@ Aqwsed
It may not contradict Catholic teaching, but aren't Muslims going to burn in hell according to the Catholic Church?
So the Pope should be calling for nothing less than repentance and conversion..
How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?
by Sea Breeze 27 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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aqwsed12345
I already answered this video on the previous page, but let me repeat what the Church taught even before the Second Vatican Council, here is the Letter of the Holy Office, August 8, 1949, addressed to Archbishop Cushing of Boston, published with the approval of Pope Pius XII.
In His infinite mercy God has willed that the effects, necessary for one to be saved, of those helps to salvation which are directed toward man's final end, not by intrinsic necessity, but only by divine institution, can also be obtained in certain circumstances when those helps are used only in desire and longing. This we see clearly stated in the Sacred Council of Trent, both in reference to the sacrament of regeneration and in reference to the sacrament of penance (Denzinger, nn. 797, 807).
The same in its own degree must be asserted of the Church, in as far as she is the general help to salvation. Therefore, that one may obtain eternal salvation, it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church actually as a member, but it is necessary that at least he be united to her by desire and longing.
However, this desire need not always be explicit, as it is in catechumens; but when a person is involved in invincible ignorance God accepts also an implicit desire, so called because it is included in that good disposition of soul whereby a person wishes his will to be conformed to the will of God.
These things are clearly taught in that dogmatic letter which was issued by the Sovereign Pontiff, Pope Pius XII, on June 29, 1943, On the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ (AAS, Vol. 35, an. 1943, p. 193 ff.). For in this letter the Sovereign Pontiff clearly distinguishes between those who are actually incorporated into the Church as members, and those who are united to the Church only by desire.
...he mentions those who "are related to the Mystical Body of the Redeemer by a certain unconscious yearning and desire," and these he by no means excludes from eternal salvation, but on the other hand states that they are in a condition "in which they cannot be sure of their salvation" since "they still remain deprived of those many heavenly gifts and helps which can only be enjoyed in the Catholic Church" (AAS, 1. c., p. 243). With these wise words he reproves both those who exclude from eternal salvation all united to the Church only by implicit desire, and those who falsely assert that men can be saved equally well in every religion...Thus a non-Catholic can be saved if they are united to the Church by "desire and longing," which can even be implicit (that is, not conscious or explicit), particularly in the case of "invincible ignorance." Such implicit desire means the person has a sincere disposition to do God's will as best as they know. However, this does not mean that all religions save equally; rather, it recognizes God's mercy for those who do not formally belong to the Catholic Church but seek God sincerely according to their knowledge.
Hence the Church has never taught a simple syllogism—“Muslim, therefore damned”—because she has never reduced salvation to a census of labels. What she does teach, unchanged from Trent through Vatican II and Dominus Iesus, is a double truth held together like the two poles of one mystery. First, every man who is saved is saved only because the merits of Christ are poured into his soul and embed him, visibly or invisibly, within Christ’s Body, the Church; the objective necessity of that incorporation will never be revoked. Second, the same Redeemer, “who wills all men to be saved” (1 Tim 2:4), can touch a conscience that suffers invincible ignorance of the Gospel and elicit there an implicit but real assent to the light given; if that man dies in the state of grace, he is not excluded from the Beatific Vision. Pius IX supplied the classical formula: no one is saved who, knowing the Catholic Church to be founded by God, refuses to enter; but those who, through no personal fault, do not know her, yet strive to do God’s will as they understand it, may attain eternal life by the interior working of grace. Aquinas had already sketched the principle when he distinguished between the necessitas praecepti of baptism and the necessitas medii that God can supply extraordinarily when the sacrament is physically or psychologically inaccessible.
Within that framework it is possible for a Muslim to be saved, not because Islam possesses a parallel salvific apparatus, nor because its denial of the Trinity is rendered harmless, but because the Holy Spirit can translate the fragmentary shoots of natural religion—fear of the Creator, sorrow for sin, rudimentary trust in divine mercy—into supernatural virtues that secretly bind the soul to Christ. Yet such a path is precarious, for it must fight the gravity of serious doctrinal error without the ordinary helps of the sacraments. Hence the Council’s stark warning: “very often men, deceived by the Evil One, become vain in their reasonings” (LG 16). So the Church can both honor whatever is good in Islam and still confess that its faithful stand, objectively, in need of the fullness of truth and means of grace entrusted to Peter’s barque.
