Posted on 01/01/2006 4:48:03 PM PST by HarleyD
Yes of course Paul ask for others to pray and prays for others.
But you neglected to mention that Paul only speaks of praying for or requesting prayers from people who are alive.
But the main point of the verses is that ONLY Jesus intercedes for us.
You forget that death does not separate us from Christ. We remain part of the Body even after our physical death. Those in heaven are even MORE able to pray and intercede for us.
Intercede = pray for...
Regards
A driver's license is a conditional privilege, subject to being lost if the conditions are not met. If you think this is the same as eternal life, then you should not call it "eternal life". You should really call it "conditional life". So, if "eternal life" is conditional and subject to change, then you must also believe that eternal damnation is also conditional and can be changed. If the eternally damned do good deeds in hell, can they be let into heaven? No one can ever be eternally damned, because "eternal" means "conditional", right?
But thank you for the verses. Now I see more clearly the tie-in to the Catholic view of assurance. This makes more sense now.
Now why would God tell us to persevere if we can do nothing?
God is commanding/encouraging us to not choose to sin, which we can always do. So, though I might say that I am already saved, for the rest of my life I might choose to sin "X" number of times, or "X" plus 50,000 number of times. If I am of the elect, then I am still saved either way. God is revealing His will that our goal is to never choose sin.
I don't follow this "never was punched in the first place". It happened. You can't deny it. We are regenerated upon Baptism, our sins are remitted. Spiritually, this is a real event. But post-Baptismal sins can undo some of the work of Baptism.
This is directly related to our discussion on what "eternal" means. To me, once a ticket is punched, that's it, the ticket has a hole in it, and it is a permanent hole. Under your system, this hole CAN be filled in again such that the ticket was never punched in the first place. To you, it is not permanent because salvation, once won, can still be lost. A person who loses his salvation is in the same place as someone who never had it at all. To me, this makes as much sense as unringing a bell. Likewise, to you "eternal" is only conditional. It belies the meaning of the word.
When you get sick - then are healed, does that mean you never were sick in the first place? Does that mean you will never get sick again? Really, now. What is so hard about this?
God doesn't promise that we will never get sick again, He promises that those who believe will go to heaven. I know that you have compared our salvific state to that of being sick before, but I don't see the support for it in scripture.
FK: "He guarantees that none of His sheep will ever be lost for good."
This was NEVER an issue between us. I have never said the elect are not guaranteed heaven.
I know you've never said the elect can be lost, but I thought that we disagreed on who the sheep were. I thought you have said that God has delegated the power to men to supersede God's word, and snatch themselves out of God's hands. However, I think you may have used different words. :) But the meaning was clear to me, free will means that anyone can override this scripture. This includes the elect, who will presumably come back later. I expect you to explain to me that in the verse, the correct interpretation of "no one" is "everyone concerning himself". That would be the only thing consistent with my understanding of what you have said.
God doesn't "repair" those who remain in sin. You should know better. The wrath of God consists in leaving men in their sin. LEAVING THEM!
OK, when I said "God promises to fix US", I should have said "God promises to fix His elect". Is that better? :)
So are you saying that God allowed His Son to die to satisfy His own sense of justice? If so, I would consider this a secondary reason for the crucifixion. Love is the primary reason, pure and simple.
Yes, I fully agree.
Who is going to have sex with another person's wife? Not a normal person.
So Mary is the singular wife of God? Unbelievable. But if Mary was the wife of God, then she and Joseph both broke with God's will when they married. How could Mary serve two masters if she had two husbands? It makes no sense to me that Mary and Joseph would have married if she already had a husband. And given this view of Mrs. God, perhaps you may understand why we Protestants are sometimes suspicious of whether or not Catholics actually worship Mrs. God. :)
SEX is not the only reason people get married.
I know that, but it is a holy and intimate part of it. God approves of sex within marriage. It seems to me that Joseph was being more than a good sport about all this. :) I don't understand why he is denied.
