Introducing Thugpreacha

Go back and read what I wrote. I did NOT ever "feel a definite calling" about the rapture. As I recall I was very cautious NOT to say anything like that. I had been persuaded that it COULD happen in the approaching time frame but I NEVER said anything along the lines of being sure of it. I was never sure of it.

"Thug" doesn't necessarily convey criminality to me, just a tough guy image.

Oh you are DEFINITELY more "open minded" than most Christians, to the point that I doubt that you even ARE a Christian because Christianity is dogmatic truth, about which you can't be open minded and still hold to that truth.

Oh good.

That's fine, I accept your definition. I was just giving my impression.I actually meant to say that I SOMETIMES think Phat isn't even a Christian. He says some bizarrely anti-Christian things for a Christian. Most of the time he's convinced me he's saved anyway, which I guess is possible even if your doctrine is wacko.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

O fer pete's sake. The reason you can't have an open mind about the principles of Christian faith is that it is based on scripture, on God's own revelation to us, God's word. Where the revelation is ambiguous we may have speculations and disagreements but overall it is God's revelation and you don't argue with God. We also of course can have an open mind about absolutely any other subject whatever.This is basic stuff. GOD IS THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY, not I and not anyone else. There are however at least hundreds of thousands who agree with me about this. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

There is nothing wrong with being judgmental, in fact Christians are charged with correctly judging all manner of things; we are told we will judge angels. The only judgmentalness the Bible condemns is about people's sins and I leave people's sins alone. Jesus died for our sins. But doctrine we are supposed to judge and judge carefully. At EvC this becomes problematic because there are all sorts including unbelievers who think THEY are the ultimate authority on things Christian.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You're a perfect example of one who thinks you know it all and gets it all wrong. Theology is ALL based on Christ, and if anyone is muddled by worldly philosophy it's you and Thugsy.I'm sure you have no clue that the "know them by their fruits" passage refers to the burgeoning Roman Church which had fruits such as no meat on Fridays and relics to be adored and condemning marriage of clergy, which has led to the horrors of sexual molestation of children, not to mention all the sexual liaisons supposedly condemned by the church that went on in the monasteries. All of their superstitions lead to bad fruits, and all are against God's word.\\Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You're deadly deceived. I hate to leave you to delude everybody else here but they like your delusional talk better than my true talk so there's not a lot I can do about it.

That is exactly HOW you are deceived, utterly delusional. You can't read the Bible piecemeal like that, it has to be read in the context of the whole thing. Words may have different meanings in different contexts, but whole teachings may not mean what you think they mean if you read everything that applies to them.

No, it looks to the future but I think there were some roots earlier.606 AD when Phocas declared the Bishop of Rome the supreme whatever, bishop I guess, or maybe Pontiff, conferring on him a general authority over all the churches. I think it was Pope Gregory who said this made the Pope the Antichrist.Got the information from the book History of Romanism by Dowling I think. May have to look it up. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You get so involved in the details of some pretty arcane scholarship it is both impressive and disappointing because it goes so far afield of what I accept as Biblical truth. I'm pretty simpleminded you could say when it comes to the Bible, not the way ringo is who thinks he can trust his own judgment of what any particular Bible verse says, but in the way that Protestant Reformed tradition reads the Bible, reading each verse in the context of the entire sixty six books. This is also consistent with evangelical views in general.So nothing in the Bible could even possibly be "pre-Gnostic," it is completely ANTI-Gnostic. Whatever your scholars say, there is plenty in the New Testament that shows that Gnosticism was alive and thriving at the time it was written, since much of it is intended to warn believers away from it.I'd have to spend time on the Colossians passage to know what I think of it since it needs some reading in context that I haven't done. So I can't answer your question.All I meant to address was the passage about "knowing them by their fruits" which I believe is pretty clearly argued by the Reformers to refer to the errors of the Roman Church, which would be documented in that book I menationed by John Dowling, The History of Romanism.The Bible is meant for all human beings, it's not meant to be complicated the way you treat it, although it can't help being somewhat difficult for us after two thousand years and the cultural gaps between the first generation and ours. But it is very simple in the most basic sense: it clearly denounces Gnosticism for instance. Trying to make any of it support that heresy in any way is straining your brain for no good reason. Paul wrote Colossians as well as most of the rest of the NT. That's what tradition tells us and it's consistent with the Bible itself if you just take it as written.Anyway. I think you need to give your brain a rest and just quietly accept what is clear in the text without jumping on all the arcane mysterious possibilities that garble the text to no good purpose.

