Pagan, Christian and Postchristian Civilization
Posted on 10 June 2011
When asked what makes civilization better than barbarism, you are likely, dear reader, to be at a loss for words to answer; but the reason why you are at a loss for words will be one of two opposite reasons, depending on your temper and character.
If you are of the temper and character that is instinctively and unselfconsciously loyal to civilization and to all that it implies, you are likely to be at a loss because the answer is too big for words.
Perhaps you will think of a dozen things in an instant, or see a dozen things in a moment, reminding you how precious civilization in all her aspects shines: civility, peace, order, rule of law, security in possessions and realty, commerce and travel by land and sea, literacy and philosophy and poetry, domestic comforts and domesticated animals, the fellowship of man, medical and technological advantages, the lengthening of the average lifespan, low infant mortality rate, electric lights, books, music, and, in short, all the beauty and dignity of life inside the city walls and civic institutions.
Again, you are likely to be at a loss to answer because you will think of a dozen things in an instant disagreeable or deadly about the anarchy, savagery and barbarism which spreads once the lamps of civilization are extinguished: dirt and toil and heartbreak of nature, the degradation and starvation, the disease and want, the brevity of life, and the continual violence and fear of violence. If you are philosophically inclined, you will think of the mental environment of the savage, who lives without record of the past or hope for the future in a cosmos dark with ignorance. The arbitrary and capricious dark gods who walk the forest or haunt the clouds may this day send victory in battle or may send defeat; or send a plague or famine to take your loved ones from you; and may indeed wipe out your whole warband, tribe and nation, so that the forest will swallow all traces that you and yours ever existed, except, perhaps, for a few carven totem poles rotting in the glade, or perhaps the painted walls of an unlit cave.
On the other hand, if you are of the opposite temper and character, you are likely to be at a loss because the question is unreasonable if not repellant to you.
Perhaps you have some romanticized idea of the liberty and dignity of the noble savages, their freedom from the cares of owning land, their spiritual insights and consequent elevated levels of kindheartedness and simplicity of life. To prefer civilization to barbarism in effect is to close that great mute book of the life experiences of those who live at oneness with nature, or to burn that book. Book-burning is the crime and pastime of such institutions as the Spanish Inquisition or the National Socialist Worker’s Party of Germany; to burn a book is a confession of intellectual weakness and grave moral evil. Hence, to prefer civilization to barbarism is tantamount to fanaticism or bigotry.
Indeed, the very idea that the different ways of life can or should be ranked into categories of better and worse perhaps strikes you are unscientific, unreasonable, partisan, self-serving, biased and ignorant, perhaps even racist.
To call some people savage and barbarian is unacceptable: if you had a word or concept for blasphemy, you would call it a blasphemy. If you had a word or concept for sin, you would call it a sin.
Unfortunately, if you are of this temper, most likely you have been robbed of these words and their meaning, so the potent emotions behind them must seek inarticulate or irrelevant expression.
A blasphemy is a question or a reproach that strikes at the root of everything you hold sacrosanct and therefore beyond question or reproach. Since you, if you are of this temper, no doubt hold religion to be barbaric and ignorant and contemptible, a disturber of the peace of civilization, and a sign of gross inferiority in mental and moral achievement, you will not admit, even to yourself, that you hold anything to be sacrosanct or to be blasphemous against it. You, of course, will still react with the offended outrage that any man who sacred beliefs are trampled reacts with: you merely will not identify them, even in your own mind, as being sacred.
A sin is not merely a crime, it is an offense against the moral order of the universe, an affront to the fountainhead of moral authority. Neither parliaments nor kings can make a sin sinless, even if they make it legal. Having been robbed of a vocabulary to express yourself, and cannot call a wound against the sacred moral authority of reality a sin. The best you can do with your limited and crippled vocabulary is to call it racism. That is the word you use to describe all sins, from the venal sin of being a tax protestor to the cardinal sin of being an opponent of the religion shared by Cassius Clay and Cat Stevens.
If you are of this temper, you are instinctively and unselfconsciously disloyal to civilization.
Men of the first temper regard civilization as a patriot regards the royal fortress from whose towers his beautiful queen flies her brave yet beleaguered standard, as something to fight to preserve, or, if called upon, to lay down his life.
Men of the second temper regard civilization not as a fortress but as a motor hotel, a place conveniently situated to park his gear for a time, whose purpose is to provide him with comfort, but to whom he owes perhaps a rental fee.
A smaller and more depraved faction of the men of the second temper regard civilization as the enemy, and their hearts instinctively incline to the raiding parties of barbarians committing acts of savagery against it. Perhaps men of this depraved faction do not cheer when the barbarians rape and loot and leave behind severed heads of civilians, but they certainly do scowl or pout when the guardians of civilization cheer for victories against barbarians.
At this point, we might ask why any civilized man is disloyal to civilization? At first blush, it would seem to be a self-defeating frame of mind, if not self-destructive, or even destructive of everything true and good and noble and beautiful in life. Man is a rational and noble animal (or so it might seem at first blush) and therefore no one in his right mind could actually be loyal to the destroyers of everything true and good and noble and beautiful in life. Or could they be? The accusation that any civilized man is disloyal to civilization is outrageous, an excess of rhetoric or a gross distortion of the facts. Or is it?
To answer, we need to look at what civilization is, and what might cause a man, a philosophy, or indeed a whole civilization to be a turncoat against it.
Speaking broadly, there are only three basic types of civilization: Pagan, Christian, and Post-Christian. Each type has a different soul. If you prefer a less accurate terminology, we might say each of the three types has a different animating or guiding principle, or a different consensus of philosophy on matters of metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, physics, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and, in short, a consensus view of the world and man’s place in it.
Within each of these three broad categories there are, of course, countless local variations, schools of thought, cults and countercultures, movements and ideologies too numerous to mention. To complicate matters, certain periods of history, such as the reign of Julian the Apostate as Imperator of the Roman Empire, or the current period, are cusps between the influences of two types of civilization, and particular ideas or cannot with certainty be ascribed to one or the other. But the generality of the comments will diminish only their applicability to such variant exceptions as may be, it will not diminish their truth.
It is nearly impossible for the modern reader to enter into the imagination of the pagan worldview. One reason for this is the romanticized and inaccurate picture of paganism which springs from the pens of writers as far apart as historian Edward Gibbon and pulp writer Robert E. Howard, not to mention the presence in the modern age of postchristians of the neopagan strain using (or misusing) the word ‘pagan’ to describe themselves and their beliefs, which are indeed nothing like real paganism.
The most significant landmark of the pagan mental landscape difficult for the modern to imagine is the inequality central to and cherished by the pagan mind. The cosmic order of being, for the pagan, is hierarchical from root to twig. At the bottom is mere matter, lower forms of life as birds and fish, higher forms as dogs and horses, then slaves and eunuchs, outlaws and untouchables, peasants, laborers and tradesmen, and higher orders of warriors and kings, aristocrats, mandarins, royalty, lower and then higher orders of various divine beings whose whims influence and order nature. The idea that all men, from leper to the empress, barbarian to pharaoh, bear the image and likeness of God, and that the village idiot and the squire’s doxy all are endowed by their Creator with an innate worth and dignity, even the criminal on the gallows, is so alien to the pagan mind as to be beyond exaggeration.
The Spartan practice of throwing unwanted babies into the pit of Apothetae, or the African tribal practice of slaying at birth one of two twins as unlucky, was keeping in the temper of all races of pre-Christian mankind. The tears and misery of a mere slave or castrated eunuch might move a pagan to laughter or to condescending but large-hearted mercy, but it would not, and could not, move him to what we would recognize as sympathy and fellow feeling. Likewise, polygamy or concubinage is keeping in this temper: the universality of this custom is rarely mentioned, but it was practiced by Chinaman and Hindu, ancient Jew and modern Mohammedan, and by aboriginal peoples of all continents. Rarely do modern minds, sickened and delirious as they are with sexual fantasies, dwell on the grossly unromantic and misogynistic nature of the horrid institution of the harem or the hetaerae. It is natural for men to trample their inferiors and to kiss the trampling boot of their superiors. To regard all men as brothers and sisters, or to hold that a slave or a whore might be a saint is not natural, and forms no part of the pagan world view.
The second significant landmark of the pagan mental world is melancholy. Contemplate the despair inherent in Norse dreams of the Twilight of the Gods, where all that is bright and good in life must perish bravely; or contemplate the grinding inhumanity of the Hindu wheel of reincarnation, where none of the travails nor sorrows of life ever perish, but return with eternal return, lifetime after lifetime, without end; or contemplate the utmost despair of the Buddhist solution to the sorrows of the wheel, which is to achieve the self-annihilating egoless nonbeing of Nirvana; the or contemplate the lament of the shade of Achilles as told by Homer, that even for the most glorious, life is fleeting and death bitter; or contemplate the resignation innate in the writings of Roman Stoics or Confucians or Taoists, who regard human happiness as being nothing more than the preservation of philosophical tranquility in the face of life’s miseries and disasters, for the sake of inner peace or outer social order, or both.
The third is propitiation and sacrifice. The cosmic order is always in need of sacrifice to keep it in balance, and when the elements are out of balance, disasters both personal and civic, natural and supernatural, must appear. The maintenance of the hierarchy that runs from dogs to slaves to peasants to tradesmen, noble, king, demigod, lesser gods and greater, and above them all fate and remorseless destiny, through endless cycles of years and aeons and kalpas and worlds, required the slaughter of animals and more to placate the implacable and occult forces of the spirit world. Ancient cities from the Orient to the Americas, stank of the continual burning of animal flesh and smokes and incense that fled up forever: and however much the sacred fires consumed, it was never enough, because the wars and disasters and miseries of man knew no end, and the Golden Age was gone, and the world was always out of balance.
Dionysus demanded ecstasy and insanity when his devotees ingested the sacred intoxicants; Diana of Nemi demanded her high priest be slain with the sword of the next ex-slave to be high priest; the old Saturn demanded the sacrifice of gladiators in the games. The various grotesqueries of other things sacrificed to idols, the demands made by Moloch or Cybele, the temple prostitution or ritual sodomy or self mutilation, is best passed over in silence. The mute testimony of the corpses hanging head-downward from Wotan’s sacred oak tree, or burned in wicker baskets by druids, or staining with rivers of blood the stepped pyramids of Mexico, or the evidences of widows and slaves buried with their lords in barrows and graves from Asia to the Andes speak for themselves.
Fourth is the absence of a mental and philosophical structure to the pagan view of the universe. There is no one in charge, no one monotheistic creator-god who made the world but is not part of the world.
Indeed, rare is the pagan lore that holds the world was created at all. The Hindu holds the universe to be infinitely old; the Stoic holds the frame of the universe to be an endless series of aeons punctuated by cosmic fires; the grave Confucian, if he bothers to ponder at all, with canny common sense points out that by definition no one was present to witness the birth of the universe, and with no witnesses to report the event, there is no point in speculating on it; the Greek held the ordered world arose out of primal chaos and old night, so that even gods and titans and older beings have an origin, but no designer who set the frame of the cosmos.
The Brahma god of the Hindu is a sublime concept close to the concept of an all-creating Omnipotence, but he is a pantheistic god, the part of the universe that periodically opens his eyes, banishing the universe, which is no more than the vapor of his dreaming, and then sleeps again and exhales once more the sun and stars, land and sea, winds and gods and dragons and titans and men. Brahma makes no promise that the world is rational, governed and created by a Logos, or Word of God—and the word Logos also means reason or rational rule or proportion.
It is often remarked by those who read Greek and Roman writers how odd it is to read of religious beliefs disconnected from moral and philosophical beliefs. The philosophers speculated about the gods in much the same way that they speculated about the stars or animals. Meanwhile the common people celebrated public festivals, or consulted fortune-tellers or visited shrines maintained by families and clans devoted to the particular god or genus loci or local spirit or ghost of a hero the pagan imagination managed to capture in a particular spot of sacred ground.
The pagans did not and do not, strictly speaking, have a Church, that is, have a Creed. Pagans have rites and practices, to be sure, and rules of ritual purity, and they have myths and stories they tell, or that their rites reflect; and pagans like Confucius make a creed of the rule of reason and submission to the will of heaven in much the same way as pagans like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius make a creed of reason and submission to the will of heaven; and pagans like Buddha speak mystically of escaping the illusion of the material universe in much the same way as pagans like Socrates speak mystically of returning to the Ideal or Pure Concept of the Good once the soul is unchained from the deceptions and passion of the material body. And Maenads dance on the mountains in madness much the same way the dervishes in the desert do.
But none of these sages, mystics, philosophers or practitioners of various rites and rituals ever met, for example, at a General Council at Nicaea or Ephesus, to determine which of two feasible but contrary interpretations of sacred creed was correct and authoritative. They have rites and cults both public and private, but pagans have no Church.
The four landmarks most striking and most alien to the modern mind of the Pagan worldview are hierarchy, melancholy, the ubiquity of sacrifice and the absence of doctrine. The basic difference between Pagan and Christian worldviews, is that, for the pagan, man is not sacred, and the world was not made for him.
