Dear Pastor Chris Okotie,

OPEN LETTER TO PASTOR CHRIS (OF CATHOLICISM, PURGATORY AND THE UNITY OF FAITH)

Calvary greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I presume you might not know me. I am principally a Lawyer, an energy law expert, a word sculptor, a prolific poet, a budding speaker, a core intellectual, a mobile encyclopedia, a conflict resolution specialist, a social Engineer, a just Nigerian, a child of God, a struggling saved-by-grace, justified by faith heaven-bound Christian (protestant, not a Catholic and as such, not 'hell-tripping'), no pun is intended, a daring to be different youth, a truth bearer, a connoisseur of knotty words (as incongruously indecipherable, monstrously 'uninterpretable', conscientiously befuddling, profusely obfuscatory, menacingly outrageous, overwhelmingly ludricrous, perilously grandiloquent, emperically unjustifiable, overtly impressionistic, horrendously exhibitionist, vociferously out-bursting, clamorously profound, matchlessly nonpareil, idiolectically 'obahahiagbonistic', If not surreptitiously more bizzare than an 'okotiestic' firebrand musing, but I have been deliberately unobtrusive because of my desire to desist from being an intellectual braggadocio, a vaunter or a swell-head egotist or deemed a 'grammatical' comedian (I mean Phonics, fussy vocabulary as misconceived by many Nigerians and foreigners alike), but I have chosen to melt off the tone of complexity in my letter to you in order to aid comprehension and ultimately bring home my message and sink in my motive, moreso that the beauty of a language is to communicate!

Be that as it may, I also have to pre-inform you that I am not a professional critic who never sees anything good in another's action, a PhD (Pull him Down) holder, a social pall bearer (bearer of bad news) or a destructive cynic who searches for a Coffin on sighting a bouquet of flowers! I only feel compelled to lend my voice of censure to any odorous and malignant malaise that rear its ugly head in the polity with calming illumination, well thought-out clarifications and practical recommendations. I am a Progressive solution-finder who will suggest how it should be done, rather than merely condemn a leader for not doing it well as I have not been in their position or circumstance to determine whether I would fare better. I am equally a Positivist, a realist and a Pragmatist. My few public outcry is in the polity and the academia as political and religious activities are clearly outside the allowable province and permissible purview of my irrepresssibly insurmountable and vehemently indomitable voice of dissent. Moreover, the Holy books admonish us not to touch the anointed or do his Prophets any harm. (This charge is applicable to both the Prophets that God called and those who called themselves into God's ministry).


I must say that I find your recent vituperation against the Catholics as poignant, malicious, spurious, unjust, baseless and unacceptable. I find your person as readily pugnacious, incredibly controversial, yet, I have and will not condemn you. I am not a Catholic even though I attended Catholic schools but I believe that a man of God should be less brazen, more discreet, less controversial and more tactful. Such a statement credited to you as condemning the whole Catholic church is injuriously miscalculated, pensively unjustifiable, broadly careless and manifestly unfair. Not to exempt anyone including the Pope is indeed harsh. I presume you have read the Scriptures that enjoined us not to judge. Leave God to determine who is Heaven-bound or not, stultify acrimony, make your words sublime, do not preach hate and resentment, reinforce peaceable co-existence, do not divide our faith, fortify Christianity, rather than disintegrate it, edify God's body, the Church, rather than mortify it, do not allow anyone cast aspersions on the symbols of our faith or denigrate the body of Christ. Assuming but not conceding that the Catholic church has missed it, I verily believe that there are more loving ways of correcting them rather than outrightly condemning the sect, their worship, beliefs, doctrine and their leader.

