3DOP

Hi manol. I have to take issue. Jesus is the "Lamb of God" slain from the foundation of the world. That hearkens back of course, to the Paschal Sacrifice in Exodus. Out of the first 128 verses where the word "sacrifice" occurs, one is from Genesis (Abraham and Isaac). One hundred and twenty three are from Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Four are from Deuteronomy. Almost all of the discussion about about animal sacrifice is found in the middle three books of the Pentateuch. One of the two in Deuteronomy appears to make reference to animal sacrifice, one is about making sure to share the best part of the sacrifice with the priests, and I am think that the last one wasn't about animal sacrifice at all. Our canonical Scriptures don't have anything significant to say in Deuteronomy either. Regards, Rory

Unfortunately for us, we can't wiggle out that way. And I would urge that difficulties abound, and we have to try to resolve them before we would declare something in our canons to be in irresolvable conflict. As a Latter-day Saint, I would at least wait for a Latter-day revelation to say any specific teaching is erroneous. Otherwise, we would have all kinds of teachings being rejected from both Testaments. How can a virgin have a child? How are we going to be resurrected with the same body when our original molecules are scattered all over creation? Ad nauseam. But of course, with care, I have to grant the LDS have a mechanism by which you could say the passage is fallible, or uninspired (not speaking as a prophet)

Hi Orthodox Christian, I am for shelving these concerns. We have to not expect to find an answer that will satisfy everyone. Many take solace in rejecting Christianity because of passages like those to which you are referring. I have been looking for answers that partially satisfy me. This week, the first reading at Mass is taken from the Book of Wisdom 12. It is a defense of God against what you describe as happening to the Amalekites. In Acts 13:19, St. Paul mentions that the Israelites destroyed seven nations in the course of gaining possession of the Promised Land. There is no hint of divine displeasure at the thoroughness of the task in that New Testament text. Wisdom 12 sheds abundant light on the truly wicked, and safe to say, demonic practices of these nations. The author also shows that judgment did not come upon this people suddenly and all at once, but gradually, with time for repentance. That is about as far as it goes. But it shows that this question you ask was already being discussed in the centuries before Christ. Establishing that God gave these nations opportunities for repentance, we can be confident that if upon seeing the Israelites approach, had they repented like the Ninevites at the preaching of Jonah, mercy would have been granted. Perhaps repentance came too late to be saved from earthly destruction. I have hope that among the redeemed in heaven will be children, women, and warriors who were slain among these nations, and that they will be praising God eternally for saving them from their sins, just like the rest of the saints in heaven. Wisdom 12 is very strong as are many other passages in both Testaments warning that no one need worry about whether God is righteous when He is judged. He doesn't seem obliged to give a complete account at this time. I think it could be argued that the Son's life, passion, and death should be enough to make it reasonable to trust in God's wisdom and goodness? Will we turn away in this life because we have judged this God to be evil before we see the fruit of what He was doing? Many do, and many will. I am putting it on the shelf, awaiting further revelation. This will come at the Day of Judgment. It isn't God's raw power alone that will cause souls to bend the knee before their Maker. They will not be fearing a God that has a blemished record. They will be loving a God who has shown them His superabundant goodness, mercy, grace, and love for every soul that has ever been conceived. That is my faith. I admit that I am only partially satisfied with this answer. I look forward to seeing more of an answer, even in this life, but certainly the next. Certainly the New Testament opens up our eyes to the idea that everyone is a brother. There is that passage from our Lord where, I paraphrase Him saying, "You have heard it said to love your friends and hate your enemies, but I say..." Jesus definitely gave the Christians a different eye with which to view our enemies. Other teachings in the Old Testament are not corrected, or properly developed until the New. The Ten Commandments do teach love, according to St. Paul in Romans. And the Good Samaritan who was more in the dark than a levite and a priest, will get his reward because he obeyed the law of his conscience and took pity on the man at the side of the road. All will be judged according to our consciences, including Amalekites. Who besides God could untangle the varying factors of every generation and every individual since our first parents? Let us take courage and be at peace, and not be precipitate enough to think God can't explain what happened with the Amalekites, if we will be patient.

