Posted on 01/01/2006 4:48:03 PM PST by HarleyD
Naturally. The search for the "Real" Jesus continues. Do you realize that EVERYONE says what you are? Jehovah Witnesses, Unitarians, Docetists, Arians, and any other group of people looking at the Book? We ALL have our perceptions of what God is trying to say... None of us were there, so, as all good scholars do, we make God into our own ideas and thoughts of Whom He is and what He has revealed.
To me, the plain meaning of this, without ANY background, would be clear. It would take a serious twisting of interpretation to change the meaning of these words. I am surprised you tried to make this point.
Again, you should read up more on Christian heresies. The Docetists say that Christ merely "pretended" to die. There is very little discussion on the agony of Christ - almost as if He was silent on the cross. The Gnostics have various different explanations as well. THEY say that God COULD NOT die on the cross. It was a substitution of Judas Iscariot or Simon the Cyrenean. The Muslims ALSO say the same thing - God didn't die on the cross. EVERYONE, including you, has a paradigm that they approach Scriptures with. These people don't think that God could suffer and die, so any "clear" Scripture is obviously a spiritual, not literal meaning. It is the Catholic faith that you draw the majority of your paradigms from.
I disagree. The only way to get to secret knowledge or anything else extra-Biblical is to build it in artificially.
Baloney. Who said that everything must be written down for it to be official? You are too enamoured with the US Justice system, I think. Much of the Jewish Scripture is based on oral traditions passed down CENTURIES until they were written down. Many of our ancient manuscripts of history or biographies are written hundreds of years AFTER the fact. Much of our information that we have is based on traditions passed down orally at least for some period of time - often for generations. Did you learn to eat by reading a book? Do you think people 1500 years ago learned by reading books? Or that they were overly concerned with written material?
I don't think the Gnostics thought that knowledge and belief were the same thing, at least to how we use the terms. I just implied in a recent post to you that some of the Pygmies will be saved without any formal knowledge. What would the Gnostics say to that? :)
You are probably correct. However, faith in something comes from knowledge. And it also depends on what kind of knowledge we are talking about. For example, when Paul talks about "knowing" the Lord, he is not discussing "book" knowledge, but experiential knowledge attained from a personal relationship. Thus, the Book is not needed absolutely for such experiences. We can come to know Christ WITHOUT a book in this manner. The Gnostic's concept of knowledge was based on God's secret revelation to them alone. The Catholic concept of knowledge was that ALL had this knowledge of experiencing Christ available to them - IF they turn from sin and place their faith in Him. What would the Gnostics say about the Pygmies? Perhaps they would agree. It would depend on the Pygmies knowledge meshing with the Gnostics view on the cosmic reality around them.
I figured I had a shot at a match with Augustine, but I didn't know about Aquinas. Thanks. :)
Catholics are taught that the elect are predestined irrestistibly by God. He actively brings His elect to Him WITHOUT overriding their will. This is an important thing to keep in balance - both realities must be maintained. But God does NOT actively choose people for perdition. Man does that on his own despite the efforts that God makes. Yes, man CAN and DOES refuse God. And God's wrath to them is shown in Romans 1:18-28. This is the basics on Catholic teaching on predestination. There is a lot of room for speculation within these parameters.
Regards
But we tend to do just that! We place the physical, rational, etc. over spiritual. The worst error is when we cloak the physical, rational, with spiritual and present it as absolute truth.
The Fathers have argued that reason is not the way to reach or understand the spiritual, and that only through prayer, when "reason ceases and words fall silent" can we reach God.
If mankind, the Church especially, did not read into the Scripture "scientifically," Galileo's discoveries would have been hailed, as all science should be hailed, for giving us a more glorious idea of God's Creation. Nothing in the Scripture contradicts science when Scripture is read spiritually, and not literalistically or dogmatically, because the physical world and the spiritual world are separate, and mutually exclusive: science makes working models; Scriptures makes virtuous men.
