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| PentecostalTheology.com
Part 1 can be found at this link.
As the Roman church began to gain temporal power, it moved to assert itself over the other churches to bring them into its fold.
Having to hold concords with other churches interfered with their primary objective, which was to obtain worldly power. This church needed to dispense with the ‘humiliation’ of having to agree with other churches on doctrine if it was going to satisfy its lust for political supremacy. It saw itself as the one true church and demanded that all other churches accept their subordination to it.
It was this mentality that led to the great schism in 1054. At this time, various religious disagreements, which had been festering for years, were made worse by a variety of political conflicts. The primary problem was that the eastern church refused to submit to the authority of the Roman church. Rome believed that the pope—the religious leader of the western church—should have authority over the patriarch—the religious authority of the eastern church. Constantinople disagreed.
Each church recognized its own leader as authoritative, which was intolerable to the church of Rome. Pope Leo III eventually excommunicated Michael Cerularius and the entire eastern church due to their ‘obstinance.’ The eastern church retaliated by excommunicating Pope Leo III and the Roman church with him.
The Roman church would have to bide its time before it could achieve domination over the churches of the world.
There were numerous reasons for the church of Rome to be excommunicated from the true congregation of Christ. Its elevation of Mary to godhood would have been an excellent justification. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the first record of the Hail Mary prayer was in 1050. This prayer assisted in her elevation to ‘Theotokos’ and was awarded the title “the Mother of God.”
This prayer was a perversion of Luke 1:28, which was concocted from the occasion when Mary was greeted by the angel Gabriel, who announced, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” As stated in the previous article, Jesus made it very clear that his mother was not to be worshipped and was certainly not to be venerated through prayer.
When Jesus taught us to pray, we were to say, “Our Father,” not “Hail Mary, Full of Grace.”
By this time, the Roman church was completely off the rails in terms of sound doctrine and was now acting well outside of its calling. Its elevation of Mary was necessary since the papacy could not use the words of Jesus to attain worldly power. They needed a mechanism by which they could bypass Jesus, paying lip service to him while using their ‘Mary’ to achieve the power they craved.
In 1095 a new problem arose. The pope took notice of the Muslims as they began to invade Christian lands. They presented a threat to the Roman church because the Muslims acted in obedience to Muhammad’s command to “Fight until there is worship of Allah alone.” There was no way that they were going to submit to the Roman church with this as their guiding mantra.
At the council of Claremont, Pope Urban II urged:
Most beloved brethren: Urged by necessity, I, Urban, by the permission of God chief bishop and prelate over the whole world, have come into these parts as an ambassador with a divine admonition to you, the servants of God…. For, as most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania [the Greek empire] as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont, which is called the Arm of St. George.…” All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.
As a rule of thumb, it is never a good idea to take the Lord’s name in vain when going to war. Pope Urban II did not receive ‘permission from God’ to engage in this war. He was also not the ‘prelate over the whole world.’ Finally, he did not have the authority to grant remission of sins for those who went to war against the pagans.
Although the war was necessary, and the pope was certainly within his rights to call the people to action, he should not have done so with false doctrine. That was most likely the reason the Roman church lost more crusades than it won.
Not only was the Roman church doing battle against those who threatened their power from abroad, they also had to deal with those who resisted their authority in the papal states. The first of these victims of the church of Rome were the Albigenses.
The Cathars, who were quasi-Christian ascetics (denial of bodily desires), rejected the teachings of the Catholic Church as immoral and most of the books of the Bible as inspired by Satan. They criticized the Roman church heavily for the hypocrisy, greed, and lechery of its clergy and its acquisition of land and wealth.
Not surprisingly, the Cathars were condemned as heretical by the Catholic Church. This condemnation was not due to their false doctrine but because they dared to challenge the authority of the Roman church. They were massacred in the Albigenses Crusade (1209-1229 CE), which also devastated the towns, cities, and culture of southern France.
Due to the wickedness of its clergy, the Roman church no longer held the moral authority to stand as a true church. This church was not the bride of Christ; it was a whore that fornicated with the kings of the earth. It found this arrangement preferable to being faithful to her husband. Therefore, it needed to be able to access the civil power of the state to keep people in line. This they did with terrible ferocity as they committed genocide against these people.
