Seriously, my question is on the Catholic claim of the pope being a successor to Peter. Why is this, and what do they use to back up this claim?
The answer to that is pretty straightforward. Peter was the bishop of Rome, so the bishop of Rome is his successor. As you can see we've already tackled Peter and his relation to the papacy
here and
here.
The idea that (a) Peter enjoyed special privileges or abilities, and that (b) the current Pope inherits them, however, took a long time to develop. The idea that the Roman church was especially authoritative was older and can be found in Irenaeus and Tertullian, in the late second century; the reasoning there is that authentic doctrine is taught in churches with an apostolic foundation. Since Rome was associated with both Peter and Paul, the top apostles, it was clearly the most doctrinally secure church. One could say it's a small step from that to the view that the bishop of that church has special authority.
However, the predication of the bishop of Rome's authority on that of Peter directly really began with Cyprian of Carthage in the third century, who argued (apparently) that the words of Jesus to Peter in Matthew 16 (“You are Peter” etc.) applied to Peter's successors as well. However, there are variant versions of the relevant passage in Cyprian so it's not clear quite what he meant.
In the fourth century, Pope Damasus I was the first bishop of Rome to use the same argument. He was also the first to call himself “pontifex maximus” and the first to refer to Rome as “the apostolic see” (which he did frequently), and he went around in a splendid carriage, threw great feasts, and generally outdid the emperor when it came to magnificence. (He was not bad or corrupt though – he also restored many ancient sites in Rome, wrote a lot of poetry, and commissioned Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin.) It was one of Damasus' successors, Siricius, who was the first Roman bishop to use the title “Pope”.
In the fifth century, Pope Gelasius I made very strong claims for the supremacy of the bishop of Rome over both other bishops and temporal powers, repeatedly stressing that the pope had the power to overrule what other bishops decreed. He wrote a treatise on anathema in which he reserves the right of anathema to the bishop of Rome alone. In a letter to the emperor Anastasius II, he distinguished between the temporal power of princes and the spiritual power of bishops, stating that the latter was greater than the former. Gelasius’ letters on these issues would later be seen as the classic statement of papal supremacy. It is also noteworthy that a Roman synod of 495 is the first known to have hailed the pope as the “vicar of Christ”.
So really it started there, but obviously the understanding of the Pope's powers and rights continued to develop right through to the nineteenth century, when he finally became infallible (sometimes).
Interesting. What do you think caused the shift in his reputation?
As far as I can tell, his earlier reputation was mainly based on his role in the Great Awakening and his Puritan sermons; it's been mainly in the past few decades that his real greatness has been generally recognised. Perry Miller's epochal biography of Edwards, published in 1949, led to a surge of scholarly interest in him which continues to grow. As is usually the case, however, public perception lags well behind scholarship, which means we can expect non-experts to become aware that Edwards was more than a brimstone preacher in another forty years or so.
Also, on the subject of American-born theologians, what are your thoughts on Seraphim Rose?
I'm afraid I'd never heard of him before, but after Googling, my main thoughts are: great name, great beard. I suspect there may be a bit more to him than that but I'm not the person to say it.
I have 2 questions:
1 what version of the Bible best reflects the most "original" language for the Torah, ie best translation? I find some translations seem to water down the terminology in favor of more generalized meanings. Like Heaven became the sky rather than a place in the sky.
I read that a bible scholar in the 1920s figured out some words came from Shumer and got confused; for example, we're told Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt, but the Sumerian word for salt also meant vapor. Another, Eve came from Adam's "rib", but the word for rib also meant life force, or that which animates. So Eve was from a rib and she's the mother of all the living.
I don't know about these specifics, but the RSV or the NRSV is the usual translation used by scholars, so it's the one I prefer. But I really don't know anything about Hebrew or how it is best translated.
2 In Genesis we're told man would exist for 120 years before the Flood, and the Nefilim were on the Earth. Does that 120 represent our time or God's?