Now, it cannot be helped but noticed that much, if not most, of the Pagan world was brought into the Christian world view, and given what can be called an intellectual baptism. Pagan gods from Apollyon to Moloch were incorporated as demons (which, considering their behavior in myth, is hardly unfair) certain rites, such as the exchange of rings at marriage, or certain Holy Days, such as Passover, were called by local pagan names: and maybe even one or two demigods or demons snuck into the Church by pretending to be saints, as Saint Brigit.
I, for one, have never been scandalized, or even particularly interested, to discover the similarities between Roman culture before and after the Christianization of the Empire, only because I never ascribed to the theory that Christian invaders burned Rome to the ground, killing all the native inhabitants, razed the buildings and torched the libraries, and sowing the smoldering landscape with salt to make it the uninhabited desert it is to this day.
Quite to the contrary, it looks to me as if the Holy Church in the First Century of the Christian Era was placed as a seed in a cultural ground particularly prepared to receive it, hungry for the good news of her message, and as her roots drove deep and shady branches spread wide, everything good in pagan culture, philosophers like Aristotle and poets like Virgil, were honored as pre-Christian saints or precursors of Aquinas and Dante, and everything evil in pagan culture, like pederasty and sodomy, gladiatorial games and infanticide, divorce and slavery, human sacrifice and superstition and astrology, were either slowly condemned and abolished or immediately.
Indeed, I know no one who actually ascribes to the theory that the Christian calamity, like the Dinosaur-killing Asteroid, wiped out all previous remnants of the language and ideas of the pagan culture of their fathers, albeit all the giggling Christ-bashers who appear each Easter and Christmas to make airy claims that these holidays are pagan holdovers, would logically have to assume it for their barbs to be expected to hold.
Christianity is itself a pagan holdover: it is what you get when the Jewish Messiah commands the Jewish Scripture and the Good News passed to His apostles and disciples to be preached to the Hellenic gentiles across Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Near East. You get a Greco-Jewish or Judeo-Hellenic culture known as Christendom.
Christendom removed or reverse these four mental landmarks, and preached and promoted a philosophy either mostly or radically different from the pagan:
First, the idea that all men, queen and farmwife alike, are made in the image and likeness of God, who is no respecter of persons and will judge the naked souls of all, from beggarman to bishop, on Doomsday, supports both the Medieval notion of a folklaw and canon law which even the King could not set aside, and the modern notion of democracy. Even barons went to confession and served penance for their sins in the so called Dark Ages, and there is no parallel for such humility among the great and powerful of the Earth to be found in any pagan or postchristian institution.
Second, Christian joy at the promise of the life to come is so thoroughly a part of the modern mental landscape that it is attributed retroactively through time even to cults and cultures that did not or do not possess it. You will hear versions of the Norse myths, for example, where Ragnarok is followed by the creation of a new heaven and a new earth under the guidance of Baldir the Bright, resurrected from the grave: this is an imposition of Christian elements into late period Norse folk tales. You will hear Nirvana spoken of as a type of paradise or heaven, when it is something more like the mystical version of the ataraxia of the Stoics, the tranquility that comes of total detachment from life and all its illusions, including the illusion that existence exists. You will hear Pythagorean and Theosophical and Oriental ideas of reincarnation explained not an inescapable wheel or endless return of suffering, but as the rungs of a ladder leading every upward to some higher point of glory, to be reincarnated as spirit beings or gods, when the ancient concept was that your next life, while you may be higher in rank due to Karmic merit, was no more free of pain than the life of, let us say, kingly Agamemnon or godlike Adonis or Hyperion, whose tragedies are recalled in the constellations of the stars of the colors of flowers.
Third and fourth, the idea that a “religion” consists of a set of doctrinal beliefs of universal application rather than a series of yearly ritual sacrifices and purifications to purely local or regional or national deities is so ingrained that – merely to take an example yours truly as a science fiction writer am wont to come across in my line of work — books and games and stories written by moderns set in pagan days, real or make believe, almost never portray cults and shrines as being like the practices of Shinto or ancient Egyptian rites, with purely local spirits being propitiated for purely local fortunes by the important families, landowners or nobles, in the community. Modern fantasy stories assume the snake-god (or whatever) has its own priesthood, and if the writer gives it any background, he assumes it has a doctrine and evangelists to spread it, and that the cult will welcome any new novices who adhere to the doctrine.
If there is a modern fantasy story where the emperor is worshipped with divine honors, or the god-king thinks he is a god, and this is not portrayed as overweening pride akin to madness, I am unaware of it. And yet nothing is more common among Empires from Rome to China to Egypt than to called the ruling dynasty of the Pharaoh or Tennyo sacred, and call the Emperor the Son of Heaven, and the source of the blessing bestowed on the land. It is the Christian notion that devotion means doctrine, that God has a priesthood and priestly hierarchy, and that religions seek new members, which make the idea that the Emperor is both human and divine seem comical or blasphemous; but most of all it is Christian humility.
But, enough. The mental landscape of Christendom needs no further explanation from me you are aware of it, or not, like a fish is aware or not of the water in which it swims, and so much so that the main body of Christian ethics is held over in the Post-Christian worldview, albeit without any root or reason, merely as a habit of mind of ever diminishing inertia.
This indeed is why the modern mind must be called Post-Christian rather than Nonchristian or Atheist or Antichristian: the Christian conclusions are still present, at least to a degree, even thought the Christian axioms are absent.
The Post-Christian mind differs from the Pagan and the Christian in three obvious respects: first, it has little or no concern for reason as such, neither logical reasoning in the abstract nor right reason as it applies to virtue or purity. For this cause, Postchristians can rightly be called postrational.
The examples of this contempt for reasoning are almost too numerous to mention: the Marxist who says that all human ideas are merely ideological superstructures created by the material circumstances of the methods of production and therefore not true does not see that Marxism is a human idea. The materialist who says there are no thoughts, only physical brain elements that produce human ideas by a mechanical action as purposeless as the action of a machine or an organ and are therefore not true does not see that materialism is not true. The Logical Positivists who hold as their prime metaphysical principle that there are no metaphysical principles; the radical empiricist or student of Hume who states as a universal and a priori truth that any statement not deduced from particular sense impressions must universally and always be false or meaningless; the Behaviorist who has the idea that all ideas are merely programs in the brain programmed by inputs in the environment; the Postmodernist who says that human ideas are always merely parts of an invented and fictional ‘narrative’ meant only to project or impose a world view on one’s helpless victims; the Determinists who determines that humans never determine their own ideas; the Nazi who says that different races use different forms of logic, so that there is no communication across such a barrier, or the Communist who says the same thing of economic classes, or the postcolonial theorist who says the same thing of men of different cultures or races, or the feminist who says the same thing of differences between the sexes; and the list goes on and on and on with maddening monotony.
The Postchristians disagree about every other point, but agree on this one point: that when the logical errors or paradoxes of their incoherent lists of things they say they believe is pointed out to them, the valid response is to say that reason cannot be trusted and that logic lies and that all ideas are false. The Postchristian can be best pictured as the foolish gardener who sits on the high branch he is busily sawing off.
Second, the Postchristian philosophy is the only philosophy in the history of the world, or its prehistory, that is utterly void of any metaphysics.
Metaphysics is the study of those universal propositions which must be true in order for any particular proposition to be true. The Metaphysics of the Postchristian consists of nothing. Among the more philosophically inclined of the Postchristians (if such a chimera can be imagined) you will from time to time hear nihilism, or a conclusion that can only logically spring from nihilism, uttered as their metaphysical position: the notion that life has no meaning aside from whatever the omnipotent and utterly arbitrary willpower of man should see it to impose.
This metaphysical nihilism is usually defended on two grounds: it is said to be practical, since metaphysical questions are not open to being settled by empirical observation or experiment; and it is said to be peaceful, since a man lacking any convictions whatsoever will allegedly never have any motive to impose his conviction by violence on his fellow man.
This second ground implies three notions, any one of which must evoke either a gush of laughter from anyone with a passing familiarity with the conditions of life on Earth, or a whimper of terror from anyone contemplating that one’s fellow man, including men in positions of power and influence, might believe such utter rubbish.
First, it the conviction that avoiding convictions avoids violence is itself a conviction. In theory, it is a self-impeaching statement; a paradox. In practice, anyone who has heard the screaming, shrieking, ranting, filled with bile and mindless hate, which comes from the mouths or drips from the pens of those zealots firmly convinced that avoiding convictions avoids violence, knows full well that this is a not a peaceful idea suggested in soft and diffident tones by peace-loving pacifists seeking nothing but harmony and goodwill. Anyone who has heard the screaming zealots knows full well that this conviction is a sacred doctrine of a militant and evangelizing cult, who will use any means, fair or foul, legal or not, to spread their doctrine and destroy any rivals. The meaning behind such movements as anti-bullying laws, anti-homophobia movements, anti-hate-speech laws, anti-hate-crime laws is mere hypocrisy: it is to crush dissent as thoughtcrime in the name of toleration and broadmindedness.
But it is not all dissent the zealots of nihilism wish to crush, it is only Christianity. Convictions such as the Mohammedan notion that one is right kill one’s sister if she dishonors the clan, or to saw the heads from Jews, are exempt from the condemnation of convictions.
The second absurd notion implied by this conviction that lacking all conviction is peaceful is the implication that all convictions are coercive. Merely to believe or to preach, no matter how peacefully or nonviolently, the Christian Gospel, is in effect an attempt to “impose” your convictions on another, and is rude, if not sinister and unlawful. To believe, for example, that homosexual acts involve grave moral sin or an objective disorder of the passions, is tantamount to advocating violence against homosexuals, and therefore, for the sake of peace and order, such convictions not only ought not be spoken, they ought not be thought.
In the Looking Glass world of the Postchristian, the only thing which is forbidden is coercion, therefore any non-coercive thing which the Postchristian philosophy condemns as heretical or blasphemous, such as “being judgmental” or “listening to logic” must first be likened, and then equated, to coercion in order for the Postchristian to be justified in bringing the force of law to bear to deter and persecute it.
The third absurd notion is that all convictions are utterly subjective and arbitrary, merely an imposition of the willpower onto a neutral void or pregnant vacuum, which will then give birth to “meanings” meaningful to you and to you alone. You have absolute sovereignty in finding the truth in reality and the meaning in life provided only that you admit such truth is “your truth” and such reality is “your reality” and such meanings have no meaning for any other person.
As above, in theory this is a self-impeaching statement: mere nonsense. If “my reality” says that objectivism is true and “your reality” says that subjectivism is true, then your reality and mine both agree that your reality is the false one.
And as above, in practice the promised peace to issue from this womb of nonsense is stillborn, and something more monstrous appears. If my willpower is sufficient to bring forth an entire world of truth and reality and meaning just by its own unaided effort from the dark void of nonbeing that surrounds the human condition, why, praytell, why is my willpower insufficient to bring forth something that I may not rightly and rightfully impose on others? If the other members of my nation, my economic class, my cult and my race all likely concur in the powerful new idea our combined willpower spawns out of the void of nonbeing, why, praytell, why should be defer to the opinion of the weak and nonconformist minority found among us whose lifestyles ignore, nay, mock that powerful new idea?
No one familiar with life on Earth, or, if not familiar, having heard a remote rumor of conditions concerning life on Earth, can possibly opine that a major source of violence, much less the only one, is due to differences of conviction, rather than, let us say, fear of others, love of gain either material or imponderable, or the desire to inspire fear in others.
No one familiar with the grotesquely tragic events on the Twentieth Century, during which the Postchristians of both the National Socialist and International Socialist bent killed human beings in numbers only an astronomer can grasp will grant the idea that the convictions brought forth by the willpower in the metaphysical nihilism of the modern world view were peaceful. The technological and scientific methods used to organize the killings, wars, famines, pogroms, and genocides are insufficient, by themselves to explain the severity and depth and cruelty and sheer mind-numbing numbers of the homicides. Hitler, Mao, and Stalin sought to wipe out entire branches of the human race, entire economic categories of human behavior, entire strata of society. The Spanish Inquisition, even if given all the materials and men of a modern police state with informants in every family and microphones on every street corner, would not shed so much blood. The Inquisitors sought to wipe out heretics and relapsed converts: not even in theory, did it have as an intent to wipe out the Jewish or Moorish races, or destroy the upper, middle, or lower classes and remake mankind into a superhuman or posthuman creature never before seen or imagined.
For modern Postchristians to boast of the toleration, peace and goodwill that flows from their doctrines, while dishonoring or scorning the peace and goodwill brought by Christendom into the world, is beyond misinformed or ironic and well into the depths of grotesquerie.
The desire for peace and goodwill is of course a civilized desire, perhaps even the most civilized desire and the mother of civilization. The Postchristian cannot be faulted for having such a desire, and, on that level, he is not a turncoat against civilization.
