January 17, 2007
Oh, By Gum! It's the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity!
Of course there are two ways of looking at this week: a right way and a wrong way. The wrong way is "Lord, let us all come to understand and accept each other's positions and blah blah blah."
The right way:
Lord, shed your Grace on all semi-Christians, heretics and schismatics, help them to put down their pride and come to the True Faith and to grow in communion with the Holy Father, the Bishop of Rome. And if they harden in their apostasy, heresy and schism, then shatter their sects, fragment them, and thus free them from the bonds of Satan, so that they may be better inclined to search for the Truth, whole and complete, which is found only in the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Amen.
Posted by erik at January 17, 2007 10:16 AMIt's amazing how much ignorance is out there.
I was sitting in the bookstore yesterday when a guy decides to give me his "Brother, are you saved?" routine (while saying over and over he wasn't trying to convert me.) He kept talking about, Well, wouldn't you want to be sure today that you're going to Heaven?
I said that that was a dangerous doctrine. (I might've called it a doctrine of demons and been more precise, but I was in a generous mood.) Now, in Baptist NC, that's blasphemy. That's the whole foundation of the culture down here. Come forward, give your life to Jesus, and you're saved. Done deal. I said gee, what if somebody makes a sincere profession but ten years later is a practicing gay person? We know from what Paul (I Cor 6:9) that that person (unless he repents) isn't saved.
But from the tenor of the questions the guy asked about Catholicism ("So the priest baptizes the wafer and it becomes Jesus"?-he actually said that) I wonder how things got this bad? How is it that truth is on the defensive? I mean-I went through an evangelical period, but at least I did some study.
(I just wrote a whole blog post. That was easy!)
Posted by: John Salmon at January 19, 2007 1:10 PM