenant, Jesus had fulfilled
the ceremonies & rituals of the Old. Now it is necessary to believe in the
teachings and obey the commandments of the New, not the Old, although the New
incorporates the commandments of the Old that are not exclusive to the
ceremonies of the Old and adopted some of the rituals of the Old to meet the
needs of the New after a proper modification.
This is what Paul means when he lauds “the faith of Jesus
Christ” over and against “the works of the law” (Galatians
2:16b, a KJV), not to mention manmade traditions that the Jews had added which
were, in many cases, useless & burdensome. Therefore, were the Galatian
Catholics to keep “the works of the law” they would have had to
keep all of the Old Covenant Law without exception (Galatians 5:3), including manmade traditions that were merely burdensome
(as opposed to those that were wise & holy). Everything --- all of the
ceremonies, all of the rituals, all of the sacrifices & every single
command. Taking bits & pieces out of context is not an option. Wherefore,
flub up by one tiny but grave little bit, by one seemingly small point…
and you’re done for. This is impossible to avoid from the get-go since
men are born in Original Sin inherited from Adam, something Old Covenant
circumcision could never remit but which New Covenant baptism can.
Indeed, it is here that we get to the crux of the matter. For by
God’s Law a man cannot commit a sin worthy of eternal death --- what the
Catholic Church infallibly tells us is a mortal sin --- and ever enter
into Heaven by his own merits alone. This is because the debt acquired through
such mortal sin is an eternal debt, a debt impossible to
pay when already marred by sin. Hence Jesus’ Sacrifice upon the
Cross. Hence it being necessary for Him, Who is the Perfect God without any
sin, to offer up His Body & shed His Blood in order to atone for the
otherwise impossible-to-pay eternal debt of mortal sin. Without this Divine
Sacrifice no man could enter Heaven, not even a newborn babe. Because the Sin of
Adam, into which all men, except for Jesus & Mary, are conceived, is a
mortal sin --- an iniquity worthy of eternal death. Ergo, no man can be
justified by the Works of Old Covenant Law. For not only are works all by
themselves unable to fully & everlastingly justify the mortal sinner in
God’s Sight, but Jesus had not yet come to earth to sacrifice His
Flesh to pay the eternal debt of mortal sins (and lesser sins, too) for
penitent, professing & obedient men in His Body, the Catholic Church!
Moreover, Jesus having now come to the earth as a man and
sacrificed Himself upon the Cross, the Works of Old Covenant Law are not simply
insufficient to pay the eternal debt of mortal sin (beginning with the
mortal iniquity of Adam’s Original Sin, and in contrast to the temporal
debt of such sins, including sins that are lesser, being only venial and not
mortal), but are now become a direct denial of the sufficiency of
Christ’s Death to pay this eternal debt.
We repeat:
Now that Jesus Christ has come to earth and completed the Sacrifice
of His Flesh & Blood in the Temple of His Divine Body, it is a massive
affront against & blasphemous assault upon God Himself --- against the
offering of His Son & upon the Saving Truth of His Testimony --- as if this
Gift of Infinite Measure, of His Son, cannot achieve the redemption God had
purposed it to accomplish since Adam’s Fall, or cannot do so apart from
the ceremonial rituals & sacrifices of the Old Covenant Church.
Which is why Paul tells the Catholics of
“For since by man came death, by man came also
the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in
Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:21-22 KJV)
And:
“For circumcision verily profiteth,
if thou keep the law: but if thou be a breaker of the law, thy
circumcision is made uncircumcision. Therefore if the uncircumcision keep
the righteousness of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be counted for
circumcision? And shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who by the letter
and circumcision dost transgress the law? For he is not a Jew, which
is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:
but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart,
in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of
God.” (Romans 2:25-29 KJV. See also Deuteronomy 10:16, where God through
the Prophet Moses tells the Jews to circumcise the “…foreskin of
your heart, and be no more stiffnecked…”, and to which Paul was
referring in Romans 2:29b.)
