Those Battling 45,000 Denominations

Now you can be offended at this and get prideful about it, or you can stop pretending to have knowledge and receive correction. I know what I believe. I know what the church teaches. You don't. Yiu are out of the loop. There is only shame in this if you insist that you know when you really don't.

And it is certainly worth saying since you are awfully opinionated about these matters.

Now you can be offended at this and get prideful about it,

or you can stop pretending to have knowledge and receive correction. I know what I believe. I know what the church teaches.

There is only shame in this if you insist that you know when you really don't.

Now believe me when I say that I want you to have a proper understanding, and don't fight me about it. You could, but it wouldn't be beneficial.

Pelagianism is heresy. What does that mean? It means that our works do not save us. James was not saying this at all. Paul is very right when he says we are not justified through works of the law.

If we have faith, the works will follow. They are intertwined. Did not Jesus Christ say himself that we will be judged by our works? Whether we fed the hungry, visited those in prison, clothed the naked, etc? How can you detach faith in Jesus from this?

Let it be known, Martin Luther was a heretic, and he not only altered scriptures to align with his perverse theology, but he is the reason that protestants to this day abandoned the septuigant and use the masoretic canon of scripture rather than what the church used for 1500 years prior.

To you it might be the same whether someone does good deeds to get the praise of men or whether they do it out of their love for Christ. However, to God the heart does matter.

I don't think you are right about 'the interpretive individualism of Protestant thought'.  Catholicism recognises two sources of religious authority - the Bible and the Church .  Protestantism tends to 'scriptura sola' so the protestant church has no power to add or take away from what is in the text.

What protestantism does not do is give individuals the right or power to interpret scripture as they see fit.  Under protestantism there is a correct interpretation and  determining the correct interpetation remains firmly in the hands of the Church, not the individual believer.   The only difference is that the Cathlolic church does not have justify everthing with chapter and verse as it claims to have independent authority.

I like the interpretive individualism of Protestant thought, with the emphasis on anti-authoritarianism and believing what feels right to you rather than what a mega-church says is right. And I like the practice of baptizing when you choose to be saved rather than at birth, before you can make choices.

I don't think you are right about 'the interpretive individualism of Protestant thought'.  Catholicism recognises two sources of religious authority - the Bible and the Church .  Protestantism tends to 'scriptura sola' so the protestant church has no power to add or take away from what is in the text.

What protestantism does not do is give individuals the right or power to interpret scripture as they see fit.  Under protestantism there is a correct interpretation and  determining the correct interpetation remains firmly in the hands of the Church, not the individual believer.   The only difference is that the Cathlolic church does not have justify everthing with chapter and verse as it claims to have independent authority.

The authors of the Bible are not still around to tell us, and simply reading their words is not enough to eliminate all gray areas and wiggle room.

I doubt they'd all agree if they were around.   I think the nt would be even less consistent if deciding what was canon was not in the hands of Paulines.   i think only James represents a non-Pauline perspective.

Ja 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

I think that is shows a very practical, this-worldly attitude that is more Judaic than the more abstract and next-world orienation of the Hellenised Paul.  James emphasises works for their on sake - Paul emphasises faith as the key to personal salvalation.

The rabid anti-semite Martin Luther hated the book of James and called it an epistle of straw,   but (as is plausible) james was the brother of jesus it might be closer to what Jesus actually taught.

btw ML was not a nice person.  He wrote of the Jews

"Jews are a base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth. They are full of the devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine."

That was 400 years before Hitler!

Par for the course when you've got a text composed of a bunch of different books cobbled together from a bunch of different authors over a period of thousands of years.

I was thinking of the nt.

The authors of the Bible are not still around to tell us

I doubt they'd all agree if they were around.

An inconsequential lettter by Paul such 2 John as was in but anything eviating from Paul's theological position

An inconsequential lettter by Paul such 2 John as was in but anything eviating from Paul's theological position

An inconsequential lettter by Paul such 2 John as was in but anything eviating from Paul's theological position

An inconsequential letter by Paul such 2 John as was in but anything deviating from Paul's theological position

Well, it isn't the authority of men to begin with. The Holy Spirit is with the church. The faith isn't really in men.

But if the protestant says they have no faith in men, what they are really saying is they have faith in man. Themselves!

Just them, the bible, and their interpretation.

The Orthodox Catholic Church wrote The New Testament and determined its canon. We are the church. The bible is a part of our Holy Tradition, it isn't the source. 

The church didn't wait around for 300 something years wondering what to do before The New Testament was compiled. No, we knew what we believed before.

And if you were to go back and pluck a Christian out from those ancient times and plop them in an Orthodox Church today, they would know exactly what was going on, even if they didn't speak the language.

You can't say that about any protestant church, and you can't even say that about The Roman Catholic Church.

Keith doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't really understand our faith, so him claiming that Paul and John differed is a matter of his faulty interpretation not reality.

They were both Orthodox Christians with common faith.

James, not John.   Of course they had many shared beliefs, but they clearly differed on the matter of works v. faith.   We read in the bible there were other disutes between Paul and others over dietary laws and circumscision.

Do you see this contrast as meaning works are needed for salvation?

No.  I hope one of our Jewish members will back me up when I say that salvation in the Christian sense is a minor matter within Judaism.  Judaism is far more concerned with 'this life' than the 'next life'.  James is not saying we should be kind to widows and orphans so we go to heaven -  he is saying we should be kind because that what god wants.   Unlike Christianity doing good is an end-in-itself, not a means to personal salvation.

The book of James explicit contradicts Paul's 'justification by faith' on other occasions,such as

2:24 You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.

and

2:26 As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.

My contention is that the book of James suggests that there was a 'strain' of early Christianity that was much closer to traditional Judaism than 'Paulism'.  (Certain passages in acts also sugest the same thing).   And if James was the brother of Jesus, was that version closer to what Jesus taught than Paul's version?

I don't think we can know.   Certainly I don't know anything that settles it - if any body else does have anything (other than quotes from the bible!) I'dcertinly be very interested in it.

I don't think we can know. 

We do have to put a certain amount of trust in the choosing of the canons being spirit-lead. To prove it by documentation alone, I would agree would be very difficult.