Posted on 10/31/2010 11:59:22 AM PDT by RnMomof7
You mean Ελα, βρε, παιδακι μου?
I think my point still holds. Perhaps you'd prefer to state that some people are unwilling to believe what they can't picture and understand in human terms. As opposed to the Credo quia impossibile!
We can just as easily believe that someone likes us as it is to believe that someone hates us.
I guess you've never been a teen-age girl! ;-)
FK-””That is my understanding of Catholicism as it relates to salvation. God’s sovereignty has nothing to do with it.””
Not true.We believe God is sovereign LOVE that is unchangeable,dear brother ,and in that sovereign LOVE we can ALL freely participate by denying ourselves.
The calvinist’s view of God creating some people for hell is dualistic and has nothing to do with sovereign LOVE
STF-quoting Saint John Chrysostom -”When effort on our part is absent, then God’s help also stops.” Saint John Chrysostom”
FK-That sounds eerily similar to “God only helps those who help themselves”. He didn’t mean that, did he? :)
I see it more like God loves us all, and all we have to do is deny ourselves and join in that love.This requires the EFFORT of self denial .
FK-””let me take this opportunity to wish each of you and your families a most blessed and merry Christmas. May the Good Lord shine His heart on all of your spirits as we celebrate our Savior’s birth. God bless you all.””
Thank you,dear brother. I wish you a Blessed Christmas as well
I never did learn to spell!
“”There was never a time when either of Them “was not”.””
I love Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev explanation of Trinity..
God the Trinity is not a frozen entity, not something static or lifeless. On the contrary, within the Trinity there is the plenitude of life and love. ‘God is love’, says St John the Theologian (1 John 4:8; 4:16). Yet there can be no love without the beloved. A lonely, isolated monad can love only itself: self-love is not love. An egocentric unit is not a personality. As the human person cannot experience his personhood save through communion with other persons, so in God there can be no personal being save through love for another personal being. God the Trinity is the plenitude of love, each hypostatic Person exists in a relationship of love for the other Persons.
The Trinity is therefore a relational entity. The relations between the three Persons are relations between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, or ‘I’ and ‘He’. ‘Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee’, says Christ (John 17:21). Concerning the Holy Spirit, our Lord says, ‘All that the Father has is Mine; therefore I said that he will take what is Mine and declare it to you’ (John 16:15). We read in St John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God’ (John 1:1). The Greek text actually says ‘and the Word was towards God’ (pros ton Theon). This underscores the personal nature of the relationship between God the Word and God the Father: the Son is not only born from the Father, He not only exists with the Father, He is turned towards the Father. Thus each Hypostasis in the Trinity is turned towards the other Hypostases.
The icon of the Holy Trinity by St Andrei Rublev portrays three angels sitting at a table upon which is a Cup, the symbol of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice; the three Persons of the Trinity turn simultaneously to each other and to the Cup. The icon has captured the divine love which reigns within the Trinity. The greatest manifestation of this love was the incarnation of the Son of God for the redemption of humanity. Orthodox Tradition regards Christ’s saving sacrifice as a common act of love and self-emptying of all three Persons of the Trinity. It is in this sacrifice that the love which exists within the Trinity was given and became known to humans. As St Philaret of Moscow said, it is the ‘crucifying love of the Father, the crucified love of the Son, and the love of the Holy Spirit triumphing through the power of the Cross’.-Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev
“There is a power within God , an eternal companion of the divine nature , which brings him to an opening , transmission , communion; which brings him to the world. It is the energy , which dogmatists call «goodness» and the mystics call «eros.» The corresponding power is man’s eros , which is directed to God. The two powers are closely connected to one another , although they belong to two different words; the Spirit unites them. As was seen at an earlier point in this discussion , Gregory Palamas , wishing to emphasize the particular energy of the Holy Spirit in the work of man’s perfection , characterized the Spirit as the eros of the divine mind directed to the Word (Reason) , as the eros of the Father directed to the Son.[x] He further stated that even man’s spirit is the eros of his mind directed to his word , his reason. The conveyor of God’s eros to man is the Holy Spirit , and the conveyor of man’s eros to God is the human spirit.
Eros is the mover of transmission and communion. It creates in both God and man «ekstasis» coming out of oneself , coming out of
the mystery and exclusiveness of God. The ecstasy of God leads to dialogue and union with man; the ecstasy of man leads to dialogue and union with God. Of course , the two movements are different; for , whereas God conde - scends , man a - scends.” Panagiotis Christou, Partakers of God
...‘God is love’, says St John the Theologian (1 John 4:8; 4:16). Yet there can be no love without the beloved. A lonely, isolated monad can love only itself: self-love is not love. An egocentric unit is not a personality
When I first heard that, years ago, it sounded so right, SFA, but on deeper reflection—when I managed to find courage to question the unquestionable—I realized that what he is saying is that God created the 'beloved' because, without us, for eons God was an incomplete (imperfect) "egocentric non-personality."
You don't say? :)
How do you know that church tradition reflects what God had to say?
The real answer: circular reasoning
The subject has already been discussed between two particular Churches in 2003, Mark, with no visible reuslts.
Visible to whom? I will submit that this is in the process of being taken of, if not already agreed upon as to the solution, in all likelihood, given the list of recommendations, and the importance of the last one:
•that the Catholic Church, following a growing theological consensus, and in particular the statements made by Pope Paul VI, declare that the condemnation made at the Second Council of Lyons (1274) of those “who presume to deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son” is no longer applicable.
