The Quadrinity

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Cosmo:

Well, I’m not sure your example holds. Humans are, by definiton, mortal - so it doesn’t make sense to be 100% human and 100% mortal - humanity implies mortality.

Now, man and God - those are two very different things. I suppose it might be possible for them to conflict.

So different, that they have nothing in common - from *our *side. If there is to be anything at all in common between in them, it can come only from God. We can’t climb up to God - but He can and does draw us up to Himself. That’s why God alone can create, give grace, and save - and why we can never be more than recipients of these things. Only God can “bridge” the distance between His Infinite fullness of Being, and the nothingness that we are. ​

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

porthos11:

Santa,

Be careful of what you call heresy. That Jesus is a divine, not human person is orthodox Catholic teaching, defined at the Council of Ephesus in AD 430. Jesus is the second Person of the trinity. As such, he is not a human person. He did have two natures, human and divine in that one person.

“It was Leontius of Byzantium who advanced the formula that enabled the majority to agree on an interpretation of the Chalcedonian formula. The human nature of Christ, he taught, was not an independent hypostasis (anhypostatic), but it was enhypostatic, i.e., it had its subsistence in and through the Logos.”

mb-soft.com/believe/text/christol.htm

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Cosmo:

I fail to see the connection between my theistic opinions and the current discussion, but I have no qualms in answering that I’m an atheist.

I wish I had known before - I wrote a long post which was based on the assumption you were a believing Christian. in fact, I thought you were a Catholic ​

 

[tuopaolo]

dominosNbiscuts:

Currently she’s poised to rise to coredemptrix - fully sharing in the salvific work of Jesus Christ. (i.e. they become the ‘salvation twins’!) The pope has already talked this one blue. The only remaining step is his infallible declaration, and she’s in.

How about instead of ridiculing the idea, you prayerfully approach it with a prayer to the Holy Spirit? Don’t exclude anything a priori. Be open to any teaching of Catholic tradition or any future definition by the Church. The holy Spirit won’t let the Church be wrong.

Beyond that, about all they have left is to boost her up to cocreatrix - fully sharing in the deific work of God the Father. (i.e. she becomes Mother Goddess!).

First you are confuisng God’s creative activity with His deity. God would be just as much God had He not created anything. In fact it is Catholic dogma that God was perfectly free to not create this world.

Secondly, if you are open, maybe you would like to read this book. I quote an excerpt here from The Immaculate Conception and the Holy Spirit from Marytown Press p.73-75. It is an exposition based on the teachings of St Maximilian Maria Kolbe.
Fr H. M. Manteau-Bonamy:

Speaking of Mary, once her amazing, ineffable declaration at Lourdes had become known, the liturgy of the Church invites us to ponder her mystery in the light of God’s word. The following passage, ordinarily so difficult to explain, takes on a real, not merely symbolic, meaning if we think of it as pronounced by the Immaculata herself, intimately united as she was with the Holy Spirit, the divine Inspirer of this text:

The Lord begot me in the beginning before he planned anything, before the most ancient of his works; from eternity I was established, before anything began, before the earth. Before the abysses were created I was already conceived . . . I was with him then, arranging everything. And day after day I found delight playing before him all the while, playing on the surface of the earth; and my delight was to be with the sons of men (Prv 8:22-24, 30-31)

If Mary, as a humble daughter of Adam, came into existence only after innumerable generations of human beings, she was already present in God’s own mind, outside of all time, in the Holy Spirit himself. In God’s eternal NOW, where she exists forever, she lives and reigns as the sovereign Mother, above all other creatures, cooperating in God’s divine task of governing the world, embracing the entire scope of creation, before her and after her.

This is why Father Kolbe does not hesitate to identify Mary with Wisdom, “the artificer of all” (Wis 7:22):

She is, [he says, applying to her the words of the Sacred Author] a breath of divine power, a most pure effusion of the Most High; hence nothing sullied can ever contaminate her. She is a reflection of the eternal light, a spotless mirror of God’s activity, an image of his excellence. . . . She is indeed more beautiful than the sun, surpasses all the constellations, and compared to light itself, she is more brilliant. (Wis 7:25-26, 29, as in Sketch, 1940)

We must acknowledge, [he goes on] that in his creative omnipotence God made the Immaculata all holy. As a creature she is close to us; as Mother of God she touches divinity itself. The Immaculata is the summit of perfection of holiness achievable by creatures. No one else could ever attain this degree of grace; only the Mother of God could ever reach it. (Conference, July 3, 1938)

. . .

