Something that has been bothering me for a while now

[Contarini]

The only significant problem I have had with what you have been saying is that it leads to the conclusion that any monotheistic belief is in the same God: be it YHWH, Allah, Lucifer, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I don’t know of anyone who actually worships Lucifer in a monotheistic fashion. Give some real examples and we can talk about them.

And of course the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a particularly silly and juvenile atheist joke.

If these are the best examples you can come up with, you don’t have much of a case.

Vishnu would be a much better example, actually, because many Hindus clearly do identify him with Brahman (the divine Reality beyond words and understanding, which clearly corresponds to the true God in some sense, just as the similarly remote and impersonal High God of ancient Greco-Roman paganism did, by the confession of all the early Christians). Shiva or Kali might be even better, since the elements in their worship that are clearly incompatible with Christianity (and may even represent a form of devil-worship, by some interpretations) are far more obvious.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

I emphasized the Christian Trinity not only because I myself am a Christian, but because I wanted some way to emphasize how it is my belief in said Trinity complicates my rejection of the Hindu belief system (which also includes a trinity, as outlined in the thread I linked), and ultimately the Islamic belief system, the Jewish belief system, etc. I had the Hindu idea in mind, however, because it was what transpired in the Hindu thread that led me to realize how I had been hypocritical in my argumentation by holding to the idea that affirming God’s oneness is enough to affirm the worship of the One God, which is essentially how I read modern Catholic apologetics on the subject.

Well, in some sense it may be. But as I have said, I think starting from the center and working outward is the best approach. Not all “worship of the one God” is equal.

I think that St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy is helpful here. All our language is imperfect in capturing the divine Reality. Christians and Jews have special divine revelation. Others have some degree of knowledge of God, whether from the natural knowledge of God written in the human heart or from some form of tradition, however corrupted it may be in places (this is most obviously true in the case of Islam, but many Catholic theologians in the 19th century, I believe, held that there was an original tradition handed down from Adam and Eve which gave rise to the various world religions, albeit becoming corrupted in the process). To the extent that their language or worship corresponds to the reality of God, they are speaking of or worshiping the true God. But this isn’t a simple either/or. There are degrees of correspondence.

One thing you haven’t dealt with so far is that pretty much the entire Christian tradition is against you. The early Christians had no problem identifying the “High God” of the pagans with the true God–they condemned the pagans for worshiping lesser gods (which the pagans admitted they were doing, seeing them as intermediaries between themselves and the supreme Deity) but did not claim that their conception of the ultimate Divinity was entirely wrong. And as far as I know St. John of Damascus and other traditional opponents of Islam, while condemning Muhammad in the harshest tones, never questioned that Muslims worship the true God. It seems to be a peculiarly modern idea. To me it seems to be linked to a Protestant rejection of the Christian philosophical heritage and of the entire concept of natural revelation. In other words, I think your disagreement with Catholicism here is much bigger than one paragraph of CCC841.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

I am with what Mick posted earlier: Either the Muslims are wrong or the Christians are wrong. Both cannot be right.

But doesn’t this contradict what you go on to say:

Not everything that every non-Christian religion teaches is wrong, and I would never hold such a view.

Then clearly it’s not as simple as “either the Muslims or the Christians are wrong.” Obviously the Muslims are not entirely wrong.

I do not make the leap that this means that they worship our God, though.

Not where the points on which they are right have nothing to do with God. For instance, Buddhists get a lot of things right, but arguably these things have nothing to do with worshiping the one God (I say “arguably” because some would say that Buddhist concepts of Nirvana or Buddha nature have some analogy to God). Atheists may get some things right, but obviously they don’t worship God at all! But as the Catechism says very precisely, the Muslims get certain specific things right: God’s Unity, His merciful character, the fact that He is the Creator. They worship God under these names and attributes. By doing so, they are clearly worshiping the true God, although in what we must regard as an imperfect manner.

I don’t think you can make such a distinction between truth and worship. If they believe something true about God, and they worship the God in whom they believe, then to some extent they are worshiping the true God.

So if you recognize that we ought to treat the Hindus differently than the Jews or the Muslims, is it wrong if I say we ought to treat the Jews differently than the Muslims?

