Papal candidates - Short List?

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God is love and love is an emotion, “For God so loved the world” - John 3:16. Also God created us in his own image and we have emotions.
 
BroomWagon said:
God is love and love is an emotion, “For God so loved the world” - John 3:16. Also God created us in his own image and we have emotions.
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The love that God IS is not a human emotion. The Fathers disagree with you.

Firstly, on the concept of love.
“…The biblical image of love is not an emotion or feeling, but it is the glue and the motivator for each person to pursue a more Christ-like way of life…This bold Christian view of love demonstrates clearly that it cannot be reduced to emotion. Love looks like something. Here, St. Paul describes it with poetic detail. He tells what love is – patient, kind, enduring– as well as what it is not – jealous, pompous, inflated, rude, quick-tempered. The reading also foretells what happens when love is absent. Without it, lives and relationships are like a noisy gong. We can accumulate things, be showered with gifts, and even give things away, yet without love, all is worthless… A love that Christ demonstrates by dying for all of us is a bond of love that cannot be broken by anything – earthly, supernatural, or otherwise…”
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***- Father Darren M. Henson, a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Kansas City ***
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God is an eternal act of love within his very nature, the self-emptying, mutually self-giving love between the Three Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity, whereby the Son is begotten of the Father and their mutual self-donating activity of love produces or spirates the Third Person, the Holy Spirit. It is from this Love, this primordial active, fruitive love which lies at the very core of the interpersonal relations within Holy Trinity from which everything that exists comes into being.

The love which Christian’s speak of, and which they say God IS, is not a human love founded on familiarity and affection. We feel that kind of love only for our closest associates, our family and the like. The love Christian’s speak of is a Divine Love which in the original Greek of the New Testament is called agape - self-donating love. Its not so much an emotion as it is activity. Thus Saint Paul tells us in the Book of Romans, "Love is always patient and kind; love is never jealous; love is not boastful or conceited, it is never rude and never seeks its own advantage, it does not take offence or store up grievances. Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but finds its joy in the truth. It is always ready to make allowances, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 NJB)

Religion must be founded upon and built up in Love, for God is Love, and love in the Bible is never a ‘feeling’ but is always something which is active - hence why the word used most in the New Testament for love is “agape” or “charity” - a ‘self-giving’ love. The second word used for love in biblical greek is ‘phileo’ or brotherly love. Religion cannot be lived by oneself or for oneself. Religion connects us with the human race at large and gives us a universal vision of reality. The word religion comes from the Latin religio which means “to bind” or “to connect”. Within God this interpersonal love is fulfilled in the mutual self-offering of the Three Persons who eternally and selflessly give themselves to each other in fruitive love.

God is not dependent on anything created. He cannot be influenced by anything or he would not be timeless and immutable. Emotions are time-bound states that need a “cause”. We are angry if someone does something to make us so. We are happy if something good happens to us. Emotions have a cause. God is the causeless, First Cause, immovable.
 
Vouthon said:
The love that God IS is not a human emotion. The Fathers disagree with you.
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Okay, show me where I said “human emotion.” The Church Father’s argued God’s emotions were way above that of humans.
Aristides of Athens (fl. c. 140)
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. . . God, who is incorruptible and unchangeable and invisible, but who sees all things and changes them and alters them as He wills.
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Firstly, on the concept of love.
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God is an eternal act of love within his very nature, the self-emptying, mutually self-giving love between the Three Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity, whereby the Son is begotten of the Father and their mutual self-donating activity of love produces or spirates the Third Person, the Holy Spirit. It is from this Love, this primordial active, fruitive love which lies at the very core of the interpersonal relations within Holy Trinity from which everything that exists comes into being.
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The love which Christian’s speak of, and which they say God IS, is not a human love founded on familiarity and affection. We feel that kind of love only for our closest associates, our family and the like. The love Christian’s speak of is a Divine Love which in the original Greek of the New Testament is called agape - self-donating love. Its not so much an emotion as it is activity. Thus Saint Paul tells us in the Book of Romans, "Love is always patient and kind; love is never jealous; love is not boastful or conceited, it is never rude and never seeks its own advantage, it does not take offence or store up grievances. Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but finds its joy in the truth. It is always ready to make allowances, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 NJB)
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Religion must be founded upon and built up in Love, for God is Love, and love in the Bible is never a ‘feeling’ but is always something which is active - hence why the word used most in the New Testament for love is “agape” or “charity” - a ‘self-giving’ love. The second word used for love in biblical greek is ‘phileo’ or brotherly love. Religion cannot be lived by oneself or for oneself. Religion connects us with the human race at large and gives us a universal vision of reality. The word religion comes from the Latin religio which means “to bind” or “to connect”. Within God this interpersonal love is fulfilled in the mutual self-offering of the Three Persons who eternally and selflessly give themselves to each other in fruitive love.
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God is not dependent on anything created. He cannot be influenced by anything or he would not be timeless and immutable. Emotions are time-bound states that need a “cause”. We are angry if someone does something to make us so. We are happy if something good happens to us. Emotions have a cause. God is the causeless, First Cause, immovable.
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Agreed.
 