An older Joseph could provide protection to Mary's virginity.
Well, so could the Temple if that's where she came from! Why couldn't Jesus have grown up in the Temple, just like His mother did? I'm sure a few regulations could have been overlooked, seeing as how this was God's child and all.
If you would have read the Infant Gospel of James, as was posted earlier by our Orthodox friends, this explanation would have become more clear.
I did read it, way way back, when Kolo first showed it to me. So sure, what you are saying is consistent with that, but THAT'S WHERE YOU GOT IT. :) My problem is that it does not appear to match scripture.
I remember being told, when I was a Protestant, that the Luke geneology was through Mary as well, but all of the early church commentators (we're talking as early as Eusebius in the 200's) reject that notion. I suppose that the idea arose among Protestants that this was the explanation, since there was no traditional account to explain the two geneologies if you don't accept the early Christian commentaries.
Both geneologies are traced to Joseph, unless you don't want to take the account in the Bible literally. :-)
One geneology says that Joseph was the son of Jacob, and the other says that he was the son of Heli. The early commentaries are universal (St. Augustine is particularly firm on this point, FWIW) in saying that it happened in this wise:
Heli (the father in the Luke account) died childless, and Jacob his brother took his wife as required by the law, and raised up seed to him.
Thus Joseph was the son of Jacob by nature, and the son of Heli by law. In either case -- whether by law or nature -- he was the son (by adoption) of David.
Given the fact that the Church has no problem making a big deal over Mary, had it been a legitimate tradition that this was her geneology. Why wouldn't the Scriptures have simply said so, had this been the case?
The name of the Theotokos' parents -- Joachim and Anna -- is a pretty ancient tradition, furthermore.
Anyway, we can be sure about our account because we have Holy Tradition -- you can't, since it isn't in the Bible. :-)
It is thought so by some highly educated people. You will have to do your own research on this. But to answer your question: his earlier Epistles contain many Gnostic words and phrases. His later works don't but are probably forgeries. Fingers point at +Irenaeus.
One thing you will have to understand is that the Church needed a way out, because it was dying quickly in Israel. +Peter came back from preaching to the Jews, which was a complete failure. Even basic knowledge of Judaism would make you understand why (for starters, Jews do not believe man needs grace to be righteous).
It was +Paul who had the flexibility needed to make Christianity acceptable to Gentiles. He even reprimanded +Peter publicly for his resistance to change Judaic practices or to eat with Gentiles. Without +Paul, Christianity would bee a dead religion.
"Where I would disagree with your statement, if I understand it correctly, is the implications that I had established my views and these views lined up with the Reformed perspective, so I was naturally inclined to the Reformed view."
No, that isn't what I meant to say, anyway. If there is one thing that I *don't* believe, it is this idea that Protestants turn to the Bible and get their doctrines straight from it -- then look for a place that fits it.
Most people who are serious about their faith have been introduced to the doctrines of that faith by someone. Something rings true, and the process of exploration begins. At some point, a critical mass is reached, and the decision to commit at some level to that tradition takes place.
I think this is very different from what you thought I said, and in line with what you describe as your experience.
So what do you think about the writings of St. Ambrose of Milan (St. Augustine's teacher), and of St. Hillary of Poitiers? These are easily the two most respected of the western fathers in the Orthodox Church.
Baptism brings us into Christ. It follows that those who are outside of Christ cannot be in the Church. It is an individual state and not of the whole assembly.
Sola Scriptura does not say to throw out anything not written. It says that God's written word is the only authority. Extra-scriptural things can be fine if they do not "offend" scripture. I believe that the opening to Luke is in support of this by taking the step of showing that something must be written in order to be sure. That's authority over all that which is not written. (Of course what is written must be God's word, and in this case, it was.)
As I have already acknowledged, I do not claim that the Luke passage is THE slam dunk for Sola Scriptura, but is useful in general support of it. We have also seen other scripture.
