Posted on 04/29/2017 8:02:13 AM PDT by NYer
As we pray for the success of Pope Francis’ trip to Egypt this weekend, a perfect prayer to use is the oldest known Marian prayer, which in fact, traces back to the pope’s host country.
The oldest known Marian prayer is found on an ancient Egyptian papyrus dating from around the year 250. Today known in the Church as the Sub tuum praesidium, the prayer is believed to have been part of the Coptic Vespers liturgy during the Christmas season.
The original prayer was written in Greek and according to Roseanne Sullivan, “The prayer is addressed to Our Lady using the Greek word Θεοτόκος, which is an adjectival form of Θεοφόρος (Theotokos, or God-bearer) and is more properly translated as ‘she whose offspring is God.'” This helps to prove that the early Christians were already familiar with the word “Theotokos” well before the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus ratified its usage.
Below can be found the original Greek text from the papyrus, along with an English translation as listed on the New Liturgical Movement website:
| On the papyrus, we can read: .ΠΟ ΕΥCΠΑ ΚΑΤΑΦΕ ΘΕΟΤΟΚΕΤ ΙΚΕCΙΑCΜΗΠΑ ΕΙΔΗCΕΜΠΕΡΙCTAC AΛΛΕΚΚΙΝΔΥΝΟΥ …ΡΥCΑΙΗΜΑC MONH …HEΥΛΟΓ |
And an English translation could be: Under your mercy we take refuge, Mother of God! Our prayers, do not despise in necessities, but from the danger deliver us, only pure, only blessed. |
More commonly the prayer is translated:
Beneath your compassion,
We take refuge, O Mother of God:
do not despise our petitions in time of trouble:
but rescue us from dangers,
only pure, only blessed one.
Several centuries later a Latin prayer was developed and is more widely known in the Roman Catholic Church:
| Latin Text Sub tuum praesidium confugimus, Sancta Dei Genetrix. Nostras deprecationes ne despicias in necessitatibus nostris, sed a periculis cunctis libera nos semper, Virgo gloriosa et benedicta |
English Text We fly to Thy protection, O Holy Mother of God; Do not despise our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O Glorious and Blessed Virgin. Amen. |
The prayer is currently part of the Byzantine, Roman and Ambrosian rites in the Catholic Church and is used specifically as a Marian antiphon after the conclusion of Compline outside of Lent (in the older form of the Roman breviary). It is also a common prayer that has stood the test of time and is a favorite of many Christians, and is the root of the popular devotional prayer, the Memorare.
Starters?
PFFFT!
Back in the old days we just used a CRANK!!
And we LIKED it!
You are not the one I just referred to.
You are not a boastful and arrogant type that we get on FR from time to time.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy
hear and answer me.
The way it's written:
REALLY???
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It's funny: Today we Cat’licks observe a “feast” of the Apostles Philip and James. An assigned reading from “church documents” is from Tertullian, who seems later to have gone off the rails. And he makes much of the Lord's promise in John's gospel that the Spirit will come and lead the apostles into all truth... therefore the Church is one, etc. etc.
But figuring out what that means ain't easy. Peter seems to have wussed out in Antioch, and while we would hold that the truth of the Trinity finally prevailed, it didn't come like water from a spring. Athanasius (memorial was yesterday!) kept being run out of town!
So, I guess my image of “Magisterial” truth is that it gradually precipitates out of Church conflicts.
And, believe me, I know and have suffered from the excesses of the “Mary cult.” I once wrote something for me “chapter” which was ... get this ... open to the shocking idea that Mary delivered IHS vaginally. /gasp!/ So a few fussy ladies were persistent in their condemnation of radical me.
I just shake my head, y’know?
But, well, if Jesus is God, then “Mother of Jesus” and “Mother of God” seem semantically equivalent to me.
AND, in my experience and alleged mind the phrase is less about Mary and more about the incomprehensible (Lewis would say “appalling”) humility of God.
The MAIN deal, always but especially in these fifty days, is God and his Love. That is where I focus my attention.
While they may be to you, they do not SAY the same thing. For anyone not familiar with Catholic doctrine, the whole thing needs way too much explanation.
And if it needs to be explained to understand if correctly, then it's inadequate for the job.
AND, in my experience and alleged mind the phrase is less about Mary and more about the incomprehensible (Lewis would say “appalling”) humility of God.
I have to disagree. The reason Mary was identified as *mother of Jesus* was to tell us which of the many Mary's mentioned in the Holy spirit was referring to.
