THAT Joy is a Radiance of Love that is without mirth, but is filled with compassion for those not in its possession... Seeking their elevation... Laughter is good medicine only insofar as it creates a break in the dark clouds of our darkened nous that Light might enter...
Yes, but...
and God has a sense of humor!
I've literally laughed out loud reading Scripture.
Anyway, an interesting study:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Humor-Christ-Elton-Trueblood/dp/0060686324
I think he meant more that THIS Orthodox should have his mouth taped shut and be stuck in a dark hole - A who could possibly disagree with THAT??
:crackup:
There is a lot more benefit available - I read of a very famous RC Historian who wrote Church History all his life, and when he went in for his annual medical exam, he found he had cancer that would most likely end his life at some fairly foreseeable point... And he immediately went to the Orthodox Church and was baptized into Orthodoxy, explaining that for living, the RCC is hands down a better place to be an historian, but when it came to dying, there is no substitute for the Orthodox Faith...
The process of dying or dying itself?
I must admit I did find it interesting in one of your posts where you mentioned something to the effect that once one is christened Orthodox, one is welcomed in all Christian traditions but the reverse is not the case. (Which, I suppose, is one of my problems with it (but I understand why the Orthodox think it's the case--I just think it's too rigid a deliniation).
It actually is simply the Essence vs Energies that proceed from that Essence issue. The Essence of God is absolutely unknowable to man, but God is known in His Uncreated Divine Energies/Operations, and there He is known only by Revelation FROM Him...
Refresh my memory--how do these energies/operations differ from the presence of the Word or the Spirit?
Barlaam was insisting that we can know God's Essence...
RCC theologians to this day think so...
It is simply not true...
Nor, regarding the Nature of God, can we go beyond what is revealed by God...
I don't think all RCC theologians think so--for example, Aquinas (though I suppose I can see how some would charge him with that). Instead, he thinks that by knowing what God is not ("by way of remotion"), we can make some positive statements:
"Now, in considering the divine substance, we should especially make use of the method of remotion. For, by its immensity, the divine substance surpasses every form that our intellect reaches. Thus, we are unable to apprehend it by knowing what it is. Yet we are able to have some knowledge of it by knowing what it is not."
Well, it is simple enough, IF I have it aright... And I hope my little explanation was helpful...
But you are the first person I have run into online who has actually READ St. Gregory Palamas... At least I assume you did... Your framing of the issue of essence vs ATTRIBUTES
Well look at that! I guess that's where I reveal the attribute of Latin spawn-hood and all...
would seem to indicate secondary sources. Do you HAVE his "Homilies"?? Because IF you do, I have an assignment for you that will transform your prayer life...
I'm sure I read parts of both--and probably found the secondary sources more helpful in framing it in terms more familiar to me. BUT I am ready--and would love--to accept your assignment!
The "genetic" unifier of parentage is patently apparent in the Protestant 'worship' service, for it is homiletically centered on the Sermon from a Lecturn at the head of the Classroom, the Church meeting hall... They were birthed straight out of the Latin Scholia which the Latins had created to establish their rules for administration by Ecclesiastical Law the Church of Christ Whose Head on earth they saw as Peter, the Chief Apostle... So the Latins as Scholastic, and the Protestants attacked them using the Bible as their Scholastic weapon to bring them down after they would not reform.
Does not an Orthodox service have a sermon/homily?
And didn't Romanides (who I wish was not so sneering...) think the genetic unifier was the use of Scripture
as revelation rather than from revelation?
And even to this day, right here on this forum, right now, and Jerry Shugart is a prime example, every Protestant Christian is proclaiming their PROOF FROM SCRIPTURE that they are right and all the others are wrong... Which makes Satan's pickings pretty easy through the vanity of intellect, though some do manage to stay clear...
I think we can all agree that to some degree that what is in Scripture is the norming norm? That it conditions us in helping to know what is of God and what is not?
By the way, Jerry's view is somewhat similar to Karl Barth's, though he probably doesn't know it. Since he hasn't (yet...) departed from homoousios, in my view, there isn't a wrong/right but another way of looking at it or another layer. That said, I get the sense that he thinks differently and there IS a "right" and a "wrong" and Chalcedon Christology is the latter.
Well, the Oriental Orthodox Split from the EOC over the homo-ousios formulaic, and remain intact to this day... The Latins split from the EOC over the issue of Papal headship of the Body of Christ on earth, and remained fairly intact, though after a thousand years there have been some major consequences... But when the Protestants split from the Latins, the split immediately split again and again and again...
I look at it as God's doing--similar to splitting Israel into the Northern and Southern kingdoms in 1 Kings 12:
24 ‘Thus says the Lord, You shall not go up or fight against your relatives the people of Israel. Every man return to his home, for this thing is from me.’”
and I think we can glean some understanding of why He did it if we look at the conditions that resulted in Israel's split.
It went viral, where today, it is every man, woman and sinner for hisself, not only having a lot of denominations [estimates vary], but worse than that, each person is their own doctrinal theologian self-taught...
This I mourn along with many Christians.
And now, in these post-modern days, most who have met God and regard themselves as believers, do not attend any particular church, and say their relationship with God is personal, and not a matter for much discussion... I don't blame them... I personally knew God for 14 years before Him telling me that He is the Christian God - Which instantly scandalized me, I should add...
Same here.
So it is the "going viral" of the Reformational Split with the Latins that is historically unprecedented... In the new Protestant neo-Scholasticism, every opinion is subject only to its own lights, and many of those lights are dim and some are turning dark...
I don't think it was historically unprecedented if we look back to OT Israel where God was constantly shaking things up. "Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter"--and boy oh boy did God strike many church "shepherds"!
Look in the upper right hand of the page where it says
Welcome, Soror1
There should be two more lines under that greeting...
The first should read:
You last visited: Yesterday at 00:00PM
The second should read
Private Messages
Click this last and you should access my PM to you...
I will send another "TEST" message.
Arsenios
Got it as you know and thanks!
