Ask a Theologian IV

[Jehoshua]

The Church rejects the notion that the Holy Spirit proceeds jointly and equally from two principles (Father and Son) and teaches dogmatically that "the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, not as from two principles but as from one single principle". The Church holds that the Father as the "principle without principle" is the first origin of the spirit. The Church's theological position can best be described as the idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the son.

The word for "who proceeds" in greek would imply that the procession was from two principles from father and son, while the latin does not necessarily uphold this. For this reason you see that some greek fathers (notably Maximus the confessor) defend the use of the flioque, although outside of the nicene creed.

 

[Plotinus]

Where does 2 Thessalonians contradict 1 Thessalonians? (Not that I know either book very well at all)

Basically, 1 Thessalonians talks about the second coming of Christ as though it were imminent and could happen at any time - Paul assumes that he and his readers will still be alive, for example. But 2 Thessalonians gives a list of various apocalyptic events that must happen before the second coming of Christ, making it clear that it will not happen for a good long time yet, and will be predictable. There are other reasons too, which are summarised here.

So is the argument here "People of the middle ages were dim wits?" Or is there a better explanation than that?

People in antiquity and the Middle Ages simply didn't think like we do. For one thing, in antiquity they did not have any concept of a "narrator" as distinct from an "author". This is why Augustine talks about Apuleius' Metamorphoses as if Apuleius were pretending to be describing his own experiences, whereas it's perfectly clear to modern readers that Apuleius' book is written in the voice of an imaginary narrator. So to the ancient mind, if a book claims it's written by a certain person, they took it as read that it was.

Of course pseudepigraphy was known, and condemned whenever it was suspected. The Apostolic Constitutions warns readers to watch out for books claiming to be written by the apostles which are fake. This is rather ironic given that the Apostolic Constitutions is itself a forgery, claiming to be by the apostles, and actually dating from the late fourth century. 2 Thessalonians 2:2 is another example, and may be a case of a pseudepigraphical text trying to "debunk" a real one (i.e. 1 Thessalonians).

Well, I'm no Catholic But I don't think this position makes sense, unless you have a darn good reason someone who is not Paul would be putting his name there. It appears to me that if it wasn't Paul it was some kind of a forger, and it defies reason that someone would blatantly lie about who they are but their book is still authoritative on spiritual matters. ESPECIALLY for a Catholic when intentionally forging a piece of sacred scripture would probably be seen as a mortal sin anyway, which would put the writer himself in a state of damnation.

People in antiquity had all sorts of reasons for writing under someone else's name, as I have briefly explained here. To assume that all pseudepigraphy is simply "forgery" is to assume modern standards and is very anachronistic. The fact is that it was rife in later antiquity. Why would any Christian, for example, write extra letters "as if" by St Ignatius of Antioch, or Dionysius the Areopagite, or St Paul, or the apostles in general, or St Ambrose, or... and yet texts exist supposedly by all of these people (outside the New Testament) which are not really written by them. It's an undisputed fact that lots of Christians did this for lots of "great Christian authors", including Paul, since there are "letters" by Paul which aren't in the New Testament and which are certainly inauthentic. It's naive to assume that the books which are in the New Testament have some kind of magical guarantee of authenticity which those outside the New Testament lack.

Another example of different ethical standards is plagiarism. Today, to use the words of another author and pass them off as your own is one of the worst things a writer or an academic can do. But in antiquity and the Middle Ages it was not only extremely common but no-one thought there was anything wrong with it. Many of Jerome's commentaries on the Bible, for example, are largely lifted from Origen's, and people only objected when Jerome started criticising Origen. In other words, it was his hypocrisy that people thought wrong, not the plagiarism in the first place.

Now from the Catholic point of view, I don't think there's any contradiction in thinking that e.g. the author of 2 Thessalonians was infallible on spiritual matters even if he was taking a few liberties with the truth when it came to his own identity. This is because, on the Catholic view, spiritual authority does not depend upon moral perfection. A priest may be legitimate, and his sacraments valid, even if he himself is not morally perfect. This was in fact the major issue between Augustine and the Donatists - the Donatists had declared that the Catholic Church had lost all spiritual authority because some of its bishops had acted immorally. Augustine replied that the church is not perfect, its people are not perfect, and Christ still acts through them despite their failings. So one could easily say that 2 Thessalonians was written by an imperfect human being who may indeed have been acting dishonestly, but God nevertheless inspired him and protected him from error on the important stuff. At least that's no more implausible than insisting that there are no errors at all in the whole Bible despite the contradictions.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8320083&postcount=807Well, Luther presumably (As far as I understand it) still thought it was bread. In any case, I've stopped lying to myself in many ways and have begun to actually look at history a bit. I don't know what the historical interpretation of John 6:54 is, but it does not make logical sense that its talking about the Eucharist, because if it did, everyone who took the Eucharist (Theoretically even unworthily) would have eternal life, and no Church teaches this. It makes much more sense (To me) that eating the flesh means reading the Word of God (The Bread of Life) and believing and obeying it.

Yes, I agree that it's a bit illogical for those reasons. I suppose the author is thinking again of groups rather than individuals. Perhaps he is seeking to attack other groups - perhaps non-Christian Jews - who did not have the Eucharist, and reassure his readers (who did) that they were in the right. I certainly don't see any reason for the interpretation you give - I don't see any indication there that Jesus is speaking about reading anything, and I don't know any passage that uses "bread" to refer to a written text. In this passage, the bread is simply Jesus himself. It just seems inconceivable to me that the passage is not intended to be about the Eucharist - I don't know of anywhere else in the New Testament where eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood doesn't have that meaning.

Here's the thing you've got to understand, no matter how horrible our arguments are (And I don't even try anymore, I'm fundamentally not good enough at science or interested enough [I'm a lot more interested in theology] to pursue most Evolution debates anymore, partially because I think its importance is a bit overhyped) nobody says "Science says Evolution is true but I still believe the world is young." We ALL think science is on our side, no matter how ridiculous that may be.

Well, I won't go into that, but I must say it seems odd to me. I could understand (kind of) someone who said, "Yes, science says the world is very old, but it's wrong." But I can't understand someone who says "Science actually says the world is very young," given that the vast majority of scientists think otherwise. It's one thing to say that scientists are mistaken about how old the universe actually is, quite another to say that they're mistaken about how old it appears to be.

That said, Jesus spoke in parables all the time. I see no reason we should assume Jesus was being literal about the Eucharist, although it does seem like most (All?) of the Church Fathers did.

A parable is a story that is intended to teach a moral of some kind. It's pretty clear when Jesus is using a parable. No-one thinks that, for example, the kingdom of God is literally a mustard seed, or that a man really was robbed and then helped by a Samaritan. "This is my body" etc., by contrast, isn't a story. It is clearly a very different kind of saying from a parable. That doesn't prove that it's meant to be taken literally, of course, but if it's not to be taken literally there ought to be some indication of that. As you say, the church fathers certainly took it pretty seriously.

Is there any reason Paul (Or whoever the writer of 2 Timothy is) wouldn't have viewed "Scripture" as the Bible we have today?

More to the point, is there any reason why he would have? Only if you're already dogmatically committed to the notion. Common sense would suggest that the author of 2 Timothy couldn't possibly have been thinking of "scripture" as we do, given that some of it had yet to be written and all of it had yet to be collected and "canonised" in any sense that we would recognise.

I guess you can argue this. I don't see why you'd trust a book enough that you'll risk your soul on its ideas being true if you still think some of its ideas are false.

I don't think people do that. People may risk their souls, or at least their lives, for (some of) the ideas contained in the Bible, but I don't think they do so because those ideas are in the Bible. They do so because they are convinced those ideas are true, and they are convinced of this because they resonate very deeply with them on a personal level. Missionaries who go off and die for the sake of Jesus don't do that because they've read about Jesus in a book that they believe is infallible. They do it because Jesus is a tremendous reality to them in their hearts and they cannot conceive of a life without that reality. The Bible's information about Jesus and witness to him is only part of that, and it's really confirmatory rather than anything else. Someone who has a burning love for Jesus may well believe that what the Bible says about him is true, but they don't have to, and they certainly don't have to believe that other stuff in the Bible is true.

You see, you're making the same assumption here that I pointed out before: you're assuming that all Christians are basically evangelicals. You're assuming that all Christians believe what they believe, and act on those beliefs in the way that they do, because the Bible says so. And, yes, from that point of view there might well be something odd about believing only some bits of the Bible and not others. But it's not the case that all Christians make the Bible their starting point. (In fact I'm inclined to think that almost no Christians really make the Bible their starting point, not even the ones who think that they do.) For non-evangelicals, the Bible is an important authority, but it is not the foundational one and it does not take priority over other authorities, such as church teaching, Christian tradition, personal experience, and reason.

And besides, even if some of the ideas are false (I still reject this, God doesn't make mistakes) what gives us authority to decide what's false?

The same thing that gives us authority to decide whether anything's false - basic common sense, careful reasoning, examination of evidence, comparison to our own experience, etc. If you think the Bible has some special status that invalidates all of these potential sources of criticism then it's up to you to explain why it has that status and why other things don't. You're perfectly happy to say you disagree with some ideas of the church, for example - particularly those of the Pope. What gives you the authority to decide when the Pope's wrong? Well, whatever your answer to that, that's the answer to your question about the Bible.

The Church (Evangelicals don't really think there's even such a thing the way the Catholics, Orthodox, or Anglicans do) has also had 2,000 years to screw itself up. The New Testament was all written by the Apostles and those that lived at the same time as they did, and the vast majority of the New Testament (Including everything Paul wrote, since he did see Jesus even though he Jesus had already ascended at that point) had met Jesus personally, and a lot of them had no doubt been taught theology by Jesus. I really don't see the Apostles getting it wrong, at least not on a theological point.

First, and obviously, the New Testament wasn't really written by the apostles, as far as we can tell, other than the undisputed letters of Paul - and while he was convinced that he had apostolic authority on the grounds of having met the resurrected Christ, I don't think that's really the same thing as knowing the historical Jesus. At any rate, I think you're far too optimistic about people's ability to avoid going wrong. Even if, say, the book of James were written by someone who knew Jesus, who's to say he hasn't misremembered what Jesus told him, or is simply using the name of Jesus to spread his own ideas? (After all, the book of James hardly even mentions Jesus!) Plato did that when writing about Socrates, and he knew Socrates personally.

