Posted on 01/29/2007 6:45:51 AM PST by stfassisi
Perhaps. Or perhaps that bloodline and family affiliation business as a Jewish traditional cultural obsession into which God fit His Son in order to make an impression on the Jews using things he knew they would understand and value, as opposed to there being any intrinsic value in that bloodline.
I would go farther than you when you say "All can gain Salvation through Jesus Christ". I would say, to more perfectly fit the Gospel, that all who gain Salvation do so through Jesus Christ (although, to go a step further, it does not appear that all who gain Salvation REALIZE that it is Jesus Christ who is saving them until after they physically die). Enoch and Elijah, too, were saved by Jesus Christ, although they couldn't have heard of him until they were taken up into heaven, perhaps BY him, or perhaps by angels, etc.
And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
God told the Jews which lineage priests were to be from. When they became lazy & disobidient about it, a price was paid.
WHen the sons of God came down to earth & bred with the daughters of man, the intent was to mess up God's plan by muddying Adam's line with the seed of fallen angels. If there had been no one left with a pure bloodline, Jesus would have been as much a son of the fallen angels as he was a son of man. God needed Mary to have a pure bloodline.
I would go farther than you when you say "All can gain Salvation through Jesus Christ". I would say, to more perfectly fit the Gospel, that all who gain Salvation do so through Jesus Christ (although, to go a step further, it does not appear that all who gain Salvation REALIZE that it is Jesus Christ who is saving them until after they physically die). Enoch and Elijah, too, were saved by Jesus Christ, although they couldn't have heard of him until they were taken up into heaven, perhaps BY him, or perhaps by angels, etc.
I agree.
I know I'm not giving you the traditional view. When Genesis is translated, "adam" (lowercase) is translated "man" in Genesis 1, yet in Genesis 2 we find "Adam" (uppercase) as a given name.
Cain was forced away from God's face by his actions. He killed his brother before the laws were given, proving he "knew" evil, yet it wasn't a sin. Wouldn't a sister, niece or grand-niece also have to have committed some kind of evil to also be sent out? Why is it easy to impute relatives, but impossible to impute people who weren't relatives?
I have no problem believing the earth & the universe are billions of years old. Woven into the Bible are hints of a time before time.
My point about the elevated sea beds has to do with radical changes that have happened to earth's topography, not that the elevated sea beds were formed during the flood.
The purpose of the flood is what is important, which was to wipe out the man/fallen angel hybrids.
"When Genesis is translated, "adam" (lowercase) is translated "man" in Genesis 1, yet in Genesis 2 we find "Adam" (uppercase) as a given name."
You have spoken truly when you have said "When Genesis is translated". Because, of course, in ancient Hebrew there are no upper or lower case letters, just letters (there aren't any punctuation marks, including quotations marks, either). So, any time that a capitalization of a word makes a difference in understanding, or a punctuation mark, it's a gloss, a translator's choice as to meaning. I personally think the best translation from the Hebrew, in the sense of being the most exact and literal account from the Hebrew into English, is the Jewish Publication Society's translation of the TaNaKh, the Hebrew Bible, from the Masoretic Text. (I don't think this is the most authoritative translation, of course, because I think the Catholic Church is inspired in what it does by the Holy Ghost, so I think that the Catholics' translations into English from a recension made from both the Masoretic Text and the most ancient manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint is, in fact, the most accurate and authoritative transmission of God's word into English, but that is a separate issue, based upon the question of authority which always lies at the heart of any religious discussion.)
I don't really think the ancient Jews who wrote down the various traditions and synthesized them into Genesis had any intention of making a difference between the Adam of Genesis 1 and the Adam of Genesis 2. Certainly there's no distinction possible with the Hebrew letters of the Masoretic Text or the Greek of the Septuagint.
So, as you might expect, I think that the capitalization/decapitalization business is simply a decision imposed on the text by modern translators trying to meet the demands of modern theology. The NIV's purposeful assertion of "had" into the crucial text in Genesus 2 is - it is clear to me - an effort to make the text fit with Genesis 1, to MAKE it more accurate and exacting, in English, than it really IS, in Hebrew, because of the theological obsessions of the folks who translated it.
But then you know that I think the creation story in Genesis is a recounting of Jewish myth, whose theological purpose is to describe the origin of mankind and the world in the will of God.
