Posted on 05/11/2005 10:04:08 AM PDT by NYer
It has to be one of the strangest things in the world: So many Christians who love Jesus with all their hearts recoil in fear at the mention of His mother's name, while many who do love her find themselves tongue-tied when asked to explain why.
Most of the issues people have with Mary are really issues about something else. "Where is the Assumption of Mary in the Bible?" isn't really a question about Mary. It's a question about the validity of Sacred Tradition and the authority of the Church. "Why should I pray to Mary?" isn't really about Mary, either. It's actually a question about the relationship of the living and the dead in Christ. "Do Catholics worship Mary?" isn't a question about Mary. It's concerned more with whether or not Catholics countenance idolatry and what the word "honor" means. And curiously enough, all these and many more objections both pay homage to and completely overlook the central truth about Mary that the Catholic Church labors to help us see: that her life, in its entirety, is a referred life. Sublime Neglect The Cultural Obstacles The Heart of Marian Doctrine Defeating Destructive Ideologies
Mary would, after all, be of absolutely no consequence to us if not for her Son. It is because she is the mother of Jesus Christ that she matters to the world at all. If He hadn't been born, you never would have heard of her. John, with characteristic economy of expression, captures this referred life in her own words: "Do whatever He tells you" (Jn 2:5). And, of course, if this were all the Church had to say about her, Evangelicals would be more than happy to let her refer us to Jesus and be done with it. What baffles so many non-Catholics is the Church's tendency to keep referring us to her. "Ad Iesum per Mariam!" we say, to which many non-Catholics nervously respond, "Isn't Christianity supposed be about a relationship with Jesus Christ? Why do Catholics honor Mary so much?"
That question sounded reasonable — right up until another question began to bother me: If Catholics honor Mary too much, exactly how do we Evangelicals honor her "just enough"? For the reality was that my native evangelicalism recoiled from any and all mention of Mary.
This was odd. After all, Evangelicals could talk all day about Paul and never feel we were "worshipping" him or giving him "too much honor." We rightly understood that God's Word comes to us through St. Paul, and there's no conflict between the two (even though Paul exhibits more character flaws than Mary).
Yet the slightest mention of Mary by a Catholic immediately brought a flood of warnings, hesitations, scrutinies of her lack of faith (allegedly demonstrated in Mark 3:21), and even assertions that Jesus was less pleased with her than he was with His disciples (because he called her "Woman," not "Mom"; and because He commended His own disciples as "my brother and sister and mother" (Mk 3:35)). And all this was despite the fact that not just God's word (e.g. the Magnificat), but God's Word, came to us through Mary (Jn 1:14). As Evangelicals we could say, "If not for Paul, the Gospel would never have reached the Gentiles." But we froze up if somebody argued that, "If not for Mary, the Gospel would never have reached the earth." Suddenly, a flurry of highly speculative claims about how "God would simply have chosen somebody else!" would fill the air, as though Mary was a mere incubation unit, completely interchangeable with any other woman on earth. "No Paul, no Gospel for the Gentiles" made perfect sense. But "No Mary, no incarnation, no death, no resurrection, no salvation for the world" was just too extreme.
Indeed, from evangelical piety and preaching as it is actually practiced, one could be forgiven for getting the sense that Jesus didn't really even like His mother (like a teenager irritated because Mom just doesn't understand him). Having "Mary is No Big Deal" hammered home whenever her name was raised tended to give you the feeling that — after her brief photo-op for the Hallmark Christmas card industry — Jesus was glad to spend time away from the family, in the Temple discussing higher things. The position in evangelicalism was more or less that we should do likewise and not lavish any attention on the mother who was too dim to understand Who He was, and whom He "rebuked" by saying, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"
And so, our claims to honor her "just enough" effectively boiled down to paying no shred of positive attention to her beyond singing "round yon Virgin, mother and child" each Christmas. The rest of the time it was either complete neglect or jittery assurances of her unimportance and dark warnings not to over-emphasize the woman of whom inspired Scripture said, "From this day all generations will call me blessed."
It was a startling paradigm shift to realize we treated her so allergically — and one which, I have since noticed, isn't unusual for converts. Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society, told me once that when he was still hanging back from the Church because of Mary, a blunt priest he knew asked him, "Do you believe her soul magnifies the Lord? It's right there in Scripture." Ahlquist reflexively answered back, "Of course I do! I know the Bible!" But even as he replied he was thinking to himself, "I never really thought of that before." It can be a disorienting experience.
