A Second Chance for the Dead?

That Christian Website ^ | 01/27/2011 | Travis Main

[muawiyah]

The concept of "purgatory" becomes more complex than simple reincarnation as believed throughout the East.

So I don't get into it.

We are, in any case, more than our observable four-dimensions. There are the other 7, or 14, or whatever ~ including heart, mind, spirit,soul ~ and several intuited and named by Orthodox Jews.

Folks are free to add to the list.

Modern physics is not far behind.

Let me predict that about the time we figure out all the dimensions in this universe (and maybe beyond) and DO STUFF with that knowledge, you'll find Time Wrapped UP in a thrice!~

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

Dang - thought this was about Jerry Garcia coming back.....

[fish hawk]

So you sound New Age. (not Christian in the true sense) Is God everything to you?

[muawiyah]

Having knowledge of other beliefs doesn't make you a "NEW AGE" type.

At the same time I am firmly of the belief that God enables us to examine the entirety of our environment ~ so that we can have DOMINION OVER IT. That includes the various dimensions ~ both those visible and those invisible, the great, the small, the fields that permeate the Universe, and even the dimensions that may extend into the areas beyond this Universe.

I find it more than a koinkydink that the ancients appear to have intuited certain elements of profound knowledge of existence without the ability to directly observe those elements.

Give you an example. Abram looked out on the night sky and saw the local galaxy, only he didn't really see it, and couldn't perceive, that all he could see were 25,000 stars or star-like points ~ and without the ability to judge depth at the vast distances, he'd had no idea that those stars had a meaning transcending chasing sheep and goats on a grassy plain in Mesopotamia.

It is only in our time that we know the vast distances from here to Uranus ~ otherwise invisible to the Ancients, and the far vaster distances to the next star, or from here to the center of the local Galaxy, or the incomprehensible distances out to the "edge" where everything just falls off into invisibility.

We are the first people in history to have a shot at seeing everything, and yet Abram intuited that there was but one God ~ of course God gave him some hints in that business of banning human sacrifice. Still even as he was renamed Abraham he did not know anything of the enormous vastness of the Universe that we know, and now we see God's Creation with new eyes, and we should be most respectful ~ even fearful. His Domain is greater beyond even that tidy little 13.8 billion lightyears we can see (in any direction).

[Twinkie]

Scripture even tells us about “atoms” stating that we have faith to believe that everything that is seen is made up of that which is not seen. Now, we know that, indeed, atoms cannot be seen by the naked eye. Back then, they had to accept it on faith in the scriptures being true.

[The_Reader_David]

A protestant polemical site that perpetuates the myth that the Latins added the balance of the canon that the protestants slander as “the Apocrypha” hardly constitutes proof my position (which in this matter is the position of the Orthodox Church) is wrong.

The very fact that I am writing as an Orthodox Christian, who considers Trent to be a gathering of heretics completely void of authority, to tell you that First and Second Maccabees, Tobit, Baruch, the long versions of Daniel and Esther, and so on are canonical Scripture ought to give you pause.

Your site adduces a handful of Church Fathers to bolster your view. One can find as many or more early Fathers who rejected the canonicity of the Apocalypse of St. John (Book of Revelations, if you prefer) Sts. Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory the Theologian (called Gregory of Nazianzus in the West), Polycarp, and John Chrysostom spring readily to mind. It uses Christ-denying Jews (Josephus and the consciously anti-Christian Council of Jamnia) as sources of authority — hardly convincing.

Finally, it asserts without a shred of evidence that the canon was fixed prior to the Council of Carthage. When? How? By whom? Surely there would be a record of such an important event.

The earliest list of the New Testament canon we all agree on occurs in a letter of St. Athanasius in the 4th century. All earlier sources have missing books or extra books. How is that if the canon was fixed in the first century? Or is your site giving the Council of Jamnia, a bunch of rabbis who denied that Jesus is the Christ, authority to decide what books the Church reads? That was the only canon-fixing in the first century we have an actual record of. Letting Jews who deny Jesus decide our canon for us (as distinct from the Jews who awaited the Christ before his coming) seems to me to be a new judaizing heresy.

