Posted on 02/12/2005 11:59:27 AM PST by NYer
Rome, Feb. 11, 2005 (CNA) - Forensic scientists in Italy are working on a different kind of investigation—one that dates back 2000 years.
In an astounding announcement, the scientists think they may have re-created an image of Jesus Christ when He was a 12-year old boy.
Using the Shroud of Turin, a centuries-old linen cloth, which many believe bears the face of the crucified Christ, the investigators first created a computer-modeled, composite picture of the Christ’s face.
Dr. Carlo Bui, one of the scientists said that, “the face of the man on the shroud is the face of a suffering man. He has a deeply ruined nose. It was certainly struck."
Then, using techniques usually reserved for investigating missing persons, they back dated the image to create the closest thing many will ever see to a photograph of the young Christ.
“Without a doubt, the eyes... That is, the deepness of the eyes, the central part of the face in its complexity”, said forensic scientist Andrea Amore, one of the chief investigators who made the discovery.
The shroud itself, a 14-foot long by 3.5-foot wide woven cloth believed by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus, is receiving renewed attention lately.
A Los Alamos, New Mexico scientist has recently cast grave doubt that the carbon dating originally used to date the shroud was valid. This would suggest that the shroud may in fact be 2000 years old after all, placing it precisely in the period of Christ’s crucifixion.
To this, you should add the passage of the atonement for the dead in 2 Maccabbees.
"Many of these groups"?
I am speaking of the divided wings of Catholicism: Roman and Orthodox.
What are the basics of the message: "Love your neighbor as you love yourself, and love God above all." Jesus said that these two Commandments were the ENTIRETY of The Law and the Prophets. In other words, on God's authority you may now fold shut your Old Testament and read those two commandments over and over again, because God has told you EXACTLY what GOD inspired in the Old Testament. The rest is detail, and it can confuse people. It can actually lead people AWAY from God's Two Commandments, if they read into the Old Testament MORE than the Two Commandments that God Incarnate said were the ENTIRETY of the Old Testament.
Any disagreement on that?
If there is, then you've gone off the message of Jesus.
Says who?
HIM!
So, that's the whole Law and Prophets, the whole OT, according to God: "Love your neighbor as yourself, and love God above all." He gave some specifics about HOW to love your neighbor as yourself: practice charity, tell the truth, do not gossip, be meek and avoid violence.
Got it.
Now, what else did God say in the New?
Well, he gave us a Church, and he left it under leaders with the power "to loose and to bind". And THEY told us to lay on hands to impart the Holy Spirit (Confirmation) and how to select the clergy and lay hands on them (Ordination).
Jesus told us to baptize, and did it himself (Baptism).
Jesus healed the sick through prayer and told his followers to do so (Anointing of the sick)
Jesus and his apostles called for the repentance of sin (Penance).
Jesus performed his first miracle at a wedding in Cana, and he told us marriage is holy and made by God (Marriage), and not to break what God has made.
And finally, Jesus told us to break the bread and take the cup in memory of him (the Eucharist).
Got it.
Seven sacraments and two commandments.
That's it.
That's the message.
There isn't anything more to it than that.
The rest is detail, and the details are not sufficient to keep us separate.
Oh, and he also specifically said, when his apostles were trying to stop others preaching and casting out demons in his name, not to stop them, because "Those who are not against us are with us."
Nothing about this is hard to understand, although much of it is quite hard to actually DO. Especially the part about being nice to others.
What do YOU think are the vital parts of Jesus' message that force us to reject each other and not walk together all the way to St. Peter's gate?
Everyone finds something on salvation and judgment in various parts of the Scripture/Tradition. These are pieces of a puzzle (mystery). The Protestants hold that salvation is by faith and that trying to be(come) sinless is futile; we can do as best as possible, but will never succeed. The Catholics are constantly "pinching pennies" so to say, paying back the "debt" with their indulgences, and the Orthodox hold that the entry ticket depends on how "Christ-like" we have become. All this tells me that no one has the key.
I spent 4 years of my life on the Neverending story threads debating that very issue. We wrote a book in that discussion. And the same can be done here. The essential problem is that amongst the divisions you'll find parts of the truth. In basic form, the groups have adopted philosophies that they adhere to - "the wisdom of men" as it were. They follow that "wisdom of men", stick a bible in the trunk for the occasional thing not answered by the philosophy and call it "christian". By this model, I could build a philosophy for whores (literally prostitutes - not metaphorically) dabble the philosophy with calls to authority from scriptures taken out of context and say I have a Christian branch for whores. How do you suppose groups calling themselves christian give assent to the idea that the unrepentant belong in the pulpit? They may belong in church post-repentance; but, in no way belong in the pulpit.
