Abraham fighting Moses: All on the Same Side - A Historicist view of the War in Israel.

[Adventist Heretic]

I have been wanting to post on this for a while but did not have the right time or context to do so. Now seems to be the right time. The right time because of the War in Isreal with Palestine brings this subject into focus and relevance.

Many people are very unaware of what the bible says about Israel/ the Jews & the church in the last days. if you believe that covenants are continual and perpetual then you will accept the view that the Chruch did not replace Isreal, but has its own covenant. So then the covenant and the promises to Israel remain and the Covenant and the Promise to the Church remain.

What most people do not realize is that there is another Covenant with Promises that remains Abraham's Covenant. Included in this covenant were Lot, Ismael, Issac, Midian & Easu, Issac went on to have Jacob who went on to become Isreal, but the other covenant members still remain.

There are prophecies in the bible concerning these other members: Midian, Edom, Moab, and Ammon. Daniel 11:41 Edom, Moab, and Cheif son Ammon. Midian was spoken of as contributing to the Isreal's fortunes in Isa 60:6. some see it as a reference to the Messiah's first coming, and some see it as a prophecy of Israel's return to Palestine. Midian is the oppressor in the story of Gideon in Judges 6 & 7 and is called "locust", the only person to be called locust in the bible. Which brings us to the final part of this prophecy.

Some see the locust of Revelation 9 as referring to the Abrahamic people, associated with Midian, which would be Islam, and the Star which fell, as Muhammad the Prophet who would fall, who was called to enforce God's law but in the process, because of their anger at sin, obscured the glory of God chocked the Holy Spirit. Muhammad who was called to force people to obey did not always obey, In other words, the one who called for Submission did not always submit. Muhammad was called to protect the Mosaic and Abrahamic Covenant Territories until God needed to return Israel to the Land. The Ottoman Empire and the Califate were implemented to ensure that this would occur. They lasted until it was time for Israel to come back. Which brings us to the current conflict.

What you are seeing play out are 2 players on the same side who are talking past each other, When they should be helping each other. They each have different roles Israel is the "keeper of God's oracles of God" Romans 3:2 they are God's administrators. Islam is the Law enforcer, the strength of Abraham, and possibly the builder of the temple. For the record Christianity is the recruiter and the trainer Matt 28:18-20.

This brings me to the final point, Islam was only purpose is to protect Abraham and Moses. God needs them to move aside and let Israel assume its rightful position for it is their job. This is preparing for the return of the Lord. They are identified in scripture with the locust of revelation 9 and have a purpose that purpose has been fulfilled, they now need to help Israel protect the Mosaic and Abrahamic territories.

 

[The Liturgist]

I have been wanting to post on this for a while but did not have the right time or context to do so. Now seems to be the right time. The right time because of the War in Isreal with Palestine brings this subject into focus and relevance.

Many people are very unaware of what the bible says about Israel/ the Jews & the church in the last days. if you believe that covenants are continual and perpetual then you will accept the view that the Chruch did not replace Isreal, but has its own covenant. So then the covenant and the promises to Israel remain and the Covenant and the Promise to the Church remain.

What most people do not realize is that there is another Covenant with Promises that remains Abraham's Covenant. Included in this covenant were Lot, Ismael, Issac, Midian & Easu, Issac went on to have Jacob who went on to become Isreal, but the other covenant members still remain.

There are prophecies in the bible concerning these other members: Midian, Edom, Moab, and Ammon. Daniel 11:41 Edom, Moab, and Cheif son Ammon. Midian was spoken of as contributing to the Isreal's fortunes in Isa 60:6. some see it as a reference to the Messiah's first coming, and some see it as a prophecy of Israel's return to Palestine. Midian is the oppressor in the story of Gideon in Judges 6 & 7 and is called "locust", the only person to be called locust in the bible. Which brings us to the final part of this prophecy.

Some see the locust of Revelation 9 as referring to the Abrahamic people, associated with Midian, which would be Islam, and the Star which fell, as Muhammad the Prophet who would fall, who was called to enforce God's law but in the process, because of their anger at sin, obscured the glory of God chocked the Holy Spirit. Muhammad who was called to force people to obey did not always obey, In other words, the one who called for Submission did not always submit. Muhammad was called to protect the Mosaic and Abrahamic Covenant Territories until God needed to return Israel to the Land. The Ottoman Empire and the Califate were implemented to ensure that this would occur. They lasted until it was time for Israel to come back. Which brings us to the current conflict.

What you are seeing play out are 2 players on the same side who are talking past each other, When they should be helping each other. They each have different roles Israel is the "keeper of God's oracles of God" Romans 3:2 they are God's administrators. Islam is the Law enforcer, the strength of Abraham, and possibly the builder of the temple. For the record Christianity is the recruiter and the trainer Matt 28:18-20.

This brings me to the final point, Islam was only purpose is to protect Abraham and Moses. God needs them to move aside and let Israel assume its rightful position for it is their job. This is preparing for the return of the Lord. They are identified in scripture with the locust of revelation 9 and have a purpose that purpose has been fulfilled, they now need to help Israel protect the Mosaic and Abrahamic territories.

Forgive me, but I believe you are entirely mistaken.

Firstly, the State of Israel exists and while there are legitimate ethical concerns about its establishment, and legitimate grievances about how it continues to treat the Palestinians, the most concerning of which from a Christian perspective involve issues relating to the civilian population, particularly those coming from the Christian population of the West Bank, who live predominantly in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Israel has a right to exist by virtue of the fact that displacing people from their homes is inherently unethical and reprehensible, even when such action is in response to a prior unjust displacement of people. As Christians we cannot endorse repaying evil for evil. As Christians, it is our responsibility to intervene for a peaceful reconciliation between the State of Israel and the Palestinians.

From an eschatological perspective, however, it must be stressed that the State of Israel does not appear, contrary to the beliefs of some evangelicals, to have any unique signifigance from a Christian perspective, particularly since it does not include the entire Jewish population, and also considering the indifference that the large population of Charedi and Chassidic Jews have towards the Israeli government, and the interesting fact that the birth rate among these “ultra-orthodox Jews” as they are often called are much higher than among the mainstream Zionist population (I also find myself unsettled by the recent spate of documentaries that seem to be interested in criticizing the Charedim and Chassidic populations, who in my view are quite benign compared to the Mormons, Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesesses, and Buddhists, and most especially the Hindus and even more so the Muslims, who together with the Communists have an impressive track record of persecution inflicted against Christians, which in the case of Islam is rivaled only by Communism itself.

The interesting fact is that if current trends continue, the majority of the Jewish population of Israel will be a mix of the Ethiopian Jews known as the Beta Israel, and the Chassidic and Charedi Jews, who are not enthusiastic about Zionism as a project. So unless the more secular and moderate Jews increase their reproductive rates or engage in much more Aliyah (immigration to the Holy Land), over the course of the next century a political change seems inevitable due to changing demographics, and thus the priority of Christians must be to ensure that the Christian population in Israel, and especially that in Palestine, survives, because Christians, owing to our orientation towards forgiveness, can act as peacemakers and ensure the safety of the Jewish people and of the Arab people. If I recall, most Christians fled the Gaza Strip during the last uprising there in the 2000s, when Israel also disconnected utility service, and so the populations I am concerned with protecting are the Christian populations in the West Bank, which are largely concentrated in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Christians have repeatedly been caught in the crossfire of struggles between Islamists and Israeli security forces, for instance, in the invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and in 2002 when accused Palestinian terrorists sought refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which was then damaged in an assault by Israeli security forces.