Incidentally, beware of thinking the Apostle Paul here condemns all
law by saying, “and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit,
and not in the letter…” (Roman 2:29b KJV) This is a
ploy of clever Protestants, who use it to bludgeon people into rejecting
anything to do with the law. However, Paul cannot have meant to put down any
and all law by mentioning “the letter” or else he would not say
just prior to this, “And shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if
it fulfil the law, judge thee, who
by the letter and circumcision dost transgress the law?”
(Romans 2:27 KJV) That is to say, Paul is clearly showing a contradiction
between “the letter” and “the law” --- the two are not
one and the same. Notice how “the letter” is linked to the word
“circumcision” in the clause “who by the letter and circumcision
dost transgress the law…” This is a big clue as to what “the
letter” is. Because within the milieu of the Bible only Old Covenant Jews
practiced “circumcision” and hence “the letter” must
have had something to do with Jews.
And so it does, “the letter” meaning that
“tradition of men” (Mark 7:8 KJV) that many Old Covenant Jews
practiced in opposition to the Commandments of God. In brief, that they had
made up many intricate rules about how to interpret and apply the Law of God,
rules that ended up, in the wickedness and hardness of their hearts, vitiating
that which they claimed to uphold. These rules, in fact, were the origin of
what later became known as Talmudic Judaism, a false religion that has totally
departed from the Religion of God in every way, not even hardly pretending
anymore to practice what Jews of ancient times once practiced, or believe what
they once believed, so far has the evil of their hardened hearts perverted
them. As a result, Paul says nothing in his letter to the Galatian Catholics to
dissuade a real Catholic from being a Catholic; but instead upholds the Faith
of Jesus Christ that is Roman Catholic and none other. A Faith that firmly
opposes the lies of wicked Judaizers, who years later were still attacking the
Church, as Paul reveals.
“For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God…
not given to filthy lucre… a lover of good men… holding fast the
faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine
both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers. For there are many unruly and
vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose
mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which
they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake… Wherefore rebuke
them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith; not giving heed to
Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth…
They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him,
being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work
reprobate.” (Titus 1:7a, g, 8b, 9-11, 13b-14, 16 KJV)
Read carefully, dear mother & father. Paul notes that it is “specially
they of the circumcision” who are part of the “many
unruly and vain talkers and deceivers”. (Titus 1:10b, a KJV) This
problem of Judaizers hiding within the Catholic Church lasted for the entire
first century, they not being decisively vanquished until the vigilance of the
earliest apostles & bishops, along with the overwhelming number of
uncircumcised Catholics, finally drove them out. And even then it didn’t
completely solve the problem, Talmudic Jews of later centuries still causing
difficulties by originating or fostering many heresies, under the guise of
being good Christians, in order to try to destroy Jesus’ Body on earth,
the Roman Catholic Church. Hence Paul warning about “…not giving
heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from
the truth.” (Titus 1:14 KJV) For these kinds of men “profess
that they know God” --- that is to say, they make-believe they’re
only decent Christians, espousing all the dogmas of the Catholic Faith --- “but
in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient,
and unto every good work reprobate.” (Titus 1:16 KJV)
Works are important! For by a man’s works, his heart is truly
known. How many men will say one thing yet do another? And who of us does not
learn to believe the actions of these men rather than their words? Such are
heretics and all rebels. And such is why men like yourselves refuse to
acknowledge good works as essential for salvation, denying the good God &
His words, even as revealed in your own bibles. For by saying ‘faith
alone’, you can seem ‘good’ while being bad. Whereas were you
to admit the necessity of good works along with right belief, then you would
both condemn yourselves and lose all excuse for not obeying the commandments.
