Posted on 07/17/2005 7:22:03 AM PDT by sionnsar
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. Here we go again with liberalism's velvet gloved iron fist. Or maybe the liberals have now decided to take the velvet off of the iron.
Is not this the religious denomination that has always complained about being fearful of papal despotism?
The cure to this insidious infection of liberalism which will be the death of all churches, not just ours is simple.
As I have noted in other replies. When vestries, churches and dioceses demand that their clergy believe in God, the Birth of Jesus, what Jesus taught us, the death of Jesus and his Resurrection, this bs will stop. If we don't, this infection of liberalism will destroy every so called Christian church in the world.
"On Saturday, June 4, 2005 the famous liberal theologian Marcus Borg is coming to central New York to give a public lecture and to speak to the clergy of the Episcopal Church. The Diocese is bringing him here. Marcus Borg is one of the founders of the Jesus Seminar in 1985. The Jesus Seminar is a group of liberal scholars who have decided that very little of what is portrayed in the Gospels is historically accurate. They say that they are in search of the "historical" Jesus, rather than the Jesus of "m yth" as portrayed by the Church for the last 2000 years."
"How did we get to a state in the Episcopal Church were orthodoxy as set forth in the Nicene Creed is out, and heresy is taught to our clergy by Marcus Borg at the request of the officials of this diocese?"
Trust me, there is no velvet here. These people are mad, totally freakin' mad. Only people either certifiably looney-tunes or possessed by a demon act this way. I am afraid with the EC that it is the latter.
The root of the problem in ECUSA is the teaching of Bishop Augustine of Hippo. All of the ills of the Western world have sprung from the fevered brain of that one African bishop.
In order to be saved, the West must repent, not just of its deeds but of its Augustinian thinking.
Orthodox Christianity will only be found in the obvious place, the Orthodox Church because it is the Orthodox Church that is the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church referred to in the Nicene Creed.
No bishop (or "bishop") shoud excommunicate any layperson for any letter, especially one defending orthodoxy and telling the truth about Borg, Spong, and the long-dead-and-forgotten Pike. To do so is not really liberalism, but fascism!!!!
Hey wow--just think...if we *destroyed* all of Augustine's writings, then there would be no more heresy and everything would be allll right!
Graves, you're not helping Orthodoxy any by such titanic exaggerations as this. It's really embarrassing.
"Graves, you're not helping Orthodoxy any by such titanic exaggerations as this. It's really embarrassing."
Hyberbole is not permitted? Loosen up.
Were you being sarcastic or serious? If the former, then I apologize for being too dense to detect it. :)
"Were you being sarcastic or serious? If the former, then I apologize for being too dense to detect it."
Let's say tongue in cheek, half serious (so to speak) and half pulling the Westerners' legs.
And now that I have you all loosened up and bent out of shape, maybe we can discuss the extent to which Augustine of Hippo is a high maintenance guy for Protestants and Catholics alike, the extent to which ECUSA's problems are traceable to him, the extent to which liberalism is traceable to him.
No one would get much profit from such a discussion with me. I have long been a devoted reader of St. Augustine's but have little knowledge or even interest in the whole grace/original sin controversy.
His opinions on same are very important to be sure, but the tendency to wrench him out of 2000 years of tradition is an unfortunate outgrowth of his popularity in Protestant polemics. IMHO, that's the only reason he looks more high maintenance than any other Father. Most Latins including myself don't follow Augustine on the sense-suffering of unbaptized babies in hell, but rather the Greek Fathers and the Scholastics. His allegorical interpretation of Genesis 1 is likewise not very popular anymore.
Augustine is the greatest Latin Father. He is not however, the only one, and he is not the Church.
On to what extent he is responsible for ECUSA and modernism, look. Either the modernists are misinterpreting him and/or drawing unwarrented conclusions from his writings, in which case why blame him? Or, he intentionally laid the groundwork for modernism, in which case why is he a saint? You telling me that some idiot couldn't do the same thing with St. Basil or St. John Chrysostom?
Yep, I'm telling you just that, Claud.
"On to what extent [Augustine] is responsible for ECUSA and modernism, look. Either the modernists are misinterpreting him and/or drawing unwarrented conclusions from his writings, in which case why blame him? Or, he intentionally laid the groundwork for modernism, in which case why is he a saint? You telling me that some idiot couldn't do the same thing with St. Basil or St. John Chrysostom?"
I and other Orthodox Christians, went through some of this over the past two-three weeks with the Roman Catholics (see the string "Eastern Orthodox Ecclesiology: against false unions [my title]"). Finally, after about 410 posts, I think the discussion with the RCs has ended, but some of it touched on Augustine.
I'll try to keep it short and simple.
Unlike any other Christian father, Augustine allowed for the use of reason, for Greek wisdom. Because of that, he tacitly allowed for individualism. His thinking was not immediately accepted on these matters. His most major opponent was St. Vincent of Lerins whose constant dreambeat in the "Commonitory" was Tradition, "that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all."