It is the safety of our people who live there, many of whom are descended from the original Jewish and Gentile, Greek and Aramaic speaking converts to Christianity, who are members of the six ancient churches which jointly control the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and various other holy sites - the Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox (represented primarily by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, but other Eastern Orthodox churches also have a physical presence), and the Oriental Orthodox, including the Armenian Apostolic Church, which has its own Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and the Syriac Orthodox Church, which has a large number of members in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and controls the Monastery of St. Mark, one of the two possible locations for the Upper Rome (and the one I regard as more likely) and also St. Mary’s Church, which is immediately adjacent to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and was also damaged in the aforementioned incident. The other two groups are the Coptic Orthodox and the Ethiopian Orthodox, who have a smaller presence, which is administered through the Armenian Apostolic church if I recall correctly (my friend @dzheremi would know more about this).

Now, regarding Islam, I completely reject your suggestion that Islam somehow represents the Midianites. There were Christians in Arabia when Mohammed had his revelation; they even lived in Medina, along with the Jews, who Muhammed later exterminated in the first of many horrifying actions of genocide on the part of Islam.

Islamist regimes are directly responsible for the genocides that exterminated the Christians in Nubia and the Sudan (the ancient Nubian Orthodox Church, which was an Oriental Orthodox church like the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church), and the Christians of North Africa to the West of Egypt, in places such as Cyrene in Libya and Hippo, near Carthage, home to St. Augustine. Later, the Mongol-Turkic warlord Tamerlane, who is venerated as a national hero in Uzbekistan, where his mausoleum is located, launched a massive genocide against the Church of the East, which was at the time the largest Christian church, and also the legitimate representative, if any existed, of the Midians, since it was present in Arabia, as far south as the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen, and as far north as Turkey, and from those two points, it strectched across nearly the whole of Asia, reaching at least as far as Mongolia, China and Tibet (and possibly reaching into Korea and Southeast Asia; we know it was in Sri Lanka and indeed it has returned to Sri Lanka in recent decades). Tamerlane and his sons killed off all the members of this church outside of the Malabar Coast of India and the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. The members of this church at the time of the genocide are sometimes anachronistically called Nestorians or Assyrians (technically only the Syriac-speaking members in the Fertile Crescent, in Iraq, Iran, Kurdistan, Syria and Turkey are Assyrian, but Syriac was the liturgical language of the church, as it was originally established by St. Thomas, who travelled from Jerusalem through Edessa to Nineveh, Seleucia-Cstesiphon and onto Kerala, India, a trade route with a heavy Jewish and Gentile presence where Syrian Aramaic was the lingua franca, that had been established following the conquests of Alexander the Great). At present, the surviving members of the church are mostly Assyrian, with some Indians (although most of the Indians were forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism or due to a strange accident of history wound up as part of the Syriac Orthodox Church, which historically has had friendly relations with the Church of the East).

The Syriac Christians, whether Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Chaldean Catholic or Assyrian, were the victims of another genocide in 1915, which they call the Sayfo, against them, and the Armenians, which continued nearly until the end of WWI and killed the majority of both populations, including the vast majority of their members in Turkey. OVer a million Armenians and more than 250,000 Syriac Christians were killed by the Turks, for being Christian. The Pontic Greeks were the victims of the same genocide, only for them, it continued into the 1920s under Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, until a population exchange with Greece put an end to it, at the extremely high price of the loss of most of the ancient Christian communities in Asia Minor mentioned in the New Testament. Later, in the 1950s, the Turks conducted a genocide against the remaining Greeks in Istanbul, leaving only the small number of Phanariot Greeks who live in the neighborhood known as the Phanar, where the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and his small cathedral, never fully repaired from damages done to it by the Turks, is located.

Previously, in the 19th century, the Turks conducted genocides against the Greeks during their bid for independence, which was miraculously successful, and then in the 1870s, against the Bulgarian Orthodox Christians; the brutality of that genocide shocked the major powers of Victorian Europe so much that the same Christian nations that would tragically fight each other with such devastating effect in the First World War a few decades later banded together and liberated almost all of the European territories from Ottoman control, leaving them with scarcely more than the bit of land in Europe they have at the moment. The Turks lost the remaining portions of Greece that had not been secured during the war for independence in 1820, and also the province they called Roumelia, which included Bessarabia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Balkans.

More recently, the Turks backed an illegal invasion of Cyprus in which the Christians were expelled from the northern portion of the island.

But the Turks and the Uzbeks are far from the only Islamic practitioners of genocide. Following the Arab Spring, we saw the terrible persecution of Christians in Syria resulting from the Civil War, when Al Qaeda captured the Aramaic speaking town of Maaloula, desecrated its historic churches, destroying their icons, and taking the nuns from the local Antiochian Orthodox convent hostage for several months. Then, ISIS formed, and began genocidal acts against Syriac Christians in Iraq and Syria, also targeting the Yazidis and the Turkmen of Iraq. In Libya and Chad, ISIS murdered 19 Coptic Orthodox workers and about 60 Ethiopian Orthodox workers, respectively. There has been an ongoing genocide targeting Christians in the northern provinces of Nigeria. More recently, a genocide has begun in Syria. Also, NATO efforts in 1998 to prevent ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo somewhat backfired, as a large influx of Albanian Muslims resulted in the Serbian Christians being the victims of ethnic cleansing. It should be noted that there are many very good Christians in Albania, including Roman Catholics such as Mother Theresa, and Eastern Orthodox, and these suffered maximum persecution under the Muslim-born communist dictator Enver Hoxha (it is ironic that the worst Communist persecutor of Christians in Europe was of Islamic descent).

For the past several years, a genocide against Anglican and Catholic Christians has been heating up in Pakistan. Most recently, the Azerbaijanis conquered all of the historically Armenian land of Nagorno-Karabakh including the historic capital of Artsakh, causing the Armenian population to flee, but thousands are missing and unaccounted for, and it is feared a genocide may have occurred. In addition, the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage such as their beautiful churches and stone crosses is already in progress. This is why I have added PRAY FOR ARMENIA to my signature in the past few weeks, because 108 years after the first genocide, the Muslims are doing it to them again, with the backing of the Erdogan regime in Turkey.

For these reasons, and also because the accounts of Muhammed’s reception of his prophetic message from an alleged angel calling itself “Jibreel” (presumably seeking to impersonate Gabriel) have characteristics unlike those of Old Testament prophets but very much like those of demonic posession, and also because the Quran praises the murder of Jews and Christians, calling us “the worst of creatures,” and also because according to all official Islamic histories, Muhammed at the age of fifty married Aisha, his youngest wife, when she was six years old and consummated the marriage when she turned nine, which is why in some Muslim countries for married couples the age of consent is actually nine years old for women, so either he did this, which is horrible and disgusting, or else the official Muslim historical sources decided this was admirable behavior. In any case, from a Christian perspective it is revolting.

 

[The Liturgist]

Oh, by the way, the Midianites later formed an alliance with the Persians, and among the Persians the predominant Christian churches are the Assyrian Church of the East, the Roman Catholic Churchand the Armenian Apostolic Church, both of which consist largely of ethnic Persians, as a great many married into these two churches before the Islamic Revolution prohibited such intermarriage in 1979. Indeed at one time the Church of the East was commonly referred to in the Byzantine Empire as “the Persian Church” because it existed almost entirely outside the borders of the Byzantine Empire and its closest major population centers were within Persian Sassanid territory. It was the only church the Sassanians really trusted, and this, more than the fleeting involvement of the church with Nestorian expatriate theologians from Nisibis, is the main reason why the Church of the East tended to be somewhat isolated from the other ancient churches, with the exception of the Syriac Orthodox Church, with which it frequently had close relations, since the two churches territories met and to a large extent overlapped in Mesopotamia, which at the time was in the Persian Empire. Indeed the bishops presiding over the dioceses Mesopotamian part of the Syriac Orthodox Church, which also had dioceses in modern day Iran, although these have been gone for a long time due to genocide, were led by vice-Patriarch called the Maphrian.

One Maphrian, Mar Gregorios bar Hebraeus, who was of Jewish descent, as his last name indicates, became extremely close friends with the Catholicos, the Patriarch of the Church of the East, to the extent that when he died in an Assyrian town while returning from the Syriac Orthodox stronghold in Tikrit to the Monastery of St. Matthew in the hills above Mosul (which miraculously still exists and is still operational, having survived ISIS), the Catholicos organized his funeral and several thousand members of the Church of the East were present to mourn him and at his burial.

