Posted on 01/01/2006 4:48:03 PM PST by HarleyD
Well, you have a point up to a point. You won't find me saying Paul was a Gnostic or that the church/Church no longer follows the Old Testament. I'm discerning about uninspired writings-that's all.
So there isn't much point to playing Orthodox "gotcha" with Kosta.
I don't play "gotcha" games. I pose questions that I think about and I hope that makes other people think. Some feel uncomfortable trying to answer the questions because of the conclusions.
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
I agree. But, then, the entire Christian faith is a matter of, well, faith, not fact! :) Nevertheless, the same can be said of the opposing side. We accept the Scripture on faith. Jews, who disagree with us do so based on their faith.
However, if it were all a matter of faith things would be easy. Unfortunately, facts get in the way. The world is not as smooth and self-congratulatory as we would like it to be, unless we choose to hide in our own little box and pretend that no one else could possibly be right, or – God forbid – that we may be wrong.
Why? Because you know so much about Gnosticism that you can defnitely say there is no such influence in Paul's writing, or because you simply refuse?
"Yes, "successors" naturally means someone who comes AFTER the Apostles - following in their footsteps and given the power to continue to lead the Church on earth. It is safe to assume that the original Apostles are long gone and in heaven by now."
_______________________________
I'm glad we can agree on something, that there are no Apostles living today.
The second part of your statement though gives me pause. There is no SCRIPTURAL basis for your assertion that the men who followed the Apostles were granted any supernatural powers. For example after Mathias was appointed to replace Judas we never heard from him again.
No, rather it's because scripture is the INSPIRED word of God. What Paul wrote came from God. How can that be Gnosticism? This seems to me to be a big DUH!!!
Galatians 2:1 Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with me also.
2:2 And I went up by revelation, and communicated unto them that gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately to them which were of reputation, lest by any means I should run, or had run, in vain.
2:3 But neither Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised:
2:4 And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage:
2:5 To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the gospel might continue with you.
2:6 But of these who seemed to be somewhat, (whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter to me: God accepteth no man's person:) for they who seemed to be somewhat in conference added nothing to me:
2:7 But contrariwise, when they saw that the gospel of the uncircumcision was committed unto me, as the gospel of the circumcision was unto Peter;
I like you Mr 50 cent,and please don't take this the wrong way, :) but you tend to make statements and then don't really provide anything to substantiate these statements. You have done this about Jewish belief and now Paul.
What words and phrases? I should not have to do the research.
Paul says that he met Christ on the road to Damascas. He had Christian witnesses that attested to a great change that suddenly came about in him. He went from one day killing Christians, to the next being in shock and unable to speak. He stayed for about a year and a half with Christians while he recovered his speech. When he did go forth to preach, he had a power that was phenomenal in interpreting the Christian religion in light of the Hebrew religion. In fact, being a Jewish scholar, unlike say Peter, brought a deeper understanding of Christianity into being, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, is simply mind blowing in its theological implications. The times of the Gentiles must come in, and how would that happen without Paul? The Christian religion was meant to spread through the Greeks, not the Jews.
The Jews were preached to first, they had their chances, then it was preached to the Greeks, second..(Romans 1:16)
Paul learned of this plan to spread the Gospel from Christ directly and says so in regards to the mystery that was revealed to him.
Romans11:25
For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.
There is a difference. There are very few scholars holding views that support traditionalist views of any kind who do not readily acknowledge that they are part of a community of faith, and that their job is, at root, a service to that community of faith. So one cannot say that there is an equivalence.
The fact that they acknowledge their faith and their service to the Church, does not mean that they believe that their views are entirely blind-faith, contrary to reason, or indefensible from a scholarly point of view. Quite the contrary. Knowing that they are swimming against the tide of post-Enlightenment thought, most academics with traditional beliefs are scrupulous in their treatment of the evidence at hand, knowing that any mis-step will be pounced on.
On the other hand, most anti-Christian scholars teach at a seminary, which means that they are intellectually dishonest and morally fraudulent: they are on the payroll of an institution that they don't believe in and that are intent on destroying. The rest are in secular institutions where they assume the guise of completely objective, "scientific" investigation.
In either case, dishonesty is involved, and in either case the superficial presumption by an outside observer is that it must be the anti-Christian scholars who are right: the former because "it must take a lot of courage for him to question his own faith," and the latter because "what those traditionalists say is just faith, but what those people at Princeton and Harvard say is *science* and *hard facts*."
