Don't know where to go - Eastern or Western?

[Miserissima]

If I’m understanding both sides, I think, but am called to weigh in with my “feelings” here – no small matter because I was taught that feelings are second to reason, no matter how much the two may dovetail.

If an RC wants to say the Jesus Prayer, he or she may. If an EC wants to recite the Rosary, he or she may.

These prayers can only build up an interior prayer life based on PRIVATE devotion, and any questions arising from any perceived conflict are for an individual to define, reconcile, or master as long as the spiritual growth comes to the same understanding.

This is why a Spiritual Director is so important, lest we fall into our own error of understanding.

This has nothing to do with “Latinizing” or “Easternizing” or “Orientalizing” one’s interior, private prayer life, because not one of the approved private devotions could ever detract from interior growth…unless, of course, it brought one to a different conclusion…but that can’t happen because the two or three major schools of thought (Theologies), though different, come to same end. In this is the unity of the Churches.

I’ve wrestled with this because of my personal journey. I didn’t want to cherry-pick what made me “feel good” lest I borrow what wasn’t mine, or insulted or brought dishonor to the Church from which a particular devotion came.

Instead, I was encouraged to look at prayer with an Eastern eye, as it were: with proper disposition of feeling and intention, not referring to an Enchiridion (though useful when justifying my prayer life to my RC friends).

Others should be able to do the same to enrich their spirituality. There would be no dilution of the spirituality of a Church if someone from a related Church participated in private – or even public-- devotions. There is dilution if and when another Church imposes its praxis in another.

Adoption is not equal to imposition. Adoption is not cafeteria Catholicism. It is the deepest commitment of a personal choice and no one is blurring lines or stealing anything, as long as there is right intention, or correct disposition. To ask anyone to prove intention is akin to becoming legalistic and petty.

Long story short (too late) I apologize if I am misunderstanding the discussion here, and I’ll quietly dismount my soapbox.

 

[josie_L]

If I’m understanding both sides, I think, but am called to weigh in with my “feelings” here – no small matter because I was taught that feelings are second to reason, no matter how much the two may dovetail.

If an RC wants to say the Jesus Prayer, he or she may. If an EC wants to recite the Rosary, he or she may.

These prayers can only build up an interior prayer life based on PRIVATE devotion, and any questions arising from any perceived conflict are for an individual to define, reconcile, or master as long as the spiritual growth comes to the same understanding.

This is why a Spiritual Director is so important, lest we fall into our own error of understanding.

This has nothing to do with “Latinizing” or “Easternizing” or “Orientalizing” one’s interior, private prayer life, because not one of the approved private devotions could ever detract from interior growth…unless, of course, it brought one to a different conclusion…but that can’t happen because the two or three major schools of thought (Theologies), though different, come to same end. In this is the unity of the Churches.

I’ve wrestled with this because of my personal journey. I didn’t want to cherry-pick what made me “feel good” lest I borrow what wasn’t mine, or insulted or brought dishonor to the Church from which a particular devotion came.

Instead, I was encouraged to look at prayer with an Eastern eye, as it were: with proper disposition of feeling and intention, not referring to an Enchiridion (though useful when justifying my prayer life to my RC friends).

Others should be able to do the same to enrich their spirituality. There would be no dilution of the spirituality of a Church if someone from a related Church participated in private – or even public-- devotions. There is dilution if and when another Church imposes its praxis in another.

Adoption is not equal to imposition. Adoption is not cafeteria Catholicism. It is the deepest commitment of a personal choice and no one is blurring lines or stealing anything, as long as there is right intention, or correct disposition. To ask anyone to prove intention is akin to becoming legalistic and petty.

Long story short (too late) I apologize if I am misunderstanding the discussion here, and I’ll quietly dismount my soapbox.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

 

[dzheremi]

I’m not sure my point is being understood or appreciated. Perhaps I am not expressing myself very clearly. I should probably just stop posting altogether on this matter, but until then, just so everyone is clear, my problem with this idea is not ‘adoption’, but I guess what you could call ‘non-adoption’.

