Copy 3 of ?

You suggested and dismissed yourself as a mod when you said, "I agree - no moderation in quite some time... Seems like an echo chamber in here... And if we don't fix it, who will?" and "I am an absolute idiot in moderation".

I only promoted us two as mods after you promoted me as mod when you said, "this place has none active moderators... One solutions could be for you to create your own page and moderate it as well as you can, another would be to call for a community that would visit a forum and place certain people, that you trust, as moderators... If you want to create your own community, I will help with everything that I have. But I suck as a moderator. I can flag things for you, if you want, but I wouldn't want to make the final decisions. If you have an idea for a new commity, you have my full support! Many will benefit from such a place!"

Copy 2 of ?

You suggested and dismissed yourself as a mod when you said, "I agree - no moderation in quite some time... Seems like an echo chamber in here... And if we don't fix it, who will?" and "I am an absolute idiot in moderation".

I only promoted us two as mods after you promoted me as mod when you said, "this place has none active moderators... One solutions could be for you to create your own page and moderate it as well as you can, another would be to call for a community that would visit a forum and place certain people, that you trust, as moderators... If you want to create your own community, I will help with everything that I have. But I suck as a moderator. I can flag things for you, if you want, but I wouldn't want to make the final decisions. If you have an idea for a new commity, you have my full support! Many will benefit from such a place!"

Copy 1 of ?

You suggested and dismissed yourself as a mod when you said, "I agree - no moderation in quite some time... Seems like an echo chamber in here... And if we don't fix it, who will?" and "I am an absolute idiot in moderation".

I only promoted us two as mods after you promoted me as mod when you said, "this place has none active moderators... One solutions could be for you to create your own page and moderate it as well as you can, another would be to call for a community that would visit a forum and place certain people, that you trust, as moderators... If you want to create your own community, I will help with everything that I have. But I suck as a moderator. I can flag things for you, if you want, but I wouldn't want to make the final decisions. If you have an idea for a new commity, you have my full support! Many will benefit from such a place!"

Where's his bowed knee and his confession that Jesus is Lord?

In 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, explained that "Positive Christianity" was not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed", nor was it dependent on "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied; rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: "The Führer is the herald of a new revelation", he said. [Shirer 1960]

Adolf Hitler used the term in point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: "the Party as such represents the viewpoint of Positive Christianity without binding itself to any particular denomination".

Are you an Apostles' Creed Son-of-God Christian, or a "Positive Christian"?

Thank you for asking! I'm a Jesus-is-Lord Christian, in a Reformed church and also regular in the Hebrew-roots community (not the legalistic one, the covenantal one). I also got confirmed Lutheran, get along well in Catholic churches, and claim all the spiritual rights of the New Israel, and claim just about any other title in Christianity. I'm a solid 66-book Bible guy.

To use history to come to contextual conclusions about the Bible is straightforward, such as to use the Herods and Caesars to date Paul's journeys. Because I'm in covenant with all believers, Ignatius the martyr is my friend and I believe God preserved his words to the same churches Jesus wrote to, where Ignatius was firsthand 12 years later. Ignatius, companion of John, is believed in history to have been one of the children Jesus blessed. I prayed for decades to learn the history of those churches where Jesus called out individuals and practices, and then I was blessed to realize the church always had the history and didn't tell me. (Obviously the deuterocanon apocrypha are not held by anyone to the same level as the 66 books, though they have human inspiration and are valued by many, and the patristics and other histories are treated as ordinary historical documents.)

Yes, before I discovered the history, I inferred grammaticohistorically that Jesus was indeed talking about (then-extant) "self-proclaimed [J]ews when describing the" synagogue of satan. (Your caps are funny.) Yes, there's secondary application if we find people whom we know are not Jews by the same high standard of knowledge as if Jesus said so. Jesus never said we get to deny the continuing Jewish community the right of being Jews, only two small groups of Gentiles (where we learn details of their infiltration from Ignatius). So the question goes to how we would get the right to tell a group externally that their self-designation is false, if we don't accord them the same external right to overrule our self-designation as Americans. That's not how nations work.

The fact that many Jews and many Gentiles are satanists is indeed the problem, but you are focused only on the Jewish side of it and ignoring the full work of the enemy (some people cherry-pick Jews and then call all outliers shabbos goyim, which is special pleading). I gave the grammaticohistorical reasons that Jesus is calling out seven works of satan, not just one. You add the althist idea that a continuous population that absorbs another one can be declared broken and replaced rather than identical, but that's not how any merger works in Bible, history, or law.

