Creationism is the cure for racism

[Hakluyt]

http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/PrintFriendly?oid=oid%3A28054

Printed from the The Independent website: indyweek.gyrobase.com

POSTED ON FEBRUARY 22, 2006:

Creation Nation

Ken Ham, who says creationism is the cure for racism, brings his $15-million-a-year crusade to Rocky Mount.

By Barry Yeoman

On the red-carpeted dais of a church the size of a department store, a man with a Lincolnesque beard is addressing a sanctuary full of evangelical Christians. It's 9 o'clock on Saturday morning, and 500 people have gathered at Rocky Mount's Englewood Baptist Church. Some belong to this congregation; others have traveled from Raleigh, Roanoke Rapids and even Virginia. They're wearing jeans and casual shirts, very few neckties and one golden sari. Many are clutching well-worn Bibles. They're listening as Ken Ham explains what he considers the root of racism: modern science.

"Darwinian evolution is inherently a racist philosophy," says Ham, cofounder of Answers in Genesis, an international creationist organization that has brought its act to North Carolina for a three-day conference. "Thousands of aboriginal graves were desecrated in the name of evolution. Darwinian evolution was used to justify slavery." Not only that, he claims: The Nazis used evolution to defend the extermination of Jews and gypsies for the sake of a purified Aryan race. And Ota Benga, a Pygmy from the Belgian Congo, suffered a short and humiliating life after Samuel Phillips Verner, an explorer and Christian missionary, brought him to the United States in 1904. "Because the explorer believed in evolution, he and the director of the Bronx Zoo put Ota Benga in a cage with an orangutan," says Ham. (Indeed, the 4-foot-11 African man was promoted in the zoo exhibit as a missing link.) "He committed suicide. It's very sad. All of that was done in the name of evolution."

The men, women and teenagers in the audience listen attentively. They know that 54-year-old Ham, with his lilting Australian accent, is one of the world's best known "creation evangelists." The author of One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism, Ham travels around the United States, often with astronomer Jason Lisle and artist-musician Buddy Davis, speaking at churches and convention centers from Merrimack, N.H., to Modesto, Calif. Part of his strategy involves painting Biblical creationism as the path to racial unity.


"We all have the same color," Ham tells the Rocky Mount audience. "There's one main pigment. It's a brown pigment. There are no white people. There are no black people." He explains that Adam and Eve were themselves "medium brown," giving them the potential to produce both light and dark offspring. "According to the Bible, we are all descendants of one woman and one man," he says, his voice occasionally taking on a machine-gun cadence. "Yet there are [now] distinct groups: American Indians and Hawaiians and Eskimos. Can you think of anything in history that separates out the gene pool?" Before anyone can respond, Ham provides the answer: "The Tower of Babel." Once God punished humanity for trying to build a tower to heaven, giving them different languages and scattering them throughout the globe, natural selection kicked in, he explains: Lighter skinned people survived better in cold climates, while darker ones adapted better to the tropics. "It's all easy to understand," he says.

This is not your grandfather's creationism. Many evangelicals in North Carolina grew up learning there were separate races created after Noah's son, Ham, was punished for "uncovering the nakedness" of his drunken father. According to this older theology, Ham was banished to Africa and his descendants cursed with darker skin. Though the "Curse of Ham" story has generally fallen out of favor, it has nonetheless been used in the United States to justify racial segregation and even slavery. This gets Ken Ham mad. "Here is the greatest Christian nation on the earth, and I can't believe the racism in the church," he says. "The curse had nothing to do with skin color. Let's get rid of this nonsense right now."


Ham pushes his audience (culturally conservative and about 90 percent white) one step further. "If you disagree with what I'm going to say, please do not give me your opinion, because I'm not interested," he begins. "I want to know what the Bible says." He implores his fellow Christians to let go of their objections to interracial marriage--because, according to the Scriptures, "there's no such thing as biological interracial marriage." As long as both parties are Christian and agree that "the husband is to be the spiritual head of the home," it doesn't matter how much pigmentation each one has. There's a quiet sprinkling of applause and amens before Ham continues: "The next time someone comes into your church and they have a different skin shade from you, look past the external minor differences and see the person. 'How can I help you? Do you need my love?'"



For many secular Americans, the current battle over the teaching of evolution in the public schools can be utterly mystifying. Compared to abortion, gay marriage, poverty or war, this issue seems, on the surface, so theoretical. Yet for some evangelicals, God's creation of the universe is the very foundation on which every other moral stand is built. "The fundamental clash we see in our society at present is the clash between the religion of Christianity with its creation basis and therefore absolutes, and the religion of Humanism with its evolution basis and its relative morality that says, 'anything goes,'" Ham wrote in 1983, when he was still living in Australia and had just helped launch Answers in Genesis. It's taken more than two decades for Ham's philosophy to reach a critical mass in the United States. But with last year's lawsuit over the teaching of intelligent design in Dover, Pa.--along with battles over public-school curricula in Ohio, Kansas, South Carolina, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania--evolution and creation have taken an increasingly prominent role in the U.S. culture wars. Recent polls show that about half of all Americans reject evolutionary theory.

While other creationist groups focus on political and legal strategies, Answers in Genesis works on changing public attitudes. A $15-million-a-year organization with 160 employees, it promotes the idea that God created the world 6,000 years ago in six 24-hour days. To spread the word, the organization is building a $25 million Creation Museum, scheduled to open next year on 50 rural acres in northern Kentucky. Ham keeps a brutal travel schedule, making hundreds of speeches a year. (The evangelist doesn't seem particularly partial to Rocky Mount. "There's no Starbucks in this town," he says.) What's more, Answers in Genesis cranks out educational titles by the score, among them Refuting the Big Bang, Did Adam Have a Bellybutton?, Dinosaurs of Eden, and Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study.

Ham makes an aggressive sales pitch for some of these books at the end of his morning lecture. As the audience files out of the sanctuary, they spill into a lobby that's been turned into a veritable Borders for Believers. There are coloring books and curricula, technical journals and DVDs. For $30, one can pick up a 339-page bound transcript of the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, which affirmed a Tennessee law banning the teaching of human evolution. One can also learn how the dinosaurs disappeared--once they disembarked from Noah's Ark. "It is very possible some dinosaurs were killed by hunters," says one book. But not to worry: "There are some scientists who think there may be a real live dinosaur living in a dark jungle in Africa."

At the children's table, the book A Is For Adam depicts dinosaurs cohabiting Eden with the medium-brown Adam and Eve. Two women, perhaps in their 30s, eye the literary offerings with a palpable sense of relief. "These kids are so blessed," one says: Her own child has a shelf full of secular dinosaur books, "and we always have to skip the pages Mommy doesn't believe in."

For the adults, there are tracts both scientific and moral. Ken Ham's book Why Won't They Listen? portrays "evolutionary termites" eating away at God's word, leaving behind a trail of pornography, homosexual behavior and lawlessness. "I'm not saying that evolution is the cause of abortion or school violence," he writes. "What I'm saying is that the more a culture abandons God's word as the absolute authority, and the more a culture accepts an evolutionary philosophy, then the way people think, and their attitudes, will also change." Another book blithely dismisses genetic mutations as the basis for natural selection. "Mutations destroy; they do not create," it says. A back issue of the journal Creation Ex Nihilo, also for sale, further explores the connections between evolution and Nazi race policy.

As the adults peruse the books and DVDs, the children under 11 sit at long tables in the church gymnasium. There, Buddy Davis, who describes himself as a "paleo-artist" and claims to have found unfossilized dinosaur bones in the Alaskan tundra 12 years ago, leads the kids through a cartooning exercise. His laptop computer, projected onto a screen, guides them through the process of drawing a winged pterodactyl with Bambi eyes. "Pterodactyls were created on what day?" he asks.

"Day 6!" cry out several little voices.

"No, not Day 6," Davis corrects them. "Day 5. Pterodactyls are flying creatures. Land creatures were created on Day 6."



Mid-morning, Jason Lisle takes the podium in the sanctuary. An astrophysicist with a doctoral degree from the University of Colorado--he wrote his dissertation on "Probing the Dynamics of Solar Supergranulation and its Interaction with Magnetism"--Lisle is the scientific face of Answers in Genesis, the man charged with offering technical reasons why mainstream theories of the universe's origins cannot be true. He is young and bookish looking, his long face clean-shaven and his slender frame clad in khakis and a blue Oxford.

Today, Lisle plans to refute the Big Bang theory. It's a tall order: Starting from Edwin Hubble's 1929 observation that stars and galaxies are retreating in every direction from the Earth, astronomers have come to conclude that the universe was once contained in a tiny hot mass that exploded more than 13 billion years ago. Since then, they have performed some highly technical experiments that give credence to the theory. Among the accumulated evidence are the results of a 1989 NASA satellite probe that detected microwave background radiation consistent with the Big Bang model.

Lisle doesn't share his colleague's conclusions. "The Big Bang is not science in an observational sense," he tells the Rocky Mount audience. "It's an atheistic story of how life came to be. I'm surprised at the number of Christians that have bought into the Big Bang. It's shocking." Then he starts to enumerate the theory's shortcomings. For one, the Big Bang model would predict a universe with hot and cold spots, but in fact the temperature is surprisingly uniform throughout. The model would also predict an equal amount of matter and anti-matter, but in reality the universe has far more matter. Mainstream astronomers have long been aware of these flaws, and have refined their theories to account for them while still insisting the weight of evidence favors the Big Bang. Lisle says the refinements are "just a story."

Besides, Lisle says, there was only one witness present at creation, and His account contradicts the Big Bang. "God knows who created the universe," he says, sounding not so much like a Ph.D. scientist anymore. "Are we going to trust God, who was actually there, never makes mistakes, never lies, and was actually responsible for creation? Or are you going to trust man, who wasn't there, makes mistakes, has limited knowledge, can often misinterpret the evidence, is sometimes dishonest, and had nothing to do with creation? It's very arrogant for us to tell God, 'Sorry, you didn't get the details right.'"