Likewise, the Antiochian Orthodox Church also historically had, and still has, a presence in Mesopotamia and at one time in Iran, and presently also in Qatar, and indeed, technically, before the schisms in the fifth century, the Church of the East was an autonomous part of the Patriarchate of Antioch, along with the Armenian church and the Georgian church, which is why those three churches are unique in their use of the title “Catholicos” to refer to their presiding bishop.

Many people like to argue that Muslims worship the same God we do, but i reject this idea unequivocally, since Muslims deny the Holy Trinity, regarding it as a form of polytheism, and also directly deny those teachings specific to Christians. One could make a case that the Zoroastrians at one time may have been a legitimate religion representing some of God’s people, owing to its marked similarity to Judaism, and it is obvious that the Samaritans are at least partially descended from the lost tribes of Northern Israel, most likely Ephraim and Manessah, as they claim, based on DNA evidence, which also indicates their Kohanim are descended from Aaron and their Levites are related to the Levites of the Jewish peoples, and also the Samaritan script in which their Torah, which is nearly identical to the Jewish one, differing only in an obvious interpolation regarding the holiness of Mount Gerizim, is written in a variant of the Paleo-Hebrew Script rather than the 22-character subset of the Imperial Aramaic “Square Letters” in which Hebrew has been written since around the time of the Babylonian Captivity, or shortly thereafter.

However, in the case of Islam, it is entirely obvious that Muhammed was not a true prophet of God, but a wolf in sheep’s clothing of the sort Christ our True God warned us of. We were advised that we would know who was legitimate and who was not by whether they taught the same Gospel, and through their deeds, and on both counts, the Islamic religion is demonstrably anti-Christian, in that it stresses revenge, rather than forgiveness, and regards suicidal attacks and dying in battle as a form of martyrdom, and lacks the Christian emphasis on sexual morality and control of the passions, and entirely rejects the commandment of Christ to love those who persecute us. Likewise, the deeds of Islam have consistently involved the brutal murder of Christians and members of other religions, and rape, and enslavement of women and children, and also polygamy and the marriage of young girls, and the brutal subjugation of conquered Christians and Jews, which in the Ottoman Empire even extended to the forcible taking of the firstborn sons of Christian families, so they could be converted to Islam, circumcized, brainwashed, and trained to fight as Janissaries. The Janissaries were recruited exclusively in this manner. There were many other horrors, for example, the Mamluk rulers of Egypt decided to suppress the Coptic language as best they could, so cut out the tongue of any Coptic Christian heard speaking it, and this led to the demise of Coptic as a vernacular language (although a superb education system in the diaspora among the youth means it has a legitimate possibility of coming back; @dzheremi , one of the local parishes in my area has won awards for its program in every age group among the youth, to the extend that the children actually are able to sing in Coptic and understand what they are singing - have you seen that in your area?

Regarding the horror of Islam, I reckon my Orthodox and Roman Catholic friends @prodromos @Lukaris @chevyontheriver and @concretecamper might also have something to add. Also I think my friend @MarkRohfrietsch might well have an interest in this subject.

 

[chevyontheriver]

Just a question about one thing you wrote:

Many people like to argue that Muslims worship the same God we do, but i reject this idea unequivocally, since Muslims deny the Holy Trinity, regarding it as a form of polytheism, and also directly deny those teachings specific to Christians.

And yet the Jews deny the Holy Trinity, regarding it as a form of polytheism and also directly deny those teachings specific to Christians. I get it the urge to say Islam really involves a different deity. But then how to speak consistently about Judaism?

 

[The Liturgist]

Just a question about one thing you wrote:

And yet the Jews deny the Holy Trinity, regarding it as a form of polytheism and also directly deny those teachings specific to Christians. I get it the urge to say Islam really involves a different deity. But then how to speak consistently about Judaism?

Well I take the view expressed by the Eastern Orthodox apologist Archpriest Andrew Stephen Damick, which would be that in order to worship God in spirit and truth, we must worship God as He really is, according to correct doctrine, and that doctrine matters, and I also agree with him that Rabinnical Judaism can be considered a newer religion than Christianity in that it emerged from the collapse of Second Temple Judaism after Christianity was already well established, and furthermore I agree with the Orthodox position that the Church consisted of the second Temple Judaism, and before that the ancient Hebrew religion, and before that the religion of Noah and his Sons, and before that the religion practiced by Adam and his descendants, in that the Church has always existed, since it is the Body of Christ, but it is in Christianity that it has reached its present fullness, in that its prior forms represented what it is now, for example, the shewbread and libations offered at the first and second temples were obviously symbols of the Eucharist that was to come, just as the animal sacrifices symbolized the future and all-sufficient sacrifice of Christ our True God.

I also accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of General Revelation, since it explains the similarity of religions, and I believe a charitable approach is required, and we see this in Acts when the Holy Apostle Paul came across the Greeks on the Areopagus worshipping at the Altar of the Unknown God, and Archpriest Andrew goes in that direction as well, when he highlights how other religions have correct insights, for example, the Egyptians correctly believed that there could be a God-man, but simply mistook the identity of that God-man for Pharoah rather than the future Christ. Indeed I suspect it was widely known in ancient antiquity that the Messiah would be God incarnate, but that this knowledge had been forgotten by the time of Christ’s incarnation, as this explains a great many things. And we also see this idea in Judaism, among the Chassidic group known as Chabad, wherein many of the members believe their Rebbe, who died in 1992, was in fact the Messiah, and is still alive, and I have read claims, which I cannot readily verify, that they even have a sort of Eucharistic meal for him, in that they have via general revelation obtained the right idea, but it is a case of misidentification.

Thus, I feel compelled to say that the Jews intend to worship the correct God, but are either not worshipping the correct God or are worshipping the correct God incorrectly. Or perhaps the right way to express it would be along the lines of what our Lord said to the Samaritans “you worship what you do not know, whereas we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews”, in that now that the Second Temple has been destroyed and it is literally impossible to worship according to Judaism as it is described in the Old Testament, since there is not a temple, nor a tabernacle, and therefore one has a choice between Christians and Rabinnical or Karaite Jews or the Beta Israel, or indeed the Samaritans, the correct choice would be the Christians, for the salvation from the Jews was in the person of Christ, which is why so many Jews converted to Christianity, indeed, if you look at the names of Middle Eastern or Indian Christians from the Syriac Orthodox Church or the Syriac Catholic Church or the Syro Malabar Catholic Church or the Malankara Catholic Church or the Antiochian Orthodox Church or the Melkite Catholic Church or the Assyrian Church of the East or the Chaldean Catholic Church or indeed the Maronite Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, you will find a great many Jewish names, and also translations of Jewish names, and so the image that exists that most Jews rejected Christ I think is quite wrong.

I think a huge number of them accepted him, and indeed when we look at the ministry of St. Peter and the ministry of St. Thomas the Apostle, they were ministering to Jews, with St. Peter going West from Jerusalem to Rome via Antioch and St. Thomas going East to Kerala in India, where the Kochin Jews lived from the time of Alexander the Great until now, with a few still living in Kerala part of the year, although at their one remaining synagogue they usually do not have a minyan. Vidal Sassoon was a Kochin Jew. The Indian Church is comprised heavily of Jews, but also of gentile converts, although interestingly there are several parishes among the St. Thomas Christians of India that consist of endogamous descendants of 400 Jews who were shipwrecked while traveling to Kerala in the 4th century AD, who converted to Christianity. They have their own parishes, where anyone can worship, of course, but these parishes exist specifically to ensure the continuity of this community of Jewish descendants by maintaining their vital records including baptisms, marriages and funerals and so forth, so that they can preserve their heritage as Jewish converts to Christianity from antiquity. St. Thomas clearly picked up quite a number of Gentile converts as well; indeed, had he not done so it seems unlikely that an enraged Majaraja would have caused him to receive a crown of martyrdom by throwing a javelin at him, and i suspect it was the same for several of the other apostles who headed in specific directions. In the case of St. Peter, we know he was focusing on Jewish converts, and St. Paul on Gentile converts, but it does not appear they were creating separate church systems, and we must consider that both the Pauline and the Catholic Epistles are applicable to gentiles as well as Jews (since we also don’t know whether St. John was focused on either Jews or Gentiles).