As the Roman church began to lose moral credibility due to the libidinous behavior of its clergy, it became necessary to find coercive measures to keep the laity obedient. “Saint” Dominic (1170-1221) rose to the occasion to put an end to any ‘misinformation’ that might be spreading about the church. He was commissioned by Innocent III and Honorius III to ‘preach’ to the Albigensian heretics and bring them back into the fold.
Thus, the unholy office of the Inquisition was inaugurated.
“Saint” Dominic had no success preaching to the Albigenses due to the fact that he had no integrity whatsoever. The Albigenses saw all Roman Catholic clergy as being lechers and corrupt. They obviously had no intention of being ‘preached to’ by people with this kind of reputation.
Since preaching to these people was a complete failure, the papacy was forced to come up with another solution. They decided the best way to deal with them was to falsely accuse them and then engage them in a war of elimination. The Roman church accused the Albigenses of killing a papal legate in 1208. As a result of this accusation, Pope Innocent III provoked a war of extermination, killing over one million of them, until their sect was eliminated.
The fact that this was extreme overkill brings into question the accusation of the killing of the papal legate. There was no real attempt to bring the alleged perpetrators of this alleged crime to justice and have anyone tried accordingly. Instead, the entire community was blamed as nothing more than a pretense to commit genocide against them.
In order to assuage his conscience, St. Dominic developed a prayer, ‘the Holy Mary,’ to aid him in his slaughter. He stated that he ‘received’ this prayer by divine revelation and used it in his fight against the Albigenses. This meditative prayer was revealed by ‘Mary’ in 1208:
Whoever shall faithfully serve me (Mary) by the recitation of the Rosary shall receive signal graces. I promise my special protection and the greatest graces to all those who shall recite the Rosary. The Rosary shall be a powerful armor against hell, it will destroy vice, decrease sin, and defeat heresies.
This was a different Gospel than the one Paul preached.
It was necessary for ‘Mary’ to issue this prayer since Jesus would never have come anywhere near it. According to Jesus, the church is to love its enemies and do good to those who are spiteful and wicked. He said that we should pray for those who persecute us because, by doing so, we may be sons of our Father who is in heaven.
“Saint” Dominic figured out fairly quickly that Jesus was not going to be much help in dealing with the Albigenses. He needed to separate the church from Jesus as quickly as possible if it was going to exercise temporal power over those who rejected their authority. Instead of praying, “Our Father, who art in heaven…,” a new prayer was needed to discipline those who were disobedient to the Roman Catholic Church.
A spirit of rebellion was in the air, and it was not long before others saw the corruption of the Roman church. The church had aligned itself with the most tyrannical of rulers and used its spiritual authority to coax them into wiping out their enemies. A group of barons took notice of this and decided to give themselves legal protection, called the Magna Carta, against the church and the kings with which it was fornicating.
Pope Innocent III wasted no time condemning the Magna Carta and, in 1215, issued this Papal Bull:
We refuse to overlook such shameless presumption which dishonours the Apostolic See, injures the king’s right, shames the English nation, and endangers the crusade…. On behalf of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and by the authority of Saints Peter and Paul, His apostles, [we] utterly reject and condemn this settlement (Magna Carta). Under threat of excommunication, we order that the king should not dare to observe and the barons and their associates should not insist on it being observed. The charter, with all its undertakings and guarantees, we declare to be null and void of all validity forever.
The provisions of this document that outraged the pope and his ‘lovers’ were:
(1) No new taxes unless common counsel agrees.
(2) All free men have the right to justice and a fair trial with a jury.
(3) The monarch does not have absolute power. The law is above all men and applies to everyone equally.
(4) All free citizens can own and inherit property.
(5) Widows who own property do not have to remarry.
(6) A government can only govern with the consent of the people.
The barons refused to back down, and the Roman church saw that the power it had fought so hard for was slipping away. Nothing will outrage the papacy as much as the unwashed masses demanding civil rights from their superiors. Such rebellions could not go unpunished.
