I'm not prejudiced against R.C.s BUT...

I’ve seen plenty of people on here with a low enough view of the Eucharist and asking for intercession from Saints, as well as veneration of icons and relics , that’s why I said that.
Maybe we have a different definition of “high church.”

Germans defecting is nothing new. They’re doing it at this very moment.
I can also apply your argument to Christianity.

And Christ having two natures and 2 wills was so revealed that they had to articulate this crucial dogma 400 years after the fact, and it was so well received that still more churches defected like all the oriental churches.

Seriously, double standard.
You do realize these are the same arguments Muslims use against the trinity? Literally the same arguments

 

Sources, please. (And I mean Muslim ones.)

BTW you can read just about any modern commentary on Acts and Galatians to get a full scholarly treatment on the role of James within the early Church. (Bishops as we know them didn’t exist at that point; the religion of James was Judaism.) The Hermeneia commentary series is quite good, as is the work of E.P. Sanders, for starters. Jewish and Muslim biblical scholars, such as Dr. Ali Ataie, have some interesting and insightful observations on this subject as well.

 

Any Muslim vs Christian debate on YouTube.
Do you genuinely want to know?
I don’t feel like sifting through Mohammedans polemics at this time in the night.
I’ve seen Muslims doing this a million times with Nicaea.
“If the trinity was so important why was it defined 300 years later!!!
Why were there people with different opinions!!!”

Also tons of secular scholars who say the trinity isn’t in the Bible. They even say Paul believed Jesus to be divine but not God or part of a trinity.
This is all basic atheist apologetics which Muslims recycle against Christians. Bart erhman is a basic one.

 

Here you go, I forced myself to do it.
A google click away:
“The best way to understand the doctrine of ‘Trinity’ is to study its historical evolution. It took four Ecumenical Councils from year 325 CE till 451 CE, spread over more than 100 years and 450 years after Jesus Christ was put on the cross, for the doctrine to arrive in what is its current form.”
Contrast all this to the simplicity and beauty of the Muslim creed, “There is no God but Allah!”

If we include the discussion about nature of Jesus also, it took 650 years after Jesus Christ was put on the cross, for the doctrine of Trinity to arrive in what is its current form.”



https://themuslimtimes.info/2011/11/30/the-council-of-nicaea-and-three-others/amp/

 

YouTube. Really?

It’s not as though they pulled it out of thin air. Mainstream Christian and Jewish scholars have been saying the same thing for a long time. Larry Hurtado’s One God, One Lord and Alan Segal’s Two Powers in Heaven are great examples of groundbreaking scholarship in that area. For better or worse, Nicaea was a genuine doctrinal development. If one had lived at that time, the most conservative churchmen were the subordinationist homoiousian bishops who objected to the homoousion and rejected the Arian position. (My source for that is R.P.C. Hanson’s learned tome The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God.) The purpose of the 2nd Ecumenical Synod was for the Pro-Nicene (minority) party to reconcile/compromise with this group of churchmen, and it succeeded.

 

It's still utterly irrelevant.

Alright. I'll concede that Germans defecting has nothing to do with whether or not the Pope is infallible.

No, you absolutely cannot. I said St. Paul tells us to test all things, under the assumption that St. Paul's epistles are inspired scripture. That is the presupposition. Try and use St. Paul's own writings to disprove the claims of Christ. Go on.

Actually, the monothelite controversy was still later. And they considered these issues to be already revealed. That is the point of the council. This isn't Christology or Triadology. This is the Pope literally becoming his own council.

Looks like they haven't been reading St. Greg (either of them) or St. Basil. Or the Gospel of John.

Alright. I can admit that it (the 1900 years aside) was an argumentum ab annis. But I won't concede that Vatican I wasn't an innovation. It was absolutely.

 

I mean I’m not arguing against the trinity. But have you ever read atheist apologetics?
They genuinely don’t believe the Bible expresses “3 persons trinity.”
I don’t care about their opinion but they do claim this, it’s extremely prevalent among people like Bart erhman.
See the website I linked.

 

Even if you don’t believe it, Rome also thought these doctrines to be revealed already so this point is null.

They don’t care about what Christians think. That’s the whole point lol.

You can believe Vatican I is an innovation if you want but these are not good refutations

 

For the past page or so, the only argument that we have received is your refutation of the following, which I have already conceded:

Is there anything else to which you might appeal: i.e., the claim made a thousand times in this thread that the conception of the papacy has been changed dramatically and that, generally speaking, every time the post-Vatican I Romans approach this issue, they enage in a species of eisegesis in which they erroneously interpret the fathers to be in favor of the notion of an infallible pope, or even a monarchical one?

 

Of course. There isn’t much in this area I haven’t read.