Also, an argument of this kind may work (assuming its premises are correct) if you're merely trying to argue that the New Testament is a good source for what Jesus' first disciples believed. In fact, of course, it is indeed the best source we have for that, at least. But you can't get from that to infallibility. If you could, Plato would be an infallible source for Socrates.

Well, here's where I was coming from. If you think there's "One true physical Church" you could believe that's literally any church without contradicting yourself; it could be the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, whatever. However, the only Church organization the Early Christians knew of was the Catholic Church, the Orthodox schsim happened 1,000 years later, and the Protestant churches formed 500 years after that. However, you claimed that the Early Christians were more Orthodox in their theology than Catholic for the most part.

As I mentioned, that's not strictly true. There were rival church organisations in the early centuries, which the Catholic Christians universally considered to be heretical and unchristian simply in virtue of existing.

If, in the first thousand years of the Church, you hold that a single, visible Church was the true Church and that it would be "Wrong" to be in any other Church, I'd think you'd have to be a Catholic. I don't see how you can argue that there is one true physical Church, and that it was the Orthodox Church (As per the Church Fathers) when the Orthodox Church didn't exist.

Then again, I don't totally understand how schism happens, so I don't know if you could legitimately argue that the "One True Church" became false and a new schismatic Church became true.

Either way, I don't understand the Eastern Orthodox claim to Apostolic Succession at all, or how it makes any sense.

As MagisterCultuum said, the Catholic and Orthodox churches have equal claim to be the "original" church. We refer to the ancient mainstream church as "Catholic" for the sake of convenience, to distinguish it from e.g. the Novatianist church or the Donatist one. But it didn't have a name - it was just the church. Over the course of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the eastern, Greek-speaking wing of this church and the western, Latin-speaking one drifted apart for various reasons. This was a very gradual process and there was no one point where the "schism" really occurred. The end result was two distinct churches which we call Catholic and Orthodox. One can't say that one of them broke away from the other (well, they might say it, I suppose) - they broke away from each other.

How did they defend those views?

In the case of the Novatianists, I don't know, and I doubt anyone does. In the case of the Donatists, we know from Augustine's counter-arguments against them. (Some Donatist writings do survive, but not on this topic.) In the early fourth century, during the Great Persecution of the emperor Diocletian, Christians were ordered to hand over all copies of the Bible. Some Christian bishops did this. They came to be called traditores, meaning "those who handed over". After the persecution was over, these bishops continued to minister in their posts and they ordained new bishops. Some Christians in Africa believed that because the traditores had compromised their faith during the persecutions, they had lost the ability to carry out valid ordinations. These Christians refused to have anything to do with the traditores, with the bishops that the traditores had ordained, and with anyone that those bishops ordained, because they believed that once the divine grace had been lost it could not be regained. They therefore split away and formed what became known as the Donatist church, which they regarded as the one true church because it was not contaminated by the traditores. The subsequent alliance of the "main" church with the emperor Constantine and his successors confirmed for the Donatists that it was not the true church, because the true church would never ally itself with the Satanic, persecuting Roman state.

How was Salvation viewed in the Early Church? And how did they interpret "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shall be saved" (Acts 16:31) and 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith —and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2: 8-9)

I had a look through some indexes to patristic works and I found very few references to these verses. As a rule, the early Christians had surprisingly little interest in the doctrine of atonement and usually seem to have had a fairly naive belief that salvation came to those who were good and not to those who were bad - despite the existence of verses like those you mention. I couldn't find any references to the Acts verse. Here are a couple of interesting references to the Ephesians one.

First, Ignatius of Antioch. It is interesting to look at this chapter and then follow the link to the next one, where he exhorts his readers to virtue. The implication seems to be that part of the gift of grace is the ability and responsibility to do good works.

John Chrysostom comments on this same verse of Ephesians a couple of times: here, and here. In the first passage he interprets it as being about the Jewish Law, so he reads it as an insistence that the Law does not save. In the second passage he sees it in the more modern sense as contrasting faith with good deeds, but here he stresses that faith without good deeds is worthless, and the purpose of faith is to allow us to do good deeds. That is perhaps a little closer to the modern evangelical view (note also how in the first passage he articulates a doctrine of the atonement very like that of modern evangelicals - a rare thing for a patristic author).

So I would say that, with passages such as these, the early Christians either ignored them, interpreted them as referring to the Jewish Law, or combined them with other passages insisting on the importance of good works .

OK that makes sense, but seems to imply that the veneration of saints was an Unbiblical addition to Christianity.

Well, it was.

Human nature I imagine? I don't know how common racism was back then, but history does show in times when it is common Christians aren't generally exempt from it. Or perhaps they weren't aware of what was going on in a distant land?

Racism in antiquity wasn't like today, because they didn't have a biological concept of "race" like modern people do. They thought in terms of cultural identity. So it's quite possible that Roman Christians were prejudiced against Persian ones, but this is something I've never encountered.

Any iidea why they didn't care back then?

They just hadn't developed the idea that the locations of biblical events had spiritual significance. And why would they - the Bible doesn't suggest it. A better question would be why they started to care in the fourth century, and I'm not sure what the answer to that would be.

How widespread was angel worship back then? I think that's rather bizarre considering Paul seemed to put the teaching of the Apostles above the angels (If even an angel preaches a different gospel than the one we passed down to you, let him be eternally condemned.)

Well, Paul's point is about which doctrines are true rather than about who has authority (although, indirectly, pretty much everything Paul says is really about his own authority). I don't know of any evidence to speak of of ancient Christians literally worshipping angels - I think the passage from Justin is more of an indication that they didn't have a clear notion of the Holy Spirit, which is certainly the case.

Of course, the gnostics would be an exception to this (as to most things). They typically had very complicated angelologies that involved worshipping beings lower than the highest God. For example, the group sometimes known as the Barbelognostics worshipped Barbelo, the first Aeon to emanate from the High God. However, to call entities such as Barbelo "angels" would be a bit misleading, since that would imply a distinction between them and God that the gnostics wouldn't have recognised. One of the points of this form of gnosticism was that there wasn't a clear distinction between the divine and the non-divine as would later be important to Nicene Christianity.

To be honest, I've heard at least two Catholics claim "Well if it includes everyone it should include Jesus as well" to try to logically prove it didn't literally mean everyone and so Mary could be exempted as well." Truth be told, this argument initially annoyed me because it seemed almost obvious why Christ should be excluded. I was curious if you'd try the same argument

I don't see why it should be obvious!

However (1 Cor. 15:22) - "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive."

Sin passes from the father to the son. As Christ had no Earthly father, and his Heavenly Father obviously never sinned, Christ was born perfect. But Mary had a father. So how could she be born perfect? And what is the theological reason that she was?

I don't believe that the Bible says anything about sin passing from father to son; that's a later addition to Christianity that came from mistaken ancient theories of reproduction. So the idea that Jesus had no human father specifically to prevent his inheriting original sin is an unbiblical one. I'm not actually sure where it first appeared - I would assume it's the kind of thing Augustine would say, but I don't know.

Mary's having a father is only a problem for her being sinless if you think that sin is associated with having a father. Since I see no good grounds for the latter, I don't see a problem with the former. Still, a Catholic would say that if God can arrange for someone to be born without a father at all, he can certainly arrange for someone to be born with a father but without original sin. That's the miracle of the Immaculate Conception, which is different from the miracle of the Virgin Birth but no less possible to God. As for the theological reason, I think it's because if Jesus was to be born without sin, he needed his mother to be sinless as well, because otherwise he would inherit sin from his mother. And at this point it all falls down, because if it's possible for Mary to be conceived normally but be born without sin, it ought to be possible for Jesus as well, in which case it wouldn't matter if his mother (or his father) were sinful.

If you look at this article you'll see that the most fundamental reason given for the Immaculate Conception is that since Mary was the "new Eve" it was simply most "fitting" for her to be sinless. I can't say that this strikes me as a very strong argument.

Regarding the Pelagian controversy, I know Pelagius lost the debate, but who won? Or, in other words, what position won? Was it in any way the same as the position that the Catholic Church holds today?

Augustine won. But what his position was is a harder thing to state, because it was complex and changed over time. The best answer I can give, unfortunately, is to suggest that you read some of this stuff and see what you think Augustine's opinion was. As for whether the Catholic Church holds a different position today, I'm not sure about that either, but I don't know any particular reason to think so.

How can you possibly reconcile Universalism with the fact that "Narrow is the way that leads to life"?

Easy - just because it's narrow doesn't mean that everyone won't, eventually, find their way through it. Narrowness can be seen as a metaphor for difficulty, not exclusivity.

 

[Plotinus]

Well, unless God, knowing what would end up in the Bible, inspired him to write that.

That's possible, of course, but you asked how it could be possible that the author of 2 Timothy wasn't referring to the (Protestant) Christian canon. It wasn't a question of whether it's possible that he was referring to that canon. In fact from a historical point of view it would seem to be far more likely that he wasn't. Which isn't to say that he couldn't have been, if you subscribe to a mechanistic theory of biblical inspiration like the one you suggest; but then the question would be why one would think that.

I don't see why its an intristically bad argument in this case.

Because it's not an argument, it's just an assertion. If the conclusion you're trying to defend is "2 Timothy 3:16 could be about the biblical canon as we understand it", then "God could have inspired 2 Timothy 3:16 to be about that canon" would indeed be a way of defending that conclusion. However, if the conclusion you're trying to defend is "2 Timothy 3:16 is about the biblical canon as we understand it", then obviously an argument of that kind won't work. You'd have to give good reason to suppose that God did inspire it in the requisite way.

Isn't it debated whether Revelation was written in the AD 90's or the AD 60's?

I don't think so. It's always dated to the 90s or thereabouts, I think, even traditionally.

Did the "Orthodox Church" actually exist back then though? I was under impression that the only Church that was around at the time (Other than the earlier schismatics) was the Catholic Church. I'm not sure if that's accurate or not though. Did anyone refer to an "Orthodox Church" before the schism?

No, but they didn't refer to a "Catholic Church" either. It was just "the church", which was both catholic and orthodox, pretty much by definition (at least by orthodox standards). As I said above, this church subsequently split into two - it wasn't a case of one church schisming away from the other.

Papal infallibility, as I recall, was actually defined in 1870, correct?