If we refer to Mary the Immaculata the double conception of thought and of love found in God – the Word and the Holy Spirit – we may say that the Father, in a way infinitely better than that of the most gifted artist, makes Mary the exemplar and matrix of the visible and invisible universe which he has conceived as an ideal in his mind before attempting to translate it into material reality. Thus in her he sees before him a model that represents his ideal in mock-up. On each occasion the artist must reshape his model in order to express a different work, conceived along other lines; but the Father, through his one Word full of Love, sees in the Immaculata the entire universe in all its rich multiplicity and harmonious unity.

Now we can better understand why Father Kolbe goes so far as to say:

The Immaculate Conception belongs to the Virgin’s very essence . . . this name she used at Lourdes is fully justified in all of her life, because she is always immaculate, hence “full of grace”; because “God is always with her,” even to that astounding degree of intimacy that makes her Mother of his Son. (Sketch, 1940)

Because of this she holds the first place in the history of salvation. Oriental Christianity understood this very well when it gave her the name “Panagia” (all holy), the same name it gives to the Holy Spirit himself: “Panagion”

 

[bekalc]

It’s funny but I heard as a Protestant so much about how Catholics worship the virgin Mary. Although at Catholic school she wasn’t a focus and I understand their official positions to be not worship. I thought co-redemptix just meant worker with the redeemer That mary was a “co worker” just like you and I can be co-workers, when we respond to God in obedience. I never thought when looking up what Catholics actually say about it that in anyways meant she was equal to Jesus! I don’t think so.

However, as someone who is converting to Catholicism, all of my fears that Catholic Church “officially” places to much emphasis on Mary has been eradicated. I’ve been worshiping at Mass for months now, and if you go to mass it is so Christ centered and Jesus and what he did for us is so emphasized every service. Their is really no emphasis on Mary. I personally encourage people who think Catholics worship Mary to go to our mass (because they are pretty uniform) and see who it is we worship for yourselves.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Cosmo:

Why not? What is it that prevents you from even acknowledging that the slimmest possibility even exists that he does not exist?

An interesting statement. The appendix is not alone; there is no shortage of human body parts that either serve no purpose or seem rightfully out of place. I am not trying to disprove to you God’s intelligence or power - but, what do you think it would take for you to acquiesce to the possibility that he may not exist?

One step at a time, indeed. Here’s some questions for you to ponder. If you answer them, perhaps then we can talk about accepting Jesus.

1. We have no scientific evidence that God exists. In the 12,000 years since man settled down and ended its hunter-gatherer lifestyle, do you not think that someone would have found God if he did indeed exist?
2. What about the thousands upon thousands of other Gods that are also said to exist? What of Zeus and Hera? What of Dionysus, Quetzalcoatl, and Vishnu? What of Allah? What of Ra, Osiris, and Mercury? What reason do you have for being a near-complete atheist, in that you believe in one God but deny the existence of thousands of others that have been named to exist? What is it that makes you cling to only one? Is there really such a big difference between me, the atheist, and you, the christian?
3. What of evil? If you had the power to prevent 3,000 deaths and the collapse of two skyscrapers on a given day in September, wouldn’t you? If God is able to prevent evil but is unwilling, is he not malevolent?

One step at a time.

If, however, evil is not a “thing”, then there is nothing to “prevent” - evil might not be like (say) a tree falling on a house, which might in principle, if one had appropriate equipment, be stopped from happening.​

ISTM that evil is a relation between things - if someone takes a hammer to your head, forcefully, evil is certainly “involved” somewhere:

• not because the hammer is defective (far from it - it has been a very good hammer, and that is part of the problem - if it were bad as a hammer, it would not be used as a weapon);
• not because lifting up hammers is a vicious act - if it were, carpentry and DIY would be intrinsically evil acts
• not because it is evil to be strong enough to lift a hammer

• all these things, such as they are, are good things - the evil is two-fold:

• their inappropriate relation to your head - since the human head is not intended to be used as a surface for testing hammers (which is a physical evil)
• the act of dashing your brains out - which is, in the person doing it with the hammer, a moral evil: the evil known as sin.