Going back to the earlier Maronite example, Fr. Dario Escobar has adopted the Maronite tradition, having been schooled in it personally by a Maronite priest in the Qadisha Valley, where he lives as a hermit as many Maronites once lived (so in a way, his path is even more traditional than many ‘born’ Maronites, despite being a non-Lebanese coming in from outside). By contrast, the so-called ‘Maronite’ monks of the Adoration at that monastery in MA have not adopted the Maronite tradition (we’ve been over this issue several times on this board, including with monks from this monastery). Even listening to how the monk from that monastery talks about their tradition in that video, it is obvious that it is outsiders glomming onto a foreign tradition, and mixing it with their Latin traditions that are absolutely foreign to Syriac Christianity (e.g., eucharistic adoration, hour long ‘mass’, etc).

Outside of your communion, an example could be made of the so-called “Habeshi liturgy” which was once celebrated in the Coptic Orthodox Church. This was a translation into Arabic of the anaphorae of the Ethiopians (which one/s, I don’t know) for celebration by Copts in Egypt. I don’t know exactly when this started, but it was stopped by HH Pope Shenouda III and his reasoning speaks volumes of the point I’ve been trying to make here regarding the boundary between appreciating another tradition and taking from it: The Coptic Orthodox Church has its own liturgies which are particular to it in terms of the way they are celebrated, and those should be kept rather than adopting others from other churches for celebration by Copts. In a way this is a weird directive, as the Ethiopians originally received many of their anaphoras from Egypt, but over time these anaphoras fell out of use within Egypt proper and hence became restricted to Ge’ez versions which were preserved by the Tewahedo only. So even for our ‘daughter’ churches in Ethiopia and Eritrea, respect for both us and them means that we don’t perform each others’ liturgies. (And when you hear how an actual Ethiopian liturgy is performed, it should definitely make sense why the wholesale importation of their liturgies sort of results in something that is neither fish nor fowl, in terms of its place in the history of either church.)

Is it ‘rigid’ to tell Copts “this is not yours; you don’t get to keep doing it when there’s really no reason to, since we have our own liturgies already which are ours to perform”? If so, then I guess HH is rigid, and I am rigid likewise. I think there’s much worse company to be in, but hey…

 

[Aramis]

I’m not sure my point is being understood or appreciated. Perhaps I am not expressing myself very clearly. I should probably just stop posting altogether on this matter, but until then, just so everyone is clear, my problem with this idea is not ‘adoption’, but I guess what you could call ‘non-adoption’.

I saw this as your meaning from the start…

Syncretism - the mixing of Rites into hybrids - is the problem. Both in the liturgical examples you’ve given, and in the lives of individuals of syncretic practice I have known.

In all cases, it is something different - neither A nor B, and often, incomplete, and frequently unhealthy.

Those of Syncretic practices I have known have either abandoned the church, or picked one or the other and gone that direction. Long term, it’s not stable, at least not that I’ve seen.

A partial exception is when it’s a large body with a particular syncretic practice. That monastery you mention is probably to small for a stable practice… but the 19th C Ruthenian Church, or the other one or two bishop churches, when confronted with an identity crisis, can be just large enough to become a stable syncretic praxis.

New rites appear to historically arise from three impulses - * Divergence in isolation* Syncretism for identification of affiliation* imposition of change by external force

Isolation results in adaptation. Change is the human condition, and the old saying “Tradition is what was done the day I was Chrismated” is more reality than perhaps it should be, and small subtle changes that make sense propagate… and unless checked, become part of tradition, then Tradition.

Syncretism for affiliation is more complex. Sometimes, as with the UGCC and Ruthenians, it was adoption of Latinizations to impress “We’re with Rome, not with Moscow”

And then, by imposition… The imposed changes by conquerers, by those to whom one is affiliated, and by those outside the church in its culture are the least stable - but once embraced, become part of identity. In some cases, such as the Ruthenian Americans, the imposer is one of their own - and some parishes still haven’t recovered from Bishop Elko’s latinizations, while others were rejecting them at the time they were being made.

Still, our Ukrainian priests are noticing what we do differently from the Ruthenians of the Ukraine… and how wide the variances are amongst the Ruthenian Americans.

Some of it is syncretism (the rubrics specifying times to sit, the differences in posture, the legalisms of the faithful), some of it is imposition (the frequent lack of iconostasi, thanks to Bishop Elko - but not at my parish), some of it is cultural (the subtle differences in the melodies).

 

[Miserissima]

I’m not sure my point is being understood or appreciated. Perhaps I am not expressing myself very clearly. I should probably just stop posting altogether on this matter, but until then, just so everyone is clear, my problem with this idea is not ‘adoption’, but I guess what you could call ‘non-adoption’.