But, in fact, it is right there in the Bible. Her soul magnifies the Lord, and from that day to this all generations have called her blessed. So why, when we Evangelicals looked at Jesus, did we never look at Him through the divinely appointed magnifying glass? Why were we so edgy about calling her "blessed" and giving her any honor? That realization was my first clue that it was, perhaps, Catholics who were simply being normal and human in honoring Mary, while we Evangelicals were more like teetotalers fretting that far too much wine was being drunk at the wedding in Cana.
Part of the problem, I came to realize, was that evangelical fears about Mary are visceral and not entirely theological. Indeed, much of the conflict between Catholics and Evangelicals is cultural, not theological. Evangelical culture (whether you're a man or a woman) is overwhelmingly masculine, while Catholic culture (again, whether you're a man or a woman) is powerfully feminine. And the two groups often mistake their cultural differences for theological ones.
The Catholic approach tends to be body-centered, Eucharistic, and contemplative. Prayer, in Catholic culture, is primarily for seeking union with God. Evangelical approaches to God tend to be centered on Scripture, verbal articulation of belief, mission, and on the Spirit working in power. Prayer, in such a culture, is primarily for getting things done. Both are legitimate Christian ways of approaching the Gospel. Indeed, they should both be part of the Catholic approach to the Gospel. But because of these unconscious differences Evangelicals and Catholics often clash about culture while they think they're debating theology. The feminine spirituality of the Catholic can regard the masculine evangelical approach as shallow, noisy, and utilitarian, lacking an interior life. Meanwhile, Catholic piety can be seen by Evangelicals as a cold, dead, ritualistic, biblically ignorant, and cut off from real life. Thus, Evangelicals frequently criticize the Catholic life as a retreat from reality into rituals and rote prayers.
Not surprisingly, the heroes of the two camps are (for Evangelicals) the Great Human Dynamo of Apostolic Energy, St. Paul; and (for Catholics) the great icon of Contemplative Prayer Issuing in Incarnation, the Blessed Virgin Mary. As an Evangelical, I found Paul much easier to appreciate, since he was "biblical" — he wrote much of the New Testament, after all. You could talk about Paul since he'd left such a significant paper trail. Not so with Mary. Apart from the Magnificat and a couple remarks here and there — plus, of course, the infancy narratives — she didn't appear to occupy nearly as much psychic space for the authors of the New Testament as she did for Catholics. Marian devotion looked like a mountain of piety built on a molehill of Scripture.
Looks, however, can be deceiving. For as I got to know the Bible better, it became obvious to me that the authors of Scripture were not nearly as jittery about Mary as my native evangelicalism. Furthermore, they accorded to her honors which looked a great deal more Catholic than evangelical.
Luke, for instance, likens her to the Ark of the Covenant in recording that the Holy Spirit "overshadowed" her. The same word in Greek is used to describe the way the Shekinah (glory of God) overshadowed the tabernacle in Luke 1:35. Likewise, John makes the same connection between Mary and the Ark of the Covenant when he announces in Revelation 11:19-12:2:
Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of His covenant was seen within His temple; and there were flashes of lightning, voices, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail. And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery.
The chapter goes on to describe the woman as giving birth to a male child who rules the nations with an iron scepter and who is almost devoured by a great red dragon.
As an Evangelical, my own tradition found it remarkably easy to detect bar codes, Soviet helicopters, the European Common Market, and the Beatles encoded into the narrative of Revelation. But when Catholics suggested that the woman of Revelation might have something to do with the Blessed Virgin occupying a place of cosmic importance in the grand scheme of things, this was dismissed as incredible. Everyone knew that the woman of Revelation was really the symbolic Virgin Daughter of Zion giving birth to the Church. A Jewish girl who stood at the pinnacle of the Old Covenant, summed up the entirety of Israel's mission and gave flesh to the Head of the Church saying, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word" — what could she possibly have to do with those images? Why, that would suggest that she was the Virgin Daughter of Zion and the Flower of her People, the Model Disciple, the Icon of the Church, the Mother of Jesus and of all those who are united with Him by faith and...
Come to think of it, Scripture was looking rather Catholic after all.
That was the revolutionary thought that made it possible for me to press on, as a new Catholic, to find out what the Church was trying to get at with her Marian teaching. In coming to understand this, it seemed to me, I'd come a long way toward understanding why Mary figures so prominently, not merely in the heads, but in the hearts of Catholics.
The first question that arises, of course, is, "Why Marian dogma at all?" Why not just dogmas about Christ and let Catholics think what they like about Mary? Why bind consciences here?