Some do and some don’t. Those who weren’t raised in the faith tend to take statements of the Gospels at face value and then try to poke holes in them. Those who were raised in the faith are often aware of biblical scholarship and argue that the Church deceived its members once common knowledge of the Bible disappeared. For the former group the Trinity is irrational; for the latter it is merely unhistorical.

Some of their arguments are garbage; others are serious and thoughtful critiques. Among the more religiously-minded, Islamic critiques have tended more toward the former (viz., “the Trinity is irrational”), while Jewish critiques have tended more toward the latter (viz., “the Trinity is unhistorical”).

 

First time I see someone saying st bellarmine didn’t believe in the papacy.
https://journals.scholarsportal.info/pdf/22847308/v18i0006/21_srbcatlopp.xml
this explains his argument against conciliarism (aka he was a papalist).
We also believe the papal office has check and balances.
Honestly this is almost pseudo history.


I will point you to this write up https://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/Understanding-of-Papal-Supremacy.pdf
Which is not catholic polemics. Just history.
The popes did believe in the papal office, it’s just a fact of history…

 

I don’t see proof of this. I’ve heard arguments it’s different from the early church, but not so far as bellarmine or aquinas. That’s just not true

 

Well, I certainly don't see proof that the Fathers thought the pope infallible either, and that it isn't an innovation contrary to the faith handed down to us from the Apostles. So we've reached an impasse.
God bless.

 

What checks and balances does the Pope have? What are you even talking about. Can anyone overrule him? Can anyone in the Pope's circle countermand his papal magisterium, or negate it? Are there papal courts which judge over him? Can the cardinals get together and cancel something the Pope has declared? Can even a General Council (according to roman teaching) stop or cancel a Pope's decree?

You may not be aware of the full features of this church that you're a member of. There isn't a single case where someone in Rome can overrule, suppress, or cancel the Pope's decisions.

Prove me wrong.

I'm not saying that he didn't believe in the papacy, but that the Roman Catholicism he saw during his lifetime is unrecognizable to a Roman Catholic today. One of the sophisms of Roman apologetics is, "if we change things slowly enough, then it's like we haven't changed them at all". History books show abundant changes to the Roman church. Not accidental or disciplinary but substantial and essential changes, alterations, erasures. Bellarmine's eyewitness reports of the Roman Catholicism of his own time are just one data point. The medieval world is another datapoint (even more unrecognizable from the vantage point of Vatican I). And the patristic world is so different that it is almost a different religion. If you don't look at history, you'll never see those differences.

 

“Pure, honest hatred. Very good.”
- Kor, Klingon Military Governor of Organia

This pretty much sums up why debates with fundamentalists of any religion are a waste of time.

 

I didn't state that Peter said the word, "fact." I think it's obvious that Peter stated a fact, namely, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God (v. 16). This fact was a revelation from God (v. 17) and Peter was the very first person to speak it aloud.

Actually, it's not "my private interpretation" to observe (as many others have) the plain words as they were recorded in the Greek and Aramaic languages. The fact that petros (and its Aramaic equivalent) is masculine and petra (along with its Aramaic equivalent) is feminine cannot be disposed of by merely claiming that someone has drawn an "interpretation." One may as well claim that a scientist's observation that the carbon atom has six electrons is his "interpretation" of the nature of that atom. Linguists have observed the fact of these words' genders being opposite. The councils and popes you mention obviously did not take this fact into account; we could only conjecture as to whether they overlooked it, purposely ignored it, or something else, but facts are facts and humans (even popes and bishops) can err.

Now, I will provide an interpretation: I think Jesus was employing a clever double entendre when He used those words. That's just my opinion and how I incorporate the incontrovertible facts into a viewpoint consistent with those facts.

 

Doesn’t the Constitution of Vatican City say that all legislative, judicial, and executive powers reside in the Supreme Pontiff?

 

I’m not a fundamentalist
I just don’t care about atheist apologetics because I’ve decided Christianity is true.
Am I supposed to care ?
The thread seemed to be going in the direction of me siding with atheists against the trinity or something so I just wanted to make it plenty obvious I wasn’t

 

By what means or mechanism does a human being become infallible? Is there some magic dust on the "chair of Peter" which perfects what comes out of the pope's mouth at certain moments? (If so, Francis needs to have his cleaning crew stop dusting the chair so thoroughly.)

The OT prophets certainly were not infallible, and many of them were actually false prophets. We are told to judge prophecies by seeing if what they foretell comes to pass. What prophecies have the popes made which came to pass, other than stuff too vague to know for sure?

 

I can’t speak for others here, but I never thought you were denying the Trinity. That would make one a rather odd Catholic, would it not?