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To: Cronos
Do you think that is the literal 1000 hills only?

Call no man father seems to be quite unfocused as well.

I'll leave, "This is my body..." for another time.

665 posted on 05/23/2022 5:01:40 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Elsie
Acts 7:2 And he replied,[a] “My brothers and fathers, listen.

1 cor 4:15 I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel

priests are not called “Father” for themselves, but in the sense of Paul in 1 Cor 4:15: as spiritual fathers,

if we grant it that Jesus REALLY meant that we should call nobody “father” in a spiritual sense, this leads to another problem. The New Testament calls St. Paul a spiritual father of Timothy. He calls Timothy his “true son in the faith” (1 Timothy 1:2) and said that 1 Corinthians 4:15 that he “begot” Timothy through the Gospel. People may object that he didn’t say he was Timothy’s father in 1:2, only that Timothy was his son. This comes across as pedantic. Are we really to believe that Jesus was against using the term “father” but didn’t care if someone implied fatherhood through the use of the term “son?” Some may also claim that Paul didn’t outright call Timothy his son in 4:15 either. But if you read that the verse, you’ll see that he says Timothy did not have many fathers in Christ. Why? Read the end of the verse. “For in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel.” Given that fathers in Scripture are those who beget, Paul was saying that Timothy did not have many fathers, for Paul alone was the begetter (a synonym for “father”) of Timothy in Christ. Taking this into account, the interpretation that Christ was instituting a universal banning of using the term “father” is fallacious because that would mean that He and the Holy Spirit (who inspired Paul) would have contradicted each Other. Which is impossible.

So what is the actual interpretation of the verse in Matthew? There is this concept of derivative titles in Scripture. Jesus is God’s only Son, yet we are called sons of God if we believe. How is this possible? Because Christ is God’s Son BY NATURE because He was begotten of the Father in eternity. We are sons BY GRACE through adoption into Christ. There is no contradiction because Christ is God’s Begotten Son while we are sons only derivative sense because we are unified with Christ, who is the Son of the Father. St. Jerome and John Calvin applied this concept to Matthew 23:9. They saw the verse as condemning calling anybody father BY NATURE because all fatherhood came from God the Father. Rather we should only call people father in a derivative sense, because they reflect the Fatherhood of the Father in their actions.

1,290 posted on 06/07/2022 8:53:08 AM PDT by Cronos
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