People of the Christian faith - Is this true?

[JLibourel]

Originally Posted by burningbright

First of all, good catch with the Mariology/Mariolatry...I knew my suffix was suspect.

Second of all, yes, you have sussed me out. Anglican Communion of North America. Where are you hailing from?

Third of all, words cannot begin to describe how amused I am that this thread has been keeping pace with the "poon-slaying" heyday thread.


I don't know the Anglican "Communion" of North America. Is that the same as the Anglican Church of North America? I am familiar with the latter. My own loyalties, such as they are, would be with the "Old Traditionalists." I'd happily worship in either the Anglican Catholic Church or the Province of Christ the King. I quite like the Anglican Church in America parish not too far from me, but I guess they are all marching Rome-ward. ACNA is compromised for me because some dioceses allow priestesses.

 

[Rambo]

Originally Posted by JLibourel

ACNA is compromised for me because some dioceses allow priestesses.
Is this a bad thing?

 

[RSS]

Originally Posted by Rambo

Is this a bad thing?

Not for all Anglicans ... and certainly not for the actual member Churches of the Anglican Communion in the USA, Canada & England. Heck, the church I attended today had three of 'em up there ... if you include the member of the transitional diaconate.

 

[why]

Originally Posted by burningbright

Are you saying that the Eucharist was created by men in the Church? So when Christ at the Last Supper says "Do this in remembrance of me" he means something else other than the Eucharist?
That has nothing to do with the creation or process of the sacrament.

I'm also not certain what the capitalization of Catholic has to do with that either. Yes, the word catholic (lower-case) means "universal" and actually refers to the whole body of believers and not just the Roman Catholic Church. It is part of the Nicene Creed we say every week. "We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church." And yes I believe Constantine's "conversion" to Christianity while helping in its proliferation, greatly hindered it through his politicization of it.

What pertinence does this have to the church itself? My point was that Christianity as a religion was not a strict set of beliefs nor a single unified church. What became sanctified was determined by men hundreds of years after Jesus was crucified.

Thank you for the recommendation of Confessions though I must admit I enjoy City of God more than Confessions. Our pastor has a Ph.D in patristics so much of what we discuss amidst pipes and scotch is of this nature. We're currently discussing Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy which is quite good if you have not read it. C.S. Lewis once stated that the two books of Western literature every person needs to read are Consolation of Philosophy and Spencer's Faerie Queene. I really enjoy the latter but am greatly disappointed that Spencer only completed a 6 of the 24 books he had planned.

1. C.S. Lewis is a Bowdlerizing editor and writer of cheap allegories. 2. His name is Edmund Spenser -- yes, he uses many odd spellings, so this might've confused you. He planned to write The Faerie Qveene: Disposed into twelue bookes fashioning XII. Morall vertues. Since you've read it, I'm sure you've seen the title page included on every edition I've seen:

 

[burningbright]

Originally Posted by JLibourel

I don't know the Anglican "Communion" of North America. Is that the same as the Anglican Church of North America? I am familiar with the latter. My own loyalties, such as they are, would be with the "Old Traditionalists." I'd happily worship in either the Anglican Catholic Church or the Province of Christ the King. I quite like the Anglican Church in America parish not too far from me, but I guess they are all marching Rome-ward. ACNA is compromised for me because some dioceses allow priestesses.

That's twice you've caught my mistakes in hurried responses. We just always call it ACNA and I hurriedly combined Anglican Communion with Anglican Church of North America. That's what happens when you've got a border collie who really has to pee and is letting you know he does.

Yeah we've got several ACNA churches in the Chicagoland area and all of them are at different places in regards to Rome and women as priests. Frankly the women issue is not a sword I'm going to fall on one way or the other, especially if it will fragment an already shaky start to forming a diocese in the Northern Illinois area.

That said, I'm glad to know that there are other fellow Anglicans here on SF. What area did you say you were from again?

 

[burningbright]

Originally Posted by why

That has nothing to do with the creation or process of the sacrament.



What pertinence does this have to the church itself? My point was that Christianity as a religion was not a strict set of beliefs nor a single unified church. What became sanctified was determined by men hundreds of years after Jesus was crucified.



1. C.S. Lewis is a Bowdlerizing editor and writer of cheap allegories.

2. His name is Edmund Spenser -- yes, he uses many odd spellings, so this might've confused you. He planned to write The Faerie Qveene: Disposed into twelue bookes fashioning XII. Morall vertues. Since you've read it, I'm sure you've seen the title page included on every edition I've seen:

I'm finding it difficult to respond to your brief remarks but I'll try anyway.

