Posted on 01/05/2010 9:46:47 PM PST by the_conscience
I just witnessed a couple of Orthodox posters get kicked off a "Catholic Caucus" thread. I thought, despite their differences, they had a mutual understanding that each sect was considered "Catholic". Are not the Orthodox considered Catholic? Why do the Romanists get to monopolize the term "Catholic"?
I consider myself to be Catholic being a part of the universal church of Christ. Why should one sect be able to use a universal concept to identify themselves in a caucus thread while other Christian denominations need to use specific qualifiers to identify themselves in a caucus thread?
Are you saying that God did not know Adam was going to sin?
I asked could not God have made man with a nature that would always choose not to sin?
DO you mean definition or translation?
The "Theo" part is clear, right? The "tokos" part has, I think, two meanings, one limited and specific, the other (remember, we're dealing with the days before embryo transplants) more general.
In sheep-farming, and I think in obstetric medicine a hard birth is a dystocia. (dis TOE shia). That "toc" is the faithful remnant (little joke there) of "tokos". We also at this late time, forget the etymological kinship between "birth" and "to bear," as in "to carry." "Delivery" is being freed from (liv = lib + De = from) the burden one is carrying. We not in the KJV, "the time came that she should be delivered" while a "fem-lib acquiantance insists that she was NOT "delivered of," but "she delivered" her children. Etymological silliness (ideology of the blinding kind inevitably leads to silliness.)
Conjecture, from Greek verbs like ginomai, and other hints, I see (guess) the Mediterranean culture was more about process rather than about discontinuities and points. SO, anyway what I mean is while to us the "delivery" or birth" is a sort of discontinuity, I'm thinking the "way back" vibe is "tokos" as the fruition of a process. As an apple tree is an apple tree when it is in blossom just as much as when it is in fruit, so a mother is a mother at conception and at "delivery".
All this is to say theo tokos means, "God - birther," but it has a vibe of "birth" including everything, all the gestation, that led up to it.
All the future children of God.. How could he pray SPECIFICALLY for them if he did not know who they were?
Eph 1:: 4 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: 5 Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,
And the term the whore of Babylon refers to the Canaanite religion that plagued the ancient Egyptians. that was eradicated by Christianity and Zoroastrianism (from West and East respectively) — the latter under Shapur I ensured that this was swept away in Ctesiphon.
Yes, every good and half-way decent gift comes from above. My choice of God, such as it is, my "work" of faith is his gift, enabled, born along by His grace. The "merit" consequent on the "work" is also His gift.
Every time I say this, speaking after the Fathers, Protestants act like I"m doing something unprecedented. If I say it again in a couple of months, there will be the same shock and surprise, followed by a careful (but fruitless) attempt at cutting me out of the Catholic herd. I will be to Catholics as Obama is, in Biden's mind, to black people, "clean and articulate," ALMOST suitable for admission to the Protestant parlor.
LOL
Because we Catholics refuse to confine God to our understanding, we can say what I just said and also speak of free will and merit. The most militant Reformers seize upon the latter and refuse to believe what we have said since before Augustine and through Aquinas, that it ALL comes from from Grace. It's as if the minute we say "work" or "merit" their minds stop working and they begin advising us to be careful.
I have written recently in this thread of a God whose power is so great that is rules in weakness and whose sovereignty is so vast that instead of enslaving it liberates. I wrote earlier of another notion of freedom other than the Nominalist (and silly) idea of freedom as a random choice between alternatives so that neither the goodness of one would attract nor the evil of the other repel. The idea, whose age alone ought to bring it some respect, was largely ignored.
Very well, let it be ignored. But don't expect me to take very seriously the thoughtfulness of those who ignore it.
Everything good is from God. Every good act "of mine" is not "of mine." If I seem to be the locus of a good act, it is because for a moment the truth of the statement "Now I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me," is apparent, and in me by His grace, Christ graciously did a good thing.
How could he pray SPECIFICALLY for them if he did not know who they were?
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born...” Jer.1:9
“You think the controversies dealt with at Ephesus and Chalcedon were matters of marketing?”
We were talking about modern day *marketing* but, eventhough I’m not real familar with Catholic dogma/history, sure.
I believe the Church leaders were making the religion more palatable to more people.
I was catching up on the thread earlier, and ran across that. How better can it be said?
