More Definitions:




Apostles: Apostles. They were appointed by Christ himself, with absolute power to govern His Church; to them He had given the keys of the kingdom of Heaven, with authority to admit or to exclude; they were also guided by His perpetual inspiration, so that all their moral and religious teaching was absolutely and infallibly true; they were empowered by their solemn denunciations of evil, and their inspired judgments on all moral questions, to bind and to loose, to remit and to retain the sins of men.



There are no apostles today because the last one died. No man has been given the power to bind or to loose, or to remit and to retain the

sins of men. This is where the Catholic Church has been in error. None of the priests in the Catholic Church were given this power. They came from a group known as the bishops.



Bishops: A bishop

was to watch over the particular church in which they ministered, in all that regarded its external order and internal purity; they were to instruct the ignorant, (1Timothy 3: 2.) to exhort the faithful, to confute the gainsayers, (Titus 1:9.) to "warn the unruly, to comfort the feeble-minded, to support the weak, to be patient towards all." (1Thessalonians 5:14.) They were "to take heed to the flock over which the Holy Ghost had made them overseers, to feed the Church of God which He had purchased with His own blood." (Acts 20:28.) In one word, it was their duty (as it has been the duty of all who have been called to the same office during the nineteen centuries which have succeeded) to promote to the utmost of their ability, and by every means within their reach, the spiritual good of all those committed to their care.



Deacons: The last of the three orders, that of Deacons, did not take its place in the ecclesiastical organization till towards the close of St. Paul’s life; or, at least, this name was not assigned to those who discharged the functions of the Diaconate till a late period; the Epistle to the Philippians being the earliest in which the term occurs in its technical sense. In fact the word (diakonov) occurs thirty times in the New Testament, and only three times (or at most four) is it used as an official designation; in all the other passages it is used in its simple etymological sense of a ministering servant.



Prophet: a prophet does not mean a foreteller of future events, but a revealer of God’s will to man; though the latter sense may (and sometimes does) include the former. So the gift of prophecy was that charism which enabled its possessors to utter, with the authority of inspiration, divine strains of warning, exhortation, encouragement, or rebuke; and to teach and enforce the truths of Christianity with supernatural energy and effect.

The gift of prophecy cannot easily be separated by any accurate demarcation from another charism often mentioned in Scripture, which we should now consider an ordinary talent, namely, the gift of teaching. The distinction between them appears to have been that the latter was more habitually and constantly exercised by its possessors than the former: we are not to suppose, however, that it was necessarily given to different persons; on the contrary, an excess of divine inspiration might at any moment cause the teacher to speak as a prophet.



Ordinances of the church:



.Baptism: " It is needless to add that baptism was (unless in exceptional cases) administered by immersion, the convert being plunged beneath the surface of the water to represent his death to the life of sin, and then raised from this momentary burial to represent his resurrection to the life of righteousness. It must be a subject of regret that the general discontinuance of this original form of baptism (though perhaps necessary in our northern climates) has rendered obscure to popular apprehension some very important passages of Scripture.



The Lord's Supper (or communion): while the Apostles themselves poured out the wine and broke the bread which symbolized the perfect union of the members of Christ’s body. Note: Here it says that this bread and wine symbolized the perfect union of the members of Christ’s body, not that it became the actual blood and body of Jesus.).



The Catholic Church: Catholic church taking its name from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. There were two factions or parties in opposition to each other, causing trouble for the church. One was called the Pauline party, and the other was the Judaizers.



The Pauline party (as they called themselves) appear to have ridiculed the scrupulosity of their less enlightened brethren, and to have felt for them a contempt inconsistent with the spirit of Christian love. And. in their opposition to the Judaizers, they showed a bitterness of feeling and violence of action, too like that of their opponents. Some of them, also, were inclined to exult over the fall of God’s ancient people, and to glory in their own position, as though it had been won by superior merit. These are rebuked by St. Paul for their "boasting," and warned against its consequences.



"Be not high-minded, but fear; for if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He also spare not thee." (Romans 11:17-22.)







Gnosticism: This laid the groundwork for philosophy. It also is the basis for most of the emergent movement of today.



One section of this party seems to have united these errors with one still more dangerous to the simplicity of the Christian faith; they received Christianity more in an intellectual than a moral aspect; not as a spiritual religion, so much as a new system of philosophy. This was a phase of error most likely to occur among the disputatious reasoners who abounded in the great Greek cities; and, accordingly, we find the first trace of its existence at Corinth. There it took a peculiar form, in consequence of the arrival of Apollos as a Christian teacher, soon after the departure of St. Paul. He was a Jew of Alexandria, and as such had received that Grecian cultivation, and acquired that familiarity with Greek philosophy, which distinguished the more learned Alexandrian Jews. Thus he was able to adapt his teaching to the taste of his philosophizing hearers at Corinth far more than St. Paul could do; and, indeed, the latter (Paul) had purposely abstained from even attempting this at Corinth. (1Corinthians 2:1.) Accordingly, the School which we have mentioned called themselves the followers of Apollos, and extolled his philosophic views, in opposition to the simple and unlearned simplicity which they ascribed to the style of St. Paul. It is easy to perceive in the temper of this portion of the Church the germ of that rationalizing tendency which afterwards developed itself into the Greek element of Gnosticism. Already, indeed, although that heresy was not yet invented, some of the worst opinions of the worst Gnostics found advocates among those who called themselves Christians; there was, even now, a party in the Church which defended fornication (See 1Corinthians 6:9-20.) on theory, and which denied the resurrection of the dead. (See 1Corinthians 15:12.) These heresies probably originated with those who (as we have observed) embraced Christianity as a new philosophy; some of whom attempted, with a perverted ingenuity, to extract from its doctrines a justification of the immoral life to which they were addicted. (This is the beginning of justification of immorality.)