The fault lies in the Postchristian abandonment of logic and religion. The perfectly laudable desire to be free from arbitrary coercion at the hands of others, when exposed to a nihilist philosophy and an empty metaphysical worldview, mutates into the bizarre, impossible and self-destructive desire to be free from all restrictions and restraint placed on any desire or appetite, sacred or perverted, coercive or peaceful, express or implied. It is a desire to snap all bonds of obligation of any kind whatsoever, whether voluntary or natural, running to loved ones or to strangers. The idea of being free to enjoy one’s own property in peace somehow mutates into the idea of being free from all inhibition, all restraint, all virtue, all decency, all scruples, all honesty, all maturity. It mutates into the demand that one be respected for one’s most disrespectable and disgusting behavior: to be praised for one’s vices instead of one’s virtues.
Obviously civilization cannot survive without law and order, no more than law and order can survive in the hands of a people without virtue or self-control. You cannot have self government without self control. Even government imposed from above by a small and disciplined elite upon and large and unruly mobs of slavish proles cannot endure unless the elite is actually disciplined and the proles have (or can be domesticated to) the habit of respecting their superiors and obeying them.
The Postchristians can affirm, with all the sneering and yodeling and scathing pomposity their souls can muster, that they believe in the sacredness of human life and in the equality of man and in the rights of the poor and oppressed, but since none of these ideas can exist where the axioms on which they are based exist, that affirmation is hollow.
No Postchristian actually believes in his heart that a baby born with Down’s Syndrome is equal to him, or that a helpless wife in a coma or a vegetative state has a right to live. No Postchristian actually believes that the vow of man to wife is sacred and unbreakable, and very few can be found even to say that such a vow is desirable, or serves any purpose at all. No Postchristian opposes contraception. The idea of “virtue” is one for which they have no vocabulary, and likewise ideas like “honor” and “dignity”. Few enough believe in the idea of private property or the superiority of man over beast.
You see, the huge secret is that when Christianity took over Western Civilization, Paganism and its virtues were wedded and melded into the result, and the pagan vices, pederasty, sodomy, slavery and so on, were expunged. The Postchristians, in the name of science or the name of progress or the name of peace and toleration, or the name of evolution, or in the name of whatever idol catches their distracted and errant fancy that decade, need and want to abolish Christianity in order to have their sins not merely made legal, but wrapped in praise and applause by all the social institutions of civilization; and they cannot get rid of Christianity without also getting rid of Pagan ideas and virtues.
Therefore the Postchristian, being post-rational, abolishes not just Aquinas but also Aristotle. Prudence is not for him.
Being post-virtuous, he must abolish not only chastity, but Confucianism. Temperance is not for him.
Being utopian and post-military, he must abolish not only the knightly virtues and chivalry of Saint George and King Arthur, but also the warrior virtues of Achilles or Ashoka or Tokugawa. Courage and fortitude are not for him.
And so Christianity ebbs. The tide is flowing out. Slavery, which had been successfully abolished worldwide during the Christian Era, now is returning in the dark corners of the world. Why slavery should be illegal if man is nothing but an ape with an accidental overgrowth of a brain lope, or if man is nothing but a machine made of meat spun by selfish genes for no purpose aside from mindless self replication, is a question Postchristians both fear and mock and leave unanswered. Pederasty has at least some advocates, albeit it is still for a season taboo; Peter Singer public advocates the return of infanticide of born children; the infanticide of the unborn is so widespread, that the population of women worldwide and of blacks in America has suffered a decline so sharp that it matches what a successful program of genocide or gynocide might have accomplished. The public acceptance of sodomy is so great that the word can no longer be used in polite circles: homosexuality is not merely tolerated, but celebrated, promoted by social institutions, protected by special laws, affirmed by custom and peer pressure. To speak against it even in allegedly Conservative circles violate the unwritten social norm. Gladiatorial games, I am happy to say, have yet made no return, but the existence of a subgenre of films called torture porn convince me that the games have not returned only because the bloodshed and gore seen from belchers in real life, without close-up or soundtrack, would be far too mild to amuse a modern audience.
Civilization rests on self-control. Postchristianity denounces self control as impossible, unhealthy, sinister, repressive, and the convictions of self control, like all convictions, are a type of coercion unacceptable in civilization. For the Postchristian, civilization is itself uncivilized.
Whether the Postchristians know or care what it is they are so busily destroying, and whether they foretell the wreckage and the void that will be left when civilization implodes, I leave as an exercise for the reader to speculate. Those who believe the Postchristians mean well but are uninformed or deceived can believe they do not know what they do; those who believe they mean ill are not so sanguine.
[...] Pagan, Christian and Postchristian Civilization | John C. Wright's … there is no point in speculating on it; the Greek held the ordered world arose out of primal chaos and old night so that even gods and titans and older beings have an origin, but no designer who set the frame of the cosmos. It is the Christian notion that devotion means doctrine, that God has a priesthood and priestly hierarchy, and that religions seek new members, which make the idea that the Emperor is both human and divine seem comical or [...]
“The third is propitiation and sacrifice.”
Christianity is formed on the premise of human (and divine) sacrifice to bring our lives back into balance. “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission” Hebrews 9:22 “for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” Leviticus 17:22
Christ being both human and divine was sacrificed for us and we being human are required to give our all to god. We are to put off the natural man and keep the commandments as well as there is the example of those that were required to give up all that they had to follow Christ. It isn’t that we sacrifice less, we are supposed to sacrifice more. It is much easier to buy a lamb at a temple to atone for ones sins then it is to change your whole lifestyle and being to follow the Lamb of God.
The Aztec’s rivers of blood was not the norm for central America that was an unstable policy instituted by a general in an attempt to stabilize a tribute empire (which is inherently unstable). The Aztec’s did sacrifice a lot more often to begin with when compared to other cultures in the area.
The Mayan, at least in the classic period, only sacrificed the nobility that were captured in battle and the main practice was that of blood letting by the kings and nobility in behalf of their people and their city-state. This included the practice of the king slitting his jugular so as to die and (with the quick application of special medicinal plants) be resurrected. The most common was gentile blood letting for men, as my wife notes (women used their tongues).
Also, creation myths are common in pretty much all pagan religions. In many it is of a similar form as Genesis with Chaos, or the Void, or the Waters, or the Apeiron existing with the first gods who then frame and shape it into existence. Or as the Pupol Vuh (Mayan sacred text) has it: the Heart of the Sky (which is said to be the name of god) gave his word in the darkness and conceived of light and life.
There is a lot more I could comment on here but for now I will leave it at that.
I think you need to reread what I wrote; I am not sure we disagree. You are merely falling prey to an ambiguity which I admit I should have made more clear: first, I am speaking specifically of animal sacrifices. The sacrificial nature of the Eucharist is a different species.
Second, the human sacrifices of Middle and South America are well documented enough that your apologetic for them is counterproductive to your point. The Aztec from the beginning had human sacrifices, as did the Romans, the Druids, the Norse et cetera and ad nauseam. It hardly addresses my point to say the in some periods of history the abominable practice was less than in others.
Third, what you call ‘creation’ myths are misnamed: when the myth says Uranus arose from Chaos, no ‘creation’ takes place, not the creation ex nihilo of a creator god above and outside the world as we are discussing here. Turning the bones and brains of a primordial frost giant into earth and sky is a different species of story, because the gods there, and in all similar stories, are within nature and within the world and part of it.
“Third, what you call ‘creation’ myths are misnamed: when the myth says Uranus arose from Chaos, no ‘creation’ takes place, not the creation ex nihilo of a creator god above and outside the world as we are discussing here. ”
This is actually a difference in basic understanding of what is God and what is creation. The account given in genesis does not say anything about ex nihilo that only appears in 2 Macabees which is not held as scripture by my church but as important writings. Sorry about that.
“It hardly addresses my point to say the in some periods of history the abominable practice was less than in others.”
Actually I was more trying to show that the thoughts of why it was done and what was being done aren’t (in the case of most of meseoamerica) that different then what we think of with the sacrament of the Lord’s supper or the sacrifice of Christ. I know that in most places the thoughts were very different but for the area of the world that my wife, and therefore I, knows most about the parallels run deep.
But Genesis isn’t a myth about the creation of GOD. That’s the critical information for Wright’s argument.
The Bible is the written notes compiled by my Church as an aid for Her teaching. Catholics also hold reason and tradition give the teachings of Christianity authority, some of which are reflected in our notes, and some not. We believe the determinations of several General Councils to be authoritative for the issues addressed, for example, and to have been inspired of the Holy Ghost.
The Old Testament was compiled by the Jews not the Catholics.
If the Bible is merely teaching notes and not a record of the dealings of God with his chosen people and of some of the revelations to that people then obviously it is not any more authoritative when it comes to religion then Plato’s Apology or The Republic or really anything else. If however it does have any accurate records of revelations then that part which is accurate should be placed in higher authority then anything else that may contradict it.
If the accounts of Gods revelations are not true but teaching notes then they might as well be lies, perhaps useful lies in getting the masses to obey those in authority but lies nonetheless. In that case any claim of authority from Christ is nonsense as no knowledge is had of Christ, merely useful fables, and the hope of a resurrection then rests on a collection of fables and myths that are useful for teaching.
If we are to rely on tradition then why not rely on the tradition of the Jews? Jesus taught against those traditions according to the teaching aids we have but of course the Church wouldn’t want people listing to the Jews and not Rome so how are we to know that those words were his and not additions by later teachers to aid in the control of the taught?
If God has revealed Himself then that revelation should trump any conjecture, council, tradition, or the wisdom of men or of this world for it would be the truth direct from the source of all truth. If the revelations are true and they contradict tradition or the reasoning of men then why should we listen to the tradition or that reasoning over direct revelation from the Being in question?
The things that of itself claims to be from God says that if we ask God then we will receive if this is true then we may indeed ask God if the books in the Bible are true and accurate accounts of revelations. Obviously, if they are not true and accurate then asking can not hurt in the slightest as even if God does answer prayers (which point would be up for question) then He would still confirm that the books in question are not true but merely teaching aids and if God doesn’t answer prayers then no answer will be received and we will be safe in assuming they are not true or accurate.
Perhaps I am dreadfully misunderstanding what was meant by your comment, I certainly hope so, but if so then I need more explanation as I can’t see another way of viewing it.
I believe you are misunderstanding in a fundamental way what I said. Please reread my words.
“If the Bible is merely teaching notes and not a record of the dealings of God with his chosen people and of some of the revelations to that people then obviously it is not any more authoritative when it comes to religion then Plato’s Apology or The Republic or really anything else. ”
The statement is false. A book can be the truth without being the whole truth. The claim that part of Christian teaching is not in the Bible carries great weight with Protestants, who make the claim that the whole of Christian teaching is within the pages of the Bible, but carries little or no weight with Catholics or Orthodox, who have never made such a claim.
You are reading my comment “this is not the whole truth” as if I said “this is false or expendable” — which is not what I said. Likewise, merely because the Jews collected certain books of the Old Testament as scripture does not mean the Church did not collect those same books into the Bible. (They also collected, for example, writings in the Torah and commentary on the law which has no authority for Christian teaching and doctrine. Without the Imprimatur of the Church, the writing is not an official Christian doctrinal writing.)
In both cases, you are reading a statement I make, “A is B” as if I were saying the contrapositive ” No B is not A.”
“If the revelations are true and they contradict tradition or the reasoning of men then…”
This was not the what was being discussed. There is no contradiction involved. Genesis does not state that God is a part of nature and arose out of Chaos, which was what was being discussed. The Church teaches authoritatively that the Creation was gratuitous, ex nihilo, and out of the superfluous abundance of divine love. I am willing to cite the Bible in support of Church Authority, but the Bible authority derives from Church authority and from no where else. The Protestants would not even be aware that Christ ever walked the Earth at all, if the Church did not teach this.
If you want at argue theology with me, feel free. But I am not a Protestant, and therefore pointing out to me that my Church teaches something the Bible (which my Church wrote and compiled and granted the only authority those pages possesse) only indirectly supports or not at all is an argument of no persuasive force whatsoever. It is like saying the teacher is teaching something not in the book the teacher wrote down for himself to help his teaching ministry.
I (and all true Catholics) also regard the writings of the Early Church Fathers as authoritative; and the findings of the General Church Councils, and the teachings of the Magisterium. Therefore saying “the Bible does not say God created ex nihilo therefore God did not create ex nihilo” is not persuasive to me, not when all non-heretical Christians, including the saints and doctors of the Church as guided by the infallible Holy Spirit (whom Christ Himself said would teach and instruct us), have believed and taught throughout all Christian history that God did create ex nihilo.
I am an attorney. I know all too well that a written document means nothing in and of itself, without an authoritative interpreter and a tradition of precedent in which to interpret it. Not even legal documents, which are written to be unambiguous, interpret themselves of themselves; how much less can poetry, psalms, folk tales, history, proverbs, apocalyptic writing, epistles, and so on and on for the many genres included in the many books of that library of lore we call the Bible?
“A book can be the truth without being the whole truth. The claim that part of Christian teaching is not in the Bible carries great weight with Protestants, who make the claim that the whole of Christian teaching is within the pages of the Bible, but carries little or no weight with Catholics or Orthodox, who have never made such a claim. ”
I did not make the claim that it is was the whole truth, just that it is in fact the truth and that more weight should be given to those that have seen God and written about it then those that have only reasoned about God without revelation.
