Posted on 05/24/2016 6:49:46 AM PDT by Salvation
Many of you know that I write the Question and Answer column for Our Sunday Visitor. Given the celebration of Trinity Sunday this past Sunday, I thought I might reproduce here on the blog a question/answer regarding the Trinity. It is a fairly common question; perhaps you have it, too. Remember that my answers in the column are required to be brief.
We read in a recent Sunday Gospel (May 1, 2016) that Jesus says that the Father is greater than He (Jn 14:28). Since we are all taught that each Divine Person of the Blessed Trinity fully possesses the nature of God, equally to be adored and glorified, what did Jesus mean by such a statement?” – Dick Smith, Carrolton, TX.
Theologically, Jesus means that the Father is the eternal source in the Trinity. All three persons of the Trinity are co-eternal, co-equal, and equally divine. But the Father is the Principium Deitatis (the Source in the Deity).
Hence, Jesus proceeds from the Father from all eternity. He is eternally begotten of the Father. In effect, Jesus is saying, “I delight that the Father is the eternal principle or source of my being, even though I have no origin in time.”
Devotionally, Jesus is saying that He always does what pleases His Father. Jesus loves His Father; He’s crazy about Him. He is always talking about Him and pointing to Him. By calling the Father greater, He says (in effect), “I look to my Father for everything. I do what I see Him doing (Jn 5:19) and what I know pleases Him (Jn 5:30). His will and mine are one. What I will to do proceeds from Him. I do what I know accords with His will.”
So although the members of the Trinity are all equal in dignity, there are processions in the Trinity, such that the Father is the source, the Son eternally proceeds from Him (Jn 8:42), and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principal (Jn 15:26).
St Thomas speaks poetically of the Trinity as follows:
Genitori, Genitoque … Procedenti ab utroque … compar sit laudautio
(To the One Who Begets, and to the Begotton One, and to the One who proceeds from them both, be equal praise.)
The Athanasian Creed says the following regarding these processions:
The Father is made by none, neither created nor begotten.
The Son is of the Father alone, neither made nor created, but begotten.
The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son, not made, nor created, nor begotten, but he proceeds from them.
So although equal, processions do have an order. The Father is “greater” (as source), but is equal in dignity to Son and Holy Spirit.
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Which is exactly why it was wise to NOT announce where it was. With some people's tendencies to idolize anything that has to do with anyone they respect, it would be a better decision to not advertise where it was.
She was the mother of their leader whom they worshiped as God.
" their leader whom they worshiped as God"
Wait... What???
You don't believe that Jesus was GOD? That His followers worship Him AS God?
oops
Every follower of Christ, at the time of her death, knew where she had been buried and would certainly have respected her burial place. She was the mother of their leader whom they worshiped as God.
I believe you are correct sir. Whenever false doctrine proliferates, even among the faithful, there are different opinions about the same issue.
Even when I was a Catholic, it was hard to put into words what I really believed. I guess I considered Mary to be almost as important as God, but only slightly less important. I worshipped her and prayed to her, so if that makes her a demigoddess, then yes, I considered her to be a demigoddess.
Of course I know, that she was a sinner, saved by faith in Christ, same as you and me, and she had lots of kids. One thing we know nothing about, because it just isn't very important, but we know nothing about Mary's grandchildren. With as many children as she had, I am sure she had numerous grandchildren.
Have you found Moses' body?
And we're not going to either! Also...notice Who did the burying.
5So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD. 6And He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor; but no man knows his burial place to this day. Deut 34:5-6
Every follower of Christ knew?? The believer in Libya knew? Antioch? Egypt? Every believer???
I guess it was in all the papers.
Don't give'em any ideas. Pretty soon they'll start selling replica's of "Mary's" house.
LOL. Good one bro. I think I had to pay for my scapular and missal, so why not plaques and replicas too? Sounds like an entrepreneur in the making. 😀
You are anachronistically reading Catholic devotion to Mary back into the NT where it simply does not exist. In all the life of the church, from Acts to Revelation, where or where do you see any devotion to Mary? Where or where do you even see her mentioned after the note that she was in the upper room leading to Pentecost? Even if you read her into Rv, 12, which is not here, there simply is no evidence of devotion to Mary at all in the life of the church with its descriptions of prayers and worship, and exhortations to obedience and means of grace, and of its notable persons. You must therefore charge that the Holy Spirit did not deem it important to note, which is absurd. Or you can read into Scripture what you can only wish was there.
