Pope Francis speaks to pilgrims during his Wednesday General Audience on April 23, 2014 Credit: Kyle Burkhart/CNA
Posted on 05/15/2014 2:15:20 PM PDT by NYer
.- Pope Francis reflected in his daily Mass on how the apostles evangelized by first telling the history of God’s people, explaining that it’s impossible to understand a Christian without this association.
“You cannot understand a Christian outside of the people of God. The Christian is not a monad,” but “belongs to a people: the Church,” the Pope observed in his May 15 homily.
“A Christian without a church is something purely idealistic, it is not real.”
Beginning by looking to the first reading, taken from the Acts of the Apostles, the Roman Pontiff addressed those gathered in the Vatican’s Saint Martha guesthouse by recalling how when Paul preached in Antioch, he did so by first recounting the whole of Israel’s salvation history.
“Jesus does not make sense without this history” because he “is the end of this story, (the end) toward which this story goes, toward which it walks,” he noted, so “you cannot understand a Christian outside of the people of God.”
“You cannot understand a Christian alone, just like you cannot understand Jesus Christ alone” the Pope went on to say, explaining that “Jesus Christ did not fall from the sky like a superhero who comes to save us.”
“No. Jesus Christ has a history. And we can say, and it is true, that God has a history because He wanted to walk with us. And you cannot understand Jesus Christ without His history.”
Pope Francis then described how a Christian without a history, a nation or the Church “is incomprehensible,” saying that it’s “a thing of the laboratory, an artificial thing, a thing that cannot give life.”
Drawing attention to the importance of remembering this “dimension of history,” the Bishop of Rome observed that a Christian is “a living memory of his people’s journey, he is the living memory of his Church.”
“Then, where is this people going? Toward the ultimate promise. It is a people walking toward fullness; a chosen people which has a promise for the future and walks toward this promise, toward the fulfillment of this promise.”
In order to do this Christians within the Church must be men and women “with hope: hope in the promise,” the Pope went on, noting that “It is not expectation: no, no! That’s something else: It is hope.”
“Right, on we go! (Toward) that which does not disappoint.”
Explaining how a Christian is also someone who remembers, the pontiff encouraged all present to “seek the grace of memory, always” so that by doing so and also looking forward with hope they might be a Christian who “follows the path of God and renews the covenant with God.”
This type of Christian constantly tells the Lord “Yes, I want the commandments, I want your will, I will follow you” he continued, adding that “He is a man of the covenant, and we celebrate the covenant, every day” in the Mass, therefore a Christian is “a woman, a man of the Eucharist.”
Concluding his reflections, Pope Francis encouraged all present to “think about our Christian identity,” stating that “Our Christian identity is belonging to a people: the Church.”
“Without this, we are not Christians” he observed, noting how “we entered the Church through baptism: there we are Christians.”
“For this reason, we should be in the habit of asking for the grace of memory, the memory of the journey that the people of God has made,” the pontiff said, and “also of personal memory: What God did for me, in my life, how has he made me walk…”
Praying, the Roman Pontiff asked “for the grace of hope, which is not optimism: no, no! It's something else,” and asked “for the grace to renew the covenant with the Lord who has called us every day.”
“May the Lord give us these three graces, which are necessary for the Christian identity.”
Yet AGAIN, Your words EXACTLY AS YOU POSTED THEM in your post#78
“Whether or not the Clergy are described as a form of “lawyer,” one of the chief issues with Protestantism is that the Protestant movement and the Protestant bibles (especially the KJV) lessen the role of the Priest by eliminating him as a necessary conduit between a Christian and Christ.”
Yet AGAIN, Demonstrate exactly how what you assert is true.
So far, you have failed miserably to demonstrate how your interpretation of what I have written is even to be seriously considered as numbering among the more reasonable understandings of my summary of one of the chief issues with Protestantism. That you should choose to emphasize one part (a necessary conduit between a Christian and Christ), out of context with the balance, simply illustrates how desperate you are to pick a fight.
Explain yourself, or end the harassment.
thank YOU!
yes indeedy
So beginning with the "idiocy" of the ‘despised and rejected’ literal and historic elements of Genesis here is what God said:
"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground; and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Gen. 2:7
Here God reveals three key points for our edification. First, that He formed the body of man from physical matter. To this initial act Job refers when he says,
"Remember, I beseech Thee, that Thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt Thou bring me into dust again?" Job 10:9
Second, after forming Adam's body He breathed into it "the breath of life" producing a twofold life: soul/spirit.
