Posted on 01/07/2012 6:00:19 PM PST by rzman21
The ecumenical label has been removed because the subject matter is antagonistic. Even the word “chaos” in the title is antagonistic. The thread is now “open.”
Rzman, I'm going to forego my usual snide sarcasm and ask you a very simple, direct question, and I hope you will answer it directly and succinctly. Will you at least think about doing that?
Here is a former Calvinist who, upon becoming Orthodox, feels the need to embrace evolutionism. You in a later post remark that Orthodox seminars are free of the theological liberalism of most western churches, yet evolutionism is the very essence of theological liberalism. So it looks like you fail that argument.
Nevertheless, here is my question. Please give me a straight answer: when a Fundamentalist Protestant joins one of the ancient apostolic churches, is he/she required to abjure and denounce young earth creationism? Is young earth creationism a formal, official heresy? If not, why is it that every single member of every single ancient apostolic body attacks it?
What if a person simply in good conscience cannot dismiss the first eleven chapters of Genesis as didactic parables? What if that person's conscience screams at him/her that doing this is a terrible thing and gravely wrong? Is this person still welcome in the ancient apostolic churches or should he/she settle for his inferior semi-chrstianity rather than pollute and defile the pure apostolic body with his Biblical literalism?
I'd kind to like to know the answer to this because this is precisely what happened to me, and why I walked out (and I was attending an Armenian rite church at the time) six years after converting.
If young earth creationism is forbidden, then the ancient apostolic churches should make this clear to all potential converts. To ignore the topic in official credal statements while continually attacking the young earth creationist position in all other venues whatsoever is confusing.
If young earth creationism is forbidden, then make this an official dogma . . . please. It will save a lot of emotional and intellectual torment, believe me.
Cerveza, I'd like your thoughts as well.
This can be summarized: Protestantism with its Bible alone nonsense is a sure path away from Christ and towards Oprah.
No! Mostly all wrong. I will post real verses of Augustine. Right now Busy.
Do yourself a favor do not just go by statements from this "scholar" check him out. Did you personally read Augustine's own verses. Also when he talks about reading scripture, He is talking about equals (priests and bishops) who are the church.
Please give me a straight answer: when a Fundamentalist Protestant joins one of the ancient apostolic churches, is he/she required to abjure and denounce young earth creationism? Is young earth creationism a formal, official heresy? If not, why is it that every single member of every single ancient apostolic body attacks it?
>>Orthodoxy and Catholicism are agnostic on this matter. They don’t have any sort of official teaching that is binding on their communicants.
Indeed. The liberal Protestant bodies that a lot of us fled represent the mature phase of Sola Scriptura Protestantism.
Protestantism cannot overcome the radicalism of its worldview and still have a conservative outcome.
Evangelicalism is starting to see this in its own ranks with the rise of the Emergent Church movement, the prosperity gospel, etc.
It has failed to transform the culture and has instead been transformed by the radical anti-God culture that the “Reformation” spawned.
Perhaps a little humility is in order.
Scholasticism introduced the notion that God was subject to human categorization and that his actions were understandable by the categories of human logic, which Protestant scholasticism continued.
The Scholastics set the ball rolling for the Nominalist reaction within the Catholic Church that later led to both Protestantism and to the Enlightenment centuries later.
The republican system in the United States had more to do with the rise of Pietism and the First Great Awakening, which altered the character of American Reformed Protestantism. Of course, both developed in a reaction to the changes following the 30 Years’ War.
Calvin’s Geneva and Puritan Massachusetts represent the true nature of unreformed Calvinism.
Whose version of God’s Word?
How can you say this is divisive considering there is no unity and that ecumenism is a fraud?
The Orthodox issue with the modern papacy is that the ancient canons never recognized the Pope’s right to act unilaterally.
The more ecumenically minded Orthodox concede that the Pope could speak as a voice for the entire Church, hear appeals from the Eastern patriarchates, but they reject the idea that he can intervene without being invited.
What does an anti-Roman Catholic polemic have to do with the Eastern Orthodox?
Leo XIII warned against the sort of anti-Christian liberalism that was incipient in American culture in his Encyclical Testem Benevolentiae.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanism_(heresy)
Though one might need read it entirety (my apologies) to fully grasp his position, Webster again, to explain my mention of Augustine, I’ll bring here this small portion;
However, the theological giant who provided the most comprehensive and influential defense of the symbolic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper was Augustine.13 He gave very clear instructions and principles for determining when a passage of Scripture should be interpreted literally and when figuratively. Passages of Scripture must always be interpreted in the light of the entire revelation of Scripture, he concluded, and he used John 6 as a specific example of a passage that should be interpreted figuratively.14
Augustine argued that the sacraments, including the eucharist, are signs and figures which represent or symbolize spiritual realities. He made a distinction between the physical, historical body of Christ and the sacramental presence, maintaining that Christ’s physical body could not literally be present in the sacrament of the eucharist because he is physically at the right hand of God in heaven, and will be there until he comes again. But Christ is spiritually with his people.15 Augustine viewed the eucharist in spiritual terms and he interpreted the true meaning of eating and drinking as being faith: ‘To believe on Him is to eat the living bread. He that believes eats; he is sated invisibly, because invisibly is he born again.’16
>>Webster is selectively reading the concept of Sola Scriptura into St. Augustine’s writings. Perhaps, St. Augustine believed in the primacy of scripture as all of the Fathers did, but he didn’t believe that scripture alone was sufficient.