The answer is that Catholics do think what they like — not only about Mary, but about lots of things. And sometimes they think deeply erroneous things. When they do, and that thought imperils some revealed truth to the point it threatens the integrity of the Church's witness, the Church will, from time to time, define its doctrine more precisely. This is a process that's already at work in the New Testament (cf. Acts 15), and it continues until the return of Christ.
So, for instance, in the fifth century there arose (yet again) the question of just who Jesus is. It was a question repeated throughout antiquity and, in this case, an answer to the question was proposed by the Nestorians. They argued that the mortal man Jesus and the Logos, or Second Person of the Trinity, were more or less two persons occupying the same head. For this reason, they insisted that Mary could not be acclaimed (as she had been popularly acclaimed for a very long time) as Theotokos, or God-bearer. Instead, she should only be called Christotokos, or Christ-bearer. She was, they insisted, the Mother of Jesus, not of God.
The problem with this was that it threatened the very witness of the Church and could even lead logically to the notion that there were two Sons of God, the man Jesus and the Logos who was sharing a room with Him in His head. In short, it was a doorway to theological chaos over one of the most basic truths of the Faith: that the Word became flesh, died, and rose for our sins.
So the Church formulated its response. First, Jesus Christ is not two persons occupying the same head. He is one person possessing two natures, human and divine, joined in a hypostatic union. Second, it was appropriate to therefore call Mary Theotokos because she's the Mother of the God-Man. When the God-Man had His friends over for lunch, He didn't introduce Mary saying, "This is the mother of my human nature." He said, "This is my mother."
Why did the Church do this? Because, once again, Mary points to Jesus. The dogma of the Theotokos is a commentary on Jesus, a sort of "hedge" around the truth about Jesus articulated by the Church. Just as Nestorianism had tried to attack the orthodox teaching of Christ through Mary (by forbidding the veneration of her as Theotokos), now the Church protected that teaching about Christ by making Theotokos a dogma. That is a vital key to understanding Marian dogmas: They're always about some vital truth concerning Jesus, the nature of the Church, or the nature of the human person.
This is evident, for instance, in the definition of Mary as a Perpetual Virgin (promulgated in 553 at the Council of Constantinople). This tradition isn't so much explicitly attested as reflected in the biblical narrative. Yes, we must grant that the biblical narrative is ambiguous in that it speaks of Jesus's "brothers" (but does it mean "siblings" or merely "relatives"?). However, other aspects of the biblical narrative strongly suggest she remained a virgin.
For instance, Mary reacts with astonishment at the news that she, a woman betrothed, will bear a son. If you are at a wedding shower and tell the bride-to-be, "You're going to have cute kids" and she responds "How can that be?" you can only conclude one of two things: she either doesn't know about the birds and the bees or she's taken a vow of virginity. In short, the promise of a child is an odd thing for a betrothed woman to be amazed about... unless, of course, she'd already decided to remain a virgin even after marriage.
Likewise, Joseph reacts with fear at the thought of taking Mary as a wife. Why fear? Modernity assumes it was because he thought her guilty of adultery, but the typical view in antiquity understood the text to mean he was afraid of her sanctity — as a pious Jew would be afraid to touch the Ark of the Covenant. After all, think of what Mary told him about the angel's words: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God."
I'm not even a pious Jew, but with words like that echoing in my ears about my wife, I'd find it easy to believe that Joseph, knowing what he did about his wife, would have chosen celibacy.
"But nothing is sure, based on the text alone. It's still ambiguous," says the critic. Right. The biblical text alone doesn't supply an unambiguous answer to this or a myriad of other questions, including "Is the Holy Spirit God?," "How do you contract a valid marriage?," and "Can you be a polygamist?" But the Tradition of the Church in union with the biblical text does supply an answer: Mary had no other children, a fact so commonly known throughout the early Church that when Jerome attacks Helvidius for suggesting otherwise, nobody makes a peep. In a Church quite capable of tearing itself to pieces over distinctions between homoousious and homoiousious, you hear the sound of crickets in response to Jerome, punctuated with the sound of other Fathers singing hymns to "Mary, Ever-Virgin." The early Church took it for granted and thought Helvidius as credible as Dan Brown.
But why a dogma about it? Because, again, Mary's life is a referred life. Her virginity, like Christ's, speaks of her total consecration to God and of our call as Christians to be totally consecrated as well. Her virginity is not a stunt or a magic trick to make the arrival of Messiah extra strange. It is, rather, a sign to the Church and of the Church. And that matters for precisely the reason I'd thought it did not matter when I was an Evangelical: because Christianity is indeed supposed be about a relationship with Jesus Christ. But a relationship necessarily involves more than one person.