Ann Rice gives testimony to theh prevalence of this superficial impression. She *knew* that Pagels and the like were the real scholars, and that Christianity was helpless in the face of the skeptical critiques. What she learned is what anyone who honestly digs deeper can learn for themselves.
No one defending the Church's positions has ever thought that the world was a smooth and self-congratulatory place. No-one who participates in FR could think so. I doubt SS. Paul, Irenaeus, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory Palamas, etc... thought it was.
They prayerfully used their considerable intellects and extensive educations to discern the mind of the Church and to defend the traditional faith of the Church from attack using every scholarly and literary tool at their disposal. And they weren't intellectually dishonest in the process -- they made no secret of their faith in and union with God.
"No, rather it's because scripture is the INSPIRED word of God. What Paul wrote came from God. How can that be Gnosticism? This seems to me to be a big DUH!!!"
Whether approach you take toward the canon of Scripture, all of these letters were indeed both determined to be inspired Scripture *and* to be the letters of St. Paul.
The Fathers and Councils who came up with the various lists of canonical NT books, and which coalesced into uniform agreement on a canon all specifically attribute all of these epistles (including Hebrews) to St. Paul.
I'm not sure that there were any canonical lists that did not include every single Epistle of St. Paul, and attribute their authorship to him. The epistles that were missing from this or that list were some of the general epistles. If any Pauline epistles were missing (or considered to be less important) from someone's list, they would have been the later epistles: precisely the ones that Pagels claims are post-Pauline anti-Gnostic forgeries. One would expect the opposite if Pagels claims were true
But HD and 1000S, Kosta is not going to accept any of those arguments, because they are self-referential arguments from the Church's tradition. If you want to discuss this, you will have to go over the details. Kosta will need to tell you the parts he thinks are Gnostic in the epistles of St. Paul, and you will need specifically to show why they are not.
I'm going to do other things, though. Have fun! :-)
Thanks for the ping. It gave me the opportunity to spell out the pre-fab Orthodox position, and that's about all I have the energy for today (I need to spend time with Mrs. Agrarian on Mothers' Day.) :-)
Then I shouldn't call a driver's licence a "driver's license". To the possesor of the license (or Christ's abiding presence), it grants that person particular abilities as duly noted. As I have noted from Scripture quotes, "eternal life", in John's writings, normally refers to Christ's abiding presence - which is subject to leaving when we sin. This much is clear in many Scripture verses, such as :
"Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, [then] we have confidence in God; and whatsoever we ask, we receive of him because we keep his commandments and do those things that are pleasing in his sight. And this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he has commanded us. And he that keeps his commandments dwells in him, and he in him. And in this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit which he has given us." 1 John 3:21-24
Once we have achieved heaven, this abiding presence is no longer subject to being lost - and thus, it does become our permanent status. This understanding is much more in line with Scriptures then "well, for the last 20 years, you never had it to begin with..." What a crock. Either you do or you do NOT have abiding presence. It is silly to claim "well, you fell away, so you never had eternal life to begin with".
God is commanding/encouraging us to not choose to sin, which we can always do.
You are missing the point! First, you deny that man can do ANYTHING - then you expect man to choose NOT to sin??? How is this possible? Either God graces man, leading man to be able to choose God - and thus making sense of perseverence, OR God demands that man do something that man cannot do - and injustly condemns said man for not being able to fulfill something he could NEVER do unaided! You can't have it both ways - God does everything/man is responsible!!!
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.
A fine analogy, IF ANYONE ACTUALLY RECEIVED A TICKET! No one does. That's the problem with this analogy. We can NEVER know we will persevere, from our point of view. Thus, there IS NO visible means for man to know we will die in grace.
God doesn't promise that we will never get sick again, He promises that those who believe will go to heaven.
Those WHO PERSEVERE in this belief will go to heaven. God expects man's response to continue throughout his life. If you REALLY believe in something, you make it part of your life, not "Lord, Lord" - and "I never knew you"... Those going to heaven are the ones who believe and put their belief into action. Not the ones who merely talk, talk, talk...
"My little children, let us not love in word neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth." 1 John 3:18
I know you've never said the elect can be lost, but I thought that we disagreed on who the sheep were
Another misinterpretation. The "sheep" are God's COMMUNITY, not individuals. When Christ is talking about His sheep, His flock, He is speaking about His Church, the community of faith. Christ doesn't speak about salvation coming to those who sit down and read the Bible for themselves. God doesn't promise individuals salvation outside of this flock.