Your soul is who you are. It is your self-conscious part, the seat of your emotions which proceed from the senses of your body. Spirit (image of God in man) is the citadel of your soul:
"The essence of the human is not the body, but the soul....For the sake of the soul...the Son of God came into the world...." (Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 25, Ancient Christian Devotional, Oden and Crosby, p. 153)
Third, life is only with God, thus His breath of life INSTANTANEOUSLY became the spirit of Adam, the principle of life within him which as the Lord reveals to us, "is the spirit that quickens" (John 6:63; 2 Cor. 3:6) and “the lamp of the Lord that sheds light on one’s inmost being.” (Proverbs 20:27)
Spirit is the unique property that distinguishes soul from the physical matter of the body. Spirit is immortal. It can will, self-reflect and think. In Biblical thought, spirit allows man to spiritually transcend the natural dimension (what God created) in order to access the supernatural dimension, thereby allowing him to enter into a personal relationship with the Spirit of God (what He said). Through this relationship, the humble man's spirit is cleansed and regenerated over time (John 3: 3-13), thus enabling him to think more clearly, experience greater inner peace, and to more perfectly orient the manner of his existence in this world in preparation for eternity.
So right from the start, the historical Adam was a person, a living soul/spirit embodied within physical matter. He was not the conscious product of magical transformism moving from chemicals, star-stuff or blobs of matter through lower life forms over billions of years, nor was the life within him either an emergent product of chemicals or other such nonsense, neither was it seeded on earth by highly evolved extraterrestrials (panspermia) supposedly existing somewhere in the vast reaches of the multiverse.
In Christian thought, a person is a spirit and personality is the total individuality of the spirit. Without spirit there is no person.
The term 'person' originated in Christian theologies developmental struggle to comprehend the nature and experience of the supernatural Triune God Who Spoke and created all things in six instantaneous acts (days) of creation:
"The derivative concept of human personhood is a gift of the Christian faith to culture…” (Stephen P. Stratton, Chapter 14, p. 247, The Self, Paul Vitz & Susan M. Felch, Editors)
Building off of this historically unique concept, St. Augustine (AD 354-430) affirmed that as all men are the spiritual image-bearers of the supernatural One God in three Persons then it logically follows that each person is a trinity of being---of soul/spirit and body.
Whether the Founders were individually Christian or not they nevertheless held a strong Christian consensus with respect to the personhood of all men. Our Constitutional rights arise from our personhood. For instance, the right to life derives from the divine nature of man's creation (Thou shalt not kill) and freedom of religion is the temporal manifestation of a person's spiritual property: conscience and reason.
Evolutionary transformism from one kind of thing to another kind of thing over billions of years is NOT OBSERVABLE SCIENCE but rather a metaphysical cosmology that undermines and destroys personhood (and by extension our Constitution)despite protestations otherwise. Yes, I know well enough that you hold that God created a cosmic egg which He supposedly ignited after which He directs evolutionary transformism over vast ages. To arrive at this conclusion, the reasoning, science, evolutionary thinking and desires of men have been elevated above the Authority and Revelation of God. It appears that men have forgotten that they are not in charge. Man is the clay, not the Potter. Since it is not within the power of the clay to use the Potter for its purposes, its claims have no basis in reality hence are without truth and meaning. There is much that God has to say about this sin, none of it good.
Evolutionary transformism over vast ages properly belongs to the very ancient occult science traditions originating in Hermetic alchemy (transformism) and apostate Jewish Cabbala (transformism) which itself originated in Chaldea (Babylon) as the Jewish Encyclopedia affirms.
Certainly the so-called "primitive" early Church Fathers were well informed about this pagan superstition and had much to say about it:
"[I]f one should search carefully, he will find that their doctrine is of necessity brought down to this. They tell us that one of their sages said that he, being one and the same person, was born a man, and afterward assumed the form of a woman, and flew about with the birds, and grew as a bush, and obtained the life of an aquatic creature—and he who said these things of himself did not, so far as I can judge, go far from the truth, for such doctrines as this—of saying that one should pass through many changes—are really fitting for the chatter of frogs or jackdaws or the stupidity of fishes or the insensibility of trees" (Gregory of Nyssa, The Making of Man 28:3; A.D. 379).
Those who hate God are already searching for another evolutionary cosmology to replace the big bang model that evolutionary-minded Christians now claim as their own. And they will certainly find what they seek, and when they do they'll turn the full force of their cruel ridicule, scorn, and scoffing upon all evolutionary Christians. They'll reject and persecute you as "anti-science" and "anti-evolution" and crucify you with the defenders of Special Creation. At that time only two choices will be open to you: Either repent of what you have done, meaning turn back to the Authority and Revelation of God, or to escape rejection, persecution and crucifixion fall even further away from Him by accepting the 'new' cosmology, which from the looks of it may very well be some type of panspermia. If so, are you prepared to welcome the Space Brothers?
