Catholicism and Replacement Theology

A caller on a local minneapolis radio program called in accusing the Catholic Church of replacement theology. It's like fingernails on chalkboard when anti-catholics quote John McCarthur as an expert on Catholicism. John McCarthur doesn't know what he is talking about and should stick to what he teaches. Why not see what the Church itself says? The Catholic Church does not hide it's teachings.

Your guest explained it pretty well, though I don't think he was Catholic. It's not either zionism or replacement theology. Why does it have to be either one view or another. As your guest said and consistent with Romans 11, the Christians were grafted on, though the Catholic Church does take it a bit further than your guest regarding the dignity of the Jewish people. The whole document which is the official teaching on the matter is called Nostra Aetate and can be found here:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html

Here are some important parts.

The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles.(7) Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles. making both one in Himself.(8)

The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.

As Holy Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation,(9) nor did the Jews in large number, accept the Gospel; indeed not a few opposed its spreading.(10) Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle.(11) In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and "serve him shoulder to shoulder" (Soph. 3:9).(12)



Also from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Church and non-Christians

839 "Those who have not yet received the Gospel are related to the People of God in various ways."325

The relationship of the Church with the Jewish People. When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People,326 "the first to hear the Word of God."327 The Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God's revelation in the Old Covenant. To the Jews "belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ",328 "for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable."329

781 "At all times and in every race, anyone who fears God and does what is right has been acceptable to him. He has, however, willed to make men holy and save them, not as individuals without any bond or link between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge him and serve him in holiness. He therefore chose the Israelite race to be his own people and established a covenant with it. He gradually instructed this people. . . . All these things, however, happened as a preparation for and figure of that new and perfect covenant which was to be ratified in Christ . . . the New Covenant in his blood; he called together a race made up of Jews and Gentiles which would be one, not according to the flesh, but in the Spirit."


The new covenant is the fullfullment of the covenants that preceeded it. God made covenants with Adam (indivdiaul), Noah (family), Abraham (tribe), Moses (nation). Jesus Christ fullfilled all of those expanding covenants and included the whole world in the covenant. The Jews are still a part of that covenant and the root upon which we are grafted as Paul says in Rom 11.

Jesus Story in Pagan Mythology? Horus and Jesus?

Was the Pagan God where Christianity gets the story of Jesus?

I always enjoy things like this sent me below and wish I had more time to look in to it more deeply.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa5.htm??#turnAdLocation

I've looked in to some things like this before concerning Catholicism like the Baptist's trail of blood theory where they take every sect along the way and call them Baptists and say the Catholics Church killed them. It Doesn't matter if the people were dualists (believing in a good and an evil god), near pagan, rigorists, Catholic except in a few doctrines etc. etc. I've read books like "Foxe's Book of Martyr's" that uses a paranoid (though maybe rightfully so) queen of England, Protestants like to call Bloody Mary, who was Catholic and the persecutions she administered, to prove something about Catholicism. In general it turned out to be mostly red herrings and distortions of Catholicism. Of course in a broad brush manner he says "see this is what the Catholic Church did". The interesting thing about this is the Author, John Foxe, is that a good friend of his, Queen Elizabeth, a Protestant, whom they like to call "good queen Bess", was at least as bloody and liked to have her government officials rip the bowels out of the victims and leave them to die a slow painful death. Not to mention the protestant penal laws and 200 priests killed in England for saying Mass, i.e. reading the word of God to the people. Again I leave God to judge whether her paranoia was well founded. Times were much different back then and there is a certain right of governments to keep order found in scripture (Rom 13 for instance).

There is the Two Babylon’s by Alexander Hislop, readily available on the net (I’ve read much of it but not all) that is very similar to your website you sent me, that goes through contortions to and does silly things like say "pagan cult x used prayer beads on a string and Catholicism does so that's where it came from and it's pagan" even though there are 2000 years before it and beads and string are nothing very unique. People simply use them to count and that's really about all we use them for as well. Big deal. Interestingly enough a Protestant Pastor in the 1960's named Ralph Woodrow wrote a book based on this supposedly well documented and footnoted book that no one questioned because it was so well documented and footnoted. Funny thing is he later pulled his best selling book that he was making lots of money off of, off the shelf and rote a poorly sold refutation of his work and the poor logic, distortions, and just plain silliness that his book put forth as truth. A deeper study convicted him that he had born false witness against the Catholic Church, event though he still didn't agree with its doctrines.

That brings me to the website lined up at the beginning. Most of these things when you dig in to them are 10% coincidental truth (i.e. some sayings that were close to what Jesus said) 20% half truth (Horus wasn't resurrected but Osiris his father was) and allot of fabrication plus or minus some percentage points on each category. I don't have as much time as I used to do this sort of thing. There are plenty of websites that refute it adequately: I

http://www.catholica.com.au/peregrinus1/066_pere_071107.php

http://www.kingdavid8.com/Copycat/JesusHorus.html

http://creativecounterpart.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/ending-the-myths-of-horus-jesus/

If all the claims on the webpage turned out to be true I would leave Christianity. I say that with confidence because when I have looked in to these things, rather than, like some people, simply let them strip them of what they believe, I find them to actually build my faith in what I believe rather than weaken it. I appreciate the challenges. I looked as some encyclopedias about who Horus was. He was the son of Osiris and Isis, not Meri and Seb. It appears Seb was the Father of Osiris or maybe his brother. Greek Mythology doesn’t have a consistent story on any of these gods and in the end what we have today are generalizations of the stories that surrounded them. I suppose that's close enough to where they thought they could get away with it. There is no Meri from what I can see anywhere near the birth of Horus, maybe you have some other info. I see some pagan sites calling her Meri but don't see any evidence that that naming occurred before Christ's time. I guess since Osiris was resurrected, that could also be used in some fashion to imply some link to Jesus. Big deal. He was resurrected by Isis so she could have sex with her (sorry no virgin birth of Horus) in a swamp. (sorry, no born in a cave in a manger). More I could say of course. But in general, I think things like this are put out just to have our neurons stroked with things we like to hear that elevate us and put other's down. Like the readers of two Babylon’s, the readers of "Trail of Blood" and Foxes book of Martyrs. Everybody wants to "exalt" their truth. Even me. There is an interesting article here: http://mnemosynosis.livejournal.com/18273.html called the "The power of repetition of False Beliefs". It's worth a read in light of all this.