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

[Cecilianus]

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.

We’re not talking about theological indifferentism, and nobody but you is talking about worshiping abstract qualities, but rather the actual life of prayer of Jews, Muslims, small children, etc.

 

[Apotheoun]

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.

The prophets did not believe in an abstract concept or series of concepts; instead, they believed in the Triune God. I would think that you as an Eastern Catholic would be familiar with the teachings of the Byzantine Church on this topic. The patriarchs and prophets - according to the Eastern Fathers and medieval theologians - had an experiential knowledge of the Trinity, that is, they worshipped the Trinity even if they did not formulate trinitarian credal statements. That said, I am sure that you know that it is heresy to believe that the Trinity only arose with the New Testament, or that the prophets did not know who it was that they were worshipping. Have you ever read St. Athanasios’ De Synodis? Have you ever read the Hagioretic Tome? As a fellow Eastern Catholic I would hope that you were familiar with these things, and with many other things too of course. Knowledge of God, according to St. Basil, is primarily experiential, for it is the experience of God in the liturgy that saves a man, while a discursive grasp about divine qualities - as St. Maximos explained in his treatise Quaestiones et dubia - will be possessed by the damned in hell. Knowledge as experience always has primacy over intellectual knowledge.

 

[dvdjs]

And you use words very sloppily. What of it?

That’s funny. My reputation is just the opposite, even pedantic to a point of distraction.

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

Agreed. And no one has disagreed. You are opposing straw men.

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.

I agree with this point wholeheartedly.
But you claim a theological indifference where there is none. To make the case, you morph the text, then you incorporate jargon, … You might keep in mind that to the extent that we are blood enemies and cannot see good in each other and love for each other we will not bring about the conversion of anyone to Christ. I

Did you ever hear Daniel Byantoro speak about Islam and Orthodoxy? Clear on the differences but not shy about the similarities. His approach is has as much “indifferentism” as the Vatican’s which you are criticizing. He is making a difference. He is bringing people to Christ. Much fruit.

 

[Apotheoun]

That’s funny. My reputation is just the opposite, even pedantic to a point of distraction.

Alas, I have not posted here regularly in many years, and so I am ignorant of your reputation. Be that as it may, in this thread you have been sloppy, but I will take your word for it that in general you are not normally so imprecise.

 

[Apotheoun]

I agree with this point wholeheartedly.

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.

I do not morph anything, I simply take John Paul II, who was a very intelligent man, at his word. He says tells Muslims that “your God and ours is one and the same,” and I disagree with him on that issue.

 

[dvdjs]

Alas, I have not posted here regularly in many years, and so I am ignorant of your reputation. Be that as it may, in this thread you have been sloppy, but I will take your word for it that in general you are not normally so imprecise.

I am not talking about here, but in non-virtual life.

 

[Apotheoun]

Did you ever hear Daniel Byantoro speak about Islam and Orthodoxy? Clear on the differences but not shy about the similarities. His approach is has as much “indifferentism” as the Vatican’s which you are criticizing. He is making a difference. He is bringing people to Christ. Much fruit.

Although I have not heard the Mr. Byantoro’s talks, I would not be shocked by them. The fact that Muslims (and Hindus, and some Buddhists, and Zoroastrians, et al.) use similar abstract concepts to describe God does not mean that they worship the true God. Worship of the true God is arrived at through revelation, and not merely by natural strivings of man to grasp something greater than himself. After all, Pelagian naturalism was condemned by both East and West during the first millennium.

 

[Apotheoun]

I am not talking about here, but in non-virtual life.

Ah, no worries; you simply were not very precise in what you wrote in your post.

 

[dvdjs]

I do not morph anything, I simply take John Paul II, who was a very intelligent man, at his word. He says tells Muslims that “your God and ours is one and the same,” and I disagree with him on that issue.

No. You started with the CCC. I detailed the morphing, then the worship->divine worship. Then the jargon for worship, adore etc. It is a pretzel word twisting.

I searched for your quote. Didn’t find it as a direct quote, Wonder how much morphing was done on it. Bit enough semantics. What about fruit. look into Fr. Daniel Byantoro work and let me know what yo think.

 

[Apotheoun]

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.

I am glad that we agree on something.



God grant you many years,
Todd

 

[dvdjs]

I am glad that we agree on something.



God grant you many years,
Todd

You too.

 

[Apotheoun]

No. You started with the CCC. I detailed the morphing, then the worship->divine worship. Then the jargon for worship, adore etc. It is a pretzel word twisting.

I searched for your quote. Didn’t find it as a direct quote, Wonder how much morphing was done on it. Bit enough semantics. What about fruit. look into Fr. Daniel Byantoro work and let me know what yo think.

There was no morphing, because I said: Muslims do not offer any type of worship to God. How can they, seeing that they follow a false prophet.

Blessings to you my friend,
Todd

 

[Apotheoun]

Apotheoun;8068922:

I do not morph anything, I simply take John Paul II, who was a very intelligent man, at his word. He says tells Muslims that “your God and ours is one and the same,” and I disagree with him on that issue.