Most LDS, here at least, would not be surprised to hear that Catholics are not even required to believe in any private revelation. Obedience though? That is way beyond being out of "left field" and into lunar orbit.

I stopped reading with "All Catholics are required to obey LaSallette."

The Nehor. You are as uncomprising a fellow as any fundamentalist for their position. I thank you for your criticisms with your single approbation. Your friend (albeit internet), 3DOP A friend as one who reveals himself to the other, and who genuinely wishes his friend only good...and in your case expects a shitload of criticism. God bless you, you *****.

Webbles. Hey. I cannot worship another like myself if it is only because He, or he, is the most intelligent. You may not have framed it the way your relative would have. Still, I can't picture myself in adoration at the smartest kid in the class. Maybe there is another way to adore Him? It certainly speaks well of him to turn to the rest of us dummies with a plan. I could love a loving friend before I could worship a fellow creature with the highest I.Q. God help us who have "gone back and forth". I am your fellow pilgrim. Rory, who goes back and forth too.

Even In the Old Testament, God used marital imagery to accuse His people of infidelity, of adultery. In the New Testament, the same continues, not so obviously when Jesus speaks to those of us who feel weary and heavy-laden: "Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light". [Matthew 11:30] A yoke of oxen are two animals pulling in the same way, like a marriage, which uses the same Greek word translated as yoke, for oxen in a team, as for marriage. I know my prayers and worship are imperfect. Maybe I go in and out of the yoke? I am thinking that is the problem. It is a problem of trust and immolation of the will before God. St. Paul calls on us to "offer up our bodies a living sacrifice"! Then he calls it "a reasonable service". (Rom. 12:1 and 2) Only if we are perfectly yoked. This is the hard part. It doesn't seem like it will make me happy. I don't completely believe this yoke is sweet. If I believed it, I would be meek and obedient to the Father (like Jesus). And I would be in the yoke I have the same sense as many of you that I should be habitually able to have a fervent and satisfying intimacy with God. I have to immolate my soul and body in offering them to God for His service, trusting that it will be sweet to do so. It is a gift from God when we have a sense of dissatisfaction over our not so profound efforts at being intimate with God. It is Jesus knocking on our doors seeking entry. We need to believe that the same one who we truly believe in as our Lord and God, still loves us while we are in "sleep mode"! We might think God is not happy with us, maybe He will be punishing us for our little or large infidelities. Not if He can help it! He wants to always forgive us. Maybe it helps to realize our misery through a deep sense of unworthiness, before we can appreciate that God would after all this, still knock, seeking entry. Anyway, fervent prayer and more perfect worship are rewards that Christ must withhold in varying degrees from us who are imperfectly yoked. He withholds while making us aware of them as part of the package of the joy that is set before us. By bashing a little on methods in my last post, I meant that preeminently, before we find what "works" according to our differing states of life, we must be properly disposed for an appropriate intimacy with a neighbour, a friend, a spouse, or God. If we have the disposition, the method, maybe perfectly suited to our unique relationships and situations, should take care of itself. Love will find a way. We need to believe in...LOVE, especially the love that comes from God...and potentially from us too! Those rivers of living water flowing out of our bellies.