In 1227, Pope Gregory IX set up an ecclesiastical (kangaroo) court that he could use to terrorize the laity back into obedience.
The process that the Roman Catholic Church set up was for the purpose of discovering and punishing heresy. The only ‘heresy’ they were concerned about was that of anyone who dared to speak against the Roman Catholic Church. This court wielded immense power and brutality to exact confessions of heresy through torture in medieval and early modern times.
The Inquisition’s function was principally assembled to relieve all ‘heretics’ of civil rights. In this way, they could deprive the disobedient of their estates and assets, which would become subject to the ownership of the Roman church’s treasury.
This ‘court’ would then relentlessly seek out and destroy anyone who spoke or even thought differently against the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1252, Pope Innocent IV officially authorized the creation of the horrifying Inquisition torture chambers. This authorization also included a new perpetual imprisonment or death at the stake without the bishop’s consent. Since acquittal of the accused became virtually impossible, very few dared to oppose the evil of the papacy.
Thus, with a license granted by the pope himself, Inquisitors were free to explore the depths of horror and cruelty against any who dared to resist their authority. Dressed as black-robed fiends with black cowls over their heads, Inquisitors could extract confessions from just about anyone. The Inquisitors invented every conceivable device to inflict pain, including slowly dismembering and dislocating the body.
Pope Gregory IX declared it is the duty of every Catholic to persecute ‘heretics,’ which was anyone who did not give complete allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. The Inquisition began because those who argued from Scripture were coming into conflict with Catholic dogma. The papacy has always despised freedom of speech because freedom of speech will always be a threat to its power.
The Inquisitors called themselves the Dominicans, and they degraded those who disagreed with them by calling them Lollards (mumblers). Unfortunately for Rome, despite their oppressions, the number of ‘mumblers’ was beginning to grow.
It was not just the barons who were resisting the Roman church, but Christians were beginning to call it into account for its false doctrines. Too many people were reading the Bible and discovering that the Roman church was making up doctrine for the sole purpose of empowering itself. The Roman church immediately moved to put a stop to this ‘heresy.’
At the Council of Tarragona: (Canon 14) in 1234, the Roman church proclaimed:
We prohibit also that the laity should not be permitted to have the books of the Old and New Testament; we must strictly forbid their having any translation of these books. (Canon 2) No one may possess the books of the Old and New Testament, and if anyone possesses them, he must turn them over to the local bishop within eight days so they may be burned.
This was done under the auspices that there were fake Bibles being distributed and that the people could not be trusted to understand what they were reading. Only approved Roman clergy could read the Bible properly and determine what was truth and what was falsehood.
In other words, the Roman clergy were the ‘fact checkers’ of the medieval period.
The Roman church understood that if it was going to have temporal power, it was going to need intellectual integrity. Whenever one wants to shield oneself from criticism, it is always best to have strong intellectual arguments to intimidate one’s opposition. Anyone who argues with you will be considered ‘unsophisticated’ – especially if you can invoke the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle – and easily dismissed regardless of the quality of the counterargument.
Enter “Saint” Thomas Aquinas.
“Saint” Thomas Aquinas was far more interested in ‘contemplating’ God than he was in proclaiming the Gospel. He was considered the greatest of the scholastic philosophers as he produced a synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy. Those who engage in this type of silliness firmly establish their intellectual credibility among the ‘elites.’
Unfortunately, this type of contemplation brings no one to repentance and the forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus.
Aquinas struggled to understand the relationship between faith and reason by combining God’s word with ancient Greek philosophy. He finally concluded that faith and reason are neither opposites nor in conflict, but each was necessary to arrive at the truth. However, some ideas are better understood through reason, while others are better understood through faith.
This is all well and good for those who want to contemplate their belly buttons, but it serves no purpose for the evangelist. God gave us the gift of faith and reason so we could use these faculties to arrive at the truth. Reason that is not guided by faith is foolishness. When reason is not guided by faith, we come to believe that homosexuality is moral, that there is such thing as gay marriage, and that there are more than two sexes.
Reason must be based on the foundation of faith for it to be of any real value.
