Posted on 11/15/2011 4:28:39 PM PST by rzman21
You still might have tried.
Still, it’s your interpretation of those verses speaking, Not the scriptures. I would take a radically different view of John 6 for example than you would.
But your manner of interpretation, is still just your interpretation and your traditions of men.
What is see is the Word according to the UnbelievingScumontheotherside. Not the Word of God.
Your manner of interpreting the Bible is still TRADITION.
You wrote:
“No, Jesus did not say follow something fraudulent.”
Moses’ seat was not fraudulent. It also was never mentioned in the Old Testament. Game. Set. Match.
“Uh... the Jews were physically the Children of Abraham.”
Not a single person alive in Jesus’ day could say that Abraham was his physical father. They were his descendents in the faith, not just bodily. A convert to Judaism legitimately called Abraham his father – and he certainly would not have meant biological descent.
You lose again.
You wrote:
“You are going by dates of official Christianization ~ how utterly stupid.”
No, the claims your asserting just don’t make sense.
“Missionaries had been at work years ~ decades ~ even centuries before those dates.”
Not there, not then, no how.
“And no, the date is in the 1700s.”
According to whom? Please post the exact info. Are you talking about Gwyn Jones’ book or not? As soon as I mentioned that I had read the two most commonly known books of the title you put forward, you clamed up. Why is that?
“Russia is a huge country with vast expanses between populated centers. The situation was far worse a century ago, and two centuries ago they didn’t even have roads in much of the place.”
They also didn’t have Vikings there in the year 1700, bud. Now, will you actually post any evidence - ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL - for your bizarre claims or not?
“I think you are confounding Kazan with Northwestern Russia which wasn’t even demarcated ~ a land of reindeer, swamps, Pomars and Sa’ami.”
I am not “confounding” anything. I think you’re confounding imagination with reality. I am posting what is true - there were NO VIKINGS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD IN 1700.
As they say, it’s time to put up or shut up.
The Roman Emperor Constantine was neither a hero, nor a villain—rather just the first emperor to make Christianity legal and favored (no he didn’t make Christianity the official religion, that came later).
To blame Constantine for the subsequent Church/State entanglements, power games, and persecutions of others, is a lot like blaming Jefferson for the banal and evil legal actions of the ACLU. They have no direct connection.
Sooner or later the Church would of been legalized and recognized—and, rulers in the ancient and medieval world ALWAYS incorporated religion into government—to enhance the power of both...(even while it tends to corrupt both...). You cannot blame one man—Constantine—for that universal human phenomena, or later human corruptions.
The Nicene Creed, something all (small “o”)orthodox Christian Churches agree to (even if all don’t recite it...) was developed by the Church—due to Constantine’s call for a Council. It is one of the earliest descriptions of Christian fundamentals....
Constantine also moved the capitol to Constantinople....allowing a form of Roman Christian civilization to last another 1000 years...NOT in itself a bad thing.
Also tens of thousands of Christians were no longer hounded or persecuted by Rome—due to Constantine—that was an extremely great blessing—as several times under persecution in the first two centuries the light of the gospel almost went out....and the torture and death of Christians in serious persecution is never a good thing, even if God blesses the Church too then....
All and all, I’m happy the Holy Spirit worked in history...and in Constantine, even though events changed after him that were not always beneficial to the good news of faith in Jesus Christ.
Still, God is in charge—and we simply cannot complain about history—or its actors.
AnalogReigns,
Suggest you look up the Donatists. They generally don’t make the papers.
From Wikipedia (standard warning):
“In 317 Constantine sent troops to deal with the Donatists in Carthage, for the first time Christian persecuting Christian. It resulted in banishments, but ultimately failed, and Constantine had to withdraw and end the persecutions in 321.”
My reason for posting this thread was to show that a sizeable portion of the Church resisted secular authority, so they could live truly selfless, holy Christian lives.
Western polemics from both Protestants and Roman Catholics ignores the fact the emperors frequently had to face uprisings from monks who spoke the truth to power.
In the Orthodox Church to this day, it is the monastics who are prized,not the ecclesiastical bureaucrats.
Maybe the Roman Church might have turned out differently if it had followed the Eastern example and strictly derived its episcopate from the monasteries.
Every emperor of Rome, and practically every Christian king (or Hebrew Kings before....see the history of King David, the BEST king in the bible) did wrong or foolish things. To err is human, after all.
As I said, Constantine was neither a hero or a villain...just a very powerful (and human/sinner...) Roman emperor.
The Donatists were, after all a very divisive Christian heresy....(they claimed all other Christian groups were false—and theirs was the only true Church). Was it right to persecute them? Of course not. Would it be right to persecute Mormons? No, of course not... That doesn’t prove the virtue of Mormonism any more than it does the Donatists. That also doesn’t prove Constantine was hideously evil....any more than the it proves people in Missouri were hideously evil for persecuting Joseph Smith...
