I've said all along that calling it something like "origination and sending without procession or spiration" is just argument over the same thing with different definitions applying.
I just explained how that's not the case - is you being born of your father the same as your brother sending you to do some work? Maybe consider that theological disputes that led to the splitting of the Church are not over semantics?
All I have to do is invert. Our Church and Tradition judges that we have apostolic succession through Luther and that the Eastern Church are the heterodox by not agreeing with Luther when they had and have access (he tried!); and Eastern claims to the contrary have already been proven wrong by our tradition, even if it sounds silly and illogical to them and we don't explain it very well, because our tradition is The True Church. You see how it doesn't work in the reverse direction, and why I don't think it works in your direction either?
You can't because you don't have a Church and tradition, that's the point. You have denominations which agree on some things and disagree on other things. We've been over this. Luther's theology has nothing to do with what the Early Church teaches so pretending he was on the same footing as the Orthodox Church is just stupid. There were no "Luthers" in the first millennium. There was a universal apostolic and synodal Church. Actually there were guys like Luther but all of them were excomunicated like Nestorius, Valentian, Origen and Tertullian.
Which is why I say feel free to keep the theology of "exceptions for good reason" and be prepared to be called on any variances from that theology.
I don't keep anything. It's not up to me to pick and choose what the faith is. I am convinced EO is the true Church and I follow it a 100%.
But you don't feel qualified to answer about conscience from your own being born or catechized into Orthodoxy, you refer me to the bishop. Got it.
Exactly. If you want to learn about Orthodoxy you have to go to the physical Church and talk to the clergy. I can only reiterate the teachings of the Church and my opinions as an Orthodox layman. There's a hierarchy within the Church. You probably won't be talking to a bishop but to a priest who was ordained by the bishop. The bishops are those who have apostolic succession and lead the Church.
("Christ sent the Spirit"? Sounds like filioque to me! What is this change?)
No. This is the Orthodox teaching of the Church Fathers. The filioque claims double hypostatic procession of the Spirit and it has to do with the origin of the Spirit. The Spirit spirates from the Father, not the Son. The Son sending the Spirit is the Spirit originating from Him.
But there it sounds like you know for certain that all Protestants are disconnected from extranormative unity. That sounds like arguing over the size of the exception, that's all.
I knew you would go there and that's why I emphasized extranormative union applies to exceptions where there's good reason for the person not to be received in the Church through normative means. This is not the case with Protestants today, who have access to the Church but choose not to come to it out of their own volition and because they persist in their heterodox teachings.
Protestants typically reject "sheep-stealing" and so I generally stick with where my family grew up because I have vital connection. If someone says I must lose something I have in Christ to join their church, that's suspicious, and my perception of what is loss must be tested as well as their own perception of gain.
Leading sheep back to the Church is sheep saving actually. In th end you have to choose between the world and Christ. If the Truth leads you away from your community and family, so be it.
Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.
- Matthew 16:24
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household.
- Matthew 10:34-36
Yes, might makes right can't be Christian because only God is the standard for what's right and only God is almighty and everyone else's might is given to them by God.
As stated in Scripture, God sometimes allows pagan nations to oppress His people (in our case the Christian nations, not the jews) when they become degenerate and apostatize. This is exactly what's happening today - our own degeneracy has led us to be subjugated by the oppressive technocratic elite that seeks to enslave us in their beast system much like Nebuchadnezzar did in the OT.
Is Nick a darwinist? I forgot Catholics embrace theistic evolution which is retarded.
All of the Royal Society gang were like this. The RS families are the fathers of the NWO way back when the British Empire was the hegemon.
He was right. It was a demonic delusion. He, along with Freud and Marx are the greatest villains of the modern world. We have to thank those guys for how the world is currently.
Of course I can tell you you're wrong, but I can't force you to see it any more than I'm telling you I think you're wrong now and you don't see it. If the Orthodox Church told you you were wrong and you disagreed, you'd be out of there. (Or else perhaps you swore to always agree with whatever the bishop tells you even if he abuses his power because he's the bishop.) Orthodoxy doesn't solve the problem of people being wrong either. People who think they're the Church either work it out with others who think they're the Church (proving they are) or they don't forever (proving they're not). Simple.