What made Galileo's discoveries subject to "vehement suspicion of heresy" was precisely dogmatic and literalistic interpretation of the center.
But, in all fairness, this is easier said now then it was in Galileo's days, and I wonder how many of us would have sided with the Church, for the Old World Order was not without precedence and its own proofs.
Kolo, this was a beautfil reply. Unfortunately, some of our Protestant counterparts see God's omnipotences as micormanagement. We see God as a loving Father who allows His children freedom to choose in order to give each and every human a chance to come to Him on his own when called. Calvinists apparently see that as God not being in control.
In our faith, God is doing everything for us; in theirs, God is doing everything for Himself and His own Glory. In ours we are His children; in theirs, we are His tools and toys, like little lead soldiers.
Everying hinges on the phronema or mindset. A glass can be half full or half empty. The two will never agree.
Thank you. I admire the Rev. Spurgeon's works. He was a very powerful preacher in an age where man was placing himself on a pedestal WITHOUT realizing that God was more than a "voice in the ear". I agree that God is instrumental in what we do in our own lives. However, I don't think one can KNOW how much exactly He does and what we do to "do" something. Human subconsciousness is quite subjective. I don't think it is a matter of God doing 87% or 99%. But I also don't see it as I have no choice. In every moral situation in where I am conscious of a decision, I feel within myself the "war" to choose one or the other. I do not feel an inexorable drive (as if I was a puppet) to do good. I normally choose good in these situations because I mentally am trying to show my love for Christ. I realize that God put that desire within me. But during those moments, I also feel that I COULD say "No". Thus, these discussions on free will.
Your quote, at first, appeared to belittle Christians who held to free will by misrepresenting their view as if they believe that man does EVERYTHING to achieve God. That is certainly not what Catholics believe. I don't know about Armianism. But we are taught the middle road, so to speak. We try to balance what Scripture tells us - that God moves within us the will and desire to please Him - AND - that man has free will and is expected to choose the good and not the evil. He is held accountable for THAT choice.
Your comments regarding religious discussion are refreshing and make good points. I also hear that "voice" in me that tells me it is time to stop and let it be. I admit that this thread has become a bit lengthy, and we are, frankly, pretty much where we started. Has anyone (perhaps besides Forest Keeper) come away with a different opinion regarding this question? While I don't condemn people for having different opinions, I am wondering about how people come to these conclusions. Certainly, people must be wondering about how I came to my conclusions. Quite frankly, I doubt whether God will judge us based on how much we know, or how correct our knowledge is, but what we do with what we have been given. The parable of the Talents (Mat 25) should be a guiding rule for us.
Best wishes this Easter
You always find an example that reflects how I feel and see things. Thank you.
No need to, Agrarian. I don't hold grudges. Faith is not an opinion but what we believe. The worst thing we can do to each other, while professing te same faith, is to mock our inability to express it, or if we honestly question it; we have all been there. Because we are all imperfect, we must never be content with what we know or believe as perfect knowledge or perfect faith. For, Scripture says "Seek, and ye shall find."
Is the man Jesus separate from the God Jesus? They are the same person! Thus, when Jesus did something, BOTH natures acted - although in given situations, His divine nature was more noticeable, and in other situations, His human nature was more noticeable. There is NO purpose of the Temptation in the Desert story OTHER than to show that Jesus, as man, COULD refuse the Tempter. If Jesus was using His "God Powers", what would be the point? That would be like me demonstrating to a 4 year old how I can pick up 200 pounds and he can't. The point is that man CAN - when they rely on God and His ways - turn from evil choices.
Well, then you are also chuckling at other Catholics! You told me yourself that some Catholics believe that God sees the decisions of man for Him, and bases His decisions for election upon them.