Hey all, I didn't expect to comment again at such an early "tomorrow". We had an electrical storm go through which woke me up. I am not wired (up for the night), but remembering to salute our beloved Lord, (albeit not first as it should be), here I am already, having also had a cheese sandwich and a shot of vodka. (Vodka is hard on the liver I am told, on an empty stomach). Like love and marriage, one can't have the one without the other? So yeah, The N., I took note yesterday of your reasonable questioning about analogical problems with including our relations with God similarly with other persons. I thought I was being original with my "theory" from p. 43 of the future pope's book. But after I woke this morning, I immediately went to MMDB for any developments. Then came the sandwich, the shot, going outside to the front porch to experience the storm...and remembering I hadn't properly saluted our good and loving God. I took care of that, thanked him for my physical sustenance, and found that after kicking a speedy spider that had been on top of my flip-flopped foot, I was only one among God's dear creatures to seek refuge under my porch roof from the storm. I decided to give to those creatures my refuge from the downpour. They had no malice, crawling on me instinctually, not with any freedom of will. Bugs aren't meant for persons to enjoy I suppose. But it is irrational to despise them. Besides the speedy spider, which I also unfortunately crushed, there was also some other tiny, dark, unidentifiable thing, which when similarly smashed, left a white, creamy substance on my forearm. Anyway, I have finished my repast in relative peace indoors. I fear my nocturnal activities might have disturbed my own wife's sleep. I will endeavor to discover in a daylight hour if this has been the case, and make amends. So anyway, enough dramatic biographical data, and stream of consciousness (?), if I understand what that means. I shall try to be more scientific and less focused upon me. I have turned back to reread, accidentally p. 42. I thought it was p. 44 in the next chapter!!! Hah. I see that a previous page, so nearby as p. 42 was the inspiration for my so "original" theory after reading p. 43. Here is the hard part of this post. In my still sober judgment, I fear I may fail to be convincing of a possible analogical parallel between "more meaningful worship", and proper ethics in conjugal relations. I don't think anyone could rationally argue against the young future pope's conclusive concern for married couples. But that it applied to everybody, every person we encounter? Even to God, not only as God, but because God is a Person? I want to quote from the book now: "So, while the commandment to love is not, strictly speaking, identical with the personalistic norm but only presupposes it, as it implies also a personalistic system of values..." (the lights just flashed...saving post)...we can, taking a broader view, say that the commandment to love is the personalistic norm." ---ibid. p. 41 I know that this alone does not advance my case, and also that I may lose some that just want to stop being so distracted in prayer or have been experiencing boring, unfulfilling worship. I have probably erred on one side by being too personal (!), and on the other by failing to translate the author's philosophy in an accessible way. I hope to try to correct both issues. And I also want to suggest strenuously that the problem in worship isn't method. Thanks to the rain, I will probably be unable to work in the yard tomorrow very well, and will try to expand on the future pope's thoughts in a broad, bright daylight hour. God help me. Good night. God bless all, 3.

Thanks for your thoughtful consideration. You raise some good points. I won't be so hasty in defending my theory as I was in posting it after it was about an hour old. Heh. Maybe tomorrow. Rory

In the 50's, around two decades before he would be Pope John Paul II, a young Polish priest, soon to be a bishop, was writing a book which has been translated into English as Love and Responsibility. In that book the future pope is opposing utilitarianism as a primary problem in marital relationships, especially with regard to the sexual urge. By utilitarianism, Karol Wojtyla (pronounced Voy-tee-wah) is speaking about a system of ethics he attributes to John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. According to the Polish priest, these philosophers asserted that whatever gives the maximum pleasure and the least pain to the greatest number of people should determine human action. I can not debate Mill or Bentham fans about any misconceptions Wojtyla might have had about nuances in their versions of utilitarianism. My purpose for this thread is to state that the future pope was developing an ethic of behavior which can, but does not always rule in conjugal relations between married people. This is the book which eventually developed in to John Paul II's famous (in Catholic circles anyway) Theology of the Body. As I was reading Love and Responsibility this afternoon, I was struck with the similarity of the union of man and wife, and with union between God and man. Selfishness and pursuit of pleasure as an end, are, says the author, incompatible with the love that married couples should have. I would propose that in a similar way, pursuit of pleasure can get in the way of a deeper and more worshipful prayer life with God. I want to quote a short passage and see what you think of my theory. The quote below is being applied to married people who are to be united in one flesh (and spirit). I am applying the ethic to our intimacy with God with whom we are also to be united intimately. "It is easy to go on from the experience of pleasure not merely to the quest for pleasure, but to the quest for pleasure for its own sake, to accepting it as a superlative value and the proper basis for a norm of behaviour. This is the very essence of the distortions which occur in the love between man and woman." ---Love and Responsibility, by Karol Wojtyla, Krakow, Poland, (1960), first English translation (1981), reprinted in 1993, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, p. 43 Just as married people can sometimes behave as though their spouse is a person to be used for one's selfish pleasure, such distortions of love can enter in to any personal relationship. Utilitarianism in any relationship can potentially thwart the unity that should exist with those we love intimately, and this would include God, whom we must seek because of our love and good will toward Him. Before anything else in a more meaningful worship of Him who we are to love with all of our soul and strength, it is absolutely necessary that we seek Him alone, and not for any other incidental pleasurable result that we hope might follow. It seems appropriate to add that this ethic which Wojtyla lifts straight from the Gospel is incidentally, that which can give us joy and peace and unity in all of our personal relationships, which we can never find by thinking about our own good pleasure. Utilitarianism cannot lead to satisfying, unifying joy. We Persons are not, praise God, created to be satisfied while being utilitarian toward other Persons.

