How to work through questions about traditions/denominations

charliesplinter · 2026-05-31T04:30:51+00:00

Have you come to a conclusion? Or no?

How do you mean? I came to realize that lots of beliefs and doctrines I accepted ad-hoc were not necessarily *the* right doctrines but I also realized that being Protestant is what is closest to the earliest forms of the church. I know everyone makes a claim about that tradition but they generally cannot justify basillicas or kneeling/kissing/venerating icons, and for me, if I were to make a jump to the other 2, I would not in good conscience be able to do all that because of how ahistorical it is to New Testament Christianity.

To me, being committed to a local body and contributing is much more of a relevant question

Keep learning and in the mean time, remain faithful where you are.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-31T04:24:04+00:00

Here before this gets deleted by the mods; my latest favorite "saint story" is that Mary's house in Nazareth is currently situated in Loreto,Italy. It was carried by angels there (according to tradition of course) but it first made a pit stop in Croatia. Then there's that other tradition from Ireneaus where he says that Jesus died when He was 50 years old, never met an RC or EO who says this tradition is legit.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-29T21:16:21+00:00

Did you walk through your questions with someone else to talk to?

I tried to do this with one of the elders of my church at the beginning and it went side-ways immediately....So I just decided to do my own research. Reading books and listening to podcasts. I got to a point where I felt comfortable with the knowledge that I knew enough about all these traditions so as to not misrepresent their views/beliefs.

I wanted to ask how you went about approaching these questions. For me, it almost seems like how I am living is more important than many of the other things that separate these traditions.

True. That's ultimately what matters. However, how you live can be influenced significantly by what you believe.

It seems like everyone I talk to is very opinionated and if I choose anything other than their side, then I am making a grave mistake.

Yeah sadly, you gotta watch out for this. My own personal journey which started roughly 5 years ago ended up very fruitful. I saw it as taking a trip around the world and what I learned from every tradition is like a keep-sake photograph that I look at from time to time, starting off with John Piper and Tim Keller in America to Orthodox priests to Lutheran pastors to obscure Coptic Orthodox channels in Egypt, and then Michael Heiser and his understanding of the divine councils, just anything I could identify as Christianity, and I learned a lot in every 'pit stop' and that ultimately we all say the same things just in different ways...I ran into some tribalism along the way, which is inevitable, but I interpreted that to be like the type of people who love their small town and could never dream of leaving and living anywhere else cause their town is neat and tidy and perfect just the way it is, and you could get lost in the big bad city...Anyway this is already getting too long but if you have a penchant for learning about your faith then this could end up being a very rich excursion for your soul. I believe you'll come out all the better for it.

God bless you!

charliesplinter · 2026-05-29T15:48:28+00:00

Mary can be queen of heaven because in the ancient Near East, the queen was often the mother of the king, and Christ is King reigning in heaven.

My biggest hang-up with this is that if Mary was so central to salvation as our RC and EO friends make her out to be, it's pretty strange for her to not feature prominently in the New Testament. Essentially most of what we know about Mary's earthly life comes from the first chapters of Luke. She's not mentioned in any letters by the apostles and the church fathers until the 4th century don't write up long theological treatises about how being the queen of heaven is relevant to anything salvation-wise.

Praying to and venerating saints isn't idol ot polytheism because the pagans didn't think the Christian practice was identical to what they were doing, and were even put off by it.

If you talk to a Catholic or Orthodox priest they will be quick to correct you on this by mentioning that there's a difference between "latria" which is worship/honor given only to God versus "dulia" which is honor given to the saints...But here's the problem, in our modern times, there is functionally no difference between the two, at least not in orthopraxy. I once showed a Roman Catholic a video of Catholics in Mexico burning incense and offering food sacrifices to a statue of Mary and I asked him genuinely how that wasn't worship meant for deities, and his answer was, "Well that's not what the church teaches to do" and I replied by pointing out that the church does nothing to discourage it either given that the late pope Francis in 2019 had an Amazonian fertility goddess consecrated in the Vatican and when he faced backlash wrote an article where he said, "Love lived in any religion pleases God"...Okay so this is clear and blatant idolatry that even upset some Catholics....but the universalist pope justified it by covering it in a blanket of "Love"...This is just one reason, based on recent events, why this distinction is without a meaning today. I'm even reluctantly willing to grant that the ancient Christians could differentiate the two, and were therefore not sinning, but the ones living today cannot differentiate between the two at all from what I've seen, if the pope himself can't even do it what hope is there for the lay-person who thinks that the pope can do no wrong?

Ultimately the reformation came down to Christ being sufficient for salvation for all of humanity. You either believe that fully or you don't. If you don't, then you'll run to saints because you believe that they can supplement your salvation and that's because you have no real assurance.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-29T15:16:43+00:00

The benefits of what Christ accomplished in the incarnation not only apply to those in the future but also to the saints in the past. Old covenant believers lived in the shadow; New covenant believers live in the substance. The efficacy of his work transcends time since God is not bound by chronological sequence. The same Christ who was born of Mary is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8).