The phrase used is to ID Mary NOT to tell us about Jesus and His deity and Incarnation.
That is dealt with in other places.
So if there was confusion about the nature of Jesus, the better option would have been to correct the error with solid Scriptural teaching instead of assigning a title to Mary in a claim to correct errant teaching about the nature of Jesus.
That just plain and simple does NOT make any sense.
1 Corinthians 2:14
Proverbs 14:12
The Bible explains why they are NOT the same.
I hope your flu has improved. I finally caught up a bit on work; now I see I have a bunch of posts to catch up on.
I don't think anyone is arguing against your conclusion. However, when someone changes the last point from "Mary is the mother of God with us" to "Mary is the mother of God" that the problem starts. The Son of God has ALWAYS existed, agreed? He has ALWAYS been God, agreed? His incarnation, taking on human flesh, was not when he became God, but when God became a man. The consternation comes from referring to Mary as the Mother of God - which omits that qualifier you used, Mother of God with us (whom we know is Jesus Christ). Nevertheless, there is no escaping the fact that a "cult of Mary" and Mariolatry didn't exist until men started calling her Mother of God. That title glorifies her and was not necessary for establishing the Deity of Jesus Christ.
Poetic or not, the Psalms are prayers, and the ones I quoted address angels directly, something you claimed does not happen in Scripture. Pointing out that other created beings are also addressed does not change the fact that angels are addressed. As for why other created beings are addressed, recall that the creation reflects the nature of its Creator (Romans 1:20), so that when the Pharisees tell Jesus to silence his disciples, he responds, "If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out," a theme we also see in the Psalms (19:1 for example). Since stones are not sentient beings, obviously this is meant metaphorically. But angels are sentient beings; and as several Scriptures indicate (including the ones cited above as well as 1 Corinthians 11:10), they are present during the Christian worship service.
This addresses some of what you say later in post, but you cite 1 Timothy 2:5, which I also want to address. Protestants like to cite this out of context to supposedly refute the idea that saints can intercede for us, but if you back up to verse 1 of that chapter, what is the context? Paul is asking Christians--created beings--to make "requests, prayers, intercession, and thanksgiving" for kings and authorities. This demonstrates that asking created beings for prayers was not seen by Paul as inconsistent with the idea of Christ as "one mediator". What he specifically means is that Christ is one mediator for "all men" (verse 6), not that we can't ask others to pray to this mediator for us.
1 Corinthians 4:6: if you'll look up commentators' discussion of the Greek for the phrase you quote as "above that which is written", you'll find that this is a rare phrase and scholars can only guess what it means. Citing it is weak support for any argument.
Your complaint about the latria/dulia/hyperdulia distinction being "semantics" ignores the fact that defining your terms is the basis of logical argument. You can only call Catholic Marian prayers "worship" by exporting your own definition of "worship" into Catholic teachings, which is fallacious, particularly since you are using a 21st-century definition rather than the one being used by the 1st-century NT documents and Augustine's 5th-century delineation of the latria/dulia/hyperdulia distinction. Nor is Augustine's distinction a merely semantic distinction, as he mentions it while discussing specific religious practices that were distinct and recognized as distinct by people of his time. Aquinas further developed this line of thought and addressed all the Scriptural objections Protestants typically make, centuries before Zwingli's followers came up with them.
Regarding Sola Scriptura: if you do not follow the many Protestants who see the principle as implying a contradiction between faith and reason--which includes Martin Luther (at times--he is not consistent on this in his writings), John Calvin, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, George Lindbeck and today's Yale Barthians, etc.)--then good, I'm glad you don't, and we may be able to find something to agree on. There are some Protestants who do not take this position and who see faith and reason as complementary, such as those coming out of the Scottish Common Sense Realism philosophical school that inspired Alexander Campbell and the nondenominational movement. I agree faith and reason are complementary, and the Catholic Church teaches this. However, this is the problem I was getting at: I do not see how you can justify reason using Scripture alone, since the rules of logic are not laid out in Scipture. They were first developed by Aristotle and they have since been refined by symbolic logic, which is the basis of the computers we are talking over. Moreover, the rules of exegesis are not laid out in Scripture, either. They were initially developed by the Jewish rabbis and by Greek interpreters of Homer. Likewise, archaeology is not a Scriptural discipline, nor is ancient history. So yes, Scripture and reason are compatible, but I don't see how you can demonstrate this compatibility by appealing to Scripture alone. You have to import knowledge from secular fields. And this can be a serious problem in apologetics when you're debating atheists who want to know what the rational basis of faith is and what the justification of Sola Scriptura is. I have been debating atheists for decades, which is why this is an issue I'm concerned with. I do see ways to resolve it, but not by using Sola Scriptura.
