Re: Religion question - Do Catholics NOT accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior?

[Kaleva]

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=10104355

The OP asks one question in the title but at the end, asks another:

"Don't Catholics believe that Jesus is the Lord and Savior?"

I would say the two are not the same. Believing in something is not the same as accepting it.

A question and answer routine could go like this:

"Do you believe that Jesus is Lord and Saviour?

Yes.

Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?

No."

In my opinion, Christianity, and probably most other religions, is full of people who believe but don't actually accept.

[wasupaloopa]

1. I am a Catholic though non practicing

To me accepting Jesus as Lord and savior is a Protestant concept. It is like taking a step from one thing to another.

The Catholic Church does not have a concept like that other than Confirmation.

Confirmation is confirming a belief in Christ as Lord and Savior that you were taught as a kid. Now that you are of the age of reason you say you are confirming that belief.

Catholics believe you are saved by Christ dying on the cross and you being baptized.

There is no need to accept Jesus to again to be saved

[CurtEastPoint]

3. Confirmation 'seals' you in the Holy Spirit. Like achieving spiritual adulthood.

[Farmer-Rick]

5. Yeah and they throw in a confirmation where you confirm your belief in Christ

At about age 12 or 13 at your first communion.

My better half has some beautiful pictures of her first communion. It was a big event back then.

She said later that day she threw up from a stomach virus. For years, She feared she would go to hell because she threw up the host.

[Igel]

10. No, but it's a ticklish question.

What do you mean by "accept"? For most Protestants, the original idea was that you weren't "really" a Xian and by accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior consciously and explicitly you showed repentance and were converted. It's what comes from not having an institutionally dominant church, on the one hand, but more importantly asserting that you can't become a Christian unless you're of age and able to make that decision or commitment. You can't baptise for the dead, you can't undergo conversion for an infant.

The Catholic church was the governmental church and one that you'd have been raised in. And if you weren't, there was the fiction you still were because otherwise it would mean the church's dominance wasn't so much dominant as diminished. But confirmation is sort of the same thing: raised in the faith, it's your acceptance of what went before. It can't be a fresh act of accepting de novo because that would invalidate the baptism, and they don't invest it with great emotion, so it's easy to deny that it's in some sense, albeit attenuated, the same or at least a similar act. It's more of a formality since everything important in your decision was done on your behalf before you could even focus. (Obviously my bias is showing here. I personally think that 13 is too young, as well, whether for bar mitzvah or confirmation or baptism, esp. in this day and age where adolescence keeps getting extended. In some cases into one's early 70s, to provide a seamless yet unseemly transition directly to senility.)

At the same time, the question wasn't about the act of acceptance but, I think, about the state of having accepted and declared that Jesus is Lord and Savior in a way that plays out. The Book of James says, "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the demons also believe, and tremble." In other words, it's not a new distinction. There's that whole issue of do you really believe what you say you believe if your actions contradict them versus you have ideals and screw up self-compliance. I personally find "accept" to be a squirrely kind of word here and really don't know what I'd give as a first attempt at a definition much of the time.

Catholics hold that Jesus is Lord. http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c2a2.htm#446 . Pretty much all the same kind of argumentation works for "Catholics hold that Jesus is savior." Even Augustine, hardly a slouch as far as Catholicism is concerned, did the "Iesous Khristos theou uios soter" bit for the fish (ikhthus) as a symbol of the Christ.

[bobbieinok]

2. I greww up in SoBaptist church in OK and TX in 40s and 50s. Was taught Catholics were not Christian

Implicit message was that the Dark Ages were dark because the Catholic church dominated the era.

In 90s I saw a Pentecostal world map listing percentage of countries' population that was Christian. France was listed as 5%. A Catholic friend was totally freaked out. She had not realized that this attitude towards
Catholics existed.

[tonyt53]

6. I grew up in one of those in KY. When JFK ran, even the preacher said the Pope would run the US.

Catholics have no idea just what the Southern Baptists STILL think of them.

[bobbieinok]

9. I heard the same thing many times when JFK ran for president

I was in college in Houston at the time and well remember when he gave his speech to the Houston Baptist Ministerial Alliance. That fall I attended the TX Baptist Student Union conference at Baylor. I wore a JFK campaign button part of the time.

History claims Nixon didn't reach out to Mrs King when MLK was in jail because he calculated he could get the votes of southerners opposed to desegation. (Taylor Branch claims JFK only contacted her at the strong urging of aides.) I now think Nixon was also well aware of the strong anti-Catholic bias in the so-called Bible Belt states that he believed would work for him.

[yallerdawg]

4. Traditional Catholicism instills a lifelong relationship with God...

through the Seven Sacraments which are the basis of the active commitment to God, Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Grace and salvation are achieved through the acts of the faithful.

Baptism, Communion, Confirmation, and Confession are all part of this lifelong relationship.

It is similar to the fundamental Five Pillars of Islam in guiding those faithful to complete fulfillment here on earth.

[Act_of_Reparation]

7. Sounds like pedantry to me.

We know what message the author was trying to convey. The Baptist missionary bandied about the ages-old Protestant trope that Catholics aren't real Christians. He asked the elderly woman if she accepted Jesus Christ because he was hoping to steer her away from her "godless Papist cult", not because he felt like exploring the semantics of belief with an octagenarian who probably doesn't even speak English.

[Pope George Ringo II]

8. From an outsider's perspective

Without minimizing how trivial the differences are relative to the commonalities, it always strikes me that they founded the club and they still constitute an absolute majority of the club. There is no set of rules where minority latecomers get to vote majority founders out of the club.