I definitely agree with Jews that a key point of the genealogies of the Noahide descendants was to show that all of mankind descended from one common parent: Noah, and that all mankind, therefore, are directly (if distantly) related, by "blood".
In the Biblical story, the only survivors of the flood were Noah, his wife, and Noah's sons and their wives.
Now, his wife was not of Noah's blood, but any further children she may have had would have been. His sons were his direct descendants, and given that every male on earth was either Noah or a descendant of Noah, then every human being after the flood is a direct descendant of Noah. Which means that Jesus is our cousin by blood, because Mary is our cousin by blood, inescapably so.
If one actually takes the Noahide story literally.
Of course I don't.
I think that most of the Old Testament is Jewish tradition.
The divine inspiration in there is "Love your neighbor as yourself, and love God above all", what Jesus said it was about.
I think that the Earth was formed, not from a bubble in the abyssal waters, but from the congealing by gravity of masses of hot gasses, not over 6 days but over billions of years. I think the universe was around several billions of years before that, and had its origins in the "Big Bang", which was God's moment of creation of the universe, not at all in the sequence of Genesis. I think that most of the stars long preceded the earth, and weren't made and fixed in the firmament as lights for men. I don't think there are floodgates in the firmament through which water once came to flood the world, nor could come, because I don't think there is any water out there beyond space. I think that mankind descended from primates over the course of long periods of time and settled out to people the world.
I think this because the physical and fossil record, although imperfect, are reasonably good, and because I make the uniformitarian assumption. If I reject the uniformitarian assumption, then I certainly could have God make the world in 6 days, and make man whole, but I still find deep contradictions in the text of Genesis which still make the test fail for me as LITERAL history.
As far as Cain's wife goes, remember that these people lived for hundreds of years and were very fertile. In hundreds of years, a woman can have hundreds of children, and those hundreds of children can themselves have hundreds of children. With no rival humans to fight, human settlement could go swiftly, and in time Cain could find himself near to a far edge of settlement and ensnare a girl for his wife...or just capture one and take her as a slave. OT morality is indifferent to the sexual rape of subordinate women for the most part (nobody asks Hagar if she wants to sleep with Abraham. She is handed over to Abraham for sex, because she's a slave. Then she's tossed out with her kid to die, later, again by Sarah. Pretty base treatment really.) There's no reason to believe that an aggressive man like Cain wouldn't simply grab a girl by the hair and take her as his wife.
Cain was forced away from God's face by his actions. He killed his brother before the laws were given, proving he "knew" evil, yet it wasn't a sin. Wouldn't a sister, niece or grand-niece also have to have committed some kind of evil to also be sent out? Why is it easy to impute relatives, but impossible to impute people who weren't relatives?
"The purpose of the flood is what is important, which was to wipe out the man/fallen angel hybrids."
Well, maybe.
On the text, the purpose was to wipe out the evil.
You're assuming that angelic blood is particularly evil, but Cain didn't have any, and he was a murderer. Etc.
It's an interesting theory (on the text). Of course, after the Flood, the angels started doing it again. Exodus tells us about Nephilim in Canaan.
I think that "the Flood" is the racial memory of most of mankind of the surging of sea levels around the world at the end of the last ice age, when the glaciers melted and sea levels surged. (Blending this with Genesis literalism, the "Tree of Life" would be somewhere in the mire underneath the Persian Gulf now.) Those high seas were real, and devastating, and left a mark on the memory and legendarium of mankind, including the Mesopotamians, whose creation stories include the Flood, which stories the original tribes of Abrahamites took with them on their westward journeys.
The difficulty, for some, is accepting that Genesis is sacred myth, recounting a moral but not literal events, but the Gospels, much nearer in time, are real history.
Some have asserted that if Genesis is not literally true then the Gospels and Jesus' Resurrection aren't literally true either. This does not follow logically, although I understand the motive for it (it makes things clear and neat).
We do not disagree over putting faith in God.
We disagree over what constitutes putting faith in God, and where God can be found to put faith in.
*Oh, gee. Now you are getting all personal and whatnot. And calling me a fool. You claim you interpret the Bible solely through what Jesus says. Riddle me this - what does Jesus say about one who calls another a fool?
I have committed no heresy. You simply don't agree with my interpretations, which is your right.
*Yeah you have. Catholic Doctrine Teaches Genesis is not a myth. You write it is. That is called heresy.