Vouthon said:
I’ve decided that I will, when I get the chance, create a thread relating to this. I might pop it in Non-Catholic religions so you can bring in Protestant, Baha’i and/or other religious perspectives on this rather than a uniquely Catholic one.
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Sounds great. I always enjoy these discussion with you. 🙂
We would probably say Deus a se or “God in God’s self”, meaning God as He is in Himself, in that inner, mysterious essence that is beyond all human reason and which is inaccessible to man and oppositely Deus pro nobis or “God for us” that is God’s relation with his human creatures through the twin lights of revelation and reason. The Eastern Orthodox came up with the very original terminology of “energy” as distinct from “essence” (ie Palamas).
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Yeah, that’s pretty much the same idea.
 
BroomWagon said:
We should remember too, the Church Fathers used impassibility meaning a boundary to God’s divine emotions, not to deny emotions altogether.
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Could you clarify it further? I am interested to understand more about what you mean regarding this.

The doctrine of divine impassibility usually holds, as part of it, that God is without passions, feelings or emotions: not subject to suffering, pain, or the ebb and flow of involuntary passions. In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, God is “without body, parts, or passions, immutable” (2.1). There is ample evidence from the Fathers that they believed it. Furthermore they clearly, as above, treated - like I do - passages which refer to God as having emotion “figuratively” rather than “literally”.

An article in New Catholic Encyclopedia (2003) states:
**“…Impassibility is that divine attribute whereby God is said not to experience inner emotional changes of state whether enacted freely from within or effected his relationship to and interaction with human beings and the created order. More specifically, impassibility means that God does not experience suffering and pain, and thus does not have feelings that are analogous to human feelings. Divine impassibility follows upon His immutabili ty, in that, since God is changeless and unchangeable, his inner emotional state cannot change from joy to sorrow or from delight to suffering…He neither can change his own inner emotional state nor can another effect a change in his inner emotional state, and thus He is impassible…” **
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The Fathers even used the word apatheia (passionless) which dictionaries often define as “the absence of passion, emotion” and from which we get the word “apathy”. Divine impassibility was thought also by medieval Christian theologians to be one of the attributes of God.

What would “divine emotions”, while obviously in a sense uncomprehendable and inexpressible, entail? They are clearly not feelings, they would be eternal, always present. Since God is above time and cannot change he cannot at one time be happy, another sad. He cannot, as per the quotes above, experience “regret” as a literal reading of the Genesis passage you quoted earlier would suggest.

What then do you mean by “divine emotions”? To what could we even compare them since God is incomparable so as to ascertain that they even fall within the definition of “emotion” as we know it?

I look forward to your reply.
 
BroomWagon said:
Impassibility in Aquinas’ time is more to a lack of passion, not divine emotion.
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Can you please provide me with a reference to where a church authority referred to “divine emotion”? You have not defined exactly what that would be, therefore I cannot comment aye or nay regarding it.