Yes. Of course that doesn't mean, from a Catholic viewpoint, that the Pope only acquired infallibility at that point; the definition of the doctrine was a recognition of a pre-existing truth. And indeed the occasion in 1854 when Pope Pius IX defined the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is often seen as an instance of papal infallibility being used. As far as I know, the only time when, according to the Catholic Church, papal infallibility has absolutely definitely been used is when, in 1950, Pope Pius XII defined the doctrine of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary. That's the only time that a Pope has said he's doing it. But that doesn't mean it hasn't happened at other times too. It's rare, anyway.

That would make sense as well. Why do the Catholics use Latin?

As Jehoshua said, because that was the traditional language of the west, and it remained the language of the church even when it was no longer generally spoken. The same thing happened in the Middle East, where Syriac remained the language of the church even when no-one spoke it. And in Ethiopia, where it happened with Ge'ez. I'm sure there are lots of other examples. In all these cases, the language in question is the one that the first Christians there spoke, and so the liturgy and other elements of the religion were written in it. And so they remained even when people no longer spoke that language. You can see a similar phenomenon with the King James Bible: no-one talks like that any more, but many Christians still use it, just because it's what's always been used.

So why do they consider the Roman position to be correct if its a completely different Church now?

Because it's the position they came to themselves. To put it simplistically, what happened during the iconoclasm controversy is that the eastern church split between iconophiles (who held the traditional view that icons are Good) and iconoclasts (who thought that icons are Bad). During this controversy, the western church largely (though not entirely) agreed with the iconophiles. The controversy ended in the east with the victory of the iconophiles. For them, this was a matter of ending the iconoclast heresy and restoring the old, traditional, correct view. The fact that the western Christians had always maintained this view was really neither here nor there, although of course it helped. Note that the western and eastern churches were not exactly in schism at this time. They were just culturally quite separate. In fact the westerners didn't really understand exactly what the whole iconophile/iconoclast thing was all about to start with.

Didn't Pelagius believe that anyone who sinned after they were baptized was definitively damned? or was that Caelstius?

Disentangling the views of Pelagius and Caelestius (and the other Pelagians) is a very difficult business. Pelagius says in On Bad Teachers if you sin after baptism you lose the state of grace, though I don't know if that means you can't get it back again.

What is the strangest justification for the existence of God you have come across?

I would say the following:

...atheists deny that divinity exists. How egotistical is a person who says, "If god does not conform to my thoughts, then he does not exist"? Perhaps then atheism as a philosophy may need some humility of its own. For it is one thing not to have seen something or not to have rationally explained something and quite another to claim an impossibility proof. As the cell biologist Lewis Thomas has written, "The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance." The possibility of divinity will always haunt the materialist and positivist with doubt about the logic of their faith in certainty.

That's from Possibilities for over one hundredfold more spiritual information, p. 29. I used to think that C.S. Lewis' argument for God's existence from moral intuitions, in Mere Christianity, was the worst argument for God's existence that I'd ever encountered, until I read Templeton.

How many groups were monotheistic in the B.C era? (besides Jews and Zoroastrians)

Which group is the first monotheistic religion ever?

There was a strong monotheistic tendency to Greek philosophy, at least some schools of it. Platonism developed a form of monotheism, to the extent that Middle Platonists and Neoplatonists could later suppose that Plato himself had been a monotheist. Aristotle can also be seen as a monotheist and certainly has strong tendencies that way, although his theological writings are lost so it's hard to be sure. Stoicism had a strongly monotheistic element to it, but it wasn't entirely consistent.

Akhenaten is often cited as an early monotheist, long before any Greek philosophers or (probably) Jewish prophets thought of it. As far as I know this doesn't seem to be an inaccurate assessment of Akehnaten's version of the Aten cult, but it's an open question how much this was a real, living religion and how much the eccentric hobby horse of one king. It certainly doesn't seem to have long outlived him.

 

[Traitorfish]

On the subject of non-Abrahamic monotheisms, do you think that Chinese "heaven worship" can be considered monotheistic, or is it simply a rigorously hierarchical polytheism? (Or perhaps something else altogether?)

 

[GhostWriter16]

Basically, 1 Thessalonians talks about the second coming of Christ as though it were imminent and could happen at any time - Paul assumes that he and his readers will still be alive, for example. But 2 Thessalonians gives a list of various apocalyptic events that must happen before the second coming of Christ, making it clear that it will not happen for a good long time yet, and will be predictable. There are other reasons too, which are summarised here.

Well, since 2 Thessalonians was written later, it would be easy to argue that Paul simply wasn't yet aware of anything that had to happen first, and so he misunderstood the meaning of "Christ is coming soon" to mean "Soon" in human terms. As long as Paul didn't actually say "Christ is coming within my lifetime" I don't see an issue here. Its obvious that this hasn't happened, yet we still take Paul's writings as Scripture. And I'm well aware that all the early Apostles had no expectation that they'd be around for very long. However, I don't think they ever put a date on when the world was going to end in Scripture.

People in antiquity and the Middle Ages simply didn't think like we do. For one thing, in antiquity they did not have any concept of a "narrator" as distinct from an "author". This is why Augustine talks about Apuleius' Metamorphoses as if Apuleius were pretending to be describing his own experiences, whereas it's perfectly clear to modern readers that Apuleius' book is written in the voice of an imaginary narrator. So to the ancient mind, if a book claims it's written by a certain person, they took it as read that it was.

Of course pseudepigraphy was known, and condemned whenever it was suspected. The Apostolic Constitutions warns readers to watch out for books claiming to be written by the apostles which are fake. This is rather ironic given that the Apostolic Constitutions is itself a forgery, claiming to be by the apostles, and actually dating from the late fourth century. 2 Thessalonians 2:2 is another example, and may be a case of a pseudepigraphical text trying to "debunk" a real one (i.e. 1 Thessalonians).

OK that would make sense.

People in antiquity had all sorts of reasons for writing under someone else's name, as I have briefly explained here. To assume that all pseudepigraphy is simply "forgery" is to assume modern standards and is very anachronistic. The fact is that it was rife in later antiquity. Why would any Christian, for example, write extra letters "as if" by St Ignatius of Antioch, or Dionysius the Areopagite, or St Paul, or the apostles in general, or St Ambrose, or... and yet texts exist supposedly by all of these people (outside the New Testament) which are not really written by them. It's an undisputed fact that lots of Christians did this for lots of "great Christian authors", including Paul, since there are "letters" by Paul which aren't in the New Testament and which are certainly inauthentic. It's naive to assume that the books which are in the New Testament have some kind of magical guarantee of authenticity which those outside the New Testament lack.

Another example of different ethical standards is plagiarism. Today, to use the words of another author and pass them off as your own is one of the worst things a writer or an academic can do. But in antiquity and the Middle Ages it was not only extremely common but no-one thought there was anything wrong with it. Many of Jerome's commentaries on the Bible, for example, are largely lifted from Origen's, and people only objected when Jerome started criticising Origen. In other words, it was his hypocrisy that people thought wrong, not the plagiarism in the first place.

OK in that context it makes more sense.

Now from the Catholic point of view, I don't think there's any contradiction in thinking that e.g. the author of 2 Thessalonians was infallible on spiritual matters even if he was taking a few liberties with the truth when it came to his own identity. This is because, on the Catholic view, spiritual authority does not depend upon moral perfection. A priest may be legitimate, and his sacraments valid, even if he himself is not morally perfect. This was in fact the major issue between Augustine and the Donatists - the Donatists had declared that the Catholic Church had lost all spiritual authority because some of its bishops had acted immorally. Augustine replied that the church is not perfect, its people are not perfect, and Christ still acts through them despite their failings. So one could easily say that 2 Thessalonians was written by an imperfect human being who may indeed have been acting dishonestly, but God nevertheless inspired him and protected him from error on the important stuff. At least that's no more implausible than insisting that there are no errors at all in the whole Bible despite the contradictions.

I can see how Christ can work through a flawed person, but I don't see why you'd take a forged Scripture that you know is forged as authentic.

Yes, I agree that it's a bit illogical for those reasons. I suppose the author is thinking again of groups rather than individuals. Perhaps he is seeking to attack other groups - perhaps non-Christian Jews - who did not have the Eucharist, and reassure his readers (who did) that they were in the right. .

If this were an Epistle, I could understand that, but it was allegedly quoting Jesus. Now, you could argue whether the quote was authentic, of course, but if it was, I don't see how you could argue that it was simply being used to attack other groups of people.

I certainly don't see any reason for the interpretation you give - I don't see any indication there that Jesus is speaking about reading anything, and I don't know any passage that uses "bread" to refer to a written text. In this passage, the bread is simply Jesus himself. It just seems inconceivable to me that the passage is not intended to be about the Eucharist - I don't know of anywhere else in the New Testament where eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood doesn't have that meaning.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6:35&version=NIV

Seems to imply a symbolic interpretation, and the Word of God is compared to bread.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew 4:4&version=NIV

Well, I won't go into that, but I must say it seems odd to me. I could understand (kind of) someone who said, "Yes, science says the world is very old, but it's wrong." But I can't understand someone who says "Science actually says the world is very young," given that the vast majority of scientists think otherwise. It's one thing to say that scientists are mistaken about how old the universe actually is, quite another to say that they're mistaken about how old it appears to be.

My (Very basic) response to this would be that even though the world appears old, a world that "Appears young" couldn't support human life, but to get to a world that was actually very old would require a lot of death (Which, unlike death after the Fall would NOT have been because of sin.) Every theistic evolutionist has to ask themselves "Why did God create a world that was already marred by death?

A parable is a story that is intended to teach a moral of some kind. It's pretty clear when Jesus is using a parable. No-one thinks that, for example, the kingdom of God is literally a mustard seed, or that a man really was robbed and then helped by a Samaritan. "This is my body" etc., by contrast, isn't a story. It is clearly a very different kind of saying from a parable. That doesn't prove that it's meant to be taken literally, of course, but if it's not to be taken literally there ought to be some indication of that. As you say, the church fathers certainly took it pretty seriously.

My immediate argument would be both that it would be a form of cannibalism, and that every miracle that Christ actually did was physical, in other words, Jesus never did a miracle that we couldn't physically see.