And you are right that Sola Scriptura does place God's written word as the source and arbitrator of all other information. Therefore, everything else must be interpreted through the Bible, rather than the Bible being interpreted through everything else.
This is a huge subject. It involves many of his words and phrases in his earlier works. His later works, which lack them, are suspected of being forgeries (possibly +Irenaeus). This is still being researched.
It is indeed strange that someone who did not know Christ in person would be elevated top be an Apostle of Christ by the Apostles -- yet the timing of him being placed in 'charge' of converting Gentiles comes at the time when Christianity as Judaism was dying rapidly.
That would be more like certainty, HD. I am not sure what your point is.
Hardly, the people who think so are mostly professors of theology.
To help you down the path of research in finding these highly educated people, Doc, the best place to start is with the primary proponent of the idea of Pauline Gnosticism: Elaine Pagels.
'Nuff said.
HD: "It's my suspicion that you will not get your Orthodox brothers nor the Orthodox Church to agree with you on this one..."
Kosta: "That would be more like certainty, HD. I am not sure what your point is."
Harley, Kosta has made it clear in many posts that his approach is not to present to the list what Orthodoxy teaches, but to discuss where he is at the time with regard to his thoughts and opinions. He plays the role of the skeptic (which you also claim, so you two should get along quite fine!)
He has also made it clear that he holds the teachings of the Orthodox Church by faith, but that he's just not going to pretend that he is convinced or that he understands this or that Orthodox teaching, even if he believes it by faith.
So there isn't much point to playing Orthodox "gotcha" with Kosta. If you want to convince Kosta that he is wrong in talking about Pauline Gnosticism as though it is historically defensible, then you will have to do it the hard way! :-)
If you want the Orthodox "party line," I'm the unimaginative guy to turn to. Of course, discussions with me aren't very interesting for precisely that reason...
Thank you Agrarian. I agree, you read me like a book! :)
Only one observation: I am not playing anything. If I have doubts, I admit doubts.
You can say whatever you want about her, and you and I share dislike for her views on Christianity, but she is not an amateur who has no clue what she is talking about.
Well, I appreciate the sentiment, and I have gotten the impression there was much more of a difference than 99% vs. 100%. Nevertheless, given how much scripture interpretation on the subject we disagree about, it appears that the real difference is larger than 1%.
We are sure - to the degree that tomorrow we will not be attacked by terrorists with a nuclear bomb.
Is this an example of what "moral certitude" is? This sounds more like the conversation we've been having all along. If I wake up tomorrow and hear on the news that a major US city has been hit by a nuclear bomb, I will be shocked, but I won't be surprised. But perhaps your example was meant to be the equivalent of being hit by a meteor. If that is true, then I am a little confused. How can Catholicism get one to 99%, but not 100%? It seems to me that with my understanding of your view of free will, that it would be impossible to get even near to 99%.
If you read the lives of the saints and Church Fathers, they explain that we can never merit the grace of final perseverance - from our point of view - because we really don't know God's plan for us in the future.
This is a perfect example of my last sentence. I thought your view was that God's plan was for everyone to be saved, and that free will is the only thing that stops that. Since you know that the rate of salvation is no where near 99%, how can you have that assurance?
WE try to remain humble and realize that God can do what He wills - even send us to the hell we so deserve.
With all due respect, I don't see how that is consistent with what you have said before. I thought your view was that God cannot send us to hell, only we can send ourselves to hell. If everyone is born with enough grace to be saved, and everyone has free will, and everyone has an open shot at accepting and persevering, then really, salvation is ours to lose. So no matter where we end up, and even with God's help, it was determined by our free will decisions. Is this right?
All there is left to do is persevere - and we shall have Eternal life in heaven.
So this is an extra-scriptural use of the word "eternal"? :)
Well, we know that many of the sons of Apostolic succession have failed to follow God's guidance, so how can you know for sure that all of the writers of scripture followed it in full? Did the writers of scripture have a special grace not given to future Bishops?