Narrowing the lens to his own planet, Lisle says scientists have gotten other details of creation wrong. They say Earth began as molten rock. Wrong: It was created as paradise. The stars preceded the Earth? Wrong: Earth came first. Billions of years? No: 144 hours from "Let there be light" to the first human beings. Dinosaurs before birds? Actually, Genesis is clear it was the other way around. "A lot of Christians think, 'Well, maybe I can make the days really long," he says. "But that doesn't work, because the order is different. The Bible is very clear that God created [the universe in] six ordinary days."



Judging by their comments afterward, many of the evangelicals present are less interested in the Big Bang--and more concerned about whether humans "came from monkeys." Here, Answers in Genesis' scientists are equally disdainful of their secular colleagues. "The fossil evidence does not compel belief in the existence of apemen, nor that man is the product of evolution," wrote chemist Russell Grigg in the organization's Creation magazine. "Fossils of so-called 'hominids' are often only fragments of bones which, when combined with a huge dose of imagination, are transformed into apemen."

Among mainstream scientists, though, there's virtually no dispute that Charles Darwin had the right idea when he wrote On the Origin of the Species in 1859. Though it has been fine-tuned over the years, Darwin's theory remains the basis of evolutionary thought: In every generation, animals and plants produce offspring with naturally occurring genetic variations called mutations. (A butterfly might develop a new wing pattern, for example, or a horse might grow larger than its ancestors.) Sometimes a variation helps an animal or plant survive: The orange-and-black viceroy butterfly that mutates to look like an unappetizing monarch is less likely to become bird food. The hardiest survivors then reproduce, passing their mutated genes to the next generation. This leads to changes within species. When a population becomes geographically isolated, natural section can lead to the development of a new species that can no longer interbreed with the old one.

Usually, these transformations happen over eons. Under special circumstances, though, they can also happen much quicker. In 1977, a drought killed off much of the vegetation on Daphne Major, an island in the Galápagos, forcing the local finches to consume the larger, tougher seeds they usually ignore. Princeton biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant discovered that while much of the finch population perished, the individuals with deeper, stronger beaks were able to crack the seeds--and therefore survived to populate the next generation. The Grants have estimated that frequent droughts could force the development of a new finch species in just 200 years.

Evolutionary biologists are quick to note that people didn't actually descend from monkeys. "Humans and modern apes shared a common ancestor, a species that no longer exists," explains the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit research society that advises the federal government. "Because we share a recent common ancestor with chimpanzees and gorillas, we have many anatomical, genetic, biochemical and even behavioral similarities with these African great apes. We are less similar to the Asian apes--orangutans and gibbons--and even less similar to monkeys, because we share common ancestors with these groups in the more distant past."

Over the past century-and-a-half, the evidence supporting evolution has grown overwhelming. Scientists have used the fossil record to observe the sequence of life, and to discover transitional creatures such as the archaeocetes, a primitive whale that had teeth like land mammals. They also have found common structures in radically different creatures (such as the similar skeletons in humans and bats), a phenomenon best explained by evolution. Researchers have studied cellular and molecular evidence; used radioactive carbon and volcanic material to date rock layers; and mapped the geographic distribution of animals and plants throughout the world. They've conducted experiments in the laboratory and observed how "artificial selection" has produced poodles from wolves and broccoli from wild mustard.

"The theory of evolution has become the central unifying concept of biology and is a critical component of many related scientific disciplines," says the National Academy of Sciences. "The scientific consensus around evolution is overwhelming."

The creationist response has been to build its own scientific counterculture, complete with research institutions and professional conferences. The Creation Research Society, founded in 1963, runs an Arizona research center to "challengethe theory of evolution at the technical level" and publishes a quarterly journal of scholarly articles like "Dinosaur Nests Reinterpreted" and "Why Mammal Body Hair Is an Evolutionary Enigma."The society also runs a speakers bureau that includes a Ph.D. microbiologist and two Ph.D. physicists. Other organizations sponsor creationist rafting trips designed to point out evidence that the Grand Canyon was created suddenly and recently. According to Ronald Numbers, a professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "a huge percentage of their research has been poking holes in evolution. There is no evidence of creation."



After lunch at the church's Lighthouse Cafe ("Thee best chicken salad") comes the day's climactic hour. Ken Ham is back at the pulpit, this time with advice about "how to evangelize in an increasingly secular world."

Ham harkens back to 1959, when Billy Graham came to his native country and held crusades in both Sydney and Melbourne. "The whole of Australia shook," he recalls. "The nation was buzzing. People were saved." Why did Australia, a country with few born-again Christians, react so strongly to the American minister? "In 1959, you had prayer at the beginning of school. There were mandatory Bible readings. People were familiar with Christian terminology." Although his country was not very observant, Ham says, it had a shared religious culture that Graham used as a foundation for his evangelism. This, Ham says, is a sharp contrast to the United States in 2006, "where the school system is anti-God and evolution is taught as fact."

Ham asks the audience to compare two stories in the New Testament Book of Acts: While the Apostle Peter manages to baptize 3,000 Jews in a single day in Jerusalem, the Apostle Paul, preaching to the Greeks in Athens, wins just a handful of converts. Ham explains the difference this way: Traditional Jews had much in common with the early followers of Jesus, including a shared monotheism, so it was relatively easy for Peter to win them over. But Paul had a bigger challenge with the Greeks: He had to introduce them to God for the very first time. "The Greeks' whole foundation of history was wrong," Ham says, in an increasingly preacherly voice. "He had to change their whole way of thinking from the foundation up."

"Would you say America is more like the Jews or more like the Greeks?" Ham asks. The audience responds as one: "Greeks!"

"Most of our evangelistic materials, by and large--would you say they're geared toward Greeks or geared toward Jews?"

"Jews!"

"We've got a bigger problem than that," Ham continues. "Most of the kids in our mainline conservative churches in America--do you think they're Jews or Greeks? I'll tell you: They're Greeks. We're sending generations into a [school] system that's turning them into Greeks. They're evolutionized. And our Sunday school literature--we're teaching them as if they're Jews. We're not connecting these Bible stories to reality. We're teaching them as stories."

Ham's not done. "There's a bigger problem: The majority of parents sitting in the pews of our churches are Greeks. Most of you are Greeks. ... Most of the elders in our churches are Greeks. Most of the professors in our Bible colleges are ardent Greeks."

To reach this increasingly secular world, Ham explains, evangelicals must preach the same way Paul reached out to the actual Greeks two millennia ago. They must begin not with Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, but instead with the very notion of God as an omnipotent being who created the world in six days. They must be prepared to explain to their children and neighbors how old the Earth really is, what the fossil record really shows, why carbon dating is wrong, why the Big Bang is claptrap, how we know Noah's Ark really existed, and why human beings couldn't have possibly evolved from "apemen." This will take time, he says. "Friends, we live in a culture where we want everything quickly. If you don't get your hamburger in 45 seconds, you complain. You've got to understand something: From the 1800s to now, you've got 200 years of turning Jews to Greeks. You can't change it overnight."

The buzz is palpable. It's as if the full importance of creationism has suddenly become clear. It's not just that Biblical creation--the notion that God has created us in His own image--is the foundation of Christian morality. It's that Biblical creation is the one true path to saving Christianity, to winning back America's children and young adults, to bringing this country from the brink of rampant paganism. When the sermon comes to an end, there's a buying frenzy in the lobby: not individual books this time, but rather $195 library packs and cardboard boxes labeled "Answers Academy," complete with a 13-DVD curriculum--everything you need to know about geology, astronomy and the stories of Genesis.

Walking out of the sanctuary, a gray-haired woman dressed entirely in black says that Ken Ham has sold her on creation-based evangelism--and on the idea that Genesis must be interpreted literally. "I was brought up believing a day can be a year or 1,000 years," she says. (Indeed, when the Apostle Peter discusses the Second Coming, he says, "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.") And now? "I believe it was a day."



The afternoon ends with a trip through the universe. Astronomer Jason Lisle is back, his laptop loaded with the space-simulation software Celestia. Lisle points and clicks, and on three enormous screens behind him, the solar system starts careering by. Lisle begins at the sun, which "God made especially stable," he says, in order to support life on this planet. "It has very little flares, and the earth's magnetic field deflects what's left over." The sanctuary turns into a miniature planetarium as the audience travels past Mercury, Venus and magnificent Earth, the only planet with liquid water. "Earth is designed for life," Lisle says. "These other worlds God created to declare His glory." Navigating past ruddy Mars, Lisle stops to explore Jupiter's moons, some of them tiny and looking gnarly like potatoes. He rotates Saturn to view its rings from various perspectives, until from a certain angle they complete disappear.

Lisle zooms toward the edge of the solar system. "Uranus has a strong magnetic field," he says, "that would have decayed if it was 4.5 billion years old, but is consistent with Biblical creationism." Past Neptune and Pluto, he steers further still, through the bright Milky Way and toward distant galaxies that speckle the sky. There is one far-away star with an identified planet, but mostly it is just infinite space, luminous, breathtaking.

"This was all made on the same day, of course," the astronomer says. "Day 4."

[Jimbo Gomez]

Darwinian evolution was used to justify slavery.

At the moment Darwin wrote his theory slavery had been abolished or was being abolished almost everywhere.

[Starr]

The next time someone comes into your church and they have a different skin shade from you, look past the external minor differences and see the person. 'How can I help you? Do you need my love?'"

should this be used outside of the church too? I have seen the light. I think I will go into a black ghetto neighborhood, armed only with love, and ask just how I can help out my brothers who happen to have a different skin pigmentation from my own.

This guy is retarded. And these "men" want to be the head of the household. Scary thought.

We all have the same color," Ham tells the Rocky Mount audience. "There's one main pigment. It's a brown pigment. There are no white people. There are no black people." He explains that Adam and Eve were themselves "medium brown," giving them the potential to produce both light and dark offspring.

blind as well as retarded.

[Jimbo Gomez]

I wonder if he really believes that where the chinks might have come from.

[Kodos]

http://alisonpace.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/stephen_colbert_2.jpg

Take that Darwinlutionists.

[Olin D. Johnston]

The fact that there are people out there who preach nonsense like this is funny; but the fact that some people believe it, now thats just scary.

