Pope Francis speaks to pilgrims during his Wednesday General Audience on April 23, 2014 Credit: Kyle Burkhart/CNA
Posted on 05/15/2014 2:15:20 PM PDT by NYer
.- Pope Francis reflected in his daily Mass on how the apostles evangelized by first telling the history of God’s people, explaining that it’s impossible to understand a Christian without this association.
“You cannot understand a Christian outside of the people of God. The Christian is not a monad,” but “belongs to a people: the Church,” the Pope observed in his May 15 homily.
“A Christian without a church is something purely idealistic, it is not real.”
Beginning by looking to the first reading, taken from the Acts of the Apostles, the Roman Pontiff addressed those gathered in the Vatican’s Saint Martha guesthouse by recalling how when Paul preached in Antioch, he did so by first recounting the whole of Israel’s salvation history.
“Jesus does not make sense without this history” because he “is the end of this story, (the end) toward which this story goes, toward which it walks,” he noted, so “you cannot understand a Christian outside of the people of God.”
“You cannot understand a Christian alone, just like you cannot understand Jesus Christ alone” the Pope went on to say, explaining that “Jesus Christ did not fall from the sky like a superhero who comes to save us.”
“No. Jesus Christ has a history. And we can say, and it is true, that God has a history because He wanted to walk with us. And you cannot understand Jesus Christ without His history.”
Pope Francis then described how a Christian without a history, a nation or the Church “is incomprehensible,” saying that it’s “a thing of the laboratory, an artificial thing, a thing that cannot give life.”
Drawing attention to the importance of remembering this “dimension of history,” the Bishop of Rome observed that a Christian is “a living memory of his people’s journey, he is the living memory of his Church.”
“Then, where is this people going? Toward the ultimate promise. It is a people walking toward fullness; a chosen people which has a promise for the future and walks toward this promise, toward the fulfillment of this promise.”
In order to do this Christians within the Church must be men and women “with hope: hope in the promise,” the Pope went on, noting that “It is not expectation: no, no! That’s something else: It is hope.”
“Right, on we go! (Toward) that which does not disappoint.”
Explaining how a Christian is also someone who remembers, the pontiff encouraged all present to “seek the grace of memory, always” so that by doing so and also looking forward with hope they might be a Christian who “follows the path of God and renews the covenant with God.”
This type of Christian constantly tells the Lord “Yes, I want the commandments, I want your will, I will follow you” he continued, adding that “He is a man of the covenant, and we celebrate the covenant, every day” in the Mass, therefore a Christian is “a woman, a man of the Eucharist.”
Concluding his reflections, Pope Francis encouraged all present to “think about our Christian identity,” stating that “Our Christian identity is belonging to a people: the Church.”
“Without this, we are not Christians” he observed, noting how “we entered the Church through baptism: there we are Christians.”
“For this reason, we should be in the habit of asking for the grace of memory, the memory of the journey that the people of God has made,” the pontiff said, and “also of personal memory: What God did for me, in my life, how has he made me walk…”
Praying, the Roman Pontiff asked “for the grace of hope, which is not optimism: no, no! It's something else,” and asked “for the grace to renew the covenant with the Lord who has called us every day.”
“May the Lord give us these three graces, which are necessary for the Christian identity.”
All these things are means of salvation given us by Christ, and subsequent upon that saving Faith of which you speak.
For example: Leftism as Psychopathy
http://jonjayray.tripod.com/psycho.html
Dear sister in Christ, are you saying that Genesis isn't a "cosmic narrative?" After all, it's all about the Creation of everything that there is, out of nothing (ex nihilo). Not just the earthly creation, but the universal one.
I know for a fact how dearly, deeply TXnMA loves God's "cosmic narrative" — His creation story in Genesis (and also in the Gospel of John, 1:1–5):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.I feel sure that you and he do not disagree about that.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
I feel sure that you and he do not disagree about that.
Spirited: No we don’t. Where we definitively part ways is with the reduction to myth and story of our Lord’s Revelation to man, specifically with His “face to face” revelation to Moses in the desert by evolutionary theists and progressive creationists.
The Church Fathers warned against this, and very sternly rebuked Origenists and apostate Kabbalist Jews (Gnostic pagan Judaizers) as damnable heretics. Stop up your ears against them, they said.
Do you not see that progressive creationism and its theological counterpart, evolutionary theism, “pull God down out of the supernatural” dimension into the natural dimension where He and His Divine Powers are within reach of mankind and their philosophies, science, et al? How else can man presume to speak for God??? To use Him, as if He is clay in their hands, to create and ignite a Cosmic Egg and afterwards act as an animating mechanism for evolution? This particularly heinous tactic has a long pedigree, stretching back to Babylon, and according to New Age historians, across the Deluge to Atlantis.