Absolutely not. *As long as the different treatment is based on actual differences. *Obviously the Trinity is not point where Jews and Muslims differ. The fact that we share Scriptures with the Jews but not with the Muslims is ground for a different attitude. As is the fact that we recognize that God made a covenant with the Jewish people.

Aye, there’s the rub! That’s what I would say about Islam’s Allah (not the Allah of the Arabic-speaking Christians, who is my God, my Lord and my Saviour…ya quddus, irhamna!). In some respects, it seems similar, but it is ultimately a different identity. It is something that I cannot recognize as my God any more than I can serve the one true God and Mammon.

But that’s going too far, whether talking about the Islamic Allah or the Hindu Ishvara (their term for the personal manifestation of God, found under the three forms of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu). As I said, there are analogies. In the case of Allah I think there is more than that. But I am happy to admit that that’s a point on which we can differ. There is clearly a spectrum: Jews worship our God; Hindus recognize an abstract philosophical Divinity which we can identify with God (at least those of us who follow the classical Christian tradition rather than a Barthian or other neo-Protestant approach can do so), but then worship that Divinity under personal forms whose relationship to the true God is much more problematic; Muslims are somewhere in between. I would argue that they fall pretty close to the Jewish side of the spectrum, but I admit that there are differences.

It is a matter of Christian history that we have always believed the God of Israel to be our God as well. This is not the case with Muslims, for reasons expounded upon much more expertly throughout the ages than I could ever manage here.

By whom? I am unaware of any traditional Christian theologian who has claimed that Muslims worship a different God. This is a point that seems universally overlooked in these discussions. Folks assume that because the medieval theologians spoke harshly of Islam they must have thought Muslims worshiped a different God. But it isn’t so.

In Christ,

Edwin

 

[SSTeacher]

SSTeacher;5854035:

Andrew,

But isn’t this part of the settled order in the West? Everything but everything

necessarily has to be developed, defined and delineated.No. That’s the stereotype, not the reality. It’s a stereotype with a good deal of basis in reality, as is true of many stereotypes. But it’s still not the same as reality.

Westerners do have a tendency to want to nail things down. But it’s a tendency, not a mandate.

Edwin

Well, I’m glad to hear it’s only a tendency as I’ve definitely picked it up from somewhere and I’d sure like to know who I can blame for it. For example, one of the enquiries I made not too long after becoming an Orthodox catechumen concerned the whereabouts of an Orthodox equivalent to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There isn’t one, of course, but I did get referred to half a dozen catechisms written in different jurisdictions by different authors. Next question I’m asking is how come I’m not able to read inside any of them the words NIHIL OBSTAT or IMPRIMATUR.

Agitatedly,
Mick
:bounce:

 

[Contarini]

Well, I’m glad to hear it’s only a tendency as I’ve definitely picked it up from somewhere and I’d sure like to know who I can blame for it. For example, one of the enquiries I made not too long after becoming an Orthodox catechumen concerned the whereabouts of an Orthodox equivalent to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There isn’t one, of course, but I did get referred to half a dozen catechisms written in different jurisdictions by different authors. Next question I’m asking is how come I’m not able to read inside any of them the words NIHIL OBSTAT or IMPRIMATUR.

Yes, but as this thread demonstrates, the Catechism leaves a lot of room for disagreement

Edwin

 

[SSTeacher]

Yes, but as this thread demonstrates, the Catechism leaves a lot of room for disagreement

Edwin

Don’t it just!

Agreeably,
Mick

 

[guanophore]

Well, it’s a choice of Sacred Scripture over Sacred Tradition.

Actually, no, it is not. There is absolutely no need to separate the Sacred Scriptures from the Sacred Tradition that produced them. There is also no excuse for pitting them against each other, as if they were in competition.

 

[fbl9]

Does not Jesus give us a bit of direction here as written in St.Luke 9:21-26… Did not one of the epistles have reference to the state fo those outside of the church?..True they that have not belief in the Trinity do not truly know who God is…but not truly knowing God does not disable proper and directed whorship to Him.

 

[dzheremi]

But doesn’t this contradict what you go on to say:

Then clearly it’s not as simple as “either the Muslims or the Christians are wrong.” Obviously the Muslims are not entirely wrong.

