Qestion to EC re.: possible future UNION between EO & RC

[Cecilianus]

It is important to go back to the Greek (and even the Latin) words that under-gird the English words we are using, because the Fathers of the Church used words very carefully and in a precise technical manner, and if one fails to recognize this fact he can fall into heresy when venerating icons.

St. John Damascene in particular is helpful here, because he points out that προσκυνήσεις (which is often translated as veneration) is a general form of honor or reverence, which can be given both to God and man, while λατρεύσεις (which is often translated as service, but which is - by both Western and Eastern tradition - better translated as adoration) is reserved to God alone. Now if these distinctions are not borne in mind - as St. John Damascene affirmed - one can easily fall into idolatry.

Ultimately our disagreement cannot be solved by simply looking at the English texts of the Vatican II documents or of the Orthodox tradition as a whole, because after all - and contrary to the KJV only views of some Protestants - none of the ancient Fathers spoke English.

Do the Muslims offer God adoration (λατρεύω)? No, they do not, and it is sad that the bishops at Vatican II chose the word “adorant” in speaking about Islam.

They give prayer of a sort reserved to God alone - how is that not latreia?

 

[Apotheoun]

If I recall correctly, Mohammed learned about the One God from the Jews and Christians of his time, and Muslims claim to worship the God of Abraham. So, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that theirs is the same God of the Bible, the God that we worship. Yes, Muslims have a different and incomplete conception of God than Christians. But, so what? People calling themselves Christian have all sorts of different conceptions of God, but we don’t usually say that they’re all worshiping different gods.

That is not what Mohammed claimed. He says that the Angel Gabriel came to him while he was meditating in a cave, and three times told him to “recite.” There is nothing about his “learning” about the God of the Christians and then accepting that God as true. That said, he did of course later say that the false “god” who came to him through angelic mediation was the true God honored by Jews and Christians, but that is not what you have spoken about in your post.

I can tell you now, that the more you learn about what Islam actually teaches the less inclined you will be to say with John Paul II that the Muslim “god” and and ours is one and the same.

 

[dvdjs]

It is important to go back to the Greek (and even the Latin) words …

Actually no it is not. It is is important to communicate. it is important to see what is words are really there, and to understand what words mean, often taking into account the entire thinking of the church. It does not take a rocket scientist of a - rather ironically - jesuitical theologian to figure our the plain but nuanced - open but limited - meaning of the words in the orginal passage.

The problem is God gets morphed into true god, and worship gets morphed into “glory” of a Humpty Dumpty type, and in the end what is the important thought? That our ritual purity is greater than the Vatican? So what - the Pharisees were better at this than Christ. Big deal.

 

[Cecilianus]

That is not what Mohammed claimed. He says that the Angel Gabriel came to him while he was meditating in a cave, and three times told him to “recite.” There is nothing about his “learning” about the God of the Christians and then accepting that God as true. That said, he did of course later say that the false “god” who came to him through angelic mediation was the true God honored by Jews and Christians, but that is not what you have spoken about in your post.

I can tell you now, that the more you learn about what Islam actually teaches the less inclined you will be to say with John Paul II that the Muslim “god” and and ours is one and the same.

That he studied with Sargis Baheera, a Nestorian monk, is a generally-accepted fact, one which the Muslims often find embarassing.

 

[Apotheoun]

They give prayer of a sort reserved to God alone - how is that not latreia?

The liturgy of the Church is λατρεύω. When have the Muslims ever offered the Eucharistic sacrifice?

There is a great book by a Roman Catholic author called “The Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation” that you should read, because in the book the author explains the real nature of divine worship, and will help you to see why even Protestants do not give divine worship to the Father.

 

[Cecilianus]

The liturgy of the Church is λατρεύω. When have the Muslims ever offered the Eucharistic sacrifice?

There is a great book by a Roman Catholic author called “The Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation” that you should read, because in the book the author explains the real nature of divine worship, and will help you to see why even Protestants do not give divine worship to the Father.

The liturgy of the Church may be λατρεύω, but in my understanding of the term so is any sort of worship which is of a sort that cannot be directed to any creature, that we would reserve to God alone. When I thank the Lord for revealing Himself through His Church in the morning, or offer up to Him the prayers and works of my day, and say that I love Him above all things (the standard Roman Catholic morning offering and acts of faith, hope, and charity), I am engaging in λατρεύω then as well.