So long as what calls itself "christian" is following something else and paying lipservice to the authority of the scriptures or building philosophies on scripture taken way out of context, all you have is people playing at religianity by following two masters and pretending they're following Christ. Many of them you can't get to defend the Bible at any cost. But, attack their philosophy and they'll defend it to the death. Therein is the folly I present as error of assumption in uniting it. It is no different than taking the religions of Old rome, banding them together and calling them the "universal religion". If Tamuz is mutually exclusive of Apollo, what truth have you preserved and what unity have you accomplished. Unity in name only is not unity.
We aren't here, as christians, to unify false doctrines into a whole. We're here to shine the light of truth. That is not served by bouding up falsehoods and giving creedance to claims of christianity while people follow anything but. And if the point is to tell people they can't follow two masters, what do you propose to do with their philosophies if you unite them? Do you do away with them (one hopes) and force them to the scriptures only? Do you call it tradition and lump all the philosophers into one volume, leaving a pantheon of masters to follow? Do you "harmonize" the philosophies into one and end yourself up with two masters again?
I understand my querries likely step squarely on your toes as Rome and many of the protestant sects are immersed in philosophy. While the Bibles they hold may be compatible to some extent, the philosophies largely have not one whit of unity either with scripture or with each other as a result. Where then is the basis for unity? The flesh? The flesh is that which we are not trying to save - bringing us back to the starting point.
I was speaking more generally of what calls itself Christianity at large as opposed to what actually is.
"By this model, I could build a philosophy for whores (literally prostitutes - not metaphorically) dabble the philosophy with calls to authority from scriptures taken out of context and say I have a Christian branch for whores."
Jesus' Church is the one for whores.
Literally.
Look in his own bloodline: Rahab the Harlot. Remember, she was the one accoutered GOOD for her deed in Jerhico...and all despite the fact she was a whore.
And then when Jesus walked, who did he observe flocked to him: the prostitutes and tax collectors, not the Pharisees.
Now, do we suppose that prostitutes were able to stop prostitution completely in those hard days even if they loved Jesus? And starve. Jesus did not hate whores. He loved them, they loved him. Love the sinner, hate the sin.
And their sin is, what? Evil behavior undertaken because of extreme poverty. More forgiveable than evil behavior undertaken by the powerful and the rich.
Who said so?
Him.
Real Christianity has always been the religion for whores.
Whatever rejects the whores who do what they do in desperation rejects Christ. HE embraced them and loved them and understood them, and was descended from one.
One Quibble as a matter of reverence - It's God's gate, not St. Peter's. I know you'll see that as a matter of point of view from experience. Semantically, you may see it as no difference. From a point of due dilligence and reverence, to me it is an all important distinction.
When God acts through a man, the action does not belong to the man. Man may assent to God's leading, but the only thing the man owns is his assent - everything thereafter belongs to God. And this is why we're to give God the glory for all things. That being said, I don't see any part of the scriptures as less important than another. We are not to quibble over tie vs. no tie issues; but, that isn't legislated by scripture. Congregations decide those things for themselves within the limits of what scripture says is proper - hopefully.
There is no detail in scripture that is not there for a purpose. To suppose we can extricate parts we like, agree on them, and toss the rest aside as debateable is to say, "part of this is true, the other part.. maybe". God didn't say 'here it is, take what you think you can all agree on.' He rather said, here it is, take it or leave it. God authored the covenant, not us. God sealed it, not us. We have the right of free will in accepting or rejecting it. But nowhere, nowhere in scripture will you find the right given to man to change the covenant.
I know you'll say it isn't "changing" the covenant when agreeing just to the parts to it that are unoffensive. I will argue that it is because you're picking and chosing what the covenant will be for yourselves. And that goes for all parties at the table. If you prefer your version of Sin definitions over that of scripture, you have a different system than the covenant defines - that means your covenant is different than anyone who takes the scriptural tack. Just an example.
It is simple - very simple and clear when broken down to it's basics. I've signed contracts before. When you sign a contract, something in that contract vs. something not in that contract is a world of difference. If you and I take the same contract for marriage and you add a prenup to yours while I don't, we don't have the same contract. We may have assented to marriage; but, our covenants are different - you have different rights. That isn't the way God's covenant works. All of us are bound by the same contract. And we are not allowed to change it. We didn't set the conditions, God did. And when you start talking about "what in the message we can agree to" you're essentially redacting the parts of the covenant you won't agree to whether you'll admit it or not. Then you'll debate the rest later and maybe accept a little more of the contract or change it further with your own ideas.
