Posted on 03/21/2016 3:43:44 PM PDT by NYer
There is a far more compelling theory regarding the origin of the word that you people should switch to.
A Christian spiritual walk is needed before one can grasp the bible in an advanced way. So much of that book is not about knowing about things, but about living out things. About certain ways that our spirits operate with respect to God and believers and indeed all mankind.
So the Catholics are right that there has to be a context. Whether their denomination as it stands, with both its saints and its sinners, comprises the only useful (or even the best) context, is quite a different question.
Dry biblicism is always a hazard. If Catholics and Orthodox cluttered up the bible with traditions imagined by men, sometimes Protestants overreacted in the other direction and rendered it contextless. If you aren’t seriously worshiping with your life, with the Lord in mind in everything you do, much of the bible won’t even make sense.
If the creation account in Genesis isn't six 24 hour days as we understand them, then how can you take the rest of the Word seriously?
How can you trust what Christ says regarding if you believe in Him you have passed out of judgment and into eternal life?
The singularity of Catholic Dogma is one of it’s strongest truths. Jesus has one flock. You are with Him or against Him. The numerous Protestant groups can’t all be right, because there is only one truth. It might be nice to imagine that we can all believe different things and all be right, but such a notion defies logic on its face.
There’s another principle which gets short shrift here, and it shouldn’t. The Conqueror nature of Christ. A thing, not itself animate or supposed to be so, which had been put to a pagan purpose, can be repurposed to a Christian purpose. The demonic connotations literally are stripped and Christian connotations applied.
Sometimes fundamentalists do this, and the result is a faith that is a shadow of what it could be, running from everything that used to be an occasion of sin even if it can now be the occasion of righteousness.
Ishtar was a goddess, but the term Easter simply refers to the East. This predates the goddess. The goddess should not be allowed to steal it.
Which is where Protestants will frequently tell you that you’re putting your emphasis on the wrong thing. We point to a Savior chiefest of all. From Him we then elucidate doctrines, but even if we get it wrong (or if Catholics get it wrong) we have not denied the Savior, only disobeyed Him. He can correct that. He can’t correct a refusal to focus on Him in the first place.
IF you can get outside of catholic authority and study Polycarp, there is much that will awaken in you regarding the faux Christianity of the Catholic Church. You will also need to study the earliest History of the Ekklesia, not the ‘authorized’ fabricated history from/of Rome. Sadly, I don’t see FR Catholics doing that.
The edifice known as the roman catholic church was not in existence until the late third or 4th century.
There was no pope.
No Mary worship.
No prayers to Mary.
No indulgences
No purgatory
No archbishop
No continual re-sacrificing of Christ over and over and over again.
No mis-translation of Scripture.
The list goes on and on and on.
What was present though were believers filled and guided by the Holy Spirit of Truth. He has been given to ALL believers in Christ. WE all have access to the throne. No priest needed.
Remind me again how long Marcion flourished in Rome, then was run off, then welcomed back in?
You have to first understand the nature of Him whom all the text is about. Certain things are characteristic of God and certain other things are not.
If you don’t understand the subject matter, you are going to get thrown by every little nuance of style.
The attempts to apply wooden literality to the whole bible are like trying to debate the “Roses are red, violets are blue” poem with botanists. In quibbling about the lack of literal blue violets, you’d miss that the purpose is love.
Philip is the spelling thirty-six times in English (φιλιππος in the Greek) whether in the AV or the DRB translations. The author hasn't yet discovered that nor has his editor (thesis advisor?), let alone the truth of the method by which God has chosen to reveal His Truth to humans of all ages.
The bottom line on the authenticity of this "graduate student" author is this:
Not having a word of truth in the slant of the article, nor even one Bible verse in support of his thesis on interpretation, not even a Word from Jesus that discounts the literal-grammatical-historical-cultural hermeneutic that He Himself and other authors of the Old and New Testaments use, and verbalizing only the illegitimate marriage of Platonic philosophy with Biblical interpretation, of which he is only an ill-taught fallible human proponent of a reasoning method that is inconsistent with itself, his article falls of its own illogic.
There is no reason why anyone should accept anything he has written here, unless a complete fool.
If this is the best that this school has to offer, FR in not a really good place for his stuff to be posted.
Having been taught in university, and having taught there myself, little Michael here gets an "F" on such a preposterous, inaccurate proposition.
There's not any FR forum to which this could be posted and accepted as truth except on one that is marked as "Catholic Caucus" and treated without comment.
Don't expect not to have any thoughtful Biblical scholar torpedo this article that attempts to wipe out the underpinnings of fact-based post-Dark Ages society.
Ishtar was the name chosen by Semiramis, wife and mother of Nimrod, when she established her religion upon the death of Nimrod. She calimed to become a goddess when the rays of the Sun, Nimrod shining upon us all, impregnated her with Tammuz.
And yet you have your own dings in your own haloes.
I’ve been walking with Christ for 27 years as a late life believer, and in a school of hard knocks. Every wind of doctrine I could encounter, I probably did.
99.9999% of the problem is NOT UNDERSTANDING THE CHARACTER OF GOD.
So any coincidence with the word Easter is just that, coincidence. Two totally different language systems.
It sure looked like other possibilities were being left out. The fallacy of the excluded middle.
I was blessed, while I was a Protestant, to have a 4 year education based around the classics (scientific as well as in other fields) of “Western Civ.” We read great huge chunks of the Bible AND Augustine, Aquinas, (Dante,) Luther, Calvin, and Spinoza. This was at a secular college where NO denomination, no faith was given explicit preference.
We discussed WHAT these people thought and how they might have come to think it. ONLY THEN we might discuss whether we agreed.
One of the things we learned, most of us, was not to change the subject or to jump to conclusions. Whether one agrees with him or not, it is hard NOT to think that Augustine was a brilliant man. He influenced the Dominicans, of which Aquinas was a member. He influenced Luther (who was an “Augustinian Canon”) and Calvin.
We can start another useless thread on how nasty everybody is who isn't a member of the denomination to which to poster belongs, but “include me out.” OR we can look at the role the Bible played in the development of Western Civ. and whether that role is being accurately portrayed in the academy.
In his letter he quotes or alludes to all 27 books of the New Testament Canon, before it was authorized as such by the Catholic Church many decades later. As the direct student of the Apostle John, by the time The Revelation was written and read by Polycarp there were yet to be any provable bishops in Rome. ONLY Polycarp is a proven Bishop via contemporary messages written to and of him. Linus has been an after thought trying to establish a bridge from Peter, the Apostle to the Jews.
In fact I’d pretty boldly assert that in a lot of these cases, the demonic world knew what the ministry of Christ was going to be, and made their own essays at mimicking it to try to fool the shallow minded. Coming up with a word that looked like “Easter” wouldn’t be the only time this happened.
And Polycarp was the authorized by Apostolic Succession Bishop of Smyrna.
Very true. I am amazed at how many scientists who shun faith are the first to fall for stuff that is beyond reason and faith.
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