Posted on 12/04/2006 7:52:47 PM PST by Pyro7480
'The Nativity Story' Movie Problematic for Catholics, "Unsuitable" for Young Children
By John-Henry Westen
NEW YORK, December 4, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A review of New Line Cinema's The Nativity story by Fr. Angelo Mary Geiger of the Franciscans of the Immaculate in the United States, points out that the film, which opened December 1, misinterprets scripture from a Catholic perspective.
While Fr. Geiger admits that he found the film is "in general, to be a pious and reverential presentation of the Christmas mystery." He adds however, that "not only does the movie get the Virgin Birth wrong, it thoroughly Protestantizes its portrayal of Our Lady."
In Isaiah 7:14 the Bible predicts the coming of the Messiah saying: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel." Fr. Geiger, in an video blog post, explains that the Catholic Church has taught for over 2000 years that the referenced Scripture showed that Mary would not only conceive the child miraculously, but would give birth to the child miraculously - keeping her physical virginity intact during the birth.
The film, he suggests, in portraying a natural, painful birth of Christ, thus denies the truth of the virginal and miraculous birth of Christ, which, he notes, the Fathers of the Church compared to light passing through glass without breaking it. Fr. Geiger quoted the fourth century St. Augustine on the matter saying. "That same power which brought the body of the young man through closed doors, brought the body of the infant forth from the inviolate womb of the mother."
Fr. Geiger contrasts The Nativity Story with The Passion of the Christ, noting that with the latter, Catholics and Protestants could agree to support it. He suggests, however, that the latter is "a virtual coup against Catholic Mariology".
The characterization of Mary further debases her as Fr. Geiger relates in his review. "Mary in The Nativity lacks depth and stature, and becomes the subject of a treatment on teenage psychology."
Beyond the non-miraculous birth, the biggest let-down for Catholics comes from Director Catherine Hardwicke's own words. Hardwicke explains her rationale in an interview: "We wanted her [Mary] to feel accessible to a young teenager, so she wouldn't seem so far away from their life that it had no meaning for them. I wanted them to see Mary as a girl, as a teenager at first, not perfectly pious from the very first moment. So you see Mary going through stuff with her parents where they say, 'You're going to marry this guy, and these are the rules you have to follow.' Her father is telling her that she's not to have sex with Joseph for a year-and Joseph is standing right there."
Comments Fr. Geiger, "it is rather disconcerting to see Our Blessed Mother portrayed with 'attitude;' asserting herself in a rather anachronistic rebellion against an arranged marriage, choosing her words carefully with her parents, and posing meaningful silences toward those who do not understand her."
Fr. Geiger adds that the film also contains "an overly graphic scene of St. Elizabeth giving birth," which is "just not suitable, in my opinion, for young children to view."
Despite its flaws Fr. Geiger, after viewing the film, also has some good things to say about it. "Today, one must commend any sincere attempt to put Christ back into Christmas, and this film is certainly one of them," he says. "The Nativity Story in no way compares to the masterpiece which is The Passion of the Christ, but it is at least sincere, untainted by cynicism, and a worthy effort by Hollywood to end the prejudice against Christianity in the public square."
And, in addition to a good portrait of St. Joseph, the film offers "at least one cinematic and spiritual triumph" in portraying the Visitation of Mary to St. Elizabeth. "Although the Magnificat is relegated to a kind of epilogue at the movie's end, the meeting between Mary and Elizabeth is otherwise faithful to the scriptures and quite poignant. In a separate scene, the two women experience the concurrent movement of their children in utero and share deeply in each other's joy. I can't think of another piece of celluloid that illustrates the dignity of the unborn child better than this."
See Fr. Geiger's full review here:
http://airmaria.com/
I don't dispute all that you say, I just add that I think Mary gave birth, physically. And because we are dealing with something miraculous on all levels, I don't think that it would have caused her to become unvirgin in any way.
I think you are working to illustrate my previous post.
Whatever verses you use, however you get there, if you end up with a capricious god, you've made a wrong turn.
God loves you, it is a very hard thing to accept, as Christ knew and taught.
Inasmuch as the statement completely denies any divinity of Jesus by saying Mary gave birth only to a man, you are right.
" I thought the position of the Church was that the New Testament was the writing of God. "
Not at all; that would be Mohammedanism. The scriptures are the writings of men inspired by the Holy Spirit.
The wrong turn in all of this is thinking we have the ability to reject what God truly wants.