How so? Recognizing that not everything taught by a non-Christian religion is wrong is not the same as acknowledging the same object of worship across all religions, which is how I essentially read the position that you are taking (please correct me if I’ve misunderstood you). That’s one thing I’ve always liked about Catholicism: It doesn’t automatically shut out whatever is good about another religion just because it isn’t Catholicism. I won’t either.

But as the Catechism says very precisely, the Muslims get certain specific things right: God’s Unity, His merciful character, the fact that He is the Creator. They worship God under these names and attributes. By doing so, they are clearly worshiping the true God, although in what we must regard as an imperfect manner.

I think the Islamic concepts of God’s “unity” and “mercy” vary widely enough from the Christian concepts of the same that the first two of those three can be legitimately questioned with regard to Islam specifically, though I’d leave it to Muslims themselves to elucidate those differences. They do acknowledge one creator, though.

I don’t think you can make such a distinction between truth and worship. If they believe something true about God, and they worship the God in whom they believe, then to some extent they are worshiping the true God.

So…is there a line here, or what? Is it a matter of a certain amount of truth, or truth regarding a certain set of attributes, or…? It all comes down to conceptions of God, I suppose. I say that certainly God is one and merciful, and so that the Muslims are right in this regard, but the question remains: Does the fact that we can agree on certain attributes of God mean that we are in fact worshipping the same diety? In certain parts of the Qur’an, Allah is referred to as the “greatest of deceivers” (3:54). Is this God or not? If this is one of those things that Muslims have gotten wrong as a result of their flawed picture of the one true God, then just what are those things that they are allowed to get wrong and still be worshipping Him, and what are those things that they must get right? I agree that none of us can ever have a full understanding of who God is, but I really still have a hard time with the idea that because of that any depiction of God is valid as being “true” so long as it contains some truth (any truth at all, apparently). I was always told by my grandfather, who was a bit of an old-style grifter as a result of his early adult years coinciding with the Great Depression, that the best lies often contain enough truth to make good, honest people believe them.

But that’s going too far

Why? I’ve already said that there are some attributes that Muslims claim of Allah that I also claim of God, so in that sense we “agree”.

There is clearly a spectrum: Jews worship our God; Hindus recognize an abstract philosophical Divinity which we can identify with God (at least those of us who follow the classical Christian tradition rather than a Barthian or other neo-Protestant approach can do so), but then worship that Divinity under personal forms whose relationship to the true God is much more problematic; Muslims are somewhere in between. I would argue that they fall pretty close to the Jewish side of the spectrum, but I admit that there are differences.

Okay. I can respect this as your view.

(continued below)

 

[dzheremi]

By whom? I am unaware of any traditional Christian theologian who has claimed that Muslims worship a different God. This is a point that seems universally overlooked in these discussions. Folks assume that because the medieval theologians spoke harshly of Islam they must have thought Muslims worshiped a different God. But it isn’t so.

Many midieval writers on Muhammad and Islam came straight out and said that Muhammad was an anti-Christ. One of the earliest non-Islamic accounts of Islam, Doctrina Jacobi (c.640), tells of a conversion between a Jewish forced convert to Christianity and an elder of the Palestinian community that is written as follows:

When the candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina. People were saying “the candidatus has been killed,” and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: “What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?” He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. (source; emphasis mine)

From the beginning, it appears that some Christians recognized not only the falsity of Muhammad’s prophethood, but his preaching not of the true God but of an anti-Christ figure. (Full disclosure: It is not clear from the extract presented above that the old man mentioned above was in fact a Christian, but as the account was written by a Christian who himself used the term “Antichrist”, I would say it counts.)

Alvaro of Cordoba followed suit in the 800s, as did others. Even others who held that it was, strictly speaking, a Christian heresy (which I assume to be the majority position held by non-Muslims during Islam’s period of expansion and rule over much of Europe, when a great many such polemics appeared in the West) ultimately concluded that Muhammad was at least a precursor to the anti-Christ, as Peter the Venerable (10th century) did. I guess the question is now is whether or not a/the anti-Christ ultimately worships the one true God…and that question makes my head hurt more than anything else we’ve discussed.