You telling me I'm wrong is your subjective opinion. Truth doesn't care about subjective opinions. The Orthodox Church holds the objective standard for what the true faith is - not single individuals in or outside of it. The Church has a living body that is visible and mystical just like you have a living body - both physical and spiritual. It has a head just like you have a head. The difference is that the head of your body is your human mind, and the head of the Church is Christ. This is why Protestants worship the self, their own head and not Christ. Because you can't be in one with the head if you're not part of the body. You have to submit to the Church thus letting Christ be your head (through the bishops and priests who were given their office by Him - apostolic succession).
Here's the correct (only) path to knowing God:
- The Spirit moves us and brings us to the Church.
- The Church (Body of Christ) unites us to Christ.
- Through Christ we are united with the Father.
This mirrors God's plan for our salvation: God the Father sent Christ who then sent the Spirit.
TLDR: You're free to proceed any way you like. If you think I might be worth a little more of your evanglistic effort, we might try again with how catechesis works. How do I submit to the bishop or catechist, what's being asked of me, what do I do with my conscience? We might also work on those two positions I identified.
Go to an EO Church (if you're in the US, I'd suggest ROCOR) and talk to a priest about becoming a catechumen. If the priest is well-disposed you may ask him questions that you're struggling with. Beside that read the early Church fathers and look up Orthodox channels on youtube like Orthodox Ethos, Jay Dyer, Patristic Nectar, Orthodox Wisdom, Father Spyridon.
Is Metropolitan Kallistos right to say "We know where the Church is but we cannot be sure where it is not"? Is Theophan the Recluse right to say "Christ is here, in our Orthodox Church, and He is not in any other church"? Orthodox disagree interpreting those two!
Both are correct and are not contradictory if understood in context. There are no other churches because the Church is only one. What the metropolitan says has to do with normative and extra normative ways to be united to the Church. There's no salvation outside the Church but God can work out ways that are not understood by us and are not revealed to us. The normative is baptism and chrismation. The extra normative is God uniting people to the Church outside the rituals and proper worship, because He knows their heart - this of course is the exception to the rule and in no way suggests that people outside of the Church should hope to be saved by exception. We have a duty to seek God and enter the Church through the front door. The exception is for people who have a good reason in God's eyes why they didn't do that.
The best example of such extra normative union to the Church is the righteous thief on the cross. This is central to the Orthodox tradition, hence the Orthodox cross having the tipped line on the bottom, signifying the thieves crucified along with Jesus and their respective judgement. As Orthodox we follow what God has commanded through His Church but we can never know God's ways and we can't set boundaries to them.
Of course they weren't. You have to be a complete ignoramus of history and philosophy of ideas to think that.
National socialism is as antichristian as any socialist ideology. It stems from the Enlightenment freemasonic triadic mantra "Liberty - Equality - Fraternity" just like all other revolutionary ideologies. This together with the left-right dialectic (radical communism and socialism vs capitalism and libertarianism) of the French Revolution and the nationalism-internationalism dialectic defines every movement in the past 250 years.
On top of that nazis are occultists and the Party follows the model of the secret societies originating from illuminism, freemasonry and the jesuits. Keep in mind all movements are based on liberalism, revolutionary ethos and republicanism at its core (just like the French Revolution). What they disagree on is the model of the NWO and how it should be achieved. Here are examples:
-
Nazism and Fascism are nationalist left-wing Fraternity with right-wing tendencies
-
Bolshevism is internationalist left-wing Equality
-
Sovietism (USSR after Stalin) is nationalist left-wing Equality
-
Liberal democracies are internationalist right-wing Liberty (based on classical liberalism) with left-wing tendencies
Dude I can't deal with your filibustering and walls of texts. We're going in circles but the circles only get bigger because you can't write to the point. I'm addressing this and tapping out.
there is only every man's conception of Scripture and Tradition, which often largely overlap. (There's never even been a collection of perfect autographs of the whole Scripture in one place, God deliberately kept the several inspired manuscripts away from each other so we'd recognize via copying that we are imperfect carriers.)