“Genesis does not state that God is a part of nature and arose out of Chaos, which was what was being discussed”
This is not what I have been claiming, God has always existed with nature and exists in the physical universe is the claim I hold which is different then saying God arose out of Chaos.
“(which my Church wrote and compiled and granted the only authority those pages possesse) ”
Authority should come from God. If the records in the Bible are actual records of God’s dealings and revelations then they have all the authority they need. If they are not actual records of such things then no earthly organization can grant it any authority whatsoever.
“only indirectly supports or not at all is an argument of no persuasive force whatsoever”
If it only indirectly supports or is silent on the matter then I have no problem with it as lots of things in my church are only indirectly supported by the Bible or the Bible is silent on. Things that appear to be direct contradictions to what is supported in the Bible do bother me.
“I (and all true Catholics) also regard the writings of the Early Church Fathers as authoritative; ”
I keep on getting conflicting answers from Catholics as to if this statement is true.
“and the findings of the General Church Councils, and the teachings of the Magisterium. ”
Councils make sense but the general teachings of the Magisterium as held in the past have some interesting things in it as I discovered previously.
“non-heretical Christians, including the saints and doctors of the Church as guided by the infallible Holy Spirit”
A lot of the early Church fathers were arguing the point that God created ex nihilo because the early church did not hold this teaching and these philosophers used Platonic thought rather then revelation from God to guide them. Given that the philosophy they were using was the dominate Greek philosophy I can’t see how them using it is justified when Paul says that what he preached was foolishness to the Greeks and not according to the wisdom of the world and that it can not be discovered by the natural man, which presumably the Greek philosophers were. The doctrines taught were not the doctrines given by the angels but the doctrines of man.
“I am willing to cite the Bible in support of Church Authority, but the Bible authority derives from Church authority and from no where else”
And where does Church Authority come from? How may one know that the Church has any authority?
“The Protestants would not even be aware that Christ ever walked the Earth at all, if the Church did not teach this. ”
But I am not a Protestant but believe in the restoration of all things as prophesied by the ancient Apostles. If all knowledge of Christ had completely disappeared from the Earth yet could the true and living God call new prophets and new Apostles to restore that portion of the knowledge that had been lost and that this has happened. Furthermore I believe that if anyone actually bothers to seek the will of God they are able to find out by the power of the Holy Spirit what is the truth. Everyone should seek to know the will of God and to have the Spirit reveal things to them. Only those that are apostate fear new revelation from God and seek to keep people from seeking the Lord themselves.
Again, I am not sure we are disagreeing, but I am not sure I see what your point is.
You seem to disagree with my statement that the world was created ex nihilo: when you said the Bible does not say so explicitly, I pointed out that I am not a Protestant or Biblio-idolater: I said the fact that the Bible is ambiguous on the point where the Church is unambiguous is not of any particular persuasive force to me.
If there are two interpretations of the Bible, and a lone heretic or lonely cult teaches one interpretation, and the consensus of Christianity, Orthodox and Catholic, from the time of Christ teaches another, I will prefer to believe what Christians have always taught and believed.
To answer your question: The authority of the Bible derives from the Church, whose authority derives from the apostles, whose authority derives from the Messiah, whose authority comes from the Father, who is the author of the world as well as of our Bible. Because Christ quoted and fulfilled the Holy Books of the Jews, whose authority comes from the patriarchs and prophets (whose authority in turn comes from God), the Early Church Fathers granted their authority to them as well: but the Old Law is not binding on those under the New Law.
While it is true that the Good Lord could indeed restore knowledge of Himself to a dark world through a new Moses or a new Saint Paul should He so decree, in fact in real life you know about Christ and his kingdom and his message through us, the Catholics, through our Church, through our martyrs who bled and our saints who spoke, and you know because and only because we carried the message to you.
The atheist who rejects both the authority of the Bible and the authority that wrote the Bible, I understand. The Muslim or Heretic who accepts the written Word as Holy Writ, but rejects the apostles and patriarchs and prophets and saints who spoke that written word before it was written down, I do not understand. Why one would attach special significance to written as opposed to an oral message when the message comes from the same source is beyond me. The same fountain does not pour forth both bitter and sweet.
“I said the fact that the Bible is ambiguous on the point where the Church is unambiguous is not of any particular persuasive force to me. ”
I claimed the Bible does not teach ex nihilo and seems to support my view, to me you appeared to claim that it didn’t matter in the slightest what the Bible said as the Catholic Church has said otherwise. I think that issue has been cleared up now but it has spawned other issues.
The Jews also had their oral law and Christ said that it was not from Him. Why would Christ condemn one oral law and then give another? Likewise, you only know of all that is in the Old Testament by the sacrifice of the Jews who have had innumerable martyrs themselves. They do not believe that Christ has come but are still waiting for a Messiah, why should we not believe them?
So your argument for authority is that because a doctrine is popular and has remained so it is true?
You do realize that I claim that the true knowledge of God was lost very quickly and was restored with a personal appearance of God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ in 1820?
Other then the fact that the Jews had an oral tradition (from Moses it is claimed) that Christ rejected there is yet my own experience to reject any sort of oral traditions. I have experienced many times the problems that arise when people of a different faith convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and are quickly given leadership positions (due to the small size of the church in the area). They tend to bring with them many ideas and beliefs that come from whatever religion they previously were and to teach these beliefs as though they were doctrine. There are those that are over them that know better and are able to correct them in these false teachings but I can see the problems that would quickly arise and did arise in the church after the death of the Apostles. The ability to correct these false teachings was lost and so, because so many members came from the same source, the truth that was in Christ was corrupted to become almost exactly the same as what was previously believed.
Look at the Council of Jerusalem. Most of the Church at that time were Jews that were converted and had there not been Peter there to say that he had received revelation from God to extend the gospel to the gentiles then the church would have upheld the law of circumcision. Without revelation the people perish.
There is also my further experience in asking God about the subject and receiving an answer through the power of the Holy Spirit.
No. I did not say ‘it did not matter in the slightest.’ I said that it was ambiguous, open to interpretation, and that I take the authoritative interpretation over heretical interpretation, and I gave my reasons for which.
“The Jews also had their oral law and Christ said that it was not from Him. Why would Christ condemn one oral law and then give another?”
Perhaps he was not condemning the oral nature of the law, but its falsehood.
“Likewise, you only know of all that is in the Old Testament by the sacrifice of the Jews who have had innumerable martyrs themselves. They do not believe that Christ has come but are still waiting for a Messiah, why should we not believe them?”
Because such a belief would not accord with the evidence or with right reason. If Christ were not the messiah, how was it that he did those things only a prophet can do? No, you are straining to draw a parallel between the witness of the Church and the witness of the Jews, but you forget that the Church accepts and blesses the witness of the Jews, those that were faithful to the Lord.
“So your argument for authority is that because a doctrine is popular and has remained so it is true?”
I will not bother to answer unless you can control yourself to stick to the topic we are discussing, and do not put words in my mouth, or set up straw men to knock down, or make up things out of your imagination.
I am an attorney; I know the difference between a line of cases correctly decided by a court having the authority to decide them, and with a facetious interpretation based on nothing but imagination. Imagine if you were in a court of law, and you quoted every case from Marbury v Madison onward to support the doctrine of the judicial power of review, and the honorable counsel for the opposing side then sniffed in contempt and said, “So! You believe the the doctrine of judicial review because it is popular, do you!”
Control your weakness for humbug, or else expect no further conversation from me on this topic.
The rest of your comments are neither here nor there. I do not deny that the Holy Spirits visits the faithful, or, even, should God so will, the faithless. It happened to me when I was an atheist and it converted me.
I will say that if a private revelation disagrees with the revelations made to the saints and doctors of the Church, then it disagrees with the Holy Spirit. That spirit lives within the body of the one true Church and guides her. What you are dismissing as oral tradition is older by thousands of years than any surviving heresy that opposes it: and it has indeed been written down and examined and revisited many hundreds of times through the centuries. Heretical opinions are the opinions of men, and they come and go. The Church teaches what she has always taught, and her credo does not change no matter how the world changes. This is because the visible Church is merely an organ of an invisible, eternal and triumphant church.
New revelation can complete or fulfill old revelation, in much the same way that Christ completed and fulfilled the old law. But one way we know that a spirit is a lying spirit is if he testified to the contrary of what the Holy Spirit taught to our forefathers and teachers. God does not change from age to age, therefore what He says cannot contradict itself.
“No. I did not say ‘it did not matter in the slightest.’ I said that it was ambiguous, open to interpretation, and that I take the authoritative interpretation over heretical interpretation, and I gave my reasons for which. ”
Like I said that point has been cleared up and I said that “to me you appeared to claim” to indicate that the view of the situation had changed and that you hadn’t actually said that.
“Perhaps he was not condemning the oral nature of the law, but its falsehood. ”
If I am straining in bringing up the Jews then so is this.
“Control your weakness for humbug,”
The authority to decide the cases is exactly what I am questioning, not the cases themselves. If the authority was lost then any precedent becomes invalid as it was decided without the power of the Holy Ghost to guide and is therefore the doctrine of men and not of God. If the authority wasn’t lost then the precedent is, of course, valid and any questioning is, of course, as silly as you claim. If this isn’t what is being discussed then there is really nothing to discuss as this is what everything else rests on for both sides.
I am still trying to get an answer of exactly how you know that the authority does rest in the Catholic Church and was not lost. Your answer has been that it is because it holds what has always been popularly held (at least by the doctors). However the problem I have is that those doctors were philosophers that brought with them Greek philosophy which Paul had said viewed his teachings as foolishness and otherwise condemned. Therefore the fact that the Catholic Church has held its views since (at least in the case of the doctors) the second century does not impress me and seems to be an appeal to popularity.
” her credo does not change no matter how the world changes.”
I have gone over this and having read a decent amount of the official documents of the Church am completely convinced that the teachings of the Church change with the changes of the world. I pointed out quite a bit of what I saw sometime ago. The biggest one (and most well documented), in my opinion, is the changes to “extra ecclesiam nulla salus” which I would be happy to document in much greater detail starting with scriptures going through the councils up to Vatican II and then on to the CCC if there is any desire that I do so.
Sorry, what? When was the claim made the the universal Christian Church “lost” the authority to be Christian or to speak authoritatively about matters of the Christian faith? Was this a claim you brought up earlier, and I failed to read it? If so, I apologize.
Since I don’t know what possible basis one could have for making the claim, I am not prepared to defend it. You would have to specify what the argument is. As far as that goes, there is nothing to discuss. You are simply making gratuitous accusations I hardly understand. In logic, a gratuitous assertion can be gratuitously denied.
If you cannot tell the difference between an appeal to popularity and an appeal to the authoritative utterance of an authority, that is humbug, and I can be of no help to you. You will have to discuss the matter with someone else.
You put me in the same position as a man suddenly challenged to defend the findings of the US Supreme Court on the grounds that the Judiciary Branch of the federal government had suddenly lost the authority to interpret the Federal Law. Not being aware even that such a claim was being made, the charge simply seems arbitrary.
It also invalidates your own denomination, unless you claim that you come to some independent notion of God outside our teaching and our Bible, as the Mohammedans claim — a claim in their case easy enough to see is self impeaching, since it relies on a previous knowledge of God and His nature and economy of salvation from sources claimed to be corrupt. Mohammedanism does not add anything new to the Jewish and Christian doctrines it copies, it merely subtracts, simplifies, and substitutes the speculations of man for the revelations of God.
The idea that Christianity is invalid because it uses Greek Philosophy, when there is no Christianity anywhere on Earth that does not use at least some Greek Philosophy, (In the beginning was the “Word” i.e Logos) is nonsense: it is like calling Christian teaching invalid because it contains Jewish elements. St. John was speaking from a prospective of Greek Philosophy already. What Paul decries is the fanciful sophistry of his day, and again, not because it was philosophy, but because it was false.
The Second Century writers include people who learned at the feet of the students of the apostles themselves, and the persecutions by Roman authorities were not passed, and so to say that the Church adopted certain teaching because they were popular is hard to believe, and, even if true, would not prove the doctrine false, but only prove that the Church successfully taught a truth that became popular.
The Church still teaches that there is no salvation outside the Church. See the catechism paragraph 846 to 848. A clarification of a point not previously in dispute–which has happened often in Church history as doctrine as developed–is not a change.
This explains a lot. I can see that there has been a fatal misunderstanding of basic assumptions. I was under the impression that you were familiar with the basic premises of my denomination. Clearly this is not the case.
In Acts you have the Apostles filling out their Quorum to Twelve again and in the Epistles of Paul there is further evidence of this pattern continuing with Paul saying that he is an Apostle. As Ephesians (2:20, 4: 11-16) says, the foundation of the church was the apostles and when they were no longer around that is when the authority to lead the church and resolve doctrinal disputes was lost. Further no new leadership in the local units could be had as “No man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron” (Hebrews 5:4), if you remember Aaron was called through Moses and not of his own choosing or of the election by the children of Israel. With no Apostles or prophets to replace the leadership in the local areas of the church eventually all authority was lost.