I searched for your quote. Didn’t find it as a direct quote,

I believe that I provided a link to that papal quote on the Vatican website in an earlier post.

 

[Apotheoun]

Yes, I did. The link is in post #97.

But here it is again: Address to the Participants in the Colloquium on Holiness in Christianity and Islam)

Blessed Pope John Paul II was sometimes a bit unguarded in his choice of words, perhaps this is one of those many occasions where he said something with a lack of due diligence and technical precision.

 

[Apotheoun]

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.

The scholars I referenced are not polemicists at all. Many of their texts were used in the Islamic Studies program in the History Department at SF State.

I have never heard either John Esposito or Mongomery Watt called polemicists before.

 

[Apotheoun]

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.

Have you read Harry Wolfson’s The Philosophy of Kalam? I would never call it a polemical text.

 

[Apotheoun]

Obviously, not having a Liturgy, Muslims don’t have “worship” in Todd’s sense. But they do have prayer to God - sometimes a horribly screwed up conception of Him, usually a merely natural conception of Him containing truth mixed with error, but just like any other person, I can know [h]im while being mistaken about some things about Him.

Not only do Muslims not worship God, they do not pray to Him. After all, God is not a bundle of abstract concepts; instead, He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I should not have to say this, but praying to an abstract concept must never be confused with praying to the tri-hypostatic God.

 

[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”).

I can tell you from personal experience that the more modern Catholic approach to Islam was ineffective when dealing with Muslims. In fact, the Muslims I spoke with saw it as a sign that I was ripe for dawah and the acceptance of Islamic tawheed. Needless to say I gave up the modern Catholic approach while working on my second BA degree - a degree that had a secondary focus on the development of Islamic theology during the first 500 years of the Muslim era - because I found that it merely confirmed the Muslims I spoke to in their submission to Islamic religious principles.

God grant you many years,
Todd

 

[Cecilianus]

The prophets did not believe in an abstract concept or series of concepts; instead, they believed in the Triune God. I would think that you as an Eastern Catholic would be familiar with the teachings of the Byzantine Church on this topic. The patriarchs and prophets - according to the Eastern Fathers and medieval theologians - had an experiential knowledge of the Trinity, that is, they worshipped the Trinity even if they did not formulate trinitarian credal statements. That said, I am sure that you know that it is heresy to believe that the Trinity only arose with the New Testament, or that the prophets did not know who it was that they were worshipping. Have you ever read St. Athanasios’ De Synodis? Have you ever read the Hagioretic Tome? As a fellow Eastern Catholic I would hope that you were familiar with these things, and with many other things too of course. Knowledge of God, according to St. Basil, is primarily experiential, for it is the experience of God in the liturgy that saves a man, while a discursive grasp about divine qualities - as St. Maximos explained in his treatise Quaestiones et dubia - will be possessed by the damned in hell. Knowledge as experience always has primacy over intellectual knowledge.

I’ve read the Hagioretic tome and St. Maximos’ dubia, I’ve not read De Synodis. Your point about experiential knowledge is not something I’m going to disagree with - I am an Eastern Catholic after all. But the prophets did not know that the Trinity whom they had experiential knowledge of was Trinitarian. Neither does any Muslim, or believer of any other religion who has experiential knowledge of God (which, from an empirical basis alone, is difficult to deny).

I am not a Pelagian - I believe that all salvation comes through divine grace, through the Holy Catholic Church, the Body of Christ. And I know where the fullness of the Catholic Church subsists - in those churches united to Peter, the Rock upon which Christ built His Church, and also though in a wounded fashion (wounded by their schism from Rome) those churches which have preserved the fullness of the Apostolic Faith and the Holy Mysteries. And the Church subsists in an imperfect fashion among those ecclesial communities that baptize their members into the Holy Church but which perpetuate heresy and do not have apostolic succession. And the Church subsists wherever else there is holiness and salvation. I may not be a Pelagian, but I do not subscribe to the Feeneyite heresy. I know where the Church is. I do not know where it is not.

And there is very good empirical evidence for the experiential knowledge of God by non-Christians, as evidenced by the writings of men like Abu Yazid and Al Hallaj, and also texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Tao Te Ching.

And even if someone is not in the state of grace, one still may have natural knowledge of God. Denial of this has been condemned as heresy by the Holy See many times, at Vatican I, in the condemnations against Modernism, and in the condemnations of other theologians - Anton Gunther, Blessed Antonio Rosmini, etc. - who denied the distinction between natural and supernatural. A sinner in mortal sin may still pray to God (otherwise, how would they come to repentance and salvation again?).

And not all knowledge of God even to those in the state of grace is experiential. That God’s existence is an intellectual fact is not as important as experiential knowledge, but it’s still true.

 

[Cecilianus]

The scholars I referenced are not polemicists at all. Many of their texts were used in the Islamic Studies program in the History Department at SF State.

I have never heard either John Esposito or Mongomery Watt called polemicists before.

I was going too far with that remark. And I was confusing Esposito with someone else. As Forgiveness Sunday is a long way off, I ask forgiveness now.