Oral tradition: on this, I will refer you to Yves Congar's book The Meaning of Tradition, where he summarizes the documentation for this (developed more extensively in his other work), and also debates a Protestant scholar named Oscar Cullman who tried to support a position similar to the one you're advancing. Cullman eventually was forced to concede that, "We, on the Protestant side, are beginning to understand the immense wealth that is contained in the writing of the Church Fathers and are beginning to rid ourselves of the strange conception of the Church's history that claims that, with the exception of a few sects, there was a total eclipse of the Gospel between the second and sixteenth centuries."
1 Corinthians 3:10-15: The Church Fathers interpreted this passage the way they did for good reasons. One is the fact that Paul is alluding to other Scriptural passages on this same theme, including one some Protestants mistakenly claim wasn't canonical for early Christians, Sirach 2:5, as well as others that are in the Protestant canon such as Zechariah 13:9, Malachi 4:1, Matthew 3:11-12, etc., none of which is talking about people being a foundation. Interpreting the passage the way you suggest is to ignore these related passages, as well as the fact Paul addresses his comments to "each one", and each Christian is not an evangelist in the sense that Paul was ("He gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists. . .": Ephesians 4:11). As for the NAB, the new version is an awful liberal translation that the U.S. bishops developed in coordination with Protestant advisors and adopted for ecumenical purposes, it has silly gender-neutral language and so forth and often does not reflect Catholic teaching. There are other approved Catholic translations that are much better; I actually prefer conservative Protestant translations over the NAB.
Regarding Abraham's bosom: in ancient Christian catacomb inscriptions, there are prayers that are specifically asking for the dearly departed to be taken into Abraham's bosom to be with Lazarus, indicating a belief in a Purgatorial realm distinct from Abraham's bosom itself. The language used is similar to that used in Catholic prayers for the dead, demonstrating that these are an ancient practice and not a late innovation.
I have tried to cover your main points here; if I have overlooked anything in the midst of responding to a long post, it is not intentional. There are a couple other shorter posts from you I see I need to reply to and then I may need to catch up on the rest of the thread another day.
[Your reply:]What kind of perverse analogy is that to kneeling before a statue and praising the entity it represented in the unseen world, beseeching such for Heavenly help, and making offerings to them, and giving glory and titles and ascribing attributes to such which are never given in Scripture to created beings (except to false gods), including having the uniquely Divine power glory to hear and respond to virtually infinite numbers of prayers individually addressed to them?
If you did that to a woman then yes, I would think you were worshiping her, like as devotees of the "dear Leader" in North Korea do.
I note that you had to add a series of additional qualifiers to kneeling in order to avoid the point that kneeling is not always worship. The point stands, since the qualifiers can be addressed. "Praise" is not worship. The Psalmist frequently praises God's creations, not as a way of worshipping them, but as a way of praising their Creator, which is what Catholics do when we praise Mary--for as Paul says, woman is the glory of man, and man is the image and the glory of God (1 Corinthians 11:7, with Mary contrasted with Eve down in verse 12). None of her titles address her as "Creator of the universe" or anything of the sort, contrary to the argument being made in this and other posts in the thread. All of her titles are meant to indicate her close relationship with her Son and to hold her up as a role model for how to imitate her Son, but she is never placed above her Son, and a review of her titles will demonstrate this (a long task I will not attempt in this post, but I will come back to it). As for her ability to hear an infinite number of prayers, this is not surprising since God has this ability and his grace is sufficient to bestow it on another, and she is the "one full of grace" (Luke 1:28)--a title Gabriel gave her, demonstrating that honoring her with titles is Biblical.
[Your response:]You mean being the magisterial discerners and stewards and translators of Divine revelation means such are the assuredly correct interpreters and teachers of it? Yes or no?
I mean several things:
1. As a historical fact, the Catholic Church decided which books belonged in the Biblical canon, and the Protestant canon is borrowed from the Catholic canon, with a portion of books omitted. Without the authority of the early Catholic councils and the historical testimony of the Church Fathers, Protestants have no authoritative basis for settling which books belong in Scripture. For instance, how can Protestants definitively exclude the Shepherd of Hermas, which many 2nd- and 3rd-century Christians considered canonical? I can see how you could make a case against it, but it would be a case based on merely human opinion, with no divine authority behind it.