Yes, you are correct that the scriptures are the writings of men inspired by the Holy Spirit. That being said, now would you admit that the book of Timothy contains the Truth of the Church?
Christ is a union, not a mixture, of two natures, FK. No mixing took place. Natures do not mix. You can't create a human-animal or animal-human (any such genetic union is non-viable) any more than you can create a demigod. You can't assume the nature of a tree and become a human-tree. If this sounds absurd to you, then claiming that the divine and human natures somehow "produced" a demigod is equally absurd.
The union took place without mixing of the natures, and Jesus Christ is a seamless union of true God and true man, with separate wills, one divine and one human. The union did not change the unchangeable God and make Him into something "new."
Christ took on Mary's humanity using her flesh. The rest is an enigma. Mary's flesh had two female genes: that of her mother and that of her father's mother. Obviously, the enfleshment of the Word was not incumbent on her genetics. It was her humanity, her human nature, that the Lord assumed.
Just as Adam did not need human genes to become human, neither did the Word need human genetics to become human. He used Mary's flesh in order to become related to humanity, Abraham and Adam, as well as David and fulfill the prophesy.
Does God love you more than the non-elect?
The mistake was using the KJV, imo. The more reliable Greek texts use the term charis (grace). KJV is based on the most unreliable Codex and it was tailored to the Protestant correctness, so the Geneva-worshipping Protestants would acquiesce. In other words: a man-made Bible for a man-made church. How fitting, imo.
Most of them actually are livid at the messanger or are in denial, or both. Those who recognize the deception return to the Church.
Poison? Mary did not give birth to a nature, BD. That's pretty silly, don't you think? Or do you believe women give birth to 'nature?'
Mary gave birth to a Person Who is God, the same God the Word the only-begotten of the Father before all ages, not to a new person, and not to a demigod.
Kosta, that's BULL and you know it. What possible benefit would the Protestants have gained by saying faith over grace? You call the Codices used by Westcott and Hort as reliable and the ones used by Stephanus and Scrivener as unreliable. Who do you think YOU are. Your rhetoric needs to be toned down and a little respect given in this debate. You may truly believe they are superior, but you don't have to accuse the translators of the KJV of tailoring a text to Protestant correctness. The word in Scrivner and Stephanus is Pisteuo. In Westcott-Hort it is Charis. In the Latin it is Gratia. You can't get Charis when the codex says Pisteuo and there is no evidence that the KJV translators did anything other than make an honest attempt to translate the Bible as literally as possible from the text they had. There would have been no benefit to say Stephen was full of faith over grace. A protestant understanding would object to either.
The Holman Christian Standard Bible, incidentally says "grace." Since it is a conservative Southern Baptist translation, where is this Protestant Correctness you speak of. It is a charge meant to insult but is as hollow as the hate that spawned it.
I rather think a veil of modesty should, and will forever, conceal the gynecological details of Mary's birth-giving. And I agree, it would not have caused her to become unvirgin in any way.
Why God decided to bestow is grace upon me or any believer, I don't know except to say that somehow each Christian plays a part, be it large or small, in His plan to bring glory to Him.
Then why are you elected and the others not?
I am surprized, after all your exchange with the Orthodox, that you would say something like this. I am even more surprized if not outright disappointed, that you would suggest that "as regards His existence" you believe the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. I do hope you realize that you are making a statement of double origin.
The gentleman who penned the text "Not by Faith Alone" and this response to Mr. Sproul is antisemitic and a bit whacked re geocentrism, however, I think his response to sproul here is worth reading - as is his book...
Protestant R. C. Sproul:
At the heart of the controversy between Roman Catholic and Reformation theology is the nature of justification itself. It is a debate not merely about how or when or by what means a person is justified, but about the very meaning of justification itself.
Reformed theology insists that the biblical doctrine of justification is forensic in nature. What does this mean? In the popular jargon of religion, the word forensic is used infrequently. The word is not foreign, however, to ordinary language. It appears daily in the news media, particularly with reference to criminal investigations and trials. We hear of "forensic evidence" and "forensic medicine" as we listen to the reports of criminologists, coroners, and pathologists. Here the term forensic refers to the judicial system and judicial proceedings.
The term forensic is also used to describe events connected with public speaking. Schools hold forensic contests or events that feature formal debates or the delivery of speeches.