OK, when I said "God promises to fix US", I should have said "God promises to fix His elect". Is that better? :) God promises to fix ANYONE who turns to Him. In the end, those who DID turn to God and died in such a state of grace were on God's elect list the whole time. There is no point in trying to put yourself on this list - we just will never know and is presumption. One of the worse sins is religious pride. I see this sin quite clearly in the attitude that "God has saved me and I am going to heaven". The Scriptures are full of verses that talk about God desiring that men turn to Him and He would forgive them of sin. From man's point of view, salvation is available to ALL men.
Regards
Who ever said that?
It seems to me that Joseph was being more than a good sport about all this. :) I don't understand why he is denied.
MAYBE they didn't have Viagra back then... Sex isn't one of those "things to do" when you are 70 years old, especially if the GIRL took a vow of 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?
You are trying to rationalize the faith, again. Why did Christ become a man? Why did Christ die on a cross? Why is there air??? Who knows the mind of God. One can ascertain many reasons for Jesus growing up in the situation that He did, rather than being raised within the Temple.
My problem is that it does not appear to match scripture.
Does the Bible say that Joseph and Mary had sex? Don't you find Mary's reply to the angel strange? Why wouldn't it be like Hannah, if Mary was just an ordinary, betrothed woman about to enter into a sexual relationship?
Regards
You are right that this is a puzzlement.
Rahlf's text of the LXX says the same as the Hebrew, and a quick glance through the apparatus doesn't reveal any alternative LXX readings that bear on this.
Bottom line is that the Scripture does portray this as a conversation between the dead Samuel and Saul.
As I said before, from an Orthodox spiritual tradition perspective, if someone goes to a psychic and asks to talk to, oh, let's say Samuel, and Samuel appears -- we would say that by definition that it was a demon, and not Samuel.
Yet, after some pretty extensive looking, I have not found any place in which any of the fathers refer to or comment on this story, so until and unless I encounter patristic commentary that explains things to the contrary, I will have to say that at the very least, this is an open question, with the nod having to go to it being a genuine (and most difficult to accept) appearance of Samuel.
I fail to see your distinction between "throwing out unwritten material" and "God's written word is the only authority". And obviously, WHO is to judge whether Scripture has been "offended"? YOU? Clearly, we both have different ideas of whether this has happened. Your view appears to be VERY literal and strict, complying with you preconceived views of man and his relationship (or more accurately, his lack of relationship, with God), while the Church's and St. Paul appears to be more open and more willing to encompass things that were said AND written.
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.
The reason why Luke writes is not because "people cannot know things that are orally given" but for the sake of organization and more clear reference. I don't find Luke at any time mentioning that oral traditions are to be abrogated. IF this was in his mind, he certainly would have wrote down something to the effect of "ignore any other rumours or teachings not given in written form from now on. They are utterly unreliable and could "offend" the Scriptures that I now write." Nowhere do we get the sense that Luke is writing an account because some people are baptizing babies when they shouldn't be...
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.
I don't see it supporting SOLA Scripture at all. I see it supporting the utility of written material - but NEVER denying that oral material had its utility AND AUTHORITY as well. It is the APOSTLES who were given the power to bind and loosen, NOT the Bible!
Because you can see out of one eye, should you then get rid of the other? Hardly. The Scriptures AND Apostolic Tradition were given to the Church as a deposit of faith, the Word of God for the Church. By ridding Christianity of part of this sense of God's Word, revelation is no longer clear. This much should be obvious to any person who considers the numerous denominations of Protestantism, even during the time of Luther.
Other Scripture verses have been refuted. It is just not there. Sola Scriptura is a tradition of men. The "Sola" part was never meant as the way that Christians would come to know God. Are you forgeting that people hardly even read the Bible until the 1500's, and these people were quite knowledgeable of the faith as a result of the teachers and practice of the faith.
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.
Fantasy that is not done in practice. The very fact that we disagree on Scriptures should point out that Scriptures do not interpret themselves!
Regards
Not sure what you mean. A person who BELIEVES Christ abides in them as a result of their subsequent obedience to the Commandments. THIS is the visible sign of His presence. If Christ abides in us, then we possess eternal life. But cannot we fool ourselves into thinking we are abiding in Christ? Or perhaps wishful thinking? Paul tells us to "beware lest you fall". We always realize that God's view of us may differ from our IDEA of who God views us.
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?
I am speaking of a person who abides in Christ, not the general public.
I thought your view was that God cannot send us to hell, only we can send ourselves to hell.
I didn't say that God CANNOT send us to hell! I said that God desires men to be saved and WE are the catalyst for our refusal and rejection of God. As a result of man's response, God DOES condemn people to hell. If you want to look at it from our point of view, we condemn ourselves by our actions.
