Posted on 07/22/2007 7:40:38 PM PDT by xzins
Wednesday, 11 July 2007
Yesterday's Reuters headline: "The Vatican on Tuesday said Christian denominations outside the Roman Catholic Church were not full churches of Jesus Christ." The actual proclamation, posted on the official Vatican Web site, says that Protestant Churches are really "ecclesial communities" rather than Churches, because they lack apostolic succession, and therefore they "have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery." Furthermore, not even the Eastern Orthodox Churches are real Churches, even though they were explicitly referred to as such in the Vatican document Unitatis Redintegratio (Decree on Ecumenism). The new document explains that they were only called Churches because "the Council wanted to adopt the traditional use of the term." This new clarification, issued officially by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but in fact strongly supported by Pope Benedict XVI, manages to insult both Protestants and the Orthodox, and it may set ecumenism back a hundred years.
The new document, officially entitled "Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church," claims that the positions it takes do not reverse the intent of various Vatican II documents, especially Unitatis Redintegratio, but merely clarify them. In support of this contention, it cites other documents, all issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Mysterium Ecclesiae (1973), Communionis notio (1992), and Dominus Iesus (2000). The last two of these documents were issued while the current pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was prefect of the Congregation. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was born in 1542 with the name Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition, and for centuries it has operated as an extremely conservative force with the Roman Catholic Church, opposing innovation and modernizing tendencies, suppressing dissent, and sometimes, in its first few centuries, persecuting those who believed differently. More recently, the congregation has engaged in the suppression of some of Catholicism's most innovative and committed thinkers, such as Yves Congar, Hans Küng, Charles Curran, Matthew Fox, and Jon Sobrino and other liberation theologians. In light of the history of the Congregation of the Faith, such conservative statements as those released this week are hardly surprising, though they are quite unwelcome.
It is natural for members of various Christian Churches to believe that the institutions to which they belong are the best representatives of Christ's body on earth--otherwise, why wouldn't they join a different Church? It is disingenuous, however, for the leader of a Church that has committed itself "irrevocably" (to use Pope John Paul II's word in Ut Unum Sint [That They May Be One] 3, emphasis original) to ecumenism to claim to be interested in unity while at the same time declaring that all other Christians belong to Churches that are in some way deficient. How different was the attitude of Benedict's predecessors, who wrote, "In subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions appeared and large communities became separated from full communion with the [Roman] Catholic Church--for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame" (Unitatis Redintegratio 3). In Benedict's view, at various times in history groups of Christians wandered from the original, pure Roman Catholic Church, and any notion of Christian unity today is predicated on the idea of those groups abandoning their errors and returning to the Roman Catholic fold. The pope's problem seems to be that he is a theologian rather than a historian. Otherwise he could not possibly make such outrageous statements and think that they were compatible with the spirit of ecumenism that his immediate predecessors promoted.
One of the pope's most strident arguments against the validity of other Churches is that they can't trace their bishops' lineages back to the original apostles, as the bishops in the Roman Catholic Church can. There are three problems with this idea.
First, many Protestants deny the importance of apostolic succession as a guarantor of legitimacy. They would argue that faithfulness to the Bible and/or the teachings of Christ is a better measure of authentic Christian faith than the ability to trace one's spiritual ancestry through an ecclesiastical bureaucracy. A peripheral knowledge of the lives of some of the medieval and early modern popes (e.g., Stephen VI, Sergius III, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI) is enough to call the insistence on apostolic succession into serious question. Moreover, the Avignon Papacy and the divided lines of papal claimants in subsequent decades calls into serious question the legitimacy of the whole approach. Perhaps the strongest argument against the necessity of apostolic succession comes from the Apostle Paul, who was an acknowledged apostle despite not having been ordained by one of Jesus' original twelve disciples. In fact, Paul makes much of the fact that his authority came directly from Jesus Christ rather than from one of the apostles (Gal 1:11-12). Apostolic succession was a useful tool for combating incipient heresy and establishing the antiquity of the churches in particular locales, but merely stating that apostolic succession is a necessary prerequisite for being a true church does not make it so.