I can already see it now, "You believe in evolution? How dare YOU! You racist!" :p

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Lets see what our Petr has to say :D

[raven]

Why are they arguing that Evolutionism is racist. Many liberals believe in evolutionism and they are very pro-multikult. In anthropology they argue that there is no such thing as seperately defined biological races ffs. (Can it get anymore PC than that?) How can this be a racist school of thought? Bullshit.

It is of my personal opinion that whether there are different races or not within the human species, it is quite clear that there are biological differences between black africans and europeans. Black people in my humble opinion are the least evolved of the human species generally and if it weren't for whites and arabs taking them in as slaves they would still be in Stone Age Africa chanting Zulu war cries. But the sciences tend to ignore these differences to remain PC. So if anything, these creationists speaking of evolutionary racism are full of shit.

[Jimbo Gomez]

He knows this all too well, this is a cheap rhetorical trick he's playing, trying to confuse his typical opponents.

[Pablo Escobar]

He knows this all too well, this is a cheap rhetorical trick he's playing, trying to confuse his typical opponents.

Exactly. Completely bullshit article.

[Petr]

Before I start criticizing this article, let me state clearly that his PC pandering nonwithstanding, I consider Ken Ham as my brother in Christ. I heavily disagree with him on some issues – and heartily agree with him on other ones. He is mostly doing great work against soul-destroying secular worldview, but on political issues like this, he is being naïve and in error, being like a fish out of water.


I would also like to point out that this modern race-denialism among creationists is often simply an exaggerated counter-reaction to a militantly racist evolutionist (popularized ever since the beginning of the 19th century) idea that argues that human races are actually different species, that they have evolved differently and not out of a single source. This idea is indeed militantly anti-Biblical, so I can at least understand their fierce rejection of it, even if they have went overboard in the other extreme.

(Btw, even evolutionists have pretty much dropped this notion of “polygenesis”, as this article from The Occidental Quarterly shows:

“Of course Simpson eagerly accepts Carleton Coon’s thesis that Homo erectus evolved independently into Homo sapiens in no fewer than five parts of the world, eventually leading to the modern world’s five major races. In this racial scheme, Caucasoids and their ancestors would have been evolving more or less undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years. Like it or not, though, the genetic evidence accumulated since Coon’s death points the other way—which brings to mind T. H. Huxley’s definition of a tragedy as a beautiful hypothesis killed by an ugly fact. All humans had a common African ancestor who lived as recently as 200,000 years ago, and Caucasoids have been in Europe for only about 40,000 years.”

http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol4no2/jvd-simpson.html


Now to some specific points in the article:


And Ota Benga, a Pygmy from the Belgian Congo, suffered a short and humiliating life after Samuel Phillips Verner, an explorer and Christian missionary, brought him to the United States in 1904. "Because the explorer believed in evolution, he and the director of the Bronx Zoo put Ota Benga in a cage with an orangutan," says Ham. (Indeed, the 4-foot-11 African man was promoted in the zoo exhibit as a missing link.) "He committed suicide. It's very sad. All of that was done in the name of evolution."
No apologies for Ham here. This is indeed a despicable example of the du-humanizing influence of evolutionist ideology, and Whites are fools if they think they can escape it on the long run.

"You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel."

http://loxafamosity.com/ent/0600-01.html


"We all have the same color," Ham tells the Rocky Mount audience. "There's one main pigment. It's a brown pigment. There are no white people. There are no black people."
Ham conveniently ignores the rather obvious fact that races differ physically in many other things besides the pigmentation of skin, like in the form of the skull for example.


He explains that Adam and Eve were themselves "medium brown," giving them the potential to produce both light and dark offspring.
Now, this here is merely Ham’s personal speculation. It could be true, but he cannot give a Biblical chapter or verse to definitely confirm such a theory.


Once God punished humanity for trying to build a tower to heaven, giving them different languages and scattering them throughout the globe, natural selection kicked in, he explains: Lighter skinned people survived better in cold climates, while darker ones adapted better to the tropics. "It's all easy to understand," he says.
Once again, these are but Ham’s personal musings of what might have happened after the dispersion of Babel. He cannot make dogmatic declarations on the causes on the origin of races, the only certain thing being that many different and differing peoples came to existence and that it was God’s will.

“What God hath separated, let no man integrate”.


"If you disagree with what I'm going to say, please do not give me your opinion, because I'm not interested," he begins. "I want to know what the Bible says."
Now this seems to lacking proper humility – Ham behaves as if his Biblical interpretation is beyond any reasonable criticism.


Ham continues: "The next time someone comes into your church and they have a different skin shade from you, look past the external minor differences and see the person. 'How can I help you? Do you need my love?'"
I would say that this is a quasi-Gnostic attitude – assuming the differences of flesh do not have ANY importance, that only “spirit” matters. From this, it’s a small logical step to the attitude that gender differences don’t matter either, and to the priesthood of women.


Petr

[Kodos]

My view of evolution can best be call neo Lamarckian Petr but c'mon you're too smart to be a "young earth" creationists... Young Earth creationists are total loons who ignore radiocarbon dating and fossil records.

Surely Genisis can be intrepreted that god guided evolution over time?

[Petr]

The world of Bible-believing fundamentalists is far from being monolithic, and Ham represents only one facet of hard-core creationism. Below is an example from one truly Bible-thumping, Israel-supporting creationist Southern Baptist source that still strongly disagrees with Ham’s interpretations:

(And this is not even a “Kinist” source, like “Little Geneva” is. The latter is a great site for Christians who understand the inevitable meaning of race : http://www.littlegeneva.com/ )


(excerpts)

www.kjv1611.org/aug-2002-c.pdf


BACK TO GENESIS

By David Cagle


”In my last article I began a discussion of the erroneous views of modern creationists on the races. The contemporary teaching is that “there is only one race, the human race.” I believe that this is a “politically correct” views adapted by the modern creationists because they are offended by what the Bible teaches about races, and they want to be accepted by the world in some area. So while they have sided with the Lord on creation, they have caved in to the world on the issue of races.”

…

“You see, the creationists forgot to tell you that not only did God divide up Shem, Ham and Japheth into three great races, He divided up their descendants into twelve major Gentile races, with the Jewish race being the thirteenth and priestly race (just like the tribe of Levi). He also divided those twelve major races into many thousand minor races, which the Scriptures term tribes, kindreds, tongues, and peoples (Rev. 5:9). All of these are legitimate uses of the word race, and the Lord divided them all the way down to the tribes.

“The creationists like to raise a “scientific” smoke screen with genetics and interbreeding and melatonin, etc. But when all is said and done, the creationists, in this aspect, are acting exactly like the evolutionists. They are explaining a phenomenon exclusively in terms of natural, physical laws apart from God. The Bible answer is that God divided the races. Genetics and interbreeding might be the explanation for how He did it. But in the Bible, the important fact is that not how He did it, but that He did it.

“Now, given the fact that God divided the races, what Scriptural authority do you have for trying to force them all together? What is your goal? Well, it can’t be peace on earth. That doesn’t come apart from the Second Advent.

“In the Bible, every move to integrate mankind is a God-defying idol-worshipping, tyrannical move to enslave everyone to the whims of one Satanic dictator (Psa. 2:13, Dan. 4:30). Yes, at that point, every common man is equal; i.e., every one of no importance is a slave (Rev. 18:11-13).

“What could possibly be “Biblical” in a “world view” that says, “there is only one race, the human race”?

…

“Now, this is what the Bible says about the races. God divided them. He divided them so they would not fall into the gross sin of the antediluvians. The only time He gathers them together is for judgment (Zeph. 3:8). He never removes boundaries to end war, oppression, hate, or any other news media clichés. He will divide the races in future (Rev. 22:2).

“The only place where the races lose their distinction is spiritually in Christ. If you try to force that condition physically, you are going to have one big mess. That does not man that local churches are not allowed to integrated (Acts 13:1). But any integration based on political or social motivation is doomed to failure. That may not be the view of the creationists, but it is the Biblical world view.”



Petr

[Petr]

I would say that this is a quasi-Gnostic attitude – assuming the differences of flesh do not have ANY importance, that only “spirit” matters.

A consistent application of this idea would also imply that it is “un-Christian” to favor even one’s own family and kin, and here you can see a great parody of this notion of “spiritual meritocracy” in the way of reductio ad absurdum:


http://littlegeneva.com/?p=342


Our friend Ralph Watson just sent this to me:


Fight Familism

by Rev. Jack O’Kobian


Modern Christians have made great strides against racism. But much more needs to be done if we are to be true servants of Equality.

Now we must confront a form of racism that most people don’t even recognize as such. This is the sin of familism, the preference for one’s children over other children. Admittedly this seems natural, but in the fallen world most sins seem natural. Only as we follow the spiritual truth of Equality can we rise above this sinful material world.

Do you doubt that familism is racism? Consider how racists often justify their hate by saying that it’s really no different from preferring one’s child. And consider how familists often use such terms as “my flesh and blood.” The similarity to the Nazi’s “blood and soil” is obvious. Only a bigot would disagree.

In the words of no less than Martin Luther King, the only basis for judging another human being is the “content of character.” Thus if a “father” prefers his “son” to another child who is morally superior to that “son,” he is clearly a bigot because he values flesh more than morality. Such a “father” clearly views his “family”—physical traits, genes and all—as a miniature Master Race.

While it is true that the Old Testament affirms family lineage and says “honor thy father and thy mother,” the law of the OT no longer applies because now, under the New Testament, we are under grace instead of law. Jesus said, “call no man your father.” Grace is spirit and abolishes physical distinctions.

Throughout history we can see the evil caused by familism, wars of dynasty, family feuds, jealousy, and favoritism. Blood ties lead to bloodshed. It is the shame of the Church that Marxists have long understood the evils of familism better than Christians and have worked to attack this and other sins against Equality. Indeed, it was the Marxist Leon Trotsky who invented the term “racism.”

To fight familism, the Church must set the long-range goal of raising all children in common. In the words of Hillary Clinton, “It takes a village to raise a child.” As a preliminary step to that goal, Christian parents should make a practice of swapping their newborns with other “families.”

Some “mothers,” of course, will object, and they will play on the sentiments of a mother holding her infant child. Nevertheless, we must cut through this sentiment and understand the sin that motivates it. The extent to which a “mother” focuses on her child is the extent to which she tunes out other children—and that is hate.

