Monday, February 18, 2008

My New Banner...Hurray!

I am so thankful to Carrie of This Is Written. She has provided me with a much needed banner.

I will go into a Penty testimonial here...It is a significant story for me.

You see for over a year now, I have mused quietly in my heart "how I wish I got a banner but I do not know how to do it". I never got to tell the one who can do it for me because for some awkward reason it was best for me not to ask.

So I never got the chance to learn how to do it, but now Carrie sent me these banners.

Thank you Carrie for being thougthful, I appreciate this, dear sister! And, thank the Lord for dropping the idea into your heart. God be praised. Amen

25 comments:

X said...

You should speak up. I could have made you one. I did mine, McCain's and the Concordia blog's banner.

LPC said...

O.H.

Ahh, I think somewhere McCain mentioned that, orthodoxy hunter did not click.


Well, now, I have two of you ladies to comeback to for some graphics help.

Thank you, now I will remember that.

You are also into photography, right? God bless you as you serve your family. I read about the challenges in your profile.

God is good, when it, rains, it pours!

LPC
PS. I much like the title of your blog rather than the negative. That is more positive. Saying negative things is fine when true but negativism can be boring, no?

Carrie said...

I am glad it works for now. If you can get a better one, go for it. OH's is very nice - I could never compete with a photographer!

Doorman-Priest said...

Well done Carrie. Its classy.

Anonymous said...

LP,

Another way to think about "Extra Nos": "It's not about you. It's about Christ for you."

Dizma said...

Nice banner.

Regards:)

LPC said...

I am glad you all like it.

And as Steve said, it is not about us, it is about Christ for us... Immanuel.

Peace be with youse all people of God.

LPC

TKls2myhrt said...

Very nice!

LPC said...

TK,

Long time no hear.

Hope all is well, sis.

LPC

Past Elder said...

I like it too!

God bless me if I didn't give in and post on Schuetz' ruddy blog. You even got mentioned in some of the fallout! You might be amused to note that it all started with his call to Pastor Weedon to join the Catholic Church.

Great Caesar's Ghost!

LPC said...

P.E.

I missed hearing from ya, bro.


Well P.E. I did not get "infamous" for nothing. Believe, bro, this is all natural to me as my missus attests.

She thinks I am a natural when it comes to inflicting pain in the you know where. I do this effortlessly without thinking, if I may say so.

Great Scott! What? Senior Schuetz called Pr Will to join the RCC? This is not helping Pr. Will when Schuetzy does that. Pr. Will needs to stay miles away from the fire and blog that way.

How could Schuetzy be so bold?

I got to check that out. I got left out of the excitement.

LPC

Anonymous said...

Hey Lito,

Re: your banner

Its too American in its syntax. A true dinky-die Ozzy would say, using the Queen's English, "its outside of us."

;-)

Thanks
David<--true blue

LPC said...

G'day David...

Or we can say "it is outside of youse all" (LOL)....

How is it at FL, USA?

Cheers mate.

Anonymous said...

Well one could say that. In the deep south, it would you, It's outside y'all." The last sounds, to me, like yorl. :-)

Btw, American syntax is great. :-)

Take care,
David

Past Elder said...

You really do have the talent, Lito. Holy Moly, straightaway you made the title of the latest post on bleeding Schuetz' blog! Good on ya! I had to join in, but I'm going to have to retire from that -- but calling on Pastor Weedon to become Catholic was just too bloody much, especially after our recent series on crypto-papism!

LPC said...

P.E.


You and I know that what Schuetz is proposing of being "Lutheran" and being in communion with the Pope is possible, because you just need to be self contradictory with yourself. Mother Church we know will let you hold private opinions so long as you do not buck her authority i.e. the Pope. So you can have your cake and eat it too.

I really do not see the need for the SSP and besides it does not help someone like Pr. Will who is a loveable sincere minister, he just get suspected of you know what.