Moreover, your hypothesis that absence of a know grave means that she must have been bodily assumed into Heaven is specious, for as John Chrysostom states,
"Tell me, are not the bones of Moses himself laid in a strange land? And those of Aaron, of Daniel, of Jeremiah? And as to those of the Apostles we do not know where those of most of them are laid. For of Peter indeed, and Paul, and John, and Thomas, the sepulchers are well known; but those of the rest, being so many, have nowhere become known. (Homilies On Hebrews, 26:2)
We are not even sure where the tomb of Christ was!
And as Jason Engwer writes,
If the early sources were refraining from mentioning Marian relics because they thought she was bodily assumed to Heaven, then why didn't they ever mention that bodily assumption? Wouldn't they be likely to mention such an unusual occurrence, especially if they held as high a view of Mary as the groups arguing for her assumption tend to..it's an illustration of the absurdity of the idea that Christians for hundreds of years would have known about a bodily assumption of Mary, yet would never have said anything about it in their extant writings, even when they're commenting on Mary.?
The church fathers of the earliest centuries repeatedly cite Enoch and Elijah as examples of people who didn’t die, were translated to Heaven, etc. (Clement of Rome, First Clement, 9; Tertullian, A Treatise On The Soul, 50; Tertullian, On The Resurrection Of The Flesh, 58; Tertullian, Against Marcion, 5:12; Methodius, From The Discourse On The Resurrection, 14), yet they never say any such thing about Mary or include her as an example. Irenaeus, for instance, writes about the power of God to deliver people from death, and he cites Enoch, Elijah, and Paul (2 Corinthians 12:2) as illustrations of people who were "assumed" and "translated", but he says nothing of Mary (Against Heresies, 5:5).
People claim to see references to an assumption of Mary in Biblical passages like Revelation 12. Yet, Hippolytus, Methodius, and other early fathers comment on such passages without saying anything of an assumption. How likely is it that all of these writers, commenting in so many different contexts, would all refrain from mentioning Mary’s assumption, even though they knew of it? Though Roman Catholics give Mary so much attention and claim that Mary is God’s greatest creation, the apocryphal assumption of Moses receives more attention among the ante-Nicene fathers than Mary’s assumption (which isn’t mentioned at all).
But Rome can "remember" what is needed when lacking actual warrant for something from where it should be found. Ratzinger states,
Before Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven was defined, all theological faculties in the world were consulted for their opinion. Our teachers' answer was emphatically negative. What here became evident was the one-sidedness, not only of the historical, but of the historicist method in theology. “Tradition” was identified with what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner, the patrologist from Wurzburg…had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the 5C; this doctrine, therefore, he argued, could not belong to the “apostolic tradition. And this was his conclusion, which my teachers at Munich shared.
How then can making belief in the Assumption a binding doctrine? Why by claiming Rome can "remember" what history forgot:"
But if you conceive of “tradition” as the living process whereby the Holy Spirit introduces us to the fullness of truth and teaches us how to understand what previously we could still not grasp (cf. Jn 16:12-13), then subsequent “remembering” (cf. Jn 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it has not caught sight of previously and was already handed down in the original Word,” J. Ratzinger, Milestones (Ignatius, n.d.), 58-59.
But which is mere sophistry, for it changes an event that has no historical warrant for belief into a teaching that too hard to understand, but which is not the case here, and in fact Caths point to the record of bodily assumptions in Scripture as understandable support for the alleged assumption of Mary.
Webster's THE ASSUMPTION OF MARY has more on this.
Even as a baptist this has always been a question of mine
Reasonable sounding enough explanation
Well, maybe whoever came up with it, was fishing for it in the drink, and they found it. You know, the dead religion imagining INC. 😀😆
WHOA!!! Fortunately for you Dan that you didn't make that comment. Wasn't our Lord begat eternally? Someone has some theological problems somewhere.
See post 1074.
HMMMmmm...
So does Rome...
Every follower of MOSES, at the time of HIS death, knew where HE had been buried and would certainly have respected HIS burial place. HE was their leader whom they worshiped adored, venerated and respected as one who talked with God.
Utah; that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross
In the BEGINNING...
Yabut ... MY true is true as opposed to Romes LYIN’ true
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