2. Also as a historical fact, the Catholic Church translated the Bible into first Latin and then English, and the Protestant translation traditions stemming from Luther's translation and from the KJV are based on these earlier Catholic translations.
3. Jesus commissioned the Apostles to preach the Gospel in His name and gave them binding and loosing authority, and they passed this authority on to the bishops through the laying of hands, as Paul records, as Clement of Rome documents in the first century (while the Apostle John was still alive, so you cannot exclude Clement even by your 100-AD-or-less criterion), and as Irenaeus, student of John's disciple Polycarp (who most likely collected the NT books for the first time in the mid-2nd century), confirmed in the 2nd century. So Catholics at least claim a divine commission for our authority, even if you don't accept this authority. In contrast, Protestants can only claim to have an authority based on the authority of a Luther or a Calvin or the founder of whichever new denomination or "nondemoninational denomination" one professes to follow--unless one wants to claim some special new divine commission such as George Fox's inner voice, but that would be going beyond Sola Scriptura. So I don't see where Protestants following Sola Scriptura can claim any authority other than merely human authority when you reject the authority of the Catholic councils that settled the canon. But Paul said his Gospel was not based on mere human wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:18ff).
I know I still have some posts to respond to; I will follow up another day on those—daniel1212 gave me enough to answer for one day :-)
Well i am recovering but have a bad headache for days that meds will not touch, likely from too much eye strain, so its about all i can do to get thru your latest replies. sorry if i seem rather curt.
I mean several things:
So there is no yes or no?
1. As a historical fact, the Catholic Church decided which books belonged in the Biblical canon, and the Protestant canon is borrowed from the Catholic canon, with a portion of books omitted. Without the authority of the early Catholic councils and the historical testimony of the Church Fathers, Protestants have no authoritative basis for settling which books belong in Scripture.
Really? You mean assuredly one cannot know what is of God apart from Rome, as being magisterial discerners and stewards and translators of Divine revelation?
2. Also as a historical fact, the Catholic Church translated the Bible into first Latin and then English, and the Protestant translation traditions stemming from Luther's translation and from the KJV are based on these earlier Catholic translations.
So again, your argument is that being the magisterial discerners and stewards and translators of Divine revelation means such are the assuredly correct interpreters and teachers of it? Yes or no?
3. Jesus commissioned the Apostles to preach the Gospel in His name and gave them binding and loosing authority, and they passed this authority on to the bishops through the laying of hands, as Paul records, as Clement of Rome documents in the first century (while the Apostle John was still alive, so you cannot exclude Clement even by your 100-AD-or-less criterion), and as Irenaeus, student of John's disciple Polycarp (who most likely collected the NT books for the first time in the mid-2nd century), confirmed in the 2nd century. So Catholics at least claim a divine commission for our authority,...
So formal descent (regardless of the early absence of the Roman pope and how problematic Rome's line is) means the magisterial discerners and stewards and translators of Divine revelation means such are the assuredly correct interpreters and teachers of it? And thus dissent from such such rebellion against God? Yes or no?
For it seems that the RC argument is that an assuredly (if conditionally) infallible magisterium is essential for determination and assurance of Truth (including writings and men being of God) and to fulfill promises of Divine presence, providence of Truth, and preservation of faith, and authority.
And that being the historical instruments and stewards of Divine revelation (oral and written) means that Rome is that assuredly infallible magisterium. Thus any who knowingly dissent from the latter must be in rebellion to God.
Does this fairly represent what you hold to or in what way does it differ?
"Had to add?" I had to add nothing , since I NEVER claimed that kneeling always denoted worship, but it is You who had to take away the qualifiers which describe what Catholics give to Mary and which correspond to worship! That is what you responded to by reducing the issue down to only kneeling.
The Psalmist frequently praises God's creations,
Sophistry. None one ever gives to any creation the depth of adulation and supernatural attributes which Catholics laud their Mary with. Once again your must craftily resort to minimization.
None of her titles address her as "Creator of the universe"
And what does this avail you? People can worship Obama without making him the creator. No created being is ever said to be the sinless dispenser or all grace, so that "the Holy Spirit acts only by the Most Blessed Virgin, his Spouse." and whose power now "is all but unlimited," and who can hear all prayers addressed to her, and who has "authority over the angels and the blessed in heaven," including "assigning to saints the thrones made vacant by the apostate angels," and that “sometimes salvation is quicker if we remember Mary's name then if we invoked the name of the Lord Jesus," and whose [Mary] merits we are saved by, who "had to suffer, as He did, all the consequences of sin," and who (obviously) cannot "be honored to excess," etc.