Would the Pope, then, betray his office if he addresses Muslims without an explicit altar-call? No more than Paul betrayed his when, at the Areopagus, he first praised the Athenians for their altar ad ignotum deum before announcing the resurrection. Evangelization is always a two-step art: one names the seeds of the Word already present, then one invites to the harvest. John Paul II, in the very speech you quoted, did both: he began with shared theism so that his hearers would recognise him not as an enemy of their souls but as a fellow worshipper of the Almighty; and he ended by confessing, without ambiguity, that Christians acknowledge Jesus as “Lord and Saviour”—a title that implicitly calls every listener to decide. The call to conversion need not roar; sometimes it must be woven into the grammar of respect so that it can be heard at all. But the mandate itself is never suspended: the Church “must proclaim Christ to all nations” (Ad Gentes 7), for in the final accounting each man will be judged by the measure of grace he has accepted or refused.
Therefore Catholics may neither consign all Muslims wholesale to perdition nor lapse into a soft pluralism. We hold instead a Thomistic tension: Christ alone saves, the Church is his universal instrument, and yet the reach of his mercy is not shackled by the visible frontier of the sacraments. From that tension flows both the urgency of mission and the courtesy of dialogue—the two lungs, as John Paul liked to say, by which the Church breathes in the modern world.
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Vanderhoven7
@Aqwsed
"Within that framework it is possible for a Muslim to be saved, not because Islam possesses a parallel salvific apparatus, nor because its denial of the Trinity is rendered harmless, but because the Holy Spirit can translate the fragmentary shoots of natural religion—fear of the Creator, sorrow for sin, rudimentary trust in divine mercy—into supernatural virtues that secretly bind the soul to Christ."
That's just the word of men. Here is what Jesus says:
I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins. John 8:24
Jesus did not say you don't have to believe I am the Son of God, that I died for your sins and that I rose again for your justification as long as you have parallel salvific apparatus.
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Sea Breeze
Not many jws or ex-jws know this point. The WTS once said only the anointed are Jehovah's witnesses, saying that Isaiah 43:10-12 was said to the Jews as being "witnesses of Jehovah" so the witnesses of Jehovah in this time have to be "spiritual Israelites" = anointed.
@Blondi
I agree.Watchtower has consistently characterized their (non-partaking) members as unsaved people, and who despite this, can still supposedly avoid dying by being obedient to Watchtower, or so they say.
They train their members to reject the new covenant that scripture specifically says is "for the forgiveness of sins" in Mt. 26: 27-28. JW's are willing to go along with this rebellion in exchange for the prospect of unending life.... which is the real product Watchtower has been selling ever since the 1920 tract (and subsequent convention series) titled "Millions Now Living Will Never Die".
Here are a few more references down through the years reminding the JW hopeful that they do not have their sins forgiven as a result of the blood of the covenant.... which is the only biblical way to pay your sin debt.
“These have not received the free gift of righteousness” WT 6/15/2011 p.15
“We read about faithful Christians: “They are being declared righteous by his undeserved kindness through the release by the ransom paid by Christ Jesus.”—Romans 3:24. In the context, these words apply directly to anointed Christians... " W90 10/15 p.28
"The "great crowd" of survivors of the "war of the great day of God the Almighty" will then be on their way to gaining absolute righteousness and perfection in the flesh....For this reason they will not be justified ….either now or then as the 144,000 heavenly joint heirs..." "Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God, 1966, p. 391
“In view of what we have seen about justification or being declared righteous by faith as being only a means to an end, so that certain ones might be eligible to membership in Christ’s body and share heavenly glory with him, it follows that all whose destiny is the earth, the foregoing ones mentioned, would have no need of having righteousness imputed to them.
After such ones achieve actual perfection at the end of the Millennium and then pass a final test, they will be in a position to be declared righteous for everlasting human life. ”WT Dec 15, 1985 p.30
No where does to bible say this. It is a lie.