The Diet of Regensberg failed. We know Luther did not bother with it even though Calvin, Bucer and Melancthon tried in good faith but it did not succeed.

If those masters of theology failed, are we better than they? So I'd say drop the SSP project and get back to JBFA.

If we can not even go past JBFA with the Magisterium, there is no where and no point in going any further.

LPC

Past Elder said...

IMHO, Schuetz and the other Tiber swimmers I have read have constructed for themselves a private fantasy in which two things characteristic of the Lutheran mind find resolution.

One is, whether one likes it or not, it was indeed the hope of the Lutheran reformers to effect reform within the existing church, and to the extent that they operated outside it (the Catholic Church) they did not see themselves as outside the catholic church nor wish to discard its customs and ceremonies insofar as they do not contradict the Gospel, and had no time for those who did.

The other is the flip side of this, that the assortment of synods and other bodies we have now does not represent the hope of the Lutheran Reformation but simply the state it is in now.

I believe any real Lutheran feels both of these, that the Catholic Church has to date shown itself resistant, to put it mildly, to reform according to the Gospel, and that our mess of synods does not reflect the catholicity we profess. Tiber swimmers think they have resolved this by joining the RCC, thereby being Lutheran and Catholic and fulfilling the hopes of each.

This is a most miserable illusion, and one not possible without the post conciliar RCC, which departs from and rejects Roman Catholicism to just the extent necessary to foster this illusion. The Tiber swimmers writings themselves reveal this -- that they would not have swum the Tiber before. IOW, they see in Vatican II enough movement to indicate that the Roman church indeed either has reformed or is reforming, so they may now "come home".

The problem is, that "home" is a vicious, vile and vulgar impostor of the RCC, worse than an impostor, its murderer who now goes about in its victim's clothes to pass itself off, a thousand times more contemptible and odious than the RCC of Luther's day. In converting to it, these misguided souls have found something which not only departs from Christ and his Gospel and his Church, but departs from the Catholic departure! IOW, what they have found is not only not the catholic church, it isn't even the Catholic Church! A delusion of this magnitude in the physical world would require medication and institutionalisation!

I believe you mistake the SSP entirely if you see them as participating in this illusion rather than holding to the hopes of the Lutheran Reformation, but I also believe it is much more important than that to be clear on the danger to the Christian faith and church posed by the post-conciliar RCC.

Maybe I'll post parts of this on Schuetz' blog, then quit. Those guys are going to kill him and the others they have duped.

LPC said...

Well, you said it right. There is flight of fancy going on and I guess this is most obvious only to us who were children of Mother Church. They are of course describing not the things the nuns taught me at St. Mary's College. It is quite different.

I am skeptical about ministrium programs like SSP etc. I do not think you can do Regensberg again. If the Reformation fathers failed, I am skeptical that anyone can do better. SSP has the 'reunion' term in their program or why they are here so if you are correct, it is pointless to reunite to a RCC that is no longer there, by your logic, I mean.

On a personal level, would you have left Mother Church anyway had there been no Vatican II?

LPC.

PS. I like what one time Dr. Ichabod used - chameleon. A perjurative term but nonetheless, illustrates a point.

Past Elder said...

The answer to your question is, I don't know, and don't think I can know.

Unlike most of my age group, I was quite happy in the pre-conciliar church and thought of becoming a priest. The church that emerged from Vatican II in the end led me to the conclusion I proposed over on Schuetz' blog -- that if this is the church founded by Christ, which at the time I thought it was and could see no other candidate, then he was not the Christ if this monster is what he founded. So I rejected not only Catholicism, but Christianity in any form.

I simply could not understand how such a thing could have happened. Now I do. I think Vatican II was inevitable, because now I know Rome had already seriously gone off the rails, and being off the rails, would only continue in that direction. This came while reading the BOC while spending a year in adult catechesis in WELS.

These days, I am actually glad there was a Vatican II, for if there had not been, perhaps I would not have had the crisis of faith that eventually led to the discovery of the Gospel rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered (which includes liturgy!) in the "Lutheran" church.