We might then also ask what exactly is meant by “heresy”. If Islam is in fact a Christian heresy (I don’t have a definite opinion this myself), does it follow that a heretic cannot worship the one true God? From the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the noun in question (available here):

St. Thomas (II-II:11:1) defines heresy: “a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas”. "The right Christian faith consists in giving one’s voluntary assent to Christ in all that truly belongs to His teaching. There are, therefore, two ways of deviating from Christianity: the one by refusing to believe in Christ Himself, which is the way of infidelity, common to Pagans and Jews; the other by restricting belief to certain points of Christ’s doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure, which is the way of heretics.

I’ve bolded portions that I think most apply to Muslims. They refuse to believe in Christ, of course, and even as they say that this is not in fact true (since they have their “Isa” in the Qur’an), they still restrict belief in His doctrine to that which harmonizes with their own book and its doctrines, the source of which is ultimately something other than the one true God.

 

[tomarin]

Yeah, and it’s raping and killing its way all over the place but what does that matter since they’re monotheists!

Vickie

It matters a lot but this is a separate issue from what you originially claimed, which is that the devil must have inspired Mohammad to write the Koran. When I take your claim seriously by bringing up a serious objection to it, you just side-step the issue by saying Islam is associated with violence (as if that couldn’t be said of many other religions, ours included). It’s a non-sequitur and a red herring.

 

[elvisman]

Well, it’s a choice of Sacred Scripture over Sacred Tradition. As a Protestant, I believe Sacred Scripture is the authorative Word of God, and it is by God the Holy Spirit who illuminates our minds to understand the Scriptures. That is the Protestant perspective of sola scriptura; therefore Reformation Day is a great day for us! It’s interesting to watch your struggles on a very basic Christian truth.

Gosh, Adam - you may have missed my post #120, so I’ll ask you again.
**I’m sure it was just an oversight and not a snub. I know you’ll show me where I can find the verse:

Post #120
Great answer.
Can you point me to the Scripture verse that confirms that the bible is our only Authority? I can’t seem to find it.

 

[2nd_Adam]

Gosh, Adam - you may have missed my post #120, so I’ll ask you again.
**I’m *sure ***it was just an oversight and not a snub. I know you’ll show me where I can find the verse:

Post #120
**Great **answer.
Can you point me to the Scripture verse that confirms that the bible is our only Authority? I can’t seem to find it.

As Christians, our only authority is God alone.

 

[elvisman]

As Christians, our only authority is God alone.

Again - please show me that in Scripture.

OR - tell me WHOSE interpretation is correct - since the Holy Spirit guides us ALL to ALL truth (John 16:13-15).

 

[josie_L]

Many midieval writers on Muhammad and Islam came straight out and said that Muhammad was an anti-Christ. One of the earliest non-Islamic accounts of Islam, Doctrina Jacobi (c.640), tells of a conversion between a Jewish forced convert to Christianity and an elder of the Palestinian community that is written as follows:

When the candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina. People were saying “the candidatus has been killed,” and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: “What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?” He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. (source; emphasis mine)

From the beginning, it appears that some Christians recognized not only the falsity of Muhammad’s prophethood, but his preaching not of the true God but of an anti-Christ figure. (Full disclosure: It is not clear from the extract presented above that the old man mentioned above was in fact a Christian, but as the account was written by a Christian who himself used the term “Antichrist”, I would say it counts.)

Alvaro of Cordoba followed suit in the 800s, as did others. Even others who held that it was, strictly speaking, a Christian heresy (which I assume to be the majority position held by non-Muslims during Islam’s period of expansion and rule over much of Europe, when a great many such polemics appeared in the West) ultimately concluded that Muhammad was at least a precursor to the anti-Christ, as Peter the Venerable (10th century) did. I guess the question is now is whether or not a/the anti-Christ ultimately worships the one true God…and that question makes my head hurt more than anything else we’ve discussed.

We might then also ask what exactly is meant by “heresy”. If Islam is in fact a Christian heresy (I don’t have a definite opinion this myself), does it follow that a heretic cannot worship the one true God? From the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the noun in question (available here):

I’ve bolded portions that I think most apply to Muslims. They refuse to believe in Christ, of course, and even as they say that this is not in fact true (since they have their “Isa” in the Qur’an), they still restrict belief in His doctrine to that which harmonizes with their own book and its doctrines, the source of which is ultimately something other than the one true God.

