Posted on 06/14/2006 8:05:55 AM PDT by NYer
We believe in the Blessed Trinity because we believe in Jesus, Who revealed the Trinity. God had prepared the Jews not only to welcome the Messiah, but to recognize through revelation what philosophers like Aristotle achieved through reason: that there is a God and there can only be one God.
Moses said to the Jews, “Acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other but to believe in God Who is the only God.” When the Messiah finally came, He revealed a huge mystery that went far beyond what the Jews were expecting: that the one God in Whom they believe is not solitary, but a unity, a communion of three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that the Messiah is the Son.
He told them explicitly that the Father and He are one (Jn 10:30). He told them that He and the Father would send the Holy Spirit (Jn 14:26, Jn 15:26). And when He sent them out to baptize in the name of God, He didn’t give them instructions to baptize in the “names” of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — as if they were three different gods — but in the “name,” for they are fundamentally a union of three persons. This is what the term Trinity means. It was devised by the early Church apologist Tertullian around the year 200 from the Latin words “unitas” and “trinus,” literally “unity” and “three.” It signifies that there is a unity of three persons in one God.
Since the beginning of the Church, theologians have spent their lives trying to penetrate this mystery and explain it to others. St. Patrick used the image of a three-leaf clover. St. Augustine used the image of the mind, with memory, reason and will. More recent minds have used the image of H20, which can exist as ice, water, or steam. But none of these analogies — though interesting and somewhat helpful — do justice to the reality of the mystery of how three persons can exist in the one God.
When St. Augustine was in the middle of his voluminous and classic study of the Blessed Trinity, he took a walk along the beach in northern Africa to try to clear his head and pray. He saw a young girl repeatedly filling a scallop shell with sea water and emptying it into a hole she had dug in the sand. “What are you doing?” Augustine tenderly asked. “I'm trying to empty the sea into this hole,” the child replied. “How do you think that with a little shell,” Augustine retorted, “you can possibly empty this immense ocean into a tiny hole?” The little girl countered, “And how do you, with your small head, think you can comprehend the immensity of God?” As soon as the girl said this, she disappeared, convincing Augustine that she had been an angel sent to teach him an important lesson: No matter how gifted God had made him, he would never be able to comprehend fully the mystery of the Trinity.
This, of course, does not mean we cannot understand anything. If we want to get to the heart of the mystery of the Trinity, we can turn to the most theological of the Apostles, who meditated deeply on all that Jesus had revealed and, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said simply and synthetically, “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16). For God to be love, He has to love someone. None of us can love in a vacuum; there must always be an object of our love. Who is the object of God’s love? It cannot be man, or the created world, or the universe, because all of these existed in time and God is eternal and therefore existed before time.
It’s also impossible to say that God merely loved Himself in a solitary way, because this would not really be love but a form of egotism and narcissism. For God to be love, there needed to be an eternal relationship of love, with one who loves, one who is loved, and the love that unites them. This is what exists in the Blessed Trinity: The Father loved His image, the Son, so much that their mutual and eternal love “spirated” or “generated” the Holy Spirit. They exist in a communion of love. The three persons of the Blessed Trinity are united in absolutely everything except, as the early Church councils said, their “relations of origin,” what it means to be Father, what it means to be Son of the Father, and what it means to proceed from the Father and the Son.
These theological insights about the blessed Trinity may seem theoretical, but they become highly practical when we reflect on the fact that we have been made in the image and likeness of God and called to communion with God. To be in the image and likeness of God means to be created in the image and likeness of a communion of persons in love. Our belief in the Trinity — the central teaching of the Catholic faith — has given the Church the deepest understanding available to human beings of the nature of man, the meaning of human life, and what it means to love.
You are operating under the absurd assumption that the Holy Family was somehow a "typical" family. Mary and Joseph were both visited by Gabriel who impressed upon them the sheer magnitute of what they would be undertaking. They were the most untypical family that ever has or ever will exist.
And in Jewish culture, relations were ALWAYS described as "son of," while the term "brother of" was used very loosely as with Abraham and Lot.
actually, the Bible never says that Joseph and Mary were married, only that they were betrothed. something to ponder.
