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My former-Catholic-now-Baptist friends speak often of the guilt they grew up with.
Yes, I have former Catholic friends, too.
The thing with the Reformed Church was that the emphasis was always on sin, hell, and death. It was very dark.
The RCA is the American derivative of the Dutch Reformed Church. There was a lot of negativity in the old Dutch ways. As an example of the mindset of the Dutch church, the artist Vincent Van Gogh, who suffered from depression and schizophrenia and would eventually take his own life, was the son of a Dutch Reformed minister.
Before he was born, his parents had another son named Vincent who had died at the age of three. Vincent was named for his dead brother (also a Dutch thing back in those days).
Every Sunday after church, Vincent's parents would take him out to the cemetery to pray at the dead brother's grave. The kid grew up seeing his name on a headstone. Maybe it didn't cause the mental illness, but the Reformed Church's constant focus on death sure as heck didn't help it any.
The last time I was at a Reformed Church service, other than my father's funeral, was about 20 years ago when my daughter was small. We went to my mother's church with her on Easter. The pastor spoke about how he was at the cemetery the day before (the church may have put lilies on the graves of deceased members or something) and he was looking around thinking, "Won't it be a wonderful thing to be here on the Last Day when all these graves burst open and the dead come up out of them..." and I just sat there thinking, No wonder I had so many problems with this as a kid. It's like something out of a Stephen King novel.
I've also told the story on here of a childhood friend who shot himself when he was around 35 after his wife left him with his kids, emptied his bank account, and cancelled all his credit cards. He had a degenerative illness and she didn't want to deal with it.
His parents went to their Reformed Church the following Sunday, where one of their friends greeted them with, "I'm really sorry to hear about your son. It must be difficult knowing he went straight to Hell for what he did."
This is what believing the Bible literally can do to people.
The underlying inference and trend of this thread ("Love VERSUS Doctrine") is that love and doctrine are mutually exclusive. Is that true? ... Or, does it beg the question, "Can one have love without truth (aka; doctrine) ... or is "God's love" or "loving God" only a warm, fuzzy emotion, interpreted as a plethora of things which, in a hundred different opinions, "a loving God will/won't do." When asked the basis of the latter beliefs, the answer is often only an ever-changing range of human emotion/feeling-based conclusions, rather than an established standard.
"Doctrine" likewise gets twisted and turned a hundred different directions. On CD, it is most often construed as a legalistic brand of 'fundamentalism' based on rigid religious views and practices, rather than "God's established truth." However, when 2 Tim. 4:3 refers to a time when people will no longer tolerate "sound doctrine," the emphasis is on God's truth, not religious dogma or practices.
In summary, one cannot understand God's love without God's truth and vice-versa. Anything less or different replaces the personal relationship God seeks with a 'religious' substitute that is neither true or loving.
The underlying inference and trend of this thread ("Love VERSUS Doctrine") is that love and doctrine are mutually exclusive. Is that true? ... Or, does it beg the question, "Can one have love without truth (aka; doctrine) ... or is "God's love" or "loving God" only a warm, fuzzy emotion, interpreted as a plethora of things which, in a hundred different opinions, "a loving God will/won't do." When asked the basis of the latter beliefs, the answer is often only an ever-changing range of human emotion/feeling-based conclusions, rather than an established standard.
"Doctrine" likewise gets twisted and turned a hundred different directions. On CD, it is most often construed as a legalistic brand of 'fundamentalism' based on rigid religious views and practices, rather than "God's established truth." However, when 2 Tim. 4:3 refers to a time when people will no longer tolerate "sound doctrine," the emphasis is on God's truth, not religious dogma or practices.
In summary, one cannot understand God's love without God's truth and vice-versa. Anything less or different replaces the personal relationship God seeks with a 'religious' substitute that is neither true or loving.
The thing is all the conflicting doctrines that the various churches have all come from the same scriptures. What seems to have happened is that all of the scriptures have been made into being about the individual whereas the New was meant to illuminate the old, I believe the things written in the scriptures are not written to individuals about the need to repent of being human and to somehow be born again. The things in the New Testament are written to the churches to come out of the prophecied “Babylonâ€
The churches seem to have their own interests at heart ie they “the Christians†get to go to heaven instead of focussing on what Jesus said we are to pray for which is Gods kingdom to come to earth
The underlying inference and trend of this thread ("Love VERSUS Doctrine") is that love and doctrine are mutually exclusive. Is that true? ... Or, does it beg the question, "Can one have love without truth (aka; doctrine) ... or is "God's love" or "loving God" only a warm, fuzzy emotion, interpreted as a plethora of things which, in a hundred different opinions, "a loving God will/won't do." When asked the basis of the latter beliefs, the answer is often only an ever-changing range of human emotion/feeling-based conclusions, rather than an established standard.
"Doctrine" likewise gets twisted and turned a hundred different directions. On CD, it is most often construed as a legalistic brand of 'fundamentalism' based on rigid religious views and practices, rather than "God's established truth." However, when 2 Tim. 4:3 refers to a time when people will no longer tolerate "sound doctrine," the emphasis is on God's truth, not religious dogma or practices.
In summary, one cannot understand God's love without God's truth and vice-versa. Anything less or different replaces the personal relationship God seeks with a 'religious' substitute that is neither true or loving.
"Doctrine" likewise gets twisted and turned a hundred different directions. On CD, it is most often construed as a legalistic brand of 'fundamentalism' based on rigid religious views and practices, rather than "God's established truth." ...snip....
What, exactly, is "God's established truth?"
I'd really like to know. Because I started a thread here a while ago wondering upon what one, single doctrinal issue can all Christians agree?
And I got crickets.
If you know "God's established truth," I await it. And then I'll await the Christians who don't agree.
The underlying inference and trend of this thread ("Love VERSUS Doctrine") is that love and doctrine are mutually exclusive. Is that true? ... Or, does it beg the question, "Can one have love without truth (aka; doctrine) ... or is "God's love" or "loving God" only a warm, fuzzy emotion, interpreted as a plethora of things which, in a hundred different opinions, "a loving God will/won't do." When asked the basis of the latter beliefs, the answer is often only an ever-changing range of human emotion/feeling-based conclusions, rather than an established standard.
"Doctrine" likewise gets twisted and turned a hundred different directions. On CD, it is most often construed as a legalistic brand of 'fundamentalism' based on rigid religious views and practices, rather than "God's established truth." However, when 2 Tim. 4:3 refers to a time when people will no longer tolerate "sound doctrine," the emphasis is on God's truth, not religious dogma or practices.
In summary, one cannot understand God's love without God's truth and vice-versa. Anything less or different replaces the personal relationship God seeks with a 'religious' substitute that is neither true or loving.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimmiej
Quote:
Originally Posted by TroutDude
What, exactly, is "God's established truth?"
I'd really like to know. Because I started a thread here a while ago wondering upon what one, single doctrinal issue can all Christians agree?
And I got crickets.
If you know "God's established truth," I await it. And then I'll await the Christians who don't agree.
I'd really like to know. Because I started a thread here a while ago wondering upon what one, single doctrinal issue can all Christians agree?
And I got crickets.
If you know "God's established truth," I await it. And then I'll await the Christians who don't agree.
Anybody?
.......
Bueller....?
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