More to the point, is there any reason why he would have? Only if you're already dogmatically committed to the notion. Common sense would suggest that the author of 2 Timothy couldn't possibly have been thinking of "scripture" as we do, given that some of it had yet to be written and all of it had yet to be collected and "canonised" in any sense that we would recognise.

What exactly would you say he was thinking about?

In addition, if 2 Timothy was NOT written by Paul, as you assert, how do we know its not the last book written?

I don't think people do that. People may risk their souls, or at least their lives, for (some of) the ideas contained in the Bible, but I don't think they do so because those ideas are in the Bible. They do so because they are convinced those ideas are true, and they are convinced of this because they resonate very deeply with them on a personal level. Missionaries who go off and die for the sake of Jesus don't do that because they've read about Jesus in a book that they believe is infallible. They do it because Jesus is a tremendous reality to them in their hearts and they cannot conceive of a life without that reality. The Bible's information about Jesus and witness to him is only part of that, and it's really confirmatory rather than anything else. Someone who has a burning love for Jesus may well believe that what the Bible says about him is true, but they don't have to, and they certainly don't have to believe that other stuff in the Bible is true.

I agree that its more than just picking up a Bible, knowing its infallible, reading it, and developing a theology, obviously. In fact, the reason I believe the Bible isn't so much because of the Bible as because of personal experiences that have verified it for me. However, I don't pick and choose what I want to believe in the Bible, I believe the entire thing. I don't see how you can "Pick and choose" and yet expect to be right.

You see, you're making the same assumption here that I pointed out before: you're assuming that all Christians are basically evangelicals. You're assuming that all Christians believe what they believe, and act on those beliefs in the way that they do, because the Bible says so. And, yes, from that point of view there might well be something odd about believing only some bits of the Bible and not others. But it's not the case that all Christians make the Bible their starting point. (In fact I'm inclined to think that almost no Christians really make the Bible their starting point, not even the ones who think that they do.) For non-evangelicals, the Bible is an important authority, but it is not the foundational one and it does not take priority over other authorities, such as church teaching, Christian tradition, personal experience, and reason.

That seems to be my fatal flaw, I know.

The same thing that gives us authority to decide whether anything's false - basic common sense, careful reasoning, examination of evidence, comparison to our own experience, etc. If you think the Bible has some special status that invalidates all of these potential sources of criticism then it's up to you to explain why it has that status and why other things don't. You're perfectly happy to say you disagree with some ideas of the church, for example - particularly those of the Pope. What gives you the authority to decide when the Pope's wrong? Well, whatever your answer to that, that's the answer to your question about the Bible.

Well, I don't believe in Apostolic Succession, so that eliminates part of the problem, including the part about the Pope. Although, that would depend on whether Christ came to deliberately found a Church. I would argue that he did not, and instead would argue that he came to show people how they could attain Eternal Life. Then again, I don't believe there's "One True Church" either, which apparently a lot of the Early Christians (Did they all believe there was one?) did. One reason I'd say the Bible has a special status is all of the Christian groups throughout history (With the possible exception of the very earliest ones, who didn't have a complete Bible) Secondly, while I think its pretty obvious that everything Jesus said (Well, I guess some Christians have argued that Christ didn't say everything the Gospels attributed to Him, but I've never heard any Christian argue that what they believe Christ ACTUALLY said is false) but I would argue that the Apostles naturally had a pretty good grasp on theology as well, I mean, most of them learned directly from Christ. Couple that with the belief that the Apostles wrote most of the Bible and Biblical infallibility makes a reasonable amount of sense. Of course, my argument naturally backtracks since I was taught Biblical infallibility.

First, and obviously, the New Testament wasn't really written by the apostles, as far as we can tell, other than the undisputed letters of Paul - and while he was convinced that he had apostolic authority on the grounds of having met the resurrected Christ, I don't think that's really the same thing as knowing the historical Jesus. At any rate, I think you're far too optimistic about people's ability to avoid going wrong. Even if, say, the book of James were written by someone who knew Jesus, who's to say he hasn't misremembered what Jesus told him, or is simply using the name of Jesus to spread his own ideas? (After all, the book of James hardly even mentions Jesus!) Plato did that when writing about Socrates, and he knew Socrates personally.[/QUOTE

How do we actually know the Apostles didn't write most of the NT?

Also, an argument of this kind may work (assuming its premises are correct) if you're merely trying to argue that the New Testament is a good source for what Jesus' first disciples believed. In fact, of course, it is indeed the best source we have for that, at least. But you can't get from that to infallibility. If you could, Plato would be an infallible source for Socrates.

Except for the fact that God wasn't trying to use Plato to give everyone accurate info about Socrates, why would he? God was certainly using the Bible to show people Christ. In fact, the gospel of John specifically mentions this.

As I mentioned, that's not strictly true. There were rival church organisations in the early centuries, which the Catholic Christians universally considered to be heretical and unchristian simply in virtue of existing.

Where did these groups actually come from? Does it actually make any sense that any of them may have been the True Church?

As MagisterCultuum said, the Catholic and Orthodox churches have equal claim to be the "original" church. We refer to the ancient mainstream church as "Catholic" for the sake of convenience, to distinguish it from e.g. the Novatianist church or the Donatist one. But it didn't have a name - it was just the church. Over the course of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the eastern, Greek-speaking wing of this church and the western, Latin-speaking one drifted apart for various reasons. This was a very gradual process and there was no one point where the "schism" really occurred. The end result was two distinct churches which we call Catholic and Orthodox. One can't say that one of them broke away from the other (well, they might say it, I suppose) - they broke away from each other.

OK, so what exactly happened, and is there any particular reason to believe one or the other? What are the arguments for each?

In the case of the Novatianists, I don't know, and I doubt anyone does. In the case of the Donatists, we know from Augustine's counter-arguments against them. (Some Donatist writings do survive, but not on this topic.) In the early fourth century, during the Great Persecution of the emperor Diocletian, Christians were ordered to hand over all copies of the Bible. Some Christian bishops did this. They came to be called traditores, meaning "those who handed over". After the persecution was over, these bishops continued to minister in their posts and they ordained new bishops. Some Christians in Africa believed that because the traditores had compromised their faith during the persecutions, they had lost the ability to carry out valid ordinations.

I must confess this argument makes sense to me.

These Christians refused to have anything to do with the traditores, with the bishops that the traditores had ordained, and with anyone that those bishops ordained, because they believed that once the divine grace had been lost it could not be regained. They therefore split away and formed what became known as the Donatist church, which they regarded as the one true church because it was not contaminated by the traditores. The subsequent alliance of the "main" church with the emperor Constantine and his successors confirmed for the Donatists that it was not the true church, because the true church would never ally itself with the Satanic, persecuting Roman state.

Is the Donastist Church still around in any form?

I'll get to the rest, man you're good to be able to post all those arguments at once!

 

[Jehoshua]

I will answer a few out of a combination of boredom, and because these particular responses of yours make me picture various arguments going in one ear and out the other, although of course your slowly starting to comprehend that not everyone thinks the same way you do!

-

I can see how Christ can work through a flawed person, but I don't see why you'd take a forged Scripture that you know is forged as authentic.

As Plotinus so recently said, you are applying contemporary standards of what consitutes a legitimate piece of literature to an ancient text. I mean, how is it illegitimate just because the author decided to put an apostles name on it to pick up on the apostles reputation? One could just as easily argue that its the content that matters, ergo a plagiarised work is just as valid as one from a notable scholar if the information it contains is correct.

I agree that its more than just picking up a Bible, knowing its infallible, reading it, and developing a theology, obviously. In fact, the reason I believe the Bible isn't so much because of the Bible as because of personal experiences that have verified it for me. However, I don't pick and choose what I want to believe in the Bible, I believe the entire thing. I don't see how you can "Pick and choose" and yet expect to be right.

Yet is that not precisely what you do, since ultimately your "personal experience" and the "I believe in the entire thing" is just you holding to a subjective interpretation of the text. Your statement is of the same nature as those people who pick and choose which doctrines to follow on the basis of what "suits them" in that your whole position rests on your own opinion.

Is the Donastist Church still around in any form?

Institutionally no, the last remnants got wiped off the north african map with the expansion of Islam. Doctrinally... well Im sure some protestant group somewhere posesses aspects of the heretical donatist doctrine.

 

[Arakhor]

In addition, if 2 Timothy was NOT written by Paul, as you assert, how do we know its not the last book written?

It really doesn't matter. It's the religious equivalent of Dan Brown stating at the front of his books that all rituals, places and items listed therein are entirely factual, when we all know that even if they are, the research or implementation thereof will be completely shoddy.

 

[Plotinus]

On the subject of non-Abrahamic monotheisms, do you think that Chinese "heaven worship" can be considered monotheistic, or is it simply a rigorously hierarchical polytheism? (Or perhaps something else altogether?)

I don't know much about it, but I would be inclined to see it as something else altogether. Tian] may have some things in common with the western "God", but seems to me far too impersonal to be called a god at all. I think it's generally a mistake to try to interpret Asian religions in terms of the concepts of western ones.

Well, since 2 Thessalonians was written later, it would be easy to argue that Paul simply wasn't yet aware of anything that had to happen first, and so he misunderstood the meaning of "Christ is coming soon" to mean "Soon" in human terms. As long as Paul didn't actually say "Christ is coming within my lifetime" I don't see an issue here. Its obvious that this hasn't happened, yet we still take Paul's writings as Scripture. And I'm well aware that all the early Apostles had no expectation that they'd be around for very long. However, I don't think they ever put a date on when the world was going to end in Scripture.

I'd say that 1 Thessalonians 4:15 is a pretty explicit statement that Paul expected to be alive when Christ returned. You're right that it's striking that this is so, and yet this book has always been regarded as scriptural. One might say that this indicates that the early Christians weren't quite as insistent upon biblical inerrancy as one might think.

I wondered what the early Christians had to say about it, so I looked up this passage in the indexes of various patristic volumes. I couldn't find very much of interest. The passage is quite often cited as a proof of the physical resurrection. Here is an example from Tertullian. John Chrysostom has a whole homily on the passage here, but it's a sermon on the perils of hell and doesn't address the issue of Paul's belief that he would be alive at the end times. He does, however, address this issue here. His solution is that when Paul says "we" he's not talking about himself, since he would in fact die before Christ returned - he is merely speaking in the voice of those who will be alive. That doesn't seem a very plausible interpretation to me, naturally.

