Posted on 01/31/2005 5:25:06 PM PST by Diago
Ok. Those Gnostic ideas are your portion. No harm, no foul.
I accept the invocation of Gnosticism as an admission of invincible ignorance ...
I chalk up the inability to come to grips with your
gnosticism as being from the eastside. :-)
Why should we celebrate the Passover instead of Easter? We are Christians, not Jews. Jesus founded a new Church based on his new revelation, he was not trying to make us better Jews. As for animal sacrifices--the protype for the Lamb of God himself--these were discontinued after the Temple was torn down.
In fact, it took a while for the earliest Christians to come to a fresh understanding and to put Jewish rituals behind them. For a number of years they held onto Jewish dietary practices and the rite of circumcision, for instance. Eventually, under Paul's leadership, they understood these were no longer necessary.
Thank you for proving my point.
Jesus said, "Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to destroy but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, Till the heaven and the earth pass away, not one jot or one tittle shall in any way pass from the law until all is fulfilled. Therefore whoever shall break one of these commandments, the least, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of Heaven. But whoever shall do and teach them , the same shall be called great in the kingdom of Heaven." (Mt. 5:17-19)
"Fulfill" here does not mean to finish so as to do away with, but to make full, to complete. In His life, Yeshua HaMashiach, Jesus Christ, completed our understanding of the Torah, and He fulfilled (or will fulfill in the Second Coming) every jot and tittle of it. He did not say that He came to do away with the religion of the Jews and create a new Gentile religion.
Now let me turn your rhetorical question around: Why should we celebrate the feast of Ishtar (Easter) with all of its pagan symbolism (rabbits, eggs, etc. all point to the fertility goddess, not to Jesus Christ)? We're Christians, not pagans! We worship the Messiah of the Jews to whom God gave these feasts and festivals for their instruction, not the gods and goddesses of Rome and Babylon, so whose feasts should we keep?
Now, if you want to continue to keep Christmas (Saturnalia/Yule/Winter Solstice) and Easter, and you wish to honor the Lord through them, that's between you and Him. But don't on the one hand say that we shouldn't follow Torah because we aren't Jews and on the other hand make the claim that the Church has kept the Torah. It plainly hasn't.
CCC 108: Still, the Christian faith is not a "religion of the book". Christianity is the religion of the "Word" of God, "not a written and mute word, but incarnate and living".[73] If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, "open [our] minds to understand the Scriptures."[74]
73 St. Bernard, S. missus est hom. 4, 11: PL 183, 86.
74 Cf. Lk 24:45.
A better question is how can you fully explain passover to someone who doesn't understand that Christ is our passover Lamb.
Overturning the things of this world is a specialty of our Lord. ;-)
lol Actually, I'd say the two pretty much go together, which pretty much sums up my thoughts on this thread.
However, if by "the things of this world" you were referring to, for example, the Jewish Feastdays, I'd suggest that you modify that. These were the feasts given directly by God Himself on Sinai for the edification and teaching of Israel, remember.
I'll go even further and state that the personal connection is the key to understanding everything related to the Church's ministry. We don't simply plant Bibles in hotel drawers and move one -- the key is the personal witness the individual gives to the personal witness given by the Apostles to the Person of Christ Jesus. The priest doesn't FedEx the host -- he personally brings the Body of Christ to those who are sick or in Church. People don't baptize themselves; Baptism is conferred personally by another. Etc., etc., etc.
Your response proves nothing of the sort. Remember, he also said you can't put new wine into old wineskins. And this saying came right after his disciples reported that the Pharisees were criticizing him for not behaving in expected ways.
"He told them this parable: 'No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, "The old is better."'"
So you see, he had not come to make us better Jews, but to make us his followers, pouring his new wine into us, the new wineskins. But he did this in such a way that did not destroy the Old Law, but incorporated it into the New by a fresh understanding. From then on the Old Law would be understood in the light of his own life and death and resurrection.
Your point about pagan adaptations also distorts what actually happened over the centuries. In fact, the christianization of pagan holidays and artifacts was a cultural, rather than a religious, phenomenon. Christians were the minority in a pagan Roman world. So they learned to make adaptations to survive, much as Jews do even today in a Christian context, converting Hanakah, for instance, into a kind of Jewish Christmas, exchanging gifts, especially focusing on children, and emphasizing a Jewish legend in a way that brings joy and merriment. There is nothing wrong with doing this. It is not a shift in religious practice or faith. It is a common-sense cultural adaptation.
Finally, I never said "we shouldn't follow the Torah", whatever you mean by this. The Torah is comprised of the first five books of Genesis. There is nothing in those texts we reject. In fact, the very first chapter of Genesis is recited during the Easter Liturgy in the Catholic Church. We would hardly do this if we rejected this text.
If that last supper was literally the Lord's flesh and blood, then there was no need to go to the cross.
Non-sequitur.
At communion, when wine changes into blood
Your homework is to define "Transubstantiation". (You can find a definition in the Catholic Encyclopedia). Define "substance". Define "Accidents". (Again, look in the CE for definitions. These are technical terms with specific meaning). Once you have these definitions in hand, you'll know what happened to the ethanol, and why it doesn't matter.
Finally, Mary the Mother of God was still walking around on Earth in the usuall manner when the last of the Epistles was written. But the Gospels do recount folks praying to Mary that she ask her Son to help them. Finding that story is another part of your homework.
The Jewish priesthood was established long before the Temple was built.
When the Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., no place remained that sacrifice could be lawfully offered.
The same thing happened during the Babylonian captivity, and yet Judaism didn't cease to exist.
What is the justification for Judaism as described in the Pentateuch (i.e., Torah, in its restricted sense) -- to continue?
Do you really think that the covenant between God and Israel cannot exist in the absence of a temple in Jerusalem?
In Matthew 26:29, Jesus says "But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom."
If it is truly turned into His blood, then why does He say here "fruit of the vine"?
I completely disagree. The heart of the Torah is the covenant between God and Israel. Part of this covenant is the commandments (all of them). A subset of these commandments are those pertaining to sacrifice.
A Catholic who has a problem with tradition? I find that ironic.
Matt 26:
27 And taking the chalice, he gave thanks and gave to them, saying: Drink ye all of this.
28 For this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.
Nor can it contradict:
John 6:
54 Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen, I say unto you: except you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.
Read all of John 6, including the part about many disciples leaving over this "hard teaching" to understand that He meant it quite literally.
Ping
Lol.
And now we have one taking "scripture" literally. This thread is getting wierd. :-)
Read all of John 6, including the part about many disciples leaving over this "hard teaching" to understand that He meant it quite literally.
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