He is either uninformed or dishonest.
“For in the Catholic Church, not to speak of the purest wisdom, to the knowledge of which a few spiritual men attain in this life, so as to know it, in the scantiest measure, indeed, becuase they are but men, still without any uncertainty...The consent of peoples and nations keep me in Church, so does her authority, inaugerated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The SUCCESSION of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the APOSTLE PETER, to whom the Lord, after his resurrection, gave it in charge to feed his sheep, down to the present EPISCOPATE...The epistle begins thus:—’Manicheus, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the providence of God the Father. These are the wholesome words from the perennial and living fountain.’ Now, if you please, patiently give heed to my inquiry. I do not beleive Manichues to be an apostle of Christ. Do not, I beg you, be enraged and begin to curse. For you know that it is my rule to beleive none of your statements without consideration. Therefore I ask, who is this Manicheus? You will reply, An Apostle of Christ. I do not beleive it. Now you are at a loss what to say or do; for you promised to give knowledge of truth, and here you are forcing me to beleive what I have no knowledge of. Perhaps you will read the gospel to me, and will attempt to find there a testimony to Manicheus. But should you meet with a person not yet beleiving in the gospel, how would you reply to him were he to say, I do not beleive? For MY PART, I should NOT BELEIVE the gospel except moved by the authority of the Catholic Church. So when those on whose authority I have consented to beleive in the gospel tell me not to beleive in Manicheus, how can I BUT CONSENT?”
C. Epis Mani 5,6
“Wherever this tradition comes from, we must believe that the Church has not believed in vain, even though the express authority of the canonical scriptures is not brought forward for it”
Letter 164 to Evodius of Uzalis
“To be sure, although on this matter, we cannot quote a clear example taken from the canonical Scriptures, at any rate, on this question, we are following the true thought of Scriptures when we observe what has appeared good to the universal Church which the authority of these same Scriptures recommends to you”
C. Cresconius I:33
“It is obvious; the faith allows it; the Catholic Church approves; it is true”
Sermon 117:6
“If therefore, I am going to beleive things I do not know about, why should I not believe those things which are accepted by the common consent of learned and unlearned alike and are established by most weighty authority of all peoples?”
C. Letter called Fundamentals 14:18
“Will you, then, so love your error, into which you have fallen through adolescent overconfidence and human weakness, that you will seperate yourself from these leaders of Catholic unity and truth, from so many different parts of the world who are in agreement among themselves on so important a question, one in which the essence of the Christian religion involved..?”
C. Julian 1:7,34
“The authority of our Scriptures, strenghtened by the consent of so may nations, and confirmed by the succession of the Apostles, bishops and councils, is against you”
C. Faustus 8:5
“No sensible person will go contrary to reason, no Christian will contradict the Scriptures, no lover of peace will go against the CHURCH”
Trinitas 4,6,10
http://www.cin.org/users/jgallegos/trad.htm
"Augustine viewed the eucharist in spiritual term"
Like symbol? I do not think so!
So Really? Wow! You should read for yourself.
Augustine of Hippo, St [354-430 AD] The City of God (Book V)
“Christ was carried in his Own Hands when, referring to His Own Body, he said, ‘This is My Body’ [Matt. 26:26]. For he carried that Body in His Hands” (Explanations of the Psalms 33:1:10 [A.D. 405]).Read More
Augustine of Hippo, St [354-430 AD] Sermon 8 on the New Testament
“I promised you [new Christians], who have now been baptized, a sermon in which I would explain the sacrament of the Lord’s Table. . . . That bread which you see on the altar, having been Sanctified by the Word of God, IS THE BODY of CHRIST. That chalice, or rather, what is in that chalice, having been Sanctified by the Word of God, IS The BLOOD of CHRIST” (Sermons 227 [A.D. 411]).Read More
Gods version of Gods word. Perhaps you put more faith in what some man says.
What is divisive is the closing sentence “I look forward to what the Protestants can find from the early church. “.
He didn’t close with a statement to invite discussion, no he closed with a barb.
Where do I say ecumenism is a fraud?
Spare yourself the effort, if it's going to be the same cut & paste job which was posted as some effort at refutation on another thread. The quotes brought there did absolutely nothing to refute what Webster was saying. Webster took pains to show his sources. The argument is with him.
Unlike many here, he takes pains to document and footnote his own sources.
I think the Author "scholar" of this book and website sat in these chairs alot in class.
Please read Augustine for yourselves. I have been amazed at these psuedo authors represented for years on these threads who intrepret the original Early Church Fathers. Please check up on them yourself in context.
I will be trying to accurately post the very words themselves from the source. Just amazing how this goes on without the original verse next to what these authors declare. I hardly ever see alongside their own words.
Do you not find that very strange when his original verses are buried in footnotes to another footnote in a another book of reference. Did you ever read an honest scholar with proper foot notes.
It's like the author is a lawyer not caring whether his client/subject is not innocence just to represent a view. Strange brew with these authors.
“Christ was carried in his Own Hands when, referring to His Own Body, he said, ‘This is My Body’ [Matt. 26:26]. For he carried that Body in His Hands” (Explanations of the Psalms 33:1:10 [A.D. 405]).Read More
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