I can see how Christ can work through a flawed person, but I don't see why you'd take a forged Scripture that you know is forged as authentic.

As Jehoshua said, "forged" is a loaded word which doesn't necessarily apply here, and even if it does, it's not the point. The question for Christians isn't whether a book of the Bible is authentic, it's whether it's authoritative, and if so, how and in what way. Christians who aren't evangelicals believe that the Bible has authority but not absolute authority, because there are other things that have authority as well, and one must balance them or understand them together in a holistic way. On that view it doesn't matter if there are flaws in some of these authorities, because taken together they are reliable. In the case of the Bible, there are various theories about why it might be authoritative, but one is that it is the record of various people's witness to the experience of God and salvation in Jesus. That's not affected by the question whether these people wrote under their own name or other people's.

If this were an Epistle, I could understand that, but it was allegedly quoting Jesus. Now, you could argue whether the quote was authentic, of course, but if it was, I don't see how you could argue that it was simply being used to attack other groups of people.

Yes, I would agree with that. However, like most of the sayings in John, it's almost certainly not authentic, at least not in this form. John is, I think, better understood as a theological treatise in the form of a Gospel, a little like some of the non-canonical gospels (although it's still much more like the Synoptics than any of the non-canonical ones are).

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6:35&version=NIV

Seems to imply a symbolic interpretation, and the Word of God is compared to bread.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew 4:4&version=NIV

Surely the word is contrasted to bread rather than compared to it. Still, I would dispute your assumption that "every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" in the Matthew passage is a reference to the Bible. Besides which, of course, the fact that Matthew uses terms in a certain way doesn't indicate that John uses them in the same way.

My (Very basic) response to this would be that even though the world appears old, a world that "Appears young" couldn't support human life, but to get to a world that was actually very old would require a lot of death (Which, unlike death after the Fall would NOT have been because of sin.) Every theistic evolutionist has to ask themselves "Why did God create a world that was already marred by death?

Ah, well, in that case you do accept that the world appears to be old, and you say that this appearance is misleading. Which was my point before: that's exactly the same as the Catholic view of the sacraments, i.e. they appear to be bread and wine but this appearance is misleading.

As for why God created a world that was marred by death, the obvious answer to that is that physical death is not a bad thing.

My immediate argument would be both that it would be a form of cannibalism, and that every miracle that Christ actually did was physical, in other words, Jesus never did a miracle that we couldn't physically see.

Perhaps not. But I think Christians believe in invisible miracles all the time, when God gives grace to people. The sacraments are thought to be a vehicle of that invisible grace.

What exactly would you say he was thinking about?

I don't know. Surely not anything in what we would call the New Testament. He says his readers have been acquainted with the holy books from childhood, which would surely rule out anything Christian, at least if the author is presenting the book as being written by Paul. I suppose the most probable answer is those books that Jews at that time considered sacred, which was pretty much anything of sufficient antiquity. Remember that in the first century there was no concept yet of a "canon" of inspired books that were clearly demarcated from the "non-canonical", non-inspired books. There was no "Old Testament" distinct from other old books. Jews of the time treated any ancient (or putatively ancient) text as if it were very authoritative.

Of course, the author of 2 Timothy doesn't explicitly say he's thinking of Christian or Jewish scriptures. When ancient Greeks talked about "inspiration" they generally meant Homer or Hesiod. Plato wrote a whole dialogue about this - Ion - which considers whether a rhapsode (performer) who recites the words of Homer is speaking with a divine voice. Even Aristotle says that Homer wrote divine words (Poetics 1459a30). I doubt that the author is really thinking of Homer and Hesiod here when he talks about "scriptures", but one can't wholly discount it. Certainly what he says about the scriptures has more to do with Greek religion than Jewish, I think, and it seems to me that the verse is an example of a hellenising influence on early Christianity - i.e. they were applying pagan concepts of divine inspiration to Jewish writings.

In addition, if 2 Timothy was NOT written by Paul, as you assert, how do we know its not the last book written?

We don't know that, but as I understand it, Jude and 2 Peter are usually thought to be the last books written, since they seem to presuppose historical circumstances later than the other books of the New Testament. Of course it's perfectly possible that 2 Timothy was the last one to be written. Even then, the one book that it simply can't include within "scripture" is 2 Timothy itself, surely.

I agree that its more than just picking up a Bible, knowing its infallible, reading it, and developing a theology, obviously. In fact, the reason I believe the Bible isn't so much because of the Bible as because of personal experiences that have verified it for me. However, I don't pick and choose what I want to believe in the Bible, I believe the entire thing. I don't see how you can "Pick and choose" and yet expect to be right.

As I've said before, we all "pick and choose". You don't believe everything everybody tells you. You use your judgement to try to work out who's right and who's wrong. To do otherwise would literally be insanity.

Part of the problem is that you're still thinking of authority in terms of infallibility. Certainly if one exercises critical judgement one can't "expect to be right" all the time. We're not infallible. But that's not a problem. We're not infallible and we don't normally expect to be. You said yourself that, in politics, simply believing everything in the party line is a flaw, and most people disagree with their chosen parties on at least some things. Is it a reasonable criticism to say that they're just picking and choosing and they can't expect to be right? Of course not, because people like that are just doing their best and believing what seems most reasonable to them. They may be wrong about some or even most of what they believe, but we don't have infallible guarantees against mistakes of this kind. Religion is exactly the same. We all believe what seems to us to be true, and perhaps we're wrong in some or all of this, but there's not much we can do about this. We can't be infallible, but we don't need to be, because we get through the rest of life OK without being infallible.

Well, I don't believe in Apostolic Succession, so that eliminates part of the problem, including the part about the Pope. Although, that would depend on whether Christ came to deliberately found a Church. I would argue that he did not, and instead would argue that he came to show people how they could attain Eternal Life. Then again, I don't believe there's "One True Church" either, which apparently a lot of the Early Christians (Did they all believe there was one?) did. One reason I'd say the Bible has a special status is all of the Christian groups throughout history (With the possible exception of the very earliest ones, who didn't have a complete Bible)

I think that all the early Christians believed that there was a single true church, and that their own church (whichever it happened to be) was that one. They did not have a concept of the body of Christ being distinct from a visible human organisation. That was a distinction that developed much later. It's only really in the post-Reformation period that Christians came to develop the idea of different church organisations being equally legitimate members of the body of Christ. I'd say that it's rather arbitrary to say you accept the authority of the Bible because all Christians do, but reject the authority of the church. What gave Luther and co the authority to reject the church's authority? Whatever it was, why can't that apply to the Bible?

Secondly, while I think its pretty obvious that everything Jesus said (Well, I guess some Christians have argued that Christ didn't say everything the Gospels attributed to Him, but I've never heard any Christian argue that what they believe Christ ACTUALLY said is false) but I would argue that the Apostles naturally had a pretty good grasp on theology as well, I mean, most of them learned directly from Christ. Couple that with the belief that the Apostles wrote most of the Bible and Biblical infallibility makes a reasonable amount of sense. Of course, my argument naturally backtracks since I was taught Biblical infallibility.

As I say, the argument is just too weak to support infallibility. It's a purely historical argument that is based on who knew what. But no human author is infallible, no matter how close to the source they may be. Would you say, for example, that Tony Blair's memoirs about being prime minister are infallible? Surely not - and yet he was as close to it as you could get! But his account will have been distorted by time, memory, bias, self-promotion, and a host of other unavoidable human flaws. That's just human nature. Infallibility requires something superhuman. To argue that the New Testament is infallible you need to show that something miraculous happened in the way it was written, not simply that the authors were tolerably close to the events they're writing about.

How do we actually know the Apostles didn't write most of the NT?

That's a very big question and the answers are different for each book. Have a look at the summaries here if you want some overviews.

Except for the fact that God wasn't trying to use Plato to give everyone accurate info about Socrates, why would he? God was certainly using the Bible to show people Christ. In fact, the gospel of John specifically mentions this.

I agree that God wasn't trying to use Plato to tell us about Socrates, but I don't agree that it's certain that he was doing so with the Bible about Jesus. Just because John says he was doesn't mean he really was. And in fact John doesn't say he was - John only says that this book was written so that you might believe. The text makes no claim to divine inspiration.

Where did these groups actually come from? Does it actually make any sense that any of them may have been the True Church?

They had various historical origins. In the case of the Novatianists, they came from a rather complicated disagreement about who should be bishop of Rome. Two candidates, Cornelius and Novatian, were elected by rival groups at the same time. (This was a time of confusion anyway, as there was a lot of persecution going on.) Cornelius eventually "won" in that more people recognised him, but Novatian had enough supporters to continue as a rival bishop of Rome and to consecrate new bishops of his own in other cities. The result was two competing church organisations, one that recognised Cornelius and one that recognised Novatian. Even after Novatian's death, his churches continued, and did so for a couple of centuries despite not having any doctrinal disagreements with the "main" church.

OK, so what exactly happened, and is there any particular reason to believe one or the other? What are the arguments for each?

It was a dreadfully long process that was down to different cultures and different political situations, as well as different theologies. It's also important to recognise that it was never really a complete split; in theory each church recognised the other as legitimate, but thought that the other lot had picked up a few problems that were temporarily de-legitimising each other. In the case of the Catholics, they thought that the Orthodox weren't giving the Pope the recognition that he was due, and they were being heretical about the Trinity. And in the case in the Orthodox, they thought that the Catholics were getting a bit over-enthusiastic about the Pope, and were being heretical about the Trinity. Plus various other issues such as whether to use unleavened bread in the Eucharist, how many fingers to bless with, whether priests can marry, and so on. There was no one big issue. Today there has been considerable rapprochement; the Second Vatican Council, for example, recognises the validity of Orthodox clerics and distinguishes the Orthodox Church from other churches that are genuinely schismatic such as the Protestants. And there are various eastern-rite Catholic churches and the like which are effectively blends of Catholic and Orthodox, so there isn't a clear demarcation between them.

It's hard to say what the "arguments" are for each and how good they are. They're just two churches that have developed the way that they have. Different people have different preferences that reflect different things that they consider important.

Is the Donastist Church still around in any form?

As Jehoshua said, no, it's not, although I would agree with him that there are parallels between the Donatists and at least some Protestants on at least some points. I've seen it said that the Donatists may have been some kind of influence on, or at least precursor of, Islam - but then that seems to be said of pretty much every Middle Eastern religious movement before the seventh century.

