re: How is it possible that some Protestant churches support gay marriage?

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That’s not sola fide. If you believe any actions can help for salvation, whether acts of morality or charity, then you do not believe in sola fide.

Sola fide means faith alone. A murderer can have faith that Jesus Christ died for his sins and still go out and murder more people. If you truly believe in sola fide, you believe that his murderous actions play no part whatsoever in his salvation.

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No, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the doctrine. As I and others have said, faith alone receives the merits of Christ. Nothing else--including our good works--are necessary for receiving justification; nothing else merits or makes up the basis of our justification but faith that receives Christ's merits.

Good works are necessary for salvation, not as a meritorious work, but as a necessary evidence of salvation.

The issue you seem to be having is the difference between a cause and an effect. Light is the effect of a lit candle, but the light isn't the cause of the candle being lit. The emitted light is necessary in the sense that it is a necessary effect of the candle being lit, but it isn't the cause of the candle being lit.

Likewise, good works are necessary in the sense that a true saving and justifying faith will produce good works, but good works to not cause or contribute to our salvation. They are a necessary effect of salvation, not a necessary cause of it.

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A change of heart leading you to perform good deeds is not having faith alone. Do any of you Protestants actually believe sola fide?

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The only people I’ve ever heard promoting those concepts are fringe televangelists, whose status as Christians is questionable. These ideas are not representative of mainstream Christian beliefs. The closest thing to that is the “once saved, always saved” doctrine, commonly taught by Southern Baptists. However, even that requires some mental gymnastics, like claiming that someone who falls away after 20 years was never truly saved to begin with.

So you believe it is impossible to believe that Christ is the son of God, the second person of the trinity, who was incarnated by the Holy Spirit and became man, and who died on the cross for our sins, and arose on the third day, without also displaying good works that serve as evidence of salvation?

Clearly you can believe all of those things mentally and go out and perform bad deeds or even refrain from performing good deeds.

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If you know the early church fathers and were taught by them, your idea of what is the true church is more credible to me than the ideas of Martin Luther and John Calvin. The early church fathers were taught directly from the Apostles. Who were taught by Jesus.

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The church Martin Luther rebelled from was literally in the business of sin, allowing money to cover the sins of their believers, in order to pay for the wants and needs of the church. If you think for one second Jesus or the Apostles would be okay with sin, as long as you paid the church enough money, I don't know what to say.

Luther was declared a heretic and had to go in hiding for pointing out that the church was condoning evil. Regardless of what the early church fathers were taught by the Apostles, by the middle ages it had become something that neither the Apostles nor the early church fathers would have recognized, much less Jesus.

Just the fact that Luther had to go in hiding should tell you something about the church in those times. The act of openly believing something different than the church decreed, put you in danger of life and limb.

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No. Forty to 100 thousand church "branches" were built by Martin Luther and other "interpreters" 1500 years after the Apostolic Church that was built by Christ.

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No, there is one visible Church of Jesus Christ, but that one church is expressed in multiple forms, like branches of a singular tree.

It's why Protestants like myself can say that there is one, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic Church of Jesus Christ.

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This is unequivocally false, and gets repeated so often by protestants who've no idea how large the scope and scale is of the major theological discrepancies are between the tens of thousands of denominations. It's mass confusion and it never stops — if someone doesn't like something, they start a new sect. You have multiple mainline protestant denominations committing atrocious blasphemy and heresies as we speak because of their own interpretations. That's because the reformed church is built upon a foundation of sand. Jesus said HE would build his Church, not Martin Luther, FooManChoo and Joel Osteen. Period.

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It's obvious you have a severe misunderstanding of things.

A singular denomination can agree about everything but the color of the carpet and so they split apart. While that is unfortunate, having a difference of belief about the color of carpet doesn't differentiate a true church from a false church, or a true Christian from a falsely professing believer. When Catholics and others criticize Protestants for the differences between us, they make it seem like all differences are equally heretical, when in fact most differences are very minor.

There are some denominations that have major and even heretical differences, though. That's why the ultimate standard we use to make such judgements is the Scriptures. For instance, I am Presbyterian but I can say that most of my Baptist brothers are truly brothers even if we disagree on a lot of doctrine because we can still agree on the absolute basics of the faith as summarized by the ancients creeds.

Jesus did found and build one Church, but that one Church isn't exclusive to Rome, for instance.

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Irrelevant. We're talking about the new church, not the old law. The OT was canonized 200 years BC.

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Not true. There wasn't an authoritative, ecumenical Jewish Council that declared which books were in the OT by the time Jesus came on the scene, and yet Jesus held people accountable for knowing what was and wasn't the word of God. That is very relevant against the criticisms against Protestantism.

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Correct. What you're failing to understand is the difference between the scripture being written, and it being canonized into the Bible, for which you claim Sola Scriptura and your own interpretations on how Christ wants His Church (not churches, but CHURCH) built, which was not a few decades: it was nearly 200 years that the church existed before the Bible became "the Bible" that 40 thousand different opposing denominations use as a source of Sola Scriptura.

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This makes me think you don't actually know what the doctrine of sola scriptura actually teaches. It's about authority for the Church. The Scriptures were completed before the end of the 1st century and therefore they were authoritative for all Christians at that time. The canon was complete with the final writing of the last book of Scripture. The reception of it formally by the Church didn't happen for a while later, but that doesn't matter in terms of what is God's word.

