Posted on 04/30/2010 8:03:48 AM PDT by Quix
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7 “When you pray, don’t babble on and on as people of other religions do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again. 8 Don’t be like them, for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him! 9 Pray like this: Our Father in heaven, --New Living Translation 7And when you pray, do not heap up phrases (multiply words, repeating the same ones over and over) as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their much speaking. [I Kings 18:25-29.] 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. 9Pray, therefore, like this: 15But if you do not forgive others their trespasses [their [j]reckless and willful sins, [k]leaving them, letting them go, and [l]giving up resentment], neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses. --Amplified Pray with Simplicity 5"And when you come before God, don't turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom! Do you think God sits in a box seat? 6"Here's what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won't be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace. 7-13"The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They're full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don't fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this: 16-18"When you practice some appetite-denying discipline to better concentrate on God, don't make a production out of it. It might turn you into a small-time celebrity but it won't make you a saint. If you 'go into training' inwardly, act normal outwardly. Shampoo and comb your hair, brush your teeth, wash your face. God doesn't require attention-getting devices. He won't overlook what you are doing; he'll reward you well. |
Mark Kirby: O Mother of Good Counsel, I am all thine, Most Holy Mary, There is no part of my life that is not open to thee, I want to be completely transparent with thee, Praying in this way, I can be at rest, |
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From our illegal Arizona friends: "Excelente!". :) Yeah, this is one of my all time favorite episodes. It makes me feel even more fragile now that I have started wearing reading glasses. :)
LOL! I have to admit I had no clue at all what this meant in your first answer so I'M the one who had to cheat and look it up! :)
“Are their home planets anywhere near yours?”
LOL you tell me. How far away from Earth are you from?
INDEED.
And, most of the So Baps I’ve been close to have been various degrees of Calvinist.
No.
Let's look at grave sins:
The eternal punishment which is intrinsic to them is ORDINARILY lifted by Baptism and by the Sacrament of Reconciliation. "Ordinarily" here means that theses are not the only ways through which God forgives the eternal punishment, by grace unmeritable, undeserved, impossible to earn.
The temporal punishment which is also intrinsic to them can be lifted or mitigated by penances done before we die or in Purgatory, and through other means, including "indulgenced" activities. As the catechism says, sometimes there is a repentance so personally sweeping (like what some Protestants might call a "revival"?) that the temporal punishment is lifted.
Without the lifting of the eternal punishment, which is REAL forgiveness, it is hard to imagine there could be any mitigation of the temporal punishment. And if, somehow there were such lifting, it wouldn't do any good because the basic breach with God would still mean that one was not forgiven.
So to say that indulgence and purgatory lead to forgiveness is incomplete because it is imprecise. There are two sorts of punishments requiring two sorts of forgiveness. Only one sort is addressed by purgation or indulgences or any penances. Purgation, indulgences, penances NOT undertaken while already forgiven are fruitless.
To put it another way, the reason Dante portrays Purgatory as a place of joy is that everyone there is, solely by the grace of God, already forgiven of the eternal punishment. They are heaven-bound and they know it.
So some, speaking lightly, but not wrongly, refer to Purgatory as the outskirts or suburbs of heaven, or to purgation as boot camp for heaven.
Purgatory and indulgences cannot and do not mitigate or remove the eternal punishment. That is removed only by God's loving grace. God's loving grace is the necessary precursor, the admission ticket, to purgatory. That forgiveness cannot be worked for, or "purchased"or any such thing. It is entirely gratuitous.
Quite interesting. Is there some explanation of this in the Scriptures? Some example?
Nice try mark.. but the Bible is a large volume and the church teaches only the magistrum can properly interpret scripture..
I have read catholics theologians that come up with new interpretations that no one else has ever seen and that are purely from their own imagination.. and catholics swallow them whole, as if they are church truth . When in fact they are being their own pope..