One small remnant of the Donatist schism remains: the word traditor, the Donatist name for those who handed over the scriptures to the Roman authorities, is the root of the English word traitor.

I'll get to the rest, man you're good to be able to post all those arguments at once!

Not good, just procrastinating!

 

[Ajidica]

...atheists deny that divinity exists. How egotistical is a person who says, "If god does not conform to my thoughts, then he does not exist"? Perhaps then atheism as a philosophy may need some humility of its own. For it is one thing not to have seen something or not to have rationally explained something and quite another to claim an impossibility proof. As the cell biologist Lewis Thomas has written, "The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance." The possibility of divinity will always haunt the materialist and positivist with doubt about the logic of their faith in certainty.

That's from Possibilities for over one hundredfold more spiritual information, p. 29. I used to think that C.S. Lewis' argument for God's existence from moral intuitions, in Mere Christianity, was the worst argument for God's existence that I'd ever encountered, until I read Templeton.

I might be missing something, but this doesn't seem that much different from the 'the universe is so complex, therefore, God' arguments my theo professor was so fond of.
While I disagree with him, they didn't seem that bad of arguments.

 

[GhostWriter16]

I had a look through some indexes to patristic works and I found very few references to these verses. As a rule, the early Christians had surprisingly little interest in the doctrine of atonement and usually seem to have had a fairly naive belief that salvation came to those who were good and not to those who were bad - despite the existence of verses like those you mention. I couldn't find any references to the Acts verse. Here are a couple of interesting references to the Ephesians one.

First, Ignatius of Antioch. It is interesting to look at this chapter and then follow the link to the next one, where he exhorts his readers to virtue. The implication seems to be that part of the gift of grace is the ability and responsibility to do good works.

John Chrysostom comments on this same verse of Ephesians a couple of times: here, and here. In the first passage he interprets it as being about the Jewish Law, so he reads it as an insistence that the Law does not save. In the second passage he sees it in the more modern sense as contrasting faith with good deeds, but here he stresses that faith without good deeds is worthless, and the purpose of faith is to allow us to do good deeds. That is perhaps a little closer to the modern evangelical view (note also how in the first passage he articulates a doctrine of the atonement very like that of modern evangelicals - a rare thing for a patristic author).

So I would say that, with passages such as these, the early Christians either ignored them, interpreted them as referring to the Jewish Law, or combined them with other passages insisting on the importance of good works .

I don't see how those passages apply to the Jewish law at all. The point seems fairly obvious to me that Paul (Or whoever wrote Ephesians if you'd contend that it wasn't Paul) is teaching Salvation by Faith. If it were teaching that Salvation could attain by works, it seems to me that would be stated somewhere.

Yes, I would agree with that. However, like most of the sayings in John, it's almost certainly not authentic, at least not in this form.

Even if this is true, I doubt Catholics are reading it that way.

John is, I think, better understood as a theological treatise in the form of a Gospel, a little like some of the non-canonical gospels (although it's still much more like the Synoptics than any of the non-canonical ones are).

For the record, how do we know that John isn't authentic? I know the synoptics are a bit different, but couldn't Christ have preached in more than one "style"? And even if he didn't, how do we know John isn't righ and the Synoptics are wrong?

Surely the word is contrasted to bread rather than compared to it

I guess I'm reading it as "Man doesn't live bread [physical food] but by every word [spiritual food]. I've never questioned this, but then again, that may be an idea taught in Scripture orr it might just be Evangelical tradition.

Still, I would dispute your assumption that "every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" in the Matthew passage is a reference to the Bible. Besides which, of course, the fact that Matthew uses terms in a certain way doesn't indicate that John uses them in the same way

Well, considering that 2 Timothy describes Scripture as "God-breathed" it certainly makes sense to me that Jesus could have been talking about the Bible, although that view would, admittedly, depend on both Matthew and 2 Timothy being accurate, which I suppose you could contest.

As for the second part, IF they were both authentic, would it matter? Considering Christ would be the one speaking, and not the authors of Matthew or John?

Ah, well, in that case you do accept that the world appears to be old, and you say that this appearance is misleading. Which was my point before: that's exactly the same as the Catholic view of the sacraments, i.e. they appear to be bread and wine but this appearance is misleading.

Well, part of the problem is I don't understand the Catholic position well-enough to argue effectively against it, but I must say the doctrine seems... odd, and certainly did not seem to me to be Christ's focus. And yet the Eucharist is the #1 focus in a Catholic (Or Orthodox) Church.

As for why God created a world that was marred by death, the obvious answer to that is that physical death is not a bad thing.

Considering how much suffering goes into death, I would contest this.

Perhaps not. But I think Christians believe in invisible miracles all the time, when God gives grace to people. The sacraments are thought to be a vehicle of that invisible grace.

Although, interestingly, Evangelicals do not, because such miracles are invisible, and invisible miracles do not occur in the Bible. Even when a Christian receives the Holy Spirit, it makes a change on their life. There's literally no visible change of the Eucharist, so I would argue its not a real miracle.

 

[_random_]

What do you think of Origen's argument that internal contradictions in the Bible are in fact divinely inspired?

 

[timtofly]

Here is what I have gathered from reading Plotinus' link to Augustin. Why does the etheral library leave off the e? I read to the part where Augustine commented on infant Baptism, and I also found some "answers" to universalism.

Historical: Origen lived about 200 CE. Jerome and Augustin were around 400 CE. Origen was a prolific writer in Greek with volumes of commentaries on the OT and the writings of the Apostles.

200 years later, you have Jerome, who was born Latin, and Augustine, who was raised a Latin philosopher who "converted" to Christianity.

Jerome went to Palestine more than likely to learn Greek and Hebrew from the Jews themselves. Augustine, lived in North Africa and was fluent in Greek, and Latin and Hebrew.

Both of them worked on translating the works of Origen and even in 400 there was hinted, the Latin Catholics and the Greek Orthodox as being seperate identities within Christiandom. Only because in the etheral writings the English points out they were using the terms Catholic and Orthodox, and Jew.

Augustine was refuting against Pelagius, and Jerome was defending himself against a latin catholic accuser who thought that some of the teachings of Origen were not quite Catholic. It seemed that the Catholic church or Latin at this time were in need of Latin translations. Was Rome leaving behind it's Greek roots and Latin was now the lingua of the day?

Augustine was able to refute most doctrine up to the point of Infant Baptism in certain points. About 7 years before his death, he had written letters to Jerome, to clarify some points, but it seems that Jerome too busy defending his own writings never got back to Augustine with such clarification. In fact, Jerome himself seems not that much into baptism, much less when it comes to infants. Here is his thoughts on Baptism itself though:

I am told, to take another point, that one of his followers, Chrysogonus, finds fault with me for having said that in baptism all sins are put away, and, in the case of the man who was twice married, that he had died and risen up a new man in Christ; and further that there were several such persons who were Bishops in the churches. I will make him a short answer. He and his friends have in their hands my letter, for which they take me to task. Let him give an answer to it, let him overthrow its reasoning by reasoning of his own, and prove my writings false by his writings. Why should he knit his brow and draw in and wrinkle up his nostrils, and weigh out his hollow words, and simulate among the common crowd a sanctity which his conduct belies? Let me proclaim my principles once more in his ears: That the old Adam dies completely in the laver of baptism, and a new man rises then with Christ; that the man that is earthly perishes and the man from heaven is raised up. I say this not because I myself have a special interest in this question, through the mercy of Christ; but that I made answer to my brethren when they asked me for my opinion, not intending to prescribe for others what they may think right to believe, nor to overturn their resolution by my opinion.

Going back to Augustine we see, perhaps that infants were baptized not for their sin, but for the "original sin" of Adam. I would assume that the Catholic stance by this time had gotten to the point where baptism is complete regeneration.

Here is where universalism comes into play. There is one writing of Origin, that upon translating into Latin, Jerome took the liberty to smooth out the reading to fit the catholic one, but he also included along side his what Origin meant and what a heritic would also mention, thus one could conclude there own interpretation.

This "teaching" was that there was an invisible world of angels before the visible world was created, these angels were cast out and in order to be "redeemed" they were the souls given to humans and thus came the conclusion that Chrisitan woman would become men and men would get back to their original angel state. This would further include that the devil and all of his fallen angels would also eventually be re-instated, thus universalism. Punishment was carried out during death and in the ages to come, things would be righted.

This had led Augustine to refute that grace was not merited from former human/angelic activity, but that grace was free and not based on any merit whatsoever. Coupled with all of this you have believers who though maried would be chaste, fearing that any lustful act would bring forth a degenerate seed of Adam, and I would assume that infant baptism came into play that in order to free one's offspring from Adam's sin, one would be baptized as an infant.

I would also like to point out that baptism was not a "christian" thing. It was a tradition that was practiced by Jews and indeed Jesus was baptized, but people never recalled Jesus baptizing any one, even though his disciples did. I hate to point out though that in John 3, being "born again" was not a water baptism, but a spiritual baptism. The "water" baptism was the human physical birth. That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Even John the Baptist preached repentance before baptism which was probably unorthodox even in the Jewish tradition. I don't know, but it seems that the Jews did not "infant baptize" Seeing that there was no concept of a Messiah dying for mankind's redemption. So if anything John was the turning point in connecting repentance and the "remission" of sin through a "water" baptism.

My opinion is that baptism was by no means "spiritual" salvation, but since it had always been done and even commanded that people be baptized, that it took on a meaning of it's own and thus the evolution of it became the accepted means of regeneration, and even more so in the Catholic and Orthodox tradition of infant baptism. I still think that each person has to come to their own conclusion that repentance is needed and faith in Christ is done in obedience to a personal call by the Holy Spirit. Baptism may free you from the Adamic sin bondage, but it definetly does not make one a saint. So I would have to agree with the Catholics that every day is a struggle to maintian the Christian life, and not even baptism should be an excuse not to.

There was an interesting side note that Jerome made a remark when the 70 wrote out the OT from Hebrew into Greek, and the copies were all identical verbatim, that it was the work of the Holy Spirit. It seemed that even Jerome had something to say about how the "scriptures" even translations have the ability to be inspired. Whether it was just a rhetorical comment or not.