+
+ + 1u. Some Very Bad News… + + +
And so we come round-robin right to where we began this latter
section, exposing the lie of ‘faith alone’ while condemning the
condemnation of so-called ‘born again christians’ like yourselves
of “every good work”. For, whereas you do not fault ‘good
works’ per se, you attack them ipso facto. Viz., you may
not say good works are bad to do, nonetheless, by calling them of no worth for
entering Heaven you then open wide the door to all sorts of wickedness,
squelching the fear of God in men’s hearts that helps to detain them from
sin. And men without fear of God are men left defenseless in the sight of the
Devil, that abominable serpent able to pick them off left-and-right as he sees
fit or leave them in place that they might do his service, corrupting the world
further as they are.
What’s more, my dear parents, you are no different from them.
Those of the “circumcision” were men who “profess that they
know God”. Likewise you. You claim to know the Creator. You claim to
serve Him. You say that you do His Will. All the while you cannot even match up
to what His Sacred Scripture reveals, as our lengthy email exchange has
demonstrated. You either straight out ignore the Bible (don’t read
it at all, at least in part) or covertly ignore the Bible (read it, but
carelessly and willfully misinterpret it). Whichever, you don’t pay
proper attention to it. Nor can you excuse yourself with a lack of adequate
circumstances, as if you haven’t had a chance to figure things out. For
you have lived many a year now and have had lots of opportunities to search on
your own. In all those decades you could have perceived the outward
discrepancies between what your ‘born again christianity’ teaches
and what your bibles say, or the internal contradictions that are contained
within your false religion’s bowels. And now for the last nine years you
have had me repeatedly tell you of what I have found --- that Catholicism is
the Religion that Jesus started, not Protestantism. I have been particularly
firm in the past six years, and even more tenacious in the last four. But for
what? Thus far, to no avail. You will not listen. You are convinced that you
are infallible, and absolutely certain that you are right despite all of the
historical evidence against you, as a simple survey of ancient Christian
writings reveals. Because men of the earliest centuries after Christ were
Catholic, not ‘born again christian’. Your ‘born again’
is no rebirth at all, being a charade and a mirage of human foolishness that
the Devil is permitted to manipulate once in awhile in order to keep you
subordinate.
“They profess that they know God; but in
works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient,
and unto every good work reprobate.” (Titus 1:16 KJV)
This is you, mother & father. I don’t care how good many
of your moral works may appear to be --- your religious works are objectively
abominable. You break God’s first three Ten Commandments by practicing a
false religion with a false christ; by taking the real Christ’s Name in
vain and refusing to use His Sacred Name rightly via prayer within the Catholic
Church; and by failing to keep His Sabbath holy, indulging in the worship of
heretical religion or ignoring Sunday as a day of religious obligation
altogether. You profess to know God while through your works of religion
denying Him, disobeying Him, and in every way proving yourselves thoroughly
abominable & reprobate.
That’s the bad news.
+
+ + 1v. …Followed by a Good News Valentine + + +
The Good News is that you don’t have to remain this way!
A few days ago, mother, you had a birthday. In years past we have
gotten together for this occasion and given you a material gift. That is no
longer possible. Even were we not determined to be bold Catholics, unabashedly
living our New Covenant Faith in front of you, you have seen with your own eyes
how you cannot stand to witness our Faith. It appalls you, offends you, and
infuriates you. You make fun of it, jeer at it and curse it --- if not to our
faces, then behind our backs. There is no way we can pretend to be at peace.
Either you must convert to the True Religion and stop being our enemies, or
else we have to apostatize and join the ranks of the Devil again. By
God’s grace we shall not do the latter, through our Catholic Faith
instead doing good works in Christ, Who is Our Lord & Saviour. One of those
good works that I am doing is this defense of the True Religion. You are the
primary beneficiary, this is my birthday gift to you.
My dear mother, I love you. I always have and I always shall until
the day that you die. I cannot any longer share the things of this earthly life
with you since you are determined to remain in a false religion. Meanwhile,
purely obligatory business shall not bring us together anymore, so what is
there that remains? Not even physical proximity. Soon, Our Lord Jesus willing
and His Blessed Mother permitting, we shall be far, far, far away from here,
much farther than the sixty miles that now separates us, seeking to save the
lost. You are included in that number. But alas! time is almost now run out. We
will be gone and you will be left alone without our immediate presence to light
your way out of darkness into Hope of Salvation found only in the Catholic
Church.