I'll respond to your first statement with a question: What did the body of believers do in between Christ's death and resurrection and the hundreds of years before the councils met to solidify what eventually became church doctrine and polity? Did they just wait around for 200 years for the go ahead to celebrate the Eucharist? The Eucharist was celebrated in places like people's homes while hiding from Roman persecution. Christ didn't say, "wait until a group of men forms a council to really get all that I've commanded down for the record and then go ahead and do this in remembrance of me."

Sacraments, before they were even called sacraments were being practiced daily before Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus or Chalcedon even occurred. Saying that there wasn't a church in between Christ's death and the first ecumenical council of Nicaea is like saying nothing much happened between the founding of America and yesterday. That's 200+ years we're talking about and you're trying to tell me that there wasn't a church going on? People were being crucified, stoned, and fed to lions under the Roman Caesars for what they believed and yet the body of believers still grew and grew exponentially. If that doesn't sound like a group of unified people with a strict set of beliefs then I'm sorry, I just don't know what does.

As for Spenser/Spencer, many of the editions you've mentioned contain a preface in which he outlined 24 books, not 12 as many think. 12 books would focus on knights who each practiced one of the 12 private virtues while another 12 were outlined to write about King Arthur's practice of the 12 public virtues of a knight.

In regards to your comments on Lewis being a Bowdlerizing editor, some examples would be helpful. In fact I find it quite ironic that you've said this because I remember back around 2000 or so when HarperCollins acquired the rights to the Narnia series that they were planning to Bowdlerize all of the Christian content from the books!

I'll be the first to admit I am not a huge fan of allegory myself (making Spencer a challenge) but I will say that Lewis' allegorical works were mostly intended for children. Though they were fast friends, even Tolkien accused Lewis of what he called "the purposed domination of the reader by the author," saying that all characters should possess free will. It is for this reason that I am more of a Tolkien (Catholic!) fan than a Lewis fan in the literary department. As a theologian, however, I hold Lewis in very high regard, even though I do not agree with everything he says.

This said, why did you even bring up what you feel are Lewis' deficiencies when all I was doing was stating a related fact about Boethius?

 

[JLibourel]

Originally Posted by burningbright

That's twice you've caught my mistakes in hurried responses. We just always call it ACNA and I hurriedly combined Anglican Communion with Anglican Church of North America. That's what happens when you've got a border collie who really has to pee and is letting you know he does.

Yeah we've got several ACNA churches in the Chicagoland area and all of them are at different places in regards to Rome and women as priests. Frankly the women issue is not a sword I'm going to fall on one way or the other, especially if it will fragment an already shaky start to forming a diocese in the Northern Illinois area.

That said, I'm glad to know that there are other fellow Anglicans here on SF. What area did you say you were from again?

I'm a Southern Californian. These days I live in East Long Beach.

On the matter of C.S. Lewis, at one time I was quite a fan of his. After reading A Grief Observed, I became rather disenchanted. Many godless pagans I have known have accepted the death of loved ones with more dignity and courage than he displayed. It was especially contemptible after reading a lot of his writings, as when the Hross in Out of the Silent Planet says that his best day will be when he "drinks of Death itself and goes to Maleldil [Christ]." As a matter of interest, when I was up at Oxford, I was on somewhat cordial terms with the priest who had given Lewis Extreme Unction.

A Border Collie must really keep you on your toes. I prefer my Tosa peacefully snoring beside me at moment.

 

[sho'nuff]

Originally Posted by Rambo

The new security guard at my building was explaining his religious beliefs to me just now and he mentioned a few facts that I was hoping somebody could help me confirm:

You, as a person, actually literally speak the word of God.
ex. say you have 10k debt. If you believe that the debt will be cleared, and say so, then God will clear the debt

If you say something negative, for instance "my back is killing me", then you are of the belief that your back will kill you. This type of talk also means that you are allowing the Devil into your life.

If you get negative news, you can refute the negative news by saying "I don't believe that."
ex. If you go to the doctor and he tells you that you've got cancer, you can say "Oh really. Well I believe that I am healed." On the next visit, you will be cancer free.

No matter what age you join the church, 5 or 50, all your previous sins are forgiven. No matter what they were, ****, killing, etc., you are considered a newborn baby in the eyes of the lord.