But I am chuckling at the idea of WAITING for man, not on whether God sees our responses or not in choosing His elect. {God did not wait with baited breath} God sees ALL time, FK, as one action. Why would He have to wait or guess or whatever? His decision is made outside of time based on His view of ALL time at the same time...Maybe we should just give up here.
GOD SCRAMBLED??? Here again are two examples of you making God dependent upon man. You have God working around man's free will decisions. You can't escape it, even as you convey the point unintentionally.
I don't know what to tell you, other than to remind you that God works outside of time, not within time. He already foresaw Adam's sin before He even created Adam in time. His one view of all time, His one blink of the eye, consists of ALL our decisions and all of our actions. Thus, He infinite wisdom is able to take into account actions that have not even occured yet in time. All I can tell you is that the Scriptures maintain TWO truths. That God's will be done and man has free will. We try to maintain both truths without eliminating the other. At this point, God has not revealed exactly how that occurs. My personal view is that God, from within eternity, sees all actions and takes into account these actions by granting His graces to ensure that the final result of His will is met. Thus, God is not "waiting" on us. He sees something and acts on it - but before it happens. Thus, He is the driving force AND we have free will.
I believe that men are ultimately responsible for their own evil, even when they have no capacity to do "good".
How can man be responsible for their actions if they can only DO one action??? Even humans do not condemn people who are severly retarded to death! But you would have God doing just that! The God of Love condemning His creation for not doing what that man CANNOT do to begin with! What a Just Judge your God is... Sorry, you need to put things in persective here. God does not command what man cannot do. Would you condemn someone to death for not being able to pick up 20000 pounds with their bare hands?
Regards
This must refer only to physical death, I am presuming. So, are you saying that all of Paul's comparisons that we have been talking about are between eternal spiritual life and only physical death? Doesn't it make more sense that he was comparing spiritual life and spiritual death? Don't all of us, as Christians, believe that physical death is merely a transition, it's what happens after that is important? "Eternally" speaking, isn't physical death, to us, really no big deal?
We do not believe that the Theotokos was born without the results of ancestral sin, in the sense of the tendency to death and corruption. We do believe that she lived a morally guiltless life, and was thus a worthy vessel for the conception and birth of Christ. We do not believe that "the fix was in" for her. We believe that she had no other tools at her disposal than the ones we do.
I think I would find this much more plausible if you said the fix WAS in. :) Mary had no other help than the rest of us, and yet she turns out to be the only human in the history of mankind (except Jesus) to choose to never sin? And, it was just a coincidence that this person turned out to be a woman? And, it was just a coincidence that she lived in an area that would bring her to Bethlehem for a census? And, it was just a coincidence that her lineage happened to be perfectly in line with scriptural requirements? I'm sure there are more. Without a special dispensation from God, what are the odds that one and only one person out of billions and billions would "choose" to never sin? I don't see it.
Ha! You and I must be about the same age. How well I remember Sagan and that "Starship Enterprise" television set.
You know, the whole Galileo incident has taken quite a beating on this thread. One interesting thing to note is that nothing of that sort ever happened, as far as I know, in the Eastern Church.
But on the other hand, while the Byzantine Empire saw great advances in practical technology, it was not particularly prominent in anything we would call experimental or theoretical science.
Of course, there was something about Western Christendom that produced a Galileo. Nothing has been so consistent as the ability of Western Christendom to make continual leaps in scientific knowledge and technology. Many explanations have been given for this, and the favorite of those who dislike Christianity is the explanation that it was all an accident of history.
But I don't think so. At the root of the rise of Western science was precisely the fact that Western religion promoted an analytical and systematizing mindset and involved the idea of an orderly universe where phenomena could be observed and predicted. If one's religion doesn't involve a faith in an orderly universe, scientific and technological progress is not terrilby likely.
What is interesting and (to me) incontrovertable is that this process accelerated exponentially after the Protestant Reformation, and the further cutting free of the independent analytical mind from the guidance of tradition. The modern industrial and technological world is in no small part the child of Protestantism. Whether that world is a spiritually healthy one is quite another question.