Paul says all Israel will be saved, the Jews will persevere until the vast majority of them turn to Jesus. Catholics and Protestants have finally learned how to start giving Jews the good news of Jesus and there's a Messianic Jewish explosion. And part of seeing them saved is removing stumbling blocks, such as our removing the right of self-identification, our treating the race monolithically, or our blaming most all satanic works on Jews. He uses them as human shields!

Protestants also rely on living tradition and relationship to help interpret pictures, dogma, and creed; they also claim the Spirit guiding them to ensure the faith is kept as members of the Body. The Church makes and publishes its judgments through individual agents and Protestants have it no differently (granted many of them are promiscuous with assigning agency). So it looks the same to me, no differences seen.

You appeal to our ability to review the Church's judgments and reason, which is exactly what Protestants affirm, the right to review. Perhaps the written decisions of the Seven Councils are as infallible as Scripture? But either way they're individually interpreted in what they say. It'd be interesting if I did find that Orthodoxy as a whole took some late interpretation that could be charged as "making up stuff that was not there before" because it adapted old text to new circumstances. Well, that's interpretation, not quite as bad as Mary's Assumption in Rome, but it'd be interesting to see if it exists.

I agree the dying or living of movements is a testament to Jesus's work among the candlesticks. I don't want to keep saying none of this makes the Orthodox distinctive, just uniquely well-reserved, so I'll close there, thanks.

And that's the point with Hitler.

Mike Warnke: Being in a church doesn't make you a Christian any more than being in a McDonald's makes you a hamburger.

If you judge Trump and Hitler by different standards, you're being impartial, illogical, and opaque.

Looks just like in Bonhoeffer where they walked out on Niemoller and then arrested him at his house.

It was a state church regarded as heretical by the Confessing Church. You should know this without a link.

What if God is the Flying Spaghetti Monster and we're all wrong?

Then God would confirm it through the people he appointed using tools like facts, holy writings, logic, and reason, same as if he were anyone else. And spotting those appointed people, well, I can't take the people's word for it because I am still the one making the judgment, so I can only trust God to guide me to the right people using those tools he gave. Logically, Pastafari doesn't claim continuity from Adam, which would be exclusivist and less loving than Yahweh, so Yahweh gets the preponderance and the inference to best explanation.

No, I appeal to the interpretation of the Church. I don't hold my own interpretation because I'm not the appropriate authority to do that.

Orthodox and Catholics often fail to appreciate that the interpretation of the Church must be interpreted by you. Interpretations come in words just like Scripture. If by interpretation you mean some other aspect of relationship, well of course Scripture requires traditional relationships, but I must interpret whether the Spirit's energies are at work in the relationship or not. (My spirit senses the Spirit's energies in you, so I continue; but if I didn't sense them, I would say like Joan of Arc whether I'm right or wrong I trust the Lord to have me right, and not myself.) How else could the Orthodox judge each other and remove heretics except by personal, individual judgment that the Spirit's not in the heretic, since there is no tradition to guide when a new heresy arises, and both sides claim authority from prior tradition? How did we kick out Simon, Hymenaeus, Alexander, Valentinus, Marcion, or Montanus, except by individual Spirit-led judgment of other covenant people without having a word from tradition (plus, their groups died)? And how do we know if the neo-Nestorians or Miaphysites have come around to our way of thinking, except by new Spirit-led judgment that heals the traditional breaches (plus, their groups live)?

You can't apply the same critique to systems that have different epistemology and metaphysics. The Orthodox hold that the Church is infallible because it has Christ as its Head and is guided by the Spirit. Individuals within the Church are fallible.

And what if I have that epistemology and metaphysics, and hold that the Church is infallible but any candlestick is at risk of being removed if that congregation fails? Rome was pretty big in 1056, and the Orthodox have no problem (like many Protestants) with the idea that all its candlesticks were uprooted completely, but they don't recognize that risk for themselves as opposed to other branches? Why wouldn't it be Rome was right to excommunicate and Byzantium was the one who had its candlesticks pulled because it wasn't the true Church? No offense, but from outside there's no difference I see.

There's no way to arbiter between all those position when you all hold the same epistemological presupposition.