Carthage, of course, was a local council, and unless one accepts the Latins’ theory that a Papal assent to a council in his patriarchate gave it universal force — a theory I reject as an Orthodox Christian — its action did not gain universal force until its canons were incorporate by reference in the canons of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. (Some Orthodox will credit the Fourth Ecumenical Council, by virtue of a vague reference to “the ancient canons”, but I incline to the stricter view.)

Arguing that books every Christian tradition which predates the 16th century hold to be Scripture are not Scripture seems a bit of a tough argument to make. The website you link doesn’t manage to make the argument.

[fish hawk]

Almost a mystery how right up even to Columbus people thought the earth was flat and he would fall off the edge and yet, the Bible which had already been around for several hundred years talks of the earth in “sphere”, “orb”, and “compass”, all inferring “round”. It all is there, just no one listening. ( a lot of this is in the Book of Job, which by the way is the oldest book in the Bible)

[RnMomof7]

I would observe that the Books of the Maccabees are inspired Scripture. They have been in the Church’s canon from the beginning

Not so David ... Jerome had placed the apocrypha in a separate section of the Christian Bible.. I specify Christian Bible because the jewish Canon does not include them as inspired books .

The OT Canon belongs to the Jews, not to the church ..Rome had no right to officially add to THEIR canon in our Bible at Trent .

No where is the practice of prayers for or to the dead taught in the NT (The inspired books given to the church ) No where does Christ teach it or model it

[The_Reader_David]

Have you been paying any attention? Do you think I do not know the Church's canon of Scripture and its history? We Orthodox keep a very precise recollection of the Church's history, since we are the Church. (If you want to fight that, check what Christian confession the addressees of all of Paul's letters, the Revelation to St. John, and the local churches mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles have been in since the first century.)

The Latins' heretical conventicle at Trent, utterly void of authority, did not add anything to the Church's canon of Scripture. We Orthodox Christians, along with the Copts and the Armenians and the Ethiopians, all of whom reject Trent as having any authority, and yes, the Latins, have had the books you protestants sneer at as "the Apocrypha" in our canon of Scripture since it was fixed, centuries before Trent.

The Jews did not fix their canon until 90 A.D.

Why do you cede the Church's authority to judge which books are inspired of the Holy Spirit to a council of rabbis who denied that Jesus is the Christ, and thereby denied that Spirit? Do you really think the blind guides who could not see that Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled the prophecies perfectly had the judgment to decide anything for the Church? Neither the Church at the Sixth Ecumenical Council nor the Latins at Trent (who happened to reaffirm the Church's judgment, not that that matters, since as I pointed out Trent was void of authority) added anything to the Jews' canon: they have their own canon, the Church has its canon. Rather, the Church refused to accept the judgment of Jews who has seen the fulfillment of the prophecies, but not perceived them (even as the prophet said they would) as to what constituted Scripture, and the Church made her own judgment on the matter. The Jews who translated books into Greek went to the trouble of translating the books you want to toss out, why was that?

Protestants removed books from the Church's canon because Jews who denied Christ (not Jews who expected the Christ, to whom the Old Testament might reasonably be said to belong) had not included them in their canon. The Latins did not add them.

The reconstruction of Christianity as an ideology founded on a text, rather than a way of life founded on a Person, undertaken by "reformers" who arrogated to themselves the authority to toss books out of the Church's canon, and then misuse that purported authority to imitate the judgment of those who denied that Jesus is the Christ is, quite frankly, not the Faith Once Delivered to the Saints. You cannot find any Christian tradition prior to the 16th century that did not pray for the dead -- not even the (Nestorian) Assyrian Church of the East, which along among ancient churches does not include the Second Maccabees in its canon.