You have chosen to repetitively bear witness that I am a heretic, and you consider this "acting". It isn't acting at all, other than in the prima donna sense of the word.
* No. I have never written you are a heretic. I have written what you write is heresy. Now, the question is - do you believe what you write? Who knows? You have already posted writings you later claim you don't really believe; that you wrote that was as part of a dialogue.
If you want to truly ACT, then go and get authority - which you are not - to discipline me. Of course, he might discipline you instead. A heresy charge is a very strong thing to be flinging about.
You're not an ordained clergyman. You're a peer. You don't like what I have to say. You've chosen to start shouting "Heresy!" from the rooftops. Apparently at least one other Catholic agrees with you, although he has not addressed me directly about this.
*Trust me,brother. MANY agree with me. It is obvious you write you embrace beliefs contrary to what the Catholic Church Teaches.
You have no greater authority in the Catholic Church than I do.
* What sort of standards do you operate with? Earlier you wrote you accept the authority of the Church. Them, a few sentences latr you made it clear you are the one with final authority. So, don't short-change yourself. I am but an obedient son in the church. You judge it. Far from me having equal authority with you is the reality of what you write. According to what you write, you have supreme authority. What good would it do to produce a mere priest when you reject the Church itself?
You have called me a heretic - serious charge.
* No. I have identified as heresy what you write.
I have called you "opinionated".
* You left out "handsome", zealous" and "combative." I feel slighted.
To this I will also add "bearing false witness". Keep it up in public, you are doing a marvelous job of explaining just why it is that there was a Reformation in the first place!
*I think it is just the opposite. Public scandal,public heresies, etc, left uncorrected leaves the impression those things are sine qua non of Christianity rather than the opposite.
Time was, folks like you could silence whoever you disagreed with with a charge like that hurled from the rooftops, and if someone with as much concern for the faith didn't knuckle under to your loudmouthed approach, he would be put to the torture for it and killed. Lots of clergymen sent themselves to hell doing this, and ended up blackening the name of the Catholic Church forever for it.
*In what world? Scandal, heresy etc have always been with us. They always will. All the Christian Church needs is more men.
Here in the 21st Century, you are their heir.
*Heir Bornacatholic. I like it. It has the ring of authority, don't you think?
I have committed no heresy whatever.
*Sure ay havee. What you write is directly opposed to Humani Generis and the Catechism.
What I said about Genesis, especially, was mirrored in the quotations from the bishops' committee in the front of my Catholic Bible which I quoted last night.
* So? Do you think a preface to a particular edition of the Bible has more authority than a Papal Encyclical? Besides, that preface didn't include anything about Genesis equivalent to what you wrote.
You have borne false witness again and again, and I am certain you are going to do it yet again.
* Heir Bornacatolic vants to see your papers...
Which is not just spiritually unwise on your part (you do not know of what you speak), but certainly confirms everybody's suspicions of what the Catholic Church is REALLY like, when you drill past the facade.
* Yeah. And it ain't seen often enough, brother.
Spiritual Works of Mercy
* To instruct the ignorant;
* To counsel the doubtful;
* To admonish sinners;
* To bear wrongs patiently;
* To forgive offences willingly;
* To comfort the afflicted;
* To pray for the living and the dead.
*I thnk I have done my job as a Christian.
Except of course that the Catholic Church is NOT really like that, I am well within it, and you're a nobody without authority pretending that you have it.
* Nobody? You prolly won't believe me, but, that is a GREAT Blessing
Rather than continuing to bear false witness against me for violating your idea of "heresy", go get an ordained minster - surely you know several, given the authority you have taken it upon yourself to act as the public disciplinary arm of the Catholic Church here - and have him, who has authority, come here, read everything that has been posted, and pronounce a decision.
* You already reject the Magisterial Teaching of the Pope and the Catholic Catechism. Is it your idea a priest has more authority?
He may tell me to stop posting what I have posted, although I doubt it. He will certainly tell you to shut up and not fling charges of heresy around again.
* LOL You don't know my Pastor, brother.
I, of course, have no authority to tell you to do so, and if you want to spend your time calling me a heretic, go ahead. I'm no heretic. I'm just a Catholic layman, like you. Your peer. Not your spiritual or hierarchical subordinate.
