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To: wagglebee
I presume that you fully agree with my other six points.

No.

1. Scriptures have already been given that the Lord Jesus had siblings.

2. No as already stated

3. Cannot be as scripture states they are Jesus' brothers.

4. So what? Does not add weight to your theory.

5. Was not accepted before catholic church...350 years. And who was to agrue with RCC, Christians risked their lives to oppose RCC teaching or were already in hiding.

6. No basis for fact...just conjecture because no histroical fact or biblical proof. As already stated Josephus speaks of Jesus siblings = fact.

7. Jesus is royality because he is God. The Son of God. Mary does not give royal status to Jesus, His Father in heaven does.

1,086 posted on 03/06/2007 6:53:47 PM PST by free_life
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To: free_life; Mad Dawg; Salvation; nanetteclaret; wagglebee; Diego1618

(i) A social religion

Almost the first thing we see when we look at a man is that he is not an isolated unit independent of others, but a social being bound to others both by needs that cannot be satisfied and by powers that must remain unused save in relation to other men. It would be strange if God, having made man social, should ignore the fact in His own personal dealings with man. To treat man as an isolated independent unit would be as monstrous in religion as in any other department of human life. It would be to treat man as what he is not. But the one being who is not likely to do that is God, who made man what he is, and made him so because that is what He wanted him to be. A religion which should consist in an individual relation of each person directly to God would be no religion for man. A social being requires a social religion. Within that social religion, the individual will have his own religious needs and experiences, but they will be within and not external to, or a substitute for, his approach to God and God's approach to him in union with other men.

Individualist religious theories there have always been, even among Christians. They have never been able to carry out the full logic of their individualist theory because their nature as human beings stood too solidly in the way. Something in religion they have had to get from other men. So the Bible-Christian despising priesthood and minimizing Church has yet had to fall back upon the Bible; and the Bible, although it is given to us by God, is given through men, the men who under His inspiration wrote it. A religion wherein the soul finds and maintains a relation with God with no dependence upon men is impossible, and what makes it impossible is the nature God gave man. The only question, then, is whether religion shall do its very uttermost to elude the social element in man's nature, accepting only so much as it can by no possibility avoid; or whether it shall wholly accept and glory in the social element as something given by God, something therefore to be used to the uttermost in religion as in the rest of man's life. In giving man the religion of the Kingdom, God showed what His own answer is .

Christ did not leave His followers free at their discretion to form their own groups if it seemed good to them, or to remain isolated if it seemed good to them. He banded them into a flock, a society, a Church. "He gave Himself for us, to ransom us from all our guilt, a people set apart for Himself. What the Jews had been, the Church now is. We remember Moses' words" "This is the blood of the covenant." But now, we have Christ's word: "This is my blood of the new covenant." There is a new covenant and a new people: not just millions of redeemed individuals: a people. The brotherhood of every Christian with Christ involved the brotherhood of every Christian with one another. His normal way of giving them His gifts of truth and life was to be through the society: in other words, the whole Christian life was not to be a solitary relation of each soul to Christ but to each to all in Christ: this is what the Apostle's Creed means by the "Communion of Saints. In solidarity with other men, we fell in Adam and rose again with Christ; in the same solidarity, we live the new life...

Theology and Sanity, Frank J. Sheed, ISBN 0-89870-470-7, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1993, Part III. Dispensing the Gifts. 21. The Kingdom, (i) A social religion, pp. 289-291 296-297.


1,095 posted on 03/06/2007 7:35:00 PM PST by Frank Sheed ("Shakespeare the Papist" by Fr. Peter Milward, S.J.)
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