The link between these ordinary usages of forensic and its theological use is that justification has to do with a legal or judicial matter involving some type of declaration. We can reduce its meaning to the concept of legal declaration.
The doctrine of justification involves a legal matter of the highest order. Indeed it is the legal issue on which the sinner stands or falls: his status before the supreme tribunal of God.
When we are summoned to appear before the bar of God's judgment, we face a judgment based on perfect justice. The presiding Judge is himself perfectly just. He is also omniscient, fully aware of our every deed, thought, inclination, and word. Measured by the standard of his canon of righteousness, we face the psalmist's rhetorical question that hints at despair: "If you, LORD, should mark iniquities, ...who could stand?" (Psalm 130:3 NKJV).
he obvious answer to this query is supplied by the Apostle Paul: "There is none righteous, no, not one...." (Romans 3:10).
God commands us to be holy. Our moral obligation coram Deo (before the face of God) is to live perfect lives. One sin mars that obligation and leaves us naked, exposed before divine justice. Once a person sins at all, a perfect record is impossible. Even if we could live perfectly after that one sin, we would still fail to achieve perfection. Our sin may be forgiven, but forgiveness does not undo the sin. The consequences of the sin may be removed or ameliorated, but the sin itself is not undone.
The Bible speaks figuratively about the sin being washed, cleansed, healed, and blotted out. The sin, which is scarlet, may become white as snow, the crimson may become like wool, in God's sight. The sin may be cast into the sea of forgetfulness or purged with hyssop. But these images describe an expiation for sin and divine forgiveness or remission of our sin. Our record does not change, but our guilt does. Hence Paul declares, "Blessed is the man to whom the LORD shall not impute sin" (Romans 4:8 NKJV).
In our redemptive forgiveness God does not charge us with what we owe. He does not count our sins against us. If he did, no one (except Jesus) would ever escape his just wrath. No one but Christ would be able to stand before God's judgment.
Again, God in his grace may regenerate us, sanctify us, and even glorify us. He might make us perfect in the future. He really does change the elect and will eventually make the justified totally and completely righteous. But even the perfected saint in heaven was once a sinner and has a track record that, apart from the grace of justification, would send him to hell.
Thus, where temporal creatures are concerned, everyone who is once imperfect is always imperfect with respect to the whole scope of the person's individual history. This is what Thomas Aquinas meant when he asserted that justification is always of the impious (iustificatio impii). Righteous people have no need of justification, even as the healthy have no need of a physician.
Both Roman Catholic and Reformation theology are concerned with the justification of sinners. Both sides recognize that the great human dilemma is how unjust sinners can ever hope to survive a judgment before the court of an absolutely holy and absolutely just God.
If we define forensic justification as a legal declaration by which God declares a person just and we leave it at that, we would have no dispute between Rome and Evangelicalism. Though Rome has an antipathy to the concept of forensic justification, this antipathy is directed against the Protestant view of it. In chapter 7 of the sixth session of the Council of Trent, Rome declared: "...not only are we reputed but we are truly called and are just, receiving justice within us, each one according to his own measure...."
Here Rome is jealous to distinguish between being reputed just and actually being just, yet it is still true that God calls the baptismally regenerated just. That is, for Rome justification is forensic in that justification involves God's legal declaration. A person is justified when God declares that person just. The reason or the ground of that declaration differs radically between Roman Catholic and Reformed theology. But both agree that a legal declaration by God is made.
Nor is it sufficient merely to say that Rome teaches that justification means "to make just," while Protestants teach that justification means "to declare just." For Rome God both makes just and declares just. For Protestants God both makes just and declares just -- but not in the same way. For Rome the declaration of justice follows the making inwardly just of the regenerate sinner. For the Reformation the declaration of justice follows the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the regenerated sinner.
R. C. Sproul is an author, chairman of Ligonier Ministries, and professor at the Orlando campus of Reformed Theological Seminary.
Commentary by Robert Sungenis:
R. C. Sproul, although a kind and polite gentlemen, unfortunately, keeps asserting the same old "Reformed" apologetic but fails to acknowledge that the issues he outlines above have already been answered. In fact, when my book Not By Faith Alone came out in 1997, CAI asked Ligonier Ministries, twice, whether R.C. Sproul would be willing to debate these issues. R. C. Sproul himself wrote a letter back to me personally and said that he did not have the time to engage in such debate, and that he didn't think it would be productive. Above, of course, we see Dr. Sproul, without the benefit of debate, holding on to the same unchallenged beliefs. It is one thing to have firm convictions, but when you are a national spokesman for your denominations beliefs, and you are challenged to debate, you owe it to all your constituents to have your beliefs checked and challenged. The fact that we disagree means someone is wrong, and thus it behooves honest men to keep themselves open to the fact that the error rests on their side of the fence.