In fact, condemning the Catholic faith for not being 'Christians' is to attempt to be more catholic than the Pope! I admire your eloquence at least, you do not posit to be a miracle worker, sorry, a magician like many others! You move with the times, from Music, through Law to Fashion, to Gospel merchandise to Politics! You are a cluster of controversy Sir, yet, we still admire you but sincerely, you goofed on this one like in many others. Should we condemn you because your marital life is in clear shambles as you have been divorced 3 good times, wilfully embracing the act of divorce which God clearly abhors! Is it not the same you that 'prophesied' that God told you to contest and that you would be Nigeria's President come 2003 and later 2007 on the aegis of Fresh party only not to lose in your ward but to have less votes than your congregation! That some of your church members did not vote for you shows your obvious imperfection too and their loss of faith in your eventual political leadership. Leading a church requires a different level of grace from participating in the murky water of Nigeria's brand of partisan politics. God does not say a thing without seeing to its fulfilment! His words never return void. I am not doubting your prophecy but Deuteronomy 18:21-22 affirms that the best way to discover a fake Prophet is that his Prophecies will not come to pass!:
'21. You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?” 22. If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed! Need I say more?

I couldn't believe my ears and my eyes even when I heard and read those statements from you. I find it utterly preposterous that you allege that Catholics are idolatous, evil, hell-bound and occultic. You condemned their faith and sentenced them to the deepest pit of hell. With all due respect, I believe you do not have the power or the capacity to do that! Only God determines who is saved and who is not! This is unacceptable Sir. I am not holding the brief for the Catholics but this brazen action If left unchallenged and unchecked is capable of breeding strife, acrimony, resentment, inter-denominational armed hostility within the Christian faith, religious fisticuffs, social adhesion, anomie, unrestricted disintegration, 'boko-haramic' annihilation of one sectum of the faith by another and subversive insurgence. It is indeed intolerable not to tolerate the faith and beliefs of other people just because we don't subscribe to them. We should learn to intermingle and not intermeddle. I am sure you know red-hot buckets of blood would have flowed freely if such outburst and open verbal attack was directed at our brethren of the other faith, Muslims, especially the fundamentalists. This is how the onslaught against Christians by some muslims and the unnerving criminality and genocide mildly tagged 'terrorism' began. This psychological obsessional hatred of humanity is a consequence of a people's inordinate preaching of hate, resentment, puerile indoctrination, unaccommodating mien, rigidly opinionated fanatism and wilful belief that only their belief is correct and as such, whichever 'infidel' does not subscribe to it should be erased from the surface of the earth. As a fair free-thinker, I use to believe that Islam, buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and other forms of religion and beliefs are perfect as propounded by their proponents and as such when something goes wrong, we should correct the fanatical 'faithfuls' and derelicts abusing the religion and not condemn the religion itself! This is why I won't keep quiet on this before denominations within the Christian faith start taking up arms against one another in the inordinate quest to fight for God (the powerful Creator of Heavens and the earth who is capable of swallowing all existence in milliseconds!) How more asinine can human beings be?

You allegedly condemned the Catholic faith as non-Christians even though they sustained the Christian movement for centuries and preserved and passed down what is now known as today's christianity on the sole basis of their belief in Purgatory. Let me take you down memory lane on what it means Sir. I have a deep knowledge of religion, law, classics, history, 'Philology' and philosophy and I won't horde this knowledge in setting the record straight and putting issues in perspective. After all, no man is an island or may be not. This is what I call the education of religion rather than the religion of education! I have read many religious books and codes of at least 17 major religions and I want you to believe what I intend to explain.

The word 'Purgatory' was derived through Anglo-Norman and Old French from the Latin word 'purgatorium'. It refers to a wide range of historical and modern conceptions of postmortem suffering short of everlasting damnation and its mostly used in a non-specific sense, to mean any place or condition of suffering or torment, especially one that is temporary.

Purgatory according to Roman Catholic teaching and faith is the state, process and place of purification or temporary punishment by which those who die with 'non-mortal sins' and especially imbued with grace are made ready for the Beatific Vision in Heaven. Thus, it is only one who dies in the state of grace that can be in Purgatory, and therefore no one who is in Purgatory will remain there forever or go to Hell. It means Purgatory is not for everyone who dies in sin, only for a select few with less grave outcomes. This theological notion has ancient tap roots and it is well-attested in early Christian literature, but the general conception of Purgatory as a geographically existing place like Heaven and hell is largely the creation of medieval Christian piety, misconception and imagination. Therefore, Purgatory in its proper sense strictly so-called is a state of pity and salvation in the afterlife by a prerogative mercy of the Sovereign God (as He would have mercy on whom He would have mercy) rather than a physical place, a pre-Heaven or another less enchanting paradise earned by post-death suffering and repentance.