“It also invalidates your own denomination, unless you claim that you come to some independent notion of God outside our teaching and our Bible, as the Mohammedans claim — a claim in their case easy enough to see is self impeaching, since it relies on a previous knowledge of God and His nature and economy of salvation from sources claimed to be corrupt.”
I thought I already brought this up with the “You do realize that I claim that the true knowledge of God was lost very quickly and was restored with a personal appearance of God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ in 1820?”.
The Bible is incomplete and has some errors in it but it is not corrupt like the Muslims think.
I am sorry if I wasn’t clear, I thought I was being so, but I can see that if I were Protestant your arguments would be pretty strong and if that is where you thought I was coming from then I must really have appeared to be speaking nonsense.
“Since I don’t know what possible basis one could have for making the claim, I am not prepared to defend it. You would have to specify what the argument is.”
In 1820 a boy of the age of fifteen (Joseph Smith) read James 1:5 (if any man lack wisdom let him ask of God…) and wished to know which Church to join being that he lived in the US where there were lots of denominations to choose from. So he went into the woods near his house and prayed asking God which church he should join and God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ came down and told him to join none of them for they were all wrong and that the professors were all corrupt, “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrine the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof”. This was the start of the restitution of all things as spoken of by Peter in Acts 3:21.
Joseph Smith was latter called as a Prophet and was given the Book of Mormon to translate which is the record of a remnant of the house of Israel that lived somewhere in the Americas from 600bc-400ad and were visited by Christ, as he said “Other sheep I have not of this fold”. This record had been prophesied by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 37: 15-28 and by John in Revelation 14:6.
New Apostles were called and when there is an opening in the Quorum of the Twelve new ones continue to be called, as was described in Acts. Likewise when Joseph Smith was martyred the most senior Apostle became the prophet and this has continued until today.
So Jesus, Himself, declared them to have no authority and had altered the doctrines and called new Apostles and gave them the needed authority. That is the basis for making the claim.
“The Church still teaches that there is no salvation outside the Church.”
In the section of the CCC you referenced :”Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation “
John 3:5 “ Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and [of] the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” See also Matthew 22:11-14.
So who is right? Jesus says that only those that have received the proper sacraments or ordinances can enter into the kingdom of God and the CCC says that there are those that enter that have not received them.
I mean no disrespect to you denomination, but where would I, an avowed atheist, have ever heard the Mormon theory of apostolic succession?
All Protestant groups have some sort of “primitive church” theory that says that while Jesus got it right, a later generation got it wrong. They differ as to which date to assign the sudden and unexpected disappearance of the Holy Spirit from the Church Christ founded, or why God broke His promises to the contrary.
I don’t think I have ever heard of someone saying that Saint John’s death (or ascension) was the end of the authority of the Church. So the Apostles were not given the ability or the authority to appoint their own successors, not even the people mentioned in holy scripture, Barbabas, Clement, saints who performed miracles and raised the dead, martyrs persecuted for the faith, no one? God’s plan was to allow nigh two millenniums of error and darkness to smother the true teaching until 1820?
The thousands of people baptized by Saint Paul himself on the very first day of Pentecost, when the fires of the Holy Spirit were still smoldering in his hair, all those people are damned to Hell and taught false faith? The concept is risible. Jesus is certainly the most incompetent rabbi Jewry ever produced, if his message did not even outlast 40 days.
But the Bible was not compiled in its present form, nor were even most of the Epistle written, until after the date you assign as the cut off date for Church authority. If so, it does no good to quote scripture at me, if you are quoting from a source you think was written by mere erring mortals for mere mortal purposes: to someone outside the Christian faith, our holy books have no authority, they are merely interesting repositories of oration or literature. I am not clear if you consider yourself outside the Christian faith, or if you consider everyone but Christ and Joseph Smith to be heretics, or what your stance is.
I hope it does not offend you if I use the word heretic to refer to you and yours. While the word has an unpleasing sound, it is technically correct. The heresy involved is Montanism, which is the doctrine that private revelation overrules public revelation.
To answer your question: the phrase “born of water and of the Spirit” and the phrase “nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience, etc.” refer to the same object. It is meaningless to say the same thing in two different ways and then ask which is right.
The Paulain Epistles were written by Paul who was an Apostle, so I don’t understand the comment that they weren’t. The Holy Ghost is able to direct people regardless of anything else so while the authority to preform ordinances and receive revelation was lost people were not stopped from following the gospel as much as they could. Saint Paul wasn’t there on the first day of Pentecost, did you mean Peter?
The plan for the succession was that the Apostles continue to call new Apostles, which they did until they no longer could. John was the end of the authority, he didn’t die though and I don’t know at what time he left.
The holy books of the Bible are exactly what they say they are and thus have all the authority they need. We already covered this part?
Moses had private revelation that overruled what was known publicly. Jesus had private revelation that overruled what was known publicly. Peter had private revelation that overruled what was known publicly. How are any of those any different then what is claimed of Joseph Smith (except for Jesus who was the Son of God)?
How is “seek God with a sincere heart” the same thing as being baptized in water?
My apologies. I read your words in haste, and thought you excluded Saint Paul from the Twelve.
“The holy books of the Bible are exactly what they say they are and thus have all the authority they need. We already covered this part?”
Forgive me, but I thought my answer was definitive and unanswerable. The holy books of the Bible were made holy by the Church and by no one else. You would not even know they existed if we had not written them, gathered them, selected and compiled them, and imprinted them with the divine authority that comes from God Almighty through his consecrated episcopal hierarchy. The Bible would not be “THE BIBLE” were it not for the Church that decreed it to be so.
To claim the Bible has a superior, or separate, or older, or more fundamental authority than the teaching authority who sanctified it, put it together, and used it to teach the only thing any one knows about it is a logical contradiction: it supposes the derivative authority supersedes the author, from whom the authorization comes.
Saint John was not seen on Earth after AD 97 or so. The four Gospels were not recognized as the canonical four until about AD 110 to 150; the final form of the New Testament, winning the agreement of the Churches in North Africa and the East, did not take place with definitive rigor until the councils at Hippo & Carthage, in 393; Third of Carthage in 397; Carthage in 419.
That is several centuries after your cut off point for when the Church was officially the Church.
If your version of the Bible includes, for example, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apocalypse of Saint John, but excludes the Apocalypse of Saint Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Didache, then you are using the Bible the Catholic Church, in the authority and the name of that Church, and with no other authority, decreed to be in the Bible. Therefore, whether you know it or not, you recognize the authority and the divine inspiration of the saints and sages and Church councils who made the decision, and the Archbishop of Rome who chaired those councils, and by whose authority they were held.
Your version of the Primitive Church myth would make more sense if you moved the date of the Fall of the Church from God’s favor to a point after you are relying on that Church to tell you which writings belong in the Word of God and which writings are apocryphal.
Most people pick the reign of Constantine. That at least has an atmosphere of feasibility, particularly among historically illiterate modern Americans innately suspicious of Established Churches.
“Moses had private revelation that overruled what was known publicly. Jesus had private revelation that overruled what was known publicly. Peter had private revelation that overruled what was known publicly.”
I am not sure how to answer these statements, aside from saying they are false. Moses did not contradict what God told Abraham, and announce that the land promised the Chosen People had been switched to Ethiopia or something. Jesus fulfilled rather than contradicted the scriptures, not to mention quoting them: there is a more extensive body of literature than I can name which attempts to make the case that his Advent fulfilled the Jewish prophecy and completed what the Old Law intimated.
“How is “seek God with a sincere heart” the same thing as being baptized in water?”
It is called a baptism of desire. You are also reading the words oddly: a man lead by his native desire who was visited by Grace and baptized directed by the Holy Spirit — let us say, for example, Abraham — would be described by both phrases, one which mentions the motive, and the other which mentions the means, of salvation.
You are straining so hard to find a contradiction, but the two phrases are talking about different aspects of one thing. If you said, “No one should get married unless he falls in love” and “no one is married unless a priest witnesses their vows” I demanded of you how a priest hearing vows is “the same thing” as falling in love, and then I claimed the two sentences are teaching two different and mutually exclusive things — in such a case, how would you answer me?
oh, and I don’t mind being called a heretic as from anyone that believes in the creeds of mainstream Christianity, I am. I consider all other Christian sects to lack the authority necessary to perform the saving sacraments and also consider them to not have a full knowledge of the truth.
You have a kind heart. Most men these days would only notice the emotional connotation of the word, not the definition. The word heretic comes from the root meaning ‘opinion’ I believe.
“I consider all other Christian sects to lack the authority necessary to perform the saving sacraments and also consider them to not have a full knowledge of the truth.”
Naturally so. All heretics who depart from the Church must invent some reason to keep part of what we have taught them and justify their inventions. Usually is it by some form or another of the ‘Primitive Church’ myth.
When I converted to Christianity, logic told me that there was no such thing as a mere Christian or a nondenominational Christian, so that same reason why there is no such thing as a primate who is not a member of one species or another. With considerable exasperation and trepidation, I began winding my way through what I thought would be a labyrinth of claims and counterclaims and countercounterclaims of arguments centuries old, or millenniums.
Several things simplified the process for me. I assumed that the Early Church Fathers, who held the Apostles in their living memory, or the men who learned at the feet of the Apostles, may know a bit more about what the Apostles taught and said and did than enthusiasts from a different culture speaking a different language and prompted by ideas found only in their own times would know.
The second assumption was that the Apostles were correctly instructed by Christ and by the Holy Spirit. No man who doubts this can rightly call himself a Christian. The only thing we know about Christ is what the Apostles and their disciples taught. If they had it wrong, logically, no one can get it right.
I found to my surprise that even a cursory inspection of their writings showed plainly that the Early Fathers were Catholic, or, if you prefer, Orthodox.
Everything said to be an accretion or an excrescence or a corruption, such as the Real Presence or the adoration of Mary, was there. They had an episcopal structure from the get-go, following their Jewish fathers. The supremacy of Peter, and of the Archibishopric of Rome, was also clear enough, at least in seedling form. And so on.
Without the myth of the Primitive Church, the whole structure of speculation of Protestant heresy — sorry to use so harsh a word, but again, it is technically accurate — collapses. There is no Primitive Church to which the later heresiarch can logically claim to be making his return to, except the Catholic Church. (I include the Orthodox, who are schismatic, but not different in doctrine.)
Now, I do not think I have ever met the argument that pushes the Primitive Church back to the point you do, that upon the hour Saint John the Apostle died (or ascended), suddenly everything the Apostles taught and said, the sacraments they wrought and the epistles they wrote, were robbed of their “mana” or divine force. The argument as the value of being bold, I will grant you that.
But it also means that every saint and martyr who loved Christ and accepted Him, suffered baptism, communion, and even martyrdom, all died in vain. Between AD 70 and 1820, upper heaven contained exactly twelve men, until the death of your Prophet Smith. Otherwise, it is empty.
That does not seem to be in accord with the promises made by Christ, some of which, if you recall, are quite extraordinary, including that he would send the Paraclete to instruct us, which all Christians (Protestant, Copt, and Nestorian alike) believe happened at Pentecost.
I claimed the Bible does not teach ex nihilo and seems to support my view
This is why the Bible teaches that no scripture is a matter of personal interpretation.
There is also my further experience in asking God about the subject and receiving an answer through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Did you test this spirit to see if it was from God? The Bible tells you to.
I am still trying to get an answer of exactly how you know that the authority does rest in the Catholic Church and was not lost.
Because the books of the Bible, if not inspired, are nevertheless remarkably close to the events as history. And they record a being of most spectacular abilities, whose abilities are further substantiated by the ability of his followers to do remarkably things, following him.
And this being promised us that it would not be lost. That he would remain with us always and guide us into the truth. (Which, of course, is the evidence that these books are inspired and not merely historical: we have been guided into all truth.)
As a mere historical document they would be strong evidence, but you, who claim to regard them as inspired, reject them.
(As for a claim that it is not the Catholic Church, it is blatantly obvious throughout history that the Catholic Church is the only one with continuity to the early church. Men do not light a lamp and stick it under a bushel; they put it up a stand so to give light to the whole house.)
The holy books of the Bible are exactly what they say they are and thus have all the authority they need.
What do they say they are? Many of them do not even say they are inspired or holy.
The Bible is incomplete and has some errors in it but it is not corrupt like the Muslims think.
Then throw it out the window. It’s not authorative if it has errors.
I also note that you rejected with high dudgeon John Wright’s statement that it was incomplete, claiming it was all the authority that was needed. Which do you hold to be correct?
As Ephesians (2:20, 4: 11-16) says, the foundation of the church was the apostles and when they were no longer around that is when the authority to lead the church and resolve doctrinal disputes was lost.
Except that the passages you speak of merely declare that the apostles were the foundation. It says nothing about the loss of anything with them. It does not even include what the Catholic Church holds, that public revelation ended with their death.