 

[Plotinus]

I might be missing something, but this doesn't seem that much different from the 'the universe is so complex, therefore, God' arguments my theo professor was so fond of.
While I disagree with him, they didn't seem that bad of arguments.

I don't see anything there about the complexity of the universe being an argument for God (just a claim that the complexity of the universe indicates that there's a great deal we don't know). The argument, as I understand it, is that it's arrogant to deny that God exists, therefore he does.

I don't see how those passages apply to the Jewish law at all. The point seems fairly obvious to me that Paul (Or whoever wrote Ephesians if you'd contend that it wasn't Paul) is teaching Salvation by Faith. If it were teaching that Salvation could attain by works, it seems to me that would be stated somewhere.

As I've said before, it's not obvious to me that any of these passages are discussing the mechanics of salvation, i.e. whether one is saved by works or by faith in a post-Reformation sense. I don't think that that's something the first-century church thought about. Anyway, that's not really the point - the question was what the church fathers thought about them, and as you can see, whether rightly or wrongly, they didn't interpret these passages in a Protestant way at all.

Even if this is true, I doubt Catholics are reading it that way.

No, I agree with that.

For the record, how do we know that John isn't authentic? I know the synoptics are a bit different, but couldn't Christ have preached in more than one "style"? And even if he didn't, how do we know John isn't righ and the Synoptics are wrong?

We don't know that John isn't authentic - it's our best guess. Remember that all we have is the texts and what can be deduced from them. However, the evidence strongly suggests that most of the material in John isn't authentic.

Yes, perhaps Jesus could have preached in more than one style. But the styles of John and the Synoptics are very different indeed, and so is the content. In the Synoptics, Jesus preaches using short sayings and parables. His main topic is the kingdom of God. He refers to himself rarely, and when he does, it is as the "son of man". In John, by contrast, Jesus preaches using long, rather rambling speeches. His main topic is himself, whom he refers to as "the Son", and he almost never mentions the kingdom of God. So immediately it seems implausible that the same person could have preached in two such different ways and on such different topics, but apparently to the same audience (i.e. his disciples and the other people around). There's no indication that the kind of teaching found in the Synoptics was delivered to one kind of audience and that in John to another. And the most problematic part is the idea that not only did Jesus preach in two very different ways, but one way was recorded in one tradition and the other in another. Maybe Jesus could have spent half his time talking about the kingdom of God and the other half talking about the Father and the Son, but in that case you'd expect to see sayings on both of these topics in each Gospel. Instead we get the former exclusively in the Synoptics and the latter exclusively in John. It seems much more plausible to suppose that at least one of these traditions does not reflect the teaching of the historical Jesus.

As for why, given the choice, most people go for the authenticity of the Synoptics rather than that of John, there are various reasons for this. One is that the kind of teaching found in the Synoptics is just intrinsically closer to what you'd expect from an early first-century Jewish preacher. It is the kind of thing that itinerant Jewish preachers said and in fact has many parallels to the things taught by other such preachers. The theology of John's Gospel, by contrast, is much more like what you'd expect Christians later in the first century to believe. For example, if the rest of the New Testament and the writings of the apostolic fathers are anything to go by, the early Christians were completely uninterested in the concept of the kingdom of God and almost never referred to Jesus as the Son of Man. It would therefore be very odd to suppose that the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, who talks about these things a lot, is a Christian invention. John's Jesus is much more suspicious from that point of view.

There's also the matter of numbers of sources. There are three Synoptic Gospels, but of course they are literarily related (i.e. some of them copied the others), so they are not independent sources. But if the two-source hypothesis is correct, which it probably is, Mark and Q are two different sources which were used by Matthew and Luke independently. But Mark and Q present tolerably similar pictures of Jesus - again, preaching about the kingdom of God, the Son of Man, and related things. Both Matthew and Luke also have access to other material unique to them, which also broadly meshes with this picture. Not only that, but Paul's letters, which are earlier than all of these other texts, have many points of parallel with sayings attributed to Jesus in the Synoptics (although he rarely quotes or cites Jesus explicitly). They do not have parallels with sayings of Jesus in John. For example, the eschatological claims of 1 Thessalonians parallel those of Mark 13, the ethical exhortations of Romans 12 parallel those of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, and the account of the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11 parallels that in Mark 14 (the Synoptics give rather different versions of this story, but it doesn't appear in John at all).

All of this indicates that the material in the Synoptics existed in a number of different traditions in the early church. But we don't have any such indication for John. If we have to choose one tradition to be probably authentic and one to be probably inauthentic, it therefore seems reasonable to favour the Synoptics over John.

Well, considering that 2 Timothy describes Scripture as "God-breathed" it certainly makes sense to me that Jesus could have been talking about the Bible, although that view would, admittedly, depend on both Matthew and 2 Timothy being accurate, which I suppose you could contest.

Naturally!

As for the second part, IF they were both authentic, would it matter? Considering Christ would be the one speaking, and not the authors of Matthew or John?

Well, you'd still have to have good reason to suppose that he was talking about the same subject in both. In the Matthew passage the devil talks about bread, and Jesus retorts that bread alone isn't enough. In the John passage he describes himself as the bread of life. So it seems to me that even if we assume that Jesus really said both of these, in the Matthew passage he's contrasting the words of God to bread, while in the John passage he's calling himself bread. In other words, he's using the concept of bread to do very different things. "Bread" in the Matthew passage means, presumably, just bread (as contrasted with words from God). "Bread" in the John passage means Jesus himself, and being coupled with "blood" in the later section of that passage has eucharistic connotations. That seems to me very different.

Well, part of the problem is I don't understand the Catholic position well-enough to argue effectively against it, but I must say the doctrine seems... odd, and certainly did not seem to me to be Christ's focus. And yet the Eucharist is the #1 focus in a Catholic (Or Orthodox) Church.

Oddness is no barrier to being part of Christianity, or any other religion for that matter! You're right that there's reason to think that it wasn't Jesus' focus. On the other hand, singing hymns seems to be a primary focus in all the evangelical churches I've been in, and Jesus didn't spend much time doing that in the Gospels either. I wouldn't say that the liturgies of any church bear much relation to what Jesus is described as focusing on in the Gospels. But then I don't really see why that would be a problem - the Gospels don't generally describe Jesus in liturgical situations.

Considering how much suffering goes into death, I would contest this.

Perhaps, but then the problem of evil is wider than the existence of death alone, and it's a problem even if you're a young earth creationist. You may say that God wouldn't create a world in which suffering and death is an intrinsic element of the development of life, but if you think that you'd also have to say that God wouldn't create a world that contains the suffering and death we see around us right now. The creationist answer that that suffering is caused by the Fall and is therefore somehow immune from this objection doesn't work, for a variety of reasons, one of which is that if you believe in the existence of suffering right now (as we all do) and you also believe that God exists (as Christians do), you must believe that God has some reason for allowing suffering right now. It doesn't matter whether you think that that reason is the Fall or free will or the therapeutic nature of suffering or whatever it may be - the point is that you believe that he has a reason. And that means you accept that God may have reasons for permitting suffering. And if you accept that, you can't assume that God wouldn't have had some reason - perhaps a different reason - for permitting or even endorsing the suffering and death involved in the development of life.

Personally I would tend to agree that God probably wouldn't have permitted it, but then I don't think he'd have permitted the suffering we see right now either. What strikes me as inconsistent is saying that he permits the latter but not the former.

Although, interestingly, Evangelicals do not, because such miracles are invisible, and invisible miracles do not occur in the Bible. Even when a Christian receives the Holy Spirit, it makes a change on their life. There's literally no visible change of the Eucharist, so I would argue its not a real miracle.

There could still be miraculous infusions of grace that make no discernible change - perhaps someone could receive the Holy Spirit on their deathbed and never have a chance to show the change in their life. Still, I must admit I've never heard of this criterion before, that a miracle has to produce a visible change if it's to count as a miracle. I don't see any good reason to accept it. The mere fact that all of Jesus' miracles in the Bible had discernible effects doesn't seem to me to be strong enough to support the claim that this is an necessary property for all miracles. It's even weaker than the Catholic argument that Jesus' disciples were all men, therefore all priests must be men too.

What do you think of Origen's argument that internal contradictions in the Bible are in fact divinely inspired?

If you think the Bible is divinely inspired and recognise that it has contradictions, I suppose you'd have to accept that! Of course Origen's argument was that God has intentionally put impossible claims into the Bible to alert us to the fact that it has a non-literal meaning (in addition to the literal meaning that most of it has as well). I don't know if anyone today would agree with that - I would say that it's an illustration of how differently ancient Christians thought about the Bible and its inspiration.

200 years later, you have Jerome, who was born Latin, and Augustine, who was raised a Latin philosopher who "converted" to Christianity.

Augustine was raised as a Christian. He never exactly lost his faith in Christ, converting to Manichaism as a young adult, but his conversion back to Christianity was more of a reversion than a conversion really.

Jerome went to Palestine more than likely to learn Greek and Hebrew from the Jews themselves.

Jerome became fluent in Greek while in Rome as a young man, where he also became fluent in Latin (his native tongue was Illyrian). He learned Hebrew as a monk in the desert of Chalcis, near Antioch. He did continue to study it years later when he lived in Palestine, which is where he did most of his biblical translations, and you're right that he hired Jewish scholars to help him with that. But I don't think that was his main, and certainly not his sole, reason for going to Palestine.

Augustine, lived in North Africa and was fluent in Greek, and Latin and Hebrew.

No - Latin was Augustine's native tongue, but he never acquired more than basic Greek, and he did not know Hebrew.

Both of them worked on translating the works of Origen...

No, Augustine didn't translate anything, and certainly not Origen (unfortunately).

...and even in 400 there was hinted, the Latin Catholics and the Greek Orthodox as being seperate identities within Christiandom. Only because in the etheral writings the English points out they were using the terms Catholic and Orthodox, and Jew.

Yes, this is correct. The Latin-speaking west and the Greek-speaking east were already culturally and theologically rather distinct (to say nothing of the Syriac-speaking further east). Their differences had already been thrown into sharp relief by the Arian controversy, which was a largely Greek-speaking affair.

Augustine was refuting against Pelagius, and Jerome was defending himself against a latin catholic accuser who thought that some of the teachings of Origen were not quite Catholic. It seemed that the Catholic church or Latin at this time were in need of Latin translations. Was Rome leaving behind it's Greek roots and Latin was now the lingua of the day?