Actually there is, Matt. 18:15-17, and a little pontificating (bridgebuilding). If you're saying your episteme is Trust Church and nobody else's is, I say Rome and all the strong apostolic successions have that so it's not unique. If you're saying my episteme is Trust God and that tempts disunity, I say anything can be occasion to temptation, but I add the apostolic successionists also ultimately must Trust God and do so unconsciously or they will get in the circle of Trust Self too (trusting the self to pick the right church to trust when several say they're the right church). The Protestant says lots of churches are right churches but we recommend our uniquenesses for consideration. The fact that there's not an earthly org doesn't deny the heavenly organism of Christ's body. If two people need arbitration, either they work it out in Christ (such as by Matt. 18) or one or both are revealed not to be in Christ. Man, who made you an arbiter between me and my brother Protestant? (Jesus's words.) If God did, he can make others arbiters too, even the totally unesteemed Protestants. (Paul's words.)

How do you justify the belief that one Protestant (or a whole denomination) is true and not the other ones over there?

Unity on essentials, liberty on nonessentials, charity on all. If we ever have a true binary disagreement we agree to disagree like Paul and Barnabas, and await God's revelation (e.g. Paul later backpedaled about Mark but it all worked out for good). Sometimes, denominations merge together if all concerns are addressed, just as the Orthodox reach out to groups that are willing to merge if all concerns are addressed. You and I could merge if we worked the essentials out.

"Seems to me nobody can have the whole wholeness, or else all Christians partake of sufficient wholeness." Can you justify that claim?

Well, of course. No individual or organization can have all of the faith content (knowledge) because that would be omniscience. What the mature have in Christ is sufficient faith ("great faith", not the "all faith" hypothetical of 1 Cor. 13:2). Adam only knew the seed of the woman, Dismas only knew the man on the cross, but those were sufficient faiths.

Historically Jesus established one universal apostolic Church that encompassed all of the Christians

Yes, and what were the covenant people before that? They were as much the Messianic body as they were afterward, they were the family of faith, they just didn't have an incorporation and constitution as Jesus provided to the Twelve. (And in particular God gave the lesson that these would be divided into Israel and Judah didactically.) So I like to be more covenantal than the Orthodox, and see the body throughout all history. The unity has always been spiritual, and occasionally physically manifest too.

But isn't it the Orthodox position that they know about their unity and don't make pronouncements about anyone else's? Obviously if Orthodox "merged in" another denomination (say Armenian), the Armenians become Orthodox, but the Armenians could equally proclaim all the Orthodox became Armenian by accepting all the Armenian traditions too. That's what unity is, just like marriage. So it seems to me it's the Orthodox and a bunch of professing Christians that the Orthodox aren't ready to count as Christian yet. But that problem goes all the way back to Simon Magus, whom Peter wasn't ready to count as Christian (for good reason). There were many strands of Simonians afterward, and some of them repented and rejoined the church (Tertullian?), because the larger church was ready to count them as Christians, and they were ready to count the larger church as Christians, no matter what anyone called them. So Orthodoxy is not, and never was, the heavenly unity of the invisible church (because there are surely a couple wolves among the Orthodox and a couple sheep that haven't found that fold), it's the visible organizational unity on earth; and the visible political system of any subgroup of the invisible church doesn't matter because we trust God to maintain the unity of his Body. The only difference is that Protestants give promiscuous credit.

Sufficiency is problematic too, because it assumes a criterion for what's sufficient. But that has to be justified too.

Not really, it's the same answer. Only God can give sufficient saving faith, and only God can give sufficient knowledge of what sufficient saving faith is. If I'm trusting some earthly system as the whole of my authority or episteme or faith deposit, pfft! Instead I trust God to work through my spirit, the Church, the Word, the sacraments, life, miracles, everything. Any instance of trusting the Church finally because it says it's the Church ... weakens the Church.

I appreciate the time you're taking. I hope it's not belligerent-sounding. I have no problem with the Orthodox commending their Church on its distinctives, but it's a free market and others can claim other commendations. Sometimes there is division to show which are approved (and which not), but sometimes division is just from the Lord for his purposes. So I guess the issue for me is when the standing aside (Biblical meaning of "apostacy"), and the criticism of Protestants, is so strong that it implies no hope, which is hardly evangelistic toward Protestants if they are unsaved. Evangelism is about culture.

So here's an idea. How about you point to the Orthodox writings that teach your theology or episteme and I wrestle with them? I'm usually pretty good at agreeing with patristics. I'm just not convinced they say everything you do. (Change? Is heresy!)

Is Jesus your Lord? I thought you'd said so.

What happened to "I'll reapeat until your thick skull breaks"? Having begun with Scripture, do you abandon it for adhoms?