Although abortion is a bad thing, it may be serving what is ultimately a good purpose. When a woman has the child in her womb killed, it desensitizes her to warmth and favoritism toward children of her own, and thereby opens her heart to impartial feeling toward all children. Gay marriage also may have a beneficial side by undercutting the prestige of familism.

We should never fail to denounce familism whenever we encounter it, even in tough cases. For example, if a couple has just lost its child in an accident, the moral response is to withhold sympathy for their grief. Tell the couple “to get over it” because there are plenty of living children around for them to love, many with a “content of character” superior to that of “their” deceased child.

Admittedly, the path to True Equality will not be easy, but it is the only way we can purge the sin of earth with the spirit of heaven. One day this love will trample out the vineyards of hate.


Before any of you scoff at this parody, keep in mind that kinists are called sinful for appreciating their connection to extended family. In our time, being a few generations removed makes all the difference between being a loving relative and a hateful racist.



And here we have the Biblical definition of what “race” really is, and it's supremely sensible at that – simply an extended family. And here is one Biblical verse that describes your duties towards your kinsmen in an unmistakable way:

"But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." - 1 Timothy 5:8


In practically every non-Western country, clan-system is still very important and your responsibilities are by no means restricted merely to your nuclear family. This is also how things were in the Biblical times.

Heck, before the advent of modern era even Westerners considered this to be self-evident.

A famous Arab proverb expresses this progressing hierarchy of loyalties:

"I and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger; I and my brothers against my cousin; I, against my brothers."


IMHO, a God-approved form of "racism" is to promote and protect members of your own race - that is, your extended family - more than members of other races/extended families/neighbors.

Just like loving our relatives more than others is perfectly natural and acceptable feeling, warm feelings towards our own ethnic group are likewise so.

However, in this fallen world almost any noble feeling can turn into an exaggerated perversion, and so our love for our race or family may turn into idolatry, so that we will adopt an amoral "my family/race, right or wrong" -attitude and sociopathic indifference or even poisonous hostility towards outsiders. Talmudic Jews are a typical example of this.


Petr

[Petr]

”In my last article I began a discussion of the erroneous views of modern creationists on the races. The contemporary teaching is that “there is only one race, the human race.” I believe that this is a “politically correct” views adapted by the modern creationists because they are offended by what the Bible teaches about races, and they want to be accepted by the world in some area. So while they have sided with the Lord on creation, they have caved in to the world on the issue of races.”

I have now found a sophisticated Christian critique of creationist anti-racism, which also argues that while creationists like Ken Ham commendably oppose worldly wisdom in one front (biology), they have surrendered to it on another (sociology), and are actually spouting libertarian atomistic individualism in Christian guise.

(Or semi-Gnosticism according to which differences in flesh do not and cannot have any meaning for truly "spiritual" people.)

http://firstword.us/2009/07/does-libertarianism-provide-an-escape-for-ken-ham/

Does Libertarianism Provide an Escape for Ken Ham?

Posted by TJH on July 06, 2009


In the previous installment, I endeavored to show that the Mulatto Model for Adam and Eve is untenable in view of creation teleology, and especially the form of the model explicitly insisted upon by Ken Ham and his colleagues. The only way I can think of out of the dilemma presented there would be a viewpoint in which racial teleology would be subverted from the outset by positing some form of Libertarianism (http://firstword.us/2009/06/the-attractions-of-libertarianism/) as the divine intent for man.

It is easy to see how appealing Ham’s Mulatto Model of humanity would be to libertarians and libertines. Blood relation differentiated into races vanishes next to the “really important” action of bloodless Individuals marrying and giving in marriage according to individual impulses, and guided by no principle above the Individual except being “equally yoked” according to propositional belief. The City of God/City of Man becomes the only relevant collective having covenantal, eschatological ramifications.


Some reasons to doubt the libertarian solution

1. It will be helpful to refer to the table outlining the racial possibilities as to creation intent in the previous article (http://firstword.us/2009/06/adam-eve-as-mulattos/). From the human perspective, we could say that the libertarian escape route is simply Column A in its entirety, i.e. a view that does not see a racial telos of history and is indifferent to origin. But what if free choice led to racial differentiation? What if the “Aryans” in Adam and Eve’s brood freely tended to prefer fellow Aryans in their choice of marriage partners, and Negroes Negroes? The idea that “opposites attract” is a simplistic formula that does not square with reality. The Libertarian typically concedes that it is fine if free choice led (as it appears to have) to differentiated, stable racial stocks, but qualifies: as long as no one says it is wrong to go out of that stock for marriage. It would be wrong to say it were wrong, or to discriminate in awarding employment or advancement, place of residence, etc.

The problem is that right from the outset, we would see typology emerging from non-teleological origin, brought about by autonomous human choice decoupled from divine intent. The table of nations, the genealogies, the whole story of humanity in the Bible is all an accident of Libertarian choice not intended by God in creation.

Such a view is a sub-Christian view of God’s Will. A Christian social theory must make sense from both the human and divine perspective. It strains credulity to think that that rapidly-diversifying emergence of clans along “racial” lines would as it were have taken God by surprise – that that outcome would not reflect the divine intent in making Adam and Eve with such diverse potentiality.

We could escape this result by supposing that free choice leading to racial diversification were the means used to execute God’s creation decree. But that would throw the creation intent back to column B, negating Ham’s racial neutrality once again.

2. For Christian libertarians, typically the only dynamic to history is the conflict and struggle between the city of God and the city of Man; all else is governed by purely individual choice restricted only by the law of God.

These “cities” are collectives: Christian libertarianism cannot avoid loyalty to at least one collective. However, notice that the dynamic of the “cities” (and typically, the sword-wielding State as well) is a sub-lapsarian duality: it is a result of the Fall. Thus, the one collective (or two, if the State is also included) having some authority over the adult Individual was brought about by the Fall, and is not part of the intent of creation as such. It is odd that history has no dynamic apart from Individual choice, until and if the Fall should take place.

The Creation/Fall/Redemption schema of history teaches that redemption restores that which was lost in the Fall, with added richness. But the main collective of the Libertarian did not exist before the Fall. How will they fit that into the schema?

Instead, we should say that history post-Fall reflects what history would have been had their been no Fall, but now under a curse. Failing to worship Jehovah is sin; racial diversity is not sin.

3. The deepest intent of the theonomic miscegenation defenders seems to be to guard against declaring anything as a sin that is not defined as such in a commandment. They are “okay” with having a preference for one’s own race, provided one does not forbid others. But does not their typical “preference” — they “just happen” to “prefer” that their own daughters marry white boys — go against their racial ideal of creation? On their view, should not the table of nations be seen as a deviation from divine intent, which should be positively resisted? They need to reflect on creation ordinance in view of these considerations. If the divine intent were humanity-as-mulatto, would it not be sinful even to prefer marrying within one’s own racial identity? Should not that which produces mulattoes be advocated as the norm? Once the Christian Libertarians start to think more biblically, their recourse to the preference vs. sin distinction may actually backfire on them.

4. Under Christian libertarianism, the only role for authority of any kind seems to be to regurgitate the law of God. The “theonomic” men on a Board that I dealt with actually were forced to admit that if a father or magistrate forbade miscegenation, their children or subjects would be free to disobey such an order, because they do not see how such a prohibition is contained in a specific law of God. In other words, authority equals “correct exposition of the law of God.”

Authorities and fathers on this view only have authority to the extent that they are restating the law of God given in precepts — they are merely expounders of the law of God to those that are less knowledgeable therein. Their subjects can always do what they want to do if they are convinced that there is not a divine precept specifically forbidding the behavior.

If the subject always has the right to decide that a command is “not a reflection of a law of God,” this really means that there are no authorities properly speaking. “Authorities” so-called become, at best, only persons more likely to know the law of God. Respecting authority, on the typical theonomic-libertarian model, amounts to consulting persons likely to know the law of God. Leaving aside the fact that lawful authorities in reality are often clueless as to the law of God, this view vitiates any concept of authority. It is just Libertarianism and the raw Individual before God masquerading as a biblical social theory.

5. Wisdom is a major theme of Scripture. Ordinarily, the younger submit to the older because the older ordinarily have greater wisdom. There is not always a precept explaining wisdom. Yet, is it not sin to act against wisdom? On the theonomic-libertarian view, a computer containing all the precepts, and which upon inputting a “circumstance” would print out all the applicable verses, would be as wise as any wise man could ever be.

6. Does Scripture countenance obedience to patriarchal authority that commands “adiaphora” i.e. that is outside that which is commanded by Scripture? If we can find even one such example in Scripture, it will be enough to refute this so-called “biblical” social theory of theonomic Libertarianism. And indeed, we do find an example.

The Rechabites were a tribe whose ancestral head had commanded his descendants to live in tents and not to drink wine, nor even to own vineyards.

But they said, We will drink no wine: for Jonadab the son of Rechab our father commanded us, saying, Ye shall drink no wine, neither ye, nor your sons for ever: Neither shall ye build house, nor sow seed, nor plant vineyard, nor have any: but all your days ye shall dwell in tents; that ye may live many days in the land where ye be strangers. Thus have we obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab our father in all that he hath charged us, to drink no wine all our days, we, our wives, our sons, nor our daughters. (Jer 35:6-8)
This example is particularly interesting, because libertarian theonomists take particular delight in promulgating that wine-drinking is adiaphora, and not prohibited by God’s law. They also are inclined to live in houses, not tents. But Jeremiah praises the Rechabites, contrasting their faithfulness to the rebelliousness of the people of Judah:

Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Go and tell the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Will ye not receive instruction to hearken to my words? saith the LORD. The words of Jonadab the son of Rechab, that he commanded his sons not to drink wine, are performed; for unto this day they drink none, but obey their father’s commandment: notwithstanding I have spoken unto you, rising early and speaking; but ye hearkened not unto me. (Jer 35:13-14)
The Board men thought they were principled theonomists, but in the end, their theory was simply plain old Libertarianism, lightly seasoned with desultory appeals to Scripture. The motif is deeply embedded in the thinking of Christians in “our circles.” Overthrowing it will not be quick work.

