Posted on 02/23/2003 12:27:57 AM PST by Destro
Edited on 04/13/2004 1:55:56 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Interested in learning more about the religion.
When He comes you won't need pictures!
Maybe I don't catch the point, but was this vision supposed to characterize the sacrifice of Christ for our sins? The one from whom no one took his life, but he laid it down of his own accord? We didn't choose to cause Jesus Christ to bear our sin. God the Father chose him to bear our sin.
But of course worship of God the Son didn't stop when He ascended back into heaven. It hadn't even reached its climax. Neither do the realities that pictures are intended to represent, require the presence of the pictures to appreciate to the full. A man might as well be preoccupied with pictures of his wife while in her very presence. She'd certainly view this as strange.
Allegory - The Holy Eucharistic bread and wine is the actual blood and body of the sinless Christ which Christians consume. The Saracen saw the vision of the bread and wine transformed to the body and blood of Christ which being sinless was processed in the Muslim's mind as being like a baby. In other words even though the man was a Muslim it seems he was a righteous man and saw the Holy Eucharistic miracle before his eyes but not being a Christian could not process and comprehend what he saw.
The part of the vision that doesn't fit the gospel accounts is the part about the priest slaying the infant. Christ gives his body "which has been broken" -- past tense -- for us. I couldn't possibly buy Christian doctrine if I had to believe a priest was killing Christ on my behalf.
A Christian is free not beleive that they are consuming the actual body and blood of Christ but that would not be historic Chirstianity.
I am sure there are many Protestants converting (is that the word?) to Orthodoxy...although an even more dramatic amd significant development is Catholics and Orthodox becoming born again Protestants.
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