I just skimmed through some commentaries on that passage in Colossians and wow is it complex, full of historical references that would take a lot of time to understand. But that's in the service of trying to understand just what the heresy is that Paul is objecting to that the Colossians got seduced into. I wouldn't normally get into it on that level, I'd be reading it for its teaching on what we are to avoid in our Christian lives and not the scholarly background.The commentary says Paul makes use of some Gnostic terms in order to use them to teach the CHRISTIAN view as the alternative to the Gnostic view. his use of those terms is probably what you are taking for a proto Gnostic point of view. But no, his objective is to teach Christian principles through those terms, and the Christian principles are far from the Gnostic principles. The commentary I looked at was David Guzik's. I like him because he's very organized and very straightforward. But I would suppose others cover the same concepts.The references to meat and drink and new moons pretty clearly refer back to the Old Testament laws meant for the Jews, that were fulfilled in Christ and no longer to be practiced by believers in Christ. So it's not a reference to Catholic practices, although since they did have the rule about not eating meat on Fridays there's that much of a connection, a practice to be avoided too, but I don't think that's what Colossians has in mind: new moons were a Jewish thing, one that was practiced in a way God objected to in the OT, so the Jewish context applies better.Of course I object to your calling the Torah a work of man. Jesus' sacrifice fulfilled all the Jewish laws so that we are no longer under their judgment, but that doesn't mean the Torah was not God's work. Jesus FULFILLED all those laws -- good thing too because we aren't capable of keeping them -- He didn't abolish them.But it's probably a Jewish MYSTICISM too. The commentary says that there is a lot of disagreement about exactly what heresy Paul is writing about. It seems to have elements of Gnosticism, Jewish mysticism and possibly some other mystery religions. Being simpleminded as I said, I wouldn't get into all those questions unless I got involved in a serious study of the book. Otherwise, as I say above, it's clear enough what Paul is saying we are to avoid so I read it on that level.I thought everybody knew that Catholics were not to eat meat on Fridays -- ALL Fridays --, that fish had become the staple Catholic Friday meal because of that rule. It was that way through my childhood. Meant you could pretty much count on a fresh fish meal at a restaurant on Fridays. Maybe it changed with Vatican II? I don't know. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Now you've gone so far away from the traditional view it's too much to try to follow you. I don't want to argue about it, not much one can say about such a difference of opinion anyway, all I can really do is just state the traditional view and leave it at that.We certainly believe that Gnosticism existed in New Testament times. Not only Paul, Paul himself, not a collective entity as you have it, wrote against it and so did John and I believe also Peter and Jude.I read a popular book on Gnosticism during the period I was becoming a Christian and they certainly rejected, actually despised, the God of the Old Testament, and regarded Him as evil, but Jesus Christ as the true God. I don't remember their views on the OT itself. No idea how you think the author of Colossians is "anti New Testament" but of course I take him to be Paul the Apostle who wrote most of the NT anyway.Jewish Christians weren't a separate sect unless they were "Judaizers" whom Paul condemned for misleading the Gentile believers. No idea what you mean by "European Christians" and the Gnostics weren't Christian but one of the heresies. The way I sort it, there was the new Testament and a bunch of different heresies against it.New Testament teaching doesn't "attack" the Sabbath, let alone Yom Kippur, but teaches that in Christ it is a part of the Mosaic Law we regard as fulfilled in Him that is no longer binding on us, though we may honor it.Sure the new moon and other practices were from the Torah but they had become misused in a way that God condemned, and in any case they no longer applied to believers in Christ. When we say that Christi fulfilled the Law we don't mean that He "attacked" it. He clearly says He didn't do away with it, it's God's Law and it is holy, so His fulfilling it validates it at the same time it releases us from its inexorable condemnation of those who remain under it. Nothing about it is "attacked," that is to completely misunderstand what Christ did in fulfilling it.I know of no "unwritten" Torah, just the five books of Moses, and they are no "work of man" but of God.That's the best I can do I think.ABE: Now I see your latest post but I'm going to have to come back to it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Are you taking the phrase "written by man's own hand" to mean the Law is a work of man? Is that where you get that? I read it as saying we ourselves put ourselves under the Law or something like that. Not that man wrote the Torah but that in our own selves we declare it against ourselves; we know our guilt under the Law and declare it against ourselves or something like that. But I'm not sure of this, it's hard to read that long paragraph.