For more on Augustine and his influence on Western life and thought (for better or worse, depending on who you are), from an Orthodox perspective, one might want to snag a copy of Fr. Michael Azkoul's ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. Reviews have been posted at http://www.stnectariospress.com/parish/azkoul's_reviews.html
Have a great day.
En arche en ho logos. You tell me where that "logos" came from.
I'm familiar with the gist of the Orthodox argument, but to say that Augustine influenced the West is only stating the obvious.
I ain't enough of a Patristics scholar to debate you or the other EO folks very long on this point. But I say again, and just as strongly, if you think that some monstrous deformity cannot be twisted out of the Eastern Fathers as easily as the Western, you are living in a strange world.
Well, one can wrench just about anything out of anything if one puts ones' mind to it. But with Augustine, it's easier. One can wrench a lot of terrible ideas from the Bible, but it's easier to do that with the Koran.
Logos was a word used by the Greek philosophers and St. John got that word from them. But he did not fill his Gospel with Greek philosophy. Similarly, homousios is found nowhere in the Bible but it is found in the Greek version of the Nicene Creed. Does that mean the Nicene Fathers adopted Greek philosophy? It does not. In fact, the Church still condemns Greek philosophy as being foolishness.
Even after Augustine employed reason in his writings, mainly the philosophy of Plotinus, the West did not go ga ga for Greek philosophy. We don't see the West really coming unglued until centuries later. Are you familiar with early 12th century war between Abelard and Bernard? It is in that war that we see reason gaining the victory over Tradition. But the seed was planted by Augustine.
The Church used many, many terms from pagan Greek philosophy -- they were using Greek.
What they did *not* do was use the standards of pagan Greek philosophy in determining what those words or terms meant. They took the words, but then in their writings, they over time defined what those terms mean. To see what "Logos" means, look at how it is used in the Bible and the writings of the Fathers, *not* how it was used in pagan philosophy.
I believe that it was Alexander Kalomiros who said that Christianity is made up of Hebrew concepts articulated in the Greek language. I think that is an apt summary that shows the fundamental discontinuity of Christianity with pagan Greek thought and philosophy.
They would occasionally even use Greek thought forms and dialectic -- sparingly, and especially in the context of apologetics. But even there, such usage was peripheral, and it was subordinated to the way of Orthodox thinking that is based on revelation, not on logic and reasoning.
There were two main attempted "Hellenizations" in the Church, and both were rejected by Orthodoxy. The first was Origen and his followers, who was a great thinker and a devout Christian who was willing to die for Christ. But, he ultimately placed pagan philosophical thought forms above Christian revelation. He was unwilling to be silent where revelation was silent. This led to ideas that were condemned as heresy.
St. Augustine did the same thing, and was the source of the second great Hellenization of Christianity. Again, he allow pagan philosophical ways of thinking and dialectic to dominate parts of his speculative writings, leading to all sorts of problems.
The difference between the West and the East was once described thusly:
1. We each had Fathers who toyed with neo-Platonic thought-forms: St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa.
2. But, the closer that St. Gregory of Nyssa got to the central part of theology -- the doctrine of God -- the more he leaned on revelation and abandoned neo-Platonic thought forms. By contrast, St. Augustine took neo-Platonism into the heart of Christian theology, and used it to define the very Trinity -- leading to the filioque.
3. The Eastern Church treated St. Gregory of Nyssa as an important Father, but one whose writings must be treated with great circumspection. Some of his writings are considered to be flat-out false (as in his speculations on universal salvation). By contrast, St. Augustine, some of whose writings are far more suspect than any of those of St. Gregory, was made the Father of Fathers in the West.
I do not hold truck with those who claim that St. Augustine is not a saint, and that everything he wrote was wrong or suspect. He was clearly a man of great piety and sanctity, and I have been greatly moved by some of his sermons, in particular.
The problem with St. Augustine is that those who hung on St. Augustine's every word uncritically ultimately gained the ascendency, while those who might have looked at his writings with great discernment and set apart those that are good from those that should be ignored as not being part of the consensus patrum were sidelined and eventually largely extinguished.
I agree that "The problem with Augustine is that those who hung on Augustine's every word uncritically ultimately gained the ascendency, while those who might have looked at his writings with great discernment and set apart those that are good from those that should be ignored as not being part of the consensus patrum were sidelined and eventually largely extinguished."
But the larger problem is that Augustine let loose the idea that every man may use "neo-Platonic thought forms"(the power of reasoning), instead of Tradition. It is that very dangerous idea that connects up directly with the present mess we see these days in the Episcopal Church. Without Augustine, there could be no Bishop Spong, no excommunicating of this layman near Syracuse, no Bishop Robinson and what he represents. What we see in ECUSA is the power to reason without any controls. This could not have happened without the triumph of Augustinian thinking in the West.
There was a time in ECUSA when reason was at least held back a bit by Tradition. When ECUSA ordained women as deacons and priests in the 70s, however, the more Tradition minded in ECUSA walked out. Thus there are no longer any controls left in ECUSA on Greek philosophical thought forms.
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