* Heir BAC has no need of permission from you. Continue to post heretical words and I will continue to admonish,and instruct. I have spoken things as I see them. You have borne false witness. I am sure you will do so again.
*Brother, have you noticed that NOBODY has written Heir BAC has borne false witness,other than yourself, who, some could argue, has a dog in the fight?
And I am certain that, when you do so, I will respond again in kind. It's not much fun, but overbearing people like you need to be put right in your place, which is an exact peer of me in the Church, nothing more. You do not speak for the Church. You speak for yourself but pretend to speak for the Church. It is an ill-advised move, especially when it is laced with calumny.
* LOL I posted the relevant passages from the Magisterium. I am happy to let the onlookers judge who is right. (I am )
Your sin of pride, however, will be on full display again, I am sure. And again and again and again. I have no wish to fight with you, and would prefer to just ignore you, just as many who disagree with me ignore me.
* Heir BAC doesn't not mind being ignored. He has been married many years. He is used to it :)
But you have taken it upon yourself to be the Grand Inquisitor. You have no commission. You have no ordination. You have no authority. You are a nobody presuming to exercise spiritual authority over a peer. And you will not be granted anything other than the same lecture every time you do it. It is not edifying to the Church to see you act this way.
* Yes it is. I took upon myself that duty when I agreed to be Confirmed.
If you have a heresy charge to bring, then BRING IT. I will not hide my identity from any true authority of the Church who wishes to investigate. Go to De Fide or any other group. Go to your priest. Go to the diocese. Go to the Charismatic Renewal Council. Go get a religious cop and bring him to the table and make your charge.
* Brother, don't you understand who it is you are dealing with? What is there in my posts that indicates you can make me change my posts?
Otherwise, stop bearing public false witness against me, repeatedly and stubbornly. It's a deadly sin, as is the flaming sin of overweening pride which drives it.
* I will admonish you,correct you, and instruct you every time you post heretical words that I read.
With Christian charity and brotherly love, I advise you to put a sock in it.
* I am, rhetorically, Heir BAC discalced
You called me a heretic.
Which is to say, you pronounced that I have committed a public sin worthy of excommunication and the death of my soul.
I called you a fool for saying so.
I would be a fool to continue an argument with you, who has no authority. And I do not intend to answer your charges of heresy at all. Go and get someone who has the authority to bring them. We will both talk to him.
You continue to bear false witness against me, and are stubborn in your pride in doing so.
Our communications are a great temptation to you. You should resist that temptation and either let it go, or go and get something with authority to adjudicate the case.
Discuss the issues all you want but do NOT make it personal!
Angelic blood isn't evil in itself. Trying to subvert God's plan is the evil. Cain's children aren't listed among the descendants of Adam, so I think it possible Cain's conception may be related to the original sin...
Of course, after the Flood, the angels started doing it again. Exodus tells us about Nephilim in Canaan.
You are correct, they did. If you do the math, how many generations does it take for a population to share common ancestors? If the first batch of hybrids hadn't been eliminated, what are the odds of any being free of any of them being in their lineage by the time Mary was born? For example, it is said that all Europeans descend from Charlemagne.
As to the rest of what you say, certainly possible. It's one of those things I look forward to finding out when I die, as I don't think it can be determined perfectly in this life.
I have enjoyed our conversations here, but it appears that my time on FreeRepublic will soon be drawing to a close.
Farewell and Godspeed.
I have enjoyed our conversations.
Farewell and Godspeed.
Ping!
*The Catholic Church does not teach that is a consequence of heretical writings.. Brother, please post anything from the Magisterium which teaches what you claim.
I called you a fool for saying so.
But I say to you, that whosoever is angry with his brother, shall be in danger of the judgment. And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council. And whosoever shall say, Thou Fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
I would be a fool to continue an argument with you...
*When facts are against one, one ought not argue :)
You continue to bear false witness against me, and are stubborn in your pride in doing so.
*I have documented Christian Doctrine are your opposition to it. I cited the authority of the Magisterium.
Our communications are a great temptation to you.
*No, they really aren't. I realise some things about myself and the matter of temptation. That is why when I go out into public, I avoid eye contact with women. I can't help their stares - it is a matter beyond their control However, if I make eye contact with them, (esp. blondes), I have found it gives them rash ideas and false hope.
Discuss the issues all you want, but do NOT make it personal.
I leave you in possession of the field.
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