We are in a time of testing. An unseen sword moves among us separating the wheat from the chaff. Please don't be among the chaff.
And finally, if all you have to say in reaction to what has been given you is yet more angry name-calling, then please say nothing at all.
Many mortals could not envision God being both the conquering Lion and also the suffering Lamb.
Many mortals could not - and still cannot - accept that the Law of Identity does not restrict the Creator of the Law of Identity. They cannot accept the Triune God.
Likewise, many mortals cannot understand that Space and Time do not restrict the Creator of them and thus must believe that God is restricted to a clock and that God's clock moves exactly as their own. This even though relativity has been confirmed time and again.
For instance, while a week elapses in the vicinity of a black hole (intense gravity) forty years may elapse on earth.
Many scientists also make the same mistake when they should know better. They often do not finish the sentence, e.g. the universe is 14 billion years old from our space/time coordinates.
God even told man explicitly in Scripture, thousands of years ago, that His time is not our time:
Likewise many mortals presume that, if a thing cannot be observed or measured then it therefore does not exist. How absurd. One cannot say that fields and dimensions do not exist because they cannot yet be directly or indirectly detected.
That leads to the same fallacy of applying math terms to natural phenomena, e.g. that a thing is "random" in nature. But we cannot say something is random in a system when we do not know what the system "is" and the total number and types of dimensions are both unknown and unknowable.
For instance, a series of numbers from the extension of pi may appear random when they are, in fact, highly determined.
Bottom line:
I do respect the faith statement of some that God became enfleshed in the body of a virgin, made water into wine, healed the sick, made the blind see, raised people from the dead, walked on water, died for our sins, resurrected, sits at the right hand of the Father and will come again - so since I believe all this, why would I question Creation week, the Noah flood, age of the Patriarchs, Jonah and the whale, etc.
But such a person should likewise respect those of us who consider all of God's revelations (His Persons, Scripture and Creation) and perceive them as perfectly consistent with one another.
God's Name is I AM.
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However, I, find fault with with your judgmental
"From what God said rather than from what spiritually blind men have said. By elevating what can be learned from creation above what God said, men have fallen into egregious errors with respect to who and what they are, what is desperately wrong with them and what must happen to rectify this before their one lifetime is over."
Your (apparently intended) application of the above to me and my work bears strong indication of an egregious malapplication of the Reformation principle of "Sola Scriptura":
The Reformation principle of sola Scriptura has to do with the sufficiency of Scripture as our supreme authority in all spiritual matters. Sola Scriptura simply means that all truth necessary for our salvation and spiritual life is taught either explicitly or implicitly in Scripture. It is not a claim that all truth of every kind is found in Scripture. The most ardent defender of sola Scriptura will concede, for example, that Scripture has little or nothing to say about DNA structures, microbiology, the rules of Chinese grammar, or rocket science.
...and, I might add, the development or age (as measured from our spatio-temporal reference frame) of the universe, or its components such as life, this planet, or galaxies, etc...
Furthermore, your disregard of the manifest limitation of Sola Scriptura to spiritual matters is also in blithe diseregard of specific instructions from our Creator, Himself:
19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
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...and your excuse is...?
"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground; and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Gen. 2:7
and...
2 Thus HaShomayim and Ha’Aretz were finished, and all the tza’va of them. 2 And on Yom HaShevi’i Elohim finished His work which He had made; and He rested on the Yom HaShevi’i from all His work which He had made.
Bereshis 2 Orthodox Jewish Bible (OJB)
Furthermore, a comprehensive, multi-translation concordance search for "INSTANTANEOUSLY" (or any of its derivatives) produces zero instances -- until this passage is reached:
1 Corinthians 15:51-52
51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
[?"INSTANTANEOUSLY"?] at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
Need I point out to you that the above passage refers to the end times -- and not creation?
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From the above, I can only conclude that your "INSTANTANEOUSLY" is a human contrivance of your own mind, or of the navel-gazing, self-referential "sages" whom you so delight in quoting.
IOW, it falls precisely into the category of "From what spiritually blind men have said rather than from what God said."
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Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!
Which, I gather, is why our Gracious and Loving Father blessed humankind with three other Revelations as well: Through His Son, His Logos Alpha to Omega, Jesus Christ, our Lord, Redeemer, and Final Judge; through the Holy Spirit Who abides with us (if we let Him); and the Book of Creation itself — i.e., the natural world, created ex nihilo, in the Beginning....