“They will be declared righteous, not in the spirit, but in the flesh. They will then have, not an imputed righteousness but actual human perfection.’ W69 3/15 p. 183
"Jehovah God will justify, declare righteous, on the basis of their own merit, all perfected humans who have withstood that final decisive test of mankind." Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God, 1966, p.400
That last quote is the bottom line for JW's. The message is clear: You don't need Jesus. -
Vanderhoven7
Thanks Sea Breeze for those revealing quotations!
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aqwsed12345
@Vanderhoven7
The Lord’s warning in John 8:24 is absolute: no one enters life while remaining in culpable unbelief of the One whom the Father has sent. That text has governed Catholic soteriology from the Fathers through Trent: faith in Christ, enlivened by grace and perfected in charity, is the gateway to justification. Where you and I must look more closely is the distinction—taught by Augustine, refined by Aquinas, and reaffirmed by Pius IX—that the act of faith can be either explicit or, under certain conditions, implicit. Saint Thomas puts it succinctly: “Before the coming of Christ it was enough to believe explicitly in the Redeemer as promised; after His coming it is necessary to believe explicitly in Him as accomplished—unless a person be so situated that he cannot hear the Gospel, in which case a readiness of will to believe whatever God should reveal is accounted unto righteousness”.
The soldier on the Roman frontier, the Chinaman of the twelfth century, the Bedouin infant who dies in the cradle do not disprove Christ’s sentence; rather, the Holy Spirit, “who blows where He wills,” can interiorly move such souls at the moment of conscience to accept the light available to them and, if they persevere in that obedience, dispose them for the final illumination by which Christ makes Himself known. When that happens—whether in the last heartbeat of earthly life or in a secret inspiration long before—the soul no longer stands in the state described in John 8:24, because the very grace that binds it to Christ also infuses the theological virtue of faith. It is still Christ who saves and still faith in Christ that justifies; the difference lies only in the hour and manner in which the Name is embraced.
Nothing in that mystery diminishes the ordinary necessity of preaching. On the contrary, it confirms it: explicit faith, the sacraments, and a life of visible communion with the Church are the ordinary road God Himself established, and charity forbids us to leave our neighbour on the perilous margin of implicit desire. But neither does the Church presume to set limits to divine condescension. She repeats the Apostle’s question—“How shall they believe Him of whom they have not heard?”—and therefore sends missionaries; yet she also trusts that the Shepherd who died for every man can reach the lamb caught in thorns beyond the edge of the pasture. To deny that possibility would not exalt John 8:24; it would circumscribe the Cross. The tradition holds both truths together: outside the Church there is no salvation, and yet—precisely because every grace flows from the wounded Heart of Christ—no man who is truly docile to grace is outside the Church in the final reckoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_of_the_unlearned#Roman_Catholic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincible_and_invincible_ignorance
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Vanderhoven7
@Aqwsed
"The soldier on the Roman frontier, the Chinaman of the twelfth century, the Bedouin infant who dies in the cradle do not disprove Christ’s sentence; rather, the Holy Spirit, “who blows where He wills,” can interiorly move such souls at the moment of conscience to accept the light available to them and, if they persevere in that obedience, dispose them for the final illumination by which Christ makes Himself known. When that happens—whether in the last heartbeat of earthly life or in a secret inspiration long before—the soul no longer stands in the state described in John 8:24, because the very grace that binds it to Christ also infuses the theological virtue of faith."
Absolute sophistry my friend! Muslims, no matter what inclinations they may have, do not believe:
a. Jesus is the Son of God.
b. Jesus died on the cross for our sins
c. Jesus rose again from the dead for our justification.
You offer false hope based on the sentiments of men.
He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.Jn.3:36
11And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.12He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. I Jn.5:11-12 -
Rattigan350
Seabreeze, you do not accept the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses, though they have been proven as true; so why do you keep arguing against them here? You just choose not to understand them because they don't tickle your ears.
2 Tim 4:3 was written for you
For there will be a period of time when they will not put up with the wholesome teaching, but according to their own desires, they will surround themselves with teachers to have their ears tickled.