Posted on 01/01/2006 4:48:03 PM PST by HarleyD
The snip which comprises your post is originally from the 19th century edition of the Ante and Post Nicene Fathers. Scholarship has come quite a distance since then, especially with the discovery of Syriac versions of the letters. Scholars today are hardly as sanguine about the inauthenticity of the letters as they once were.
"Most Protestants never heard of the Tubingen divines writing to Patriarch Jeremiah II in Constantinople, not once but thrice, because it did not produce the desired effect."
Too true. When the EP didn't buy into their "theology", they became, shall we say, "insistant". It took two letters more from the EP to get them to leave him alone.
I think you are on the right track. This is what Prof. Kalomiros alluded to in his (in)famous "River of Fire," which the western Chirstians see as gross distoriton of their beliefs. But, then, the only way one can see the forest from the treets is to have an outside view.
In terms of human justice, the concept of original sin and payback make perfect sense, but not in the Greek mind. And the Greek term for God's justice falls short of the Hebrew term. Our biblical terms used to convey God's justice actually distroy the Hebrew term used, which means God's "means of accomplishing our salvation" — mercy, forgiveness, love.
So, clearly, when we read one and the same text, even if the translation is "true," we do not experience the words in the same way, because they mean something specific in each culture, and therefore cannot possibly understand the minds of the scribes who wrote the Bible.
That is pretty scarry, and that is the reason Christ left His Church to His priesthood and did not give everyone a copy of the Bible and said "just read it; even a child can understand it; everything you need to know is in it, indexted and alphabetized," and then just left it up to everyone to do as he or she can, as the Protestants would have us believe.
If the faith was going to be unifoversal, it had to be supracultural, supratraditional, supralinguistic. The Church was tasked with saving not just the documents but the interpretation of those documents in context and in the culture from which they came.
" I can't speak for other Protestant churches, but our missionary trips are to places like Eritrea, our last big one."
I trust its the Mohammadens there you are after and not the Copts or the Roman Catholics.
The term has a broader meaning than just "Greek Catholics" in the Ukraine. The much, and perhaps deservedly, maligned Balamand Declaration makes it clear that what you propose as a model for reunion is rejected by both particular churches.
I predict the Protestant answer will be "yes we do, 'cause it's in the Bible!"
"I don't think "original sin" as meant by Orange had the same connotations that it did after Trent. Orange specifically refutes the Pelagian notion that Adam's sin does not effect his ancestors. Pelagius said that we commit sin by example from Adam. The Church Fathers consistently refuted that, calling Adam's sin the first sin and one we inherit as being part of our human nature. St. Augustine quotes numerous Fathers when discussing how Adam's sin affects us today."
I have no idea what the Council of Orange meant by "original sin", but I can tell you that none of the Eastern Fathers, save perhaps in speculation (and I don't know of any of that)said that we inherit "Adam's sin" as part of our nature. Certainly the Fathers recognize it, call it "ancestral sin" and recognize its effect on human nature, but they don't say we inherited the sin; that would be you guys and your Augustinian notion.
I would have to see that to believe. Trying to convert Mohammadens can cost you your head. Orthodox and Copts are much less deadly.
It always amazed me that various proslytizing groups would go to a Chirstian country or eareas with all the pagan souls around them, and try to set camp.
So are cooperation with grace by works, confession, ordination, and Eucharist...
Ah FK, more "COE" for you, this time +Ambrose of Milan (you should ike this):
"Although we are baptized with water and the Spirit, the latter is much superior to the former, and is not therefore to be separated from the Father and-the Son. There are, however, many who, because we are baptized with water and the Spirit, think that there is no difference in the offices of water and the Spirit, and therefore think that they do not differ in nature. Nor do they observe that we are buried in the element of water that we may rise again renewed by the Spirit. For in the water is the representation of death, in the Spirit is the pledge of life, that the body of sin may die through the water, which encloses the body as it were in a kind of tomb, that we, by the power of the Spirit, may be renewed from the death of sin, being born again in God"
Typo here. He meant "womb".
"It always amazed me that various proslytizing groups would go to a Chirstian country or eareas with all the pagan souls around them, and try to set camp."
Me too. But then again, American Protestants do so very deeply understand other cultures and especially Eastern Christianity that, well frankly, Kosta, if we only understood as well as they did, we'd likely simply flock to them and leave aside all our old non Western religious ideas.
Well, in order to get to the "works" you have to get past +Paul...
I don't think he did.
No, you don't. You just have to read his letters to the end. He ends every letter with a call to works of charity. It is a Protestant myth that there is any kind of tension between St. Paul and, say, the Gospel of Matthew or the Letter of James.
Do I detect a note of sarcasm here?
"And we, in receiving Baptism, . . . conceal ourselves in [the water] as the Savior did in the earth: and by doing this thrice we represent for ourselves that grace of the Resurrection which was wrought in three days. And this we do, not receiving the sacrament in silence, but while there are spoken over us the Names of the Three Sacred Persons on Whom we believed, in Whom we also hope, from Whom comes to us both the fact of our present and the fact of our future existence." +Gregory of Nyssa
"Are we only dying with the Master and are we only sharing in His sadness? Most of all, let me say that sharing the Master's death is no sadness. Only wait a little and you shall see yourself sharing in His benefits. 'For if we have died with Him,' says St. Paul, `we believe that we shall also live together with Him.' For in baptism there are both burial and resurrection together at the same time. He who is baptized puts off the old man, takes the new and rises up, `just as Christ has arisen through the glory of the Father.' Do you see how, again, St. Paul calls baptism a resurrection? +John Chrysostomos
I was making a joke at Forest's expense. He reads John 3:5 as a reference to birth of the womb and spiritual rebirth, rather than as a reference to baptism as we sacramentally understand it. In order to make the text fit his theology, he insists that when Jesus speaks of "water" in John 3:5, the actual reference is to the vaginal fluids. I find this quite hilarious.
"Pope Leo III consented to filioque being sung but not inserted into the Creed because the Creed cannot be altered (in writing)."
Very odd. Have you seen this anywhere but in that quotation from Romanides -- i.e. have you read independent accounts of the "singing vs writing" that make clearer what is somewhat obscure in Romanides?
Your reading of Romanides, then, is that Pope Leo thought it was fine to sing the Creed (ad lib, I guess) with the filioque in the Liturgy, as long as it was never put into writing? This would seem to make little sense -- by this logic, a priest or bishop could make whatever changes to the services he wanted, as long as they were not theologically incorrect, and as long as what was actually written in the books wasn't changed.
"However, every source I looked at, including Romanides', leaves no doubt that +Leo stated to the effect that filioque was theolgically sound and that he agreed with it. As to why he agreed with its theology is a different story."
Yes, in what looking I have done, everything either remains silent on his view of the theologically soundness of the filioque, or it states that he privately thought it was OK. I have found nothing that specifically indicates that he disagreed with it theologically. But as you say, and as Romanides articulates, the context and circumstances (the man went through some *very* rough and dangerous times) do reasonably point at his holding a view of the filioque that Orthodoxy, then or now, wouldn't have a problem with.
Ha! only if your method of reading scripture is pick and choose proof texting.;) If one reads scripture as the song of God's love of man, sung in many voices, there is no conflict.
My face has never been straighter. For the subtext, see 8217.
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