There is deep wisdom in all four Revelations of God. All four, finally, are in agreement with each other. I imagine our Lord is pleased when He sees His sons seeking to find Him "revealed" in that natural picture — in its fundamental organizational principles, His natural and moral law as increasingly revealed in human observations of what He hath wrought....
It may come as a surprise, but the latter insight was a major motivator of two of the greatest scientists who ever lived, Newton and Einstein.
Who has eyes to see, and/or ears to hear, please note.
Thank you ever so much for this superb essay/post, dear brother in Christ!
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betty boop, you wrote:
"There is deep wisdom in all four Revelations of God. All four, finally, are in agreement with each other. I imagine our Lord is pleased when He sees His sons seeking to find Him "revealed" in that natural picture — in its fundamental organizational principles, His natural and moral law as increasingly revealed in human observations of what He hath wrought...."
Amen...
IMHO, the above is also why He gifted humankind with the intelligence, curiosity, creativity and will to create extensions of our senses -- to allow us to seek the truths and revelations of Himself -- beyond the Recorded Word -- that he provided for us to "read"...
It is my profound belief that He intended -- and will tolerate -- no disharmony between His multiple "modes of revelation". And -- it is our responsibility to seek truth and harmony between them -- not to foment one-sided controversy and dissension.
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Thank you for your excellent, thought-provoking and challenging essay-post!
You guys got me to thinking...
We tend to measure miracles with a time factor. If it happens quickly in human terms, its a miracle. If it happens slowly, again in terms that a human perceives, or if it happens in the background and isn’t perceived at all, then no miracle has occurred. Which I suppose means the miraculous gets measured against a human constant.
God stands outside time, of course, and has his own agenda. When he intervenes in his own clockwork suddenly, we understand that as miraculous. When he does it in such a way that it unfolds over time, as humans perceive time, then in our minds it is natural and therefor no miracle. Even though the natural itself, the clockwork itself, and the leaf moving imperceptibly upstream, God’s chess pieces inexplicably in the right place at the right time are evidence and fruit of his handiwork.
But you have to have eyes for it.
If you are observant you will notice that God intervenes sometimes in dramatic ways, and sometimes in ways that almost imperceptible until they have gathered momentum and if you weren’t paying attention you’d have never noticed.
But the measure of a miracle isn’t the time factor, of course, but the author and the exertion of the author’s will. When events unfold according to normal cause and effects, we obviously don’t consider that miraculous although it is the fruit of an earlier miracle that established the rules of the game at the beginning. But when God intervenes and suddenly changes the rules, or shields you from consequences, or starts a new game, we call that a miracle... unless he does it slowly in our terms, or he does it in such a way that in retrospect we can explain it away.
Which brings to mind one more point. It is my experience that people tend to forget miracles very quickly after they occur. Because the new reality has problems of its own, and very quickly we get caught up in the day to day worries of the new reality and we forget the miracle that gave it to us.
My response to all this quite simple..
Some may like it, some may not...
BUT I have a message for all of you..
Some may actually listen—>> https://vimeo.com/74280827
I think what you say really drives home just who chooses who.
When I look back over my life I see someone little different to most anyone else.Overly led about by emotions,believing (and placing a subconscious faith in)things merely because I'd heard them so many times.Faith does indeed come by hearing,wether you're a believer or not! The god of this world is relentless in his propaganda and until we are awoken we carry on being led by the nose,blissfully unaware and often thinking we know a thing.The flow is very strong and none of us are very good swimmers,so to speak.
My point is that when I contrast that mindset with the way I think now I can't help but believe it's a slow-motion miracle.It's speed governed somewhat by my blindness,pride,ignorance,arrogance,recalcitrance and a boatload of other baggage...you get the picture,but a miracle nonetheless.When I look back I sometimes think...'how'd that happen!?'
"But you have to have eyes for it."
John 6:29
beautifull
Thanks
Thank you for your post. Believe it or not I very much identify with what you just said.
Its strange. I am exactly the person I have always been. And yet I am very different in ways I cannot articulate. And I suspect there is more to come.
I think it's fair to say that if it were fully revealed to us right here,right now,what is to eventually become of us it would probably drop us stone dead on the spot.Thank God for His kindness towards us!
"And I suspect there is more to come"
LOL! ya think? I'm not entirely sure what I might do when I have that same suspicion,curl up under the bed in the fetal position and suck my thumb,run around as though my hair were on fire,or take up the sword and start really swinging.
Sigh.... Evancho is a phenom and I so love her voice and general presentation....
I gather in this video, she is singing the Lord's Prayer. I would have loved to hear it!
And yes, the Lord's Prayer is a most excellent "message for [all] of [us!]"
Thanks so much for writing, dear brother in Christ!