You don't see the problem with this? What does "largely overlap" entail? An appeal to majority's interpretation? For the last time: You don't have a standard against which to judge what the correct interpretation of both scripture and tradition is. If one protestant believes in baptism and the other doesn't when both appeal to their interpretation of Scripture, how do you arbiter this?
So "Tradition" is not a standard because it doesn't externally exist to our experience, unless we count it as a concept in God's ineffable mind, something that we each collectively and substantially approximate.
Wrong. Tradition exists externally in the Church which keeps it. It doesn't exist externally in your system where very denomination or Bible reader makes up their own tradition by deconstructing and reforming what came before. Sure, some are more conservative with the process but that's arbitrary - both radicals and conservatives are equally Protestant (same goes for "protestantism" in the political realm - the left/right republicans where both sides are equally revolutionary and opposed to true conservatism which is monarchy and Church). Just like everything else in this system, it's entirely subjective and built around the individual and their immediate relationship with God. It is self-worship guised as Christianity. Protestantism is at its core satanic because it appeals to man and not God (the Church being His Body and His Spirit) as the authority. I can be a protestant and deny all previous traditions while interpreting Scripture in the most schizo way possible and you still wouldn't be able to tell me that I'm wrong and I'm not the Church. As long as I appeal to Scripture we're at an equal footing epistemologically.
Hitler was a patsy for the international banking cabal. They propped him up as an antithesis to the liberal democracies (just like they propped up the bolsheviks). They knew he was a keg of powder and wanted a war in order to complete the destruction of the old throne and Church world order (which WWI began). But while the bolshevik regime was strictly jewish and talmudic, the nazis we're it's antithesis. In reality all governments at that point were revolutionary modeled after the French revolution dialectic of girondins (right) and jacobins (left) - democratic or authoritarian, nationalistic or internationalistic. True conservatism was destroyed. The synthesis was the NWO post WWII, the eternal victimization of jews and the creation of Israel. It's all dialectics all the time. Once you know the mechanism it's too obvious.
This is how Count Cherep-Spiridovich among others knew about all the wars years before they came. He understood the Protocols.
So is the OrthodoxWiki conception of the Invisible Church in heaven. I merely point out that some of the church is invisible on earth due to its incomplete acceptance of the hierarchical churches.
Come on, you're being bad faith again. Did you miss the part where the Orthodox also believe in the visible historic Church here on Earth? Don't cherry pick but look at the whole picture.
This seems to accord with agnosticism about where the Spirit is not.
Exactly, all you have is negative theology. The Orthodox have both the negative and the positive claim as to where the Spirit is and isn't. Protestants don't have an objective standard for that - it's whatever individuals claim to have the Spirit and profess a generic faith in Christ and even that standard is subjective to each person (because each person reading the Bible is the ultimate authority).
I appreciate your reference to Palamas, but I think that route (though I suggested it) would then lead to circular defense, because the latest is always said to have come from before. But the earliest teaching of any proposition is "new" in its time. And that's how the Scriptural canon works: books kept getting added to the Word that had already been approved and each book took its centuries to have unanimous approval, Revelation being the fastest approved perhaps. Well, each book is "change" and "novelty", but over time it becomes Tradition.
It's not circular - it's regressive and ultimately goes back to the beginning of the apostolic Church. What the Early Church taught is the standard against which later teachings are verified. This is why appealing to the Scripture doesn't work, because it was compiled by the Church at a later stage and wasn't there initially. This is the defeater argument against Sola Scriptura.
But maybe Orthodoxy has closed its canon of Tradition like we agree the canon of Scripture is closed. I don't recognize that epoch, I see reasons why Tradition must remain open. I appeal to Stephen's reference to "living oracles" being understood in Messianism as oral tradition remaining flexible, not static.
