"A third constant in Patristic writings is the Circumcision of Christ conceived as continuous with his work of redemption. Since the debt incurred by the sin of Adam cannot be met by Adam’s insolvent progeny and since Christ’s blood pays the ransom his Circumcision becomes, as it were, a first installment, a down payment on behalf of mankind."
Oh, dear. It's worse than I thought.
Christ's circumcision, as an act, was one more instance of Jesus Christ fulfilling the law of God.
The blood Christ shed at His circumcision did not save anyone, just like His saliva doesn't save anyone, nor His toenails.
But this error is what permits Rome to sell vials of "holy water," and to make trinkets into idolatrous relics, and to insist His mother was born without sin when absolutely none of that matters one single bit to anyone's salvation.
Rome is tangled up in the material world when it needs to look to the spiritual. Christ's blood on the cross, and only Christ's blood on the cross, ordained by God to be "the lamb slain from the foundation of the world," is what covers His flock with His righteousness and His faith and His obedience and His mercy and His ability to fulfill the law perfectly.
Really, stfassisi, keep posting utter nonsense like this, so foreign to the word of God and to the victorious redemption Christ won on the cross, and God willing, more and more people will recognize the idolatrous superstition that is at the heart of the papacy.
And flee from it.
Some sell his foreskin. real relics ya know >(
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
The life Christ begins at conception ,DR E
Every pain of Jesus and EVERY drop of blood shed was done for our sins all the way to the Cross in the TOTAL life of Our Lord from Conception to the Cross
Your theology is bordering on many old heresies that effect the divinity of Christ when you separate the divine blood of Jesus as a child from the divine blood of Jesus at Calvary.
Your theology also strips away the COMPLETE life of Christ and would only make sense if Christ came to earth pre nailed to the cross.
Listen to the words of the Saint Bonaventure.....
"Today our Lord Jesus Christ began to shed His consecrated blood for us. From the very first, He who had not sinned began to suffer pain for us, and for our sins He bore torment. Feel compassion for Him . . . for perhaps He wept today. . . . Today His precious blood flowed. His flesh was cut with a stone knife. . . . Must one not pity Him?"