It comes down to is this: Jesus can do a world of wonderful things, but there is something even Jesus cannot do: He cannot model for us what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus. Only a disciple of Jesus can do that. And the first and best model of the disciple of Jesus is the one who said and lived "Yes!" to God, spontaneously and without even the benefit of years of training or the necessity of being knocked off a horse and blinded. And she continues to do so right through the agony of watching her Son die and the ecstasy of knowing Him raised again.
This is why the Church, like the Gospels, has always called Mary our Mother: because Mom is the best model for training children. The command to call her "Mother" comes, of course, from Jesus Himself. John doesn't record the words "Behold your mother" (Jn 19:27) because he thought his readers might be curious about domestic arrangements for childless Jewish widows. Rather, as with everything else John writes, "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name" (Jn 20:31). In other words, he doesn't record everything about Jesus, only those things that have a significant theological meaning. This includes Christ's words to the Beloved Disciple. For the Beloved Disciple is you and not merely John. Mary is your mother and you are her child. And so we are to look to her as mother and imitate her as she imitates Christ.
This brings us to the last two (and intimately related) Marian dogmas. Given that Marian dogma is always a commentary on Christ and His Church, what is the Church saying in its dogmatic teaching that 1) Mary was preserved at the moment of her conception from the stain of all sin, both original and actual; and 2) Mary was assumed bodily into heaven at the end of her earthly existence?
The great crisis that faced the Church in the 19th century (when the Holy Spirit, doing His job of leading the Church into all truth, led the Church to promulgate the dogma of the Immaculate Conception) was the rise of several ideologies — still very much with us — that called into question the origins and dignity of the human person. Darwin said the human person was an unusually clever piece of meat whose origins were as accidental as a pig's nose. Marx said humans were mere ingredients in a vast economic historical process. Laissez-faire capitalism saw people as natural resources to be exploited and thrown away when they lost their value. Eugenics said human dignity rested on "fitness." Much of Protestantism declared humans "totally depraved," while much of the Enlightenment held up the myth of human innocence, the "noble savage," and the notion of human perfectibility through reason. Racial theory advanced the notion that the key to human dignity was the shape of your skull, the color of your skin, and your membership in the Aryan or Teutonic tribe. Freud announced that your illusion of human dignity was just a veil over fathomless depths of unconscious processes largely centering in the groin or emerging out of issues with Mom and Dad.
All these ideologies - and many others - had in common the degrading rejection of human beings as creatures made in the image of God and intended for union with God (and the consequent subjection of the human person to some sort of creature). In contrast to them all, the Church, in holding up the icon of Mary Immaculate, held up an icon of both our true origin and our true dignity. That she was sinless was a teaching as old as the hills in the Church, which had hailed her as Kecharitomene, or "full of grace," since the time of Luke, and saluted her as Panagia, or all-holy, since the early centuries of the Church. So then why did the Holy Spirit move the Church to develop and focus this immemorial teaching more clearly?
Because what needed to be said loud and clear was that we were made in the image of God and that our fallenness, though very real, does not name or define us: Jesus Christ does. We are not mere animals, statistical averages, cogs in a machine, sophisticated primordial ooze, or a jangling set of complexes, appetites, tribal totems, Aryan supermen, naturally virtuous savages, or totally depraved Mr. Hydes. We were made by God, for God. Therefore sin, though normal, is not natural and doesn't constitute our humanity. And the proof of it was Mary, who was preserved from sin and yet was more human than the lot of us. She wasn't autonomously innocent, as though she could make it without God. She was the biggest recipient of grace in the universe, a grace that made her, in a famous phrase, "younger than sin." Because of it, she was free to be what Irenaeus described as "the glory of God": a human being fully alive. And as she is, so can the grace of Christ make us.
The 19th-century ideologies didn't, however, remain in libraries and classrooms. In the 20th century, they were enacted by the powers of state, science, business, entertainment, education, and the military into programs that bore abundant fruit in such enterprises as global and regional wars, the Holocaust, the great famines, the killing fields, the "great leap forward," the sexual revolution, and the culture of death, which is still reaping a rich bounty of spiritual and physical destruction. In short, as the 19th-century philosophies assaulted the dignity and origin of the human person, so the working out of those philosophies on the ground in the 20th century assaulted the dignity and destiny of the human person.
So what did the Holy Spirit do? Once again, in 1950, in the middle of a century that witnessed the biggest assault on the human person and on the family that the world has ever seen, the Church again held up Mary as an icon of who we really are and who we are meant to become by promulgating the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. Just as the Immaculate Conception held Mary up as the icon of the divine dignity of our origins, so the Church, in teaching "that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory" was now holding her up as the icon of the divine dignity of our destiny.