Further no new leadership in the local units could be had as “No man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron” (Hebrews 5:4), if you remember Aaron was called through Moses and not of his own choosing or of the election by the children of Israel. With no Apostles or prophets to replace the leadership in the local areas of the church eventually all authority was lost.
Only if you know that they didn’t replace the leadership. But we know for a fact that they did. Paul instructs that it be done: “And what you heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will have the ability to teach others as well.”
I did not make the claim that it is was the whole truth, just that it is in fact the truth and that more weight should be given to those that have seen God and written about it then those that have only reasoned about God without revelation.
Except that we were promised that the Holy Spirit would guide us to all truth.
But I am not a Protestant but believe in the restoration of all things as prophesied by the ancient Apostles.
You say that as if it were a contradiction. . . .
But, moot point. The ancient Apostles prophesied that “the faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones.” Therefore, you believe in the restoration of the belief that no subsequent revelations are conceivably necessary.
I (and all true Catholics) also regard the writings of the Early Church Fathers as authoritative
That’s a bit high. They are strong evidence for what has been taught always, everywhere, and by everyone, but they are not authoritative. St. Ignatius of Antioch cited The Shepherd of Hermas as scripture, and St. Augustine doubted whether Revelation was — they were not heretics because the doctrine had not been defined, but they weren’t right, either.
That depends on your definition of authoritative. Saying something is what has been taught always, everywhere, by everyone is a claim of authority.
In any case, I said ‘authoritative’ not ‘sacred writ’ nor ‘infallible.’ The Christian who dismisses the writings of the Early Church Fathers as being nothing of particular consequence say those writings are not authoritative. (I have a Protestant friend who asked me not to read the Antenicene Fathers on the grounds that they were misleading, i.e. she felt she had a clearer understanding of Christianity than the men who learned at the feet of the Apostles of Christ Himself.)
To the contrary, like the early Supreme Court cases (as Marbury v Madison) the early cases have more authority to interpret the Constitution than the late ones, considering the the writers of the Constitution were still alive at that time, and shared a culture and language and outlook with the early justices, reading the same books, and having the same outlook — something later readers can only achieve by a sustained effort of imagination.
The early court cases have the weight of authority behind them. Even a case that is later rejected, as the Dred Scott decision, or the Shepherd of Hermas, still cannot be dismissed as having no weight.
If God has revealed Himself then that revelation should trump any conjecture, council, tradition, or the wisdom of men or of this world for it would be the truth direct from the source of all truth.
Big if there.
Assuming you reject the Gospel of Judas, etc.
The things that of itself claims to be from God says that if we ask God then we will receive if this is true then we may indeed ask God if the books in the Bible are true and accurate accounts of revelations.
What things are these, and how do you know they are from God?
Replying to everything (unless I missed something) from you here.
“This is why the Bible teaches that no scripture is a matter of personal interpretation.”
Yes, there is needed revelation from God by way of an Apostle or Prophet to say what is the correct interpretation.
“Did you test this spirit to see if it was from God? The Bible tells you to.”
To see if it confesses that Jesus is the Christ? Yes, it does.
“And this being promised us that it would not be lost. That he would remain with us always and guide us into the truth. (Which, of course, is the evidence that these books are inspired and not merely historical: we have been guided into all truth.)
As a mere historical document they would be strong evidence, but you, who claim to regard them as inspired, reject them.”
The Spirit would remain with the Apostles always is what was promised, not that the Church would remain always on the Earth. Also, since the Spirit does testify of truth it did remain on the Earth always testify of the the truth that people had and if listened to instead of supressed will lead one to the truth.
“(As for a claim that it is not the Catholic Church, it is blatantly obvious throughout history that the Catholic Church is the only one with continuity to the early church. Men do not light a lamp and stick it under a bushel; they put it up a stand so to give light to the whole house.)”
Why not Orthodox or one of the few other groups that also claim to have continuity with the early church?
” What do they say they are? Many of them do not even say they are inspired or holy.”
For instance, the Gospels claim to be a record of the life and teachings of Jesus with Matthew being from Matthew the Apostle and written with a somewhat Jewish perspective, Mark being from one of the early church leaders as mentioned in Acts (by Luke), Luke being a companion of Paul that attempted in Luke and Acts to document from eyewitness accounts and other primary documents what had happened, and John being written latter by the Apostle John to the Church to counter many of the false gospels that were in circulation and complete the synoptics, being his testimony of what had happened. The Paulinine Espistles claim to be the writtings of Paul to the various people to settle disputes that had arisen and address other matters. And so on. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, and Esther are primarily historical in nature but do record some other things as well. Do I need to continue?
“Then throw it out the window. It’s not authorative if it has errors.”
Ok, so I should claim it is not authorative if there are differences in the numbering of the children of Israel at various times by different books of the Bible? Scribal errors or Typographical errors don’t detract from the over all authority of the books in the Bible.
” I also note that you rejected with high dudgeon John Wright’s statement that it was incomplete, claiming it was all the authority that was needed. Which do you hold to be correct?”
It has all the authority it needs but is not a complete record of Gods dealings with His people or of the revelations that He has given.
“Except that the passages you speak of merely declare that the apostles were the foundation. It says nothing about the loss of anything with them. It does not even include what the Catholic Church holds, that public revelation ended with their death.”
Losing the foundation of a building is a fairly good way of destroying a building.
” Only if you know that they didn’t replace the leadership. But we know for a fact that they did. Paul instructs that it be done: “And what you heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will have the ability to teach others as well.””
Timothy was given the authority to appoint local leadership of the Church but was not given authority to appoint others to the same position that he held. You would have to understand more about the sturture of the church.
” Except that we were promised that the Holy Spirit would guide us to all truth.”
Again if listened to it will guide the individual to all truth.
” You say that as if it were a contradiction. . . .”
It is. Protestants do not claim that there has been a restoration of authority but that the authority continued to exist and the teachings of the church needed to be reformed back to what they originally were.
” But, moot point. The ancient Apostles prophesied that “the faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones.” Therefore, you believe in the restoration of the belief that no subsequent revelations are conceivably necessary.”
And you claim that I take scriptures out of context… The basics of the faith was given and indeed has been given many times in Earths history and has likewise (as Jude is talking about in the next verse) been corrupted many times. Everytime that a person prays and recieves and answer to a prayer that is personal revlation. Everytime there was a council revelation should have been sought as God is a living God and has called Prophets in all ages to deliver His message, He is unchanging and so will not change that pattern.
“Big if there.”
Why? Can God not reveal Himself and does He not in part do so everytime a person recieves and answer to a prayer?
“What things are these, and how do you know they are from God?”
Many of the books of the Bible claim to contain revelations from God and records of God’s dealings with his people. Also, the Book of Mormon and other scripture. How to know is something that I thought I laid out pretty well, you pray and ask God if it is from Him.
How do you purpose to know they are from God?
Yes, there is needed revelation from God by way of an Apostle or Prophet to say what is the correct interpretation.
The Bible doesn’t say that. What it says is that no scripture is a matter of personal interpretation.
The Bible also says that “Surely the Lord God will do nothing but He reveal His secret to His servants the prophets.” “Where there is no vision the people perish” “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men shall see visions”.
Also, God is an unchangeable God and in the past has many times called prophets (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and etc. including John the Baptist, Peter, and others as in Acts and Ephesians). Why is this patterned changed? Did God change?
If God is unchanging and the gospel is unchanging then why would God not reveal His plan and His Son to all the ancient prophets just as He did in Christs time and just I know He continues to do today? Does God not know all things and the end from the beginning?
Is God a living God yet does nothing as He has no prophets and there is no need for prophecy?
Why was prophecy not needed for any of the Church councils? It was had at the one in Jerusalem so why not afterwards?
The early Apostles and Jesus interpreted the scriptures very different than the Jewish church had, yet because of their calling (and who Jesus was) their interpretation was correct.
Why is this patterned changed? Did God change?
We changed. In many ways. For instance, we now have the baptism of Christ, which is superior to the baptisms that went before, such as that of John the Baptist — indeed so superior that all those who knew only the baptism of John were rebaptized.
If God is unchanging and the gospel is unchanging then why would God not reveal His plan and His Son to all the ancient prophets just as He did in Christs time and just I know He continues to do today?
First question: whether He did reveal His plan to all the ancient prophets?
“For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it”
“Amen, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.”
“the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past. But now it has been manifested to his holy ones,”
Given that God did not reveal His plan to the prophets, or even to anyone in the earlier ages, obviously something changed. Since He revealed it “once for all” His inspiration in the present day is not for public revelation.
All the prophets since the world began had the plan of God revealed to them and rejoiced. Those before Christ longed and desired to see His day when they would be set at liberty from sin and death but did not, see Hebrews 11 particularly 13 and 26. Also, just for instance, Isaiah 53, Acts 7:52, and Revelation 13:8.
The Spirit would remain with the Apostles always is what was promised, not that the Church would remain always on the Earth.
“Even to the end of the world”? That that means the Apostles is impossible.
So a private meeting in a mountain with Jesus and the Twelve where He says He will be with them even unto the end of the world is not referring to the Twelve but to the entire Church?
Perhaps you should look at even the rest of that verse instead of taking small pieces of a verse out of context and twisting the meaning of that piece to fit your own desires.
Leaving aside the matter that no, it doesn’t say only the Twelve were with Him — that the world did not end with the death of John the Apostle is sufficient evidence that He spoke to them in their character as the Church, not in their individual capacities.
“Your own desire” — when you deny He was with anyone to the end of the world, when you declare He bungled His own church and let it fall to ruin, and lie in ruin for centuries, when you deny many explicit promises that He would not let this happen — perhaps you would be wise to avoid the ad hominem.
John the Apostle never did die.
“John the Apostle never did die.”
So the tradition of the apostolic and catholic Church teaches. This information appears nowhere in scripture. Once again, the heterodox pay the orthodox the compliment of agreeing with the teachings of their own forefathers.
Matthew 28:16-20 is the part in question is it not? It clearly says “Then the eleven disciples..”.
“when you deny He was with anyone to the end of the world” – John is not dead.
“when you declare He bungled His own church and let it fall to ruin,” – bungled it? He set it up perfectly it was man that “transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.” (Isaiah 24:5).
“when you deny many explicit promises that He would not let this happen —” – I believe that is part of what we have been discussing here is what were those promises exactly, to who were they given, and why they don’t mean what you think they do.
“when you declare He bungled His own church and let it fall to ruin,” – bungled it? He set it up perfectly it was man that “transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.” (Isaiah 24:5).
Bungled it. Your quote proves nothing except that people have sinned — unless you claim that the Mormons are no better off than anyone else.
And if God can not keep people’s sins from letting His Church fall to ruin, He would not have promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it, as you teach they did.
Matthew 16: 13-20 is the part in question here. In it Christ asks Peter who Christ is. Peter answers correctly and Christ says “for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven, and I say unto thee, that thou are Peter (little rock) and upon this rock (big rock) I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” and then promises Peter the sealing power of the priesthood.
Cross reference that with Psalms 118:21-23, Isaiah 28:16, 1 Peter 2:5-6, Acts 4:11, 1 Cor. 10:4 and to grasp more fully the subject Gen 49:24, Deut 32:4, 15, 1 Sam 2:2, 2 Sam 22:2, 2 Sam 23:3, Ps 18:2, 18:31, and 18:46. There is also a few more in Isaiah. Clearly Peter is not the one being talked about as the rock on which the church is built but Christ is referring to the Revelation of Christ by God, the Father.
The Gates of Hell were not able to keep Christ as he rose from the dead and overcame death and hell. As such Christ was given the keys of such and allowed Peter the sealing power to allow all to overcome the effects of death and hell by performing the ordinances for the dead. The church literally has the power, through the Rock of Christ, to release the spirits of the dead by way of baptisms for the dead and the preaching of the apostles and others in the spirit world (see Clement of Alexandria and/or 1 Peter 3:18-19 and 4:6). Though the authority on earth was lost the authority to preach to the dead was not, for Christ had risen from the dead.
Those that build upon the Rock that is in Christ by way of revelation will not be prevailed against by anything though they will be tried and tested in all things. “That the trail of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ: Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory” The prophets of old also knew of this as Peter testifies in 1 Peter 1:10-12. “Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
See also 1 Peter 4:11.
I am really not sure how much of all of that to explain see Jacob chapters 4-6 if you are interested in having some explanation on the subject.
Again if listened to it will guide the individual to all truth.
You contradict yourself. You claim you need an Apostle or Prophet for that, and now you claim you don’t.
No, I didn’t contradict myself, you just keep confusing the church as a whole with an individual person. The church needs a prophet to guide it, the individual can follow the Holy Ghost (which is available to everyone in some extent) to truth and can receive individual revelations for themselves.
Each individual can infalliably know the right interpretation, but the whole bunch of them will bungle it? That’s impossible.
Besides, the history of individual interpretation is sufficient to know that the claim of personal interpretation is false — and in that the Bible is quite right.