Yes, Latin seems to have become the language of Roman Christians by the end of the second century or the early third century. That's when we find Christians based in Rome or in the west writing extensively in Latin for the first time. Before then, even western Christians had been mainly Greek-speakers - Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, for example, were both based in the west but wrote in Greek.

Going back to Augustine we see, perhaps that infants were baptized not for their sin, but for the "original sin" of Adam. I would assume that the Catholic stance by this time had gotten to the point where baptism is complete regeneration.

It was complicated. There was, as far as I can tell, no generally accepted understanding of precisely what sins baptism removes. The closest antecedents to Augustine are Ambrose of Milan and Ambrosiaster (someone writing under the name of Ambrose), but they still differ from Augustine himself.

Here is where universalism comes into play. There is one writing of Origin, that upon translating into Latin, Jerome took the liberty to smooth out the reading to fit the catholic one, but he also included along side his what Origin meant and what a heritic would also mention, thus one could conclude there own interpretation.

No, you've got this controversy rather wrong. It was Rufinus, not Jerome, who translated Origen's On first principles into Latin, and smoothed the text to remove what he regarded as heretical elements. In the introduction, he stated that he had done this because he believed that the heretical bits were interpolations that Origen himself had not written, and he said that in removing them he was following the practice of other notable translators of Origen, by which he meant Jerome, although he did not name him. Jerome had translated a number of Origen's commentaries into Latin. When he read this, Jerome went completely ape and insisted (a) his translations were accurate and not bowdlerised, and (b) he was not then and never had been an Origenist - a pretty implausible claim given that even in the commentaries he'd written under his own name he'd plagiarised great chunks of Origen's.

Jerome then made a new translation of his own of On first principles which he circulated as a rival to Rufinus'. This translation was brutal and showcased all the heretical bits of the book. Jerome did this partly to show how awful Origen was and partly to show what a better translator he was, compared to Rufinus.

Unfortunately the only complete version of Origen's On first principles that survives today is Rufinus' translation - the Greek original is lost and so is Jerome's version, although fragments of both remain. So it's impossible to know for certain what Origen really said.

This "teaching" was that there was an invisible world of angels before the visible world was created, these angels were cast out and in order to be "redeemed" they were the souls given to humans and thus came the conclusion that Chrisitan woman would become men and men would get back to their original angel state. This would further include that the devil and all of his fallen angels would also eventually be re-instated, thus universalism. Punishment was carried out during death and in the ages to come, things would be righted.

Origen probably did believe something like this and certainly elements of this can be found in his surviving texts. However, it's not certain that he really did teach universalism, although it would indeed seem to be entailed by other things that he certainly taught. Some Origen scholars, notably Danielou, have argued that Origen was never a universalist at all.

At any rate, universalism was only one of the things that Jerome rejected about Origen (at this point in his career). Origen's opinions about the resurrection body were much more contentious at the time, and these were the main reasons why he was regarded with suspicion at this time and over the next couple of centuries.

This had led Augustine to refute that grace was not merited from former human/angelic activity, but that grace was free and not based on any merit whatsoever. Coupled with all of this you have believers who though maried would be chaste, fearing that any lustful act would bring forth a degenerate seed of Adam, and I would assume that infant baptism came into play that in order to free one's offspring from Adam's sin, one would be baptized as an infant.

Augustine's voluminous writings on grace had nothing to do with the controversy between Jerome and Rufinus regarding Origenism. They were a response to Pelagius and his followers, and this controversy was years later (Rufinus was long dead by the time Pelagianism became an issue). Confusingly, though, Jerome regarded Pelagius as yet another Origenist, and a sort of new Rufinus. He objected to Pelagius on quite different grounds from Augustine. For Augustine, Pelagius was wrong because he taught that human beings could save themselves and did not require divine grace. For Jerome, Pelagius was wrong because he taught that human nature can become perfect, which he thought was one of the principal errors of Origenism.

I would also like to point out that baptism was not a "christian" thing. It was a tradition that was practiced by Jews and indeed Jesus was baptized, but people never recalled Jesus baptizing any one, even though his disciples did.

That's what John 4:2 says, but note that John 3:22 says that Jesus did baptise people.

I hate to point out though that in John 3, being "born again" was not a water baptism, but a spiritual baptism. The "water" baptism was the human physical birth.

We've argued about this already in these threads. I don't know of any good reason to think that "born of water" isn't a reference to baptism. It seems to me just perverse to insist that it means literal birth. See John 1:26, where John the Baptist describes himself as baptising with water, and contrasts this with what Jesus will do.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Even John the Baptist preached repentance before baptism which was probably unorthodox even in the Jewish tradition. I don't know, but it seems that the Jews did not "infant baptize" Seeing that there was no concept of a Messiah dying for mankind's redemption. So if anything John was the turning point in connecting repentance and the "remission" of sin through a "water" baptism.

Baptism was rather varied in Judaism of the time. You're right that the Jews did not practise infant baptism. The rabbinical writings state on a number of occasions that converts to Judaism must be baptised, but it's much less important than being circumcised. Hasidic and Essene Jews seem to have used immersion in water as a form of penance, and there was certainly a strong idea that baptism constituted, symbolised, or was a precondition of remission of sins. See this old but exhaustive article.

There was an interesting side note that Jerome made a remark when the 70 wrote out the OT from Hebrew into Greek, and the copies were all identical verbatim, that it was the work of the Holy Spirit. It seemed that even Jerome had something to say about how the "scriptures" even translations have the ability to be inspired. Whether it was just a rhetorical comment or not.

Yes, the early Christians certainly all believed that the scriptures were inspired, and most of them thought that it was the Septuagint that was inspired, not the Hebrew originals - i.e. the moment of inspiration came when the "seventy" made their translation. Augustine came to hold a compromise position: there are some things that appear in the Hebrew originals but not the Septuagint, and there are some things that appear in the Septuagint but not the Hebrew originals, but since they're all inspired, this means simply that God decided to say some things by the Hebrew prophets and some by the "seventy", and he did this to show that they're all prophets.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

What's the history of the chapters and verses of the various books of the Bible? Do any of them exist in their oldest forms? Were all of them created at the same time? Has any edition of the Bible (or of individual books) used different chapters and verses, or a different system entirely?

 

[Plotinus]

The system of chapter divisions is not ancient. A number of chapter divisions are known to have been introduced in the thirteenth century, notably by Hugh of St-Cher. His older contemporary, Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, is thought to have devised a rival system which is the one we still use today. His system of chapters was used in most editions of the Vulgate after his time, and was used in concordances of the Vulgate to help locate passages. (Langton was also the first to mix the deuterocanonical books in among the other books of the Old Testament - they had previously been kept together at the end.)

However, Langton didn't introduce the verse divisions. For the Old Testament, these were based on the Hebrew punctuation mark sof passuq, which corresponds to a Latin stop (i.e. the equivalent of a full stop, semi-colon, or comma). (I believe it's rather more complicated than this, with other punctuation marks or natural line divisions being used too, but I don't know Hebrew so can't say any more.) In around 1440, the French Jewish philosopher Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus created a concordance to the Hebrew scriptures (modelled on Christian concordances to the Vulgate) in which he used Stephen Langton's chapter divisions and supplemented them with "verse" divisions based on these natural divisions of the Hebrew. The result was the familiar method of biblical reference by chapter and verse, and his divisions became standard with the development of printing.

As for the New Testament verses, an Italian Dominican named Santes Pagnino devised a system in the early sixteenth century, presumably inspired by Nathan's system for the Old Testament, but it never caught on. Robert Estienne created a new system of verses for his edition of the Greek New Testament which he published in 1551, and he used it again in 1553 when he published a new French translation of the Bible (which of course also used Nathan's Old Testament verse divisions). This French edition was therefore the very first Bible to contain the chapter and verse divisions that we know, in both Old and New Testaments, because Estienne's system of verses for the New Testament is the one that became standard. And the first English edition of the Bible to use the same system was the Geneva Bible of 1560.

 

[_random_]

How did St. Isaac of Nineveh managed to get himself venerated by Catholics, Copts, and Orthodox without being in communion with any of them?

Are there any reasons for the popularity of the Ussher chronology beyond its having been included in early printings of the King James Bible?

 

[caketastydelish]

I have heard from previous threads that you are a published writer.

Can you name some of your books? I might buy one for my iPad (if available) or maybe even see if I can get one off the internet at a site like amazon.

 

[Dachs]

I have heard from previous threads that you are a published writer.

Can you name some of your books? I might buy one for my iPad (if available) or maybe even see if I can get one off the internet at a site like amazon.

In the event that he's too damn modest to say - I had to get his name from somewhere else - here's the list of his books from Amazon.

 

[Plotinus]

Looks like I left this hanging again - sorry!

How did St. Isaac of Nineveh managed to get himself venerated by Catholics, Copts, and Orthodox without being in communion with any of them?

I think in large part because he wrote only on ascetic subjects and never mentioned the (christological) issues that divided his church from those ones. You're right that this was an unusual feat, but it can happen. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is another example - he was probably some species of Monophysite (he is first cited by Severus of Antioch) but obviously both Catholic and Orthodox thought rather highly of him. That's a special case, though, since they thought he really was sub-apostolic.

A rather more interesting example is Philo of Alexandria, who seems to have been completely ignored by pagan Platonist philosophers and (I think) by later Jewish thinkers, but who was read and appreciated by Christians, especially after a couple of centuries.

Are there any reasons for the popularity of the Ussher chronology beyond its having been included in early printings of the King James Bible?

It had the virtue of being extremely thorough and well researched. Chronology was a nascent science at this time and Ussher was one of its best representatives, so I'm sure that that had something to do with it. Beyond that I can't say.

I have heard from previous threads that you are a published writer.

Can you name some of your books? I might buy one for my iPad (if available) or maybe even see if I can get one off the internet at a site like amazon.

In the event that he's too damn modest to say - I had to get his name from somewhere else - here's the list of his books from Amazon.

Thanks - there are in fact a couple more not on that list here and here. Unfortunately, and unaccountably, I don't think that any of these are available in e-book format at the moment.

 

[Soda7777777]

Just wondering, are the mythologies of Western Pagan religions equivalent to Biblical stories? What I'm trying to say is did they ancients view Theogony as a historical document or more of a religious one?