shadman's old Musings

A friend of mine asked me a question about baptism a week or so ago. He has sat under the teaching that baptism is required for salvation as well as the teaching that baptism is ceremonial in nature. His question is one that has been around for a long time, and in some respects the questions is nearly as old as the church is. Is salvation really that simple: repent and believe? Or are there things I must do as well? Is baptism a work or a sacrament, a rite of observance that must be performed to seal the repentance and belief? It also reminded me of something I had recently taught in my little weekly Bible study, but we'll get to that in a few minutes. There are in fact three views on baptism: The first is that baptism is a means of salvation. This is normally called the Roman Catholic view, but I'm more familiar with it as a view held by the churches of Christ, usually the Boston and Indiana versions. The second view is that baptism is a sign and a seal of the new...

I seem to have forgotten to post this from my Yahoo 360 blog. Posted Sept 13th .... I sometimes troll for Christians or interesting people on the Yahoo 360. Some times I run across an interesting person or something that peaks my interest. This happened as I was looking at a friend of one of my Yahoo 360 friends. Here is an excerpt from the blog of a friend of a friend, ... There is a Gospel known by the name the Gospel of Barnabas, which the church banned in 492 AD by the order of Pope Gelasius. It was confiscated everywhere. But there was still a copy of that Gospel in the library of Pope Sixtus V. Fortunately a certain Roman Monk called Framarino managed to bring it out. He had found the letters of Ireneus, where the came upon the name of the Gospel of Barnabas mentioned as a reference. His curiosity urged him to look for that gospel. When he became a close friend to Pope Sixtus V, he got that copy of the gospel and found in it that there would come a time when it would be claimed t...