You are right that Elaine Pagels has a lot of knowledge. What makes people like her so insidious is the combination of that knowledge and a thinly veiled agenda.
Whenever I smell an agenda in an academic work or a popular press work by an academic (which better describes her well-known books), my hackles go up, and not just when it comes to religion.
If Pagels were to write an evangelistic work for Gnosticism, I wouldn't care. But her "evangelism" is presented as scholarship, data, and hard facts, when they are often anything but.
Ann Rice (yes, the vampire lady), who recently converted back to Catholicism and wrote what sounds like a very intriguing book on the life of Christ, has had some very perceptive things to say about modern Biblical/theological studies. She said that when she started the process of research for her book, she knew little about Biblical studies, but she knew a lot about researching things and about following arguments. I read excerpts in a print journal, but found essentially the same collections of quotations on-line.
Rice: "...Having started with the skeptical critics, those who take their cue from the earliest skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment, I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud. I'd have to end up compartmentalizing my mind with faith in one part of it, and truth in another. And what would I write about my Jesus? I had no idea. But the prospects were interesting. Surely he was a liberal, married, had children, was a homosexual, and who knew what? But I must do my reseach before I wrote one word.
...What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments--arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts, lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.
In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it--that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years--that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read.
I saw almost no skeptical scholarship that was convincing, and the Gospels, shredded by critics, lost all intensity when reconstructed by various theorists. They were in no way compelling when treated as composites and records of later "communities."
I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.
I'd never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.
The people who go into Elizabethan studies don't set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don't personally dislike her. They don't make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. They approach her in other ways. They don't even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don't spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.
But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ. Of course, we all benefit from freedom in the academic community; we benefit from the enormous size of biblical studies today and the great range of contributions that are being made. I'm not arguing for censorship. But maybe I'm arguing for sensitivity--on the part of those who read these books. Maybe I'm arguing for a little wariness when it comes to the field in general. What looks like solid ground might not be solid ground at all..."
I certainly wouldn't recommend Rice as a definitive source for Christian doctrine -- she's just returned to Christianity. I also haven't read her book yet. But she does know how to turn a phrase, and she, coming in as an outsider, has absolutely nailed modern Biblical scholarship. I have been reading the works of modern Biblical critics, historians, etc... now for more than 25 years, and because I've always been a believer at heart, I've sought out rebuttals of those ideas, and my conclusion is the same as Rice's.
Most scholarship that challenges traditional Christian accounts and beliefs is sloppily done -- which is generally what happens when one begins with a desired outcome (the trashing of traditional Christianity) and then gathers evidence to support the desired outcome. truth.
One of my favorite works of Biblical scholarship is R.K. Harrison's "Introduction to the Old Testament." I was first introduced to it by a professor at an Orthodox seminary here in the U.S.
In a quiet, understated way, Harrison ripped holes the size of New Jersey into the liberal orthodoxies about "what scholarship has proven" about the Old Testament. One of the things that strikes me about his detailed accounts of the various trends and paths of OT scholarship over the last 150 years is how often serious works rebutting these liberal orthodoxies have been written -- but never answered.
All too often, liberal scholars choose to "answer" their critics with ridicule ("they're ignorant fundamentalists")at best, or by completely ignoring the critiques, at worst.
Sorry... you know what happens when Elaine Pagels and her ilk come up. :-)
... Knowing the words (formula) and 'knowing' are two different things. The written word has tremendous value; however, it alone does not magically result in knowing in the reader.
Yes, I agree with you. I don't think we could expect anyone to "get it" if we just locked him in a room for six months with a Bible. Teaching has great value. I don't think this view offends Sola Scriptura. That doctrine says that the Bible is the only and final authority. So, it comes down to what is actually taught. If it is consistent with scripture, then it is "good" teaching, etc. I think the differences that Catholics and Protestants have are more around "what is consistent with scripture". :) On this issue it appears there are huge differences, because of the different interpretations. So, I would say that both sides actively encourage and practice oral teaching.
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