The tradition is not closed because it's living. There are contemporary Saints of the Church. What you propose is evolution of doctrine which is a RC idea. But the dogmas and doctrines of the early Church reflect truth and changing truth leads to falsehood. What would necessitate such a change today?
Thanks for admitting. Protestantism by its name means not that Rome is false (that was an extreme) but that Rome erred in handling Luther. That's nominal united agreement even when Protestants forget their name. Since Rome takes about 911 years to apologize (1054-1965), we're still waiting. Protestants believe the Church continues otherwise but that radical times called for flexibility about physically demonstrated succession (just as they do for flexibility about water baptism and even Eucharist). The conservatives recognize Rome (and Luther tried to partner with Constantinople but the work was physically undoable at that distance).
You're playing word games. It doesn't matter how the name of the movement came to be, but what the movement was and it was a radical theological movement in opposition to the Western Church and not just a reaction to a political incident. Of course the Reformers believed Rome was false and denied the authority of the Pope and the See's indefectibility. Again, they may recognize certain aspects of the tradition but to determine that they'd need to have a standard which is other than tradition itself. Hence, they had to claim Sola Scriptura as their standard to judge tradition, but I've already explained why that doesn't work (because tradition is prior to and more fundamental than Scripture; it produced Scripture and encompasses it).
So again the similarity is that we have sufficient assurance our church is right enough, we constantly test our assurance, and we decline to judge other professing churches except in extreme cases. And that seems compatible with the Orthodox view.
No you don't and you don't have a standard to judge that. What does "right enough" entail? You're appealing to sufficiency which also requires a standard. Where is the cutoff point where one's not "right enough" anymore?
For an Orthodox to say that Orthodoxy has perfect assurance of continuing in its own name, no need to keep tested daily, or perfect ability to judge outside its jurisdiction, seems incompatible with it
The true Church has assurance given by Christ. If I can demonstrate the Orthodox Church is the true Church (and going back to Church history proves that) then whatever it judges, it is right because it has the guidence of the Spirit.
Again you are commended for your dogged maintenance of this discussion and it's helpful to me; perhaps your sharing your ideas of how Orthodoxy will someday under Messiah heal the breach and welcome Protestants back en masse under some agreements and negotiations (while definitively ruling out the heretics among us) will be a useful tack to take.
Our eschatology differs. You mean after Christ second advent? Everyone who renounces their false beliefs and wishes to come to the true Church is welcomed at any time of course. No negotiations or compromises with the faith are possible, even if it means that only one Orthodox person is left in the world. Anything else would amount to surrendering the true faith and abandoning the Church. If any Orthodox Church does that then it's no longer the Church (here's looking at you, Bartholomew seeking to unite with Rome). Those outside the Church are like the prodigal son or the lost sheep but in the end we're told there will be few people, even among the nominally Orthodox, who would have kept the faith and the commandments as Christ has ordered. So I don't think we'll be seeing more people coming to their senses and coming to the Church but the opposite. Jesus prophesized that false teachings and deceptions will multiply in the end times.
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.
They may say that, but they can't justify the claim. What is the Body of their Church - a collection of all believers in Christ as God in the most generic and inclusive sense? It's an abstraction and there are no real boundaries. They apply an arbitrary standard and pick and choose things within the tradition (like the Bible, elements of worship, particular Church fathers and councils). Again, there are elements of the true faith, but it's not the wholeness of the faith. It's a binary - you either have the true faith or you don't. There's no 90% faith or having 90% overlap of consensus between all sects that leads to communality. Truth can't be mixed with lies. Even the smallest lie will poison the whole system. This is why it's crucial to defend the faith as deposited in the Church.
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.
The individual agents act in accordance with the mystical body of the Church, not on their own accord. You insist on presenting it the other way around to prop up your false equivalence with the Protestant system which puts the Spirit moving individuals first.
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.
