Posted on 09/02/2011 9:07:47 AM PDT by marshmallow
Minneapolis, Minnesota (CNN) –Prior to 2006, few people even knew that then-Minnesota state legislator Keith Ellison was a Muslim. Because of his English name, he said, no one thought to ask.
But five years ago, when he ran for a seat in the United States House of Representatives - a race he would go on to win - word of his religious affiliation began to spread.
“When I started running for Congress it actually took me by surprise that so many people were fascinated with me being the first Muslim in Congress,” said Ellison, a Democrat now serving his third term in the House.
“But someone said to me, ‘Look Keith, think of a person of Japanese origin running for Congress six years after Pearl Harbor–this might be a news story.’”
Though Ellison's status as the first Muslim elected to Congress is widely known, fewer are aware that he was born into a Catholic family in Detroit and was brought up attending Catholic schools.
But he said he was never comfortable with that faith.
“I just felt it was ritual and dogma,” Ellison said. “Of course, that’s not the reality of Catholicism, but it’s the reality I lived. So I just kind of lost interest and stopped going to Mass unless I was required to.”
It wasn’t until he was a student at Wayne State University in Detroit when Ellison began, “looking for other things.”
(Excerpt) Read more at religion.blogs.cnn.com ...
Keep it up and I shall taunt you again!
Parables do not use real people. This was a real happening being described. >>Even BEFORE the 'final' judgement?,<
Obviously.
>>And Samuel said to Saul: 'Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?'<<
disquieted, bothered, interrupted. To bring me up – to bring me back to the land of the living.
Remember that Jesus had not died on the cross at the point of the story. Abraham, Lazarus and those in that place were taken from there to heaven when Christ spent three days there setting them free. That’s the place Catholics get their concept of purgatory. Prior to Christ’s death there was no redemption. Once Christ took those souls to heaven it served no purpose. That “holding place” no longer exists.
This is probably the most confusing thought I have ever had unaided by Mother Nature....
This is not like asking someone on earth to pray for you, since they are physically here to converse. What the Roman Catholic is doing is asking those who are not physically here and are unable to see or affect the affairs of mankind on earth... to do what is attributed to God only.
When we look in the Bible we find that prayer is directed to God alone.
To set up a person as a recipient for our prayers,..... is making them out to be deity. ......Asking a saint to help and guide or protect is something only God can do.....
There is not one example of a Christian addressing prayers to Mary or saints, or those who are dead passing from our world.
There is much to be said of those who practice Spiritism that use this method......There are hundreds of prayers and passages about prayer in scripture, and none of them instruct prayers to the dead. The scriptures forbid attempting to contact the dead, yet the Catholic Church teaches people to do it.
A shocker to Catholics I suppose but when Jesus paid the final price and descended He took those with Him and closed the place since the promised Messiah had arrived and the need to wait in anticipation was over. The age of works was over and the age of grace had arrived.
Even before the final judgment...
placemark
I understand that there is no explicit command to pray to the saints who have died. As far as I can see the status with regard to death is irrelevant.
(I'm not trying to be contentious.I'm trying to lay out my side.)
That is, WHOEVER, who is NOT IHS and whom I ask to pray for me is nevertheless, I think, being asked to perform a intermediary function, whether you want to say "advocacy" or want to call it some other thing.
Whether they've died or not, If I say, "Hey, you go talk to so and so on my behalf and ask him for such-and-such," I think I'm asking someone to mediate, to be between me and the person from whom I want something.
And I think that when you read from I Tim 2:1 to 2:6, at least a POSSIBLE interpretation is that we are to perform this intermediary function BECAUSE (rather than in spite of) there is One Mediator (into whom we have been grafted.)
That is, the issue of having died or not does not alter the esse of the action Paul tells Timothy he wants everyone in the churches to do. Whatever it's CALLED, what it IS is a kind of mediatory activity, however derivative.
Is one of those what you are saying?
