Kids are more in tune to natural instincts
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Thanks Winston! I used to be very anti-ecumenical. I'm still leery of it but I see more of what God is doing by letting it happen. Your reading of the text is still not mine.
Ok, what's your reading? I've heard popesplainers have a go on it and their mental gymnastics are hilarious. I don't think you can top them although you're pretty well versed in sophism and filibustering too.
To adore and contemplate is, for casuists like the pope, not to worship. He's trying to be kissy with them and find commonalities and still not press Christian tradition beyond its guardrails. Obviously the person who "adores God" but doesn't acknowledge Jesus as God is incomplete in theology and practice. But if we want to evangelize them we do better to accept the right things in their approach, and build from them, rather than to lead by rejecting minor wrong things that their cultures currently approve out of felicitous inconsistency.
If Orthodoxy appears to have nothing to offer but 3-year secluded catechesis, it's less likely to build bridges. Missionaries who spend 3 years learning another person's culture have much more fruit. Does that make enough sense?
No, adore is a synonym for worship according to Denzinger. It doesn't matter if it's incomplete, because the position of NA is premised on natural theology. Rome teaches jews and muslims, being "monotheistic Abrahamic religions" worship God the Father of the OT. This is the communality NA is referring to.
I don't know anyone who had 3 years of catechesis. Orthodox aren't expected to be theologians, but to know the basics of the faith and dogma. To know what they actually believe in when they enter the Church which is completely reasonable and necessary. You go build bridges with hindus, buddhists, muslims, JW, LDS, ecumenists - have a blast.
What is the fruit exactly? Arriving to some ecumenist perenialist compromise that has nothing to do with the true Church and the faith of Christ? We're not freemasons. Don't give me that bs. Everyone participating in ecumenist efforts and dialogues (like the Rockefeller ran WCC) should be excommunicated. Jesus nukes bridges between His people and the heterodox, Satan is the one who brings people in false unity in his one world religion and beast system.
Well, I've always looked at embedded missionaries as having the most effective fruit, starting with Paul in Corinth. But when you say:
That's very similar to where I've been before, and currently I would say it's still a risk but there ought to be an ability for the discerning to distinguish false bridges from true. In 251 the church started arguing over whether welcoming the Lapsi was a true or false bridge. So I can't dismiss it out of hand as your appeal to theology does. But I take your warning seriously as I don't want to be involved in the false, even as I have recently been given my own charge and it looks more false to some people than any other charge I've gotten.
The words for "worship" are pretty difficult and I'm not arguing them right now, I was just chiming in my view. If Rome actually taught that Jews and Muslims by their systems' theology already worshipped God the Father (who is always one with the Son if he is to be worshipped at all), that would be pretty clearly contrary to prior teaching, which is why I'm confident the casuists permitted the phrasing that retains ambiguity. (Obviously righteous Jews before Christ worshipped God the Father without contradicting the Son or knowing the details about him, but if someone rejects the Son after he's been revealed then that's out.) Jewish theology stays agnostic about Jesus, despite their folk practices that go beyond the theology, and Muslim theology is pretty anti-Jesus but has pathways to permit the truth, and the only way to Jesus within those systems is by finding the truth about Jesus in spite of the system. So I have hope for those; and I understand officially Orthodoxy does not forbid hope.