This is my birthday gift, dear mother. It is not a material gift,
but a spiritual gift. I give it on earth, but its origin is from Heaven,
containing the precious Gospel of Eternal Life that was given by God to men
through His Son & His Son’s Apostles and deposited in the Roman
Catholic Church. I place it in your hands. I adjure you and beg you…
please do not cast it to the side. It holds the means to save your soul,
refuting the lies that the Devil employs to enslave your soul.
It is also St. Valentine’s Day today. How lovely! That upon
the day that the Church remembers that wonderful priest and medical doctor who
gave his life in martyrdom for the sake of the Catholic Faith around AD 270 in
the City of
There is so much more to tell but no time to say it. This is
sufficient. Your last email was a litany of biblical verses intended to support
your heresy, little comments or remarks nestled in-between here and there. I
have addressed what needs to be addressed. Baptism I have shown to be not only
commanded but also necessary for salvation. It is the first work, as it were,
of the New Life, causing rebirth into the Covenant of Christ, which gives men a
New Law and a New Testimony. This New Covenant does not destroy the Old but
fulfills it, giving men a chance to start anew, free of all sin --- even that
which was original from Adam at our very conceptions --- and opening the Door
of Heaven.
Then comes the challenge of living the New Life, impelled by the
Holy Spirit, unto all perfection. It is hard, but not impossible. By the Grace
of the Triune Catholic God it can always be done, even in the Old Covenant. The
magnificent saints of the Old Law before Christ are proof of this; men like
Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, Samuel, David,
Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel & so forth. The difference between the Old Law of
Moses & the New Law of Christ is simply this:
That whereby the saints of the Old lived by a Promise not yet
fulfilled --- the Promise that God would eventually send His Christ, the
Son of the Living God, to atone for the eternal debt of their mortal sins,
including the Original Sin of Adam in which they were conceived --- the saints
of the New live by that Promise fulfilled. To wit, that His Divine Son
has come, fulfilling the Old Covenant Law to bring us His New Covenant
Law… the Law of Faith in God’s Christ through His Body, the
Catholic Church. This fulfillment is the eternal debt of mortal sin (and lesser
sins, too) paid by Jesus’ Sacrifice on the Cross. By faith therefore in
the very definite & infallible teachings of Jesus through His Body, the
Catholic Church --- that what He says through Her is the actual reality, what
God has really done & surely decided about how to save men’s immortal
souls from the Fire of an Everlasting Hell --- men embark on the Narrow Path to
Salvation, headed for the Door of Eternal Life. This begins in the waters of
baptism, wherein men die in Christ to their sins so that they might someday
rise again with Him to a Sinless Eternity. Their eternal debt remitted (and
their temporal debts, too, at that moment), they begin life anew. Truly, as new
creatures in Christ, professing His Roman Catholic Faith & obeying His
Roman Catholic Commandments. They are wholly justified in
God’s Eyes.
Obedience to the Old Law could not do this. Even the greatest of
Old Covenant saints could not enter Heaven after death upon the earth, their
souls detained in the Bosom of Abraham until Christ came to pay the eternal
debt of their mortal sins. Those who cling to the Old Law are thus headed for
damnation since no man can fully justify himself in God’s Sight by
adhering to Old Covenant Law, its ceremonies, rituals & traditions of men.
Everything the Apostle Paul says in his letters supposedly
‘disparaging’ the Law is merely him driving this fact home,
especially the uselessness of superseded ceremonies, rituals & traditions
of men. The contradiction is thus not between all law & all
faith, but between Old Covenant Law & New Covenant Faith.