But getting back to Galileo, I think that it is helpful to think of this not so much as a conflict between religious dogma and science, but between an older scientific dogma and a newer scientific construct.
Anyone who has spent any time around the scientific world will know that some of the fiercest and most brutal bloodlettings are between supposedly objective scientists who are discussing supposedly hard facts and purportedly logical theoretical constructs. In my own little field of expertise, I have seen tremendous advances -- and yet every single time, the scientific establishment has resisted those advances. I've seen virulent public disputes at scientific meetings that make our theological discussions on FR seem like child's play.
At the root of those virulent disputes is the fact, as I have pointed out repeatedly on this thread, that even the hardest of sciences are not nearly as hard as the credulous modern man believes them to be. The "hard facts," are rarely as incontrovertible and hard as the average laymen, with his essentially religious faith in modern science, supposes them to be.
Scientists know this -- thus the bloodlettings involved in their internecine disputes.
In fairness to the keepers of the old guard, the other side of things is that for every truly revolutionary advance in science and technology, there are 10 more that claim to be advances but which are quite simply errors. If one immediately embraces every supposed "advance," this can be dangerous, because of the consequences of embracing an "advance" that turns out, upon closer examination or with the passage of time and experience, to be wrong.
I see no need to look on it as either coincidence or as coersion. As the Scripture says, Christ came "in the fullness of time..." I don't think it is terribly profitable to try to describe it in other than those Biblical terms.
As we have belabored on this thread repeatedly, prophecy is not a blueprint that God wrote in the past, then manipulating things in such a way to make sure everyone followed his blueprint in the future, lest he look stupid for having put something in his blueprint that wasn't followed.
This implies that God has a past and a future.
Prophecy is God speaking from outside time to us who are inside time. He inspires someone from our past to foretell what will happen in our future. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
I don't think that when the Gospels say things like "that the Scripture might be fulfilled," they mean that Christ was play-acting and reading lines from a script. They are simply a literary way of reminding the readers that this or that event had been prophesied long ago. It is a way of saying that the God of the Christians is the very same God the Hebrews had worshipped all along. It is also another way of showing what Orthodox Christians have always believed: that "the Lord God" of the Old Testament is none other than the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity.
This is why every icon of Christ has, in the nimbus behind Christ's head, the Greek words "o on" (sorry, unlike Kolokotronis, I don't know how to do omicron and omega in html) -- which are the words in the LXX by which the Lord identifies himself to Moses from the burning bush when Moses asks him who he should say has sent him: "He who is." (Unlike translations based on the Hebrew, the LXX uses a clearly masculine pronoun, incidentally.)
I was referring to the General Relativity Equivalence Principle:
Experiments performed in a uniformly accelerating reference frame with acceleration a are indistinguishable from the same experiments performed in a non-accelerating reference frame which is situated in a gravitational field where the acceleration of gravity = g = -a = intensity of gravity field. One way of stating this fundamental principle of general relativity is to say that gravitational mass is identical to inertial mass.Given our laser beam focus on the free will and the errors of Luther, it is a bit offtopic. The classic example is that the gravity one experiences in a static elevator at the earth surface is undistingushable from the inertial force in an accelerating elevator in the outer space. Gravity is acceleraion; the underlying physical reality is that either gravity or acceleration are different labels we put on the curvature of timespace. Likewise, in an accelerating car the observer experiences one curvature that pushes him and his coffee downward, formed by the mass of the earth, and he normally refers to that one as the earth gravitational pull; and the other curvature pushing him to the backrest of the seat and the coffee to the edge of the cup, created by the energy of the engine, and he normally refers to that one as inertial force. If instead of a car accelerating along the surface of the earth we had a car-shaped spaceship accelerating upward (toward the roof of the car) and pulled by a planet behind its hood, with a proper adjustment of the energy of that spaceship providing the upward thrust, and the size of the planet providing the rearward pull, we would have the exact same observations, even though the directions of gravity and acceleration have been swapped, gravity threatening to spill the coffee and acceleration securing it inside the cup.