I was re-reading your excellent statement, with the consideration of , perhaps somehow using or paraphrasing it in my narrative /voiceover -- when I realized that there is a minor point that I would change:
All four, since they are of God, have always been in agreement. Rather, it is our understanding that has finally reached the point where we can see, with clarity, their convergence into harmony.
I can see the following as nothing but providential:
~~~~~~~~
Just as I had completed my cosmological development (aka "Creation") diagram, and could envision the results of the (previously) nonsensical (to me) scriptural claim:
"And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
-- and even had placed a "blank 'Universal Now' slice" in the diagram at the temporal point where it occurred -- "science" finally produced "the last piece of the puzzle" -- and precisely "filled in the blank"!
Many thanks to my scientist colleagues in Antarctica, who published -- in March of this year -- their data illustrating an earlier polarization pattern imposed on the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) -- that very neatly explains why the CMB is patterned ad why our universe is anisotropic and "patterned", rather than remaining isotropic "without form and void" -- until the end of time...
IMO, they were observing evidence of "Ruach Elohim", (the "Spirit" or "Wind" of God) -- imposing His anisotropic ("gravity wave" ) 'design pattern' on His created universe -- very shortly after He had initially created it "without form and void"!
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No wonder that even my scientist colleagues are calling the BICEP-2 data, "God's Fingerprint":
in the data plot, you can actually see fingerprint-like "whorls" ... '-)
~~~~~~~~~~~
So, let me propose this modification to your statement:
"There is deep wisdom in all four Revelations of God. All four, we, at last, can see, are in agreement with each other."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"And Ruach Elohim moved upon (hovered over) the face of the waters."
Without anisotropy we would not exist.
Without isotropy we could not survive...
I'm currently reading an astonishing, challenging book by David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order [1980]. Speaking very roughly here, in it Bohm makes the crucial distinction of "explicit" and "implicate" order.
Again speaking very roughly, explicit order is that which is accessible to physics and the language of physics (i.e., mathematics). It is premised on direct observation (as technologically extended), and thus forms the basis of scientific investigation. Explicate order is based on the system of ideas of Euclidian geometry — which in turn is premised on 3+1 spacetime.
But, as Bohm argues, explicate order cannot generate a complete description of the Universe, for it is "merely" a part of a greater, fundamental Whole that is itself specified in terms of implicate order.
The implicate order is a non-observable in principle; but it is that which alone accounts for the indivisible wholeness of the entire universe, "from first to last." It is the implicate order that is responsible for indivisible wholeness of the entire universe, and all operations in the explicate order are "nested" in it.
Implicate order is that which makes possible the primary yet non-observable ordering of the Universe as one indivisible Whole, and operations in the explicate order are "lower-level" participants in it — which is a concept that science in general seems rather blind to, and seems glad to stay that way.
Implicate order is timeless — which is a real stumbling block for most modern-day physicists, who work exclusively with visible or directly observable explicate-order phenomena in 3+1D spacetime. The funny thing is, if one knew absolutely everything about explicate-order phenomena (which one definitely doesn't), and one "added" them all up, one could still not "see," let alone "explain" the implicate order of which they are "parts."
Given science's current presuppositions and methods, it cannot account for the indivisible Wholeness of the universal system. It can study parts; but the idea of Wholeness is inaccessible by means of such presuppositions and methods.
To me, truly the timeless implicate order is indeed a miracle! I strongly associate it with the Logos Alpha to Omega, God's Word in the Beginning.
As to how the implicate order intrudes on and affects the world of visible phenomena, Bohm suggests it is the source that manifests as "hidden variables." These hidden variables subsist "below the level" of the universal quantum field.... Physicists have been resisting this idea for the past hundred years or so. But then physicists tend to be blind regarding matters of universal non-observables in their work — notwithstanding their unshakeable confidence in such universal non-observabes as the laws of physics, not to mention mathematics itself.
As you wrote, dear brother in Christ: "When events unfold according to normal cause and effects, we obviously don’t consider that miraculous although it is the fruit of an earlier miracle that established the rules of the game at the beginning."
I so agree!
Regarding the issue of cause and effect, note that Newtonian physics deals only with LOCAL causes involving close neighbor relations, in a 3+1 dimensional world.
But quantum physics demonstrates that not all causes are "local." Indeed, non-local causes have been experimentally shown to be real.
To me, the ultimate non-local Cause is the timeless implicate order that God "loaded" into the Universe, in the Beginning.... It is the reason the world is as it is, constantly over time, and not some other way. It is the fundamental "cause" that defines our Universe.
Just some thoughts, dear brother in Christ. FWTW.
Thank you so very much for your wonderful observations!
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