The second problem with the new document's insistence upon apostolic succession is the fact that at least three other Christian communions have apostolic succession claims that are as valid as that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Eastern Orthodox Churches, which split from the Roman Catholic Church in 1054, can trace their lineages back to the same apostles that the Roman Catholic Church can, a fact acknowledged by Unitatis Redintegratio 14. The Oriental Orthodox Churches, such as the Coptic and Ethiopic Orthodox Churches, split from the Roman Catholic Church several centuries earlier, but they too can trace their episcopal lineages back to the same apostles claimed by the Roman Catholic Church as its founders. Finally, the Anglican Church, which broke away from the Roman Catholic Church during the reign of King Henry VIII, can likewise trace the lineage of every bishop back through the first archbishop of Canterbury, Augustine. In addition to these three collections of Christian Churches, the Old Catholics and some Methodists also see value in the idea of apostolic succession, and they can trace their episcopal lineages just as far back as Catholic bishops can.
The third problem with the idea of apostolic succession is that the earliest bishops in certain places are simply unknown, and the lists produced in the third and fourth centuries that purported to identify every bishop back to the founding of the church in a particular area were often historically unreliable. Who was the founding bishop of Byzantium? Who brought the gospel to Alexandria? To Edessa? To Antioch? There are lists that give names (e.g., http://www.friesian.com/popes.htm), such as the Apostles Mark (Alexandria), Andrew (Byzantium), and Thaddeus (Armenia), but the association of the apostles with the founding of these churches is legendary, not historical. The most obvious breakdown of historicity in the realm of apostolic succession involves none other than the see occupied by the pope, the bishop of Rome. It is certain that Peter did make his way to Rome before the time of Nero, where he perished, apparently in the Neronian persecution following the Great Fire of Rome, but it is equally certain that the church in Rome predates Peter, as it also predates Paul's arrival there (Paul also apparently died during the Neronian persecution). The Roman Catholic Church may legitimately claim a close association with both Peter and Paul, but it may not legitimately claim that either was the founder of the church there. The fact of the matter is that the gospel reached Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, and other early centers of Christianity in the hands of unknown, faithful Christians, not apostles, and the legitimacy of the churches established there did not suffer in the least because of it.
All the talk in the new document about apostolic succession is merely a smokescreen, however, for the main point that the Congregation of the Faith and the pope wanted to drive home: recognition of the absolute primacy of the pope. After playing with the words "subsists in" (Lumen Gentium [Dogmatic Constitution on the Church] 8) and "church" (Unitatis Redintegratio 14) in an effort to make them mean something other than what they originally meant, the document gets down to the nitty-gritty. "Since communion with the Catholic Church, the visible head of which is the Bishop of Rome and the Successor of Peter, is not some external complement to a particular Church but rather one of its internal constitutive principles, these venerable Christian communities lack something in their condition as particular churches." From an ecumenical standpoint, this position is a non-starter. Communion with Rome and acknowledging the authority of the pope as bishop of Rome is a far different matter from recognizing the pope as the "visible head" of the entire church, without peer. The pope is an intelligent man, and he knows that discussions with other Churches will make no progress on the basis of this prerequisite, so the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the pope, despite his protestations, has no interest in pursuing ecumenism. Trying to persuade other Christians to become Roman Catholics, which is evidently the pope's approach to other Churches, is not ecumenism, it's proselytism.
Fortunately, this document does not represent the viewpoint of all Catholics, either laypeople or scholars. Many ordinary Catholics would scoff at the idea that other denominations were not legitimate Churches, which just happen to have different ideas about certain topics and different ways of expressing a common Christianity. Similarly, many Catholic scholars are doing impressive work in areas such as theology, history, biblical study, and ethics, work that interacts with ideas produced by non-Catholic scholars. In the classroom and in publications, Catholics and non-Catholics learn from each other, challenge one another, and, perhaps most importantly, respect one another.