The famous ontological equivalence of mass (source of gravity) and energy (source of acceleration) follows from this example.
Our Lady remained a virgin is an inerrant Tradition in a physiological way.
Christ died and was buried and rose form the dead, according to the Tradition, in a forensic pathology sense.
The Jews were slaves in Egypt, according to the Tradition, in a sociological sense.
They defeated the Egyptians with assistance of miracles, and then defeated sundry Amalekites, Canaanites, and the rest, according to the Tradition, in a military sense.
But the mustard is not the tallest tree in the botanical sense because the Tradition does not teach the botany of mustard and botany teaches the opposite.
Really, the two did not mix? In that case, who was Jesus telling us to believe in? His invisible, and separate, alter-ego? What did Jesus mean when He said "I and the Father are one"? To be consistent, you must believe that the man Jesus NEVER claimed to be God. I am amazed you are saying this. I guess the Jews were way ahead of you.
If He was walking around with the "inside knowledge" then He was more than Adam.
It is controversial to you that Jesus was more than Adam? Words fail me.
Unless He was in every way like us except that He (as fully human without "inside information") chose not to sin but could have sinned according to His human nature, the whole thing was a show.
How in the universe do you come to that conclusion? Jesus was ONLY human, or else His existence was a show? How did the human Jesus perform miracles? Did the Father send down special powers, BYPASSING the divinity in Christ, to Jesus the man? Where do you get this stuff? :)
I remember reading some detail about Galileo, and I was convinced at the time that the heresy Galileo was accused of was indeed a theological heresy. The naked assertion that the earth revolves around the sun would not have been considered heretical. Another part of Galileo's guilt was that at least according to his fellow scientists he did not really prove his physics satisfactorily -- he was correct, as we know now, but his proof was not sufficient. I do not remember the particulars.
We often take the popular history of science for granted: the Catholic Church had taught geocentrism and was against science, so it supressed scientific research, and Galileo was a model scientist who got victimized. In fact the Church supported science but insisted on rigor both in theology and in science.
I think this is a major hurdle for Protestantism, as their view on the anthropology of man certainly differs from Christianity's of 1500 years. It inevitably leads to their idea that man has no free will and God is somehow responsible for evil.
Show me how I believe that God is responsible for evil. I do not. The only thing I can fathom is my saying that God allows evil to happen. I have already said many times that this "omission" is not causal because God has no DUTY to prevent it. God doesn't OWE us anything.
Very true. Both the condemnations of geocentrism and the notion of Galileo's persecution come from popularizers of science, and from scientists trying to be theologians, rather than from science itself.
I disagree on one thing. The scientific culture was well underway in the West centuries before Protestantism emerged on the theological scene. Variously, it can be traced to the medieval scholasticism, -- an organic Catholic phenomenon, -- or to St. Augustine. Protestantism, along with absolute monarchies and the Plague contributed much to the spiritual vaccuum we now endure, of which scientism is a side effect, but it did not contribute to science in any direct way.
That's funny, given that religious wars were the reason for some many millions of deaths and endless conquests. Scientific controversies exist until proven otherwise. The Apostolic Church has been in schism for almost one thousand years.
It's neither the science nor religion but human nature that is at the heart of that. More often than not, the crux is personal preference.
The "hard facts," are rarely as incontrovertible and hard as the average laymen, with his essentially religious faith in modern science, supposes them to be
Well, the arrangement of planets in our solar system is what I would call a "hard fact." What is not agreed upon is the convention that would make Pluto and other "captured" objects, a "hard" planet.
I mean, the cause of tuberculosis is pretty much a "hard fact" barring any unusual mutation. And optical formulations based on pure mathematics faithfully reproduce and predict the behavior of light although we can't really define light in simple terms.