That's another false equivalence. In Orthodoxy you're not in a position to judge the decisions of the Church. You may study them and see their reasoning but if you disagree with anything and prefer your reasoning, that automatically leads you to sectarianism, i.e. you and not the Church being the authority and having primacy in judging on theological matters. You see - by the mere act of approaching the matter this way you assume the Protestant framework.
Orthodoxy is having unanimity on all matters of faith. If some contradiction occurs, it has to be resolved - the false teaching condemned and the true teaching affirmed. The arbitration between the true and the false is the Spirit working through the Church, because this task is impossible for the fallible human faculties alone.
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.
You could try. One of the latest teachings in Orthodoxy is Palama's essence/energies distinction which was prompted by Barlaam's western-influenced teaching which contradicted the teachings of the Church. So even this "new" teaching is not new at all but an elaboration of what the previous Fathers taught, brought about by the need to refute this novel contention.
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.
The other contenders would be the apostolic traditions that are alive today - RC, Nestorian, Oriental, Coptic. As already mentioned, (Reformed) Protestantism is not a tradition dating back to the Early Church but a radical innovation of the RC tradition (same for Anglicans). It's not even a single tradition, because it's solely defined as opposition to prior tradition and lacks unity of confession (the closest unified Protestant doctrine are the Solas I guess, but one can still be a Protestant even if they reject it). But even if I grant you that Protestants inherit their tradition from Rome, then if RC is proven false, Protestantism is false too by association. But the whole point of the Reformers is that RC is false. Therefore such appeal to tradition is self-refuting.
In the end true Protestantism is radical individualism and nominalism which were later philosophical developments historically. At the time of Christ and the early Church Fathers those ideas didn't even exist (that's another defeater for Protestantism).
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?
Don't have time rn so I'll answer this only.
Interpretation of the Church is not just written word - it's the teaching of the Church and the living tradition as a whole. For example icons are no less important than the texts. Dogma is very concise for the purpose of conveying the correct teaching. But even the Nicaean creed could be misinterpreted so it is always to be understood within the Church tradition. The crux of the matter is this - Orthodox claim that the Spirit was sent to the Church at Pentecost and provides it with His guidance, making sure the faith is kept
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?
Such judgments are done by the Church, not by individuals. The decision to condemn a teaching as heretical is debated and justified and argumented by the council. We can go over all condemned heresies and look at how the Church came to its judgment in each case and the reasons given. No one argues based on the Spirit because it's question begging - where the Spirit resides becomes apparent by exposing the heresy and the Church successfully keeping the true apostolic faith intact. The verification method is not adding or making up stuff that was not there before - it's that simple.
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)?
We'll know that when they abandon their false teachings and come to the Orthodox faith. In fact, the dying away of those movements is a testament to their falsity because the Church will exist to the end of time.
Except you keep appealing to it and saying everything needs to be justified.
I just told you there are two more resolutions to the epistemological problem (Münchhausen trilemma). I go the coherentism route where the whole system itself serves as justification. That's why my argument is at the worldview level. Ultimately it's TAG - demonstrating that the Triune God is the necessary precondition for metaphysics, logic, ethics and epistemology which is the basis of every possible worldview.
The majority have consciences that function according to God's principles, that is my point.
That's begging the question. You have to justify this belief (i.e. where do you get it from)? The point is ultimately you have to appeal to divine revelation to justify it.
So as I said you're no different to everyone else who has to argue for their views and argue against others. You didn't mention the Bible as part of this process because it doesn't prove anything unless one already accepts its veracity.
Exactly. This is a philosophical argument, not a theological one. Asserting your worldview is true is meaningless so that can't be the starting point. The starting point are those things that both sides assume by necessity and by virtue of debating (logic, knowledge, truth, etc.)
On the other hand if one believes in a creator then nature is already accepted to be from the creator and then one either has to accept the wisdom of nature or provide reasons for why they reject it.
The problem is you have to justify those assertions. Christians have direct knowledge of the Creator and His wisdom because He has revealed Himself. So divine revelation serves as justification. The creation itself can't reveal anything on it's own because it's subject to interpretation. When looking at nature you see a wise Creator but a materialist sees seemingly purposeless matter governed by laws of physics and cause and effect that has led to all this.