The Church is repeating, in effect, that the God Who loves the world does not will that our fate be the oven, the mass grave, the abortuary, the anonymity of the factory, the brothel, the cubicle, or the street. The proper end of our life is supposed to be for us, as it already is for her, the ecstatic glory of complete union with the Triune God in eternity. Once again, God shows us something vital about our relationship to Himself through her, His greatest saint.
And that, in the end, is the point of Marian devotion and theology. Through our Lady, we see Jesus Christ reflected in the eyes of His greatest saint. But we also see "what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power in us who believe, according to the working of His great might" (Eph 1:18-19). For what He has already done for her, He will one day do also in us.
***You will find that it was geocentric scientists who pressured the Church to put a muzzle on Galileo for disagreeing with the Bible's literal interpretation.***
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
The Inquisition had rejected earlier pleas by Galileo to postpone or relocate the trial because of his ill health. At a meeting presided by Pope Urban VIII, the Inquisition decided to notify Galileo that he either had to come to Rome or that he would be arrested and brought there in chains. Galileo arrived in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition on February 13, 1633. After two weeks in quarantine, Galileo was detained at the comfortable residence of the Tuscan ambassador, as a favor to the influential Grand Duke Ferdinand II de' Medici. When the ambassador reported Galileo's arrival and asked how long the proceedings would be, the Pope replied that the Holy Office proceeded slowly, and was still in the process of preparing for the formal proceedings. In the event, having responded to the urgent demands of the Inquisition that he must report to Rome immediately, Galileo was left to wait for two months before proceedings would begin.
On April 12, 1633, Galileo was brought to trial, and the formal interrogation by the Inquisition began. During this interrogation Galileo stated that he did not defend the Copernican theory, and cited a letter of Cardinal Bellarmine from 1615 to support this contention. The Inquisition questioned him on whether he had been ordered in 1616 not to teach Copernican ideas in any way (see above); he denied remembering any such order, and produced a letter from Bellarmine saying only that he was not to hold or defend those doctrines.
He was then detained for eighteen days in a room in the offices of the Inquisition (not in a dungeon cell). During this time the Commissary General of the Inquisition, Vincenzo (later Cardinal) Maculano, visited him for what amounted to plea bargaining, persuading Galileo to confess to having gone too far in writing the book. In a second hearing on April 30, Galileo confessed to having erred in the writing of the book, through vain ambition, ignorance, and inadvertence. He was then allowed to return to the home of the Tuscan ambassador. On May 10, he submitted his written defense, in which he defended himself against the charge of disobeying the Church's order, confessed to having erred through pride in writing the book, and asked for mercy in light of his age and ill health.
A month later (June 21), by order of the Pope, he was given an examination of intention, a formal process that involved showing the accused the instruments of torture. At this proceeding, he said, "I am here to obey, and have not held this [Copernican] opinion after the determination made, as I said."
On June 22, 1633, the Inquisition held the final hearing on Galileo, who was then 69 years old and pleaded for mercy, pointing to his "regrettable state of physical unwellness". Threatening him with torture, imprisonment, and death on the stake, the show trial forced Galileo to "abjure, curse and detest" his work and to promise to denounce others who held his prior viewpoint. Galileo did everything the church requested him to do, following (so far as we can tell) the plea bargain of two months earlier. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Although ten Cardinal Inquisitors had heard the case, the sentence carried out on June 22 bears the signature of only seven; one of the three missing was Cardinal Barberini, the Pope's nephew. It is generally held that this indicates a refusal to endorse the sentence. The seven who signed, however, were those who were present at that day's proceedings; Cardinals Barberini and Borgia in particular, were attending an audience with the Pope on that day. Analysis of the Inquisition's records has shown that the presence of only seven of ten Cardinals was not exceptional; hence the inference that Barberini was protesting the decision may be doubted.
"All things must be done decently and orderly, but there is a certain pragmatic freedom in Christ as to exactly how we organize ourselves."
How so? Seems pretty clear that false teachers were to be shunned throughout Scripture. Seems pretty clear that there was only ONE Gospel. Seems pretty clear that the Apostles established lines of authority in the Churches that they visited. Seems pretty clear that Jesus gave the power to bind and loosen ONLY to the Apostles and their successors, not to the entire Church. What specifically do you mean by "freedom" to organize ourselves?
Regards
***Seems pretty clear that Jesus gave the power to bind and loosen ONLY to the Apostles and their successors, not to the entire Church.***
Can you provide a reference for this?