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.
That's what we believe. God allows us to chose Him or reject Him. But how does God's timeless foreknowledge play into this? We frankly can only speculate. We must hold to teachings as equally true: God desires all men to be saved AND men has free will to chose or reject God. Scriptures give us these as fact. Rejecting one teaching "offends" the Scriptures!
Regards
First, you seem to believe that the Bible completely records EVERYTHING that was done by the early Church! The Bible is a compiliation of SOME of the Apostles' letters to individual churches that asked for THEIR help and guidance on particular issues. It is not a systematic theology book or a catechism. Thus, we shouldn't expect the Bible to discuss EVERY Apostle's work. At any rate, we can find more information outside of the Inspired Holy Writ that is ALSO reliable.
And even within Scriptures, in particular, the Pastorals and the Acts of the Apostles, we see the conferment of power being given by the "Church elders" to others, such as Timothy and Titus. This "laying of hands" was understood as the giving of the Spirit in a special way, a vocation and a sending - thus, in a sense, making these second generation Christians "apostles" in that they were sent to continue spreading the Word of God. Do you think that Mat 28:20 was meant only for THAT generation of men and women? God's Word transcends time and place.
Regards
The Catholic Church has never claimed that individual bishops are inerrant.
But I understand your dilemma: because you reject the idea that the Holy Spirit has ever guided the Church that compiled and finalized the New Testament, you have no logical reason to believe that the New Testament is inerrant.
Tut, tut. You can't make the claim that Orthodox/RCCers accept the traditions handed down by the fathers and then say, "It's OK to ignore those traditions." especially when in comes to the Bible. If the Church settled on these books as inspired, then what happen to the insolubility of the Church and the traditions of the church fathers?
Truth is traditions are picked and chosen by various groups within the Church. This is one example. At least Protestants tend to be a little more focus and accept the word of God as standard.
Kosta will need to tell you the parts he thinks are Gnostic in the epistles of St. Paul, and you will need specifically to show why they are not.
Please do. And while you're at it please provide for me the references from early church fathers who, after the scriptures were put together in a book, still believed Paul's writings were Gnostic. We'll base it on Church tradition. How's that for being fair?
That would be way too easy! First, this is not a simple matter. It's as if someone said "Tell me everything about yourself in 30 seconds." Second, this is not about spoon feeding. What you know, from what I can tell, is what you worked on. No one poured the knowledge onto the silver plate for you to use.
HD, 1000 silverlings, what good was telling people that the earth was not flat if they refused to consider the evidence? How can you tell is someone is a doctor unless you know what being a doctor is? And it isn't something you can just list in a half a dozen bullets. You will just have to find out yourself, the way you found out everything else.
Now, it is your choice to say "Bah, I give no authority to these lies" and dismiss a number of academics with very impressive backgrounds as charlatans, but then the Reformation did that with the 1,500 year-old-Church. It's an option, just as it's an option to state that if God wanted man to fly He would have given him wings!
Agrarian, your charge that the academics are dead set to destroy the religion would have to be substantiated. Bishop Eusebius, the first Church historian (4th c.), specifically said that the Church will use only that information which is profitable for the Church and ignore the rest. We must assume that each side seeks to defend its beleifs, and not prejudge their motives.
You can't make the claim that Orthodox/RCCers accept the traditions handed down by the fathers and then say, "It's OK to ignore those traditions."
You are absolutely right! And, contrary to what you think, I don't! I have said it before and I will say it again: I believe Eastern Orthodoxy is pure Christianity, as my tagline says. I believe in everything the Church teaches, even if I don't understand it.
That does not, and should not, preclude me or anyone else from seeking and engaging information that seems to contradict, alter, supplement, widen, etc. the faith and/or ecclesiastical praxis, and put them to a test, especially if it is not some old heresy that has been rehashed and rejected, but something new and previously unknown.
I will drop yet another bomb: to me it is inconceivable that anyone would feel perfectly at peace, perfectly content with their faith, as if they have reach perfect sainthood, live a sinless life, and believe in perfect knowledge, and have no need or desire to be purified as long as they live, but instead believe they have learned everything there is to learn, to know everything there is to know, believe and live their faith perfectly.
Apparently, many seem to believe themselves that good, having nothing more to learn, but only to preach and teach us less perfect beings something about perfect faith and perfect knowledge.
No, we believe that faith moves you to do deeds in God's name. A faith that does not move you to do God's work is dead faith.
I would also say that faith produces good deeds, and faith comes only from God. So, our difference would be to what degree you believe faith is man-generated. My view is to say 0%.
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