Here is the definition of “emotion”:
e·mo·tion (-mshn)
n.
  1. A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.
  2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance: spoke unsteadily in a voice that betrayed his emotion. See Synonyms at feeling.
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No.1 cannot apply to God since nothing “arises” in Him, he simply IS by his very act of self-existence, he IS existence. He cannot undergo any “psychiological changes” because he has no physiology except in his incarnation as the Son.

And no.2 certainly can’t apply.

So what is “divine emotion”? Wouldn’t that be oxymoronic?

On Aquinas, he wrote:
Summa Contra Gentiles I.LXXXIX.12
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Differentiating emotions and passions
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“No passion in intellective appetite” (Aquinas)
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God does not acquire knowledge through the senses and thus has no sensitive appetite, there could be no need for sensitive appetite

Every passion is accompanied by somatic change (alteration) but God is not a body (ST I.3.1, maybe)

Emotions draw one outside the connatural disposition. But God cannot be withdrawn from outside of the connat. disposition since God is utterly immutable.
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Passion has one object
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Every passion is also in a subject “that is in potentiality.” Yet God has no potential whatsoever.

Sorrow or pain [evils inherently by species] cannot be in God.
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Repentance “denotes a change in the appetite.” Repentance is a kind of sorrow: it thus implies a change of will.

God cannot be angry:
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See SCG I.91.16-18 and II.2.5.9
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BroomWagon said:
Okay, show me where I said “human emotion.” The Church Father’s argued God’s emotions were way above that of humans.
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Is there someway of moving this entire part of the thread elsewhere? I really think this is worth discussing, but we are derailing the thread topic.
I think the secret lies in one of the quotes which Vouthon quoted, namely that God is impassible but becomes passible for our sake. Vouthon may have confused the issue by defining impassible as ‘human emotion.’ Impassible means incapable of suffering or feeling. Obviously, the crucifixion is all about God suffering. I just finished giving a lecture on the Babylonian captivity wherein a pointed out that not only does the Hebrew conception of Yahweh become universal during this period but that God comes to be seen as One who went into exile with His people and therefore suffers with and for them. The real question here is whether this applies to God’s essence (what I called the Deus Absconditus) or only to what He has revealed of Himself? I think it can be argued that God’s essence is impassible, but if God’s Essence is truly unknowable (as I believe) then we don’t know that either.
 
smaneck said:
Vouthon may have confused the issue by defining impassible as ‘human emotion.’ Impassible means incapable of suffering or feeling.
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I would agree that “human emotion” was a regrettable choice of words since it has led BroomWagon into setting up a hypothetical “divine emotion” in opposition to it, when what I really meant was the incapability of suffering or feelings, emotional states etc.

To me “divine emotion” seems somewhat oxymoronic.
 
smaneck said:
Is there someway of moving this entire part of the thread elsewhere? I really think this is worth discussing, but we are derailing the thread topic.
I think the secret lies in one of the quotes which Vouthon quoted, namely that God is impassible but becomes passible for our sake. Vouthon may have confused the issue by defining impassible as ‘human emotion.’ Impassible means incapable of suffering or feeling. Obviously, the crucifixion is all about God suffering. I just finished giving a lecture on the Babylonian captivity wherein a pointed out that not only does the Hebrew conception of Yahweh become universal during this period but that God comes to be seen as One who went into exile with His people and therefore suffers with and for them. The real question here is whether this applies to God’s essence (what I called the Deus Absconditus) or only to what He has revealed of Himself? I think it can be argued that God’s essence is impassible, but if God’s Essence is truly unknowable (as I believe) then we don’t know that either.
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Alright, I put it in the Philosophy section so since that area only says “an emphasis on Catholic teaching”, perhaps all points of view can go there.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=10362462#post10362462

Titled ‘Divine Immutability and Impassibility’ per a blog entry I found though I don’t know if the blog link is important to pursue, it is a Catholic orientated website.
 