Do you remember when millions of Christians killed each other because your guy Leo X couldn't or wouldn't answer a few simple questions put in theses 82-89?

Do you want people to go around saying you don't act like a servant of Jesus because you can't answer simple questions about him?

Do you want people to get the idea that you worship another Jesus than the real one because they know the real one is a Jew?

Are you a Gentile-worshipper? A goiolater?

According to the Bible, Jesus, the Son of God, hates the Jews. This fact is irrefutable.

No such text.

Here are many texts that don't apply to "the Jews" collectively, followed by all the ones that do, just by doing a simple word study. OP refers to Jesus's treatment of individuals, never of the collective "the Jews". Also, he said the synagogue of satan were not Jews but Gentiles, so he was equal opportunity with his invective.

The fact that the first Christians hated the Jews so much proves that Jesus himself must have hated them.

Not at all, the first 5,000 Christians were all Jewish and there were a million Jews in Christianity that century. Later generations continued to criticize individual Jews like Trypho (Tarphon). Even if the statement were true it's not an "irrefutable" inference because Christians make mistakes.

Nicholas Donin, Johannes Pfefferkorn, and Jacob Brafman, all of whom were Jewish

You admit that Jews converted to Christianity can still be Jewish, but you others deny it of the early church and of Jesus, which is illogical.

Even God hated the Jews so much that he wanted to destroy them all in the desert. God was the first to want to commit genocide against the Jews.

No such text.

God said "Jacob I loved" (i.e. Israel and Judah). He did not say in Deut. 9:12-14 what he wanted but what he would do if left alone, because he wanted Moses to intercede. We know what God wants by what he does and commands. The Hebrew is a conditional that frames an interrogative of whether the hearer agrees with the hypothetical.

You are so much fun to refute on behalf of the lurkers. I also pray that sooner or later you may come to full knowledge of the truth in Jesus, because I appreciate that you sometimes change tack when refuted. If you want to larp as a conservative American in this nationality-privacy zone, you would do well to learn how to accept criticism graciously and acknowledge it and make adjustments as a result; it would do wonders for your earnings and your friends' acceptance of how much outreach you've gotten done.

I think it would be far better for probable Muslims like you if you reached out with how much shariah law is like Christian moral law and Jewish torah. You could emphasize that shariah and torah are the same word. By making the occasional concession about the ahadith that need not be emphasized because they're Muslim-disputed and objectionable, you would gain many concessions from the Christians and Jews about how much their law is like shariah. For instance, if you said no mainstream Muslim really believes Muhammad molested Hasan and Husain and that's only a discredited fringe tradition, then you might get Christians and Jews more comfortable fitting together their sabbaths with the jumu'ah. If your goal is to promote shariah triumphalistically, you would do better to commend it forthrightly rather than to try to drive wedges between Jews and Christians.

Rent-free advertising then. Those are some stupid Muslims. Bad calligraphy on the resh too.

Are you saying that for Catholics there are stupid questions that you have no duty to be respectful to when offered sincerely?

Are you putting a stumbling block before people who want fellowship with the Holy Church and denying the Lord's name by refusing to defend what you know of him?

Christianity should obviously never teach it so boldly as everyone in history who never accepted Jesus going to hell, because the name Jesus was not known for thousands of years. But every culture has a Pandora tradition of the salvation by hope in the seed of the woman, no matter how it's been transmitted, and this is seen in the constellation Virgo as well; and if someone willfully rejects the seed of the woman (rather than is agnostic about it), then why would they want to be in "the same place" where that good seed is destined to go after his death? If you reject Jesus (or any hoped-for seed) you don't want to be in heaven with him; so not all souls want to go to the same place. Same for if I violently rejected Gautama Buddha and if Buddha is in heaven, why would I want to go to heaven then if rejecting Buddha is my eternal choice? Thank you for your consideration.

No, the other signs stay around 2,160 average, while Ophiuchus just would take time away from neighbors Scorpius and Sagittarius and leave the same total. The actual astronomical boundaries based on the included stars have widely varying swaths of the equator, so the number of years of any sign can vary hundreds of years from 2,160.

The year has about 12-7/19 moons to it so it gets sometimes 12 sometimes 13. The great year is always 360 degrees, invariant, and they can be divvied up either 12 or 13 ways with any proportions you like.