-- Okay, I do not KNOW for sure, but my GUESS is that the (having died) saints intercede for us, JUST AS the not having died saints do. They lay their petitions, so to speak, before IHS's feet, and HE takes them to the Father. It does not compute in any way for me that their intercession would not be "in and through" IHS. There's no way around the Second Person of the Trinity. There's only through.
-- A lot of people say I'm not a representative Catholic. I don't know. But I do know that when my daughter was, we were told, dying, I asked anybody who would hold still to pray, whether they'd died or not!
So for me, to say that our asking the having died saints to pray for us interferes with our asking the not having died saints to pray for us just isn't true.
And the Catholics -- at least the ones in the so-called "Latin Rite" -- have this charming custom. During the "free" part of our intercessory prayers at Mass, someone will often say, "For a special 'intention'" ['intention' is Catholic-speak for 'thing I'm praying for']." In other words, "I would like the prayers of everyone here, but it's private."
I think that's kind of cute.
I hope this moved the ball in a helpful way.
Look back at that verse which speaks about those who were brought before the Great White Throne Judgment. They were ALL cast into Hell after their judgment, no one passed to Heaven at that judgment. They were judged according to their deeds - which some people think speaks of degrees of punishment in Hell. The Book of Life is there to prove that their names are NOT written in it. It is also called the Lamb's Book of Life. The question then is what is this Book of Life, how are names put in and when do names get blotted out/removed?
There are a few schools of thought on this. The idea of a book that, from the beginning of time, has all the names of all the humans that will ever be conceived. Numerous times in the Psalms, for example, David asked God to "blot of his enemies names". The book of Revelation speaks about this Book of Life from which those who worshiped the Antichrist and took his "mark", had their names blotted out of the book:
Rev. 13:8 "And all who dwell on the earth will worship him, every one whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the Book of Life of the Lamb Who has been slain." (speaking of the Antichrist)
Rev. 17:8 "The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the Book of Life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, now is not, and yet will come."
When you get to Revelation 20, it is speaking of all those who were the unsaved from all time being in the final judgment. Their names have been blotted out of the Book of Life. The above verses also speak of those who WILL take the Mark of the Beast, the Antichrist, and seems to say that there are some names that NEVER get written in the book. The Book of Life in the Revelation 20 passage is brought to the final judgment as evidence that the name of those judged is blotted out forever from it. This is a reference that explores this idea further here.
Thank you so much for those beautiful Scriptures, dear brother in Christ!
I am just getting started tonight! On the idea of the purpose of intercessory prayer, I think there is a solid Biblical teaching of both the necessity and benefit of prayer in general. It is taught by our Lord to follow a basic outline. Though I know the Lord's Prayer/Our Father is often repeated - and I don't have a gripe with it, I think Jesus was saying we should pray like this, rather than pray THIS prayer. Are we kewl so far? I wonder how many people read the next verses after Jesus gave that? Let's look:
Luke 11:5-8
Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
So, it is our "shameful audacity" or persistence that grants our petitions. The KJV uses the word "importunity". The next verses speak of "asking", "seeking" and "knocking" and the Greek tense makes them mean, "keep on asking", "keep on seeking", "keep on knocking". That seems to me to be all about the persistence of prayer. Another parable Jesus gave was about a man who was a judge in a city and he had a reputation as a guy who didn't fear God nor care about what other people thought about him. But a persistent widow kept hounding him to avenge her of an adversary:
Luke 18:1-5 "Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
So, I believe we have more than ample admonitions to pray, to pray often and to pray persistently. Add to that the requests to pray for each other, ourselves, our leaders and rulers, the world, etc., I get the idea that God really wants us to pray - even though he knows what we need even before we ask. I can't see how asking others to join us in this persistence towards our Father in Heaven is wrong. If some think this can even be requested of those who have already died, it's not for me to say other than bringing in the warnings of prayers to "call up" the dead. Hope you have a good night!