When God is either shut away in the supernatural realm, pulled down out of it, or declared dead (Nimrod, Kabbalists, Marx, Nietzsche) the result is naturalism of which there are two kinds: atomism and pantheism.
Progressive creationism and evolutionary theism are not thesis but antithesis. They are as spiritually perilous as Marx’s Dialectical Materialism, Darwinism, Blavatsky’s Luciferian Theosophy, Steiner’s Anthroposophy, and Kabbalism.
Yes, I know what I say is offensive. Nevertheless, it must be said.
But what on earth does this have to do with TXnMA??? He's not doing any of that.
What is this evolutionary creationism business? I haven't had that preached to me lately (or ever), so I wonder what that is.
No faithful lover of God would dream of trying to "pull Him down" to "'our' [human] level." What sense does it make to say that our Father is "reducible" to the (finite, imperfect) thoughts/ideas of His [human] son, who was made in His image?
I have a very strong suspicion that my dear brother in Christ, TXnMA, understands that such a thing would be complete heresy, and wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Why do you impute so much "bad stuff" to him?
My “words” on FR are a matter of record. Are you alleging that I am denying them?
“What is this evolutionary creationism business? “
It’s only theoreticians like Dobszhansky and Hugh Ross who describe evolutionary transformism as progressive creationism. At any rate, billions of years of evolutionary transformism (antithesis) is according to what man said (i.e., Teilhard, Michael Dowd, Ken Wilber, Geering, etc) instead of six instantaneous acts/days of creation (thesis) according to what God Said. That is what it is about: thesis vs antithesis.
God the Father revealed Himself in several ways: 1) through the Person of His only begotten Son, Jesus, 2) through the Person of the indwelling Holy Spirit, 3) through Scripture and 4) through His creation both physical and spiritual.
It's not an either/or - the testimonies all agree. Indeed, TXnMA affirms that science is just now catching up with the truth of Genesis 1:1-4.
Scripture is God's revelation and so is His Creation. The one should not be pit against the other. If we have a problem reconciling the two, the problem is ours, not His.
I believe that I don't need ANYONE to act as a conduit to Christ. He shed his blood for me and I have a direct relationship with him - no stand ins necessary!
Oh so beautifully said, dearest sister in Christ! I SO agree.
But why would anyone want to "pit one against the other" in the first place?
It seems the "two worlds" are complementary in some vital way: a case of "you need both" to explicate the whole of which they are principal parts; this is not a true/false, yes/no competition.
On the other hand, nothing can make sense absent a prior sense of Truth — which bridges the above-metioned complementarity, in turn suggesting the possibility of reconciliation of Holy Scripture and human history and accumulated experience.
Whatever. Must run for now.
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister, for sharing your insights with me!
Thank you for your encouragements!
And -- with far more grace than I (as you will soon see) am able (or willing) to muster when faced with scurrilous treatment by a slavishly indoctrinated and doctrinaire organizational "mouthpiece".
~~~~~~~~~~~
spirited irish (or whatever senile friar or nun was then seated at the "spirited irish" keyboard):
Congratulations! You have acomplished something that I don't recall happening in my 76+ years of communicating with others: You produced an ad hominem mind-barf so outrageous and maliciously non sequitur -- that I was glad to step aside and let others (betty boop & Alamo-Girl) speak first -- on my behalf!
(BTW, you have not heard the last re your mal-directed comment...)
1 Timothy 2:5 "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;"
King James Version (KJV)
(Only Douay & Darby substitute "of" for "between" -- and they are (by far) the minority...)
My #232 was supposed to be addressed to you, as well...
Yes. And I have continually asked exactlywhere I have even suggested what you allege.
“I believe that I don't need ANYONE to act as a conduit to Christ.”
That is a brief summation of one of two polar opinions. It has taken a week to drag this much out of you.
Thanks, Brother, for your contribution. More help than we’ve otherwise enjoyed in a week.
That’s exactly what my point was! However, YHAOS has continually said that it’s a Priest that is the necessary conduit (mediator) to Christ.
Where did you get that “instantaneous” idiocy? Certainly from nowhere in Scripture...
It is an honor and pleasure to speak up for you, dear brother in Christ!
So you assert. The assertion does not prove the fact. Prove the fact. Demonstrate exactly how what you assert is true.
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