THE CHURCH FATHERS: A DOOR TO ROME (fundamentalist warns saying they sound too Catholic)

Way of Life ^ | August 18, 2009

[RobbyS]

Funny thing, when I read the whole Torah last year, I seem to have seen God talking to man. He even made covenants with them. This was not something that the gods did. To the gods, men were slaves.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your encouragements, dear Zionist Conspirator!

And yes, I realize that you are not Christian. And I am very sure when you meet the Messiah, you will know Who He IS.

Also, I mentioned the Gosse Omphalus Hypothesis for comparison purposes only.

Basically it posits that God said He created the universe 6,000 years ago (by our space/time coordinates) and therefore that is the truth of the matter. If it looks old, it is because He created it that way.

[theanonymouslurker]

You most certainly did. You likened the details in the Bible's account of creation to the stoning of homosexuals and even accused it of saying that bats are birds. You are the one knocking down straw men, not I.

No, I did not make any such equation. Just pull my exact quote where I equate the Bible's account of creation with the stoning of homosexuals. It should be that easy.

[fabian]

no I wouldn’t...because overall the church has fallen down badly when it comes to prayer. It’s being still and knowing God, not the constant talking to God. The bible says to pray uncessingly...obviously it is speaking of a silent prayer of awareness, otherwise we would be needing to talk to God all the time and would be mental cases.

[wagglebee]

In other words, your anti-Darwinism isn't based on a defense of the Word of G-d at all but on philosophy.

You obviously didn't understand my post AT ALL.

Again, my generalization of Catholics and other liturgical chr*stians holds good.

I'm not all that interested in your generalizations, generalizations are typically cop-outs.

For the record, I do believe in Creation as it is written in the Bible.

I wonder how many people believe J*sus was conceived without a father and came out of his mother's side in order to prevent tearing her hymen? For some reason that seems terribly important to people who don't care whether or not the Word spoken by G-d is absolutely true.

Perhaps you should ask them, I've read every post on this thread and haven't seen that expressed by anyone.

[Mad Dawg]

Notice, it doesn’t say he continually offers himself in sacrifice, but that “he did this once for all”.

Once again. We're talking past each other.

"Eternally" is not the same as "continually." Everything in Eternity is "once" and that "once is always "now."

And there are similar problems with the other objections.

I have the benefit of having been a Calvinist leaning protestant with a background in philosophy. But, forgive me if this is off-base or out of line, I get the impression that a lot of Protestants learn just enough of what Catholics say and think to be able to construct an argument that they're wrong. They conduct their research looking for flaws rather than for understanding. And the result is that they then produce some, to them, quite devastating refutation, and the Catholic replies, "What does THAT have to do with what I think?"

Also, I personally have kind of a book-keeping problem with the sort of conversation which drops, without noting the dropping, a line of attack (for such it is) without saying something like, "Okay, I see that maybe I don't understand the relationship between "substantial" and "physical. But what do you say to this quite different objection?".

You seem to offer the first paragraph of your post as an argument against my stand. But to me it's an adumbration of what I am saying. The issue is the difference between HOW a thing happens and THAT it happens. THAT the elements become the Body and Blood of Christ (whatever that might mean) is not in dispute for us. HOW one might approach thinking about it is in dispute and, for us, the discourse profitably goes in a Aristotelian direction.

It's like this: As far as I can tell, the Bible says about created things that they are created by the word of God, and at least one Hebrew word for "thing" also signifies "word."

But as for the philosophical question,"What is a thing?" (which is, as it happens, a title of one of Heidegger's short later works) it remains and philsophers can and do speculate. And all I'd say about that is that as long as their speculations don't lead them to a point where one may NOT say a thing is somehow uttered by God, go for it!

So the quote in the first paragraph has nothing to do with whether the elements become the Body and Blood of Christ. It is about how Augustine's philosophical background hindered his explanation of it.

And do not think that we think that an explanation exhausts or ends the mystery and miracle. Aquinas not only provides an impressive technical explanation but also wrote a number of beautiful eucharistic hymns.