Add to this the fact that God will not dispense to men of bad will, who remain
stubbornly mired in the Old Covenant, the grace to enable them to overcome sin,
which is a breaking of His commandments. They will be left to their own
strength to do a job that is beyond their strength alone. Nor did He assist men
of bad will during the Old Covenant who vitiated His Law with manmade
traditions that are wicked. Whereas the good willed man of the New Covenant ---
Roman Catholic --- has God’s Spirit living inside him, provided he stays
free of the mortal sins of heresy & immorality, allowing him to increase in
sanctification unto all perfection. The man of the Old Covenant could do this
also. It’s just that he couldn’t be wholly justified,
his eternal debt of sin promissorily remitted but not actually remitted till
Christ died on the Cross.
+
+ + 1w. Catholic from the Beginning + + +
Finally, the title ‘Catholic Church’ comes from most
ancient times. A bishop named Ignatius who went to martyrdom at the beginning
of the second century used it with utter ease and absolute familiarity, proving
it to have been of no recent invention. Moreover, he was a very old man when he
died, nearly ninety years, having been a Christian since earliest youth. To top
it off, he knew the Twelve Apostles personally, having been ordained a priest
by Peter and made a bishop by John. He thus cannot be accused of reckless
‘innovation’ and his letters, preserved till this day, are available
for anyone to read who wants to do so. The particular copies that I have are
the translative work of Protestant scholars, who are no friends of Catholicism.
Consequently, they cannot be accused of being propagandists for the Church of
Rome.
Furthermore, the title ‘Catholic Church’ is preserved
in the text of the Apostle’s Creed, an ancient statement of dogmatic
belief that comes from, as the name implies, the Twelve Apostles themselves and
hence the first century. You do not want to believe this, as is the case with
most people nowadays, but the fact remains. It is also a fact that the very
first Protestants universally accepted it. Only gradually did later Protestants
phase it out of use, offended by its obvious religiosity and stark opposition to
what Protestantism was becoming as the years went by. It is still employed by
some Protestants, such as certain conservative Anglicans.
And, as if that were not enough, the word ‘Catholic’ is
preserved in the titles of the letters of James, 1 & 2 Peter, 1 John &
Jude in the Bible. You won’t find the word in modern translations because
modern people don’t want to believe Jesus’ Church was Catholic from
the beginning. However, it is a fact that the earlier Protestants recognized
this, even calling themselves ‘catholic’ during the first fifty
years or so after their original rebellion in the 1520s. This is why real
Catholics came to be called Roman Catholics --- because they,
alone, of all men who wanted to call themselves ‘catholic’,
remained loyal to the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, to whom real
Catholicism has always clung as the steward of Jesus Christ on earth to lead
His Church with Holy Spirit-endowed authority to teach infallibly and so defeat
the religious deceptions of a lying Devil. Protestants rejected this truth from
day one of their existence. The letters of the Bible mentioned above, though,
retain the fact that these epistles were written to men who were Catholic since
part of the text of a writing is a title and not just its body. That is to say,
look at ancient manuscripts of the Bible and you will invariably see a title at
the top of the first page, identifying its contents. Part of the title of these
letters was the word ‘Catholic’. As for instance, The Catholic
Epistle of James, etc. The term ‘catholic’ simply means
‘general’ or ‘universal’, coming from the Greek word, ‘katholikos’. These letters were written to all
Christians in general or universally, and not just to one local church in
particular. And the reason why ‘katholikos’
became the Church’s name from the first century is that only the
Catholic Church professed the Faith that was held universally throughout
the world no matter where She was --- all other versions of so-called
‘christianity’ were limited in scope, being at best regional or
continental. The titles of these letters recognized this fact, and old
fashioned copies of the KJV bible still reveal it. The KJV scholars chose to
render the Greek word ‘katholikos’
as ‘General’, as in The General Epistle of James, etc., since
this is not as plainly Catholic-sounding, but the evidence is still there. Go
to a Strong’s Concordance, look up the word ‘general’ and you
will find an entry for its place in the title of James’ epistle,
referenced numerically to 2526 in the Greek Dictionary in the back. Then look
it up. You’ll find the Greek word ‘katholikos’,
clearly from where the Catholic Church derives Her name --- although a good
Webster’s dictionary with etymological notes will prove this derivation
to you should you doubt.