Additionally, in the specific case of Rabinnical Judaism, when we look at the development of the Mishnah, and the Talmud, and then the Zohar and the emergence of Kaballah, we see the formation of a theology radically different from that which is indicated by a literal reading of their own Masoretic Text translation of the Old Testament. Kaballah in particular is extremely theologically problematic in that it reimagines God as consisting of ten sephirot, which have different attributes, and the mysticism of Kabbalah has a quality to it which I find disquieting and uncomfortable and altogether alien. I cannot reconcile that conception of God with the God described in the Old Testament and the New.

I am much more comfortable with Karaite Judaism, which rejects the authority of the Rabbis and of the Mishnah and the Talmud, but even there, there exist obvious problems. The Karaites are kind of like Sola Sciptura Jews, and in Israel they are discriminated against by the Chief Rabbinate, for example, since their understanding of Kashrut differs from that of the Rabinnical Jews, their butchers and delicatessans cannot advertise themselves as Kosher, since the standards of what is Kosher have changed, and since there are only 50,000 Karaites in the world, and indeed only one synagogue in the US, in Daly City, and their former synagogues in Alexandria and Damascus abandoned when politics forced them to migrate to Israel, one really feels sorry for them.

However, the fact is that Karaites, whi interpret scripture using a logical method called the “Kalaam” which does not produce doctrine that a Christian would expect. For example, they do not believe in the existence of the devil, and instead rather amusingly consider that Eve was deceived by a particularly cunning snake. Perhaps it was Kaa from Walt Disney’s final animated film, The Jungle Book, since he could clearly talk and was clearly a very sneaky snake indeed as he slithered about plotting on how to lure young Mowgli into his coils.

In all seriousness, however, I feel compelled to agree with the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, where on Good Friday, there is a litany that includes a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. There would be no point to the Roman Catholic Church or the Syriac Orthodox Church or any other church having received Jewish converts if Jews were worshipping correctly and if Judaism were still a valid spiritual path. And for that matter there would be no point for St. Paul and St. Peter to have agreed that St. Paul would be the apostle to the uncircumcised as St. Peter was to the circumcised. And to suggest that efforts to convert the Jews were unsuccessful disagrees with the historical record and also seems a bit contrary to piety, since surely the ministry of all the Apostles was equally blessed by the grace of our Lord, who is everywhere present and fills all things, God the Holy Spirit, our Paraclete, who was sent to help the Apostles so that the maximum number of people would believe in the Good News of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection of Christ our Lord, God and Savior, for the glory of His unoriginate Father, our almighty Lord and God, who shall reign together with His only begotten son and His Holy Spirit, always One God, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.

So clearly many Jews have been converted, and many more will be converted, God willing, and furthermore in the case of those who died before the incarnation, the doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell clearly establishes that God did not just forget about righteous Jews, and before them Hebrews, and before them the followers of the religion of Noah, and before that of Adam…God knows his sheep and has taken care of them. That is why we refer to a number of Old Testament persons as saints. There was a St. Abraham Catholic Church in Tehran. St. Elias (Elijah) is one of the most common patron saints for Eastern Orthodox and also Syriac Orthodox churches. St. Esdras and St. Isaiah are also common, and in St. Petersburg the main cathedral is dedicated to St. Isaac (it might be dedicated to St. Isaac the Syrian, but St. Isaac the Syrian’s patron saint would have been St. Isaac the son of St. Abraham. I try to refer to Old Testament saints as Saint as much as possible, because they are important members of the Church Triumphant. And I feel comforted by them, just as I feel comforted by our most blessed and glorious lady Theotokos and ever Virgin Mary, whose feast day on the Julian Calendar for Eastern Orthodox and Ukrainian Greek Catholics is tomorrow.


Also by the way if you recall I am hoping the next Pope will be a Ukrainian Greek Catholic. Or failing that, someone like Bishop Athanasius Schneider or Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco. Of course the Ukrainian Catholic Patriarch is already a Cardinal, but I don’t know if he has exceeded the age limit. I need to familiarize myself with the UGC hierarchy, because I really feel like a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Pope could be what the Roman Catholic Church needs, and the current situation, while tragic, affords an opportunity for Rome to have the first Pope with a significant Eastern Christian background since St. Gregory the Great, who did significant work in Constantinople as Legate, including writing the Liturgy of the Presanctified which remains in use in the Byzantine Rite and Eastern Orthodox churches as well as in the pre-1955 version of the Roman Rite mass on Good Friday.

 

[Adventist Heretic]

Forgive me, but I believe you are entirely mistaken.

Firstly, the State of Israel exists and while there are legitimate ethical concerns about its establishment, and legitimate grievances about how it continues to treat the Palestinians, the most concerning of which from a Christian perspective involve issues relating to the civilian population, particularly those coming from the Christian population of the West Bank, who live predominantly in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Israel has a right to exist by virtue of the fact that displacing people from their homes is inherently unethical and reprehensible, even when such action is in response to a prior unjust displacement of people. As Christians we cannot endorse repaying evil for evil. As Christians, it is our responsibility to intervene for a peaceful reconciliation between the State of Israel and the Palestinians.

From an eschatological perspective, however, it must be stressed that the State of Israel does not appear, contrary to the beliefs of some evangelicals, to have any unique signifigance from a Christian perspective, particularly since it does not include the entire Jewish population, and also considering the indifference that the large population of Charedi and Chassidic Jews have towards the Israeli government, and the interesting fact that the birth rate among these “ultra-orthodox Jews” as they are often called are much higher than among the mainstream Zionist population (I also find myself unsettled by the recent spate of documentaries that seem to be interested in criticizing the Charedim and Chassidic populations, who in my view are quite benign compared to the Mormons, Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesesses, and Buddhists, and most especially the Hindus and even more so the Muslims, who together with the Communists have an impressive track record of persecution inflicted against Christians, which in the case of Islam is rivaled only by Communism itself.

The interesting fact is that if current trends continue, the majority of the Jewish population of Israel will be a mix of the Ethiopian Jews known as the Beta Israel, and the Chassidic and Charedi Jews, who are not enthusiastic about Zionism as a project. So unless the more secular and moderate Jews increase their reproductive rates or engage in much more Aliyah (immigration to the Holy Land), over the course of the next century a political change seems inevitable due to changing demographics, and thus the priority of Christians must be to ensure that the Christian population in Israel, and especially that in Palestine, survives, because Christians, owing to our orientation towards forgiveness, can act as peacemakers and ensure the safety of the Jewish people and of the Arab people. If I recall, most Christians fled the Gaza Strip during the last uprising there in the 2000s, when Israel also disconnected utility service, and so the populations I am concerned with protecting are the Christian populations in the West Bank, which are largely concentrated in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Christians have repeatedly been caught in the crossfire of struggles between Islamists and Israeli security forces, for instance, in the invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and in 2002 when accused Palestinian terrorists sought refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which was then damaged in an assault by Israeli security forces.

It is the safety of our people who live there, many of whom are descended from the original Jewish and Gentile, Greek and Aramaic speaking converts to Christianity, who are members of the six ancient churches which jointly control the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and various other holy sites - the Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox (represented primarily by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, but other Eastern Orthodox churches also have a physical presence), and the Oriental Orthodox, including the Armenian Apostolic Church, which has its own Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and the Syriac Orthodox Church, which has a large number of members in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and controls the Monastery of St. Mark, one of the two possible locations for the Upper Rome (and the one I regard as more likely) and also St. Mary’s Church, which is immediately adjacent to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and was also damaged in the aforementioned incident. The other two groups are the Coptic Orthodox and the Ethiopian Orthodox, who have a smaller presence, which is administered through the Armenian Apostolic church if I recall correctly (my friend @dzheremi would know more about this).