Please don’t stop trying. It is because of this post I understand much more clearly and your patience humbles me. I am also grateful for your patience because, ‘By golly, I think I’ve got it!’

Even listening to how the monk from that monastery talks about their tradition in that video, it is obvious that it is outsiders glomming onto a foreign tradition, and mixing it with their Latin traditions that are absolutely foreign to Syriac Christianity (e.g., eucharistic adoration, hour long ‘mass’, etc).

This blows my mind. My view was strictly talking about personal, interior prayer life. I had no point of reference on your example and can see this “hybrid” spirituality is strange. It’s strange to me, too. Again, I have seen private devotions done by RCs, but I could never imagine cherry-picking Liturgies and other forms of public prayer/devotion.

…] the point I’ve been trying to make here regarding the boundary between appreciating another tradition and taking from it: The Coptic Orthodox Church has its own liturgies which are particular to it in terms of the way they are celebrated, and those should be kept rather than adopting others from other churches for celebration by Copts.

Instead of asking questions to bring this further off topic, would you kindly link me to some of those threads? It’s such an eyebrow-raising thing to hear of a Liturgy Mash Up that I want to look into it further, if only to ask, who approved this ‘hybridism?’ And man oh man, how…odd.

Again, I apologize for totally missing the point between using private devotion and mixing Liturgies. It’s…bizarre.

Is it ‘rigid’ to tell Copts “this is not yours; you don’t get to keep doing it when there’s really no reason to, since we have our own liturgies already which are ours to perform”?

No, I wholeheartedly agree that no one has the right to mess with a/the Liturgy. Private devotions, especially for lay folk though, are a horse of a different color.

 

[dzheremi]

This blows my mind. My view was strictly talking about personal, interior prayer life. I had no point of reference on your example and can see this “hybrid” spirituality is strange. It’s strange to me, too. Again, I have seen private devotions done by RCs, but I could never imagine cherry-picking Liturgies and other forms of public prayer/devotion.

What? Now I’m confused. The ‘Maronite’ monastery promo video says that their eucharistic adoration is two hours per day outside of liturgy. So that would be informative of their ‘personal, interior prayer life’, no? And that’s a uniquely Latin devotion, having no place in traditional Syriac spirituality. You think Mor Maroun or even Mor Charbel had a gaudy monstrance like in that video in their caves in the hills? Think about it for a few minutes: If these people have hour long ‘masses’, like the monk interviewed said that they do, then even if they have them every single day of the week, that’s still 161 hours out of 168 hours in a week that would be classified as ‘personal, interior prayer’, being outside of the confines of the liturgy. What do you think happens if you spend the vast majority of your time outside of the liturgy engaging in worship from outside of your tradition? It’s not as though the liturgy is some magic glue that will set right countless hours spent not learning and practicing your tradition. If I spent all my time outside of our Coptic liturgies (which are three and a half times longer than the Qurbono as apparently celebrated by those ‘Maronite’ monks, if they’re even celebrating the Qurbono according to the traditions of the Maronite Church in the first place) listening to Protestant and Roman Catholic lectures, praise music, and practicing these other churches’ devotions, I would have to be a crazy person to think that I could continue like that and have it not affect my way of relating my own church’s practices. Nope, sorry…the Church and its faith is a whole life…you don’t take it off to put on other things in your private life, as this is not a division to be respected in the first place – lex orandi, lex credendi is still the operating principle by which we all are to live. By that principle, praying like a Latin and a Syriac person (or any other combination) makes a person spiritually schizophrenic, even if it is allowed by indulgences. No, I think Aramis had it right, in that this sort of thing is ultimately unsustainable. You can’t be all different kinds of Catholic at once and be rooted firmly in any particular tradition. That’s what these ‘Maronite’ monks show us, and they’re just trying to be one thing (but they’re not actually committed to it, so it’s not working).

Instead of asking questions to bring this further off topic, would you kindly link me to some of those threads? It’s such an eyebrow-raising thing to hear of a Liturgy Mash Up that I want to look into it further, if only to ask, who approved this ‘hybridism?’ And man oh man, how…odd.

No, because they’re mostly old and locked/deleted by now, so I have no idea where to find them.

Again, I apologize for totally missing the point between using private devotion and mixing Liturgies. It’s…bizarre.

I’m sorry, but you’re still missing the point in your reply.