 

[dvdjs]

There is a great book by a Roman Catholic author called “The Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation” that you should read, because in the book the author explains the real nature of divine worship, and will help you to see why even Protestants do not give divine worship to the Father.

Now another morph… “worship” is now “divine worship”.
But this is trivial: it has already been suggested that “worship” means, and only means the Eucharistic sacrifice’. And that is a true glory (nice knock-down argument).

 

[Apotheoun]

That he studied with Sargis Baheera, a Nestorian monk, is a generally-accepted fact, one which the Muslims often find embarassing.

I have read books by many Western scholars (Montgomery Watt, John Esposito, Harry Wolfson, De Lacy O’Leary, and several others) on Islam, and none of them have ever confirmed the idea that Mohammed “studied” with a Nestorian monk. I would like to examine the primary and secondary sources that you have examined in support of this assertion, and so I look forward to your response.

 

[Apotheoun]

Now another morph… “worship” is now “divine worship”.
But this is trivial: it has already been suggested that “worship” means, and only means the Eucharistic sacrifice’. And that is a true glory (nice knock-down argument).

Not a morph at all, because I do not hold that Muslims offer any type of worship to God.

Christ - whether you like it or not - offered the only acceptable act of worship to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. If you do not believe this to be the case, why even be a Catholic?

 

[Apotheoun]

The liturgy of the Church may be λατρεύω, but in my understanding of the term so is any sort of worship which is of a sort that cannot be directed to any creature, that we would reserve to God alone. When I thank the Lord for revealing Himself through His Church in the morning, or offer up to Him the prayers and works of my day, and say that I love Him above all things (the standard Roman Catholic morning offering and acts of faith, hope, and charity), I am engaging in λατρεύω then as well.

Worship is only given to God by the Body of Christ, i.e., the Church. There is no other act of worship whereby man can approach unto God. How many acts of worship are there? For me, as a Catholic, there cannot be many sacrifices; instead, there is only one sacrifice made manifest in many places. Christ alone offered true worship to His Father, and the Church is the continuation of Christ’s incarnation through space and time.

 

[Apotheoun]

The problem is God gets morphed into true god, and worship gets morphed into “glory” of a Humpty Dumpty type, and in the end what is the important thought? That our ritual purity is greater than the Vatican? So what - the Pharisees were better at this than Christ. Big deal.

There is only one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If a person does not believe in the Holy Trinity revealed by our Lord, then he does not believe in God. Oh sure, he may believe in a bunch of abstract concepts that he thinks of as God, but that is not faith, nor is it worship. Pelagianism seems to be quite popular here at CAF.

 

[dzheremi]

Sorry that you have spent so much time on this.

Likewise, I am sorry that you have apparently spent so little. I can think of few things more important to have a clear idea of than what we believe about God. This is why I eventually began to have some serious problems with the RC approach to non-Christian religions.

You, and others have made errors and stated false things on this forum. That does not mean that everything that you say is false. Nor does it mean that you should be treated as though everyhting that you say, and everything about you is false. What would be the point of that ?

Indeed, what’s the point of this? I refuse to believe that worshiping God is all a matter of degree. It’s a matter of belief. Traditional Islamic belief is that we’ve made a false God out of a true prophet, and that the Holy Trinity is polytheism, and that much of what we do is idolatry, etc. Only in Islamic proselytizing and apologetics has anything about Islam’s god’s relation to the Christian God ever been suggested. The Vatican and whoever else embraces these false beliefs about Islam and Muslims is unwittingly (or at least I should hope so!) doing their bidding in weakening the Christianity of their followers and so perhaps helping to convert them to Islam. I know that is an outrageous statement, but I have in mind (for instance) a certain European poster who used to post here about Islamic topics while still a Catholic (his username was Benjamin, but it had some numbers after it that I cannot recall), only to eventually convert to Islam and come back here to CAF to lecture us all on how much better and more true Islam is than Christianity. He was quickly banned. I can only say that this is what you get when you nurture these ideas of “degrees of truth” rather than, say, “degrees of similarity” or “degrees of inoffensiveness” (the idea that not everything that Muslims do or belief is necessarily in conflict with us; quite different than the approach of gracing foreign beliefs with a stamp of “truth” or “falsehood”).