All of her titles are meant to indicate her close relationship with her Son and to hold her up as a role model for how to imitate her Son,
Come on. By ascribing such attributes and glory to Mary which are nowhere given her or to any created being then you are making here into a demigoddess, not a Biblical role model.
As for her ability to hear an infinite number of prayers, this is not surprising since God has this ability and his grace is sufficient to bestow it on another,
You do realize what you have just done don't you? Faced with an attribute only God is shown having and not any created being, your resort to rationalizing that it is fine to say Mary has that power since God can give it to her, but what God can do is no basis for claiming. You might as well teach that she parted the Red Sea and multitude other fantasies!
she is the "one full of grace" (Luke 1:28)--a title Gabriel gave her, demonstrating that honoring her with titles is Biblical.
Once again we see the art of Catholic extrapolation, attempting to use a Biblical principal to justify what they wring out of it. Sure God honors persons of virtue, which Mary was, but which simply does not justify the manner of adulation given to Mary, which is indeed far "above that which is written" (which is not of obscure meaning). Meanwhile, Mary is not said to be "full" of grace as is said of Christ, and is not a formal title.
The issue was what you see in the texts, which means you somehow see these angels and elders being prayed to? No, you do not! And that you contextually see this as being a continuous service and the ability to hear all prayer from Heaven, which is unique to God? No, you do not either, or if you do then you are reading into it that which is not there.
There is nothing that suggests continuity here, but a number of future events are recorded in the context of the coming judgment upon the earth. And before judgment God brings forth testimony of the warrant for it, which includes the cry of those martyred souls under the altar in Rv. 6:9, and with odors representing prayer, akin to Leviticus 6:15, "burn it upon the altar for a sweet savour, even the memorial of it, unto the Lord." (Leviticus 6:15)
As for only God being able to hear all prayer from Heaven, with zero examples of any prayers to anyone else in Heaven, and statements that God hears prayers, then it is up to you to prove otherwise. Which, even if you could, would still not mean that are to be prayed to.
There is a point in the Catholic Mass (as well as the Masses of the Eastern churches) where prayers for the dead (i.e. memorial prayers) are offered and entrusted to the
Of what use is this? The errors of your church will not make such Scriptural.
Hebrews passage I quoted where angels are present with the spirits of righteous men made perfect), a practice that is documented in the earliest available records.
You are simply reading into the text what is not there, which is that of any example of them being prayed to or exhortation made to pray to them, which if any book was going to teach this it would be Hebrews. Instead, it states believers have access with boldness into the holy of holies in Heaven by the sinless shed blood of Christ, (Heb. 10:19) who is the only One set forth as man's heavenly intercessor, and uniquely able to help! (Heb. 4:15; 7:25) Stop reading into Scripture that which the Holy Spirit surely would have recorded if it was doctrine, but did not!
Poetic or not, the Psalms are prayers, and the ones I quoted address angels directly, something you claimed does not happen in Scripture. Pointing out that other created beings are also addressed does not change the fact that angels are addressed.
Are you serious? That is absurd! Telling the sun and moon, beasts, and all cattle etc. to praise the Lord is no more that of praying to them that it is telling angels to do so!
Since stones are not sentient beings, obviously this is meant metaphorically. But angels are sentient beings...;
Which helps you how? Psalms 148:7-10 also includes sentient beings Psalms 148:7-10 Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps:...Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl: (Psalms 148:7-10) Just give it up as it makes you look even more desperate.
This addresses some of what you say later in post, but you cite 1 Timothy 2:5, which I also want to address. Protestants like to cite this out of context to supposedly refute the idea that saints can intercede for us, but if you back up to verse 1 of that chapter, what is the context? Paul is asking Christians--created beings--to make "requests, prayers, intercession, and thanksgiving" for kings and authorities. This demonstrates that asking created beings for prayers was not seen by Paul as inconsistent with the idea of Christ as "one mediator".
Which is simply more Catholic sophistry, trying to use earthly communication as if it was the same as spiritual communication btwn Heaven and earth, despite approx. 200 prayers in Scripture and no one addressed to anyone in Heaven by God, except by pagans. But understand your desperation.
What he specifically means is that Christ is one mediator for "all men" (verse 6), not that we can't ask others to pray to this mediator for us.
