Hi Randy: No apologies are necessary, and hopefully you will forgive any ways in which I might have offended you, because any such transgression on my part would be entirely inadvertent.
Good evening Eddie. I trust that the nuns who taught me covered what they felt was important. I’m not seeing a lot of value in trying to place my church in some position over the churches of others. I expect that the very desire to claim a place closer to God than someone else, regardless of circumstance venue or context (such as what church we belong to) might in fact be the very greatest impediment in our ability to actually draw near to God at all. Maybe this is why the nuns who educated me stuck with other things. I am staring to think so. A few of them are still alive and I will discuss this with them the next time I talk to them.
Yes and no.
Well done Randy!
Truth matters. Religion is a map to eternal happiness. If the map has minor errors, no problem. If it has serious errors, you won’t know until it is too late that it doesn’t lead where you want to go. Even one serious error can send the driver into a tailspin.
Good evening Jim: Yes, truth matters, however, my sense is that it is possible to take a rather one dimensional view of something that has more than one dimension. My aim in being on his thread was to learn something of the other point of view, but have been instead swarmed by people from one point of view. I have heard that point of view and would like to hear the other. It’s really all that simple. I am not here to pass judgment on who has a good map or a bad map.
Good evening Randy: I may have failed to clearly state my question, because you didn’t actually answer it. We’ll call it my fault if you like. My question was whether or not you feel that your knowledge of Catholic theology brings you closer to God than a Protestant’s view of theology brings them to God. And do you think that you are closer to God than I am? The question was not whether or not knowledge is useful, although I wonder if according to the idea you have presented, if a genius has a better capacity to know and love God than a person with a more limited or even diminished cognitive capacity. That is actually a fascinating possibility that you have posited, and I intend to give it some thought. As for loving God perfectly by knowing Him perfectly, I would ask another direct question: Do you know God perfectly? Is your love perfect? Whose love is lesser than yours, and how do you measure it? Depending on your reply, I may have some follow on questions.
An accurate map gets you closer to your destination more quickly than an incomplete or inaccurate map. So, yes.
How can I know this?
In this sense, I believe it might be better to ask which glass is more full: the shot glass or the beer mug. One HOLDS more than the other, but both are at maximum capacity. Therefore, we must all seek to be as full as possible and to love as fully as possible based on the capacity that God has given us.
1 Corinthians 13:11-13
Hi Randy: They have different maps. The routes might be different, but the destination may well be the same. It is not for me to say. The matter as to whether or not you get there may be more about how we follow what map we have rather than how well we talk about how much better our map is.
I wasn’t aware that we had established that a given theology was better than another.
Yes, how can you know this? That was my point. I was taught to live a life of prayer and introspection, to wit I spend a few hours each day in prayer and a good deal of time trying to learn how to love others. That is the map I was given. Then a few posts back on this thread, I was told that I was poorly taught by the sisters who oversaw my religious education by a person whose map seems to me as being about becoming an information repository. I will grant that may have been of some value before Google, but it is not all that impressive these days, and the whole idea of getting closer to God in that way seems to me at least to suggest that the web browser on my cell phone is closer to God than both of us.
I agree completely.
It doesn’t. Just being honest Randy. I simply asked if you knew God perfectly. You had intimated that it wasn’t possible to love something perfectly that isn’t known perfectly, and the way to know God perfectly is to know a lot of theology. This was the answer you had to the question I had posed as to why you trouble yourself with theological contests with Protestants. Like many things in the bible, Cor 13:11-13 can be bent to fit most any position. What I asked was a simple question. Do you know God perfectly, and do you love God perfectly?
The Catholic.
But when Christian missionaries travel to the rain forest and give the animist a better map, isn’t that a good thing? I mean, that’s what Jesus told the Apostles to do in the Great Commission, right? But why bother if all maps lead to the same destination?
Is Christian theology a better understanding of the creator of the Universe than that of the animist who holds that spirits live in trees, etc.? Is that really something that needs to be established?