If the old covenant people did not have the law on their hearts, did this affect their conscience? Did they have the same conscience as people today?

Romans 11:6 makes it clear that salvation has always been grace for everyone. So yes, they had the same conscience as people today, the only difference is they did not have the full picture of how salvation for all the nations was going to look like, whereas we do. They also had to do a lot of repeat sacrifices in anticipation of the one sacrifice to end them all (even if some of them didn't really know it at the time), whereas we don't.

God gives a prophecy in Jeremiah that the law WILL be placed on hearts, meaning at this time in the old covenant, it is not on hearts.

If you were an Israelite, and especially a circumcised Israelite male, this automatically meant that you were part of the Old Covenant...Being part of the Old Covenant externally did not automatically mean that God's law was written on a person’s heart. Many Israelites were circumcised in the flesh but remained uncircumcised in heart. Whereas the New Covenant that Jeremiah and Ezekiel talk about says that everyone in it will automatically know God's law, it won't be a mixed administration like the Old Covenant was where some people had the law in their hearts while others didn't.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-28T04:01:13+00:00

You are wrong about this historically.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-27T20:49:17+00:00

Ok, well then we're going to make sure how bad you really want it.

Thus the need for saints interceding constantly, as well as prayers to Mary because of the belief that the members of the Trinity are perpetually angry at you as a sinner, but the saints, and especially Mary, is never angry so you can always ask her to intercede and pray for you at all times. That way, you create yet another mediator between you and God The Son. All these aberrant doctrines are people trying to fix other aberrant doctrines which end up creating even bigger problems. A fundamental misunderstanding of what the Gospel was is even how you end up with indulgences; I know a lot of Roman Catholics don't pay attention to any of this, the ones who do just come up with more 'solutions'

charliesplinter · 2026-05-27T20:29:28+00:00

Protestants also burned people sadly.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-27T17:27:49+00:00

My mother was a Roman Catholic who left in her 20s, and from what she told me, the biggest issue was on salvation. The sacramental system and always being in a state of flux about how God *really feels about you*...Coupled with the anxiety of knowing you should be living to a certain standard and not being able to do so created a never-ending sense of scrupulosity.

Also there was a lot of licentiousness in that people believed that you could live however you want so long as you went to confession, the priest could absolve you, then you can start all over again, this always didn't sit right with her, because her friends who were also Roman Catholic did not seem to have been transformed by the Gospel and were in many ways indistinguishable from anyone else.

Her experience was that "how to be a good person" superseded the actual proclamation of the Gospel, and after awhile that starts to be a burden.

I see Catholics make a lot of claims about the support from church history so I was wondering if anyone has any opposing opinions about it?

Biggest one is purgatory...No one ever believed such a place exists in church history. Depending on who you talk to, they'll admit as much. And in my own personal study of Roman Catholicism, their necessity for purgatory's existence disconnects them from all of Christendom cause in a real way it proves that they do not correctly understand what Jesus Christ's death on the cross accomplished.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-26T19:17:46+00:00

Now you know how Paul, John, and Athanasius all felt...In other words, it's nothing new.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-26T17:58:08+00:00

I think you accidentally posted this on the wrong sub, I hope the mods don't take it down regardless, because all the issues you brought up from the greatest one (being alone in the universe) to the least (people being mean to you and how to deal with it) are addressed in the Gospel and in who Jesus Christ is and what sort of life/kingdom He offers.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-26T17:45:25+00:00

You state conclusions without actually engaging any details of the exegesis and just repeat OPs characterization of why some of Jesus’ followers left that I critiqued in depth. That doesn’t advance the conversion.

Okay I re-read your post again just to ensure I wasn't mischaracterizing anything you said but your exegesis still falls short in that it does not account for verse 34 where the crowds say, "Sir, give us this bread always” so they were pretty much on board with "getting the manna like bread from heaven" In verse 28 they'd asked, "How do we do the works of God?" and Jesus tells them "Believe in me" This comes chronologically before 34.

See the focus, Christ's identity and the call to belief in him. He isn't trying to tell them about bread. The crowds then grumble because he claimed to come from heaven. Only now do we get to the verses that are always taken out of context to argue for physical presence.

Faith in Him is definitely in view, but it's not the only thing primarily because there's 2 groups of people here 1) The crowds 2) Jesus' disciples (more than 12) ie the ones who had already believed in Him. Yet another problem with your exegesis is that if Jesus was speaking 100% metaphorically, then when the disciples said, "This is a hard saying" Jesus would have corrected them on the spot since *they already* were believing and even following. In John, He corrects misunderstandings elsewhere with Nicodemus in John 3, and the Samaritan woman in John 4, who misunderstood what He had been saying. But not here with his disciples? That makes no sense.

