mary and idols i have been studying the bible now for about a year i love it but i am not very familiar with the different denominations or traditions or common beliefs of various christian groups i have heard various people outside this news group describe idols such as power money material possessions etc these things are worshiped in some sense i suppose but i never really gave idols much thought until now i have been reading the postings in this news group which i just found a few days ago and i have a question first i m not trying to question anyone s belief or try to push my views on anyone else i haven t been at this long enough to have any views other than i cannot get to heaven by being good i must understand that christ bore my sins on the cross so that i could be saved and i need to repent i e realize that every time i sin i might as well stick a sharp stick in christ s side because he took the punishment for my sins when he died on the cross in my studies mary never really comes up i know who she is but that s about it it seems to me that a statue of mary could be considered an idol do people pray to statues of mary it sounds like educated christians more educated than myself i m sure believe mary was sinless wow i hoped to spend the summer convincing myself one way or the other about tongues i m reading charismatic chaos i guess i ll study tongues in parallel with reading this news group any help you can give me will be appreciated i don t think the issue is so much that people are more educated than you though it may well be that they are as that they come from a different tradition than yours this is a discussion between catholics and protestants catholics generally believe that mary was sinless protestants do not the issue comes down to different sources of authority protestants generally limit themselves to the bible as a source of doctrine since this isn t in the bible except in passages that no one would understand in this way if they didn t already believe it protestants don t accept it catholics see continuing revelation through the church though they believe the results are consistent with the bible i interpret your posting not as a call for yet another argument about whether the catholic marian devotions are idolatry an argument i am not prepared to see newed here but as a sign of being interested in learning about traditions other than your own catholics are of course a major one but by no means the only one i generally consider the major traditions to be catholic orthodox and various subsets of protestantism within protestantism it s a matter of how finely you want to cut things these days i think the major division is between those who accept biblical inerrancy and those who don t there are also a number of major historical traditions but in recent decades distinctions are tending to blur i d identify the major protestant traditions as lutheran reformed anglican they re sort of halfway between catholic and protestant wesleyan baptist holiness pentecostal church of christ but there are a number of others historical distinctions tend not to be so important among the liberal churches anymore and i think current trends in society and the church are also tending to make conservatives seen themselves as allies from a general evangelical perspective but differences among these various traditions are still quite marked i think the best introduction to these issues is to read a good book on church history anyone who wants to understand the church really needs to understand how we got where we are now a church history will normally show you where each of these traditions came from and give a feeling for their nature unfortunately i m away from my library at the moment so i don t have anything specific to recommend clh