The charge by Catholics that every protestant is his own pope rings hollow when the church has never taken time to teach the scriptures in context in an OFFICIAL catholic commentary ...so every bible study teacher , every theologian , every priest on Sundays is in fact giving his personal reading ...because your church knows if they ever did a contextual commentary it would show the faulty doctrine for what it is
BB-Waaayyyy to close to the "disruption in the FORCE" talk for my tastes. Smells alot like karma, too. ICK!
Nonsense Dear Sister! I guess this means you don't think the sins of Adam and Eve had an effect on others than? We see this theme throughout the Bible
When someone asks God for forgiveness of sins they should also being doing penance for the sin that has added to the sins of mankind effecting others and disturbance of nature that comes with sin. Penance can be giving up something you really enjoy and using that time for prayer for the harm you caused by sin.
Why would anyone have problem with that?
how does one's suffering in "purgatory" benefit either the deceased - who can no longer make amends in the physical world
They can make amends for those living in the physical world by praying for them while in purgatory and those in the physical world can help those in purgatory by praying for souls in purgatory.
Once you understand that heaven is perfection than you will understand that you can't get there until the "last penny is paid back"(Matt 5:26)- meaning temporal punishment for sin
What a refreshing acknowledgment of the literal meaning of Genesis, and the repercussions throughout the Bible and throughout Creation.
All too many purported Catholics on FR relegate Genesis to the status of fable, in order to embrace evolution.
Thank you for standing up for the Biblical account, all of it, and not picking and choosing in order to accomodate your church to the current understanding of man.
Ken,If you understood indulgences as forms of reparations you would realize that the Early Church Fathers DID teach reparation for souls in Purgatory and reparations can be in many forms.
For example -From Saint Cyril of Jerusalem
"Then we commemorate also those who have fallen asleep before us, first Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, that at their prayers and intercessions God would receive our petition. Then on behalf also of the Holy Fathers and Bishops who have fallen asleep before us, and in a word of all who in past years have fallen asleep among us, believing that it will be a very great benefit to the souls, for whom the supplication is put up, while that holy and most awful sacrifice is set forth. And I wish to persuade you by an illustration. For I know that many say, what is a soul profited, which departs from this world either with sins, or without sins, if it be commemorated in the prayer? For if a king were to banish certain who had given him of-fence, and then those who belong to them should weave a crown and offer it to him on behalf of those under punishment, would he not grant a remission of their penalties? In the same way we, when we offer to Him our supplications for those who have fallen asleep, though they be sinners, weave no crown, but offer up Christ sacrificed for our sins, propitiating our merciful God for them as well as for ourselves.” Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 23:9,10 (c. A.D. 350).
Well, I have to confess I had no memory of the Burgess Meredith episode. But, for some strange reason that "cookbook" episode stuck like gum on my shoe. I can still see the guy getting hustled up the ramp...
I am grateful we have been informed all of that stuff is all just make-believe. Think of the poor unbelievers living in a world where that might be possible. They have no idea what is real, who might show up, whether they will become the hors d'oeuvres for some 9 foot alien. Yet another benefit of being rescued.
Certainly, to a Christian, Christ purges all the guilt and temporal punishment due to man - eternal death - by His death, burial and resurrection from the grave to an eternal life in a new, powerful, glorified, immortal spiritual body, just as the Apostle Paul reveals to us in I Corinthians 15.
Check out my web site for articles on this last paragraph - you may find them interesting.
Allow me to propose an analogy.
(Wow! Who saw THAT coming?)
If you look at stuff directly, you come to Aristotle's conclusion that things slow down unless some force is applied to them, that heavy things tend toward the center of the earth while light things, like fire, tend upwards, blah blah.
But if you back off a little, refine your frame of reference, you might come to see that Newton's laws make it far easier to account "elegantly" for what you observe. Things tend to keep on going, unless forces act on them to change their direction or speed. That wasn't a no-brainer.
So this is KIND of a little sort of my experience with the Bible. If you are asking could I prove these two sorts of consequence to sin if I had nothing but the Bible, I'd have to say that I don't think I could do so, at least not persuasively.