***What specifically do you mean by "freedom" to organize ourselves? ***
Because the NT does not specifically lay out how the church is to be organized. Who leads the local assembly? The "Shepherd", a "teacher", a "prophet" the elders???
Also there is no set order of service.
This does not make clear which "Copernican ideas" specifically were condemned. My general understanding is that the Church objected to the theology that questioned man's dominion over nature and was attaching itself to heliocentrism. It is very similar to those who today object to Darwinianism inasmuch as it attached itself to atheism, not to legitimate study of reproduction and evolution.
I have to disagree. Christ, Himself, didn't have "pragmatic freedon". To wit, the agony in Gethsemane. The prescribed will of God was Christ's mission on earth. The path to heaven is not forgiving towards "pragmatic freedom", rather, it is narrrow and filled with briers and thorns. The wide, easy path allows for all the pragmatic freedom anyone can want. So if the literal body of Christ was beholden to His pre-ordained method and manner of suffering on the Cross, how then can the Church "body of Christ" be any more "pragmatic" than Christ was permitted to be?
Respectfully in Christ.
This does not make clear which "Copernican ideas" specifically were condemned.
Specifically heliocentricism...
"In 1616, the Inquisition warned Galileo not to hold or defend the hypothesis asserted in Copernicus's On the Revolutions,... "
"The Copernican system can be summarized in seven propositions, as Copernicus himself collected them in a Compendium of De revolutionibus... that was found and published in 1878:
1. Orbits and celestial spheres do not have a unique, common, center.
2. The center of the Earth is not the center of the Universe, but only the center of the Earth's mass and of the lunar orbit.
3. All the planets move along orbits whose center is the Sun, therefore the Sun is the center of the World. (Copernicus was never certain whether the Sun moved or not, claiming that the center of the World is 'in the Sun, or near it.')
4. The distance between the Earth and the Sun, compared with the distance between the Earth and the fixed stars, is very small.
5. The daytime movement of the Sun is only apparent, and represents the effect of a rotation that the Earth makes every 24 hours around its axis, always parallel to itself.
6. The Earth (together with its Moon, and just like the other planets) moves around the Sun, so the movements that the Sun seems making (its apparent moving during daytime, and its annual moving through the Zodiac) are nothing else than effects of the Earth's real movements.
7. These movements of the Earth and of the other planets around the Sun, can explain the stations, and all the particular characteristics of the planets' movements."
- Wikipedia
"You seem to be saying that before the book of Acts was written, there was no writing that was the same as the book of Acts. It doesn't seem to be a really strong point but I agree that before any book was written it didn't exist."
The point that I am making is that the Early Church was able to make decisions, to bind and loosen upon the entire Church, WITHOUT THE USE OF SCRIPTURE! We see here a precedence of action. The Church believed that the Holy Spirit guides them (Acts 15:28). They made a decision that was to be implemented throughout the world (Acts 16:4). That is the point. The Scriptures did not dictate the decision. This is brought up to show you that the Bible is not the sole source of faith of Christianity. The written Word of God is infallible and inspired by God. The Church defines nothing that goes against the Scriptures. God is a God of truth, whether speaking through Councils or through Scriptures. To better understand Catholics, one must understand that we realize that our Church has divinely guided authority to make decisions that are binding (or loosening) on the rest of the community. Sola Scriptura does not apply, especially in Acts 15.
The Apostles were the vessels through which the scriptures came into being.
These very same Apostles led the early church.
There is no discontinuity here.
***Christ, Himself, didn't have "pragmatic freedon".***
But he did, in certain realms - like what he would wear, or what he would eat etc.
***The path to heaven is not forgiving towards "pragmatic freedom", ***
2 Corinthians 3:17
"... where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."
Galatians 5:1
"For freedom Christ has set us free;"
1 Peter 2:16
"Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God."
Specifically what I means in this. The NT is not a book of rules. You will be hard pressed to find many rules in the NT - especially when compared to the OT.
What we do have is a book of truth and principles. We are to live our lives by principles and are to be guided and empowered by the Spirit to do so. We are presented with truth and are told to go out and live our lives in light of that.
Example:
Ephesians 1-3 "Look at all the wonderful things Christ has done for you.
Ephesians 4-6 "Now in light of all these things go out there and walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called".
Your thoughts?
Seems pretty clear that Jesus gave the power to bind and loosen ONLY to the Apostles and their successors, not to the entire Church.
The clearest reading of scripture is that Jesus gave authority to bind and loose ONLY to the Apostles.
There is no scriptural hint that there would be successive generations of Apostles.