The heart is deceitful and unknowable. This modern generation has revealed that there is no end to the stupidity that can be arrived at through reason alone. Even simple math can be perverted so that 2 + 2 can equal whatever we want it to be.
As for Aquinas’ moral philosophy, he posited that wonderful gem of knowledge he called the ‘first principle of the natural law.’ This first principle was that ‘good is to be done, and evil avoided.’ The fact that this is extremely trite is an understatement. If he had spent more time in the Bible, he would have heeded Paul when he said, “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.”
The over-intellectualization of Scripture always leads to this kind of foolishness. It is for this reason that systematic theology should be avoided. The evangelist should just stick with reading Scripture; otherwise, he will be headed down a rabbit hole. Anyone, like Aquinas, who wants to share the faith while needing 10 million words to do it is wasting your time.
“Saint” Thomas Aquinas, through his use of ‘reason,’ also found that the church had the authority to execute heretics. He stated, “As for heretics, their sin deserves banishment, not only from the Church by excommunication but also from this world by death.”
The idea that the church has the authority to order the execution of an unbeliever is apostasy. This is the kind of mindless idiocy that emanates from those who ignore the scriptures.
Not that they needed it, but Aquinas provided the intellectual ‘alcohol’ that would help inebriate the church of Rome. Crimes against humanity are more easily committed under the influence of a mind-altering false ideology based on ‘logic’ and ‘reason.’
As further evidence of his foolishness, during the Feast of Saint Nicolas in 1273, “Saint” Thomas Aquinas had a mystical vision that made writing seem unimportant to him. At mass, he reportedly heard a voice coming from a crucifix that said, “Thou hast written well of me, Thomas; what reward wilt thou have?” to which “Saint” Thomas Aquinas replied, “None other than thyself, Lord.”
Some may be impressed by his ‘piety’ until they realize that this revelation did not come from God. Since the Canon is closed, it must have come from another source.
When “Saint” Thomas Aquinas’s confessor, Father Reginald of Piperno, urged him to keep writing, he replied, “I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears to be of little value.” “Saint” Thomas Aquinas never wrote again.
At least this false revelation served one useful purpose; it got him to shut up.
Whenever a false teacher wants his work to have greater credibility, the old extra-biblical revelation is always a real crowd-pleaser.
Overintellectualized nonsense is not always extremely helpful in dealing with real-world problems. There are some challenges that cannot be settled with arguments devoid of substance. Pope Boniface VIII proved to be a master of this type of reasoning.
In 1301, King Philip had a French bishop tried for treason and imprisoned. This was intolerable to Boniface VIII since he was probably the one who ordered the bishop to commit treason, and he issued a reproving bull. This Bull (1302) was decisively rejected by the Estates General and even the French clergy who supported their king instead of the bishop.
As a result of his ‘impudence,’ Boniface announced that he would depose King Philip if need be. He issued the Bull Unam Sanctam (‘One Holy’), the most famous papal document of the Middle Ages, affirming the authority of the pope as the heir of Peter and Vicar of Christ over all human authorities, spiritual and temporal.
Spiritual power, according to the Bull, rests in the hands of the church. Temporal power is in the hands of kings and soldiers but is to be exercised only as the church permits because things spiritual are superior to things temporal.
If temporal power errs, it is to be judged by the one who holds spiritual power. If lesser spiritual power errs, it is to be judged by higher spiritual power all the way up to the supreme spiritual power, the papacy itself, which can be judged only by God. This Bull proclaimed, ‘We declare, state and define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.’
It is extremely important to the Roman church that the pope be accepted by the world as the supreme religious authority. One day, in the near future, a pope will rise up and demand that the world submit spiritually and politically to the Antichrist. This training of the world population in obedience to the Pontiff will not occur overnight. This type of deception takes time, and the papacy has been at it for several hundred years.
The Roman church began as a submissive mistress to the kings of the earth and then moved to become the dominant member of the relationship. This bond had come full circle. The fact that the woman rides the beast of Revelation is indicative of the fact that she can direct its movement. The ability to direct the movements of the civil authorities is crucial for political control over a population.