For anyone who would like to read detailed answers to R. C. Sproul's assertions, I have done so in a point-by-point fashion in my book Not By Faith Alone. In fact, there are 47 separate pages in Not By Faith Alone dealing with the arguments of Dr. Sproul. In those pages you will find such things as:
1) Contrary to Sproul's claim, the New Testament does not treat "justification" as a forensic event. In fact, the very word "declared" to which Sproul appeals is never used in the New Testament in the forensic sense. The Greek word in contention is logizomai. It is the word that Protestant translations invariably render as "declared," seeking to portray an act in which God legally declares someone as justified, although the person does not possess any justifying qualities within himself. It is as if God put a label on the individual's forehead that said "Justified," yet he remains the same sinful person he was before the label was given to him, even though he might better himself a little in the process of sanctification. The problem with Sproul's view is that the Greek word logizomai, which is used 41 times in the New Testament, refers preponderantly to the very opposite of what Sproul and the rest of Reformed theology is claiming. Let me quote from Not By Faith Alone, pages 324-325:
"And it Was Credited Unto Him as Righteouness"
We must now investigate one of the most popular Protestant arguments for the concept of imputed righteousness. This matter concerns the use of the Greek word logizomai translated as, "reckoned," "credited," "accepted," "counted," "considered." The lexical definition carries several meanings as well: reckon, calculate, take into account, put on someone's account, estimate, evaluate, look upon as, consider, think, dwell on, believe, be of the opinion of (Lexicons by Walter Bauer: pp. 475-476; and Liddell and Scott, p. 416). Protestant exegesis, especially that of Romans 4 where the Greek word logizomai appears twelve times, has consistently understood the word in the sense of "credited." As noted earlier, the analogy drawn to describe the righteousness credited to Abraham in Romans 4 is that of an accountant giving a "credit" to Abraham's ledger book, a credit that was secured completely by the work of Christ in the atonement. Abraham is understood as one who has "something to his credit" so that when God looks at his ledger book, as it were, he sees that, in accounting terms, Abraham is in the black. Evangelical Joel Beeke comments on this verb:
This very most often indicates 'what a person, considered by himself, is not, or does not have, but is reckoned, held or regarded to be, or to have. It is clear then that when Abraham was justified by his faith, the righteousness which was reckoned or 'charged to his account' was a righteousness not his own but that of another, namely, the righteousness of Christ. (Justification by Faith Alone, p. 56).
Unfortunately, Beeke presents a false premise which leads him to make a false conclusion. First, the Greek verb logizomai does not "most often indicate" what someone or something is merely "considered" to be but is not so in reality. The New Testament uses logizomai 41 times. Most of these refer to what someone is thinking as a mental representation of the reality they are witnessing (cf., Lk 22:37; Rm 3:28; 6:11; 9:8; 1Co 4:1; 13:5, 11; Ph 3:13; 4:8; Hb 11:19, et al). Contrary to Beeke's proposition, in only a few instances is logizomai used a mental representation of something that does not exist in reality (cf., Rm 2:26; 2Co 12:6). Hence, the preponderant evidence shows that logizomai denotes more of what is recognized or understood intrinsically of a person or thing than a mere crediting to the person or thing something that is not intrinsic to it.
In the case of Abraham, for example, we can understand the phrase "his faith is reckoned as righteousness" in Romans 4:5 such that God is recognizing or viewing Abraham's faith as righteousness, or that God interpreted the faith Abraham demonstrated as righteousness, or both. This is very different from saying, as Beeke claims, that God "credited" Abraham with righteousness as if to say that Abraham was not really showing any righteous qualities when he demonstrated his faith but that God, because fo the alien righteousness of Christ, merely gave him the label of righteousness.
*Mr. Sungenis' work is an admixture of the very good and the very evil. And, he must certainly repent of his antisemitisms. However, his book is one y'all might take a look at as re imputed vs infused righteousness
Sheeezzzeeee...In one place you tell me Timothy was written by Paul and that was his opinion and now you tell me the Greek text are more reliable than the KJV. Does it matter if it was only Paul's opinion?
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