No, I wholeheartedly agree that no one has the right to mess with a/the Liturgy. Private devotions, especially for lay folk though, are a horse of a different color.

They’re really not, though, for the reasons I gave above: You are a _____ (whatever it is you are: Latin, Syriac, Byzantine, etc.) outside of liturgy as well as within it. Act like it, pray like it, live like it, be it.

(This is all highly amusing to me, by the way, as I was originally accused by Josie L of being “compartmentalizing” in my stance, and now I have Catholic people telling me that there are essentially no rules for what they are to do outside of the liturgy so long as their devotions are approved and ‘Catholic’, and so long as this somehow doesn’t bleed over into the liturgy itself. Hmmm.)

 

[Nestor_kea]

You can be also enjoying visiting and following two or three different rites, attending mass according to feast in church with celebration better fitting your attitude to the feast… You can personally follow practices from more than one rite. You can be Byzantine cantor, Latin catechist, Ethiopian drummer, Coptic iconographer, and fan of Syriac prayers. Well, probably not all of this. But this is not only about masses. Maybe you could be happy in Byzantine liturgy or Chaldean mysteries or elsewhere but maybe discipline of fasting could be something not very pleasantly followed. Maybe prayers of hours would be strange for you and rosary superb (or vice verse). Try and you will see, switching rites (in fact sui iuris churches) is not to be hurried.

Well, this is mine and I didn’t have a clue it would start such a discussion. I thought that listing “everything possible” would make it clear it was not serious at 100 %, of course not all this at the same time, it probably would not even be humanly possible.

Later I stated this:

Thanks for correcting my “advice”. I was not serious when saying he could be six-ritual, I just wanted to show he can enjoy East in its many forms as well as West. So many practices would not be possible and if, not working. But attending e. g. Byzantine liturgy and still being Latin seems OK to me.

I didn’t notice expansion in number of posts and now I don’t have time to read it all so maybe I will be just repeting something now.

I don’t think many-ritual is the right way but… when you want to choose rite, how can you choose? By experiencing and trying. Maybe someone is coming to church and wants to find suitable sui iuris, or just feels that current rite is not the right one… – now it is not the most important think. Part of my family lives in area where it is not unusual to have, for example, one grandparetn Orthodox, one Roman Catholic, one Greek Catholic, one Lutheran, and aunt Calvin… How do you think families there are functioning? You have two Christmas, two Easters, you are able to follow liturgies in four churches, and if Catholic, you go to church in village where you want to visit friends or where they have nicer celebration of feast which is just today, or when in hurry then simply in nearer one. Some cross themselves always in Byzantine way, no matter what’s the rite of church where they are you just now etc. When you get older you usually choose “your” rite and mostly follow that one but why not to have Byzantine or Latin or no icons according to your taste? I think people in situations like this are usually better informed, better catechized, and so also less confused. They are informed and experienced and nearly in 100 % they are quite “stabilized” in their main rite but not closed to other and if needed, they take what they feel better for them.

 

[Peter_J]

Hi all. I’ve been an inactive participant of this thread thus far, and even what I will say will probably be only a shell of what I’d like to given lots of time. But anyhow …

…

Dzheremi, I agree – in principle – with much/most of what you’ve said (in your various posts). But mightn’t it be slightly lacking in perspective? I acknowledge that there can be a danger of hybridization, and selectivenessism (or should that be “selectivenicity”?); but perspective should point out that the people in question are Catholics staying Catholic – not switching from Orthodoxy to Catholicism or vice versa.

Or to take even a slightly different perspective, wrt ECism we have many different priorities, but one of the highest priorities (at this time anyhow) is that Eastern Catholicism is not about proselytizing – I could quote the Balamand Statement, but you probably already know which sentence I would quote. (That’s not to say that proselytizing is no longer an issue: it is no longer the Catholic policy, but the past has a long shadow.) Also bear in mind that there was a time when the only way to become Greek Catholic or Oriental Catholic was to convert to Catholicism from the corresponding [Orthodox] Church – when there was no changing from LC to EC.

It may seem that I’m rambling but I don’t think I am. If you have that/those perspective/s, the matter of someone becoming more Byzantine, or more Syriac, etc and picking-and-choosing a little bit in the process, can be seen as (while not necessarily ideal) not a very big problem.