But if libertarianism is false, then on what basis will Ham be able to say that parents and tribal leaders may not steer marriages away from the inter-racial, or employ various other criteria that might be deemed important?

Also a good reader's comment on the piece above:

1. Good points all. This is what is so frustrating with Christian theonomists who think the way that they do on issues of race and collective identity. You especially do a good job of showing how patriarchal authority is not simply exposition of God’s law.

Another good example is the commandment in the New Testament for servants to obey their masters. This is obviously a biblical commandment, but it is obvious that this is not limited to express biblical commands.

Under the libertarian model, if a master tells the servant, it’s time to cook dinner, the servant could simply reply; where in the Bible does it tell me that I have to make dinner?

Obviously the commandment to cook dinner is nowhere expressly stated in scripture, but the authority to command such is implied in relationships that have legitimate authority. The servant/master relationship is legitimate in scripture therefore the master has the right to make such a request.

This means that it is only wrong for legitimate authority figures to request something that is against God’s laws, like committing idolatry, fornication, stealing, etc.

Comment by Scarborough Fayre — July 8, 2009 @ 4:50 pm
http://firstword.us/2009/07/does-libertarianism-provide-an-escape-for-ken-ham/#comment-6962


Petr

[Arrow Cross]

I would say that this is a quasi-Gnostic attitude – assuming the differences of flesh do not have ANY importance, that only “spirit” matters. From this, it’s a small logical step to the attitude that gender differences don’t matter either, and to the priesthood of women.
You seem to be rather opposed to the idea. Don't Lutherans have female clerics?

[Petr]

You seem to be rather opposed to the idea. Don't Lutherans have female clerics?
I am not a member of the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran church (which I consider to be a same kind of sellout state church as, say, English Anglican church), although I believe that there are still genuine believers even within that outfit.


Petr

[Petr]

Kinist blog "Spirit, Water, Blood" adds in its usual earthy style (which I btw do not fully approve) some additional thoughts on the above article:

As Tim knows, this is a common ailment among Reformed Bible sheriffs in the mold of Joe Morecraft and others. As Kinists have always said and as Christians have always known, children have a duty to obey their parents and foreparents, even a non-Christian father, simply because he is their father. And if a father doesn’t want his name and heritage besmirched by rebellious children, it’s not the business of the Morecraftian propositionalist bobbleheads to tell him that it’s not rebellion at all because he doesn’t “understand” the law of God. Only an egotistical blowhole who names a splinter-church after an ecumenical council would give so much credit to knowledge. The real issue at hand is duty, the most sublime word in the English language. If these loud-mouthed presbyterians who pride themselves on their knowledge could come to realize that duty is more important, their view of the Fifth Commandment would not be so perverted. Nor would their understanding of Romans 13 be perverted. Please remember, dear readers, that the Reformed Bible sheriffs gladly ascribe authority to the most godless civil magistrates, purely because of the offices they hold, while condemning Christian fathers, despite their office, for disallowing grandchildren who look like Fu Manchu or Whoopi Goldberg.
http://spiritwaterblood.com/2009/07/say-to-wisdom-you-are-my-sister/


Petr

[Arrow Cross]

I am not a member of the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran church (which I consider to be a same kind of sellout state church as, say, English Anglican church), although I believe that there are still genuine believers even within that outfit.


Petr
So you are attributing the appearence of female clergy to the modernism of contemporary "state" churches?

Intresting. It is true that St. Paul strictly forbad women from preaching, but he also forbad them from teaching, commanding them to be silent and obidient. Not only these weren't the words of Christ, these suggestions in Paul's letters were also specifically consistent with the societies of the Antiquity, and their entirely different perception of the roles and values of men and women.

While we certainly mustn't fall into the same trap Ken Ham did, we also need to recognize the rationality behind certain changes of time. Not every modern social alteration is necesserly bad, no matter how destructive many of them have been.

God's talent for the various roles we can fill in His service is freely given, and there are many women, too, who receive great charisma, oratory skills, and a blessing from the Holy Spirit for pastoral work. They will probably always be a minority, but now that the secular social obstacles have been removed, should we keep these exceptional children of God away from the service they could otherwise fulfill?

I've listened to multiple consecrated Reformed female clerics preaching here in Hungary myself, decent women with a clear faith, untouched by modernist poison. One of them is serving in the congregation I belong to, and although the ear is unaccustomed to her voice, the evangelium is as true as if coming from the mouth of any male priest.

Theological universities are getting more and more female applicants each year. Yes, I know men will always command more attention, more authority. But should we bar those sisters of ours who truly excel in the calling of the preacher?

[Columnist]

Would a father have the right to raise his children in a made-up language, thereby creating his own tribe?

[Hartmann von Aue]

It is true that St. Paul strictly forbad women from preaching, but he also forbad them from teaching, commanding them to be silent and obidient. Not only these weren't the words of Christ,

Rejecting the authority of St. Paul is to reject the authority of the Bible and the constant tradition of the Church.

these suggestions in Paul's letters were also specifically consistent with the societies of the Antiquity, and their entirely different perception of the roles and values of men and women.

And entirely consistent with the vast majority of people in Western Civilization, until the 20th Century. And the vast majority of Christians.

While we certainly mustn't fall into the same trap Ken Ham did, we also need to recognize the rationality behind certain changes of time. Not every modern social alteration is necesserly bad, no matter how destructive many of them have been.

Women preaching, men feeling the need to defend such preaching = bad

God's talent for the various roles we can fill in His service is freely given, and there are many women, too, who receive great charisma, oratory skills, and a blessing from the Holy Spirit for pastoral work. They will probably always be a minority, but now that the secular social obstacles have been removed, should we keep these exceptional children of God away from the service they could otherwise fulfill?

They weren't secular obstacles. They were obstacles of the natural order and of the Holy Bible.

I've listened to multiple consecrated Reformed female clerics preaching here in Hungary myself, decent women with a clear faith, untouched by modernist poison. One of them is serving in the congregation I belong to, and although the ear is unaccustomed to her voice, the evangelium is as true as if coming from the mouth of any male priest.

I don't know if rejecting St. Paul is specifically modernist poison or not. (though in this context, it certainly tends to be) Certainly among Catholics it is modernist, because it makes the Faith something that changes over time - such a relativistic view tends to be based on modernism.

Theological universities are getting more and more female applicants each year. Yes, I know men will always command more attention, more authority. But should we bar those sisters of ours who truly excel in the calling of the preacher?

Of course. Except they do not excel.

[Graves]

...St. Paul strictly forbad women from preaching, but he also forbad them from teaching, commanding them to be silent and obidient....

God's talent for the various roles we can fill in His service is freely given, and there are many women, too, who receive great charisma, oratory skills, and a blessing from the Holy Spirit for pastoral work. They will probably always be a minority, but now that the secular social obstacles have been removed, should we keep these exceptional children of God away from the service they could otherwise fulfill?...

A correction: What St. Paul forbade was certain actions by women during the hours and the Divine Liturgy. Outside of the temple, women might do all sorts of things. Two outstanding examples are the Protomartyr St. Thecla and Equal of the Apostles St. Nina the Enlightener of Georgia. In addition, we have the example of deaconesses in the early Christian Church, e.g. saints Priscilla and Phoebe of the church in Cenchreae.

[Petr]

Would a father have the right to raise his children in a made-up language, thereby creating his own tribe?
Are you asking that sincerely, or in a smart-aleck manner?

If the father were a Christian, he would not feel need for such frivolous quirks, especially since he would be required by God's word to instruct proper ways of righteousness to his children instead of indulging in stupid whims.


Petr

[Columnist]

Are you asking that sincerely, or in a smart-aleck manner?

If the father were a Christian, he would not feel need for such frivolous quirks, especially since he would be required by God's word to instruct proper ways of righteousness to his children instead of indulging in stupid whims.


Petr

I do have an interest in constructed languages. But isn't the case of the Rechabites living in tents indulging in whims?

[Petr]

But isn't the case of the Rechabites living in tents indulging in whims?
Actually not, if you know the social background of the case. Their forefather had in all likelihood ordered his descendants to keep their nomadic way of life in order to avoid the allurements of agricultural Canaanite culture. Nomadism had been the condition of Israelites during their desert trek to the promised land (and thus nostalgically idealized), and Rechabites would represent a "primitivistic" reaction against the pomps of cultivated cosmopolitan Canaanite-Phoenician paganism. The Bible often records how many Israelites who had "settled down" had been tempted to semi-pagan syncretism, and the Rechabites wanted to avoid that fate.

The wine was also a potent symbol of agricultural culture, and often employed in lewd pagan ceremonies.

So the Rechabites would be somewhat comparable to the Amish who refuse to live amongst the heathen and to go along with social progress (moving on from nomadism to agriculture).


Petr

[Arrow Cross]

Of course.
Thank you for your peculiar input, but the question was directed at a fellow Protestant, and with good reason.

I've stopped arguing with Catholics over differences in our faiths and organized churches. Catholicism modernized where it shouldn't have, and kept dogmatic where it shouldn't have. The result is a sharper decline than ever before.

But, to stay at the subject at hand: was it really better for the simple believers to hear the liturgy in Latin for millenia, the vast majority of them not understanding it until very recently, than listening to the word of God in their own respective languages, from a cleric of whatever gender?

Traditions can not be more important than real faith. And it must reach the hearts by all means.

[Hartmann von Aue]

the vast majority of them not understanding

The Faithful were catechized. Far better than they are today.

[Hartmann von Aue]

Catholicism modernized where it shouldn't have, and kept dogmatic where it shouldn't have.

The mainline branches of Protestantism began to fall apart long before Catholicism.

Traditions can not be more important than real faith.

The Faith is something that is taught by Tradition. For example: what St. Paul taught, and his authority.

[Königin Luise von Preußen]

Thank you for your peculiar input, but the question was directed at a fellow Protestant, and with good reason.

I've stopped arguing with Catholics over differences in our faiths and organized churches. Catholicism modernized where it shouldn't have, and kept dogmatic where it shouldn't have. The result is a sharper decline than ever before.

But, to stay at the subject at hand: was it really better for the simple believers to hear the liturgy in Latin for millenia, the vast majority of them not understanding it until very recently, than listening to the word of God in their own respective languages, from a cleric of whatever gender?

