The Truth: Jesus Said, "I AM The Way!"

Amen! Not even through religion, is right! No religion died on the cross to save us from our sins. Jesus certainly never left us to guess on how to get to heaven. He told us exactly how to get there. None will be able to say that they didn't know how, because the gospel has been spread around the world. We need to get ready for His coming. Thank you so much for this important post.

[i]The only really absolute mysteries in Christianity are the self-communication of God in the depths of existence—which we call grace, and in history—which we call Christ.
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(Fr. Karl Rahner, Jesuit priest and theologian, 1904–1984)

Such grace and self-communication is not restricted to the understanding and creedal formulas of Protestant Reform Theology, nor their biblical hermeneutics.

The Catholic monk Thomas Merton spoke in his Journal of a passage from Irenaeus, one of the early Church Fathers .(A passage that my own understanding and experience associates with the Pure Land notion of "being made to become so (of itself) without/beyond the calculation of the devotee, where "no working is true working")

The passage was:- [i]If you are the work of God wait patiently for the hand of your artist who makes all things at an opportune time........Give to Him a pure and supple heart and watch over the form which the artist shapes in you........lest, in hardness, you lose the traces of his fingers......[/i]

Merton commented:-

[i]The reification of faith. Real meaning of the phrase we are saved by faith = we are saved by Christ, whom we encounter in faith. But constant disputation about faith has made Christians become obsessed with faith almost as an object, at least as an experience, a "thing" and in concentrating upon it they lose sight of Christ. Whereas faith without the encounter with Christ and without His presence is less than nothing. It is the deadest of dead works, an act elicited in a moral and existential void. To seek to believe that one believes, and arbitrarily to decree that one believes, and then to conclude that this gymnastic has been blessed by Christ - this is pathological Christianity. And a Christianity of works. One has this mental gymnastic in which to trust. One is safe, one possesses the psychic key to salvation......[/i]

The "encounter with Christ" is beyond the parameters set by any theology or creed.

Hi there, I see that the calvary has arrived...😀. Just to say that such words as you quote are well known to all Universalists and those who recognise that the Way is found in the Universal Christ and not simply in, or through, "Jesus". Maybe you should seek to expand your own knowledge of Christianity in its full width and depth. Open your heart to a Biblical hermeneutics not restricted to Protestant Reform Theology.

"Truth" is never ours, we are not its mouthpiece. There is the [i]Living Word[/i] which blows where it will. You mistake a text and your own time conditioned understanding of it for the Living Word.

All the best.

Amen brother

And he is!

Nonsense, just take the left turn at Albuquerque . Go a couple miles, until you get to the fork in the road, and your there.

Amen

🔯