Any translation, and it's very clear Jesus says they're not Jews. KJV, "which say they are Jews, and are not". He wasn't referring to first-century Jews but to first-century Gentiles. Now people can insult any group they want with that epithet, but it wasn't what Jesus meant, as my link showed exactly the group of people he was referring to; one of them may have been the then-pagan Onkelos.

People-groups determine for themselves who is genealogically continuous with them, not outsiders. You wouldn't want a group of foreigners to decide who is and isn't American, and to say that we say we are Americans and are not, would you? There is continuous existence of the Jewish people, with some having genealogies that go all the way back, and the intermarriage of any group of converts does not make the Jewish people lose title to the name "Jew".

Jesus hints at seven works of satan in the link, among Jew and Gentile, and we are not to ignore any of them or to focus on any one race in realizing the enemy's work; that would be to ignore much of the rest of his work. Of course to the degree anyone is doing the work of the synagogue of satan in Jesus's judgment, that is deceit and lies and connects with murder; but since Jesus says they're not Jews then we don't get to say (as you do in this comment) they are Jews. Even if you meant "his synagogue (alleged Jews)" instead, the problem is that the Golden Rule prohibits us from saying those accepted as Jews by Jews are Jews, and there has been no church finding that they are not Jews.

So whatever tradition brought you to infer things like assuming that all Jews are to be called the synagogue of satan just because Jews have synagogues, even when Jesus was actually referring to a Gentile institution (proven by Ignatius) that he called a synagogue, it doesn't agree with the Bible. Romans 11 says that all Israel will be saved, meaning the vast majority of Jews will someday become Christians (in Hebrew, "Messianics") and accept Jesus as Lord just as they first did in Jesus's time. It's been estimated that there were a million Messianic Jews in that century (Acts 21:20 mentions many myriads, at least 30,000), and that there are again a million Messianic Jews today. These people don't get to be told "you're not Jews you're Christians", nor "you're not Christians you're Jews"; they are our brothers. The other millions, the Rabbinical Jews, should be evangelized. For instance, the Catholic Church has a vicariate of the LPJ that allows Jews who believe in Jesus to continue Jewish traditions like Passover while worshipping as full Roman Catholics. The fact that many Jews (and Gentiles) are satanists does not dissuade us from evangelizing any group. Thank you for understanding.

Video not supported. Since Jesus is my Lord and the pope calls me a separated brother, some people on the forum think all such people are the new Jews. I used to say I wasn't ethnically or rabbinically Jewish, but then I realized most askers don't take my word for it; since nobody knows, I decided it would be better for me to suffer with any race or group that anyone mischaracterizes me as. Like Paul who is all things to all men, I identify as everything.

Why don't you answer my questions?

Is there something about Catholicism that makes people not answer questions?

Did you want to share what truth Christians twist into something else? We're not perfect.

Problem exists between internet and brain.

That's why the standard has to be the objective authority of the Church which holds the correct interpretation (singular).

That's circular, Patrick! What if First Century Bible Church, the parent ministry of Swamp Rangers, is the singular Church which holds the correct interpretation? I've got our apostolic succession around here somewhere. More particularly, Catholics argue exactly the same way.

You mean against YOUR interpretation of Scripture.

And you test your experience against your interpretation of the words of Scripture And Tradition. Everyone has the same epistemological lack, which cannot be made up by humans alone but only by God reaching in and delivering regeneration and faith. I do not count on myself to be right but only on God to be right in giving faith to fallible me.

But only the correct paradigm, and I'd argue that's the Orthodox Church, has the wholeness of the faith.

Seems to me nobody can have the whole wholeness, or else all Christians partake of sufficient wholeness. It's very interesting and the debate about circularity has gone on a long time.

Why do you not answer my questions like a student of truth?

When you are in Jesus and in the Church, what would you have to fear from the truth?

Would it upend your theology if Jesus was Jewish or if the Catholic Church had a ministry to Messianic Jews that allows them to keep their culture (the Saint James Vicariate for Hebrew-Speaking Catholics, in the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem)?

Does your theology deserve to be upended if it is untrue?

Have you asked your priest about these things and about your namecalling?

The math wouldn't change but there would be an Era of Ophiuchus (not a sphinx) that would overlap with others.

Christian's don't act "in the sense of the Almighty Creator". Pagan kings have fought for the Lord's work in spite of themselves.

No Christian confession found, only ecumenical theism and "Christian movement".

Adolf painted Jesus as someone other than he was, so I suspect he worshipped the wrong Jesus. Bonhoeffer said so and he's pretty reliable on the subject.

Child porn is evil and should not be tolerated.