 

[dzheremi]

Dzheremi, I agree – in principle – with much/most of what you’ve said (in your various posts). But mightn’t it be slightly lacking in perspective? I acknowledge that there can be a danger of hybridization, and selectivenessism (or should that be “selectivenicity”?); but perspective should point out that the people in question are Catholics staying Catholic – not switching from Orthodoxy to Catholicism or vice versa.

So? As if you can’t make a mess of your spiritual life entirely within one communion?

the matter of someone becoming more Byzantine or more Syriac, etc and picking-and-choosing a little bit in the process, can be seen as (while not necessarily ideal) not a very big problem.

All I’ve said in this entire thread is be whatever it is you are. It’s not about being “more” or “less” that thing. The monks of that monastery could pray their liturgies entirely in Syriac for all I know or care (and hence be “really Syriac”, according to some ways of looking at things), and they’d still be Latins glomming on to a foreign tradition because their way of thinking and approaching their adopted tradition is shaped by their own Latin mindsets. They haven’t done the metania, so to speak. I’ve had this discussion before privately with certain CAF people, and I’m pretty certain that the central problem in this approach to Christianity is not in the adoption of foreign ritual period (as though the world is going to fly off its axis if a Latin says the “Lakhu Maran” for some reason), but the taking from foreign traditions as bits and pieces of some vague ‘Catholicism’ without actual adoption of the traditions themselves. This is purely fetishizing other people and their Christianity. It’s colonialism of the worst kind, really, because it leaves the prayers intact within their own tradition, but takes them outside of their traditional context to be used by people who, historically, did everything they could possibly have done to destroy those very same churches from which they now steal. Now the Latins who burnt the Maronite books are telling everyone of the glories of the Syriac tradition, or I type in “Coptic incense prayer” into Google and the first sites that come up are not Coptic Orthodox (i.e., not the Church that actually composed the prayer in question), but Roman Catholic ones showing off the beauty and breadth of these “other rites”, as though we were never an autocephalous Church to begin with but merely a ‘rite’ within your communion (I know how much you hate ‘rite’ talk in lieu of ‘Church’, Peter), and as though Roman Catholics and others of England, France, Scotland and elsewhere in Europe did not come to Egypt for decades on end, planting their confessions among the native Christians to save them from their ‘heresy’ (not coincidentally, usually after finding Muslims too difficult to convert), and in the process infecting the whole country with their religious ideas and art, thereby destabilizing the traditional church for frankly pathetic gains (164K Catholics in some ~300 years; more if you want to count Florence as the start of the Coptic Catholic Church).

And you want to tell me that all of this is no big deal? Sorry, Peter J, but tokenism, stealing, and destruction are a giant deal, and Roman Catholics would not be prevented from appreciating the beauty of the East, with whom they share a great many saints and ultimately common practices, by having the decency not to take what isn’t theirs just because it’s somehow Christian. As I’ve written before, everything has its place, and that place is not everywhere. The Latin tradition, authentically lived, is unsurpassed in beauty within its own context (i.e., those characteristics borne of its own approach to Christianity that makes it uniquely Western: austerity, relative brevity, etc.), but so long as you have Latins looking to take from other people rather than live their own lives, what you’re going to end up with is a mess. As Christianity flowed from East to West in the first place, the commonality that Catholics apparently see themselves as emphasizing by taking bits and pieces of other people’s traditions for their private, out-of-context use (y’know, it’s all Catholic!) is actually better expressed without doing that. As you may already know, the Church of Rome itself had distinctly ‘Byzantine’ periods in its history prior to the rise of Gregorian chant, and many of the more ‘local’ liturgies of Latin Christendom (e.g., the Mozarabic, Ambrosian, etc.) are what we would consider in today’s context strongly affiliated with Eastern Christianity. That proves how entirely arbitrary looking at all this stuff through the East/West imperial (Roman) division is, and why I’m choosing to present it as what is true to the roots of particular (not generic ‘East/West’) Christian devotion and what is not. The bottom line is that these various non-Latin prayers that are granted to Latins to use are just as problematic to the living of Catholicism for Western Christians as the dreaded ‘L-word’ (erm…I mean Latinization) inspired-modifications of various Eastern and Oriental liturgies have been for Catholics of those churches, and for precisely the same reason: They don’t belong there. If anything, all I’m doing is taking it one step further and saying, as there is no strict division between what we are to do in our private prayers and what we do in the liturgy (ideally), they don’t belong in anyone’s private devotions, either. You either care about the integrity of all traditions equally (including your own), or you don’t and you don’t see any problem with any of this. But I’d prefer to end this discussion finally by reflecting upon the ramifications of the wisdom of our teacher St. Luke, who reminds us that he who is faithful in little is faithful in much (16:10).