Now, regarding Islam, I completely reject your suggestion that Islam somehow represents the Midianites. There were Christians in Arabia when Mohammed had his revelation; they even lived in Medina, along with the Jews, who Muhammed later exterminated in the first of many horrifying actions of genocide on the part of Islam.

Islamist regimes are directly responsible for the genocides that exterminated the Christians in Nubia and the Sudan (the ancient Nubian Orthodox Church, which was an Oriental Orthodox church like the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church), and the Christians of North Africa to the West of Egypt, in places such as Cyrene in Libya and Hippo, near Carthage, home to St. Augustine. Later, the Mongol-Turkic warlord Tamerlane, who is venerated as a national hero in Uzbekistan, where his mausoleum is located, launched a massive genocide against the Church of the East, which was at the time the largest Christian church, and also the legitimate representative, if any existed, of the Midians, since it was present in Arabia, as far south as the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen, and as far north as Turkey, and from those two points, it strectched across nearly the whole of Asia, reaching at least as far as Mongolia, China and Tibet (and possibly reaching into Korea and Southeast Asia; we know it was in Sri Lanka and indeed it has returned to Sri Lanka in recent decades). Tamerlane and his sons killed off all the members of this church outside of the Malabar Coast of India and the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. The members of this church at the time of the genocide are sometimes anachronistically called Nestorians or Assyrians (technically only the Syriac-speaking members in the Fertile Crescent, in Iraq, Iran, Kurdistan, Syria and Turkey are Assyrian, but Syriac was the liturgical language of the church, as it was originally established by St. Thomas, who travelled from Jerusalem through Edessa to Nineveh, Seleucia-Cstesiphon and onto Kerala, India, a trade route with a heavy Jewish and Gentile presence where Syrian Aramaic was the lingua franca, that had been established following the conquests of Alexander the Great). At present, the surviving members of the church are mostly Assyrian, with some Indians (although most of the Indians were forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism or due to a strange accident of history wound up as part of the Syriac Orthodox Church, which historically has had friendly relations with the Church of the East).

The Syriac Christians, whether Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Chaldean Catholic or Assyrian, were the victims of another genocide in 1915, which they call the Sayfo, against them, and the Armenians, which continued nearly until the end of WWI and killed the majority of both populations, including the vast majority of their members in Turkey. OVer a million Armenians and more than 250,000 Syriac Christians were killed by the Turks, for being Christian. The Pontic Greeks were the victims of the same genocide, only for them, it continued into the 1920s under Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, until a population exchange with Greece put an end to it, at the extremely high price of the loss of most of the ancient Christian communities in Asia Minor mentioned in the New Testament. Later, in the 1950s, the Turks conducted a genocide against the remaining Greeks in Istanbul, leaving only the small number of Phanariot Greeks who live in the neighborhood known as the Phanar, where the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and his small cathedral, never fully repaired from damages done to it by the Turks, is located.

Previously, in the 19th century, the Turks conducted genocides against the Greeks during their bid for independence, which was miraculously successful, and then in the 1870s, against the Bulgarian Orthodox Christians; the brutality of that genocide shocked the major powers of Victorian Europe so much that the same Christian nations that would tragically fight each other with such devastating effect in the First World War a few decades later banded together and liberated almost all of the European territories from Ottoman control, leaving them with scarcely more than the bit of land in Europe they have at the moment. The Turks lost the remaining portions of Greece that had not been secured during the war for independence in 1820, and also the province they called Roumelia, which included Bessarabia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Balkans.

More recently, the Turks backed an illegal invasion of Cyprus in which the Christians were expelled from the northern portion of the island.

But the Turks and the Uzbeks are far from the only Islamic practitioners of genocide. Following the Arab Spring, we saw the terrible persecution of Christians in Syria resulting from the Civil War, when Al Qaeda captured the Aramaic speaking town of Maaloula, desecrated its historic churches, destroying their icons, and taking the nuns from the local Antiochian Orthodox convent hostage for several months. Then, ISIS formed, and began genocidal acts against Syriac Christians in Iraq and Syria, also targeting the Yazidis and the Turkmen of Iraq. In Libya and Chad, ISIS murdered 19 Coptic Orthodox workers and about 60 Ethiopian Orthodox workers, respectively. There has been an ongoing genocide targeting Christians in the northern provinces of Nigeria. More recently, a genocide has begun in Syria. Also, NATO efforts in 1998 to prevent ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo somewhat backfired, as a large influx of Albanian Muslims resulted in the Serbian Christians being the victims of ethnic cleansing. It should be noted that there are many very good Christians in Albania, including Roman Catholics such as Mother Theresa, and Eastern Orthodox, and these suffered maximum persecution under the Muslim-born communist dictator Enver Hoxha (it is ironic that the worst Communist persecutor of Christians in Europe was of Islamic descent).

For the past several years, a genocide against Anglican and Catholic Christians has been heating up in Pakistan. Most recently, the Azerbaijanis conquered all of the historically Armenian land of Nagorno-Karabakh including the historic capital of Artsakh, causing the Armenian population to flee, but thousands are missing and unaccounted for, and it is feared a genocide may have occurred. In addition, the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage such as their beautiful churches and stone crosses is already in progress. This is why I have added PRAY FOR ARMENIA to my signature in the past few weeks, because 108 years after the first genocide, the Muslims are doing it to them again, with the backing of the Erdogan regime in Turkey.

For these reasons, and also because the accounts of Muhammed’s reception of his prophetic message from an alleged angel calling itself “Jibreel” (presumably seeking to impersonate Gabriel) have characteristics unlike those of Old Testament prophets but very much like those of demonic posession, and also because the Quran praises the murder of Jews and Christians, calling us “the worst of creatures,” and also because according to all official Islamic histories, Muhammed at the age of fifty married Aisha, his youngest wife, when she was six years old and consummated the marriage when she turned nine, which is why in some Muslim countries for married couples the age of consent is actually nine years old for women, so either he did this, which is horrible and disgusting, or else the official Muslim historical sources decided this was admirable behavior. In any case, from a Christian perspective it is revolting.

Then what does Rev 9 mean? come up with an answer. what you don't seem to get is that Christians can disobey God and if it gets to a point where it is severe enough God sends punishment. Think the book of Judges. They did evil in the sight of the Lord. so you objection to that as a possibality has to be dismissed. God does discipline his people. Now to the issue of of bad marriage practices. That is covered in the fact that the star (messeanger) fell. in another words the one who called for obediance did not obey and it is covered by the fact that the smoke (the anger of the Lord) obscured the Sun (the Light of God). in other words they don't represent God properly all the time. on of the things that bothers me coming from a protestant background in the the Catholic/Orthodox churchs don't seem to think they can ever do any wrong or need any corretion. They do the same thing over and over and don't ever ask why is this happening. If the prophecy is correct and Islam is there for a reason and that reason is to correct the chruch. if that is the case then if the Chruch corrects it's self and the problem of Islam come to an end.

 

[Adventist Heretic]

Just a question about one thing you wrote:

And yet the Jews deny the Holy Trinity, regarding it as a form of polytheism and also directly deny those teachings specific to Christians. I get it the urge to say Islam really involves a different deity. But then how to speak consistently about Judaism?

i think you hit it on the head. Islam is a form of Judaism, not Christianity. In my view, God went back to Judaism to discipline the Church. The church abandoned some very important aspect of obediance to God.

 

[chevyontheriver]

i think you hit it on the head. Islam is a form of Judaism, not Christianity. In my view, God went back to Judaism to discipline the Church. The church abandoned some very important aspect of obediance to God.