If Mohammed is a precursor to the or is the anti-Christ ( I won’t deny this, but I have a hard time believing that the present Muslims are somehow going to Hell for not knowing He is, and furthermore, that they are worshiping a false God, i.e., a demon, which they cannot be faulted for) because of his false beliefs then couldn’t the same be said of Christian heretics (weren’t Protestants at one point in time viewed as heretics but are now considered as separated brethren)?

 

[Contarini]

Many midieval writers on Muhammad and Islam came straight out and said that Muhammad was an anti-Christ. One of the earliest non-Islamic accounts of Islam, Doctrina Jacobi (c.640), tells of a conversion between a Jewish forced convert to Christianity and an elder of the Palestinian community that is written as follows:

When the candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina. People were saying “the candidatus has been killed,” and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: “What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?” He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. (source; emphasis mine)

From the beginning, it appears that some Christians recognized not only the falsity of Muhammad’s prophethood, but his preaching not of the true God but of an anti-Christ figure.

Non sequitur. The passage you describe does not say that the God Muhammad proclaimed is an anti-Christ figure.

I guess the question is now is whether or not a/the anti-Christ ultimately worships the one true God…and that question makes my head hurt more than anything else we’ve discussed.

The Antichrist would not of course *sincerely *worship the true God. Again, the problem is that there is ambiguity in what we mean by “worshiping the true God.” The early and medieval Christians seem to have believed what you find problematic, that if people worship one God (at least if that one God has certain basic attributes such as eternity, incorporeality, etc., and is the creator of the world) then that God should be spoken of as our God. Obviously if Muhammad was a false prophet (in the sense of a deliberate deceiver) or an Antichrist figure or a forerunner of the Antichrist or whatever, he wouldn’t genuinely worship God. But the God he spoke of would still be the true God.

Again, you may have problems with this, but you need to deal with the fact that that is how medieval Christians spoke.

We might then also ask what exactly is meant by “heresy”. If Islam is in fact a Christian heresy (I don’t have a definite opinion this myself), does it follow that a heretic cannot worship the one true God?

I would say that most often a heretic does. The Gnostics arguably didn’t. The Mormons perhaps don’t. But generally a heretic worships the true God with mistaken ideas and practices.

Edwin

 

[SSTeacher]

Hello again, dzheremi,

One of the points raised by Contarini in Post #143 on this thread (that you subsequently addressed in Post #150) prompted me to fall into a brown study.

I am unaware of any traditional Christian theologian who has claimed that Muslims worship a different God.

You’re doubtless aware that it’s repeated proverbially inside Orthodoxy that one who prays is a theologian and that a theologian is one who prays. That was my starting point – and from there I jumped to something that I suddenly remembered reading in a book that a fellow catechumen lent to me. The book is by Matthew Gallatin. His name may be familiar to you. He’s a former Evangelical pastor and convert to Orthodoxy that has a regular podcast on Ancient Faith Radio. The book I recalled reading was titled Thirsting for God in a Land of Shallow Wells and is the story of his spiritual journey into Orthodoxy.

His biggest obstacle as an Evangelical, of course, was fighting his way past the stranglehold of Sola Scriptura. He described this quite early on. He found himself singing in a large interdenominational Protestant gathering with a Calvinist friend on his left and an Arminian friend on his right and they were both singing, “In our hearts we’re undivided.” And it was then the thought came to him that Calvinists and Arminians do not believe in the same God (he was at the time an Arminian).

Interesting, huh?

He had “well–meaning friends” who told him that he shouldn’t worry about doctrine and that he should just place his trust in Jesus but apparently that didn’t help much (as if it would ) and he continued to try to wrestle his way out of the conundrum. He already knew, as we all do, that words convey ideas but he took that a little further and eventually came to the conclusion that people jointly claiming “Jesus is the Son of God come in the flesh” was not the true test of unity. To be one in their confession, he decided, they must mean the same thing by their words. And then he went on to declare the following.

If, in fact, it is my Calvinist friends who are right about God, then the God I worship simply does not exist. There is no such thing as a God who allows men to freely choose, or lose, salvation. If that is the case then I am not a Christian. I am not anything for I worship a God who is false. Of course, if I am the one who is right about God, then it is the Calvinists and others who are in the awful place of worshipping a false God.