There were those that at temple after Jesus was born rejoiced to have seen their Lord and Savior while the Jewish church as a whole did not ever know Jesus to be such. Interpretation has nothing to do with it but revelation does.
Is there a particular reason why you engage in this sort of bait-and-switch? Why are you dragging in a distinction between revelation and inspiration to deny that if each part of the Body can figure out the proper meaning, the entire Body, being composed of them, can do so?
One can not merely read the scriptures or anything of the sort to figure out things but needs revelation from God, that is what I meant.
If each part of the Body of the church were to seek the will of God then the whole Body would indeed figure out the proper meaning. Each part does not in actuality do so but instead trusts tradition, their own philosophies, and whatever else and so while every piece that does the will of God is able to know of the truth there are many that say Lord, Lord and don’t have a clue what they are talking about.
Is the concept that each persons salvation is an individual affair that is a separate issue entirely from if there is an authorized organization of the church on the earth so hard to understand?
And you claim that I take scriptures out of context…
Where?
The basics of the faith was given and indeed has been given many times in Earths history and has likewise (as Jude is talking about in the next verse) been corrupted many times.
It does not say “many times” — it says “once for all.”
Furthermore, it does not say that it was corrupted. It said that “some intruders” were perverting the grace of God — not the universal fall from grace that Mormonism demands in direct contradiction of the Bible.
“where?”
I have not gone over all the exchanges, perhaps you, Mary, have not claimed that. However, it has been by many others.
Timothy was given the authority to appoint local leadership of the Church but was not given authority to appoint others to the same position that he held. You would have to understand more about the sturture of the church.
On what grounds do you make this assertion?
“Except that the passages you speak of merely declare that the apostles were the foundation. It says nothing about the loss of anything with them. It does not even include what the Catholic Church holds, that public revelation ended with their death.”
Losing the foundation of a building is a fairly good way of destroying a building.
Then we are in big trouble.
“According to the grace of God given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building upon it. But each one must be careful how he builds upon it, for no one can lay a foundation other than the one that is there, namely, Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw, the work of each will come to light, for the Day will disclose it. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire (itself) will test the quality of each one’s work. If the work stands that someone built upon the foundation, that person will receive a wage. But if someone’s work is burned up, that one will suffer loss; the person will be saved, but only as through fire.”
But Jesus is lost, too. He is not here, any more than the Apostles are. Indeed, Paul is in big trouble, too, since Jesus was lost before his conversion.
Or perhaps your interpretation of the metaphor is demonstrating why personal interpretation is forbidden.
Jesus isn’t here? Jesus is lost? What religion do you belong to that thinks that Jesus is gone? Did He die again and so we are yet in our sins?
Paul saw Jesus and was thus converted.
Jesus is Risen and as such is able to reveal Himself as He wills. He is the Living Christ, not the dead or invisible but living, and because He lives so shall we.
And you evade the point entirely. . . . I assume this means that you agree that the terrestial life of someone is not necessary for them to act as a foundation?
Perhaps I am misunderstanding the point that you are trying to make. Please explain in more detail.
I don’t see how. I can’t explain “1+1=2″, either. I’ve already told that your assertions about what is needed for us to have a foundation obviously contradict each other.
Clearly I am not understanding what you are trying to say. If you are saying I am contradicting something then you need to explain it because I am not seeing it. Moses and Elijah also did not die if that helps you in doing so.
Good post, but this part kind of undercuts your earlier point:
“…no doubt hold religion to be barbaric and ignorant and contemptible, a disturber of the peace of civilization…”
Since you just described the postchristian as loving barbarism, at least in ‘noble savage’ form. I’m guessing here you mean to use it in ‘Lindisfarne’ form.
Only if you assume they are consistent.
This materialist does not say that.
A materialist, by definition, doesn’t say anything……
This materialist does not even, because of the movement of his atoms, make the mouth-noises that, if they came from a Real Human ™, would be interpreted as having the meaning of the sentence I quoted.
“If there is a modern fantasy story where the emperor is worshipped with divine honors, or the god-king thinks he is a god, and this is not portrayed as overweening pride akin to madness, I am unaware of it.”
I think Dune did a pretty good job with this, and some other fantasies which take near or far Eastern cultures (like the Chung Kuo series) as their starting point often do a better job than those using the West.. Still, it’s like what Tolstoy said of families – all the ones in which it is not portrayed as pride are different, and the others, in which it is pride akin to madness, are the same, no doubt because they are drinking from the same cultural backwash.
I believe the Forgotten Realms setting has several gods who were once human, and it is canonically possible for sufficiently-powerful characters to become literally divine. But I have the impression (it is a while since I read any of these books, and no doubt they have moved on in the interval) that there are no god-kings, as such – no gods whose chief function is to rule a human realm. Rather there are gods of magic, death, farming, and so on.
As a once hardcore FR DnDer, even at my nerdiest, there was something that always struck me as …fake about all the DnD gods. Yes, I know by very definition they are fake, but I think you know what I mean. None of them had any real meat to them as would be found in stories of Odin, Zeus, etc.
But yes, you are correct, there were several in the FR pantheon that had once been mortal and were raised to godhood.
That is presumably because most of the gods, the ones that did not ascend from humanity, were created ex nihilo by Ao at the beginning of time; naturally they have no backstory. Odin, of course, is loosely based on some very successful tribal chieftain who led the folk-migration to Scandinavia from somewhere in the Ukraine. So there is a core of stories, starting with the war with the Vanir (which, reading between the lines, was not in fact a draw as the Aesir-centered Norse myths would have you believe) around which other stories could accrete. Similarly if you look at Freya, the very earliest mentions of her have her living in a large farm (estate? minor kingdom?) somewhere in southern Sweden, and the modern title ‘Frue’ (what is translated into English as ‘Mrs’) is explicitly explained as being derived from her name. And, of course, it would be quite unsurprising to learn that many stories now told of St Olav, in particular those where he fights trolls, were first told of Thor.
Getting back to the Forgotten Realms, the old (pre-Time-of-Troubles) gods have no such backing in the made-up history of the Realms. Presumably it would be possible to tell stories of the new Mystra and of Kelemvor from their days as mortals, but then again they took over portfolios (magic, death) with an established priesthood and no tradition of such storytelling. Indeed, the religions have always been the weakest part of any D&D setting – you get the combat applications, but almost no sense of how these demonstrably powerful gods fit into daily life. Imagine having a village priest who can reliably pray over the sick or injured and have the wounds close and the fever-struck rise from their beds! Not to mention the applications of “Create food and water”, a first-level (!!) priest spell, to famine-stricken areas. You would think these people would be almost fanatically religious. But no, you get a few snake cults and that’s it.
Actually the same could be said of arcane magic; again, the rulebooks and novels concentrate on the combat applications. But there at least the real-world counterpart is, presumably, things like alchemy and natural philosophy, occupations for the wealthy elite; not religion that is woven into the lives of the poorest peasants.
“you get the combat applications, but almost no sense of how these demonstrably powerful gods fit into daily life.”
- BAM! That’s it right there. In all the old stories of the REAL world, pagan and Christian alike, religion and the gods were woven into pretty much everything. They may not have been the subject of the story, perhaps not even DIRECTLY mentioned, but they were always there, like the very air breathed by the characters.
DND in general always lacked that quality, which now that I think about it, is what made it feel forced.
Why pick on D&D? Fantasy religions are commonly bad. Give me a second to dig. . .
Ah, here’s my rant.
I pick on D&D for the same reason I pick on STAR WARS: because I love it.
All fantasy is lovable, and most of it worthy of abuse in this arena.
As I recall, the Books of Swords trilogy by Saberhagen had somewhat of the aspects of pagan religion that you lament the lack of – no surprise since he’s basically cribbing off of existing pagan religions anyway. Certainly people in that story prayed to whichever god they wanted help from at the time, and there were a couple places as well where they ran into some shrine to who-knows-what local god, with offerings left there because hey, who doesn’t want to be on the good side of whatever god’s shrine this is. The gods do seem in that tale to be somewhat of the air they breathe, at least until humans start forgetting the gods in their mad quests for the god-forged Swords.
‘Course, he went back and revealed the origin of the gods in later installments in that universe, which I really wished he hadn’t. It was utter nonsense. Much better to forget that he ever wrote anything in that universe after that series, although the eight-book series after the trilogy has books of decent worth including the only example I’ve read of a full-fledged mystery novel in a fantasy universe.
I read his Face of Apollo. What religion it showed worked pretty well.
Then, I winced at the potatoes in ancient Greece, and then at the man named God. Then at the end the oracle/computer is printing out in ALL-CAPS excerpts from the Book of Wisdom and I go “Whoot!” Except that the clues were still clunky, even knowing they were clues.
Many things by Brandon Sanderson have this. Mistborn has the God-King that is evil (turns out, only sort of evil) as well as the actual gods that come from mortals.
I respectfully disagree. To my recollection, in DUNE, neither the Padishah Emperor nor the Fremen Messiah who overthrew him, were said to be divine beings after the fashion of Roman Emperors. A prophet is not a god.
I was referring to Leto Atreides II, the titular character of God Emperor of Dune, incidentally my favorite of the Dune sequels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_emperor_of_dune
I should have said the Dune series instead of just Dune in my original post, sorry.
The mistake is mine, in part because I never read the whole series. I gave up after LEPERS OF DUNE MEET GODZILLA, or somewhere around there.
You didn’t miss much after the first Dune book. I read all of them, even the one that Herbert had outlined but died before writing but his son and his friend filled out two books with. At some point, whatever message or deeper meanings he was trying to convey became entirely incomprehensible to anything outside the universe he’d created. Not to mention that almost nobody ever actually died for real. The series ended with everybody important who’d ever lived in the series being brought back to life. Also, something something robots.
I never read his son’s works, but there was a lot of dreck in the series. Also, this was in high school, and I was even able to stomach Robert Jordan at the time, so there’s no telling if I’d like any of them except Dune (which I have re-read since) now.
“Postchristianity denounces self control as impossible, unhealthy, sinister, repressive, and the convictions of self control, like all convictions, are a type of coercion unacceptable in civilization.”
This is perhaps a reductio ad essentiam rather than a reductio ad absurdum, but it is a reductio and thus perhaps not quite fair.
I know no “post-Christians” at all who consider all types or degrees of self-control bad or unhealthy. The vast majority of them still deplore dishonest infidelity, failure to control addictions, loss of control leading to violence, abuse of women by men or children by adults, theft of resources from the needy, and so on; attitudes learned from Christian heritage and still quite fiercely upheld (albeit often riddled through with caveats designed to render permissible individual particular peccadilloes, like the desire to thwart political opponents by calling their property “theft” and thus justifying its destruction, or the promulgation of the concept of the “open” relationship being acceptable as long as everyone is “honest”).
Their tragedy is that to some degree they are victims of Christianity’s own success. They believe the degree of self-control insisted upon by Christian doctrine to be, for lack of a better word, overkill; that it can be relaxed in many small ways and many small places that will make life much more pleasant and pleasurable for most without incurring any significant social cost. And they believe this for two reasons: (1) the tremendous “levelling of the playing field” that previous stricter social virtue created makes them think that people will naturally stay at that level of civilization without the additional reinforcement; and (2) the egregious moral failures of some of Christianity’s most public advocates and representatives, which, while they are neither unfair nor untrue denunciations, have been disproportionately overpublicized to such a degree that people now reflexively associate Christianity with its failures and costs rather than its successes and benefits.
In other words, they don’t believe in spiritual entropy; they do not recognize, or really believe even if they do make noises in that direction, that a human being who stops constantly fighting to do better must inevitably backslide for the worse. They think it is possible to achieve, and maintain indefinitely, a state of Good Enough, and that that state is Good Enough. In Jeffersonian terms, they have forgotten that the tree of liberty must be regularly watered with the blood of patriots; in modern medical terms, they are the parents who distrust all vaccines because they’ve associated them only with supposed neural damage, no longer believing them necessary sheerly because of how successful they’ve been. They may recognize the slippery slopes, but most honestly believe we’ll always be able to brake hard enough to stop at the right place before hitting bottom.
Self-control is easy to recommend to people who’ve lived with none of it. It’s much harder to recommend to people who appreciate its worth, but wish its bar wasn’t set quite so high. The healthy don’t fear the physician, and the truly sick positively embrace Him; it’s only those hoping their complaint is minor enough to ignore who can comprehensibly fear that the cure may be worse than the disease.
“I know no “post-Christians” at all who consider all types or degrees of self-control bad or unhealthy.”
Nor do I. We are not dealing with a philosophy in this case. Philosophies seek some degree of logic or internal consistency. We are dealing with an attitude, an emotional and unquestioned assumption.
The postchristian who would regard it as vile and absurd criminal blasphemy to ask a man inclined toward homosexual erotic desires to control those desires would not regard it as unusual to ask, or even to insist, a racist to control his natural and native desire to prefer his own tribe and race above foreign tribes and races.
But the statement in general is still true that when a Christian or pagan speaks of duty or honor or self control or chastity, the postchristian rarely will take any of those ideas seriously — even if the selfsame postchristian holds it to be a point of honor, requiring immense self control, to abide by a duty to give each man his civil rights, or defend hateful speech in the name of the First Amendment.