Except I don't think Islam is a form of Judaism. It's more a crazy misinterpretation of Christianity than a misinterpretation of Judaism. At best it is a badly mistaken worship of the true God.

 

[chevyontheriver]

Well I take the view expressed by the Eastern Orthodox apologist Archpriest Andrew Stephen Damick, which would be that in order to worship God in spirit and truth, we must worship God as He really is, according to correct doctrine, and that doctrine matters,

So few of us, if pressed, have correct doctrine. Close maybe. Under rigorous examination most will be found a little off.

and I also agree with him that Rabinnical Judaism can be considered a newer religion than Christianity in that it emerged from the collapse of Second Temple Judaism after Christianity was already well established,

Agreed.

and furthermore I agree with the Orthodox position that the Church consisted of the second Temple Judaism, and before that the ancient Hebrew religion, and before that the religion of Noah and his Sons, and before that the religion practiced by Adam and his descendants, in that the Church has always existed, since it is the Body of Christ, but it is in Christianity that it has reached its present fullness,

I think so.

in that its prior forms represented what it is now, for example, the shewbread and libations offered at the first and second temples were obviously symbols of the Eucharist that was to come, just as the animal sacrifices symbolized the future and all-sufficient sacrifice of Christ our True God.

Exactly. This seemed obvious to me but is so seldom commented on.

I also accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of General Revelation, since it explains the similarity of religions, and I believe a charitable approach is required, and we see this in Acts when the Holy Apostle Paul came across the Greeks on the Areopagus worshipping at the Altar of the Unknown God, and Archpriest Andrew goes in that direction as well, when he highlights how other religions have correct insights, for example, the Egyptians correctly believed that there could be a God-man, but simply mistook the identity of that God-man for Pharoah rather than the future Christ. Indeed I suspect it was widely known in ancient antiquity that the Messiah would be God incarnate, but that this knowledge had been forgotten by the time of Christ’s incarnation, as this explains a great many things. And we also see this idea in Judaism, among the Chassidic group known as Chabad, wherein many of the members believe their Rebbe, who died in 1992, was in fact the Messiah, and is still alive, and I have read claims, which I cannot readily verify, that they even have a sort of Eucharistic meal for him, in that they have via general revelation obtained the right idea, but it is a case of misidentification.

The 'similarities' between Christianity and many older religions are not proof of Christianity getting it wrong by copying but of other religions having glimmers of truth here and there.

Thus, I feel compelled to say that the Jews intend to worship the correct God, but are either not worshipping the correct God or are worshipping the correct God incorrectly.

I think it is worshiping the correct God incorrectly. Close to correctly for some Orthodox Jews. Stretching it quite a bit I would say Islam does the same.

Or perhaps the right way to express it would be along the lines of what our Lord said to the Samaritans “you worship what you do not know, whereas we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews”, in that now that the Second Temple has been destroyed and it is literally impossible to worship according to Judaism as it is described in the Old Testament, since there is not a temple, nor a tabernacle, and therefore one has a choice between Christians and Rabinnical or Karaite Jews or the Beta Israel, or indeed the Samaritans, the correct choice would be the Christians, for the salvation from the Jews was in the person of Christ, which is why so many Jews converted to Christianity, indeed, if you look at the names of Middle Eastern or Indian Christians from the Syriac Orthodox Church or the Syriac Catholic Church or the Syro Malabar Catholic Church or the Malankara Catholic Church or the Antiochian Orthodox Church or the Melkite Catholic Church or the Assyrian Church of the East or the Chaldean Catholic Church or indeed the Maronite Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, you will find a great many Jewish names, and also translations of Jewish names, and so the image that exists that most Jews rejected Christ I think is quite wrong.

Exactly. Judaism split, or rather the Israelite religion split into Christianity and Judaism.

In all seriousness, however, I feel compelled to agree with the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, where on Good Friday, there is a litany that includes a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. There would be no point to the Roman Catholic Church or the Syriac Orthodox Church or any other church having received Jewish converts if Jews were worshipping correctly and if Judaism were still a valid spiritual path. And for that matter there would be no point for St. Paul and St. Peter to have agreed that St. Paul would be the apostle to the uncircumcised as St. Peter was to the circumcised. And to suggest that efforts to convert the Jews were unsuccessful disagrees with the historical record and also seems a bit contrary to piety, since surely the ministry of all the Apostles was equally blessed by the grace of our Lord, who is everywhere present and fills all things, God the Holy Spirit, our Paraclete, who was sent to help the Apostles so that the maximum number of people would believe in the Good News of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection of Christ our Lord, God and Savior, for the glory of His unoriginate Father, our almighty Lord and God, who shall reign together with His only begotten son and His Holy Spirit, always One God, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.

So clearly many Jews have been converted, and many more will be converted, God willing, and furthermore in the case of those who died before the incarnation, the doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell clearly establishes that God did not just forget about righteous Jews, and before them Hebrews, and before them the followers of the religion of Noah, and before that of Adam…God knows his sheep and has taken care of them.

Agreed. We pray for them, and pray that they recognize their messiah.

Also by the way if you recall I am hoping the next Pope will be a Ukrainian Greek Catholic. Or failing that, someone like Bishop Athanasius Schneider or Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco. Of course the Ukrainian Catholic Patriarch is already a Cardinal, but I don’t know if he has exceeded the age limit. I need to familiarize myself with the UGC hierarchy, because I really feel like a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Pope could be what the Roman Catholic Church needs, and the current situation, while tragic, affords an opportunity for Rome to have the first Pope with a significant Eastern Christian background since St. Gregory the Great,

He is a mere boy, born in 1970. And he should be a cardinal but pope Francis has bypassed many who should have been cardinals and appointed many more dubious people instead. I have hopes for him in the future. Maybe as pope some day.

 

[Adventist Heretic]

Except I don't think Islam is a form of Judaism. It's more a crazy misinterpretation of Christianity than a misinterpretation of Judaism. At best it is a badly mistaken worship of the true God.

So What do you think Rev 9 means? The Star and the Locust? The only place in scripture where a people group is described as 'locust" is in Judges 7. It is Midian, the relatives of Israel and part of the Abrahamic Covenant. So in it seems to me that the locusts would be an Abrahamic group of people.

 

[chevyontheriver]

However, in the case of Islam, it is entirely obvious that Muhammed was not a true prophet of God, but a wolf in sheep’s clothing of the sort Christ our True God warned us of. We were advised that we would know who was legitimate and who was not by whether they taught the same Gospel, and through their deeds, and on both counts, the Islamic religion is demonstrably anti-Christian, in that it stresses revenge, rather than forgiveness, and regards suicidal attacks and dying in battle as a form of martyrdom, and lacks the Christian emphasis on sexual morality and control of the passions, and entirely rejects the commandment of Christ to love those who persecute us. Likewise, the deeds of Islam have consistently involved the brutal murder of Christians and members of other religions, and rape, and enslavement of women and children, and also polygamy and the marriage of young girls, and the brutal subjugation of conquered Christians and Jews, which in the Ottoman Empire even extended to the forcible taking of the firstborn sons of Christian families, so they could be converted to Islam, circumcized, brainwashed, and trained to fight as Janissaries. The Janissaries were recruited exclusively in this manner. There were many other horrors, for example, the Mamluk rulers of Egypt decided to suppress the Coptic language as best they could, so cut out the tongue of any Coptic Christian heard speaking it, and this led to the demise of Coptic as a vernacular language (although a superb education system in the diaspora among the youth means it has a legitimate possibility of coming back; @dzheremi , one of the local parishes in my area has won awards for its program in every age group among the youth, to the extend that the children actually are able to sing in Coptic and understand what they are singing - have you seen that in your area?

There are different schools of Islam, and not all of them are bloodthirsty. The kind I ran into in The Gambia wasn't remotely as fanatical as Shiite or Suni. There is horror in Islam but not exclusively. I'm NOT saying that some schools of Islam are salvational. Just that not all of them are horrific. At best they try to worship the true God via the ideas of a fake prophet.