Because you speak the word of god, everyone in your immediate family is protected by the spreading of your belief.


All of this is predicated on the belief that you have accepted the word of God as your word, you do not say or do anything negative, and that you do not take any bad influences into your life.

Talking about religion on the internet I found out personally doesn't go anywhere but just waste time and energy.

But I got to say I don't know who your 'christian' friend is, but this is one of the more convoluted and silly statements I have ever read on christianity.

 

[why]

Originally Posted by burningbright

I'll respond to your first statement with a question: What did the body of believers do in between Christ's death and resurrection and the hundreds of years before the councils met to solidify what eventually became church doctrine and polity? Did they just wait around for 200 years for the go ahead to celebrate the Eucharist? The Eucharist was celebrated in places like people's homes while hiding from Roman persecution. Christ didn't say, "wait until a group of men forms a council to really get all that I've commanded down for the record and then go ahead and do this in remembrance of me."

1. Polity does not mean what you seem to think it means.

2. No, they did not 'just wait around for 200 years for the go ahead to celebrate the Eucharist'. Early sects of Christianity were highly divergent in beliefs systems. The formation of the church was not divined by God. I don't see why this is such a difficult concept to understand. You'd see a few of these divergent practices had you read Augustine's Confessions as you claimed instead of relying on History Channel 'Christians were persecuted by the Romans nada pues' simplicities -- especially because they're largely irrelevant in many patristic studies since many of the most influential church fathers were born after the First Council of Nicaea.

Sacraments, before they were even called sacraments were being practiced daily before Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus or Chalcedon even occurred. Saying that there wasn't a church in between Christ's death and the first ecumenical council of Nicaea is like saying nothing much happened between the founding of America and yesterday. That's 200+ years we're talking about and you're trying to tell me that there wasn't a church going on? People were being crucified, stoned, and fed to lions under the Roman Caesars for what they believed and yet the body of believers still grew and grew exponentially. If that doesn't sound like a group of unified people with a strict set of beliefs then I'm sorry, I just don't know what does.

They were unified as a church because they were executed together? They all had vastly different practices. They were executed because they were not pagans, not because they were all part of a unified Christian church. What became orthodox was due to the work of men, not divination by God.

As for Spenser/Spencer, many of the editions you've mentioned contain a preface in which he outlined 24 books, not 12 as many think. 12 books would focus on knights who each practiced one of the 12 private virtues while another 12 were outlined to write about King Arthur's practice of the 12 public virtues of a knight.

Those prefaces refer to his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh. His plan wasn't to write 24 books, it was 12. That's why both the 1590 and 1596 edition both say 'disposed into twelue bookes'. In his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, he writes:

By ensample of which excellent Poets, I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised, the which is the purpose of these first twelve bookes: which if I finde to be weel accepted, I may be encoraged, to frame the other part of polliticke vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.

There is no explicit mention of 24 books (I don't know why modern editors seem to think both narratives of Arthur's life would be part of the same book nor of equal lenth), and it's unlikely that Spenser would accord with his outline as he mentions it in his 1589 letter to Raleigh after the arduous task of writing the 1590 edition consisting of the first three books. Spenser enjoyed his fantasies.

In regards to your comments on Lewis being a Bowdlerizing editor, some examples would be helpful. In fact I find it quite ironic that you've said this because I remember back around 2000 or so when HarperCollins acquired the rights to the Narnia series that they were planning to Bowdlerize all of the Christian content from the books!

'Bowdlerize' refers to censoring literature that does not conform mostly to societal norms of propriety -- specifically, to Victorian propriety. I don't see how Christian ideology is part of that.

I think The Allegory of Love contains most of his Christian apologetic writings in which he tries to argue the rather that the rather overt sexual references in many medieval and Renaissance writings are something else entirely. A lot of his argumentation ignores homosexuality specifically.

 

[Etienne]

Originally Posted by Piobaire

But then you need a whole bunch of people to interpret what the word really means.
Nonsense. The word of God is very clear. That word is "no".

 

[Rambo]

Originally Posted by Étienne

Nonsense. The word of God is very clear. That word is "no".
In the Old Testament, I believe the word is "Kill Him!!!"

 

[emptym]

Originally Posted by KitAkira

... What was I advertising? Please use hate-smileys correctly or don't use them at all.
I think he meant "spasm" not "spam."