Ephesus: 431. Christianity has been legal for fewer than 100 years.
The Roman empire is divided in two. The Huns have the north of the Black Sea and are pushing Goths, Vandals and others west, so that they threaten the Western Roman Empire in what will later be Austria, Switzerland, and the Balkan states. Visigoths had taken Greece and had moved westward into northern Italy, threatening then sacking Rome (410) , and moving into southern France and Spain.
Chalcedon: 451. Attila has taken most of Germany and is threatening downwards onto Macedonia, advancing into France, and in 452 invading Italy to be bought off with protection money.
The Easter Empire has abandoned Britain, ceded part of North Africa to the Vandals. The Visigoths in 20 years have been compressed into a small part of western France.
TO give an idea of the instability: By 476 or so the Huns have virtually disappeared; France is divided among 7 tribes; All of Italy is under the kingship of Odoacer; the Visigoths have sprung back and taken all but northern and northwestern Spain. The Vandals have Sardinia, Corsica, and part of Sicily. The Slavs, and behind them the Finns, are threatening Europe from the Northeast.
And, to touch on more Churchy matters, by the end of the first quarter of the 500's, Arians control Spain,Southern France, all of Italy and some of the Balkans, as well as the Algerian coast. "Catholic Christianity" is confined to Parts of Britain, Ireland the Northern half of France, and the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt around through Byzantium to Greece.
And Arianism is just the most politically powerful heresy. Monophysitism, Nestorianism, Donatism, Sabellianism, Pelagianism have threatened Christianity from within while manicheism threatened from without.
To think for a minute that the energy, even the violence, that went into the Trinitarian and Christological heresies were part of some wll oiled marketing campaign by ad execs in Rome is just crazy.
These people thought the world was falling apart around them. A few decades of Imperial peace was being lost as tribe after tribe poured into Europe, and pillaged its way to brief mastery.
In the face of the political chaos and internal strife, it is hard to conceive that some priests and bishops are sitting back, puffing cigars, and saying, "Tell you what, boys: We'll put it out there that We're calling Mary the "Mother of God." That ought to pull in the Ephesians and all the mother-goddess cults. Now we can't be too obvious about this. I know, let's pretend we're arguing about the nature of Christ."
Excuse the typos. It's really cold here and my fingers are stiff.
Well of course...A Christian has two natures...An old man and a new man...
When we die, the old man goes into the ground and the new man heads up towards the North Star and then the after-burner kicks in...
You can't kill God and you can't kill me...
1Pe 3:18 For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:
The only part of God that died was the flesh...
I don't see how you can have it both ways...
“Are you saying that God did not know Adam was going to sin?”
No. I said, “God knew what would happen, but he didn’t cause it.” Therefor, God knew Adam was going to sin.
“I asked could not God have made man with a nature that would always choose not to sin?”
Of course. A man without free choice would always choose not to sin. But if choices are to be made freely, then the option of sinning must be there. Even after the fall, we have a sinful nature but we do not choose sin every moment of our life.
Wiki summarizes total depravity as “Total depravity does not mean, however, that people are as evil as possible. Rather, it means that even the good which a person may intend is faulty in its premise, false in its motive, and weak in its implementation; and there is no mere refinement of natural capacities that can correct this condition...All good, consequently, is derived from God alone, and in no way through man...This idea can be illustrated by a glass of wine with a few drops of deadly poison in it: Although not all the liquid is poison, all the liquid is poisoned. In the same way, while not all of human nature is depraved, all human nature is totally affected by depravity.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_depravity
Your syllogisms are wanting. Humans consist of body, soul and spirit, (1Ths. 5:23) and mothers ontologically pass on humanity, however God is most essentially a spirit, (Jn. 4:24) which by definition, has not flesh and bones (Lk. 24:39) - despite what the LDS propagates (and who also believe in a heavenly mother). While Jesus was made flesh, in which the two natures are understood to be somehow commingled (in the mystery of the incarnation), yet what Mary contributed to Christ was not Divinity, but humanity. The difference is that of being a vessel thru which God was made flesh, versus ontologically being the mother of God, which term is further problematic as God is one.
While Catholicism claims to make this distinction, its incessant uncritical use of the term, in contrast to the Biblical manner, along with its other exaltations of Mary above that which is written, is the problem.
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