The postchristian tends not to use words like honor and duty; they speak instead of rights itself, and take for granted that their neighbors will shoulder whatever burdens duty and honor demand to protect and defend that right. The demand for the toleration of others is an absolute – some postchristians acknowledge limitations (for example, they will allow that the First Amendment does not protect a right to distribute child pornography to minors) but philosophically those limitations are easy to defend or explain in their world view.
Of course, sooner or later someone had to post this quote, anent this topic:
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” — Robert E. Howard, “The Tower of the Elephant”
I yield to no man in my appreciation of civilization’s benefits, but I’d be lying if I claimed there was no barbarian in my breast who has, from time to time, dearly wanted to brain people for some of the vilenesses they’ve uttered.
If our public magistrates are virtuous, they will do the braining for us, accompanied by all the dignity and terror of the law.
Kingsley Amis — “There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.”
That’s my answer.
Upon my linking this article on Facebook, one friend (currently a graduate student in history) expressed disgust at the “broad, sweeping generalizations” contained within your work, exemplified in this article by your lumping all the various civilizations in the world into three categories.
“Three kinds of civilization, pagan, Christian and post-Christian? Really? Does that mean he’s lumping, say, Confucian China with the Aztec Empire with ancient Greece? Tsarist Russia with Puritan New England? And where does Islam (obviously not Christian, and equally obviously not pagan) fit in?”
Apart from my curiosity as to where exactly Islamic civilizations DO fit in, I notice that in your musings you do have a tendency to speak in sweeping, general claims. A hasty individual might read your writings where you lump many disparate things together under a single heading, as your lumping many various civilizations under the heading “pagan” and so on, or your lumping of the many and contradictory viewpoints into that which you call “Leftism,” and this hasty individual might conclude that you do so out of sheer ignorance of the striking and meaningful differences between the objects you lump together. Whereas a slothful and complacent individual such as myself might assume that obviously you were only making the claim that they were similar in a few important ways, and you are able to do this by means of your having studied them lots.
So I ask – Upon what do you found the general claims that permeate your musings? Have you written any articles in which you provide ground-up justification for any general claim in particular? (I, not having read the entirety of your blog, would not know.)
Mohammedanism is a Christian heresy. Islam shares the egalitarianism, the hope for paradise, the lack of blood sacrifice, and the monotheism with its corresponding unified metaphysics as the Christian worldview. It has a tendency toward legalism, as Judaism does.
I take it your friend did not read the qualifications with which I headed the article. I have long since fallen out of the habit of adding such qualifications, since it is perfectly clear that no one reads them or believes I mean them. Allow me to repeat myself:
Within each of these three broad categories there are, of course, countless local variations, schools of thought, cults and countercultures, movements and ideologies too numerous to mention. To complicate matters, certain periods of history, such as the reign of Julian the Apostate as Imperator of the Roman Empire, or the current period, are cusps between the influences of two types of civilization, and particular ideas or cannot with certainty be ascribed to one or the other. But the generality of the comments will diminish only their applicability to such variant exceptions as may be, it will not diminish their truth.
You will have to ask me a specific question about a specific claim. I do not know what general claim your question has in view. I did not make a claim about “having studied them lots” one way or the other. To judge from my words, I might either be the world’s foremost expert, or I might be a windy amateur. Please do not assume I am making a claim I have not made.
I am canny enough to recognize that Leftists use the charge of generalization to criticize a criticism of them, on the grounds that this then can move the conversation into a boring recitation of minutia, or a recitation of authorities the audience has not read. The logical difficulty that a statement true only in most cases is nevertheless not false is one this use of the charge tends not to notice. It is a sleight of hand of rhetoric, allowing the Leftist to change the topic from the topic (where his argument is weak) to the qualifications of the speaker — who then can be dismissed as a boaster (if his qualifications are sound) or mocked as a poseur (if not).
I am familiar with this sleight, so it is unlikely to work on me.
“If your version of the Bible includes, for example, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apocalypse of Saint John, but excludes the Apocalypse of Saint Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Didache, then you are using the Bible the Catholic Church, in the authority and the name of that Church, and with no other authority, decreed to be in the Bible”
We use the King James Version of the Bible in English as a matter of convenience. We do not consider the Bible to contain the complete record of the revelations that were given and know that there are many things that are missing from the Bible that should be in it. We have an open canon and it is quite probably that when members of the LDS church start following the commands that they have, not only to say but to do, that more of the ancient scriptures will be added to the canon. Possibly not in the Bible as that is a term of convenience for us. For instance, we do not accept the Song of Solomon to be canonical but continue to have it our scriptures for purposes of convenience.
The standard canon of the Bible was had earlier then what you mention but not completely formalized as such until later. The other books mentioned are considered useful but non-canonical per revelation in modern times.
I am pretty sure I covered that the authority of the book comes from God by way of the person that actually wrote that portion of the book. I do not believe in the current theories of where the books come from as I believe that revelation is possible so it is not needed to place things mentioning the destruction of the the temple after the actual event, for instance. Therefore I believe that Peter (most likely by way of a scribe) wrote 2 Peter, John wrote his Gospel and Revelation, and so forth.
I also think you are confusing the two types of authority that I tried to point out. The death of the apostles was the end of the ability to receive revelation for the whole church and to resolve doctrinal disputes for the whole church. However, people like Timothy that were ordained of Paul could continue to call local leadership of the church but could not call someone to replace themselves, thus the local authority to perform the ordinances in some places of the church could have lasted for quite some time later but without the Apostles would eventually run out (some potential caveats to that but nothing that changes it drastically).
In your assessment of the different claims there is also the problem of if the authority was lost how was it regained. If the authority was not lost then clearly the Catholic (or Orthodox, or a few other minor possibilities) is correct. If it was lost then it could not be regained by any thing short of God restoring it by way of a prophet.
No problem with having Peter be the head of the early church, the bishop of Rome however was just the bishop of Rome (a local area of the church) and nothing more. Also, the claim is that God called a new prophet in this day and age to restore the church, not that any study of the scriptures or early church writings could restore the church.
I also think you missed the part that the Holy Ghost was able to continue to guide individuals after the eventual loss of authority in the early church. They were not able to receive the necessary ordinances at that time but will (or have already) receive them. The giving of the needed ordinances by proxy to those that are dead (such as by baptism for the dead) is one of the main things that happens in the temple as no one can get to heaven except they be baptized of water and of the spirit.
The prophets didn’t contradict what God had actually told previous prophets but certainly did contradict what the people (and especially those that led the people) thought had been said. If there is a potential contradiction in the LDS understanding of things then this needs to be pointed out and investigated.
“It is called a baptism of desire”
Abraham was actually baptized and had the authority to baptize, the church existed at that time. I wonder if I should have given a more complete account of things.
What the Catholic Church has said on the subject (pre-Vatican II but in council so infallible (according to Catholics)):
“It firmly believes, professes, and proclaims that those not living within the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart “into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels” [Matt. 25:41], unless before the end of life the same have been added to the flock; and that the unity of the ecclesiastical body is so strong that only to those remaining in it are the sacraments of the Church of benefit for salvation, and do fastings, almsgiving, and other functions of piety and exercises of Christian service produce eternal reward, and that no one, whatever almsgiving he has practiced, even if he has shed blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he has remained in the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church.” – Cantate Domino – Papel Bull from the Council of Florence.
Fourth Lateran Council, Profession of Faith :
“There is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us. Nobody can effect this sacrament except a priest who has been properly ordained according to the church’s keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors. ”
Also, Jesus said nothing at all about Baptism of Desire only of being born of water and of the spirit. I do not see how desire is in any way the same thing as being baptized in water.
“. If you said, “No one should get married unless he falls in love” and “no one is married unless a priest witnesses their vows” I demanded of you how a priest hearing vows is “the same thing” as falling in love, and then I claimed the two sentences are teaching two different and mutually exclusive things — in such a case, how would you answer me?”
Should is different then Is. Plenty of people get married without falling in love but according to what you have said no one is married unless the priest witnesses their vows regardless of if they love each other. They are very different but I don’t see the mutual exclusivity?
“We use the King James Version of the Bible in English as a matter of convenience.”
Then, as a matter of convenience, you accept the authority of the Church when convenient, and otherwise ignore it or explain it away.
“Also, Jesus said nothing at all about Baptism of Desire only of being born of water and of the spirit.”
Then it is fortunate that the body of Jesus on Earth, that is, His holy Church, whose head is Christ, has clarified and expanded on His brief and cryptic comment, or otherwise the faithful, being as sheep without a shepherd, would either wander each man according to the imaginations of his heart, or would follow the reasonable-sounding but un-canonical teachings of heresiarchs.
“Then, as a matter of convenience, you accept the authority of the Church when convenient, and otherwise ignore it or explain it away. ”
And we both as a matter of convenience accept the authority of the rabbinical scholars that put together the Old Testament and otherwise ignore it or explain it away, per the teachings of Jesus.
“Then it is fortunate that the body of Jesus on Earth, that is, His holy Church, whose head is Christ, has clarified and expanded on His brief and cryptic comment, or otherwise the faithful, being as sheep without a shepherd, would either wander each man according to the imaginations of his heart, or would follow the reasonable-sounding but un-canonical teachings of heresiarchs.”
I like how every time I find something that appears to be a clear contradiction in Catholic teachings that the word “clarified” comes up.
So the claim of authority can be determined by that it is universally held (popularity) and has always been held (antiquity)? I know you disagree strongly with that assessment but you haven’t given me another way of testing the claim of authority.
If God answered a prayer on the subject of His own existence why would He not do so on the question of authority?
For instance, the Gospels claim to be a record of the life and teachings of Jesus
All the Gospels say that. There are lots and lots of them, you know.
yes I do. Currently the only ones we use are the ones in the standard bible plus the Book of Mormon which contains record of his visit to the Americas post resurrection. As the Gospel of John says that if everything were written the world could not contain the books that would be written. It is probably that some of the other gospels are based on a true and accurate source but as there is no authorized translation of them they are not canonical. However if one has the Holy Ghost then one is able to profit by the reading of them as the Spirit will tell what is truth from error.
John 21:20-23 – it is in scripture. See also D&C 7 where knowing the tradition Joseph inquired of the Lord as to the facts of the matter.
Actually, all that passage says the opposite, if it says anything. John is the one writing the passage, and he says that the Lord did not say to him abide until I come, He said to Peter, should I tell John to abide til I come, what is that to you?
No one, neither you nor your Prophet nor anyone else, has any reason to believe in the Assumption of Saint John, or even would have heard that Saint John existed in history at all, aside from the traditions preserved by the Catholics. Why do you balk at this? There is no Tacitus or Josephus or any non-Catholic (or non-Orthodox, which at the time was the same thing) who records the Assumption of Saint John, or even mentions that he existed at all.
1 Corinthians 15:51-54 – He will abide til Jesus comes again but will technically die in that the mortal will be put off for immortality in a twinkling.
“No one, neither you nor your Prophet nor anyone else, has any reason to believe in the Assumption of Saint John, or even would have heard that Saint John existed in history at all, aside from the traditions preserved by the Catholics. Why do you balk at this? There is no Tacitus or Josephus or any non-Catholic (or non-Orthodox, which at the time was the same thing) who records the Assumption of Saint John, or even mentions that he existed at all.”
To begin with this isn’t technically true as Nag Hammadi library contains writings that claim to be by John. Not that they are or that they give much in the way of accurate information of anything but still as long as the buried texts existed and were eventually found some knowledge of Saint John would have remained.
I am unfamiliar with the assumption of Saint John and from my readings on the Catholic encyclopedia it says that John died and is buried in Ephesus.
If the Prophet really is a Prophet then God would certainly be able to reveal knowledge of a people or person that was otherwise unknown. This is in fact what is claimed of the Book of Mormon.
“To begin with this isn’t technically true as Nag Hammadi library contains writings that claim to be by John”
You know this statement does not contradict what I said, which was that the tradition that Saint John was assumed up into heaven rather than died is a tradition not found with roots outside Catholic/Orthodox tradition.
Why are you writing to me?
So far, every time you have written a comment here, it has been of the some type: some sort of blustery nonsense about some point where we do not necessarily disagree, about some topic only tangentially related to anything I said, or not at all, and then a long rant defending your beliefs when no one is attacking them.
If you are merely looking for some flimsy excuse to proselytize your faith, I salute your zeal and admire your persistence, but this is not the right forum, nor the right method of approach. I had a really high opinion of Mormons whom I have met before, walking the neighborhood doing good works, and I have defended them from slander whenever the opportunity arose. I like them.
I mean no disrespect, I am pointing out that your approach is counterproductive.
The technically true would be that all knowledge of John comes only from the efforts of the Catholic/Orthodox tradition.
“we do not necessarily disagree” – I am too defensive sorry.
A long philosophical piece, if you like philosophy, worth the read: Pagan, Christian and Postchristian Civilization http://t.co/KQV0GQo