Once this control was achieved, the church could then remove its political opposition. Its greatest obstacle to ultimate temporal and spiritual power would always be the saints of Christ. It is for this reason that this church would become inebriated with the blood of the saints.
One of the most famous martyrs of the Roman church was Jan Hus (1372-1415), who was a Catholic theologian from Bohemia. He understood how evil Roman Catholicism had become and made an ill-advised attempt to reform it. He called for a higher level of morality among the priesthood. He pointed to the financial abuses, sexual immorality, and drunkenness that were common among the priests of Europe.
He called for preaching and Bible reading in the common language and for all Christians to receive full communion. At that time, laypersons received only the bread during communion, and only priests were allowed to receive the wine.
He opposed the sale of indulgences. These were documents of personal forgiveness from the pope, which were sold for sometimes exorbitant prices to raise funds for Crusades. Further, he opposed the relatively new doctrine of papal infallibility when papal decrees contradicted the Bible. He asserted the primacy of the Scriptures over church leaders and councils and the traditions that they had created.
This caused a Great Schism in the church, and a Council was called to resolve the issues. However, the Roman church had no intention of reforming itself but instead ridding itself of the pesky complainer.
Hus was invited to Constance under a safe-conduct pass from Sigismund (‘Holy’ Roman Emperor) in the hopes of resolving the tensions between himself and the church. He arrived in the city on November 3, 1414, and for the next several weeks, was able to move around freely. On November 28, he was arrested and imprisoned following a false rumor that he was planning to flee. He was held in confinement until trial in early June 1415.
During Hus’s trial, supporters urged him to recant his beliefs in hopes of saving his life. He insisted that he would recant only if his dissident views were proven to be in error. He told his judges:
“I appeal to Jesus Christ, the only judge who is almighty and completely just. In His hands I plead my cause, not on the basis of false witnesses and erring councils, but on truth and justice. ”
He may have survived this ordeal if he had appealed to Mary.
On July 6, 1415, Hus was taken to the cathedral dressed in his priest’s robes. An Italian prelate preached a sermon on heresy and then condemned Hus from the pulpit. Hus was stripped of his robes, and a paper cone inscribed with the word Haeresiarcha (“leader of a heretical movement”) was put on his head before he was burned at the stake.
The intoxication of this event was exhilarating to the Roman church, and it began to demand more blood. The followers of Hus were large in number and not ready to bend the knee to the pope.
Pope Martin V (1429) commanded one of these ‘lovers,’ the king of Poland, in a letter that read, “…it is a duty to exterminate the Hussites…. These impious persons dare proclaim principles of equality (as in the Magna Carta); they maintain that all Christians are brethren and that God has not given privileged men the right of ruling nations; they claim that Christ came to earth to abolish slavery; they call the people to liberty… burn, massacre, make deserts everywhere…
At this time, the Roman church had earned the name “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations.”
John Wycliff condemned the Council at Constance, but he died before the Roman church could murder him. However, they would later dig up his bones and put his corpse on trial in a ridiculous effort to ‘anathematize’ him.
Somehow Martin Luther escaped with his life despite his many criticisms of the Roman church’s lechery and false doctrine. His complaints against the corrupt church of Rome are well documented and will not be repeated here. There is simply too much information to be included in article form.
On a final note, Rome’s hostility to the Jews was legendary. Once it began to attack the true saints of Christ, attacks on the Jews quickly followed.
The Council of Zamora in 1313 and the Council of Basel in 1434 threatened to turn Jews into second-class citizens around the world.
The Jews were excluded from State functions, forced to wear a distinctive badge, church members were not to associate with them, and they were forbidden to hold public office.
Once again, history has shown that the papacy of the church of Rome mirrors what John the Apostle wrote in the Book of Revelation. It hates the true saints of Christ and the Jews, who are the recipients of God’s promises that are yet to be fulfilled.
History also shows that the church of Rome morphed into a mirror image of the Whore of Babylon, as described by John the Revelator, due to its lust for temporal combined with spiritual power.
The post The Future of Roman Catholicism (Part II) :: By The Gospelist appeared first on Rapture Ready.