I would say, that most of science, excluding the forefront, is a reliable source of knowledge and working models. The "faith" in science comes from the "hard" fact that it works. Disagreements come from personal differences, specific needs, etc.
You are right on both accounts. The only people who are truly against science are some extreme Evangelical Christian sects, Bible literalists.
As to the second statement, yes, Galileo was permitted by two or three Popes to continue his work. That is an important consideration. The disclaimer that was required with all books of science was to be printed at the very beginning saying, to the effect, that we may never know what is true and therefore assure the readership that the author does not posit his work as something challenging dogma.
I couldn't agree more. Science is a working model based on limited knowledge and such knowledge cannot be universal, complete, perfect. We must never assume that we have seen all physical phenomena, but it is easy to understand that in Galileo's world there were no wireless communications, save for spiritual consumption. I mean, who has seen radio waves?
Galileo was sunder "vehement suspicion of heresy" by only a portion of the Roman Inquisition. While he could not explain the carted studded Moon and perhaps had to accept the Vatican "explanation" that the "devil" was distoritong our view, or that the "strange appendages" on Saturn were also satanic distortion, but once he observed Venus change its fully illuminated face to a crescent shaped one, he knew that the geocentric system was incorrect and he could prove it. He violated therefore the disclaimer that proceeded all his works.
I must add that Galileo assured everyone that he did not forget about God, but that was all in vain. I can see how this can happen given the historical and cultural prejudices that we are all subject to.
It is not HTML, really. HTML does not have a reliable way to produce Greek letters in any browser. If you install a Greek character set in your computer and go to a Greek website, you will see Greek in a variety of fonts because the server supplies a page-level language meta information; you cannot do so by posting into a page served in English by the Free Republic server. What Kolokotronis uses is a hack that works ofr some readers, but not for others, and only with one "Greek" font. It is not really even Greek, as I am about to explain. MS-Windows computers have a font called "symbol". It associates Greek glyphs with Latin letters, rather idiotically, by how they look. For example, W is glyphed Omega because it sort of looks like it (both Omicron and Omega sound as O in most languages). If your computer has this font, -- and it is a part of the stadnard Windows intallation -- you can select that font in your word processor, and type "o Wn" and get Omicron Omega Nu glyphed. If you don't --e.g. you have a Mac or a Linux, -- you get "o Wn" in the default font of that machine.
HTML allows to specify the font. The tag is <FONT FACE=arial> <FONT FACE=dingbat>, or what have you. You can add two other attributes, SIZE or COLOR. It has to be closed with </FONT>
This is what I am going to type at the end of this message:
<FONT FACE=symbol>o Wn</FONT><BR>And this is how it is going to look in your browser. If you have Symbol and Wingdings, you will see "o Wn" glyphed in these fonts, and if you don't, you will only see "o Wn" each time.
<FONT FACE=wingdings>o Wn</FONT><BR>
<FONT FACE=arial>o Wn</FONT><BR>
o Wn
o Wn
o Wn
I would say I get it from the Fathers, such as +John of Damascus, who writes:
Confessing, then, the same Jesus Christ, our Lord, to be perfect God and perfect man, we hold that the same has all the attributes of the Father save that of being ingenerate, and all the attributes of the first Adam, save only his sin, these attributes being body and the intelligent and rational soul; and further that He has, corresponding to the two natures, the two sets of natural qualities belonging to the two natures: two natural volitions, one divine and one human, two natural, energies, one divine and one human, two natural free-wills, one divine and one human, and two kinds of wisdom and knowledge, one divine and one human. For being of like essence with God and the Father, He wills and energises freely as God, and being also of like essence with us He likewise wills and energises freely as man." [Exact exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book Book III, Chapter XIII]
His two natres are united in one Person, but are not mixed. Thus, Christ is one Person, with two distinct wills and two distinct natures, united but not mixed.
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