The doctrine of TNSSBTTTN must not be conflated with the assertion that the elements become the Body and Blood of Christ anymore than the Crick-Watson research on DNA should be conflated with saying "A Man and a Woman fall in love and have children who sometimes look like one or both of them."

The conflation gives our adversaries a chance to say, "See? See? The real presence is a LATE teaching, an invention!" And as I say, we just look at one another is say, "I wonder what he's trying to say."

[Mad Dawg]

[me]

So his advice to Timothy comes down to, “We don’t know what actual books are Scripture, but if we ever figure that out, and you run across one of ‘em, you can bet it’s real good.”

[you]

No, that is not what he wrote. ALL (every, the whole thing) scripture is God-breathed. The Pentateuch is God-breathed. The Psalms. The Prophets. By the time 2 Timothy was written, at least a couple of the Gospels, and probably some of Paul’s Epistles were already accepted as scripture.

Accepted by whom? Where did they get the authority to speak for the Church on that matter? Why should anyone believe what those people said about, say, the Book of Enoch v. Revelation?

Further, okay I wasn't as precise as I should have been. How about:

“We don’t know what actual all of the books are which will one day comprise the entire Scriptures, but we do know some and if we ever figure that the entire set out, and you run across one of ‘em, you can bet it’s real good.”

[Nikas777]

It seems that just as Jews prefer liberal to conservative chr*stians, so liturgical chr*stians prefer liberal to conservative Protestants.

I have never had this observation. I won't argue with you one way or the other because it is qualitative data not quantifiable data so I can't argue with your perceptions. We all have them and they are unique to each of us.

[Mad Dawg]

Which lexicon?

The coolest in the known universe book about NT Greek is the 10 (or more) volume Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. The articles on the words look at the LXX, the HEbrew words which underlie the words in the LXX, the words use in contemporary secular literature, their use by the Fathers, and all like that. It’s WONDERFUL!

[Mr Rogers]

This online version has strong’s numbers, and a small online lexicon linked to it.

I’ve got an old copy of Vine’s Expository Dictionary. Other than that, I usually do an online search for the word itself...usually can find a better lexicon, but it takes a while sometimes.

I’ll also do a search with both the word and the verse reference...sometimes I can find a paper or two discussing the use of that word in that verse. There are enough layers of meaning in Hebrew and Greek that it doesn’t do justice to just look at the word in isolation.

[Mr Rogers]

Oops! Forgot the link...

http://www.tgm.org/bible.htm

[Mr Rogers]

"Eternally" is not the same as "continually." Everything in Eternity is "once" and that "once is always "now."

Some while back, bdeaner & I had this conversation. He made this point, and at the time I accepted it - after all, that is what I was taught as well. God is 'outside' of time.

However, I've been thinking about it and trying to pay attention while reading the Bible, and I haven't found any evidence it is true. Scripture often speaks of God doing this in the past, or waiting for this future event...but I haven't seen anything saying time is irrelevant to God.

God knows the future, but that isn't quite the same as saying there isn't a future with God.

Any ideas? I'm probably missing something obvious.

[ArrogantBustard]

Thank you for the explanation.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Also, I mentioned the Gosse Omphalus Hypothesis for comparison purposes only.

Basically it posits that God said He created the universe 6,000 years ago (by our space/time coordinates) and therefore that is the truth of the matter. If it looks old, it is because He created it that way.

Again, I don't understand what "appearance of age" has to do with the creation of a fully developed universe or of the first couple as adults. This is not an "appearance of age" other than by retrojecting current reality into the creation process. And certainly "false memories" are a fantasy.

I've never met a non-literalist on Genesis who was also a millennarian. Are you the only one of your kind?

[Zionist Conspirator]

Funny thing, when I read the whole Torah last year, I seem to have seen God talking to man. He even made covenants with them. This was not something that the gods did. To the gods, men were slaves.

And are we not G-d's slaves?

[Mad Dawg]

(BTW Alfred North Whitehead, the "inventor" of "Process Theology" agrees with you that God is not outside time.)

Here's the beginning, but only the beginning.

"A thousand ages in thy sight, are like an evening gone." Then Peter adds a moment is like a thousand years. So we've already got God with a kind of malleable and voluntary relationship with time.