When you begin redacting or adding things to the scriptures, you're telling God and all of us that you have usurped the authority of God and are changing the covenant. That is a usurpation not unlike that of Satan. "I will.." Satan wasn't content with what God willed, Satan's will got in the way and he decided he'd rewrite the order of things in heaven. Very simple to understand; but, it doesn't seem to ocurr to people when they start doing the same thing themselves that the same result follows - being booted out of eden.
Assent must be assent to the whole message, not the bits we like. And it must be restricted to the message, not the message plus philosophies we include without authority to so do. Assent must be to God's covenant with us - not our rewrite with submission to god demanding signature for same. And I'm not unaware that there are councils among some groups that meet and act as signatory for God when he doesn't give his own assent to our will.
I don't pretend these are not harsh words for the ears of many. They are stated with as little specificity as possible in order to note that all are guilty of these things - all. If we have the wisdom to correct our own stances and adhere to the actual covenant rather than what we try to change it in to - to that extent, we are spiritually already brothers. To the extent that we give assent to others altering the covenant, we've already blasphemed God in our assent to such.
I would one up you, Christ's church is for all sinners. The differentiation I would make is that it is for repentant sinners. The unrepentant may come and go; but, the wider church is the repentant. And that is the point I was making. Unrepentant sinners do not belong behind the pulpit. That is why scripture encapsulates a set of guidelines to give us a gist of what should and should not be. To the extent that a homosexual church is a church of practicing homosexuals, they've made their own covenant by not holding to the Christian one. It may be a religion; but, it isn't christianity. God didn't tell the adulterous woman merely "go", he noted the sin and stated "go and sin no more". He saved her phyisicl life to note that men didn't have the right any longer to stand in mortal judgement over her sins. If he forgave her, that was enough.. but, go and sin no more meant she was not to be adulterous any longer. It means the Homosexuals, theives, etc. all must turn from the wickedness of their sin in order to be one of us. Thus, Repent!
In that manner, Christ's church is one for ex-whores, not one of whores. And especially not one where an active prostitute is teaching the church. Coming to God to turn back into the worldly heathen is not the goal. But that is what many have made of the church with philosophy.. the wisdom of men.
"O God of spirits and of all flesh, You have trampled upon death and have abolished the power of the devil, giving life to Your world. Give rest to the soul of Your departed servant (Name) in a place of light, in a place of repose, in a place of refreshment, where there is no pain, sorrow, and suffering. As a good and loving God, forgive every sin he (she) has committed in thought, word or deed, for there is no one who lives and does not sin. You alone are without sin. Your righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and Your word is truth."
What we pray for is mercy, perhaps God's mercy in overlooking the effects of the sins of the deceased which have limited that person's likeness to God. Perhaps the fire of God's love, extended quite on its own by the way and not because we ask for it, burns the soul and so burnishes it into a likeness of God.
"When you begin redacting or adding things to the scriptures, you're telling God and all of us that you have usurped the authority of God and are changing the covenant"
Query: Are 1 and 2 Maccabees books of the Bible?
Yes or no?
Ok, so from what I have gleaned so far, you are asserting that there is a clear and convincing moral code for Christianity.
I agree.
You think it is in the Bible.
And I agree.
You seem to think that you know what it is.
Perhaps I will agree with your assessment, but perhaps I won't.
It worries me when you start talking about not picking and choosing in the Bible. We must, because the Bible conflicts. Deuteronomy tells us how to divorce our wives. Jesus tells us that divorce NEVER was the will of God.
God tells us in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that pork and shellfish render us impure. Jesus tells us that nothing a man puts in his mouth renders us impure, only that which comes out of it. But then Paul goes on about meat sacrificed to idols.
So, which is it?
Is it what God said to Moses?
Or what Jesus said to his disciples?
Or what Paul said in his epistles.
Three conflicting things.
Somebody's got to decide which.
When I read this, it is perfectly obvious what the answer is.
