It’s false that your heresy has existed for 2000 years; it’s only been the last few hundred. Salvation is through the Church, not through Christ, and outside the church you’re damned. Sorry.
Mate, I don’t even have a frame of reference to understand where you’re coming from. Do you believe the Bible? What are you, Eastern Orthodox or something? Or are you trolling? I don’t want to assume ill intent, but I’d like to have something to go off of. The idea that mankind can save each other is preposterous to me. What do you think Jesus died for? And also I’m part of a church and I’ve seen God work in my life, so you’re going to have to be more specific if you’re going to say that’s not up to standards.
If you’ll take a word offered in the spirit of kindness - this, this right here is where you lost this conversation. The goal should not be so much to “win”, as to truly win. By your own admission, you cannot save anyone, hence you are not responsible for even trying, only for representing what your faith has done in your own life.
And calling the other person a troll - even (especially) if they are one - cements their attitude against you. Then further calling their understanding as “preposterous”… well, you get the idea.
Do whatever you want, but I thought I’d offer that thought at least.
I wasn’t trying to “win” in the way you think I was yet. I was just trying to gather information.
My default assumption when someone claims to be saved is that they are until proven otherwise, but believing that the Church and not Christ is the source of salvation is a convincing proof otherwise from my perspective. But then my mind goes into “rebuke” mode and not “plant some seeds” mode, because people who consider themselves part of the Church should be open to rebuke (though of course I still try to be kind about it, that doesn’t come across easily over the net.)
For the sake of the rebuke, I wanted to understand what exactly they believe in so I could address it more directly, but that clearly wasn’t going anywhere. By their logic, I didn’t even have the right to ask because I’m not already part of whatever “Church” they’re a part of. Between their aggression and the fact that I’ve never heard of a belief system that lines up with what they were saying, I saw trolling as a likely possibility, moreso than I let on at this point. I suppose I could have tried for a little longer before bringing it up, but as you can see, I only asked, and then stated immediately afterwards that I didn’t want to assume ill intent.
So it wasn’t intended so much an accusation as a test of the waters, but I suppose it didn’t come off that way, and a troll wouldn’t answer that honestly, so the only purpose it served was to protect my own pride against the vision I had of someone laughing at their screen going “look how long I’m keeping this fool in an argument, and they don’t even suspect I’m trolling.” I’ll try to do better about that in the future.
As for the use of “preposterous,” I did add “to me” to soften it a bit, and this is clearly someone who’s able to handle that level of bluntness.
Thanks for your thoughts. I guess upon becoming sure that they were a troll, instead of calling them out to end it there, I should have shifted out of rebuking mode (since someone who’s pretending to be a Christian for trolling purposes is not going to be open to Christian rebuke,) and considered whether I was in a position to share my faith. In this case, I think I was, but it might be too late now. I’ll take another look tomorrow to see.
Of course you don’t have the right frame of reference to understand because your mind is steeped in heresy. You think you can steal the Bible from the religion that it belongs to and just decide what it means for yourself, but it doesn’t work that way. God ordained his Church as his representative in the world, and only through that Church can you be saved. The Church is the only one who can interpret the Bible, and outside the Church you stand condemned.