How does one define the Church? Christians have many different understandings of the term, and Catholics are divided among themselves, as are non-Catholics. The ecumenical movement is engaged in addressing this issue in thoughtful, meaningful, and respectful ways. Will the narrow-minded view expressed in "Responses" be the death-knell of the ecumenical movement? Hardly. Unity among Christians is too important an idea to be set aside. Will the document set back ecumenical efforts? Perhaps, but Christians committed to Christian unity--Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant alike--will get beyond it. The ecumenical movement is alive and well, and no intemperate pronouncement from the Congregation of the Faith, or the current pope, can restrain it for long. Even if ecumenism, at least as it involves the Roman Catholic Church's connection with other Churches, is temporarily set back a hundred years, that distance can be closed either by changes of heart or changes of leadership.
And evolution is a myth, not even a hypothesis let alone a theory.. so what?.. The observer problem is merely observers observing while God observes us observeing what we think is him.. when it is NOT HIM AT ALL... He is that he is is good enough.. The purpose is in the attempt to seek god not the actual acquisition..
Thank you for your reply, Editor-Surveyor.
On the other hand, perhaps God's creation needs to be "unbounded" in order to express and fulfill all the splendor he designed into it from the Beginning, in the course of time. The current scientific cosmological model suggests that the universe is not only unbounded, but finite; it does not run on into infinity, but will have an End, the timing of which only the Father knows: God is not finite; but His Creation is.
As to the waters above and below, this could be a reference to universal fields that God intends as the context, or matrix, or supporting structures, in which the Creation unfolds....
It seems to me that God's purpose in creating is not limited to Earth, but extends to the entire universe. If there were no stars, then the elements on which the physical universe, and ultimately life, depend, could not have been "manufactured." Stars are the manufacturing plants of most of the elements that comprise complex matter. Without stars there could be no Earth. Without our own Sun, life on Earth would be impossible.
Yet whether the universe be bounded or unbounded, it is clear to me that God regards man as the focal point of the Divine Plan. He made the universe for Life, by means of Light; and man is the point of the exercise.
The astonishing ingenuity of God in the execution of His divine plan seems to me to be beyond the ability of humans to fully comprehend. But we can see what He has accomplished, and can have some imperfect sense of how He went about doing it. That is because the created, physical universe is not the "all that there is," but Spirit is mixed into it through and through.
To God goes all glory for the entire universal creation, not just Earth.
IMHO, FWIW.
You must be careful.. If there is a thing called "eternity" how can an eternal PAST be NOT possible.. Did God appear by magic?.. It is possible that this universe had a beginning but then there must be "something else" besides this universe THEN.. for God to reside in.. Some kind of UGH... DIMENSION..
The SPIRITUAL dimension!!(pipe organ plays ominous chord with flourishes)..
Now your doctrine of Cain being the son of Satan is directly contradicted by the plain language of Genesis 4:1. Adam was the father of Cain. Period. End of argument. You want to deny that, then you are denying the plain truth of scripture for some gnostic interpretation. Is that what you want?
In regard to this current post, I am at a loss as to how you justify your strange doctrines using the verses you quoted, but why don't you try. I would prefer it if you just realized from the above verses that your theory does not hold water, but if you wish to try to explain your strange doctrines, then please start with Revelation 1:18.
What does this verse have to do with anything you espouse?
I'm off to a depo, so I'll check back this afternoon. But do try to explain why Jesus holding the keys to hell and death proves a pre-existent world, and the Kenite theory. Maybe you have some hidden knowledge on this theory, if so please share it so that we can try to understand.
BTW, I'll admit that my mind is not open to your theories, but you are free to try to explain them.
Thanks.
Marlowe
"Sons of God" is the term used in Hebrew in the Old testament to denote angels. What were the angels doing on earth having sex with dauthers of men? (even if such a thing were possible...that is...angels are bodiless)
Nothing really, An unbounded universe is freaky.. as is eternity, infinity and any other thing without limit.. The human animal is like a monkey in a tree considering a Rolex watch.. It is shiny, looks interesting, even the gold chain is interesting but the monkey needs to be BORN AGAIN..
I personally once was a primate, they tell me.. but I evolved..