 

[dvdjs]

Not a morph at all, because I do not hold that Muslims offer any type of worship to God.

Christ - whether you like it or not - offered the only acceptable act of worship to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.

You use words in a very special way - even when looking at other peoples words. You make seemingly subtle changes by adding a little here or there that have big consequences on the actual meaning. I’ve asked before: what is the point? Are you really trying to suggest that the in these statements that Vatican is backing away from Trinitarian theology? Or revealing an ignorance that Moslems and Jews do not share our Trinitarian theology? Surely that can’t be the point - so what is it?

 

[Apotheoun]

They give prayer of a sort reserved to God alone - how is that not latreia?

No, they do not pray to God, nor do they worship Him; instead, the pray to a being that predestined some men (and jinn) to hell from all eternity. They believe in a being that causes men to sin, and I do not believe in that, nor do I believe that confessing a few abstract qualities is the same as knowing and worshipping the Holy Trinity.

 

[Apotheoun]

You use words in a very special way - even when looking at other peoples words. You make seemingly subtle changes by adding a little here or there that have big consequences on the actual meaning. I’ve asked before: what is the point? Are you really trying to suggest that the in these statements that Vatican is backing away from Trinitarian theology? Or revealing an ignorance that Moslems and Jews do not share our Trinitarian theology? Surely that can’t be the point - so what is it?

And you use words very sloppily. What of it?

Muslims do not worship the true God, how can they when they deny the dogma of the Holy Trinity.

As far as Rabbinic Judaism is concerned - and you will note that I did not call it Biblical Judaism - it is not a way of salvation any more than Islam is, nor does Rabbinic Judaism provide a valid way to offer worship to God, and in fact how can it do so when it is predicated upon a denial of Jesus as the Christ, or have you forgotten what St. John said in the New Testament: “No one who denies the Son has the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also.”

My point is quite simple, although it has escaped your notice, so I will state it bluntly:

Theological indifferentism will not bring about the conversion of anyone to Christ. The Church must remain firm in her faith, and not adopt politically correct ideas that have no basis either in scripture or tradition.

 

[George_G]

That is not what Mohammed claimed. He says that the Angel Gabriel came to him while he was meditating in a cave, and three times told him to “recite.” There is nothing about his “learning” about the God of the Christians and then accepting that God as true. That said, he did of course later say that the false “god” who came to him through angelic mediation was the true God honored by Jews and Christians, but that is not what you have spoken about in your post.

I can tell you now, that the more you learn about what Islam actually teaches the less inclined you will be to say with John Paul II that the Muslim “god” and and ours is one and the same.

Honestly, I don’t care about Mohammed’s claims. Obviously I don’t give them much credence, being a Christian and all. I’m saying that it is my historical understanding that Mohammed first learned of God from Jews and Christians before he made his prophetic claims, which is why we can say that Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians, however imperfectly.

 

[Cecilianus]

I have read books by many Western scholars (Montgomery Watt, John Esposito, Harry Wolfson, De Lacy O’Leary, and several others) on Islam, and none of them have ever confirmed the idea that Mohammed “studied” with a Nestorian monk. I would like to examine the primary and secondary sources that you have examined in support of this assertion, and so I look forward to your response.

Many of those authors are polemicists, not scholars. The first source I thought of off the top of my head is The Mystic and Martyr of Islam, a study of Al-Hallaj, by the Melkite priest Fr. Louis Massignon.

 

[dvdjs]

Likewise, I am sorry that you have apparently spent so little. I can think of few things more important to have a clear idea of than what we believe about God. This is why I eventually began to have some serious problems with the RC approach to non-Christian religions.

Same question to you as to Apo: Do you really think that the Vatican is backing away from what we believe about God, say Trinitarian theology? Really?

Oops Apparently so.

I

refuse to believe that worshiping God is all a matter of degree. It’s a matter of belief. Traditional Islamic belief is that we’ve made a false God out of a true prophet, and that the Holy Trinity is polytheism, and that much of what we do is idolatry, etc. Only in Islamic proselytizing and apologetics has anything about Islam’s god’s relation to the Christian God ever been suggested.

The Vatican and whoever else embraces these false beliefs about Islam and Muslims is unwittingly (or at least I should hope so!) doing their bidding in weakening the Christianity of their followers and so perhaps helping to convert them to Islam.

