Are you SURE you're the same person who wrote that paper about truth?
I said nothing of the sort of thing you asserted just above. Not at all.
It seems to me that your glasses have become as dark as those of some others on here. Very sad, that.
Championing someone else's absurd evil that comes out of bad-faith heart motives can do that.
When you are ready to exchange posts in as much truth and mutual respect and understanding as possible, please let me know.
So you think you are doing your job when you are not well-received. Is that a fair inference?
Being well-received means you are not doing your job. That follows, correct?
Then what is your job? Is your job to alienate, is it to FAIL TO make converts, to avoid persuading those who disagree with you that your account is correct?
As far as I can see, all these are implied by the statement in Italics.
Discord, not being well-received, is a sign to you that you are doing your job.
My statement, objectionable to you, is:
any truth that might make for peace is to be avoided — because what really matters is enmity.
Now if discord it the sign of success, if the absence of discord is troubling to you, then concord it to be avoided as a sign that you are not succeeding. That shows the equivalence between what you wrote and what I wrote up to the hyphen.
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There are two strands of thought (well,okay, gazillions of strands of thought) in the NT. John's writings are very firm on division. We see,for example, that in the healing of the man born blind that his healing 'sets off' and emphasizes the blindness of "the Jews". And when our dear Lord raises Lazarus, that is the final straw for 'the Jews'. It is then that they resolve to put him to death by hook or by crook.
Sight v. blindness // life v. death.
But the other strand, hymned gloriously in Ephesians, is unification: the mystery, hidden until Christ and Paul, is that those who are far off and those who are near will be united.
Now, to me, the division does not need us to make it happen. All we have to do is to be true, and the division will spring up because of the work of our adversary and the poison he has put in the heart of man.
But Paul says God entrusted to him the ministry of reconciliation, and he did everything he could to fulfill the duties of THAT ministry. When he was not heard, when he was scorned, that didn't shake his faith in his proclamation. But he had been trying not to provoke scorn and rejection but to save those who rejected his preaching.
When the non-Catholics reject with abuse and scorn (rarely with real argument) what we proclaim, it does not shake our faith, But WE are not reassured by the rejection that we have done well.
My patron, Dominic, wept over sinners, and pled for them to God. He took no reassurance when he preaching was rejected. He redoubled his efforts.
But you take reassurance from rejection. This is why I say that enmity is more important to you. The issue, it appears,is not to save souls for Christ (insofar as that,which is HIS work,is given to us) but to make plain the division.
That is the ministry of Islam. Not to heal and to save but to convert the compliant kaffir, and to kill, enslave, or burden with second class status the uncompliant.
That is a critical difference. you take reassurance from those you fail to persuade. We pray for them and ask for help to amend what we view as our failure.