The Apostles, along with the OT Prophets ... are the FOUNDATION of the church, ... with CHRIST Himself as the chief cornerstone.
Only one foundation was laid ... that (Aposolic) ministry does not continue.Ephesians 2:19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;
20 And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone;
21 In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord:
22 In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.
In spite of all deficiency in his arguments, Galileo, profoundly assured of the truth of his cause, set himself with his habitual vehemence to convince others, and so contributed in no small degree to create the troubles which greatly embittered the latter part of his life. In regard to their history, there are two main points to be considered. It is in the first place constantly assumed, especially at the present day, that the opposition which Copernicanism encountered at the hands of ecclesiastical authority was prompted by hatred of science and a desire to keep the minds of men in the darkness of ignorance. To suppose that any body of men could deliberately adopt such a course is ridiculous, especially a body which, with whatever defects of method, had for so long been the only one which concerned itself with science at all. It is likewise contradicted by the history of the very controversy with which we are now concerned. According to a popular notion the point, upon which beyond all others churchmen were determined to insist, was the geocentric system of astronomy. Nevertheless it was a churchman, Nicholas Copernicus, who first advanced the contrary doctrine that the sun and not the earth is the centre of our system, round which our planet revolves, rotating on its own axis. His great work, "De Revolutionibus orblure coelestium", was published at the earnest solicitation of two distinguished churchmen, Cardinal Schömberg and Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Culm. It was dedicated by permission to Pope Paul III in order, as Copernicus explained, that it might be thus protected from the attacks which it was sure to encounter on the part of the "mathematicians" (i.e. philosophers) for its apparent contradiction of the evidence of our senses, and even of common sense. He added that he made no account of objections which might be brought by ignorant wiseacres on Scriptural grounds. Indeed, for nearly three quarters of a century no such difficulties were raised on the Catholic side, although Luther and Melanchthon condemned the work of Copernicus in unmeasured terms. Neither Paul III, nor any of the nine popes who followed him, nor the Roman Congregations raised any alarm, and, as has been seen, Galileo himself in 1597, speaking of the risks he might run by an advocacy of Copernicanism, mentioned ridicule only and said nothing of persecution. Even when he had made his famous discoveries, no change occurred in this respect. On the contrary, coming to Rome in 1611, he was received in triumph; all the world, clerical and lay, flocked to see him, and, setting up his telescope in the Quirinal Garden belonging to Cardinal Bandim, he exhibited the sunspots and other objects to an admiring throng.It was not until four years later that trouble arose, the ecclesiastical authorities taking alarm at the persistence with which Galileo proclaimed the truth of the Copernican doctrine. That their opposition was grounded, as is constantly assumed, upon a fear lest men should be enlightened by the diffusion of scientific truth, it is obviously absurd to maintain. On the contrary, they were firmly convinced, with Bacon and others, that the new teaching was radically false and unscientific, while it is now truly admitted that Galileo himself had no sufficient proof of what he so vehemently advocated, and Professor Huxley after examining the case avowed his opinion that the opponents of Galileo "had rather the best of it". But what, more than all, raised alarm was anxiety for the credit of Holy Scripture, the letter of which was then universally believed to be the supreme authority in matters of science, as in all others. When therefore it spoke of the sun staying his course at the prayer of Joshua, or the earth as being ever immovable, it was assumed that the doctrine of Copernicus and Galileo was anti-Scriptural; and therefore heretical. It is evident that, since the days of Copernicus himself, the Reformation controversy had done much to attach suspicion to novel interpretations of the Bible, which was not lessened by the endeavours of Galileo and his ally Foscarini to find positive arguments for Copernicanism in the inspired volume. Foscarini, a Carmelite friar of noble lineage, who had twice ruled Calabria as provincial, and had considerable reputation as a preacher and theologian, threw himself with more zeal than discretion into the controversy, as when he sought to find an argument for Copernicanism in the seven-branched candlestick of the Old Law. Above all, he excited alarm by publishing works on the subject in the vernacular, and thus spreading the new doctrine, which was startling even for the learned, amongst the masses who were incapable of forming any sound judgment concerning it. There was at the time an active sceptical party in Italy, which aimed at the overthrow of all religion, and, as Sir David Brewster acknowledges (Martyrs of Science), there is no doubt that this party lent Galileo all its support.