Christians reject it because they have a story of how nature became corrupted, but they have no evidence for this story so it amounts to an unjustified rejection.
The evidence for the Bible story is the Christian worldview itself - it's ability to justify metaphysics, epistemology, logic and ethics.
But I never argued that nature means the same thing to all these people. My argument is that the natural world or universe (planets, plants, animals and so on) was made by the creator, and almost everyone believed that before philosophy sought absolute proof of everything and found God (along with everything else) can't be absolutely proven. Therefore we can learn about God through the natural world, which came from God, rather than anything else of which we have no good evidence God is the proximate cause. Yes there are different ways of extracting knowledge from nature which lead to bad and contradictory conclusions, but this doesn't invalidate my claim and that some ways are better than others.
Many people believing somthing is an appeal to majority and it doesn't tell us if that something is true. Again, there's no such a thing as generic common denominator God - if such an entity exists it has to have certain properties that define it. Is it personal (a he, she, they/them) or unpersonal force or realm like Plato's monad. Is he/it uncreated or created (part of the creation). Did he create the world ex nihilo or out of prima materia (meaning matter preceded it/him). Is he the sole creator or are there others like him/them? Does he have providence and participation in the creation, or is the creation a wound-up mechanism that is left on its own device as deists believe? Is he moral or amoral? Did he create everything out of necessity or out of his own free will (assuming he has it)? Etc...
I'll close with this thought experiment:
Imagine you're a disembodied psychic alien coming from another realm, who's never heard of humans. You see a painting without prior knowledge of what paintings are or where they come from. How would you come to the conclusion that paintings are produced by humans and what can the painting itself tell you about what a human is like?
Now swap the painting with the creation and the human with the creator.
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.
What if God is the Flying Spaghetti Monster and we're all wrong?
The answer is simply that it was not the case because we know what the early Church looked like and what they taught based on the Church fathers and Scripture (Acts and Epistles).
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.
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. 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.
I do not count on myself to be right but only on God to be right in giving faith to fallible me.
But so do all Protestants, and they hold contrary beliefs to yours. There's no way to arbiter between all those position when you all hold the same epistemological presupposition. How do you justify the belief that one Protestant (or a whole denomination) is true and not the other ones over there?
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.
Can you justify that claim? Historically Jesus established one universal apostolic Church that encompassed all of the Christians so even if you believe the Church was split later on, it logically follows that it was united in it's beginning at Pentecost. Sufficiency is problematic too, because it assumes a criterion for what's sufficient. But that has to be justified too.
As I've already said in another thread, the current system is ultimately digital and ran on servers. Real money creation is 1s and 0s on bank servers. Cash comes downstream to this system and its 10% of all money in circulation.
We've been over this. It's not the same. You're the one who wants to keep the current system, as long as it's cash, which is ran by the Fed.
All of this literally happens through the current fiat system as we speak. I wonder who profits from ATM transactions, interest rates and bank accounts? Do we pretend this never happened?
Sure but BTC isn't centralized. My point was we can't escape the power grid and digitalization but can escape money centralization in the hands of international jews and their ghouls.
You are either retarded, a subversive, or both.
Ad hominem instead of addressing what I wrote is a fallacy. It seems you're the retarded/subversive one.
You're helping your neighbor. Not that you'd understand the importance of community. It's not even charity because you're not sacrificing anything - just lending money you don't use that you'll get back. Charging interest on that is immoral kikery.
Exodus 22:25 “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.”
Explain what's wrong about lending money with no interest?
No, it means that some who believe they have the Spirit are wrong, so belief must be continuously tested.
Exactly. That's why the standard has to be the objective authority of the Church which holds the correct interpretation (singular). Pluralism leads to the aforementioned contradiction.