Traditions can not be more important than real faith. And it must reach the hearts by all means.
a fair point, IMO. in the old world, i.e. in Europe catholicism prevailed more in the so called Romanic language countries, like Italy, Spain, France.. one exception is certainly Poland, while Protestantism became great by the fact of making the people learning to read first of all the Bible in their own language..
as far I know, it was only Croatia, that is a western Christian and catholic country and was allowed to have their liturgy in Croatian already in the 12th. century, first time in Senj.. (maybe because of the good relations to Rome and the St. Hieronymus Stift, i.e. Stift means a feudal entity under the secular rule of a prince of the church) I mean all of the former territories, where the Old Church Slavonic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic) was invented for, are still today East Orthodox, exception here is Croatia..

[Columnist]

Actually not, if you know the social background of the case. Their forefather had in all likelihood ordered his descendants to keep their nomadic way of life in order to avoid the allurements of agricultural Canaanite culture. Nomadism had been the condition of Israelites during their desert trek to the promised land (and thus nostalgically idealized), and Rechabites would represent a "primitivistic" reaction against the pomps of cultivated cosmopolitan Canaanite-Phoenician paganism. The Bible often records how many Israelites who had "settled down" had been tempted to semi-pagan syncretism, and the Rechabites wanted to avoid that fate.

The wine was also a potent symbol of agricultural culture, and often employed in lewd pagan ceremonies.

So the Rechabites would be somewhat comparable to the Amish who refuse to live amongst the heathen and to go along with social progress (moving on from nomadism to agriculture).


Petr

So can constructed languages help to keep a separate identity.

And according to your reasoning, living in tents should actually be a duty to all Israelites.

[Petr]

So can constructed languages help to keep a separate identity.

And according to your reasoning, living in tents should actually be a duty to all Israelites.
Are you picking a (verbal) fight?


Petr

[Arrow Cross]

a fair point, IMO. in the old world, i.e. in Europe catholicism prevailed more in the so called Romanic language countries, like Italy, Spain, France.. one exception is certainly Poland, while Protestantism became great by the fact of making the people learning to read first of all the Bible in their own language..
as far I know, it was only Croatia, that is a western Christian and catholic country and was allowed to have their liturgy in Croatian already in the 12th. century, first time in Senj.. (maybe because of the good relations to Rome and the St. Hieronymus Stift, i.e. Stift means a feudal entity under the secular rule of a prince of the church) I mean all of the former territories, where the Old Church Slavonic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic) was invented for, are still today East Orthodox, exception here is Croatia..
Indeed, and it was a very wise move from Croatian religious leaders to ask for this permission. The Holy Spirit won't just magically imbue those present in the temple, they also need to understand the word of God.

The mainline branches of Protestantism began to fall apart long before Catholicism.
Mainline Protestant branches are just fine in Europe, thank you. In fact, the weakening of Rome presents them with an excellent opportunity for converting Catholics; not all of Europe is having a competition in Islam.
Even my own mother is a convert Protestant who was born Catholic.

[Lud]

Traditions can not be more important than real faith. And it must reach the hearts by all means.


I thought Protestantism was was all about "sola scriptura."

Here you've presented an argument without any reference to scripture, but rather urged Christians to "get with the times." Is that the basis of your argument for female clergy? Its hip and now?

[Arrow Cross]

I thought Protestantism was was all about "sola scriptura."
Yes. Not "church tradition", "advises of saints" (that can even contradict each other, having been only humans themselves), or "de jure celibate, exclusively male priests of an infallable leader, preaching in a foreign language".

Here you've presented an argument without any reference to scripture, but rather urged Christians to "get with the times." Is that the basis of your argument for female clergy? Its hip and now?
The scripture is not as relevant in this case as in other, more important topics, because nowhere in it is a reference on the subject from the Lord. If you don't "get with the times" at all, why not join the Amish? We need to be ever-adopting to our current circumstances, continous self-reformation is also a core pillar of Protestantism.

There are, however, references to clerical servicewomen, both pro and contra. Even St. Paul himself spoke of them with praise.
See: Acts 18:18 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2018:18;) Acts 21:9 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2021:9;) Romans 16:1–4 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2016:1%E2%80%934;) Romans 16:7 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2016:7;) 1Cor 16:19 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1Cor%2016:19;) Philippians 4:2–3 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians%204:2%E2%80%933;)

At any rate, decisions have been made already, and most Protestant denominations take the 'priesthood of all believers' doctrine literally enough to make those who fit eligable... for both learning, ordination, and service. Not all that is modern is good, but talks about this already started in the XIXth Century, and I'd definitely call it a progress.

[Hartmann von Aue]

At any rate, decisions have been made already, and most Protestant denominations take the 'priesthood of all believers' doctrine literally enough to make those who fit eligable... for both learning, ordination, and service. Not all that is modern is good, but talks about this already started in the XIXth Century, and I'd definitely call it a progress.

Arrow Cross, I can understand you sticking up for your church, but my word, this idea that you can change the subject with generic insults to Catholicism simply because someone points out that it's absolutely a fact that having women preach in church is totally contrary to the Bible, well, it doesn't make your case any stronger.

I recommend you do some reading here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=fMAPAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+roman+missal

You see, the Bible supports Catholic theology and practice. It always has.

It doesn't support Protestantism. On the contrary, practically every Protestant cult is based on opposition to some scriptural teaching that is held by the Catholic Church.

[Lud]

The scripture is not as relevant in this case as in other, more important topics, because nowhere in it is a reference on the subject from the Lord. If you don't "get with the times" at all, why not join the Amish? We need to be ever-adopting to our current circumstances, continous self-reformation is also a core pillar of Protestantism.

There are, however, references to clerical servicewomen, both pro and contra. Even St. Paul himself spoke of them with praise.
See: Acts 18:18 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2018:18;) Acts 21:9 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2021:9;) Romans 16:1–4 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2016:1%E2%80%934;)
Romans 16:7 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2016:7;) 1Cor 16:19 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1Cor%2016:19;) Philippians 4:2–3 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians%204:2%E2%80%933;)

At any rate, decisions have been made already, and most Protestant denominations take the 'priesthood of all believers' doctrine literally enough to make those who fit eligable... for both learning, ordination, and service. Not all that is modern is good, but talks about this already started in the XIXth Century, and I'd definitely call it a progress.


Ok, I was not asking for the purposes of making the theological equivalent of a flame. You are a member of a Calvinist congregation and I had thought this was a non-starter among mainline Calvinists.

Moreover, I had thought Calvin was not in favor of female preachers. If this was not a biblical position, as you argue, then was Calvin following tradition?

[Petr]

If you don't "get with the times" at all, why not join the Amish? We need to be ever-adopting to our current circumstances, continous self-reformation is also a core pillar of Protestantism.
I must say that you sound too liberal for my taste here.

Still in the 1860s, a Reformed Baptist preacher like C.S. Spurgeon could thus speak about the authority (or lack thereof) of Queen Victoria herself (she being the nominal head of the Anglican church):

See the Preface to the Articles, "Being by God's Ordinance, according to our just Title, Defender of the Faith, and Supreme Governor of the Church, within these our Dominions;" and again, "We are Supreme Governor of the Church of England." This is the way in which your Church bows herself before the kingdoms of this world. I demand, earnestly demand, a "Thus saith the Lord" for this royal supremacy. If any king, or queen, or emperor shall say, in any Christian church, "Our will and pleasure is," we reply, "We have another King,—one Jesus." As to the Queen, honored and beloved as she is, she is by her sex incapacitated for ruling in the church. Paul decides that point by his plain precept, "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence;" and if a king were in the case, we should say, "We render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things which are God's."
http://www.reformedreader.org/spurgeon/1864-03.htm


Petr

[Graves]

...You see, the Bible supports Catholic theology and practice. It always has...

Oh?

If that is so, how is it that Orthodox Christians will not even pray with those of the Roman-Latin Confession? How is it that one Orthodox Christian writer (Fr. Alexey Young), himself a convert from papism, has gone so far as to call the Roman-Latin Confession a Protestant sect? Shall I enumerate all of the teachings emanating from Rome that Orthodox Christians have declared to be heresies?

[Hartmann von Aue]

Oh?

If that is so, how is it that Orthodox Christians will not even pray with those of the Roman-Latin Confession? How is it that one Orthodox Christian writer (Fr. Alexey Young), himself a convert from papism, has gone so far as to call the Roman-Latin Confession a Protestant sect? Shall I enumerate all of the teachings emanating from Rome that Orthodox Christians have declared to be heresies?

Of course you disagree, but certainly you see problems in Protestant opposition to teaching in scriptures, do you not?

[Boleslaw]

The notion ones nation or ethnicity being an extension of ones natural family is well upheld within Catholicism. I've often posted Pope John Paul II's remarks on the issue, even stating in his 1994 "Letter to Families" the importance of ethnic ties in linking individual families with the wider society; and that the principle duty of families is to produce children for their nations.

[Graves]

Of course you disagree, but certainly you see problems in Protestant opposition to teaching in scriptures, do you not?But of course. The main problem inherent in Protestantism is it's inability to settle on one unifying principle of authority. As a result, Protestantism is comprised of any number of ever increasing sects. Lacking a unifying principle of authority, Protestantism is helpless to stop this from continuing to take place. And we even see this going on within the Roman-Latin Confession. In my own area, I can point to Roman-Latin Confession parishes that disagree on the most basic of issues, including even that of who - if anyone - is currently in charge of things in Vatican City.

Not all Protestantism is purely sola scriptura. A noteworthy exception would have to be Anglicanism and, to some extent, some of the spinoffs from Anglicanism, e.g. Presbyterianism. Another exception would be Lutheranism.

As has been remarked upon by quite a number of Orthodox writers, all of Western Christendom seems to lean pretty heavily on the thinking of Bishop Augustine of Hippo. Even one Roman-Latin Confession historian has admitted this. In Byzantium ― The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Judith Herrin, a Roman Catholic scholar at Oxford, candidly admits that, throughout the Middle Ages in the West, Augustine was known as "the founding father of the western Church" (p. 40)*. Most Protestants too find themselves leaning on Augustine. Even Arrow Cross.

*Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston, "Our Fathers in Heaven", http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=52211 .

[Macrobius]

Here's a site Graves might like: http://creatio.orthodoxy.ru/ , if he doesn't know it already.

English portion:

http://creatio.orthodoxy.ru/english.html

[Graves]

Here's a site Graves might like: http://creatio.orthodoxy.ru/ , if he doesn't know it already.

English portion:

http://creatio.orthodoxy.ru/english.htmlInteresting links at that site. Thanks.

[Boleslaw]

But of course. The main problem inherent in Protestantism is it's inability to settle on one unifying principle of authority. As a result, Protestantism is comprised of any number of ever increasing sects. Lacking a unifying principle of authority, Protestantism is helpless to stop this from continuing to take place. And we even see this going on within the Roman-Latin Confession. In my own area, I can point to Roman-Latin Confession parishes that disagree on the most basic of issues, including even that of who - if anyone - is currently in charge of things in Vatican City.

Not all Protestantism is purely sola scriptura. A noteworthy exception would have to be Anglicanism and, to some extent, some of the spinoffs from Anglicanism, e.g. Presbyterianism. Another exception would be Lutheranism.

As has been remarked upon by quite a number of Orthodox writers, all of Western Christendom seems to lean pretty heavily on the thinking of Bishop Augustine of Hippo. Even one Roman-Latin Confession historian has admitted this. In Byzantium ― The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Judith Herrin, a Roman Catholic scholar at Oxford, candidly admits that, throughout the Middle Ages in the West, Augustine was known as "the founding father of the western Church" (p. 40)*. Most Protestants too find themselves leaning on Augustine. Even Arrow Cross.

*Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston, "Our Fathers in Heaven", http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=52211 .

And what the hell is wrong with St. Augustine of Hippo?

[Vindex]

Not cramming all the races into the White races Nations is a cure for racism.

[Graves]

And what the hell is wrong with St. Augustine of Hippo?For openers, he's not a canonical saint and thus not considered to be a Father of the Church. As to the rest, one might want to read the essay by Metropolitan Ephraim. Click on http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=52211 . See also "Theological Discussion on Eight Teachings of Augustine of Hippo" by clicking on http://www.geocities.com/trvalentine/orthodox/augustine8.html .

[Vindex]

Was Augustine the guy who believed nuns had to bath with canvas covers over the tub lest god see them naked and be offended by their unclean nakedness. That is fucking crazy for so many reasons.

[harjit]

Before any of you scoff at this parody, keep in mind that kinists are called sinful for appreciating their connection to extended family. In our time, being a few generations removed makes all the difference between being a loving relative and a hateful racist.
The other side of the coin is that little bit of distance between people has also historically resulted in all manner of horrendous treatment of certain groups.

[Columnist]

Are you picking a (verbal) fight?


Petr

Yes, I am.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Ignota

A Lingua Ignota (Latin for "unknown language") was described by the 12th century abbess of Rupertsberg, Hildegard of Bingen. A recognized saint of the Roman Catholic Church, she apparently used it for mystical purposes. To write it, she used an alphabet of 23 letters, the litterae ignotae.

She partially described the language in a work titled Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which survived in two manuscripts, both dating to ca. 1200, the Wiesbaden Codex and a Berlin MS. The text is a glossary of 1011 words in Lingua Ignota, with glosses mostly in Latin, sometimes in German; the words appear to be a priori coinages, mostly nouns with a few adjectives. Grammatically it appears to be a partial relexification of Latin, that is, a language formed by substituting new vocabulary into an existing grammar.

It is unknown what the precise purpose of Lingua Ignota was; nor do we know who besides its creator were familiar with it. In the 19th century some believed that Hildegard intended her language to be an ideal, universal language. However, nowadays it is generally assumed that Lingua Ignota was devised as a secret language; like Hildegard's "unheard music", it would have come to her by divine inspiration. Inasmuch as the language was constructed by Hildegard, it may be considered one of the earliest known constructed languages.

In a letter to Hildegard, her friend and provost Wolmarus, fearing that Hildegard would soon die, asks ubi tunc vox inauditae melodiae? et vox inauditae linguae? (Descemet, p. 346; "where, then, the voice of the unheard melody? And the voice of the unheard language?"), suggesting that the existence of Hildegard's language was known, but there were no initiates that would have preserved its knowledge after her death.

[Arrow Cross]

You see, the Bible supports Catholic theology and practice. It always has.
What I did was merely pointing to a number of Catholic dogmas that are completely unrelated to the scriptura themselves, e.g. celibacy and papal infallibility. Protestants don't dismiss the notion of 'church tradition' either, but we definitely wouldn't carve them into stone, because the world is changing, and the only constant and solid compass can be the Bible.

And even the Bible can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. These discussions are as old as Christianity itself.

I must say that you sound too liberal for my taste here.
Fair enough, Calvinism has always been one of the boldest mainline Protestant denominations. But don't get it wrong for a moment. My experiences and my faith in my consecrated sisters stand still, but I firmly believe that our church will move with the times wisely, in living faith and good reason.

There is still no tolerance for faggotry from the Reformed Church of Hungary. There is still no tolerance, no "modernism" for revolutionary leftist ideas that corrupt so many western churches, it is still a traditional enemy of the liberal-socialist establishment, and a supporter of healthy nationalism. In most congregations, the national hymn is sang just before receiving the priest's blessing. "Immigration" and "racism" are not even a topic here, and many preachers sometimes go to great lengths in explaining how we should relate to "tolerance", and towards neo-liberalism and its spawns that aim to poison our society. Sunday by sunday, in almost every temple, prayers include a begging for God for the recovery and rebirth of this nation.
That is how... liberal we are.

It is true that the decade of the 1990's has brought up historical questions in the life of the Church almost as difficult as those it faced during the first centuries of its existence. The development of the relationship between Church and state reveals a kind of vagueness and uncertainty. The cause of the uncertainty on the part of the State is two-fold: the State, with its neutral ideology, considers the Church to be a grouping that, although it was established through the free choice of the citizens, has no right to claim special treatment from the state. At the same time, every political force must recognise that the Church has, after all, the right to be given a special deal, as without the service of Reformed Christianity, which has indeed shaped history, and whose activity has moulded culture and morals, the life of the Hungarian people would not be as it is today or, even more importantly, what it has the potential to be in the future. These two approaches have created and still create tensions, which have and may yet cause unbalanced and precipitate measures on the part of the state.

http://www.reformatus.hu/english/state.htm

[Graves]

... Protestants don't dismiss the notion of 'church tradition' either, but we definitely wouldn't carve them into stone, because the world is changing, and the only constant and solid compass can be the Bible.

And even the Bible can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. These discussions are as old as Christianity itself.The only difference between you and Bishop Gene Robinson is that he is more advanced than you. As Protestants go, you are more hidebound, and obviously behind the times in your thinking, dangerously irrelevant, and so forth. The world is passing you by. :munch:

[Graves]

...Rechabites would be somewhat comparable to the Amish who refuse to live amongst the heathen and to go along with social progress (moving on from nomadism to agriculture). Amish do live amongst the "heathen", but they obviously don't adopt the ways and mores of "the English".

I pass through one Amish community fairly regularly (Montgomery, IN). What I've noticed is Amish folks working side by side with "the English", and utilizing English establishments such as the local Stop & Sea restaurant.

Gasthof village [Montgomery, IN]

The town has a sizable Amish population who run a tourist attraction center called the Gasthof Amish Village. The village features various shops offering furniture, blankets, and other handmade goods created by the Amish. A large antique mall called the Blue Door is also ran by the village. Wagon rides and tours of the nearby Amish farms are offered to the public. Visitors can also stay at the Amish Inn and eat at the restaurant.[Wikipedia]

[Boleslaw]

For openers, he's not a canonical saint and thus not considered to be a Father of the Church.

He is a canonised saint, and the Orthodox Church itself recognises him as such.

[Petr]

Not all Protestantism is purely sola scriptura. A noteworthy exception would have to be Anglicanism and, to some extent, some of the spinoffs from Anglicanism, e.g. Presbyterianism. Another exception would be Lutheranism.
You should know that it's precisely the wildest and most heretical "Protestant" sects that deny Sola Scriptura! They actually are rather closer to the RC/EO idea of "continuing revelation"!

Many of the newer denominations don’t even practice sola Scriptura. Pentecostals have Scripture as their main authority but also rely on charismatic experiences and ongoing revelation. Some heretical denominations of the past, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, were started by those who claimed to be prophets, and some of their writings are used along with Scripture.
http://contra-gentes.blogspot.com/2008/04/doctrinal-chaos-argument-one-of.html

JWs and Mormons, for example, have newly added scriptures of their own.


Petr

[Graves]

He is a canonised saint, and the Orthodox Church itself recognises him as such.You are in error. Some Russian jurisdictions, in ignorance of the totality of his heretical writings, beatified him. None have glorified him. My own jurisdiction is considering declaring him a formal heretic, a move long overdue IMO.

[Graves]

You should know that it's precisely the wildest and most heretical "Protestant" sects that deny Sola Scriptura! They actually are rather closer to the RC/EO idea of "continuing revelation"!


http://contra-gentes.blogspot.com/2008/04/doctrinal-chaos-argument-one-of.html

JWs and Mormons, for example, have newly added scriptures of their own.


Petr
Orthodox Church is not into any revelations that contradict the Tradition. JWs and Mormons are gnostic sects. Gnosticism - then called "the doctrine of the Nicolaitans" (Apoc 2:15) - was declared heretical during the apostolic age.

[Boleslaw]

You are in error. Some Russian jurisdictions, in ignorance of the totality of his heretical writings, beatified him. None have glorified him. My own jurisdiction is considering declaring him a formal heretic, a move long overdue IMO.
I doubt your jurisdiction is even legitimately Orthodox.

[Hartmann von Aue]

What I did was merely pointing to a number of Catholic dogmas that are completely unrelated to the scriptura themselves, e.g. celibacy and papal infallibility.

There are teachings in Paul encouraging celibacy and there is Christ's commission to Peter.

Protestants don't dismiss the notion of 'church tradition' either, but we definitely wouldn't carve them into stone, because the world is changing, and the only constant and solid compass can be the Bible.