But once I, stand back and think, and read Aquinas and stuff, and then turn and come back, I see it in lots of places -- and not just in the Bible but in life as we allegedly know it.
Its kind of like that with the Trinity. If I wrap my mind around the doctrine as much as I can and then go back and look at the sayings of Jesus about his relationship with the Father, and Paul's words about the Spirit, and even the Creation story in Genesis, suddenly it starts to fit into place.
Is that an answer?
You lost me. If you're "in purgatory" you're deceased.
who can no longer make amends in the physical world - or those who have had their "windows" broken that remain?
making up for the hurt I did YOU when I sinned against you is not (To my understanding, could be wrong) part of purgation. I shoulda got you a window before I croaked -- or you could have filed a claim against my estate.(and REALLY good luck with THAT after the dear leader gets a hold of estate taxes ...)
Again, I go with the therapeutic model. Sin not only affects my relationship with God and with you, but it affects ME. Sin is BAD for me. It's not just "forensic." Lying can so easily become a habit. Steam-rolling over polite and diffident people is so easy to do without noticing. if I've done those things a lot I need help with Truth, probably courage,and charity and selflessness. I expect purgatory to be the means whereby God cures my leftover sinfulness after I croak.
Forgiveness goes both ways.
Sorry.I'm not getting this.
No.
Okay, again. I admit what you are saying is taught by the RCC. Seems to me you want to take my statements and apply them to all the little intricate doctrines/teachings concerning sin and punishments in this life and the time between death and resurrection. If I would have realized that you wanted my take on that I would have went into it, but seeing as how nothing you said in the first few posts indicated it - that is until you posted from the catechism a short part on the two conceptions of sins punishments, which I admit I had never contemplated you were looking for. It does seem that the RCC teaches "eternal punishment" can't be purged, yet in other teachings say that it can be purged (although by God only) - very confusing to many individual, although I can understand the distinction your trying to make.
Purgatory and indulgences cannot and do not mitigate or remove the eternal punishment. That is removed only by God's loving grace. God's loving grace is the necessary precursor, the admission ticket, to purgatory. That forgiveness cannot be worked for, or "purchased"or any such thing. It is entirely gratuitous.
Hmmm....while I don't agree with what the church teaches here, much less in the whole concept of "purgatory" and the division of sin into catagories along with means of purgation through indulgences of any kind, I do have to agree that your church does teach it, although not all that many in the pews will ever gain an understanding of it for its complexity. I do understand completely what the RCC teaches, and do not misunderstand it at all, as some would assert blindly. I simply do not accept all these philosophical ideas put forth to back up the concept of purgatorial doctines concerning sin.
Now that we have exhausted the topic, what next?
Absolutely not...there, I answered it for him. :-)
However, I do expect he does have something to say, and I look forward to that explanation.
It is a very important distinction indeed, dearest sister in Christ!
One way to put it would be to say that it's the same distinction that exists between ontology and epistemology....
Thank you so very much for your beautiful essay/post!
To God be the glory, not man, never man!
Sorry, I don't consider nor take Cyril's 4th century writings seriously. It shows me what he thinks, which may or may not be in line with what other writers have to say, who also speak of their own thoughts and ideas. Besides, he's 300+ years from Christ, and time has a way of changing things...but not God's things. Tell a story one day to one person and if it get repeated the next day, and then the next day, etc. and etc., it may be so corrupted that you wouldn't recognize it as the one you told that first day - so it is with traditionalist doctrines handed down orally day after day after day, etc.
However, Stfassisi, even though I understand the RCC's teachings of indulgences, and the philosophical explanations, I do not accept them at all as being from God or Christ and His Apostles.
Ahhh...Yes, and it may surprise you to read that is an answer I do understand, really do understand even as I find it a refined version of hammering a square peg into a round hole. Yes, an answer and not yours alone.
One of the things I HATE about being Catholic is that every time I come up with something I think is cool, somebody else already said it, and probably said it better. Humility sucks.
Is the roundness and squareness related to 'Biblical' v. 'Greek' culture, view,thought, blah blah, or to something else?
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