I don't know if there's any reason to think that the Pentateuch knows of such a distinction, but at any rate, I don't know of any reason to suppose that the lengths of time referred to in Genesis are not meant literally. As you say yourself, ancient Middle Eastern texts give absurdly long lifespans to legendary figures of the past.
I don't really believe in creation, I was just putting up a former viewpoint of mine. I have move far to the left in the last year, you should read some of my posts in the "ObamaCare Passes" thread.
I don't really see what that has to do with left- or right-wing politics. In fact the association of literalist or anti-scientific religious views with right-wing politics in the US is not only a rather parochial association (it is not mirrored elsewhere in the world) but it is a pretty recent one, going back only perhaps thirty or at most forty years. Remember that William Jennings Bryan attacked Darwinism so strongly because he thought it was an attack on basically left-wing ideals.
They weren't that far off, and the fact they even came close is impressive - a sequence does support the concept of evolution. Assuming of course the original terminology didn't get screwed up over time because later peoples couldn't understand the text with complete accuracy. They gave earth's history in a few lines and it wasn't a bad job by no means.
A sequence alone doesn't support evolution. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, geologists and biologists agreed that there had been a sequence of life on earth, with species disappearing and new ones appearing, but they did not agree that this meant evolution had occurred; many held the alternative theory of "catastrophism" or successive creation. And indeed Genesis would appear to support this, at least partially, since it speaks of God creating the new species on each day, not of the new species developing out of the old ones. Of course, Genesis has no concept of extinction, and we do not hear of old species ceasing to exist, so on that score it diverges significantly from both evolution and catastrophism. So I think any attempt to suggest that the opening chapters of Genesis serve even as a potted summary of the (actual) history of life on earth, let along of the history of the earth in general, is not going to get very far.
Can you recommend any original materials (with good English translations, preferably something available in a relatively inexpensive paperback edition) by major Christian theologians that go into a lot of depth about asceticism (why its good, what it consists in, etc.)? One thing I found from a short search was
this... how does it look to you? While it is a work of secondary scholarship, it apparently includes a lot of Athanasius's writings.
I haven't read that book but the one I would instinctively recommend is Brakke's
Demons and the making of the monk, which is a great survey of early monasticism. The major work of Athanasius on the subject is his
Life of Antony, which is available in a good translation in the
Classics of western spirituality series from Paulist Press. Otherwise you should look for
The lives of the desert fathers and
The sayings of the desert fathers, which I think are available in various translations which should be pretty accessible and affordable. I'd also recommend the writings of Evagrius Ponticus; A.M. Casiday has a volume on him containing many passages.
According to Revelation 20 after the first 1,000 years after Armageddon, we will all get a second chance. So if I do come back after I died, I would certainly know God exists and would resist with all my might the devil, when he tries to play tricks on us again as a test. and therefore avoid the final fateThe only benefit I see in believing in God before hand is you get to live with him for the first 1,000 years after Armageddon. So I am willing to take the risk that he does not exist, since we will all get this second chance. Is this a correct view and should the prophecy in Revelation be accepted what will happen in the "endtimes".
I don’t really see how the passage you describe speaks of a “second chance”; it may be consistent with such a view but it’s not inconsistent with its denial. Matthew 25 suggests that people will be judged on the basis of how they have acted in life, rather than what they say they believe after the resurrection. As for whether the book of Revelation should “be accepted what will happen in the ‘endtimes’”, that is not a question that I can answer.
I posted this Because the Bible was often given as evidence of God's existence
Is it really, though? I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered anyone arguing that the Bible is evidence of God’s existence. In my experience, the kind of people who base everything on the Bible are the kind of people who think that God’s existence is just obvious and doesn’t need to be backed up by evidence – also not a very useful way of arguing, but I think marginally preferable to the notion that the Bible is evidence for God.
, the Aramaic Hawwah, who was made from the rib of Adam, in a strange reflection of the Sumerian myth.