The next step is the question, "What is time?" Related is
"What is a clock?"

A clock is a system, as isolated as possible, from outside influence. (A REALLY GOOD spring chronometer is a better clock than a pendulum clock because the thingy clicks at the same interval no matter what your latitude. Spring chronometers therefore made easy the computation of longitude, while pendulum clocks were useless). The critical other element is a clock has CHANGE. Something happens, but the only physical cause of it is in the system. If the cause doesn't change then the interval shouldn't change ....

Skip steps to ...
Time is "the measure of change."
Therefore
Without change, no time.
(Which leads to the old joke: Time is God's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

Does God change?
If not, then either the created world has no beginning or end, or we can imagine God without any created thing. That would be a God outside of time.

The Bible witness is ambiguous. But clearly the Bible presents him as repenting (turning). So, how to think of this?

Well, ONE way to deal with this is to present an Eternity which comprehends temporality.

We, being in time and all, cannot help but see/experience things sequentially, as though we were a bug crawling through the Great Shag Rug of Time. But we can imagine someone standing outside the rug and seeing the whole rug at once. He puts bug food here and RAID there. To the bug it looks like FIRST he gave me manna, THEN he hit me with a plague! But the outside-standing guy says, No I put those things down at once, you just came upon them one after the other.
(Not perfect, The guy would have to see every position of the bug at once. But theology is doomed to imperfection.)

In Theology we have to recognize that we can't possibly see things from God's POV, but we have to try. And we can't possibly adequately express with our language the truth about God, so we will have to know we are failing from the git-go and still use images and analogies to do our best.

(This leads to the Dawg Formulation about the Truth of the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian definition: We don't know how to say it right, we're not even entirely sure what this means. All we know is that if you way something which contradicts this, it's wrong.)

I am not criticizing here, I'm wondering about:

God knows the future, but that isn't quite the same as saying there isn't a future with God.

We humans have such diverse ways to know (and to remember.) We know ABOUT things, as it were, at a distance. We know some things, without any 'about' to it -- they are present before us. I'm kind of inclined to think that God knows what's going to happen with perfect knowledge. it is "present" to Him.

That's all I can do right now. I have to pretend I have important things to do.

[Zionist Conspirator]

No, I did not make any such equation. Just pull my exact quote where I equate the Bible's account of creation with the stoning of homosexuals. It should be that easy.

If you are talking about Creationism vs. Evolution, I think Claud pretty much has been addressing these points. If you are talking about stoning homosexuals, bats being birds, etc., then that's another issue.

I notice you concede the point about bats allegedly being birds.

[Zionist Conspirator]

For the record, I do believe in Creation as it is written in the Bible.

Is it possible you have a split personality?

I wonder how many people believe J*sus was conceived without a father and came out of his mother's side in order to prevent tearing her hymen? For some reason that seems terribly important to people who don't care whether or not the Word spoken by G-d is absolutely true.

Perhaps you should ask them, I've read every post on this thread and haven't seen that expressed by anyone.

You don't believe in the virgin birth? If it's the hymen thing, that's one of those "Catholic miracles" that "really happened" (like the sun dancing at Fatima). I'm sure some of our illustrious higher critical Orthodox FReepers will be glad to confirm it.

[Zionist Conspirator]

It seems that just as Jews prefer liberal to conservative chr*stians, so liturgical chr*stians prefer liberal to conservative Protestants.

I have never had this observation. I won't argue with you one way or the other because it is qualitative data not quantifiable data so I can't argue with your perceptions. We all have them and they are unique to each of us.

Just out of curiosity, do you believe in evolution and higher Biblical criticism like the majority of your co-religionists?

[wagglebee]

Is it possible you have a split personality?

First of all, this is clearly a personal attack.

Secondly, I challenge you to find a SINGLE POST of mine where I have EVER indicated that I do not believe in Creation. If you CANNOT do this, I consider it to be bearing false witness on your part.

Otherwise, I am done discussing this with you. You mentioned earlier on this thread how most Catholics do not want to convers with you, I am beginnging to understand why.