You just don't get it. When Catholics are not arguing for the validity something unseen in Scripture on the basis that God could do it, then they are arguing that it is valid since there is no express injunction against it, but the point here was that Christ is the only heavenly intercessor named btwn God and man, that just as "there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. (1 Timothy 2:5)
1 Corinthians 4:6: if you'll look up commentators' discussion of the Greek for the phrase you quote as "above that which is written", you'll find that this is a rare phrase and scholars can only guess what it means. Citing it is weak support for any argument.
Hardly. Contextually the meaning it clear. Men were thinking of men too highly, thus forming sects after men, and thus being puffed up against each others, and this Paul warns them not to think of men above that which is written, "that one be not puffed up against the other for another, above that which is written." (DRB) "Huper" is a common word which means "over," above," and the word for "which" is exceedingly common and means that when referring to something, while "graphō" means to grave, to write, and refers to a standard, and the only supreme written standard is Scripture.
Your complaint about the latria/dulia/hyperdulia distinction being "semantics" ignores the fact that defining your terms is the basis of logical argument. You can only call Catholic Marian prayers "worship" by exporting your own definition of "worship" into Catholic teachings, which is fallacious, particularly since you are using a 21st-century definition rather than the one being used by the 1st-century NT documents and Augustine's 5th-century delineation of the latria/dulia/hyperdulia distinction.
No, i am referring to how worship is described, as it is manifest as an activity and goes along attributions, so that giving such obeisance and praise to created beings that is only given to God in both idolatry and blasphemy, to the two being related. Thus my statement that one would have a hard time in Bible times explaining kneeling before a statue and praising the entity it represented in the unseen world, beseeching such for Heavenly help, and making offerings to them, and giving glory and titles and ascribing attributes to such which are never given in Scripture to created beings (except to false gods), including having the uniquely Divine power glory to hear and respond to virtually infinite numbers of prayers individually addressed to them.
Regarding Sola Scriptura: if you do not follow the many Protestants who see the principle as implying a contradiction between faith and reason-
Nothing more needs to be said here other than the fact that the supreme definitive source for what the NT church believed is the only wholly inspired substantive body of Truth, Scripture, specifically Acts onward which reveals how they understood the rest of Scripture. In which the Catholic distinctives are unseen and contrary to it.
1 Corinthians 3:10-15: The Church Fathers interpreted this passage the way they did for good reasons. One is the fact that Paul is alluding to other Scriptural passages on this same theme, including one some Protestants mistakenly claim wasn't canonical for early Christians,
Look. You can invoke every so-called "church father" you want and it will not change the fact that only suffering for believers that is manifestly taught as after this life is that of the judgment seat of Christ, which does not begin at death, but awaits the Lord's return, (1 Corinthians 4:5; 2 Timothy. 4:1,8; Revelation 11:18; Matthew 25:31-46; 1 Peter 1:7; 5:4) and is the suffering of the loss of rewards (and the Lord's displeasure) due to the manner of material one built the church with, which one is saved despite the loss of such, not because of. (1 Corinthians 3:8ff)
As for the NAB, the new version is an awful liberal translation that the U.S. bishops
It follows that the Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of per sons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors. - VEHEMENTER NOS, an Encyclical of Pope Pius X promulgated on February 11, 1906:
Regarding Abraham's bosom: in ancient Christian catacomb inscriptions, there are prayers that are specifically asking for the dearly departed to be taken into Abraham's bosom to be with Lazarus, indicating a belief in a Purgatorial realm distinct from Abraham's bosom itself. The language used is similar to that used in Catholic prayers for the dead, demonstrating that these are an ancient practice and not a late innovation.
A late Jewish innovation, and in any case the record of what some people did simply does not mean it Scripture. If prayer to created beings - a most common basic practice that was are supposed to believe in - was Biblical then you would have to run to such traditions or engage in extrapolating support of you texts which simply do not teach it. It remains that the Holy Spirit was neither negligent nor forgetful in providing approx. 200 prayers to Heaven in Scripture but none to anyone else but the Lord, and instructing Him to be addressed, who He himself cries to from within the believe ("Abba, Father," not "Mamma, Mother") and only setting forth Christ as the incessant heavenly intercessor btwn God and man, whom believers call upon.
The End.
I agree totally. You summed it up well. God has no beginning nor end.
Thank you for taking the time to reply despite your headache. I do not want to aggravate your headache, and I have other posts I need to catch up on, so I will come back to your posts another day, in the hopes you are feeling better then. I get headaches from working at the computer too much and from allergies, so I sympathize. Sumatriptan helps with my worst headaches.
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