“Maybe the Roman Church might have turned out differently if it had followed the Eastern example and strictly derived its episcopate from the monasteries.”
Perhaps. But history is history, and we cannot indulge “what ifs.” I could speculate that since the vast majority of formerly Orthodox Christian lands are now ruled and peopled by Muslims—that must show some flaw in Eastern Orthdoxy. However, that’s not an argument I would make...as again, history is history—that is often a mystery.
Historically, practically ALL the reforms in the West—but, not a little corruption too—flowed from Monasteries. The whole concept of Universities (which despite the wonders of education today...are also a mixed blessing) comes from Monastery schools..... Power, wealth and corruption too sprang up and grew in Monasteries (in the West anyway—I’m not familiar with EO Monasteries), so it is a mixed bag. I’m not a Roman Catholic—so I won’t say all is wonderful from Rome, but neither am I Eastern Orthodox—in which I see many of the same problems of Rome.
As a Western Christian though, I do love St. Augustine (but not without criticism)—someone I know is distinctly NOT admired in the East. But for Constantine’s reforms, I’m not certain an Augustine would of been possible.
All is under God’s control, and part of His plan...
Arguably, even Protestantism—which I’m sure you’re not positive towards—sprang up out of monasteries—since after all, Dr. Martin Luther was actually, an Augustinian monk, and University professor.
Had Luther sprang up a couple hundred years earlier—its likely that, had he not been burned to death for heresy—he would of been allowed to form (yet another) Monastic Order dedicated to reforming the Latin Church. Every order I’m aware of in the West began in an attempt of reform.
Calvin too, had been educated in a Monastery-founded religious University (of Paris) and had a thoroughly Christian education... ALL the Protestant reformers had similar histories. God used the Monasteries historically...to reform and purify His Church invisible, both East and West.
My faith in Jesus’ complete control of His Church, His followers—whatever human institution they are a part of....in essence that the Church is an invisible body, transcending visible institutions....is a primary reason I see even in the unfortunate division of Western Christianity in the Protestant Reformation...a good thing—and a washing and real reformation of Jesus’ Church.
The Muslims succeeded because they Byzantine Empire was divided as a result of the schisms of the 5th century that created what we now call the Oriental Orthodox.
Chalcedonian Christianity became associated with being Greek, and the Greek emperors of the 6th and 7th centuries caused Chalcedon to be viewed as a Greek thing.
This created resentments among the Syriac- and Armenian-speaking Christians in Syria, Palestine, and the Levant, as well as among the Copts in Egypt who took up the anti-Chalcedonian banner because they hated the Greeks.
Christianity was divided and weakened. The persisting Donatist schism in North Africa resulted in the obliteration of the ancient Church of Carthage, which rivaled Rome itself in the early centuries.
It wasn’t unlike the split between the Latin peoples of Southern Europe and the Germannic peoples of Northern Europe that occasioned the rise of Protestantism. Protestantism was as much of a political revolution as it was a religious one.
Eastern Christianity has retained far more of the primitive Christian ethos than the post-Scholastic Christianity that the Protestants revolted against.
Unlike the West, Eastern Christianity never developed systematic theology and is accessible to even the simplest layman in a way that Roman Christianity never was.
Protestants and Roman Catholics come out of the same roots in pagan Roman legalism. That sort of legalism has been foreign to Eastern Christians since the earliest days of the Church.
We don’t typically read St. Augustine for example and hold many of his teachings with suspicion.
Hence Christian divisions made it easy for the Muslims to conquer the Christians. In some cases treacherous Christians fought alongside the Muslims because they hated the Greeks more than the Muslims.
You wrote:
“Maybe. If we were having that conversation.”
I have no idea why you’re addressing that to me. I did not make the comment in question.
“And Jesus blasted those sitting on it.”
Yes, and He still told the Apostles to obey them.
“And you find this where?”
Where do you find otherwise?
Thou shalt have no other gods, before me. There is but one Father, one God, one person that should be worshipped as Holy and Righteous. No flesh man can claim that right on this Earth or in Heaven.
???
Don’t you worship your mother when you ask her to pray for you? Don’t you know that’s idolatry?
To suggest Catholics and Orthodox worship other gods is preposterous and ignorant.
“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!” Mark 12:27
“We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” 2 Corinthians 5:8
Asking the prayers of those in heaven in no way detracts from the worship of God anymore than asking someone on Earth to pray for us.
Maybe Protestants should stop asking their friends to pray for them because it creates another intercessor between them and God.
http://www.protomartyr.org/prayer.html
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