Posted on 06/04/2010 5:43:13 AM PDT by markomalley
The obvious question is are these 2 gospels the same?
Let me know if you're with me so far..
Thank you for the invite, wmfights. I hope you won't' take an offense if I respectfully decline. I am way beyond questioning my EO roots. While I can't for sure say if there is a God or not, I am pretty sure God is not what man made him out to be.
Kost, sometimes you need to stop and wait. And let God reveal Himself to you. you can be so busy trying to disprove God that you miss His reaching out to you. Maranatha!
Second, you say "He does not say that Christ is the source of grace by which a person may become righteous through sanctification."
I guess that fits in perfectly with his unorthodox Christology. Christ is supposed to have everything the Father has, and that would include grace. But Paul doesn't think of Christ one of the divine realities of the same God, he specifically states the only the Father is (the real) God (YHWH); the Son and the Spirit are Lords, and the Son is the firstborn among creatures in Paul's theology.
So, we have some serious theological (Triniatrian) and Christological issues with Paul, so why not with his views on everything else?
Please note that Jesus is never quoted as saying anything even remotely close to Paul's mumbo-jumbo. He never mentions the concept of "justification" or "sanctification" because they are unknown to Judaism. Jesus never uses the term "Godhead." It is clear that a large segment of people who call themselves Christians are actually followers of Paul the way there is a small remnant of a once large group of followers of John the Baptist.
When he uses the word righteousness with respect to justification, the apostle is underscoring the wonderful truth that in Christ God provides a completed righteousness, apart from the works of man
The Catholics and Eastern Orthodox see it a little differently: In his mercy, God forgives. Being forgiven and being made 'just' are two different concepts. being paroled is not the same as being exonerated. As long as we sin we are guilty; forgiven but still guilty. So, rather than "righteousness" they see God's mercy and love, and forgiveness, not justification.
It is a righteousness which has fulfilled the just demands of the law of God
The theology of Divine satisfaction is a heretical theology of Anselm that permeated western Christianity form the 11th century and then taken to its extreme by the Reformers. It was unknown to the Church in the first millennium. You are preaching Paulianity and heresy to me. I may be an agnostic, but that doesn't mean I now thing that the Protestant heresy is somehow suddenly "right."
Of course, there is an orthodox understanding of Paul and it is based on the way the early Church understood him. They didn't need Thayer’s Greek–English Lexicon in those days because they spoke the very language of the New Testament and understood the nuances much better than people 1500 years later.
That's why I say you preach Paulianity, something that was derived from Paul's teaching through the western phronema and Latin legalistic world, as well as Augustine's mistaken conclusions about the fall of man—things that were unknown to the Church in the first millennium.
Be it imputation, justification, 'created' grace, etc. these concepts are alien to the mindset of the original Church. Of course, I can't convince you of that here, nor do I want to. Ultimately we all find our own way to "explain" all this.
I am telling you thins because you are wasting your time preaching Paul to me. I could inundate you with orthodox views on the same topics, but I won't. If I can at least motivate you to look at other interpretations, preferably the original ones, then that's good. If not, of well...
The core difference between the Apostolic Church and the Protestant offshoots is that the former teaches that salvation is restoring a human with the help of grace to a Christ-like person. The Protestants teach that by some magic Christ waved his wand and made all the (s)elect "righteous" because Paul said so.
Maybe that's exactly what he is doing... :) I have no desire to disporve God. I just no longer don't confuse God with what man created in his own image and calls "God."
I have a good friend that is not a believer. A very bright guy. He teaches at a prestigious medical school, runs a research dept as well as conducting research. One point from our last discussion about this that has given him pause is I asked him how inorganic matter became organic and then became self replicating. He was honest and said science can't explain it.
I mention this because looking at nature is often a good first step in seeing the existence of God. We aren't arguing translations or interpretations we are just observing that nature is not totally random.
That shouldn't give him a pause unless he never thought about, and being a bright individual I expect he would and should have. Just realizing how little we know is humbling, but at the same time it should also make it clear that ignorance doesn't prove God's existence.
besides your question is incorrectly stated (and he should have corrected you). organic molecules are not self-replicating. in fact, organic chemistry doesn't deal with self-replication. Organic molecules are compound structures made up of inorganic atoms plus at least one atom of carbon (which is capable of forming long chains, just as silicon is). For example, methane is neither self-replicating nor living, but it is an organic molecule, and so is benzene, and xylol, and phenol and so on and so on.
I mention this because looking at nature is often a good first step in seeing the existence of God
That is human just fancy jumping to conclusions.
I shall quibble here: by many definitions, organic chemistry is the study of carbon chains bonded to hydrogen. Methane is a borderline case. But dicarbon oxide (ie) is not considered organic. Organic substances have nothing to do with communes in California using goat droppings to grow lettuce, except by accident...
Well, it's a single chain hydro-carbon molecule CH3. Two methanes make ethane, and so on. Wine is an organic substance, especially the cheap wine, full of those long-chain alcohols that give you bad hangover. The way I see it, two bricks are still made up of single bricks, and a single organic "brick" is methane.
Organic substances have nothing to do with communes in California using goat droppings to grow lettuce, except by accident...
LOL!
Ahem. More quibbling. Methane is CH4. Ethane is C2H6. Propane is CH3CH2CH3. Longer chains are built in the middle by adding CH2 groups. These chains are built by adding methanes which results in the longer chains plus hydrogen molecules. Double bonds, aliphatic rings, additional nitrogens, sulfurs, oxygens and OH groups (alcohols) get increasingly exotic until you arrive at protein strands, and eventually into RNA and DNA strands.
Wine is an organic substance
Not mostly. Wine is mostly water contaminated with alcohols and a variety of organic substances. If the water is bonded (ie hydrates), then the top level can be considered organic, but if it is the basis for a solution or a slurry, then not usually. What most people do not realize in this PC age is that wood, plastics, pharmaceuticals (except for pure arsenic and so on), paints, plexiglas, adhesives and so on are organic. I had one idiot tell me the other day that organic meant that you harvested it from the earth or dug it up out of the ground. I guess that by that definition, that basalt and iron pyrite are organic. You'd have to have rocks in your head to believe that.
Which brings us back to Calvinism...
Mark: Not mostly. Wine is mostly water contaminated with alcohols
Well, yes, it is a solution of water and organic substance (mostly ethyl alcohol). The cheaper ones have higher proportion of undistilled long-chain alcohols mostly reponsible for hangover.
I had one idiot tell me the other day that organic meant that you harvested it from the earth or dug it up out of the ground. I guess that by that definition, that basalt and iron pyrite are organic. You'd have to have rocks in your head to believe that. Which brings us back to Calvinism...
LOL!
Did you catch his interview last night on EWTN Live?
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