 

[Peter_J]

So? As if you can’t make a mess of your spiritual life entirely within one communion?

I would never say that. We gave up proselytizing because we believe it to be wrong, not out of some fantasy that it’s impossible to mess up one’s spiritual life entirely within one communion.

All I’ve said in this entire thread is be whatever it is you are. It’s not about being “more” or “less” that thing. The monks of that monastery could pray their liturgies entirely in Syriac for all I know or care (and hence be “really Syriac”, according to some ways of looking at things), and they’d still be Latins glomming on to a foreign tradition because their way of thinking and approaching their adopted tradition is shaped by their own Latin mindsets. They haven’t done the metania, so to speak. I’ve had this discussion before privately with certain CAF people, and I’m pretty certain that the central problem in this approach to Christianity is not in the adoption of foreign ritual period (as though the world is going to fly off its axis if a Latin says the “Lakhu Maran” for some reason), but the taking from foreign traditions as bits and pieces of some vague ‘Catholicism’ without actual adoption of the traditions themselves.

Yes. That’s more or less what I was conceding when I said:

I acknowledge that there can be a danger of hybridization, and selectivenessism (or should that be “selectivenicity”?)

This is purely fetishizing other people and their Christianity. It’s colonialism of the worst kind, really, because it leaves the prayers intact within their own tradition, but takes them outside of their traditional context to be used by people who, historically, did everything they could possibly have done to destroy those very same churches from which they now steal. Now the Latins who burnt the Maronite books are telling everyone of the glories of the Syriac tradition, or I type in “Coptic incense prayer” into Google and the first sites that come up are not Coptic Orthodox (i.e., not the Church that actually composed the prayer in question), but Roman Catholic ones showing off the beauty and breadth of these “other rites”, as though we were never an autocephalous Church to begin with but merely a ‘rite’ within your communion (I know how much you hate ‘rite’ talk in lieu of ‘Church’, Peter), and as though Roman Catholics and others of England, France, Scotland and elsewhere in Europe did not come to Egypt for decades on end, planting their confessions among the native Christians to save them from their ‘heresy’ (not coincidentally, usually after finding Muslims too difficult to convert), and in the process infecting the whole country with their religious ideas and art, thereby destabilizing the traditional church for frankly pathetic gains (164K Catholics in some ~300 years; more if you want to count Florence as the start of the Coptic Catholic Church).

**And you want to tell me that all of this is no big deal?
**

That’s just what I’m *not *saying. On the contrary, it is largely because proselytism is such a big deal (and btw you didn’t mention the worst of it: you mentioned the work of missionaries but not the actions of kings) that I take a slightly (just slightly mind you) laissez-faire attitude toward someone “picking and choosing” what Eastern and Western elements they want in their spiritual lives.

 

[dzheremi]

I would never say that. We gave up proselytizing because we believe it to be wrong, not out of some fantasy that it’s impossible to mess up one’s spiritual life entirely within one communion.

Your point about proselytizing was in a different part of your post than the part I was replying to when I wrote that.

That’s just what I’m *not *saying. On the contrary, it is largely because proselytism is such a big deal (and btw you didn’t mention the worst of it: you mentioned the work of missionaries but not the actions of kings) that I take a slightly (just slightly mind you) laissez-faire attitude toward someone “picking and choosing” what Eastern and Western elements they want in their spiritual lives.

I’m not really seeing the connection, but okay.

 

[MorEphrem]

To the above mention of the “Maronite” monks, by the way, they’re anything but Maronite. They epitomize the danger I see in a bunch of Thomists finding novelty in the East and so doing an eastern “touch up” to the novus ordo.

 

[dzheremi]

And that, my friend, is the danger of this approach to Christianity in general, so they make a good example of something, at least.

 

[josie_L]

And that, my friend, is the danger of this approach to Christianity in general, so they make a good example of something, at least.

But you’re going waaaaaaay beyond that point in your stance (not the same)!

 

[Miserissima]

I have revised my reply several times and reach time our sounds less than charitable; but I’m not out yet…just give me a bit to wordsmith and polish.