Originally Posted by burningbright

...So no, I don't feel they did make changes to Christianity. They simply sought to bring the church back to Christ.
I thought you would say that. I agree completely that members of the Catholic church were sinning terribly, but I wouldn't say the Reformers simply returned things to some ideal, original state. IMO, they went from one extreme to another, from an excessive emphasis on human works/power to a one-sided emphasis on divine power. The end result of this is Calvin's doctrine of double predestination. He has an interesting line that sums up the wrathful image God that most people in the West identify with God: "To the question of why God would create someone for the purpose of eternal damnation, the only answer we can give is, 'Because it is his pleasure.'" Such is the sad change when one says that works don't matter. Of course, Augustine, that old misunderstood hero to the reformers, understood the importance of God's gift of freedom and thus wrote something like, "God created you without your say but will not redeem you without your say." God certainly saves us, and this is a gift, but the gift must be consented to or rejected, in every word and deed we do.

Originally Posted by Piobaire

Well that's one of my beefs. If something is correct, it doesn't change, except to become wrong. If something is wrong and needs changing, well, that's a mighty poor belief system you have so much invested in...
True judgements do not change. But truth must be learned, and along that way, people have misunderstandings. (1) Misunderstandings need to be corrected. (2) Correct understanding must be advanced. (This includes continued discovery). (3) And since cultures change, people need to be taught old beliefs in new ways in order for them to understand these truths in the same way they had been understood. So sure, the truth does not change. But Christianity is comprised not merely of truth but also of people who must discover and learn the truth, through a process that involve at least the three above reasons for change (correction of misunderstanding, discovery, and translation). Life is not so black and white.

Originally Posted by Rambo

So, just got done talking to him. Here's tonight's offering: Pennance is worthless (Hey Catholics, here's just another reason to lapse!) because once God's forgiven you for your past sins, he's forgiven you for your future sins as well. So, if you **** up, its already pre-forgiven...
Tell him that Catholics believe that penance changes the penitent, not God. We know God is unchanging and divine forgiveness is eternal. Have you ever felt genuinely sorry for hurting someone? And have you ever felt the need to do something in order to make up for your offense? If so, then you have felt what a true penitent feels.

 

[emptym]

Originally Posted by Étienne

Nonsense. The word of God is very clear. That word is "no".
It may be true that God's word does not change, but like the rain, it affects different people differently. You experience the divine emanations as a "no" and others as a "yes." This is rightly so.

 

[Piobaire]

Originally Posted by emptym

True judgements do not change. But truth must be learned, and along that way, people have misunderstandings. (1) Misunderstandings need to be corrected. (2) Correct understanding must be advanced. (This includes continued discovery). (3) And since cultures change, people need to be taught old beliefs in new ways in order for them to understand these truths in the same way they had been understood.

So sure, the truth does not change. But Christianity is comprised not merely of truth but also of people who must discover and learn the truth, through a process that involve at least the three above reasons for change (correction of misunderstanding, discovery, and translation).

Life is not so black and white.


If the truth does not change, life is indeed black and white.

I do not like to argue theology with you. First, you strike me as a really good guy but second, your arguments are the epitome of wanting to have things both ways. So since I like you, I prefer not to dig into things and dissect them with you.

 

[scarphe]

Originally Posted by burningbright

My apologies. We appear to be laboring under a difference of opinion on what the word "full" means. I will admit that I had a very difficult time even deciphering what your critique was, to be honest.

Now you're coming out of leftfield with blanket statements about the trinity and the canonization of Scripture that sound as if they were probably gleaned from the religious section at Half-Price Books. Do some serious scholarship and read a few historical monographs from people actually in this line of study. Preferably those with doctorates from credible universities. There are both Christian and non-Christian scholars alike who have written some really solid pieces of scholarship that address what it is I think you may be trying to argue against.

This Dan Brown pop-history crap is rotting people's brains.

but you are working on some absurd idea that the somethings of the church are natural or divine. when most of the good idea's according to you or divine ones cannot be truly dinstiquished from the man made one´s since they were slected and approved by the church. Why do i i go after the trinity as a concecpt beacuse it show the glaring poltical nature of supposed acceptbale divine doctrine to a lesser extent with the gospels but there is still some politic in volved in that. not all christian beliefed that jesus was divine,so the supposed idea that the trinity was vital to very christian is false, it was an imposed byt eh church.

you threw the first punch, let me throw mine, not quite sure sure on this one but is your brancht the number anti gay one spreading in Africa?