The “thief on the cross proves sola fide” claim is one of the most repeated Protestant arguments online right now.
It treats Christ’s extraordinary, pre-Resurrection, personal pardon of a dying man as the ordinary rule of salvation for the entire Church age.
It quietly assumes a closed Protestant canon and interpretive authority whose own historical formation is never itself justified by “Scripture alone.”
Extraordinary mercy is not the same as normative doctrine. Confusing the two is how the argument keeps circulating!
If this exception is the rule, what remains of the ordinary means of grace the Church actually received?
The man who can only name himself by the wounds that broke him has already surrendered, because the person is not a pile of trauma stories but one body and one soul held together by the form that keeps this flesh alive even when the mind forgets the unity. Identity diffusion is just the intellect mistaking every new feeling for a new self instead of seeing them as movements of the same soul. Digging deeper into the pieces will not heal him, only the virtues that put the appetites back under the soul’s command can
⚠️ A Muslim man tortures and humiliates his wife based on verses of the Quran. He ties a scarf around her head and then pours water over her.
Another woman has water poured over her head and is asked if she’s a dog.
This is the daily reality for millions of Muslim women!
This Christian refugee in McKinney, TX’s speech to the City Council urging them to not allow a 5 acre Islamic center has gone viral: “I am a Sharia law survivor from Iran.” Courageous.
Orthobros/Jay Dyer fanboys worship Jay as their personal christ. They vehemently defend him and his heretical views. They attack others that criticize Dyer. This group has become an Orthodox cult right before the eyes of the entire Holy Church and ROCOR. ROCOR’s silence in the matter makes them complicit.
The body is not a costume you put on until the soul invents a better story, it is the matter God joined to a rational form so that every passion, every wound, and every virtue has a real location and a real hierarchy. When a culture teaches the young to treat their flesh as raw material for self-invention it is not liberating them, it is training them to hate the only nature they will ever inhabit. Refuse the lie! Say it out loud where someone can actually hear you, then reply with the first moment you watched someone you love start treating their own body like something they could rebuild from scratch.
Treating the Pope and the councils as rivals is a false dilemma the early Church never held because authority and synodality always moved together, and the reason a council still mattered is that it gave solemn universal witness while the living voice of Peter confirmed it.
You reduce Rome’s primacy to politics then act surprised when the record refuses to cooperate, since Constantinople tried that exact claim at Chalcedon and Leo vetoed the canon while the fathers appealed to the Cathedra Petri, not the Senate, and Cyprian Jerome and Augustine all knew the difference. Canon 7 of Ephesus forbade a different faith not clarifying the one already held, the Filioque was Western precision against local Arianism drawn from the same fathers you claim, and those joint statements you wave around discuss first-millennium administration without ever becoming a dogmatic surrender of the primacy the councils themselves already confessed.
Good job picking the pieces that suit you, that selective reconstruction is the same private judgment the Protestants use, and wrapping it in ancient names does not make the individualism any less disordered.
Individualism is just narcissism that learned to quote Scripture, and the second you decide you get to pick and choose what to believe you are already butchering the text countless martyrs bled to preserve intact.
Do better. Come home to the Church that actually handed it on.
@DividonBX@joshwhitlatch You diagnosed the fruit of private judgment and mistook it for fanaticism! The yellow highlighter becomes the only sacrament the moment the living Church that preserved the text is written off as one more indoctrinated tradition.
@AbaddonSpeaks Your counting game is a tired Arian dodge. The New Testament already treats the Son as the eternal Word who is God, the One before whom every knee bows, and the Lord Thomas confesses as “My Lord and my God.”
@PrestonNAnthony@IndianaBrunner Canon 28 was a political power play the papal legates rejected on the floor and Leo annulled by Peter’s authority. The same council that cried “Peter has spoken through Leo” still sought Roman confirmation..
Calling Trent’s video “cringe” and a credibility hit is pure deflection. He used the Protestant’s own stated definition of sola scriptura and pressed the consequences. When Scripture is treated as the sole formal principle binding the conscience, natural law has to be smuggled back in as an optional extra. Private judgment produces exactly this: each man decides which version still lets him keep the moral order he needs. The composite is severed and the remnant is still expected to do the work of the whole. The embarrassment is not Trent’s.