Thank you for granting the possibility of our doctrine. It is more than many will do.
That being said scripture does not show us any further comments on Mary's sinless or sinful ways after her the miraculous birth of her son and our Lord. Full of grace? You bet she was, she was full of the Holy Spirit for He was with her to bring the Messiah for the world...Talk about being blessed!!
I suggest you contemplate the linguistic argument already presented about the unusual Greek form used to refer to Mary's fullness of grace.
One thing I don't understand from your posts is how you view humans not as sinful from birth as the psalmist says and Paul tells us time and again that we are natural enemies of God becuase of our "sinful nature". It's nothing we crazy "prottys" are making up. Paul lays it out pretty simply and clearly in the epistles. Paul demonstrates in many different verses how we could never be saved without God finding us thru the Spirit. Show me the man who, without being brought to God by the Holy Spirit, will reject the sinful flesh and choose the way of th Spirit...Only Christ did this...man will always choose the ways of the flesh unless he is brought to God by the Spirit and even then we all far too often choose the way of our sinful flesh. That's original sin, that's our nature due to the fall of our orignal parents. We are born slaves to sin, but become slaves to Christ...
I will attempt to explain the nuanced points I am trying to make. I don't deny anything you have just said. My objections stem from making the distinction between original sin and actual, or personal, sin. One is, as you say, a state we are born into. The other is actions we actually undergo that we know are wrong.
Those who take "all have sinned" and try to make it universal, allowign no exceptions either have an altered view on what sin actually is, or have not thought about the implications.
It is used as a cudgel to insist Mary must have sinned during her life, since only Jesus is an exception to this iron-clad rule. Except I can think of many exceptions, and logically there is nothing to suggest that God is incapable of making a special exemption for Mary.
We must first understand that the IC, Mary being born without original sin, is a distinctly different thing from the idea that Mary lived her entire life without sin. Adam and Eve were made without original sin, yet they managed to sin in their lifetime.
So do you agree that original and personal sin are two different things? And that being saved from original sin does not guarantee that one will never commit a sin?
So what does it mean to commit a sin? It is to know what is right and what is wrong, and to choose to do what is wrong. That is sin.
Anyone who lacks the mental capacity to distinguish right from wrong and make free will choices is incapable of committing a sin. This means infants, young children and those with mental handicaps do not sin. They can not sin! Sin is rejection of God and God's way, and where one can not choose, one can not sin.
So the idea that a Bible verse saying "all have sinned" is meant to allow no exceptions is a simplistic reading.
Now, what happens to infants who die?
Do they go to Heaven or hell? Well, this is why we baptise infants, to remove original sin and bring the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This makes them worthy of heaven until the time that they can commit actual sin, after which they would need to repent ofthe sin and seek forgiveness before being restored to their sanctified state.
That's the point. God condems us to hell for the sins we commit. Not because we were born human. Now because we are born in a flawed state, those who attain an age and mental capacity will inevitably sin. This is the meaning of "all have sinned."
All that said, if God wishes to impart special graces to His mother in order to preserve her from sin, who are we to say He can not do this?
SD
That's the very same strawman. Who said sex would "degrade Mary?"
You're battling figments of your own imagination.
SD
You assume that a righteous sexual intimacy between a husband (Joseph) and a wife (Mary) was somehow impure.
You must remember that Joseph and Mary were Jews and within the law that they were under was a necessity to marry. Jewish teaching is that if you didn't have a wife, you were a sinner. They would say that a man who does not have a wife and child has slain his posterity and lessened the image of God in the world. According to the Jewish leaders there were seven kinds of people couldn't get to heaven, and number one was a Jew who had no wife. The second was a wife who had no children. They theorized that since God said be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28), you would be disobedient if you remained single.
That celibacy is wrong for those who are married should be an obvious truth, but it was not obvious to some of the Corinthian believers. There is no place for celibacy in marriage. The word "due" is literally "the debt" and refers to an obligation. Paul is saying that when you get married, you become obligated to meet the physical needs of your partner.