If I give you a good book on prayer written by the Doctors of the Church who have travelled the path to holiness and union with God before you and have written for the benefit of others seeking to travel that same road, will you benefit from learning what they experienced? How does more understanding not help you?
Yay.
And my answer was just as simple: Now I know in part; then I shall know fully.
This is stream of consciousness as I work through the question…
)Well, not apples to apples. More like a baptist ministry in one state admonishing another baptist ministry in another state-
First, it was not a bishop that sent the letter, it was an entire church. Second, how do you know someone else didn’t also admonish the Corinthian church ?
Same continent, same empire. Again, it was what should be done by any guy who catches wind of a brothers sin. Are you saying you can only admonish or correct those below you ? A respecter of persons are we?. Who correctly admonished Job ? a young whipper snapper named Elihu ?
I mostly agree with your thinking here, with a few minor differences, one of which I want to mention.This is stream of consciousness as I work through the question…
If I thought that Jesus actually intended for “the” Church to be Orthodox instead of Catholic, wouldn’t I have to consider conversion in order to follow Jesus as closely as possible?
I converted once before for that reason…
However, because I think both EO and Catholics are “saved”, the matter would be murky. I’m not sure that all EO consider Catholics to be Christians much less saved due to their issues over our baptisms.
So, the question of salvation would be the key. If I thought that I could ONLY be saved by conversion to Orthodoxy, then I would have to convert.
OTOH, if I were Orthodox considering this question, I would probably be confident of my salvation but uncertain that I was in the Church that Jesus founded upon Peter, etc. (Actually, if I WERE Orthodox, I would have bought into all the usual arguments, and I would be convinced of my superiority.
But the primacy of Peter, etc. would nag at me.
Hi Gary: Just to let you know that I happen to agree with the statement you made about living a life of prayer. As a Descalced Carmelite Secular, a life or prayer and introspection and recollection is something I spend a few hours a day too. I also am learning that love of others is very important as we are to love others as God loves us, a very hard thing to do in this day and age. Does it bring me closer to God? I only hope so. Knowledge is a good thing and also a very powerful thing to have. However, simply trying to love God for who He is and not so much for what He can do I think is important. Not everyone is going to have a great deal of knowledge about God or and of the Church, but be as that may, living the Gospels and the teachings therein and of the Church as to how we treat others and ourselves, not worring about how to explain every mystery of in the dogma’s and doctrines we have, and accepting them just as the first believers in Christ did,( The Apostles and those they proclaimed the Good News to).is not a bad thing. I’m all for knowledge but most importantly, a simple faith in loving God throught our Lord Jesus the Christ, who loved us first works for me.
Good evening Randy: I am not entirely sure of that. I think that our assumption that the Great Commission meant that we should invade indigenous cultures with their own history and their own relationship with God is very myopic. That view may have been excusable in the first century, but seems to defy logic when viewed against the backdrop of what we know nowadays about the vastness of time on this planet alone, much less the cosmos of which we are part. The story of our species on this planet goes back at least 200,000 years in our current form as anatomically modern humans. It defies all credible lines of thinking to suppose that God waited until the Jews appeared in the last hour of the human day to establish some sort of relationship with the human species. That is the mentality of a civilization that had no inkling of the timespans they supposed were at play, nor any idea of the sorts of people that inhabited rain forests and what their story might be and what their relationship with God was. The world of the Jews and early Christians was an egocentric and ill informed world that was totally immersed in their own affairs.
Lots of love to you Spina.
So you are now admitting that Clement was speaking for the entire Church? Doesn’t that make him the highest authority in the Church? (aka, the Pope)
Do you go around admonishing your boss? Did you go around correcting your parents and teachers when you were a child? If so, how did that go over? (I’m thinking, not very well.)
God is no respecter of persons - the reason is that His authority is the highest of all. Those of us with less authority have to obey those in authority over us. (Hebrews 13:17)
If I recall the story correctly, it was God who corrected Job.