(1) The Mosaic Code applied to Jews, and only Jews, and Judaism passes by the blood. I am unfortunately not blessed with any Jewish ancestry of which I am aware, therefore I am not prohibited from eating shellfish and pork whether Jesus was God or not. Even if Jesus was not God but Yahweh is, Yahweh prohibited those things to Jews, and only Jews. The only thing God prohibited to ME, a descendent of Japheth (and therefore blessed) is the Noahide laws: not to kill man, and not to eat blood. Other laws, such as not to commit adultery, seem to creep into the Noahide "Canon" in other OT Scripture. So, I can eat pork, but not pork blood.
(2) Jesus says that nothing that goes into a man's mouth makes him impure. I could eat feces and not be spiritually impure, just sick in the head. Of course, as a Gentile, nothing I ate other than blood would have rendered me impure. But Jesus said NOTHING, and He was God. Therefore, I can eat blood pudding and blood sausage, or African blood soup and not sin. This WOULD BE a sin under the Noahide laws, but Jesus said that the blood prohibition was not from God, by saying NOTHING makes me impure by eating it.
Since Jesus was God, that ends the discussion.
(3) But ah! Paul, the Jewish lawyer and ex-Pharisee, says to refrain from eating blood and meat sacrificed to idols. He has his reasons, no doubt. No doubt some of them are his own traditions and prejudices seeping through. But no doubt, too, he is getting at something. And what he's getting at can't be the food part: Jesus was God and HE said nothing we eat can make us impure. Paul says to abstain from blood and idol-offered meat, but Paul clearly cannot overrule God. So, Paul must mean something else. Perhaps the practice of eating blood coupled with the practice of idol-offered meat. The problem was not the food, it was the temptation to idolatry that being in the presence of such rites, and the full knowledge that everyone then had about such rites, that Paul was aiming at. Indeed, in the ancient world, meat was usually obtained by sacrifice to SOMETHING.
In our day, meat is obtained from slaughterhouses, and neither it nor blood has any idolatrous connotations. Not only that, but biologically, the blood is no more "the life" than is the cells of the meat. So, the religious concerns Paul was aiming at have disappeared, and we can go with God's very simple message, spoken from his own lips: NO FOOD IS IMPURE.
Indeed, the more consistently one follows what GOD said IN PERSON, when he was here in the flesh, the more that all of the strange conflicts of the Bible disappear or are cleared up. They COULD mean a lot of things, but they DO mean what Jesus said. Because HE was God, and Paul and Moses weren't.
Simple. Sane. Clear. God doesn't play "Hide the football", and doesn't require literacy of his followers.
But it still worries me when you speak of not picking and choosing in the Bible. Are 1 and 2 Maccabbees in the Bible?
No. But that's not a complete answer, is it.
Christianity was never given authority over the oracles of God - the Old covenant. Paul states flatly in his discourses that those were intrusted to the house of Israel. In trying to add to the old covenant - which in no way affected the church of the new covenant and which the new covenant church had no authority over, the group that did so overstepped their authority - assuming they had any to begin with. There is no authority given to over-ride this condition. If Paul didn't have said authority and noted he did not, how then does anyone with his authority or less have such authority.
That may not be the answer you'd like; but, it is nonetheless the happenstance as noted by no less than an Apostle chosen by Christ to spread the covenant.
Doesn't bother me in the slightest.
I am slightly concerned for you, that's all.
You have abandoned science, which has interesting things to say about the cloth, and are asserting something on the basis of FAITH. Which is swell...unless God left that cloth there exactly as it appears as an aid to men's faith. Certainly he performed so many of his other miracles for that very purpose! This would hardly be out of line.
In that case, you are calling an act of God a sinful graven image. And that would be an error. Probably not a very serious one, but an error nonetheless. You are asserting with certitude that which you cannot possibly know, and if you are wrong, you are giving God a raspberry, telling him that you don't need His stinking sheet.
Anyway, we are all free to think what we want to think.
I am not hostile to science, and find that the process of uncovering the truth or fiction about the Shroud teaches me an awful lot of interesting science and Church history.
One thing that certainly doesn't appear anywhere in Orthodox writings that I have encountered is the Roman pugatorial idea that a "purpose" of the intermediary state in which we find ourselves between death and the final judgment is to undergo some sort of burning and cleansing us from sins.
Orthodox teaching seems to be that the critical thing for all of us is the overall disposition of our soul at the time of death: are we turned toward God and become like him, or are we turned away from him and such that "I never knew you."
As to the "toll-houses," much ink has been spilled on that in Orthodox circles, but the important thing to remember is that they are and always were a metaphor, an imperfect description of what the soul experiences after death.
