Posted on 01/01/2006 4:48:03 PM PST by HarleyD
Since I missed your point, could you please try to make it again so that I understand what you are trying to say. I thought you were trying to say what a prejudiced place America was for Greeks, but I guess I misinterpreted.
I know that there is little to none patristic support for my reading of Matthew 18. I came to this understanding all alone (does it make me Protestant?). I did read subsequently that St. Francis de Sales had offered something similar, but I could not find it in de Sales, and I did not look in any late Latin fathers.
However, the patristic support that you cite does not satisfy. Why is the second condemnation different? Why verse 25 treats the payment as something possible, at least if combined with the proceeds from the sale to slavery? In verse 26, likewise, the debtor treats it as large but not infinite. There is no scriptural warrant to treat the payment as impossible in 34, and to therefore treat the sentence "until he paid off the debt" as some kind of cruel mockery.
Secondly, the patristic interpretation makes the Landlord reneg on his forgiveness, which is inaccurate from any theological standpoint.
Lastly, the parable, like any such parable, anthropomorphizes God, and therefore it should not surprize us if it makes Him an indirect torturer. After all, it does point to the debtor's lack of charity as the real source of the torture, just like the doctrine of Purgatory would teach.
Naturally, the doctrine of Purgatory in no way suggests that all are eventually saved, so whether St. Gregory of Nyssa posited his reading in that unfortunate context or not, his reading remains one patristic authority I will be happy to take.
Leaving aside your Jack Chick version of history, the episode with the sale of indulgences is not an illustration of doctrinal development gone awry. The Church at all times maintained that simony is wrong, encouraged indulgenced work, encouraged monetary donations, and strived to add to the visible splendor of our glorious Church. The issue whether indlugenced work can be done for hire -- in other words, whether indulgences can be sold -- was never doctrinally stated till Trent. After some deliberation it was decided that it would be simony, thus doctrinal refinement occurred, which should make you happy. Are you happy?
"Orthodoxy has no opinion on this. We just don't know as we don't know whither the Spirit will go. We can say that salvation is found within The Church. Its quite another thing to say, as I think the Latin Church does, or did, that it is not found outside The Church."
This seems to be a hard concept for many outside Orthodoxy to understand about us. On the one hand, we are almost fierce in our clinging to Orthodoxy, being convinced that it is the Church and the ark of salvation.
On the other hand, we absolutely refuse to offer any opinion about salvation outside the canonical boundaries of the Orthodox Church. Some, such as Bp. Kallistos (Ware), have copied the traditional R.C. formula of "there is no salvation outside the Church, but there are many people who will be saved who are not in the visible Church -- this means that they *really* were/are members of the visible Church but just don't know it."
I remember discussing this with an Orthodox priest during my catechumenate, asking him about what Bp. Kallistos had written. His reply was shocking to me at the time -- he pointed out that the classic statement of "there is no salvation outside the Church" was that of St. Cyprian of Carthage. He suggested the probability that St. Cyprian was probably just plain wrong about that, and that if one simply starts from the premise that St. Cyprian was wrong, everything becomes pretty straight-forward.
As the years have gone by, I have become more and more convinced that that priest was right and that Bp. Kallistos was wrong. To accept St. Cyprian's statement means that an Orthodox Christian either has to believe that all non-Orthodox Christians will go to hell, or he must believe that the Church is something amorphous and, shall we say, invisible.
If one simply acknowledges that we cannot know where the Spirit is *not* found, and that God is perfectly free to save whoever he wants to outside the Church, thank you very much, then one is forced neither into the amorphous gyrations required to show that people who aren't in the Church really are in the Church even though they don't know it (the equivalent of an invisible Church) nor into a rigid exclusionary attitude that does little but create dangerous pride amongst those Orthodox Christians who hold to it.
Anyway, that is just MHO.
Of course he is not correct, unless you took the reference to the order of worship to mean the bare rubrics of the said signing. "This is my body; do this in memory of me" is a prescribed element of worship, and is not reading the scripture and is not singing hymns.
You write real purdy, Dr Eckelburg. :-)
do the souls in purgatory pray each other out of purgatory?
No, the souls in purgatory lack the free will to pray and so they cannot reduce their stay. We have to do the praying for them.
if a priest binds that someone is to be released from Purgatory, is God bound by the priest's declaration?
Not a priest, but the Pope (who hold the Keys of St. Peter) can define indulgenced work upon which a soul is released. To learn more, see The Enchiridion of Indulgences
If a priest declares that Hitler's sins are forgiven, is God bound by that one too?
If a priest gives an absolution through the sacrament of confession, the absolution binds in heaven, of course. This is the plain meaning of John 20:23. However, a priest cannot absolve a sin that is not confessed in person, and Hitler missed that chance. Had Hitler gone to confession and repented, the confessed sins would have been forgiven him in heaven, and the history of the world would have been different. I hasten to add that if Hitler had confessed but also had continued with his murderous policies, then he would have added an even heavier sin on his soul, as he would have failed to repent.
There is no such thing, and there is no scripture that says what your "church" imagines to be the case.
No, it is not. Nor is Trinity "biblical language". It is a concept Christ defended at a considerable risk to His ministry on earth in John 6.
Gnawing Jesus' Flesh
I do that at least weekly.
Strike "atomic". That is an accident, it remains bread or wine. The substance changes; there is no laboratory test to detect the change in substance since the physical science deals with accidents and not substances. Other than that, your statement is correct, the office of a validly ordained priest is the entire difference.
Gnawing Jesus' Flesh
****I do that at least weekly.****
White meat or dark meat?
In the real world we call that doubletalk.
Dr. E., I'm sure you know by know and through our discussions that my thoughts on the Eucharist are pretty much as they were when I was Catholic.