Heretics from Orthodoxy also believed they had the Spirit and thought themselves continuing to be Orthodox after they were excommunicated. So failure is not a theological corollary, it's an endemic risk that attacks the Protestants more easily (just as the risk of tyranny attacks central hierarchies more easily).
Again, it doesn't matter what individuals believe about the faith. They are not the standard. It's not only that Protestants run a risk of being wrong - their problem is that they lack an epistemological standard that can tell them if they are following the true faith or not. It's all personal subjective belief informed by personal interpretation of Scripture. Protestants lack epistemological grounding. It's all floating in circular space within their head.
Correct if held; but ultimately then the answer is I constantly test my experience against Word and Spirit, and have substantial (possibly fluctuant) assurance of salvation, not perfect assurance.
You mean against YOUR interpretation of Scripture. That's a circle.
A logical issue is that you're making charges against "Protestant theology" when it's a myriad, and I too am defending "theology" when it's still a myriad. We have many official practices that are "best", and "worst". It seems that we must both retreat a bit to "what Protestant theology should be" and when we do that we find it very harmonious with Orthodoxy. In that case I'd agree on most all your charges that Protestantism shouldn't be that, and I'd disown sects that do teach that (and you might agree with some of my statements what Protestants should be and occasionally are). We might then only disagree on why the two don't rejoin, which is good because then we could give steps for both sides to advance union in Christ that would address current concerns (as the Orthodox have lately done with other groups), without being "ecumenicalists".
I'm arguing against the basic presuppositions of Protestantism. In this case their epistemology which is informed by the Sola Scriptura doctrine. I'm doing an internal critique of the Protestant system which is shared by pretty much all denominations and I exposed it's internal contradictions and fallacious logic.
Protestants still can come to correct teachings but that doesn't make their paradigm correct. Even atheists can come to true beliefs about the world. But only the correct paradigm, and I'd argue that's the Orthodox Church, has the wholeness of the faith. This is why branch theory doesn't work.
Lol what does FTX has to do with BTC? "Oh no, there are people running crypto scams, therefore the whole system is corrupt". Do you think banks were free of corruption prior to Wall Str.? Seems like a double standard to me.
I literally gave you an example why the Orthodox and the Catholic position is not the same and you've blown past though it... Orthodoxy taches monarchical Trinitarianism - the Father is the origin of the Trinity. He begets the Son and spirates the Spirit. The theological consequences of the filioque are devastating. Here's a video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDwuQqPr-rM
The resolution of the filioque is for Rome to renounce this development and return to the original Nicaean creed. But you understand that admitting they've taught error for 1000 years will automatically destroy their whole system so that's not happening. Btw, as I already said if Rom falls, Protestantism falls too because you adopted their tradition and their teachings like the filioque.
You don't have apostolic succession through Luther. Luther wasn't a bishop to begin with. He never claimed to have apostolic succession. He doesn't need it for his system which is based on personal inspiration, Sola Christus and Sola Scriptura. He literally made up that system to undermine the authority of the Pope which is guaranteed by tradition and apostolic succession. You're making up stuff to check the boxes you see that are missing in your system. This is idiocy.
That's not a mark but a necessary precondition. There are many things which define and identify the Church. The reason I call it the True Church is to set it apart from all the heterodox who use the term to denote multiple sects. The Church can only be one. There are no 100 bodies of Christ. There's no division within His Body either, but complete unity in sacraments and creed. Everyone is in communion in the Church through baptism and the Eucharist. The fullness of truth and grace is only in the Church. If "a Church" doesn't lay claim to being the single true Church, then it's definitely not it. Branch theory is unscriptural. But if you are a Lutheran and believe the Lutheran Church - the specific denomination that has common creed and tradition - is the true Church then you're past that hurdle. Now all you have to do is demonstrate how that's the case. You can't of course because of the stated above.
Correct, Origen wasn't excommunicated but his teachings were condemned. Tertullian left the Church for montanism. He didn't bring anything back to Christianity - he became the leader of that sect and influenced it but didn't return to the Church. His earlier writings are considered authoritative but he's not canonized as a saint.