In these circumstances, Galileo, hearing that some had denounced his doctrine as anti-Scriptural, presented himself at Rome in December, 1615, and was courteously received. He was presently interrogated before the Inquisition, which after consultation declared the system he upheld to be scientifically false, and anti-Scriptural or heretical, and that he must renounce it. This he obediently did, promising to teach it no more. Then followed a decree of the Congregation of the Index dated 5 March 1616, prohibiting various heretical works to which were added any advocating the Copernican system. In this decree no mention is made of Galileo, or of any of his works. Neither is the name of the pope introduced, though there is no doubt that he fully approved the decision, having presided at the session of the Inquisition, wherein the matter was discussed and decided. In thus acting, it is undeniable that the ecclesiastical authorities committed a grave and deplorable error, and sanctioned an altogether false principle as to the proper use of Scripture. Galileo and Foscarini rightly urged that the Bible is intended to teach men to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that, while there was as yet no sufficient proof of the Copernican system, no objection was made to its being taught as an hypothesis which explained all phenomena in a simpler manner than the Ptolemaic, and might for all practical purposes be adopted by astronomers. What was objected to was the assertion that Copernicanism was in fact true, "which appears to contradict Scripture". It is clear, moreover, that the authors of the judgment themselves did not consider it to be absolutely final and irreversible, for Cardinal Bellarmine, the most influential member of the Sacred College, writing to Foscarini, after urging that he and Galileo should be content to show that their system explains all celestial phenomena -- an unexceptional proposition, and one sufficient for all practical purposes -- but should not categorically assert what seemed to contradict the Bible, thus continued:
I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated.[...]After his return to Florence, Galileo set himself to compose the work which revived and aggravated all former animosities, namely a dialogue in which a Ptolemist is utterly routed and confounded by two Copernicans. This was published in 1632, and, being plainly inconsistent with his former promise, was taken by the Roman authorities as a direct challenge. He was therefore again cited before the Inquisition, and again failed to display the courage of his opinions, declaring that since his former trial in 1616 he had never held the Copernican theory. Such a declaration, naturally was not taken very seriously, and in spite of it he was condemned as "vehemently suspected of heresy" to incarceration at the pleasure of the tribunal and to recite the Seven Penitential Psalms once a week for three years.
Under the sentence of imprisonment Galileo remained till his death in 1642. [...]
The discontinuity is between Acts and when your church was organized.
It's as if the history between vanished.
How did your church handle the enlightenment and the separation of science from theology?
***How did your church handle the enlightenment and the separation of science from theology?***
Not well!
But I don't know of anyone who did - do you?
The discontinuity is between Acts and when your church was organized.
It's as if the history between vanished.
There are many lines of history from Acts until the church of today.
One line of history is that the Apostles which ministered with Jesus for three years ... and led the early NT church ... also were led by the Holy Spirit to leave a written record of ...... the life of Christ,These writings ultimately came to form the unblemished basis for the church of this day.
... the history of the NT church,
... pastoral writings to the NT church,
... and a prophetic vision of the last surviving Apostle.
We, today, ... have the very writings of the Apostles of Jesus Christ.
The church has always depended upon the teachings of the Apostles (the foundation).
Such is perfectly reliable history.
And there your history stops, until 1500 or so years later.
When something stops, it doesn't continue, that's discontinuity.
I'd still be interested to know just which church that is.
But I don't know of anyone who did - do you?
None that had to go through it. I do see a lot claiming credit for tests they never had to take.
Sooooooo basically this article gets around to stating he was prosecuted for "advocating the Copernican system".
And on the way there takes a sucker punch at the the literalist interpretation of Scripture...
"In thus acting, it is undeniable that the ecclesiastical authorities committed a grave and deplorable error, and sanctioned an altogether false principle as to the proper use of Scripture."
The "false principle" being that the, "Holy Scripture, the letter of which was then universally believed to be the supreme authority in matters of science, as in all others."
But they didn't err by trusing the Bible! They erred by mixing the Bible and Aristotelian cosmology into a concrete of "Sacred Tradition" that ran afoul of science.
The spin doctors have been at work on this doc!
One line of history is that the Apostles which ministered with Jesus… leave a written record of… And there your history stops, until 1500 or so years later.
When something stops, it doesn't continue, that's discontinuity.
The true church has always (through the centuries) ... rested upon the foundation of the teachings of the Apostles (whether in their lifetime or from their writings).
I don't believe that the claim is that there was no time when the histories of the Catholic and the Protestant and the Orthodox churches were joined.
I think you made the case for a major disjoint occurring right after the first Apostles.
I don't believe that the claim is that there was no time when the histories of the Catholic and the Protestant and the Orthodox churches were joined. I think you made the case for a major disjoint occurring right after the first Apostles.
I said that the church's foundation was completely laid during the era of the Apostles.
There remains no more need for the laying of any foundation than the one which Christ and the Apostles laid.
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