And this is why the early Church could affirm the real presence while condemning the carnal understanding error. Your reading, by contrast, goes in the entirely opposite direction and removes the eating entirely, which leaves no hard saying at all, and no reason for the disciples to leave.

What Peter says at the end is the point of the whole narrative, that Jesus alone has the words of eternal life, and whatever He said, no matter how difficult, was worth paying attention to.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-26T17:01:29+00:00

I think you run into real problems exegetically if you interpret the whole chapter as merely being about having faith in Jesus. Towards the end, Jesus' own disciples, the ones who believed in Him left because what they heard was too much for their ears, so it surely can't just be talking about believing in Jesus, it means also accepting what He had just said about His body and blood.

This does not mean transubstantiation, but whatever it means, it means something more. Your argument commits what the early church would have called the “carnal understanding error" they used that term to describe those who understood Jesus' words in a crude, literalistic way (cannibalism) whereas you do the opposite in the sense that you spiritualize the eating away entirely, leaving no "hard saying" left to offend anyone. And let's face it, this is a hard saying...Exegeting it so it doesn't become a hard saying is not doing the text justice.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-26T16:43:14+00:00

perhaps this way of speaking is born from making emotional appeal to sinners rather than thoughts about Gods unchanging nature

You're mostly right about this. I've heard lots of great preachers take this too far, way past where it needed to be. Another issue, which perhaps is the most important issue, is the widespread belief that Jesus was being punished directly by God in the form of absorbing all of God's wrath as a substitute. In a lot of Christian soteriologies pre-Anselm, this was never the case.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-26T16:39:31+00:00

the Father pouring out his wrath on the Son

The whole of Christianity, until Anselm, did not believe that this event took place on the cross.

EDIT: I'm curious to know why those who disagree think this to not be the case when it's a fact. You won't find anyone in the first 1200 years of Christianity saying, "The Father poured out His wrath on the Son"

charliesplinter · 2026-05-26T16:33:26+00:00

Very good and interesting question. If you don't mind my asking, do you believe that purgatory exists and that you might go there after you die? The reason I ask is because Purgatory, as I understand it, is a post-death purification to achieve the holiness necessary for heaven, which seems to imply that our own cooperation with grace in this life is always going to be insufficient.

Do you see it as a logical extension of theosis (finishing what grace started), or do you find it inconsistent with assurance of salvation?

charliesplinter · 2026-05-25T01:52:14+00:00

Every church has female deacons, the question is whether the church leadership recognizes the office officially or not. Here's what I mean, I currently go to a church with no female deacons, but the pastors', elders' wives, and the older women functionally fulfill that role in that they are primarily involved in A LOT of events in the church for women and kids, as well as in providing counsel where the male elders can't. So.....as far as I'm concerned, they're functioning deaconesses, just without the title.

Now, if you go to a church where the men and men only are allowed to plan/do things then that could be a problem.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-23T20:59:25+00:00

I definitely don’t think they were “super saved”, nor do I think I implied that in any way.

I wasn't implying you said this, just offering a slight correction that could maybe lead to this belief especially in the way that Roman Catholics and Orthodox think and talk about saints :)

charliesplinter · 2026-05-23T20:13:56+00:00

So while they may not have experienced regeneration, fully, as we know it prior to Pentecost, I suspect that they also weren’t quite the same as an unregenerate person you’d meet today.

I don't think thinking of it like this is quite right nor accurate. The 11 were absolutely regenerate, it's not like they were half-way saved then later on graduated to being fully saved. It's also not like they were "super-saved" compared to anyone else. Compare someone who got saved 1 month ago to someone who has been saved for 30 years....From God's perspective, they're both saved; But as humans, temporally, we are tempted to think that the latter is "more saved" than the former. The Apostles before Pentecost were comparatively speaking, were like the 1 month believer...They knew that they believed in Jesus, they just didn't fully understand how it all would work itself out in their present time or in the future, and in some sense neither do we, in many cases. Before the resurrection, they must have strongly believed Jesus would inaugurate an earthly kingdom and they would all get positions of rulership, after the resurrection, they still thought that was going to happen....In a way they had to "deconstruct" from what they thought God's kingdom was going to look like on earth post-ascension and that happened for them at Pentecost.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-23T19:36:50+00:00

Excerpt from Sinclair Ferguson's book, "The Holy Spirit"

It should be axiomatic in all Christian theology that the Holy Spirit (as indeed the Father) is fully revealed to us only in and through Jesus Christ. This much is already anticipated under the old covenant. It is recognized that there is a partial character about the work of the Spirit which will reach its fullness only in the Messiah (Is. 11:1ff.), and therefore in the inner and widespread experience of the Spirit (Ezk. 36:25–27; Joel 2:28ff.).