Let me echo that to all of you; we have at times been Christian in behaviour and sometimes barbarian. My own imitation of Christ is much less than average and certainly poorer than that of the company I keep here on FR. Nonetheless, I ask from the very back row of the Church for Almighty God to bless you all.
If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, ‘God is Love! Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the modems really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day, never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colorless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.
There are those who don't see it that way:
And Mahomet shall answer out of the whirlwind, the red whirlwind of the desert, Who ever served the jealousy of God as I did or left him more lonely in the sky? Who ever paid more honor to Moses and Abraham or won more victories over idols and the images of paganism?
In your daily life you are unwilling to believe a lot of things because they are either impossible or highly improbable, because we all do. The criterion sane poeple use is the reality of the world as we know it. We don't leap off the tall buildings believing it's possible we will successfully glide our way down. We don't attempt to walk over the river, believing it's possible we can walk on water.
Then we walk into a church and something happens. The real world ceases to exist, and the impossible and the unseen become the norm. What happened? Did we leave our brains at the doorstep? How else to explain that perfectly rational people can surrender to the irrational, as if someone flipped a switch, and all of a sudden people can live inside the belly of a fish for three days, donkeys talk, the dead get up and walk away, and congenitally blind suddenly see.
You are right, some are unwilling to believe whatever our resourceful and apparently limitless fancy can come up with, unless it corresponds to the way the real world is.
The anathemas of the past have been lifted, Mark, and we no longer treat each other as heretics but as members of the same Church, same House of God, embroiled in some familial squabble. We have basically agreed to disagree and pretend the emperor has clothes. :)
Not even in my wildest dreams. Although you believe it's possible? :)
Behind all that poetic language of his is a serious logical flaw. No matter what you call it, it's still self-love.
There are some places that hint at the idea of foreordination of the reprobate, such as:
However, the doctrine isn't explicitly laid out in scripture. Predestination of the elect is in many places, though. Double predestination just means that there is predestination without universal salvation. And it should be pointed out that the doctrines are not symmetrical. God DOES grant the grace which leads unto salvation, but God does NOT work evil into the reprobate, making them lost forever.
I realized that what he is saying is that God created the ‘beloved’ because, without us, for eons God was an incomplete (imperfect) “egocentric non-personality.”
Perhaps Blessed Fulton Sheen can help you with this?
From Fulton Sheen...
If we would seek out the mystery of why love has a triune character and implies lover, beloved, and love, we must mount to God Himself. Love is Triune in God because in Him there are three Persons and in the one Divine Nature! Love has this triple character because it is a reflection of the Love of God, in Whom there are three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the answer to the questions of Plato. If there is only one God, what does He think about? He thinks an eternal thought: His Eternal Word, or Son. If there is only one God, whom does He love? He loves His Son, and that mutual love is the Holy Spirit. The great philosopher was fumbling about for the mystery of the Trinity, for his noble mind seemed in some small way to suspect that an infinite being must have relations of thought and love, and that God cannot be conceived without thought and love. But it was not until the Word became Incarnate that man knew the secret of those relations and the inner life of God, for it was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who revealed to us the inmost life of God.
It is that mystery of the Trinity which gives the answer to those who have pictured God as an egotist God sitting in solitary splendor before the world began, for the Trinity is a revelation that before creation God enjoyed the infinite communion with Truth and the embrace of infinite Love, and hence had no need ever to go outside of Himself in search for happiness. The greatest wonder of all is that, being perfect and enjoying perfect happiness, He ever should have made a world. And if He did make a world, He could only have had one motive for making it. It could not add to His perfection; it could not add to His Truth; it could not increase His Happiness. He made a world only because He loved, and love tends to diffuse itself to others. -Fulton J Sheen
I've let this observation sit for a while, hoping someone better equipped to address the matter might happen upon it, and correct such a peculiar misperception. The Old Testament God is the New Testament God. God is eternal. He is the Great I AM. Anyone who believes it was God who changed from Old to New is deluded. If the "Latin" God is not the Old Testament God, then there is a problem with the "Latin" belief, not the Calvinist.
I agree, but in 5716 there appears to be agreement with what I said:
FK “I rather like that Kosta, thank you. The Calvinist God is unlike the Latin God because the Calvinist God is like the God of the OT. I love it! :)”
[Mark:] “That is my understanding as well...”
[Kolo:] I agree too, FK. That’s why I often observe that it seems we worship different Gods.
It has never occurred to me either that there are two different Gods spoken of in the Old and New Testaments. It's an interesting difference, though.
Putting created beings, dead or alive, in a position of authority or even as intercessor between us and God is not a minor doctrinal matter, and so we see the apparently endless debate. Calvinists have been the most determined to point out the error in this, but it's an error that is recognized by most deemed "Protestant." Could the language be less provocative? It certainly could. But, then again, severity is a hallmark of Calvinism, in my perception at least, and so it's to be expected to some extent.
Yup, I suppose I can see where that's fair. :) We're an in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound bunch, so it's only natural that severity and provocation are going to be in the mix. I guess one thing we ain't is wishy-washy. :)
Well, thank you for a calm and even kind response, I was on a fine line betwen civil and provocative with that one myself, lol. I’m surprised it’s not generated more commentary.
Merry Christmas! Looks like we’re going to have a White Christmas here in North Carolina, an unusual thing, only four on record previously.
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