Cardinal George to play key role in picking next pope
“If you look at where the church is strong in terms of population, in terms of the faithful, it would be in Latin America or Africa,” he said. Popes historically hail from Europe.
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“That would be an appropriate question: Should we look elsewhere?” George said.
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Thavis said he has never ruled out an American pope, but that’s contrary to conventional wisdom.
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“The standard thinking is ‘An American? Never. They already run the world. They want to run the church too?’” Thavis said. “But I’ve never heard a cardinal say that.”
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George, however, explained that cardinals place more weight on personalities than geography.
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Dale_M;10348087] I agree that Cardinal Wojtyla was an out-of-left field choice. But as I recall, age was one of the factors which may have worked in favor of Cardinal Ratzinger. Reportedly there was interest in picking a “caretaker pope” who wouldn’t put a strong personal stamp on the Church as Pope John Paul II did. … Again, there was some sense that Pope John Paul had had too much personal influence on the Church simply by holding the office for so long.
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Question: According to Roman Catholic records who was the longest serving pope?

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MichaelTDoyle;10348391] Just asking…We have had bad Popes in our history. Does that mean the Holy Spirit sent us a bad Pope as a chastisement?..I know we have Christ’s promise to protect the Church from teaching error and be an instrument to help us to our salvation “The gates of hell shall not prevail”, but I know of no guarantee that God will send us such good leaders as we have had.
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Hi Michael. Not as a chastisement, but as in the following verse to show His power:

***"For the scripture saith to Pharao: To this purpose have I raised thee, that I may shew my power in thee, and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth. " *** Exodus 9:16 (quoted in Romans 9:17 (Douay-Rheims Holy Bible).

The following is an excerpt from Barnes Notes on the Bible re- that passage.
"This passage is designed to illustrate the doctrine that God shows mercy according to his sovereign pleasure by a reference to one of the most extraordinary cases of hardness of heart which has ever occurred. The design is to show that God has a right to pass by those to whom he does not choose to show mercy; and to place them in circumstances where they shall develop their true character, and where in fact they shall become more hardened and be destroyed; "
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Mrs Sally;10350064]No need for the giant font my dear. I choose not to take any heed of your “prophesy”.
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Hi Mrs Sally, that reminds me of one of my favorites, “The person who shouts the loudest is hardly ever right!”(a.k.a. “Demonstrations by Rent-a-Crowd”)

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LisaA said:
I can’t answer your question although it sounds like there are a number of worthy candidates. I watched some of the interviews on YouTube Abyssinia linked and recall before then Cardinal Ratzinger was named Pope that he was extensively interviewed and I learned a lot about him.

Sorry to hear about your “woo woo” homily on Ash Wednesday. Ours was more a call to action…IOW don’t just give up chocolate or Starbucks for Lent but do something positive with the time and money saved. I do agree that a) some priests seem timid about speaking of the grave issues of our time and what the Church teaches…can’t say I have ever heard an explanation of why abortion or contraception are wrong and b) sadly some in the pews WANT the homilies watered down so they don’t have to squirm in the pew and think about going to reconciliation (although they probably wont).

Take a look at those interviews and you might get a better understanding about some of the candidates. The one with Cardinal Scola is VERY long so will have to set aside time for that one but many are a few minutes and quite enlightening.

Lisa
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Thanks Lisa. I’m glad to hear that there are quite a few candidates that could fit “my” bill (you know, because it’s all about ME 😉

It sounds like your Ash Wedensday homily was at least practical and certainly appropriate. I’d much prefer that. I wouldn’t be surprised if the priest saw in my face what I was thinking…evolved from star dust. Ok, then. I’m still in a state of disbelief at what I heard…and quite honestly, I’m angry about it.
 
BroomWagon;10353596] I can speak of percentages but it does seem a lot of Africans from English speaking countries are Evangelicals while those of French Speaking Countries are a safe bet to assume they’ve remained Catholic. Interesting.
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Hi BroomWagon, that may have something to do with the historic enmity between the English and the French.
Though Ethiopians certainly adhere to their Orthodox roots and heritage.
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Which ones, i.e “…roots and heritage(s)”

There are (apparently) quite a few “Orthodox roots and heritage(s)” of long standing, even Jewish and muslim. Some have even alluded to “The Lost Tribes of Israel” although I cannot identify the original source.

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