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That's not up for debate, it's fact. Paul lived in Ephesus for nearly 3 years, yet he only left 6 chapters that were canonized into the Bible by God for humanity. Surely you don't believe Christ's Apostolic church from the day of Pentecost only has 6 chapters of teaching from Paul to the Ephesians, and from the Ephesians to us? Think of all the teaching and instruction they were given on how to build Christ's church as Christ instructed Paul and the disciples. That's why singular church tradition is so important to a unified church.

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No doubt Paul taught other things not in Scripture, just as Moses taught other things not in Scripture and Jesus taught other things not in Scripture. The question is what is authoritative to the Church? Jesus didn't hold the people accountable to the oral traditions of Moses, but to the Scriptures.

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The Church that Christ built is, ultimately, infallible, and He told us that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. If you don't like that, take it up with Him. He said it. HOWEVER, as far as the individual goes, regarding infallibility, what protestants fail to realize is that it is actually protestants who are the ones that wind up believing their interpretations of scripture are infallible, hence the explosion of denominations that contradict and oppose one another. Sola Scriptura is a man made concept 1500 years after the fact, and that's not up for debate either. Sola Scriptura would've been unrecognizable to the 200 years of OG Christians, because there was no scripture.

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Jesus didn't say the Church would be infallible. He said that it would endure and conquer. That doesn't mean she wouldn't ever err. In fact, Paul was correcting errors from the beginning because the Church is made up of fallible people. That's why the Scriptures alone are said to be God-breathed.

Speaking as a Protestant, I don't actually believe that my interpretation is infallible. That's why I adhere to the motto semper reformanda or "always reforming". It's precisely because I believe that I can be wrong while the Scriptures cannot that I study the Bible and pray that God would reform me until He gives me full and perfect knowledge in Heaven.

The principle being sola scriptura is taken from the Bible, itself. The concept was found all throughout the ECFs prior to the Bishop of Rome taking on the consolidated power that he did.

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The Orthodox church has no "bad interpretations," nor a "top down" conformity to said bad interpretations. What does this even mean? There are no pluralities in Orthodox interpretation, because there's only one— passed down from the day of Pentecost.

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This is exactly what I'm talking about. You believe that everything the EOC teaches is precisely what was taught from the beginning, and to disagree with the EOC is to disagree with THE infallible truth.

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And that is protestantism's fatal error and why it's drying up as we speak. The shallow plasticity of protestantism is what makes it so unappealing and unrecognizable to the rest of the world, especially young people who are hungry for principles and authority, as well as people who are actually living in a hell on earth under duress and persecution. A Palestinian Christian in the middle of bombings has no use for a church that is capriciously whimsical: they need a faith that is built upon a rock that hell itself cannot prevail against it.

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That's quite the broad brush of false statements you're painting with there. You are saying all Protestantism is the same, and it isn't. Broadly evangelicalism as represented by those mega churches you mentioned are having all sorts of problems because they have no substance, but that isn't a problem with Protestantism, but with faithlessness to the Scriptures and conformity to the world rather than to God. You're right in that many are leaving those places and looking for substance and thinking they will find it in the bells and smells of Catholicism or Orthodoxy, but all they will have is the trimmings of false teaching with an ancient facade.

I don't have enough characters to continue in this post, so I'll just say that as a Reformed Christian, I believe Christ is the truth, not the fallible doctrines of men.

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Right, except it isn't exclusive to protestant churches. All organized religion is man-made, and therefore deeply flawed.

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I would deeply disagree.

While religion is merely Man's interpretation of certain Biblical aspects, there are tenets that are fundamental bedrock not open for interprestation.

Demoninations can disagree about use of alcohol or what positions women can or can't hold in the Church.

It absolutely can not ignore blatant Sin called out in The Holy Bible as SIN. The Holy Bible means in 2025 what it meant when it was written.

There is also no interpretation of who Jesus is and The Holy Trinity. Those are not Religion, those are of GOD. What Jesus called Good is Good. What he called Evil is Evil. If a Church deviates from that, I submit it is not a Church, no matter how much they declare themselves as one.

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Sola Scriptura has literally fractured and and fragmented the Church. There are literally thousands of different Protestant denominations because of Sola Scriptura.

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Agree to disagree. What fractured and fragmented the church was the utter defense of evil (indulgences) resulting in the excommunication and persecution of those who refused to condone them. I think they came from the utterly evil things being taught and condoned, which were obviously outside the scripture and faith in Jesus.

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BTW, I’m Greek Orthodox, not Catholic. Just in case you are wondering.

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Bc they split from the true church. When they did that they opened the doors for everything that is going on today.

Instead of seeing this and making corrections they have furthered the lgbtq agenda.

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ed with Protestant churches, and I honestly didn’t realize the Catholic versus Protestant divide was such a significant issue until I began reading posts online.

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This is significant on one side and it’s not the Catholics.

The absolute ego you all have thinking Catholic Churches worry about other denominations is mind blowing lol. Literally nothing in any religions outside Catholism have any of yall done anything noteworthy.

I’ve never heard a priest in 39 years ever address a different religion. No offense, we don’t much realize or even think of other religions. Once you go you go. We don’t try to pull you back.

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This is significant on one side and it’s not the Catholics.

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It has never been discussed in any Protestant church I’ve ever attended.

I’m assuming it’s being discussed by someone other than just online, perhaps TV evangelists?