 

[chevyontheriver]

So What do you think Rev 9 means? The Star and the Locust? The only place in scripture where a people group is described as 'locust" is in Judges 7. It is Midian, the relatives of Israel and part of the Abrahamic Covenant. So in it seems to me that the locusts would be an Abrahamic group of people.

Could you be reading a little bit too much into the text?

 

[Adventist Heretic]

There are different schools of Islam, and not all of them are bloodthirsty. The kind I ran into in The Gambia wasn't remotely as fanatical as Shiite or Suni. There is horror in Islam but not exclusively. I'm NOT saying that some schools of Islam are salvational. Just that not all of them are horrific. At best they try to worship the true God via the ideas of a fake prophet.

I would not use the word "fake", but rather a "Fallen" as indicated by Revelation 9 and the fallen "star" which is a messenger.

 

[Adventist Heretic]

Could you be reading a little bit too much into the text?

No, God did not give us the prophecy to confuse us. They are either real or they are fake. I think you are closed to the idea, given the lack of effort you put in. If you try to give an answer. rather than dismiss it we might get somewhere.

 

[chevyontheriver]

I would not use the word "fake", but rather a "Fallen" as indicated by Revelation 9 and the fallen "star" which is a messenger.

You can use the words you want to.

 

[chevyontheriver]

No, God did not give us the prophecy to confuse us. They are either real or they are fake. I think you are closed to the idea, given the lack of effort you put in. If you try to give an answer. rather than dismiss it we might get somewhere.

Whatever. It seems you have it all figured out. I'm more skeptical that it is that easy to figure out.

 

[Adventist Heretic]

Whatever. It seems you have it all figured out. I'm more skeptical that it is that easy to figure out.

that is an easy road to take. blame me rather than offer an answer. if you don't know you don't know, but if there is no other answer or a better answer, then one really doesn't have anything to offer and it is not helping anyone to comment.

 

[chevyontheriver]

that is an easy road to take. blame me rather than offer an answer. if you don't know you don't know, but if there is no other answer or a better answer, then one really doesn't have anything to offer and it is not helping anyone to comment.

Did I BLAME you? No. I just don't think you have it as all figured out as you think you do.

 

[Adventist Heretic]

Did I BLAME you? No. I just don't think you have it as all figured out as you think you do.

I think it is easier than you want to believe. how do you see it? you have not offered an alternative. I never said I had it all figured out, but the answer seems to work. unless you have something better

 

[The Liturgist]

on of the things that bothers me coming from a protestant background in the the Catholic/Orthodox churchs don't seem to think they can ever do any wrong or need any corretion.

That’s simply false. Ask any Orthodox member on this forum, Eastern or Oriental Orthodox, and they will admit historical heresies the church has had to deal with and current issues it faces, for example, my Orthodox friends @dzheremi @prodromos @Lukaris @HTacianas and others.

Firstly, most of the heresies that affected the early church occurred in the eastern church, whose bishops primarily spoke Greek and Classical Syriac. These heresies included Arianism, which originated with the corrupt heretical bishop Paul of Samosata in the 3rd century and then became a major heresy due to the efforts of the rebellious Alexandrian priest Arius, who continued to preach despite having been deposed by Pope Alexander of Alexandria, and his backers such as Eusebius of Nicomedia, who conspired behind the scenes to have the Imperial government in Constantinople overrule the decision made at the Council of Nicaea, which resulted in St. Athanasius, who had worked to secure an anathema against Arius at that council and to establish consensus for the initial version of the Nicene Creed, being sent into exile for most of the time he was Pope of Alexandria after succeeding St. Alexander.

In addition, during most of the fourth century, when the Empire was under the control of Arian heretics, several other heresies appeared in the Eastern church, most notably Macedonianism, which denied the personhood of the Holy Spirit, and Apollinarianism, a Chiliast sect which also believed that Jesus Christ had a divine soul in a human body, which is in error (Christ our true God is fully human and fully divine).

Then in the fifth century we had to deal with Donatism, Pelagianism, Nestorianism and Eutychianism, and in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries, Mongergism and Monothelitism, and in the Eighth and Ninth centuries, Iconoclasm. Many of these heresies, such as Monothelitism and Iconoclasm, had Imperial support, and indeed the Oriental Orthodox broke communion with the Eastern Orthodox due to the brutal persecution they were subjected to by Emperor Justinian (especially the Greek and Syriac Oriental Orthodox of Antioch).

There are a number of current issues in the Orthodox church, including canonical irregularities concerning the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Orthodox Church in Ukraine (which represents an incursion onto the canonical territory of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had been an autonomous church under the Moscow Patriarchate but which declared its independence, which is another canonical complexity), and also a break in communion between the Antiochian Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, over the opening of a Jerusalem Patriarchate church in Qatar, which Antioch regards as its canonical territory, and the Ecumenical Patriarch refusing to act on an appeal made to them by Antioch under Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon.

We then have the issue of disunity in the churches of the diaspora, which is further exacerbated by the fact that the Orthodox Church in America, which was granted full independence by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1970, is not recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which is responsible for all Greek Orthodox churches except those in the Holy Land (under the Patriarch of Jerusalem) or Egypt and Africa (under the Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa), or those parts of Greece liberated in the Greek War of Independence in 1821, which are part of the Church of Greece, but not those portions which became Greek territory in the 1870s and after WWI, including Crete and several other Greek islands such as Lesbos, and also Thessaloniki, which is noteworthy because that church is one St. Paul wrote two epistles to, and which still survives, unlike the churches of Ephesus, Laodicea and several others mentioned in the New Testament, which had the misfortune of winding up in Turkey, where due to genocides and ethnic cleansing only a small number of Greeks remain in the Phanar neighborhood of Istanbul, where the Ecumenical Patriarchate is based. And there are other problems as well.

And the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Moscow Patriarchate have not been the only sources of controversy. ROCOR, the autonomous Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, argues that it has a mandate to operate in any countries where there exists a diaspora of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians (ROCOR has a large Ukrainian membership and until the summer of 22, its presiding bishop, Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral, was a Canadian of Ukrainian ethnicity, who died of cancer sadly; he was much loved by ROCOR parishioners, who tend to be quite loyal. So among those who desire unity among the different churches in each region, ROCOR also poses a challenge, since ROCOR and its parishioners are highly loyal to it, because of its traditional approach to liturgy and to theology, as ROCOR, along with the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Georgian Orthodox Church, are arguably the three most conservative Orthodox churches with an international presence, and the people of these churches aren’t keen on the idea of winding up under a jurisdiction perceived as being more liberal, such as the Orthodox Church in America or the Ecumenical Patriarchate (which has some of the most conservative Orthodox monasteries, including the famous monasteries on Mount Athos in Greece, which is an autonomous self-governing monastic territory which one must obtain a visa from the Ecumenical Patriarchate to enter (but not fully sovereign like the Vatican or even semi-sovereign like the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta), and those established by Elder Ephraim, memory eternal, in the US, but also some of the most liberal parishes, particularly in the Church of Finland, a semi-autonomous church supervised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

All of these various issues combined to cause the Great and Holy Council held in 2016 after nearly 50 years of planning to fail to accomplish any of its primary objectives, which were originally to address such important questions as how to facilitate reconciliation with the Oriental Orthodox, the implementation of some canonically regular system of non-overlapping jurisdiction among the different Eastern Orthodox churches in the diaspora, a standard approach to the reception of converts and the approach to be taken to marriages between the Orthodox and non-orthodox Christians, and so on.

There are also several schismatic Old Calendarist churches which I have spoken of previously; their initial objection was to the change to the Revised Julian Calendar by several Orthodox churches (but a minority of the total Orthodox population) in 1921, but has since extended to include ecumenism and ecumenical dialogue, which they regard as the greatest of heresies. However, the Old Calendarists are highly factional, with there being several jurisdictions, and I have had unpleasant encounters with several Old Calendarists, which could be a coincidence, but it contrasts with the loving interactions I have had with clergy from the canonical churches, called “World Orthodox” by the Old Calendarists.