In any case, that is how it worked out, and praise and thanks to God for that!

LPC said...

Luther did not have Vatican I and II and he kicked up a fuss.

The crisis of faith is precipitated by works based teaching being taken seriously.

God uses all sorts of circumstances to get to us the Gospel.

So perhaps what matters is where are you are now and not how you got there.

LPC

Past Elder said...

I quite agree. He didn't have Trent either, for that matter!

You have hit on another way of expressing what I am saying. From our perspective, it is important to remember that the Roman Church as it existed in those times no longer exists. The Tiber swimmers think the changes since then signal a return home, little understanding the Rome has simply tweaked its religion of works righteousness, not come closer to the Gospel. But we too need to understand that the BOC was written primarily to stand for something, not to protest against something else, and what we stand for is for the ages, while those who stand for something else come and go.

LPC said...

The BoC specially the Apology is in a way stood for something forward but just as much as Rom 3,4,5 is a polemics against works righteousness so is it too. It just hums along Scripture's melody.

Since works righteousness is theology of glory, man can invent anysort of thing that is just a variation on a theme, thus you get Vatican II etc. Sola fide/Solus Christus can not be varied, it can never be modified and get away with it because Gospel cesaes to be Gospel when that happens.


LPC

Past Elder said...

Certainly I have no disagreement there. Really there are only two religions, works righteousness, which has infinite variations some of which appropriate the term Christian, and the Gospel. To stand for the Gospel is to protest not just one but all forms of works righteousness.

What I mean, among us Lutherans, is, be careful not to extend the protest against works righteousness to a refusal to deal with works at all, and be careful when protesting against the errors of Rome that, while by nature all that is not Gospel is works righteousness, we understand that Rome has tweaked its errors, and in a way in which many have come to think there is no error now at all.

Odd that the theology of glory/theology of the cross has become a big deal on Schuetz' blasted blog too. The drift seems to be, since Rome now teaches the theology of the cross, or as they would say, always has but now more clearly, there is no essential difference between Lutherans and Catholics -- with the gotcha of "dialogue" being, now you must "come home to Rome".

Frankly at this point I wish I had stuck to my resolution not to post there any more. You simply cannot reason with a Catholic, and ironically the recent posts there have to do with reason! The basic fact remains, the central tenet of Catholicism is belief in the Catholic Church.

In my case, this became apparent to me as I found that whatever I did, the only way to find post-conciliar Catholicism at all in a hermeneutic of continuity, as they say, with what went before it at any time was to proclaim it the same because they said so, because the same institution says so. (That is also why, however much I admire them, I could not affiliate with the SSPX.) So the real root of faith, however much one may speak of Christ, the Church, the Gospel, etc is not these things but the Roman Church.

Converts and cradle Catholics since the council will not have this experience, so I do not know what it will take for them to see this. I can contribute my experience, however, Rome has sufficient spiritual hallucinogens to overcome that easily. One can only trust to the power of God's Word.

God bless me if one of these days I'm not going to hop a Qantas flight for Runzas at la casa de Lito. Hell, invite Schuetz and Bob Catholic or whoever over too, let them "think with Runza"!

LPC said...

P.E.

spiritual hallucinogens

Heeeheeeheeehawhawhaw(LOL). Aint that the truth bro.

That would be a blessing if you can come down here.

Mi casa es tu casa.

Oh, that will be a lot of fun when you get down here!

LPC

Past Elder said...

Judas, even Christine has jumped over the rope into the ring at Schuetz' blog!

You can do or say about anything and make of the Catholic church anything as long as you do not leave it or deny it.

I'll say one thing about my unfortunate break in silence over there, it has as before reinforced, as if that were necessary, my experience that for one thing whatever these guys believe it is not the Catholic faith, and for another that in any of the various things claimed to be the Catholic faith the one inviolate article of faith is in the Catholic Church and from there you can believe whatever you want.

A state religion that outlived its state.