Paul in adressing the Corinthians had some very strong teaching concerning intimacy within a marriage. Some overzealous husbands apparently had decided to set themselves apart wholly for God. In doing so, however, they neglected or even denied their responsibilities to their wives, especially in the area of sexual relations. Some wives had done the same thing. Paul is emphasizing that all married believers are not to sexually deprive their spouses, whether the spouse is a Christian or not.
Verse 3 is in the present imperative in the Greek text and literally says, "Let the husband continually keep on rendering to his wife the debt and likewise also the wife keep on rendering the debt she owes her husband." The sexual relationship in marriage is to be a continual giving to one another. There must be a growing intimacy of two lives, blended together in all dimensions, into an unbreakable bond of love. God made sexual satisfaction a great part of marriage. He holds all marriage to be sacred, and holds sexual relations between husband and wife not only to be sacred, but also proper and even obligatory. God makes it clear that physical relations within marriage are not simply a privilege and a pleasure, but a responsibility. Your physical union in marriage can be expressed in any way you desire. That is God's design. The Bible glorifies sexuality in marriage. The Song of Solomon is an book written solely on the physical part of marriage. God designed marriage to be a physical expression of love. He honors sexual desire in marriage.
The Protestant argument doesn't bear scrutiny, so they will ignore your attempts to logically put together the family tree. The Protestant argument leads to Mary, the Mother of the Lord, being referred to in Scripture as "the other Mary."
I pointed this out once and it was shrugged off. "That Mary wasn't very important any more by that time in the narrative."
How can you argue facts and logic with that? They'll just pull out the same "brother of the Lord" quotes again and again, no matter how many times you try to lead them through a logical examination.
SD
Living together in the times of Joseph and Mary indeed caused them to be married. We call this common law marriage today and the same held true then. If Joseph and Mary co-habitated they were indeed married whether or not they had sexual intimacy or not.
Under Roman rule, even if they had not had the proper Jewish marriage ceremony, they were married under the custom called usus. Today we would call it common-law marriage. This particular custom meant that a man and woman could live together for one year and at the end of the one year, they would become identified as husband and wife.
No Catholic has said this. Please stop beating up strawmen.
SD
Jesus was also a Jew and he was called Rabbi. So would I be correct in assuming that you subscribe to the heretical notion that Jesus married and had children? I only ask because if you are going to ascribe Jewish marital laws to Mary and Joseph than it would seem that you would apply them to Christ as well.
Why can't you allow for the exceptional nature of the Holy Family?
Do you think a just and merciful God would allow someone to be God Incarnate's little brother? Seriously. Think about it.
Are you so incapable on self-control in the most grave of circumstances that the idea of devoting your entire being to the raising of the Christ child is simply unthinkable?
SD
There is indeed a possiblility (however slight) that Jesus was married. We know almost nothing of the first 30 years of his life.
I don't necessarily believe that he was married...just stating the possibility (OH NO here comes all the Da Vinci code crap!)
It is staggering to imagine how unhappy a life that would be for anyone. And then to imagine that while on the Cross, our Lord would add to this "brother's" humiliation by entrusting His Mother to a non family member.
You cannot honestly believe this and consider yourself a Christian.
Why must we. Can't we assume that they were a normal Jewish family, living a normal Jewish life. Why would you assume it would be some onerous burden to be the sibling of Christ. There is nothing Biblical that suggests he was an exeptional child (except the account of his staying in the temple at age 12.) I should think it would be a great blessing to be the brother or sister of Christ. (no teasing and tormenting, fighting and unrighteous dominion of the eldest brother) : )
We are all brothers and sisters IN Christ are we not?
You forget I come from a Mormon background. Old habits die hard :-)
How is it so difficult to accept the Immaculate Conception and Mary's perpetual virginity then? There are countless verses that point to this. There is nothing that would indicate that our Lord was married.
Also explain why YHvH would need or desire it. It only occurs in Pagan Mythology. Please provide some scriptural support for this concept.
b'shem Y'shua
Genesis 3:15 and all of Luke 1.
He is God, by definition that is exceptional. So exceptional, in fact, that nothing else even matters. Certainly Herod and the Maji understood how exceptional He was.
no teasing and tormenting, fighting and unrighteous dominion of the eldest brother
So why then would Jesus choose to dishonor this "sibling" and entrust His Mother to John?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.