What you say above makes so much more sense to me. I don't know what you are talking about. I haven't studied these things. But I have studied a little about my own early church, and I cannot believe that the bishops at the Council of Nicea were a bunch of philosophy driven apostates who didn't care about what Scripture says. If we are apostate, by that theory, there is no room for anything but contempt. I do not know the scholarship, and naturally I do not accept the theory that you propose, but it has the advantage of actually having respect for the members of the apostate church. It is much more consistent and believable for those of us who have gained a deep admiration for the fierce and even heroic faith of many souls in the first three centuries after Christ, who lived and sometimes died for His name. Regards, Rory McKenzie

Kevin Christensen, hi. Thank you for... "I find specificity in details makes stronger arguments than abstract labels and blanket dismissal. FWIW." FWIW.

When LDS apologists accuse the early Church of "hellenizing", it makes me wonder if you have been taught that every school of Greek thought is wrong about everything. Is non-LDS Christianity apostate because non-LDS agree with some Greek schools of thought, or all of them in some pernicious fashion? Do LDS disagree with only some Greek thinkers, or all of them? It seems to me that it is possible that Greek philosophy covered so much subject matter that whether we know it or not, all of us are touched by, or agree with, one or another school of thought. It seems possible to me that LDS are no less "hellenized" than a Catholic like me. I would just ask my LDS friends to consider how this charge of being hellenized seems so vague. I wouldn't even know why I should be concerned about it if I hadn't seen that it proves to LDS that everybody else is apostate.

To be discouraged about our distractions in prayer and worship tells God that we are desiring to have a more satisfying interior life. But still we have to be patient. According to my faith tradition, we cannot summon up a spirit of prayer by our own powers. A reason why God sometimes withholds this gift, especially from those who have had a taste of it, is that when we worship in a meaningful and reverent way, it sometimes leads to a different kind of distraction. We are consoled and enjoy a true spirit of prayer to a fault. When would that happen? It can happen if we begin to measure the value of our prayers according to how it makes us feel. Sometimes God is less honored when we desire the consolations of God more than the God of consolations. Many Catholic saints talk about this and become aware that we can be found honoring Him and pleasing to God when we persevere in dryness and distractions to do our best that moment, that day. When we find ourselves thinking about dinner while we are supposed to be praying, we tell our God how it pains us that we are so seemingly unable to speak and listen to Him. And we keep trying. It might be that this kind of prayer expresses our love and adoration even more than when we are feeling it. I don't know if this way of looking at one's prayer life would fit all Christian traditions. I have to say that if Catholicism is true, as I believe, that God loves whoever is moved to call His name. But the dynamics might be different with those who don't believe in Christ's love for us in the Holy Eucharist and in other advantages that are unique to Catholic faithful that aids our ability to worship. Devobah, thanks for your inquiry. I felt obliged to share an insight from Catholic teaching on the spiritual life, but with some doubt about its utility in a non-Catholic setting. Whatever your faith tradition might be, I ask for your prayers and I offer up mine that you and everyone here might find the good God of consolations. None of us can be completely satisfied in life by anything else. 3DOP