We have memorial services for the departed on the 3rd, 9th, and 40th day of their repose. The Church has given us some explanations as to why these are important times of transition for the soul, and there are too many experiences that Orthodox Christians (including me) have had surrounding those days to treat this lightly.
But what is described by the Fathers who describe what happens after death is the soul being confronted with his sins. What seems to be happening is not "payment" for sins or "purification" from sins, but rather a revealing to the soul the implications of how one has spent ones life.
There just isn't found in Orthodox thought the idea that every sin has to be legally accounted for in one way or another. There are certainly stories of those who were lost because of a single sin, but the point to the stories generally is that the secretly harbored sin was reflective of the person's true disposition toward God, which he had hid from the world, and perhaps from himself.
No, the Bible does not conflict. We read in one of two ways - to glean the truth of a matter or to fit it into our notions. If we're gleaning for the truth of what's there, there is no conflict. If we try to fit our ideas on it, then conflict appears to exist. If you add to it things that are in conflict, then conflict will exist because of what you've added.
Jesus tells us that divorce NEVER was the will of God.
This isn't a conflict. It is true. God initially forbade divorce; but, as the scripture states, grudgingly consented to it due to the hardness of man's heart. It was not God's will. But it isn't conflict to say he did it. It wasn't Pilot's will to crucify Christ; but, he did it. If you're fishing for appearances, you can find them. If you use some sense, they fall apart quickly.
God tells us in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that pork and shellfish render us impure. Jesus tells us that nothing a man puts in his mouth renders us impure, only that which comes out of it. But then Paul goes on about meat sacrificed to idols. So, which is it?
You're comparing apples and oranges. Impurity as regards kosher preperation and what was/was not allowed was a matter of physical shortcomings - ie what comes out of them. The animals were "unclean" or 'given to disease'. Paul is discussing spiritual uncleanliness when speaking on things given to idols.
Meat sacrificed to idols in and of itself is not impure; but, the demonic things that attach themselves to the meat is spiritually impure. By partaking of the meat, you drag along with it the unclean spirits. Thusly, abstention from them was a matter of wisdom to keep from all the ills that could arise from partaking. Staying out of heathen rituals was already a given and was seperately addressed. You weren't far off; but, as long as you heed the warning, the reasoning is unimportant. It only becomes important when you don't, then we have not far to go to help get ya out of trouble. Hopefully anyway. If you've ever dealt with opression and possession, it isn't necessarily that simple.
Indeed, the more consistently one follows what GOD said IN PERSON, when he was here in the flesh, the more that all of the strange conflicts of the Bible disappear or are cleared up.
This is simply a matter of contextualizing. Though overgeneral, it is essentially correct. But, it is not a given that people constrain themselves to contextualizing when they have adopted things that deconstruct the context and prefer their philosophies rather than the scriptures. Case in point, According to scripture, God was admonishing people in the OT about going to the market to by and eat bread that does not give life while noting that his words are the bread that does give life. If God's word was the bread of life back then and he was feeding it to people by speaking to them, how then is it required to eat something physical to partake of the "bread of life" in the new covenant. It isn't; but, that truth is missed because someone didn't know what they were reading.
As I noted before, the message is the matter of import, not the philosophy you supplant it with. Rewriting the covenant may be valid to you and give you a club or a religion; but, it doesn't give you eternal life. And it most assuredly doesn't give you authority. And I am using the word "you" ambiguously.. it is not intended to point you out specifically. The people it is for know precisely who they are and are likely a bit uncomfortable.
I suppose there are some corners of Catholic thought, especially back in the bad old pre-Tridentine days of the sale of indulgences (which, in fairness, was a period of naked abuse that lasted perhaps a hundred years, and was associated with the takeover of the Italian Church by frank privateers) that really made an accounting system for getting rid of this sin and that.
Trent got rid of that, and good riddance.
Certainly it isn't what I believe.
I think it's all a mystery, but I just don't think that God damns everyone - which would just about be the effect of an "any sin, no salvation" approach.
"We have memorial services for the departed on the 3rd, 9th, and 40th day of their repose. The Church has given us some explanations as to why these are important times of transition for the soul, and there are too many experiences that Orthodox Christians (including me) have had surrounding those days to treat this lightly."
We've had experiences alright, all of us so far as I know!
Let's return to Maccabbees for a moment and stipulate to some history.
Was the Jerusalem Temple the one true temple of God before the advent of Jesus? And were the High Priests of the Temple the authorities of God's Church before Jesus?
Yes or no?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.