Make that our SHAMELESS audacity. ;o)
It almost seems like Jesus was telling us that repetitious prayer, like the persistence of the widow to the judge, was what was the right way...and that it wouldn’t be in vain.
I have this vision of this short, stout, cylindrical, English woman swathed in black silk wearing a black straw hat with little artificial cherries and carrying a monstrous, huge umbrella, WITH a parrot’s head handle, which she waves in the judges face.
I love that parable! I bet people smiled when Jesus told it.
"Let us remember one another in concord and unanimity. LET US ON BOTH SIDES OF DEATH always pray for one another. Let us relieve burdens and afflictions by mutual love, that if one of us, by the swiftness of divine condescension, shall go hence the first, our love may continue in the presence of the Lord, and our prayers for our brethren and sisters not cease in the presence of the Father's mercy." - St Cyprian of Carthage, 3rd Cent.
I bowed out of this thread for a few days because it had descended into a mudslinging match dominated by Protestant Peg Leg Smiths. It now seems as though there is some actual dialog.
Protestants seem always to act and argue as though there were only one kind of prayer, that of petition. Catholicism recognized five distinct kinds of prayer; Adoration, Expiation, Love, Petition, and Thanksgiving. It would be advisable for Catholics and non-Catholics to be more specific when referring to kinds types of prayer when defending or denigrating Catholic doctrine.
Good point.
You are so right. Most of my prayers are of thanksgiving.
I rarely pray for me, though I do ask for mercy on my soul at each Mass.
In terms of the larger argument, though, I'm confused about where we are. If I seemed to be arguing against prayer, I did not intend it. I was trying to separate the 'dead' issue from the 'one Mediator' issue. Then I was asking how we are to think of the 'one Mediator' in the light of Paul's saying he wants members of the churches to do what seemed to me to be a mediatory sort of activity, and SEEMS to be basing that on there being one mediator.
For, PART of the argument against asking the intercession of the Saints was the "one Mediator" argument. But I think that that PART of the argument collapses in the face of our being asked to pray for others. (The "praying WITH them, not FOR them," seems weak when one considers that many for whom we are asked to pray are not Christians.)
But as long as I'm in "distinguo mode" it's important to divide the 'fringe benefits' of prayer from its basic intention, and its intention from what it is.
It IS good though to have clarified the question of TO WHOM the saints in heaven (as we think) go with our prayers. I have to say it simply never occurred to me that anyone thought that they would NOT go THROUGH Jesus to the Father.
(By "never" I mean "not since the mid-Seventies" when, I think, I got the basic 'jobs' of the three persons of the Trinity doped out.) To the Father, THROUGH the Son, WITH the Holy Spirit, would be the little proverb or maxim.
I forget what flavor Christian church you go to. I do know that for us, for the Episcopalians (the four or five who still believe), at least some Lutherans and Methodists, the doxological "Great Amen" at the end of the Eucharistic prayer is a big deal.
Through him [that is, Christ], with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.(The prayer is addressed to the Father.)
All: Amen!
But then, people do speak carelessly. Recently I asked a Catholic, NOT one who thinks theologically, to whom she thought the saints take our intercessions, and she said, "to the Father."
So I said, "Say more. More detail."
She said, "Well, through the Son to the Father."
So I can see how careless speech would give the wrong idea, and there's a lot of careless speech going around.
TO sum up,in this one little sector of the front, I am trying to distinguish the nature of intercessory prayer from the issue of "praying to the dead." And my contention is that, as regards the "essentia", what we ask the saints in heaven to do for us is, in our minds, no different -- in essence -- from what is asked of us when somebody puts up a prayer request on Free Republic.
If that's a little clear, then it seems that EITHER those opposed to the intercession of the saints in heaven have to show that WHOM something is being asked for changes the essentia of what is being asked, OR we can abandon the argument and move on to the problem of addressing prayers to the so-called "dead."
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