All this to say that the title ‘Catholic’ existed in
common usage as a name, for the Church that Jesus alone started, since the
first century. It is a demonstrable fact and therefore incontestable. And it
flies in direct opposition to your contention in section seven of your most
recent email that the name ‘Catholic’ did not exist in the early
Church. An early Church that cannot ever be identical to your Protestantism ---
or ‘born again christianity’, if you prefer --- since no Protestant
shares the beliefs of earliest Christians, as both an examination of their
ancient writings and an investigation of your bibles reveals. Indeed, how could
they share the beliefs of earliest Christians when they can’t even agree
with each other? All Protestants are divided on teachings, sometimes
dramatically so. This is why your citation of Ephesians 4:4-6 was tragically
laughable:
“There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye
are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one
faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all,
and through all, and in you all.” (Ephesians 4:4-6 KJV)
Have you no idea that one in body, one in Spirit, one in Lord, one
in faith and one in baptism is the last thing in the world that Protestants or
so-called ‘born again christians’ are? Every Protestant
congregation or denomination has a different creed, or no official creed at
all, no single Protestant ever to be found who espouses the exact same thing as
another Protestant when it comes to beliefs. You are not one in faith! In fact,
the only way you can even approach to having some kind of doctrinal
‘unity’ is by paring down your teachings to almost nothing, causing
them to be so bland and so few that no one who goes by the name of
‘christian’ could possibly take offense at them… unless, of
course, you happen to be a real Catholic who knows very well that Jesus taught
far differently --- and far more --- than what your meager imitation of
‘christianity’ professes.
In summation, my dearest mother & father, you and your peers
are united on almost nothing. You split congregations at the drop of a hat, you
switch ‘churches’ or ‘bible studies’ at the blink of an
eye. Should one not prove to your satisfaction, then you try another. Should
someone at one ‘church’ or in one particular congregation rub you
the wrong way, then you ditch it and run off to find another. You’re not
even all baptized (leaving aside the fact for a moment that you don’t
know what right baptism is), so how in the world could the adherents of your
religion possibly be ‘one’ in baptism? A word, by the way ---
‘religion’ --- that you hate, thinking it to represent the
purportedly ‘dead’ works of an organized religion like Catholicism,
such as a salvifically necessary and ceremonial baptism, but which I showed you
several times in past years is used respectfully by the Apostle James in his
letter. Accordingly, where he says:
“If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth
his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled
before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in
their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” (James
1:26-27 KJV)
Yet you have never addressed this, preferring to cling to your dead
faith and all of its entanglements, one of which is an unreasoning hatred of
the word ‘religion’ and anything to do with liturgy, ceremony or
ritual. But is this what your bible tells you to do? Not according to James and
the Holy Spirit that spoke inerrantly through him!
I pray earnestly for your conversion out of dead faith into living
works. May Queen Mary, the Blessed Ever-Virgin Mother of God, obtain for you
the graces from Her Son needful to enlighten your minds, soften your hearts,
and humble your souls. I am here to assist you into the Catholic Church. Your
always loving son,
-Paul
Doughton
+
+ + + +
Part Two of The Dogma of Baptism
Upheld & the Lie of ‘Faith Alone’ Cast Down (7 Letters
Consisting of 6 Prefacing Notes & 19 Chapters)
Part Three of The Dogma
of Baptism Upheld & the Lie of ‘Faith Alone’ Cast Down (2
Letters Consisting of 2 Prefacing Notes, An Afterword & 18 Chapters)
+
+ +
Pilate’s
query met:
Note:
if you have come
to this webpage directly from a search
engine or other
website, then, when done viewing this webpage
--- and assuming
you wish to view more of this website’s pages ---
please type the
website’s address (as given above right before this
note) into the
address bar at the top of your browser and hit the
‘enter’ button on the keyboard of your computer.
Please go here about use of the writings
on this website.
© 2008 by
Paul Doughton.
All rights
reserved.