So then brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us. [2 Thess 2:15; see 1 Cor 11:2]

And even the Bible can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. These discussions are as old as Christianity itself.

Sure, people can try to make it mean what they want it to mean, while neglecting what it says. That is what Protestants generally do.

Fair enough, Calvinism has always been one of the boldest mainline Protestant denominations. But don't get it wrong for a moment. My experiences and my faith in my consecrated sisters stand still, but I firmly believe that our church will move with the times wisely, in living faith and good reason.

Yes, I see your defense of the women priests as being based on loyalty, not necessarily on Christianity.

There is still no tolerance for faggotry from the Reformed Church of Hungary. There is still no tolerance, no "modernism" for revolutionary leftist ideas that corrupt so many western churches, it is still a traditional enemy of the liberal-socialist establishment, and a supporter or healthy nationalism. In most congregations, the national hymn is sang just before receiving the priest's blessing. "Immigration" and "racism" are not even a topic here, and many preachers sometimes go to great lengths in explaining how we should relate to "tolerance", and towards neo-liberalism and its spawns that aim to poison our society. Sunday by sunday, in almost every temple, prayers include a begging for God for the recovery and rebirth of this nation.
That is how... liberal we are.

Well, I'm glad they are nationalists, but being conservative in some respects does not protect them from accepting liberal positions in others.

[Graves]

I doubt your jurisdiction is even legitimately Orthodox.And you also doubt Orthodoxy itself too. Being a papist, you are, after all, a heretic. So of course you doubt the legitimacy of all the jurisdictions that you are in protest against, as does Pope Benedict himself. That is the essence of Protestantism.

[Petr]

I doubt your jurisdiction is even legitimately Orthodox.
Out of curiosity, what exactly makes a jurisdiction "legitimately Orthodox"?


Petr

[Boleslaw]

Out of curiosity, what exactly makes a jurisdiction "legitimately Orthodox"?


Petr
They're in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch and follow the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Graves parish seems to be an Orthodox counterpart to the Sedevacantists within Catholicism.

[Petr]

They're in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch and follow the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Graves parish seems to be an Orthodox counterpart to the Sedevacantists within Catholicism.
In other words, they are Orthodox Protestants. :p (or Protesting Orthodox)


Petr

[Arrow Cross]

There are teachings in Paul encouraging celibacy and there is Christ's commission to Peter.
Yes. Encouraging. Not compelling. And then we have:
1Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry. 2But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. 3The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. 5Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6I say this as a concession, not as a command. 7I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.

8Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. 9But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
1This is a true saying, if a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work.

2A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;
5For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee:

6If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly.

7For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre;
Why does the Catholic Church not heed the advice of Paul now? So many more healthy Christian children could have been born, so many perversions and tragedies avoided, if Rome would not have forced celibacy on its pastors.

As for the commission of Peter: where exactly does the infallability of Peter and his successors stand? In fact, not long after commissioning him, Christ also predicted that Peter will betray him three times on the night of his capture. Peter was all too human, just like any other pope after him, with faults, mistakes, and lacks in faith. But that is exactly why it's so easy for a simple believer to relate to him and his stumbles when reading the Bible.

Sure, people can try to make it mean what they want it to mean, while neglecting what it says. That is what Protestants generally do.
See above. That is what everyone does, theologians have been interpreting the scripture since ancient times, trying to convince their brothers that their opinion is the correct one. Synod after synod, it begeted changes, alterations, and additions in the 'church tradition', which's church itself has fallen to multiple factions long before the Reformation, all with their own traditions and own interpretations, claiming to be the one and only true Church.

[Boleslaw]

In other words, they are Orthodox Protestants. :p (or Protesting Orthodox)


Petr
Embrace your spiritual brethern.

[Graves]

Out of curiosity, what exactly makes a jurisdiction "legitimately Orthodox"?
They're in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch and follow the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Graves parish seems to be an Orthodox counterpart to the Sedevacantists within Catholicism.He's saying this because the EP and Pope Benedict both play kissy kissy when they meet. I would remind everyone that it was an EP who invented the Nestorian heresy.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/111/311007609_d17d7bf3de.jpg?v=0

Good to know Boleslaw thinks SVs are "within Catholicism". This confirms what I said earlier as to the Roman-Latin Confession being inclusive of all points of view, including rejection of the present Pope of Rome. Why, who knows? Even the Dali Lama might be a Roman Catholic.

[Boleslaw]

I would remind everyone that it was an EP who invented the Nestorian heresy.
I know, I made that argument before. In fact it was the Pope who continually crushed heresy within the Eastern Church. Think about that!

[Graves]

I know, I made that argument before. In fact it was the Pope who continually crushed heresy within the Eastern Church. Think about that!Good for him. All of that came to a screeching halt when he himself committed heresy in A.D. 1054 and he's been spouting additional heresies ever since. Your point?

[Graves]

In other words, they are Orthodox Protestants. :p (or Protesting Orthodox)
PetrThere are, interestingly, two Protestant denominations (maybe more?), calling themselves Orthodox. One is the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, http://www.opc.org/. The other is the Orthodox Anglican Church, http://eoc.orthodoxanglican.net/eocwebsite/ . In addition, some Amish and Mennonites retain the concept of Orthodoxy by calling themselves "Old Order", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish and Baptists calling themselves "Primitive" as opposed to those whom they consider to be "new fangled"(?). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_baptist.

Having said that, however, it needs to be pointed out that Orthodox Christians are not Protestants. All Protestantism is of Western origin - i.e. a spinoff from the heretical Roman-Latin Confession - and all Protestant denominations owe a debt, in one way or another, to their true founding father, Bishop Augustine of Hippo. John Calvin went so far as to acknowledge this in his Institutes while Martin Luther, for his part, was an Augustinian canon regular when he nailed his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg.

[mladikov]

Indeed, and it was a very wise move from Croatian religious leaders to ask for this permission. The Holy Spirit won't just magically imbue those present in the temple, they also need to understand the word of God.

I disagree. While it's certainly a good thing to conduct services in the common language, it's also equally true, I believe, that the spiritual power of prayer transcends the boundaries of human language. Our prayers are directed towards an omniscient and all-powerful God, not other sinful and imperfect human beings, and accordingly it matters to Him nothing whether the faithful understand the prayers or services offered on His behalf, since He will. If He deigns to accept the prayers of children and the mentally infirm, who are incapable of a complete literal understanding of Scripture and many prayers besides such as the Lord's Prayer, then how can you believe otherwise? Faith is not predicated on rational understanding or intellectual assent, but rather is given through the Spirit. Many of the apostles were simple and unlearned folk, but despite this became great teachers and saints for the glory of God and His Church. Some were even illiterate, and would have been unable to read even a word of Holy Scripture - yet, through the grace of God, they achieved spiritual greatness.

[Hartmann von Aue]

Yes. Encouraging. Not compelling.

No one is forced to take a vow of celibacy.

From the Gospels:

http://bible.cc/matthew/19-12.htm

It is clear that Protestants do not seem to believe that celibacy is a higher calling in life. This is contrary to the Gospels and St. Paul. It contradicts the Bible.

The issue of the Papacy is complex. I'm simply going to restate what I said before - most Protestant sects are most vehement in their rejection of those parts of scripture they don't like.

Whether it's the Book of James - which directly contradicts Luther

http://bible.cc/james/2-24.htm

(St. Paul does not support Luther's Justification by Faith alone, btw)

Or the Mass:

http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/11-27.htm

etc.

[Arrow Cross]

No one is forced to take a vow of celibacy.
Not even priests, bishops, cardinals? Vow or not, they need to practice it. I understand it makes the clergy mobile and displacable at the church leadership's will, but it still doesn't have a biblical root.

It is clear that Protestants do not seem to believe that celibacy is a higher calling in life. This is contrary to the Gospels and St. Paul. It contradicts the Bible.
We're absolutely fine with what Apostle Paul said: if it is celibacy that helps you more on your path to God, then by all means, practice it. And if you need to have a family, a wife and children to love you, then do that. It's quite clear in the quotes in my previous post.
Personally, I'm on the celibate side in the matter, but I'm still definitely against forcing it on others.

The issue of the Papacy is complex. I'm simply going to restate what I said before - most Protestant sects are most vehement in their rejection of those parts of scripture they don't like.
The Book of James is not part of the Protestant Bibles, its origins are unclear and debated. It has no authority over a Protestant.

(St. Paul does not support Luther's Justification by Faith alone, btw)
Sola Fide is best understood by likening faith, in its true and clean form to a root, from which all the good deeds spring. If your faith is real, acts of kindness are evident.

[Petr]

The Book of James is not part of the Protestant Bibles, its origins are unclear and debated. It has no authority over a Protestant.
Whoa, whoa! Just speak for yourself. The Book of James is canonical alright, and a huge majority of non-liberal Protestants agree.

Btw, this thread has greatly slipped from its original topic.


Petr

[Graves]

No one is forced to take a vow of celibacy. From the Gospels: http://bible.cc/matthew/19-12.htm...On the whole I agree with your reply to Arrow Cross, but I find this remark a bit disingenuous. And it fails to take note of historical reality.

The Roman-Latin Confession is comprised of "rites", and the Roman Rite is the largest. Within the Roman Rite, all clergy - with a very few exceptions - must be celibate. But clergy in other rites, e.g. the Maronite Rite, need not be. Within the Roman Rite, if a male wants to follow a particular career path, he is indeed forced into celibacy. It's either that or follow a different career path such as....ladies hair dressing.

Historically, this ridiculous situation did not come about in the West until the pontificate of Gregory VII, well over a thousand years after Pentecost. But celibacy for the parochial clergy has never been required by the Orthodox Church. It's something entirely unique to the West.

[Graves]

...The Book of James is not part of the Protestant Bibles, its origins are unclear and debated. It has no authority over a Protestant...Are we on the same planet? I know of no Protestant sect, not one, that denies the canonical status of the Epistle of St. James. Which sect do you belong to? Who leads it? Does this sect have a document showing that it denies canonical authority to this epistle?

Are you familiar with the number one all time favorite Protestant Bible for English speaking people, the Authorized Version , aka the King James Bible? FYI: The Epistle of St. James is found therein.