The notion of Purgatory is associated particularly with the Latin rite of the Catholic Church (in the Eastern sui juris churches or rites, it is a doctrine, though it is not often called Purgatory, but the final purification, often called the final theosis. It is illuminating for you to know that this concept is not peculiar to the Catholics alone as the Anglicans of the Anglo-Catholic tradition generally hold to the belief, along with many Lutherans (of the Luther order) of High Church Lutheranism. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism equally believed in an intermediate state between death and the final judgment and in the possibility of continuing to grow in holiness thereat. These are pure beliefs reinforced by conviction and preserved by adherents of the schools of thought.

The general belief is that some people need purification and trusting in God’s love and mercy as they can't do it on their own, Catholics then believe that these people will not be rejected for all eternity. This is their conviction and truth based on their interpretation of God’s word, The Holy Bible as recorded in 1 Corinthians 3:10-15. The purification that Catholics refer to in the doctrine of purgatory then posits that even after death, the all powerful God is still believed as being able to save some people. 1 Corinthians 3: 15- If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames! This is the whole crux of the Purgatory debate. God's ways are not our ways, so I enjoin you to leave God to be God and do his work. Moreover, It is not appropriate to tell our father that he married an ugly wife! Then in 1 John 5:15-17 we read that some sins do not lead to death and people with these type of sins will be presumably saved after purification by God himself. Verse 17. All unrighteousness is sin: there is a sin not unto death!

You also condemned the elevation and 'worshipping' of Mother Mary but all these are backed up by the Bible. As one Scriptural scholar remarked: 'If Mary is not your mother, then, the Devil must be your father!'. Do you really count yourself among the generation of people that will call her blessed? In Luke Chapter 2. Can you be numbered among those who will be privileged to behold Mary as their mother? “Woman, behold your son, Son, behold your mother” This is where the Catholics found their belief: in the Bible, so please, let their faith grow along side with yours. We are all saved by grace. Whether you are Catholic or firebrand, If you do not have a personal relationship with Jesus the Christ and hold a 'red' passport, saved by the blood of the lamb, you are hell-bound!



In a similar vein, the Eastern Orthodox Churches believe in the possibility of a change of situation for the souls of the dead through the prayers of the living and the offering of the Divine Liturgy and many Orthodox, especially among ascetics, hope and pray for a general apocatastasis i.e the reconstitution, restitution and or restoration to the original or primordial condition. This is despite the counter-belief in the Scriptures that there is no repentance in the state of death! Or the more explicit one that states that the next phase after death is Judgement! A similar belief in at least the possibility of a final salvation for all is equally held by Mormonism. Judaism also believes in the possibility of after-death purification and often use the word purgatory to present its understanding of the meaning of Gehenna, but this concept of after-death soul purification has been explicitly denied in other faith traditions and espoused by many amongst which adherent you seem to be one.


There has always been an uncanny rivalry between and amongst the pentecostal church, the protestants, the Orthodox church and the Catholics. It is my desire that we will one day attain a unity of faith. Without any need to preach to you or intimate you about the concept of the unity of faith as propounded by St. Ecumenios as you are probably grounded in Theology Sir.

Historically, the Orthodox Church is the Church founded by our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ, described in the pages of the New Testament. It is the same Church that continued through time to this day and to the age to come. Her history can be traced with documents and facts, much as secular history in unbroken continuity all the way back to Christ and His Twelve Apostles.
For her two thousand years of existence, the Orthodox Church has continued in her undiminished and unaltered faith and life. Today, her apostolic doctrine, worship, structure, and practice remain intact. The Orthodox Church is the living Body of Jesus Christ, the Arc of salvation.