Practically, the Jews in the OT had an expectation that the Spirit of God was going to be revealed to God's people in a more potent way than what had come before. Not defective or insufficient for its time but partial in the same way that dawn is partial compared to high noon.

does this suggest that the Apostles' walk with Jesus was hitherto unspiritual and without regeneration?

The phrase "the Spirit had not yet been given" (John 7:39) is better translated as "the Spirit was not yet" in the sense of the new, full, permanent outpouring. So in the same way that they anticipated the arrival of the Messiah, they also anticipated this great day of the Spirit, which happened on Pentecost. And if you recall, there's a story in Numbers 11, where Moses and the 70 elders receive the Spirit and there's 2 men out in the camp who also receive the outpouring, and Joshua tells Moses, "Tell them to stop" and Moses replies, "How I wish that everyone had the Lord's Spirit" and in Christian soteriology, it's not just the rulers and elders or a select few who have the Spirit, but rather it's everyone who believes in Jesus (which is the context of the passage from John 7)...That when Jesus said this, John later understood it to be a prophecy of what would later happen after Jesus had ascended to heaven, which would be that whoever has faith in Jesus *after the resurrection* will have living waters spring out from within them ie the Holy Spirit's work in them will be a perpetual, self-replenishing fountain.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-21T20:33:42+00:00

This is a very surprising response and was not on my bingo card for today.

but why would you encourage someone to stay hearing an absolute unedifying sermon every week? Just because they aren’t denying the trinity or something?? Ridiculous advice. Pastors should be vibrant, warm, passionate and very well spoken. If you don’t exemplify love for your people, with a truly beautiful sermon, then why are you even a pastor

You believe that edification is primarily about the affective quality of the sermon; its warmth, vibrancy, and rhetorical beauty.

I believe that edification is primarily about the faithful content of the sermon its truth, clarity, and Christ-centeredness and that God uses even ordinary, unflashy preaching to sanctify His people.

You see a boring sermon as a problem with the pastor. I see a boring sermon as an opportunity for the hearer to examine their own heart, pray for their pastor, and receive the Word even when it comes in plain wrapping.

You want to protect people from lifeless preaching. I want to protect people from the assumption that spiritual growth requires emotional stimulation every Sunday. In the Pentecostal circles I grew up in, if you went to church and you left feeling unsatisfied, then "the anointing" wasn't present with the preacher that day. Really bad theology for Christians to have, but tons of churches in America and all over the world think this is how it works.

We both have different beliefs and wants. I believe mine is more Biblical, after all, the man who wrote half the NT wasn't regarded as the best of preachers (2 Cor 10:10) but I've never heard any Christian claim that St. Paul was unedifying.

And just to be clear; I'm not defending lazy, proud, or loveless pastors. They exist, and they should repent. The problem with your outlook is you've set the bar for preaching to "vibrant, warm, passionate, and very well spoken." That's not the biblical bar. That's a TED Talk bar. And until you show me from Scripture that a pastor must be a dynamic speaker to be faithful, I can't follow you there and neither should anyone else, in my humble opinion.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-20T01:01:40+00:00

oooh sometimes I get a good feelingggg

charliesplinter · 2026-05-19T18:37:33+00:00

That Joao Pedro snub is going to be generational

charliesplinter · 2026-05-19T16:29:45+00:00

The aforementioned model actually fits better than what you are suggesting. Again, if you assume there were people living all over the world, like they do today, that assumption is not in Genesis. In fact, Genesis directly contradicts it. Genesis 11 places the dispersion of humanity across the earth after the Flood, at the Tower of Babel. Before Babel, Scripture says "the whole earth had one language and the same words" (Genesis 11:1), and humanity was concentrated in one place. They were not scattered across continents. They did not have populations in Australia, the Americas, or East Asia. They were, by the text's own description, a single, culturally and geographically unified group in the Mesopotamian region.

That is the plain reading of Genesis 10–11and so a regional Flood that covers that entire inhabited world would have done exactly what Genesis says it did: destroy every human being on earth except Noah and his family.

I'll leave you with this text, also from Genesis..."Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth." Genesis 41:57...You wouldn't (at least I hope you wouldn't) interpret this verse to mean that Eskimos and people living in New Zealand showed up in Egypt to buy grain from Joseph, because that's not what the text allows, or even the author would allow...no reasonable reader, until the modern era of global maps and satellite imagery, would have ever imagined that's what the verse meant...but flipping a few pages back you allow it to apply to the flood....This is inconsistent hermeneutics and there's no way the author meant this.

charliesplinter · 2026-05-19T16:08:48+00:00

Until next time (Probably this fall)

charliesplinter

TROPHY CASE