I know that is an outrageous statement, but I have in mind (for instance) a certain European poster who used to post here about Islamic topics while still a Catholic (his username was Benjamin, but it had some numbers after it that I cannot recall), only to eventually convert to Islam and come back here to CAF to lecture us all on how much better and more true Islam is than Christianity. He was quickly banned. I can only say that this is what you get when you nurture these ideas of “degrees of truth” rather than, say, “degrees of similarity” or “degrees of inoffensiveness” .

First, it is very highly objectionable for you to suggest that the Vatican embraces false beliefs. Surely there are better places for you to vent bigotry.

Second, when you harbor ideas of black and white, you get fallacious thinking; you get error. Fallacy and error are bad - even in they are undertaken in support of some conception of the greater good. That is not Christian ethos. You certainly don’t want to be treated that way - as though a single degree of dissimilarity or a single deviation from the truth means that you are beyond the pale.

the idea that not everything that Muslims do or belief is necessarily in conflict with us; quite different than the approach of gracing foreign beliefs with a stamp of “truth” or “falsehood”

Please elaborate on the difference? Is there a principle at work here, or is it all special “pleading”.

Do you think that the things that OO and EOs are not in conflict on, cannot be seen by each other as elements of truth in each others belief? Or should they hold the line - from Chalcedon and simply say: anathema, heretics, outside of the church. And should they go on to say that we not the same God, no existence of worship, …

 

[Cecilianus]

There is only one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If a person does not believe in the Holy Trinity revealed by our Lord, then he does not believe in God. Oh sure, he may believe in a bunch of abstract concepts that he thinks of as God, but that is not faith, nor is it worship. Pelagianism seems to be quite popular here at CAF.

Then all innocent children too young to understand the Trinity “do not believe in God”, simply because they lack the intellectual sophistication to worship something more subtle than just plain “God”?

What about the Jews? Were all of the Prophets people who just believed in a bunch of abstract concepts?

Pelagianism is irrelevant here. It concerns how one is saved, not whether one prays to or believes in God.

I hold to the Church’s teaching proclaimed at Vatican I that we can know of the existence of God through natural reason, and that knowledge of the Trinity is absolutely inaccessible through natural reason. I am neither a cafeteria Catholic nor a “I’m going to reject all but the first 7 Ecumenical Councils because that limits the number of inconvenient doctrines I have to accept” Catholic. I gave up being my own Pope when I renounced Lutheranism.

 

[Apotheoun]

Likewise, I am sorry that you have apparently spent so little. I can think of few things more important to have a clear idea of than what we believe about God. This is why I eventually began to have some serious problems with the RC approach to non-Christian religions.

Indeed, what’s the point of this? I refuse to believe that worshiping God is all a matter of degree. It’s a matter of belief. Traditional Islamic belief is that we’ve made a false God out of a true prophet, and that the Holy Trinity is polytheism, and that much of what we do is idolatry, etc. Only in Islamic proselytizing and apologetics has anything about Islam’s god’s relation to the Christian God ever been suggested. The Vatican and whoever else embraces these false beliefs about Islam and Muslims is unwittingly (or at least I should hope so!) doing their bidding in weakening the Christianity of their followers and so perhaps helping to convert them to Islam. I know that is an outrageous statement, but I have in mind (for instance) a certain European poster who used to post here about Islamic topics while still a Catholic (his username was Benjamin, but it had some numbers after it that I cannot recall), only to eventually convert to Islam and come back here to CAF to lecture us all on how much better and more true Islam is than Christianity. He was quickly banned. I can only say that this is what you get when you nurture these ideas of “degrees of truth” rather than, say, “degrees of similarity” or “degrees of inoffensiveness” (the idea that not everything that Muslims do or belief is necessarily in conflict with us; quite different than the approach of gracing foreign beliefs with a stamp of “truth” or “falsehood”).

This is a great post.

That said, I have on occasion been attacked by my fellow Catholics (mainly Roman) who ask why I remain in communion with the Melkite Catholic Church, which happens to be in communion with Rome, and I usually answer by saying this:

I am not going to let a few people (no matter what position they hold in the Church) who subscribe to a form of theological indifferentism drive me out of the Melkite Catholic Church. I believe that Christ is the sole Savior of mankind, that He alone gave true worship to the Father, and that He empowered His Church to offer this one act of right glory (ορθο δόξα) and worship until the Parousia at the end of the age.