For the first 1,000 years of Christian history there was virtually one Church. In the eleventh century, a disastrous schism, nay, a volcanic division between people, usually belonging to an organisation, movement or religious denomination occurred, resulting in the Western Church, under the Pope of Rome, splitting itself from the Orthodox Church. The Eastern Orthodox churches refused to be subject to what they called papal absolutism, accepting no other head than Jesus Christ Himself.

Sir, every church is unique and a Church is nothing more than a night club with a thin veneer of religiosity If its central theme is not Jesus Christ!

The pure undiluted truth is only known by God as historical circumstances have changed the content of faith, beliefs, doctrines and the proper delineation of denominational worship mode including the Holy Bible! It is circumspect to note that the Bible as its known today is a 'bowdlerised' version. I don't believe that we should query and condemn those who handed down the faith but we should rather put our gaze on our Lord and Saviour, Jesus the Christ and not begin a limitless inquest into the veracity of the claims of each sect and denomination and holding a punitive or condemnable or even a contemptible view. It is not only needless but sacrilegious to do otherwise. The Christian faith should be therefore consciously extracted from the unnerving crucibles of a mere religion into the enviable path of a way of life! It is equally profound to note Sir that our Lord Jesus Christ did not start 'Christianity', he came to the world with the message of eternal hope and salvation. Christianity as a movement and indeed a religion commenced after Christ's ascension and earthly departure at Antioch when Christ-like features were spotted in his disciples and adherents.

In being more epexegetic about my proposition regarding adding and subtracting to the differentiated sects' Christian beliefs, Rome added to the ancient Creed of the Church, while numerous Protestant denominations rarely study or recite it. Rome has layers of ecclesiastical authority; much of Protestantism which is anti-hierarchical or even independent in polity. Rome introduced indulgences and purgatory in reaction, Protestantism shies away from personal effort and discipline.




It is my hope and desire that you apologise to the members of this faith whose doctrine you condemned, thus, affecting their psyche and breaking the strength of their religious conviction. What we should all strive towards is the Unity of faith! What then does the term Unity of faith, (an ideal that will end this type of outburst) mean? It is a scriptural ambition to unify denominations as one body politic in Christ Jesus. For instance, Ephesians 4:13 states:
“Until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God”.

Unity of the faith is not to disagree about the dogmatic teachings. Likewise, unity of the knowledge of the Son of God means that there are no differences in the understanding of Him'. (St. Ecumenios, 11th century A.D., Comment. in Ephesians. ad loc.; PG 118:1220C).

Unity of faith is that we shall one day congregate as one indivisible body with Christ Jesus in Heaven, chant Halleluyah chorus and shout Hossanah, praise God and worship the Trinity in the beauty of God's holiness. Disunity and discord are absent in Heaven, no denomination in Heaven, no confusion by speaking incomprehensible vocabulary in Heaven as the only language is praise!, no divorce or physical marriage in Heaven, no Political party and election in Heaven, no insults in Heaven, no perming of hair in Heaven, no Facebook in Heaven, only the Book of life!, no Pastor or Bishop in Heaven, we will all be equal before God as human beings and Christ's deserving brides who have fought relentlessly the good fight of faith! I pray for you as much as I pray for myself and everyone who professes Christ (Protestants and Catholics) from the bottom of my heart that may we not miss Heaven, our final destination.

Please, do accept the assurances of my highest regards.

Yours faithfully,

'Tosin Ayo,

Can some1 summarize this


Thanks

Why giving this man the attention he's looking for?
God told him he'll be a nigerian president. He quickly contested twice n lost both times.
God told him to marry d first wife,he obeyed,but later God told him to divorce her cos she's devilish, he did.
Then God told him to marry another man's wife, he again obeyed, but later God told him to divorce her cos she's equally devilish, he obeyed again.
This time God must have told him the next devil to marry. This his God should pity him nah


Now the same God has told him who and who is going to hell
Omg this man is very funny

Great one 'word bank'! Nice to meet you here bro.