The Oriental Orthodox are also not immune from problems, in particular, a nasty schism among the Orthodox Christians of India, between those who wish to be a part of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, and those who wish to be a part of the entirely Indian Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, and finally, there being a sort of neutral group that is in communion with another church that is part of the Anglican Communion, the Malankara Independent Syrian Church.

There is indeed a joke among Orthodox Christians that we don’t believe in organized religion, given how chaotic everything is. The Eastern Orthodox communion and the Oriental Orthodox communion, which are separate but very similar denominations, are both extremely ancient, extremely complicated and extremely diverse churches which are closely related to the cultures of those countries whose populations are at present predominantly Orthodox, or were in the past (such as Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia, which were predominantly Orthodox before the rise of Islam and its rapid military expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries under the Ummayid Caliphate). That being said, all of the Orthodox churches, Eastern and Oriental, understand the need for evangelism, and most of them are active to varying extents, with several making major efforts to include Western Christians, which have included the creation of Western Rite Vicarates in the Antiochian Orthodox Church and ROCOR, the former of which worships in a manner similar to traditional Catholic and traditional Anglican worship, and the latter of which operates using a reconstruction of what Western Christian worship is believed to have been like in the English speaking world in the Anglo-Saxon period, before the Norman conquest, and also according to the ancient Gallican Rite in France and other historic forms which have fallen into disuse.

What unites Orthodox Christians however is our belief in the Early Church and the correctness of its decisions, and this also forms common ground with the Roman Catholics, and also with the Lutherans, Anglicans, traditional liturgical Methodists and Wesleyans (like the Epworth Chapel on the Green in Boise, Idaho), some Calvinists (particularly those that might identify as Reformed Catholic or Scoto-Catholic; the Reformed Episcopal Church comes to mind as well as some of the high church Congregationalist parishes of the late 19th and early 20th century, most of which are gone, but there is still Park Street Church in Boston, also it is worth noting that the phrase consensus patrum, used to refer to a consensus of the Early Church Fathers, is of Calvinist origin. Our friend @hedrick is particularly knowledgeable concerning Calvinist Patristics. And concerning Anglican and Lutheran commitment to the tradition of the early church, our friends @Shane R , @ViaCrucis and @MarkRohfrietsch are particularly knowledgeable.

And each of the traditional churches has its own problems similar to those being experienced by the Orthodox at the moment, for example, among Anglicans there is the issue of rampant liberal theologians having become dominant in several Anglican churches including the Episcopal Church USA, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Church of Ireland, the Church of South Africa, and the Church of New Zealand, and the friction this is causing with the very traditional churches of the Global South and Gafcon, and among Lutherans there is the problem of the extreme liberalism of ELCA and the national churches in Europe, some of which have also merged with Calvinist churches or become crypto-Calvinist. And this is also why the LCMS, LCC and certain other Lutheran jurisdictions dedicated to what is called Lutheran Orthodoxy and also Evangelical Catholicism are not in communion with all of the other traditional confessional Lutheran churches, most notably WELS, which has somewhat of a less sacramental approach than LCMS.

So each denomiation is struggling with various obstacles, but the churches I mentioned each have a great love for the early church, and also believe that they are correctly interpreting it, which is why they are not all in full communion, since many of them adhere to a visible church ecclesiology based on apostolic succession, which I think is a supportable position. I myself am only comfortable with it and a few other ecclesiologies all of which are centered around the Eucharist. Where I might be regarded by some as slightly out of alignment with normative Orthodox Christianity is that I am an extreme supporter of ecumenical reconciliation, although I do believe the Orthodox Churches have the most complete and accurate reception of the doctrines of the early church, however, I have encountered Anglicans whose beliefs are so close to ours as to be indistinguishable, and likewise Lutherans and certain other Christians. Essentially, if one embraces the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian creed (preferrably without the filioque in both cases), the Apostle’s Creed, and certain other vital doctrines, such as the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and rejects the heresies of Iconoclasm and Nestorianism, I find this satisfactory. And the reason for this is because the Orthodox Church dealt with all of these heresies, most of which happened to it, originating in several cases in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which had some of the best and worst Patriarchs (among the best were St. Gregory Nazianzus and St. John Chrysostom, and among the worst were Nestorius and some of the Monothelite and Iconoclast Patriarchs).

Lastly it should be noted that the laity in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches do have the power to override the decisions of what would be an ecumenical council. This happened most notably in the 1430s, when the laity refused to accept the Council of Florence, under which the Eastern Orthodox Church was to have been integrated into the Roman Catholic Church and in return, the Byzantine Empire would receive military assistance from Western Europe to protect it from the Turks. The laity of the Byzantine Empire made the courageous decision to submit to the tyranny of the Turks rather than compromise their faith. What I admire most about the Orthodox Church is its refusal to compromise even on matters that might seem trivial, to the point where if one makes a minor change to the liturgy and forces it on the church, it could cause a schism. This provides an assurance that correct doctrine will be preserved, since a correct liturgy will be preserved, and since the liturgy defines how we pray, and since how we pray defines our beliefs, under the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi, this provides a high assurance that whatever the Eastern or Oriental Orthodox believe on a subject is likely to be accurate. And these beliefs, with only a few exceptions, align with those of the high church Anglo Catholic movement in Anglicanism, and the Evangelical Catholic / Lutheran Orthodoxy movement in Lutheranism, and equivalent movements among the Methodists and the more liturgical Reformed Christians, specifically those who reject the Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth and other concepts like Semper Reformanda. Although Calvinism does have a bit of a problem despite its investment in Patristics, and that is even where it has rejected the iconoclasm of John Calvin, it still tends to be Monergistic, and monergism contradicts the Orthodox faith (except the minority of people who claim to be Orthodox but embrace Universalism, like Dr. David Bentley Hart, who would have been anathematized except apparently he is not taken sufficiently seriously in this regard, and I do think the best approach is probably for the bishops to simply make clear the Orthodox doctrine in their preaching without anathematizing someone like DBH, unless he poses more of a threat, since there is some utility posed by the Universalist concept, although on the other hand, some of his other beliefs are worrisome, but he has largely kept quiet about them.

At any rate, I reject your view about the Biblical importance of Israel, based on the established views of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox church and also the Roman Catholic, Continuing Anglican and confessional Lutheran churches, and the other traditional liturgical churches I love so much.

And concerning the origin of Islam because it is contrary both to the established history of the Middle East, in that Islam is probably not even related to Ishmael, despite their claims to the contrary, but rather is the result of a synthesis of a heretical form of Christianity, such as Arianism or Syrian Gnosticism, that Muhammed encountered before he became a prophet, when he was a merchant, and Meccan paganism, and also what appears to be demonic possession in his case. And I don’t see what any of this has to do with Revelations 9 and Christians disobeying God, since I can assure you the Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and other traditional churches I have mentioned are not disobeying him. We might have problems with our internal administration, as I outlined in my opening paragraph, but so do all denominations, except for cults - I am suspicious of any denomination that lacks church politics as this points to cult-like authoritarian leadership. But what we aren’t doing is ignoring the Pauline epistles concerning the authority of the Law, or accepting novel and unproven doctrines, or performing gay marriage, or supporting abortion, or otherwise engaging in practices that directly contradict the New Testament. And to maintain the purity of our faith, all of these churches have paid in blood at the hands of Islam and Communism, which are the two primary enemies of Christianity. And unfortunately Israel is not helping the situation; Israel has the power to protect the Christians of the Middle East but instead they tend to regard them at best with disdain and at worst with suspicion and in some cases, such as the invasion in Lebanon in 2006, a country with a Christian President, mandated by the Lebanese constitution, with open hostility.