He then came to what was for me was a rather surprising conclusion. Still considering the cacophony in contemporary American Protestantism he observed that the modern Protestant situation – with its different versions of who God is that come as a direct result of the Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura – creates religious conceit. For even when he tried to embrace the contradictory views of others about God as “being somehow equally valid with my own," in his heart he was saying, ‘I’ll accept you folks as brethren. But let’s not forget that it’s my beliefs that are the true ones!” He considered that he had no option but to think along those lines. Otherwise he would have put himself in the schizophrenic position of believing that the things he’d decided to be true were actually false, or could be false!

The parallel is clear. Christians are not in any way at one with Muslims. To be at one in their confession they must mean the same thing by their words. And they don’t mean the same thing at all. A Catholic can recite the Nicene Creed all the way through and mean by the words he or she utters exactly what the Christian Church has defined as revealed truth about God and His plan of salvation. A sincere Muslim can in conscience recite only the first sentence of the Nicene Creed and even then he or she will not mean the same thing as is meant by the Catholic when that Catholic utters those same words. Q.E.D.

Unequivocally,
Mick

 

[josie_L]

Non sequitur. The passage you describe does not say that the God Muhammad proclaimed is an anti-Christ figure.

The Antichrist would not of course *sincerely *worship the true God. Again, the problem is that there is ambiguity in what we mean by “worshiping the true God.” The early and medieval Christians seem to have believed what you find problematic, that if people worship one God (at least if that one God has certain basic attributes such as eternity, incorporeality, etc., and is the creator of the world) then that God should be spoken of as our God. Obviously if Muhammad was a false prophet (in the sense of a deliberate deceiver) or an Antichrist figure or a forerunner of the Antichrist or whatever, he wouldn’t genuinely worship God. But the God he spoke of would still be the true God.

Again, you may have problems with this, but you need to deal with the fact that that is how medieval Christians spoke.

I would say that most often a heretic does. The Gnostics arguably didn’t. The Mormons perhaps don’t. But generally a heretic worships the true God with mistaken ideas and practices.

Edwin

I agree with you Edward. God bless.

 

[Contarini]

Suppose that, as a good traditional Orthodox Christian, you or your friend Mr. Gallatin provides me with evidence from the Church Fathers supporting this claim.

I mean, of course, the claim that Orthodox and heretics, or Christians and Jews and Muslims, do not worship the same God.

Yes, the Jews come back at this point. If you have to believe the same things about God to be worshiping the same God, clearly Jews don’t worship the same God as Christians. Which presents you with an insuperable problem, unless you are going to claim that believers in the Old Testament believed exactly the same things about God that Christians do and that later Jews somehow rejected these traditional beliefs. I know that some Christians have claimed something like this. It’s rarely held any more because it’s so clearly unhistorical. But you may not care about history very much. Many Orthodox don’t. (“Tradition” in the sense many Orthodox and some Catholics use it is almost the opposite of history, because it denies change and even, in the case of many Orthodox, development.)

Edwin

 

[SSTeacher]

Suppose that, as a good traditional Orthodox Christian, you or your friend Mr. Gallatin provides me with evidence from the Church Fathers supporting this claim.

I mean, of course, the claim that Orthodox and heretics, or Christians and Jews and Muslims, do not worship the same God.

Yes, the Jews come back at this point. If you have to believe the same things about God to be worshiping the same God, clearly Jews don’t worship the same God as Christians. Which presents you with an insuperable problem, unless you are going to claim that believers in the Old Testament believed exactly the same things about God that Christians do and that later Jews somehow rejected these traditional beliefs. I know that some Christians have claimed something like this. It’s rarely held any more because it’s so clearly unhistorical. But you may not care about history very much. Many Orthodox don’t. (“Tradition” in the sense many Orthodox and some Catholics use it is almost the opposite of history, because it denies change and even, in the case of many Orthodox, development.)

Edwin

I acknowledge your observations and opinions and additionally note that you are being argumentative and confrontational. I thought you had stated in an earlier post that you wanted to help dzheremi? How can trying to pick a fight with me in any way help him? Please try to be more helpful. And, if I may be so bold, perhaps you could in future omit the snide remarks? There’s no call to assert that many Orthodox don’t care about history, is there? If you find it impossible to be civil perhaps you’d be kind enough not to post at all. Many thanks in advance for your cooperation.

Appreciatively,
Mick