Gods word is now very shiney and intricate.. and speaks of eternity.. which starts TODAY...
A re-modeling.. or re-creation.. could be a good thing...
God didn't tell Jeremiah that He knew what he would do in this life but that "I knew thee". We know that there is an age after this one. Our soul steps out of this body and stays the same soul as it goes into the next realm. Why do some think it impossible to be that same soul from before that is now in our flesh body?
I don't think so. Jews believe that one makes himself acceptable to God by works, not by faith. Christians believe we can never make ourselves worthy of salvation.
I agree with you, in that it applies to this age. Christ died for our sins in this age. Perhaps works were required in the first age as they will be in the 3rd age:
This is at the end of the millennium: Rev.20:12 And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
By that logic, the Muslims believe in the same God. Jewish God is not a Christian God. Allah is not a Christian God. It takes little imagination to see that Christian God is different than either the YHWH or Allah in how Christians, Jews and Muslims experience their God.
Actually - He is everyone's God but many don't know it as He is not who they worship. We are ALL His children. I believe the Jewish God is our God. There is no difference. All of us seem to have differing positions on how to worship Him but He is, never-the-less, our God. Muslims, on the other hand, do not in any way, shape or form worship our God. They will, as "every knee will bow" but they do not now.
So, Satan was back in heaven after his fall from grace? LOL!
He has to be there in order to be kicked out at the end of days.
.....Ping
Did you want to stuff God into some dimension that would facilitate this communication between Him and Man? (Questions of dimensionality seem related to considerations of relative Time -- but God is not in Time at all.)
Do you think God needs a dimension in order to operate? If so, what of His Omnipotence? (It seems to me a God who "needs" cannot be omnipotent.)
You know that I am attracted to Sir Isaac Newton's idea of the sensorium Dei, which as I understand it, is some sort of universal field-like interface between the spiritual kingdom and the created world. But God is not "in" the interface; He is beyond it.
Yet I have reason to believe that Newton thought of the sensorium Dei as the God-designed, universal facilitating means by which the Lord of Life can be with His creatures, without "over-determining" the Creation.... perhaps it represents the "waters above?" [And here's an additional speculation: a universal zero-point vacuum field may represent the "waters below"; both facilitate "inputs" from a divine "beyond," the "waters above" referring to influx of Spirit, the "waters below" to the influx of virtual matter -- e.g., photons (light) -- essential to the maintenance of physical creation. On this model, both "above" and "below" are divine in origin and constant impulse. But I digress....]
Think of it: If God the Creator were physically "in the world," His mere Presence would utterly determine all possible outcomes; there would be no freedom of development of the Creation according to His Laws; and human free will would be a fantasy.
Anyhoot, whether or not this understanding is correct -- and I have long meditated and prayed over these issues -- my sense is there isn't a dimension "big enough" to "hold" God.
So call me crazy. FWIW my dearest brother in Christ....
And for that, I am most grateful (and lucky).
So, I’m back to the Peanut Gallery with my popcorn..
Enjoy your popcorn and come back anytime. Your input and humor is a welcome relief.
....Ping
One can't, but God can, since Godly precision is by definition the caliber of God's foreknowledge.
That happens with humans all the time. I plan to go to a movie tonight. But, a few hours later, my wife doesn't feel well, so we postpone until later. I had a perfectly good devised plan that was altered by uncontrollable or random circumstances.
I don't see anything random here, just outside your control.
If the millions of random free will acts of EACH of the billions of humans who have lived were a part of God's plan, then the whole thing is just a crapshoot.
False premise: Human free will choice is random.
For God, that is no real plan, that is sitting back on the couch and simply recording all of these random events as He foresees them.
False Premise 1 (above) and False Premise 2: God has no effect on human life and human choices.
Again, I'm arguing against your logic. Logically a plan can be made and executed and the results "foreknown" (predicted correctly) by humans without controlling each individual factor - and accounting for truly random events. Even humans do this all the time.