IOW - ISTM, that what we call evil, is a nexus of relations between things. It is not an independent existing thing, but something that can “exist” only because real things give its insubstantiality the appearance of real existence. Evil is so nothing, that it can be known only by being related to real things - like cheeses, or the human will, or whatever it may be.

Sometimes, they are evil only from our POV, because they are inconvenient to us: a hurricane hitting Louisiana at 180 m.p.h. is a physical “evil”, because people are killed and property is destroyed by it, with all the consequences that this has for the future; if Hurrican Katrina had blown itself out in mid-Atlantic, it might have been very specacular, & an awesome reminder of the powers of untamed nature, and so on and so on - but it would not have been thought of as an evil, if no one had been living in its path.

An awesome display of natural forces, and an appalling catastrophe, may be exactly the same thing as each other; or even be the same thing, at different stages; they differ in our estimation only because one is not harmful to us, while the other is. There were probably immense hurricanes while this planet was forming - but we weren’t involved, so we don’t think of them as evil; if we think of them at all.

Or else, things can be real, & good in themselves, but not good for us: bacterial infections, for instance. the badness of the infection for us, is perfectly compatible with the felicity of bacteria, and with the fulfilment of bacteria in doing what they do best; but not with ours. The Zyklon-B capsules used at Auschwitz were no doubt excellent capsules, of their kind; that is why the Nazis used them - because they were good as what they were. But their goodness as Zyklon-B capsules was fatal for millions of Jews. Or to use your example: the evil of September 11 2001 was caused in part by good things such as skill in flying planes. ##

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Reformed Rob:

I haven’t read all this thread, but the thing that entered my mind quickly was something from a book I read recently. It was not a very exciting book, but I felt it was necessary.

Alexander Hislops’ The Two Babylons

In that work (I looked briefly for the page

Page 89 of the Loizeaux edition - near the end of chapter 2, section 3. ​

and quote, and source he cited just now, but couldn’t locate it) he says something about how the Roman Catholic Church teaches that Mary and Joseph are in the Trinity! Don’t worry, I don’t believe that, nor do I believe that Catholics actually believe that. In fact, if you believed that, you would cease to be Catholic.

Now, you should believe that Mary is uniquely related to the Trinity in a very special way that perhaps no other mere human enjoys. But that’s outlined quite well in teachin on the Immaculate Conception.

Rob

Here’s a link to that Hislop quotation:​

philologos.org/__eb-ttb/sect23.htm

The real puzzle is why the author didn’t realise that Catholics have the same Trinity as other Christians.

This is the best site for the book, IMO, as it has all sixty-one illustrations, unlike many sites - but not the three prefaces, which is a shame. they are available elsewhere.

I read that this book influenced the JWs to think that the Trinity is pagan. The author, it should be said, does not say it is pagan; but, that there are pagan distortions of it. His view was that the religion of the Patriarchs was pretty much the same as Christianity - the main difference being, that they believed in a Christ Who was yet to come. If the Patriarchs believed in the Trinity, then his position - that other religions are distortions of the “Patriarchal faith” - is not unreasonable. (Christianity does in some sense fulfil Judaism - but not in quite that direct sense). ##

 

[Br.Rich_SFO]

Juxtaposer:

I was at an Orthodox liturgy today, and some Orthodox friends of mine told me that there is a sect of Catholics who want Mary to be named the fourth member of the Trinity. Is there any truth to this whatsoever? Judging by how mainstream Catholics view Mary (i.e. Mediatrix of All Graces) I’d say this day may not be too far off.

The Mediatrix and Co-redemptrix was petitioned for by a group of the Faithful. However it was refused by John Paul II, not rejected but refused at this time. Because this view of Mary is actual very old from the early centuries. No the Catholic Church would clearly reject as heresy any petition requesting a change in the Doctrine of the Trinity. That is just nuts.