Posted on 11/27/2013 3:29:16 PM PST by navysealdad
In a far-ranging 50,000 word statement released by Pope Francis on Tuesday, he illustrated that he is sympathetic to the tenets of liberation theology and hostile to capitalism.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness
[21] ...For from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succsession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy (or kingdom of darkness) may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies (that is, to the old wives' fables in England, concerning ghosts and spirits and the feats they play in the night). And if a man consider the original of this ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start out of the ruins of that heathen power. >p>[22] The language also which they use (both in the churches and in theirpublic acts) being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nationnow in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?
[23] The fairies, in what nation soever they converse, have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universla king, the Pope.
Part III. Of a Christian Commonwealth.
Chap. xxxviii. Of Eternal Life, Hell, Salvation, and Redemption.
[12] And first, for the tormentors, we have their nature and properties exactly and properly delivered by the names of the Enemy (or Satan), the Accuser (or Diabolus), the Destroyer (or Abaddon). Which significant names (Satan, Devil, Abaddon) set not forth to us any individual person, as proper names do, but only an office or quality, and are therefore appellatives, which ought not to have been left untranslated (as they are in the Latin and modern Bibles), because thereby they seem to be the proper names of demons, and men are the more easily seduced to believe the doctrine of devils, which at that time was the religion of the Gentiles, and contrary to that of Moses, and of Christ.
[13] And because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and Destroyer, is meant the enemy of them that shall be in the kingdom of God, therefore if the kingdom of God after the resurrection be upon the earth (as in the former Chapter I have shewn by Scripture it seems to be), the Enemy and his kingdom must be on earth also. For so also was it in the time before the Jews had deposed God. For God's kingdom was in Israel, and the nations round about were the kingdoms of the Enemy; and consequently, by Satan is meant any earthly enemy of the Church.
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness
Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world," [Ephesians, 6. 12] "the kingdom of Satan," [Matthew, 12. 26] and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons," [Ibid., 9. 34] that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air";[Ephesians, 2. 2] and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world":[John, 16. 11] and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the "children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
The bible certainly says for the rich to “use the mammon of unrighteousness” to win friends that will meet them in eternal dwellings.
If the lavishness of the Vatican truly is an evangelism tool, far be it from me to deny that it is what the Lord made it.
I’m, however, skeptical about such things. Even in the Catholic system of viewing affairs, most of the recognized saints dwelt rather frugally.
What is weird about this kind of diatribe, Dash, is that it inadvertently manages to sing the song of much of the Roman Catholic attitude that it hates... but does so in a Protestant key.
And I wonder now, as thought leads to thought, if some of the attitude that Francis is expressing here, is a projected sense of guilt. We have to do something about the rich being too rich. Francis does witness well in his own life about frugality. But he lives in a gilded Vatican that he can't quite bring himself to exhort to be more frugal itself, as that would be a kind of lese majeste that is unspeakable to him. So he tells the world at large to be frugal. At least that's my guess. I'm not getting dogmatic about it.
This is supposed to mean just what, Dash?
Ordo Draconis... sine pari...
The order of the dragon, without peer?
Color me slow. I have to think through such things and try not to knee jerk.
I will pray for you.
I Googled for that without much success finding a greater context. If an organization that claims Christ also got into something like what this suggests, that would be a sin, or at least flirting too closely with sin for comfort. Not the unforgivable one, however. Can you furnish some more context?
We will do well to all pray for one another... to get closer to Christ, which is the light that will better illuminate all such disputed matters. I think overly polarizing talk is being used here. The truth is difficult enough to assert in this world without throwing gratuitous firebombs into the middle of it.
I have been looking for several years to find a copy of this. Do you know where I can get one?
So far I see lots of cutesy/provocative stuff and no explanation about how it is supposed to fit into a context.
That makes me wonder where your thought processes are.
Orthodoxy...
Try looking by title on You Tube.
This is not an excuse-all of the Inquisition, but it’s a counter to some of the worse misrepresentations of it. How accurate it is, I can’t say. I do know that when I, as an evangelical, speak with Jews about things Christian, then the matter of the Inquisition, seen as part of some supposed nonstop hatefest of Christians towards Jews, often gets jammed in my face. People bent on screaming “there’s a devil here” often are hard to convince that God was there too, who sharply limited the deviltry. If I had as a Jew to choose between Inquisition Spain and Stalinist USSR, I think I know what I’d pick! Only several orders of magnitude more murder in the latter....
Are you saying you are thinking Greek Orthodoxy or what. Stop being cutesy. Say something in a complete sentence.
Serbian, Greek, Russian, American, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, etc...
Can you stop the cutesiness. Cutesiness is not communication.
Stupidity is all yours... I leave you with it...
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