Time is relevant to human flesh.. the human spirit may be beyond time.. as may be all Spirit.. A seven day work week may be an object lesson and a metaphor at the same time.. And years may be a temporal place marker.. The bindings of the universe may beyond humans to conceive of.. while they are still limited by human brains..
Truly, we mortals fall into mental gymnastics every time we try to apply our mental constructs to God.
Time, for instance, is a property of the Creation and not something in which the Creator exists. Nor indeed can we think of Him as a thing subject to being described by space/time coordinates, volume and such. Ditto for Aristotlean Laws of Logic, e.g. Law of the Excluded Middle.
Words like timelessness, spacelessness, uncaused cause of causation would be more appropriate in visualizing the beginning ex nihilo.
To God be the glory!
Well and truly said, dearest sister in Christ! So very, very true!
To God goes all glory for the entire universal creation, not just Earth.
The words of God are spirit and they are life. Spiritual Truth is hidden in plain view.
To God be the glory!
Thank you so much for your encouragements, dearest sister in Christ!
Not only inadvertently, but deliberately as well. For those who are not familiar with this, the vowels were added to the original Hebrew text, along with formatting, in the Christian era centuries after Christ died.
One reason for this is that it made reading the Tanakh easier, which is true, but no one in those days was concerned about making the sacred books available to its mostly illiterate population. In fact, the ability to read sacred texts was jealously guarded by the few privileged. So, this reason is really not the real reason for adding the vowels.
The rabbis had every reason and motivation to make sure nothing in the Tanakh is understood to support any Christian leanings. The easiest way to accomplish this was by adding the vowels and changing the meanings of potentially undesirable words.
They didn't do this for sinister reasons. They were and are deeply convinced that Christianity represents a horrible apostasy and they wanted to make sure that the Hebrew scripture is set in stone and could not be interpreted any other way.
Thus the very addition of vowels was a deliberate alteration of the Old Testament. And since the rabbis were not inspired as far as we know, we must assume that the alteration corrupted it the way various versions of the New Testament are a clear corruption. The advnatage we have with the NT at discerning the truth is by using textual criticism, and arriving at the post plausible "true" rendition of it. We don't have the same luxury with the Old Testament.
Similar deliberate alterations of the New Testament can be seen in additions of punctuation marks, such as commas, for example. Often, depending where a comma is added, a sentence can be made to mean something completely different.
As all of you probably know, the Tanakh was written without any vowels (saves plenty of precious papyrus, clay, copper, parchment, or whatever else was used for writing; they couldn't just go to Office Depot to buy more...).
The ancients also didn't use word breaks, such as semicolons, colons, commas, quotation marks, etc. for the same reason.
Thus an ancient Hebrew text in English transliteration and formatting would look like this:
That's Gen 6:1-2 in case you wondered (the only vowels visible are the two letters "a" at the beginning of the word).
What one can do with vowell-less text is obvious when we consider a 'wrod' such as shp. Depending where you add the vowels, that letter combination becomes ship, shape or shop.
In Hebrew the possibilities of more combinations are even greater. Now consider that just about every word in Tanakh can be altered to mean something completely different simply by adding a vowell or two, or a comma where there wasn't one in the original text, and you get the picture.
That's why various Bible resources give you uncertain or multiple meanings of the same "word" (actually a cluster of consonants). And this is why the Mesoretic claim that their text remained [sic] unaltered, as evidenced by the findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls is as misleading as it gets. The consonants are unaltered, but the vowels changed everything.
Editor-Surveyor: The very same 'water' that God said is there. Remember, this universe is temporary; it is set to terminate "with fervent heat" at the end of Christs millenial reign
I think some people had too many mushrooms in their diet.
I understand, but we're 3rd dimensional creatures O.K. 4th dimensional.. if you must.. Some Quantum Mechanics ratchet out many dimensions.. and bolt them into place with various screwy concepts.. Could be that humans may not know what a "dimension" is.. There could be many "realms" we are unaware of..
True... God could very well be beyond dimensional configurations.. If God can create not only universes but dimensions too.. i.e. dimension/realm/kingdom/paradigm..
Like the sentence you just wrote?
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