I have no idea whether it's conditioning or what I know to be true. At this point it falls under the rubric of working out my salvation.
I believe that Calvin believed it was the Body and Blood of Christ in much the same way Catholics did, except that he didn't commit the kind of theology so beyond man's scope to feel confident in speculations about accidents and substances. He knew Our Lord's command, and he took it seriously.
Harley commented in another post about men with too much time on their hands, and I'm in full agreement with him on that. Every red hat that's bestowed upon a Cardinal should be accompanied by a spade and hoe, with instructions to 'dig baby, dig, anytime you're moved to commit theology beyond your scope, and then feel the turgor to bind millions upon millions upon milliions of souls to your singular speculations.'
The Church says it owns the loaf, it consecrates the loaf, it confects the loaf, it dispenses the loaf to those 'in communion.'
The problem is that St. Paul and St. Peter would never recognize what is called being in communion today, they would have never had the temerity required for such persumption. Never!!!!! Let it own the loaf, it's perfectly in line with the love of power that is in its bones.
/rant
You say that the anthropomorphic portrayal of God in the parable allows you to take a loose interpretation of God delivering the man to "the torturers" (i.e. delivering to the tortures of the demons someone that God intends later to take to heaven -- if considered more literally.)
On the other hand, you seem to want to take a literal view of "until he paid off the debt" as being a 'cruel mockery' rather than a simple piece of anthropomorphic hyperbole. Remember that the original debt was one that was so large that not only the man, but his entire family was going to have to be sold into slavery until it was paid off (and how is a slave going to pay it off and get his family back?) The servant may have promised to repay all (wouldn't any debtor facing being sold into slavery say the same thing), but it was an unpayable debt, and that was what prompted the servant's desperation, and the master's mercy.
I think that this parable is a pretty straightforward one, but I will admit that I am heavily influenced by Orthodox spriritual praxis on this. I don't know about Catholicism, but a failure to forgive others is considered to be the single most spiritually dangerous thing that a person can do -- at least that is the lesson I have taken away from literally hundreds of confessions to probably a couple dozen different Orthodox priests over the years.
In virtually every confession, the last thing an Orthodox priest will ask (and often the *only* question that is ever asked by a priest), is whether one can and has forgiven all who have sinned against us or offended us. The message I have gotten over the last decade and a half is that this is the single most likely thing to result in us sending ourselves straight to the bad place after death. This message is hammered home in homilies, spiritual writings, confessions... probably more than any other single piece of spiritual advice. At least, that is my experience.
The message of this parable is simply that we can recover from and be forgiven for multitudes of sins, big and small -- "ten thousand talents" worth -- but we can undo the whole thing and permanently poison our own soul through a failure to forgive our brother, and end up spending an eternity apart from Christ (and with the demons for our companions instead) as a result.
The fact that you stated at one point that you found this passage as "impossible" to interpret in any other way than as a portrayal of Purgatory (with a fairly thorough discussion breaking down the details of debts, venial sins, etc.), shows that your reading was likewise heavily influenced by the specifics of the Catholic spiritual/confessional life as you have experienced it or come to understand it.
"Naturally, the doctrine of Purgatory in no way suggests that all are eventually saved, so whether St. Gregory of Nyssa posited his reading in that unfortunate context or not, his reading remains one patristic authority I will be happy to take."
That's not what the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory says, but it is *precisely* what St. Gregory of Nyssa is saying, so I'm not sure how you can take him as support. Since St. Gregory's fires are the punishing fires of hell, his reference to this verse would seem to be meaningless outside of his theory of eventual universal salvation. But that, too, is probably a function of the lens through which we look at this.
Dr. E, and Harley are used to my schizophrenia (and I think love me all the same...), but I didn't really mean to impose it on you.
In the world of politics it is called spin.
" I thought you were trying to say what a prejudiced place America was for Greeks, but I guess I misinterpreted."
Well, it was. That's just an historical fact. You asked what I meant by saying that the old Greeks (and others) tried to "pass for white". They wanted to be American so much much that they made some lamentable compromises with their religious customs to be accepted. The historical context within which that happened is important to understand why they did what they did, for which, by the way, Greek and Antiochian Orthodoxy is still condemned by certain "purists". That America treated immigrants badly then is no news nor, at least to my way of thinking, even particularly lamentable. Most survived just fine and prospered without government handouts and the multicultural police making sure they had more "rights" than native born Americans. They and especially their descendants became fully American, far more so than the blood suckers Bush et al and the Democrats are welcoming with open arms, especially the Mohammadens who seem to have flocked here as "refugees" and whom the government, Catholic Charities and Lutheran Family Services have dumped in poorer rural areas in the interests of broadening our ethnic horizons! :(
I'm reminded of this scene from Exorcist III:
Mrs. Clelia: My radio. Aren't you going to fix it? Nothing ever gets fixed round here. Just a whole bunch of pies and anchovies. Go away. I don't ever talk to strangers.
Dt. Kinderman: I'm the radio repairman, Mrs Clelia.
Mrs. Clelia: Well then, fix it.
Dt. Kinderman: What's wrong with it?
Mrs. Clelia: Dead people talking. It's right here. Do you see it?
Dt. Kinderman: Yes. I see it.
Mrs. Clelia: I just knew you weren't really a radio repairman. That's a telephone I'm holding.
For the record, Harley's excellent history lesson is not limited to Jack Chick. Most, if not very nearly all Protestants hold that view of the disreputable history of the RC church.
It's easier for you to dismiss that judgment if you think it's just a marginal opinion.
It's not.
FWIW I've noticed that the Catholics use "Jack Chick" in their arguments the same way that the Mormons use "The Tanners".
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