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NBB · 2025-11-02T00:59:50-0500

The bible could mean not literal 6 days, maybe they were like times not days.
In any case God created everything but for me old earth could still be biblical, and makes more sense.
Things like, light of stars could have not reached us, if the world was 6000 years.
Those layers of 'mud' geologist investigate etc, that makes sense formed with a lot of time.

The Liturgist · 2025-11-02T00:56:13-0500

RileyG said:
It’s my understanding in the pre-Vatican II Good Friday liturgy, Holy Communion was not received by the faithful.

That is correct, in the Usus Antiquor of the Roman Mass, for many centuries the faithful have not received. Also in a Solemn Mass, historically the faithful did not receive, instead partaking of the Eucharist in the low mass or missa cantata, but I don’t believe this rule is adhered to any longer, in part because where the Traditional Latin Mass is still celebrated, it is no longer the norm, and thus the laity no longer have the choice of a large number of low masses celebrated at side-chapels where they could make their communion, as in the past (and the number of available masses has been further reduced by the introduction of concelebration, which, while a normal practice in the Eastern and Oriental lituriges, was historically not done in the West; indeed instead of concelebrating, my understanding is that priests celebrate the mass as deacons or subdeacons, so there is never more than one celebrant, or “Eucharistic President” as some in the 1960s and 70s liked to refer to him, something i always found amusing.*

*Particularly liturgical texts which refer to the celebrant as the President; it would be amusing to see the familiar line “Bless, master” from the ancient liturgies read as “Mr. President, give the blessing.” Perhaps the deacon should be referred to as the “Vice-President?” :liturgy:

Dan1988 · 2025-11-02T00:53:26-0500

BNR32FAN said:
You did specifically refer to yourself as a Calvinist.

So my claim that you follow 16th century theologians is in fact true according to your own words.

I used the term "Calvinist" to distinguish myself from you Arminians. Since every single Christian is either a Calvinist or Arminian, there is not third option. I have asked you to identify this third option a year ago and you failed miserably because you know there is no third option.

Nobody can claim to be a Christian, because every Christian is distinguished and identified by the gospel they believe. You obviously believe that Jacob Arminius, interpreted the gospel correctly, with his "saved by works" version of the gospel. And I believe that John Calvin, interrelated the gospel correctly by proclaiming that "we are saved by grace"

Don't even think about trying to mix the two gospels together to create a "hybrid version of the gospel". It just doesn't work, you are either saved "by grace or "by works", as in keeping the law, take you pick.

Aristarkos · 2025-11-02T00:52:13-0500

Dan Perez said:
# A. So you want to favor and keep. the LAW. , which is. the OLD COVENANT , was HARSH. ??

You make yet another mistake, the law and the covenants are two different things. Both the old and the new covenant are about the law.

You can read more about the covenants here: The Five Key Covenants God Makes With Humans in the Bible

Aristarkos

rjs330 · 2025-11-02T00:49:01-0500

durangodawood said:
I dont assume this is legal. Summary execution certainly does not accord with any US legal principles Im aware of that deal with suspected criminals.

But lets stipulate youre right, and it is legal. Do you defer to the courts on what is correct and moral?

I do the same thing you do. I defer to the courts on what is legal. Of course there are times when I disagree with the courts. Just like you do. Do you ever disagree with the courts?

Morality is another matter entirely. I don't defer to courts on matters or morality.

The Liturgist · 2025-11-02T00:48:48-0500

RileyG said:
It’s also my understanding visiting 7 Churches to venerate the cross was part of the devotion on Good Friday. IIRC. Not to go off topic.

Then there are the famed “Station Churches” of Lent and Holy Week in Rome.

The Liturgist · 2025-11-02T00:48:06-0500

MarkRohfrietsch said:
Some better Pictures:
View attachment 370071

View attachment 370072

View attachment 370073 View attachment 370074

I want to thank you Mark for sharing this lovely photographs with us of the mass in your parish, which represents an elegant service in accord with the traditional ideals of Western Rite Christianity.

The Liturgist · 2025-11-02T00:46:39-0500

Gxg (G²) said:
That was not slavery in the sense as it occurred in the Americas - Chattel Slavery/race-based - and as it concerns what God set up, it was a form of indentured servitude. Nothing close to what happened overall, from the Barbary Slave Trade to the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and further. We know abuses were NOT allowed and others were to be set free - and it was NEVER allowed to claim someone's ethnicity means they were meant to be enslaved.

The Bible never condoned slavery and insisting such goes against the entire text - and practical places for review can be found here in “Does the Bible Condone Slavery? - Christian Think Tank” () - as it concerns the entire Old Testament context where servants hired themselves out.

The point, however, of the OP isn't about what God defined with servants in the Old Testament. This is the question: What are significant world events that have caused the the church or groups within it to change substantially? Do you feel that there are dynamics today that are leading into more groups within Traditional Church circles to develop in ways that differ from others in the same camp?

Insofar as the faith of the traditional churches is supposed to be the one received from the Fathers, ideally no.

In practice some mainline churches have been driven by secular political movements to embrace ideas foreign to the early church, or noxious to it, concerning sexual morality, the ordination of women and related issues. Likewise the Roman Catholic Church has been influenced by South American socialism in the form of Liberation Theology, which since Pope Francis, and now regrettably under Pope Piux XIV, appears to remain the dominant force in the RCC, despite the sincere attempt of Pope St. John Paul II (who was been canonized and subsequently overridden by Pope Francis, with several of his achievements such as Ecclesia Dei simply brushed aside), and Pope Benedict XVI to eradicate it.

Apple Sky · 2025-11-02T00:42:41-0500

Hentenza said:
You are the perfect candidate for false teachers and wolves in sheep clothing to pray on.

Why, because I don't agree with everyone here ?

The Liturgist · 2025-11-02T00:41:58-0500

Blessed Karl of Austria, pray for us!

The Liturgist · 2025-11-02T00:40:58-0500

dms1972 said:
Even at that length, it wasn't finished. There was supposed to be a fifth part on Redemption. I have a couple of the part volumes, but the whole of Church Dogmatics is incredibly daunting.

Indeed, in this respect its similar to another magnum opus of computer science, the epic Art of Computer Programming by the Lutheran computer scientist and organist Donald Knuth, the difference being that the latter demonstrates in one set of volumes the basics of CS and is not a derivative work, and the unfinished final volume, Compiler Techniques, would have been superfluous, since another famous volume on Compilers wound up being the most exhaustive and definitive treatment of that subject (the so-called “Dragon Book”, the cover of which depicts a fearsome dragon in acknowledgement of how difficult compilers can be to write efficiently; conversely the leading book we have on operating systems is called “The Dinosaur Book” for the dinosaurs on its cover, which reflects the massive and unwieldy nature of operating systems (and perhaps also alludes to their origin on the giant mainframe computers of the late 1950s and early 1960s; mainframe computers are nicknamed “dinosaurs” and those datacenters and parts of datacenters that house them, which have to supply three phase power, a raised floor and other amenities not required even by midrange servers, are nicknamed “Dinosaur Pens). And indeed there was a type of cable used to connect together some particular IBM mainframes which was famed for its thickness, it was nicknamed a “Boa” and there were, hopefully apocryphal, stories of hapless computer operators being constricted within its metallic coils).

Apple Sky · 2025-11-02T00:28:58-0500

Hentenza said:
They don’t actually. You can see the same stars and planets but in different parts of the sky.

Do you think that this maybe due to the stars moving & not the earth ?

He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved. Psalms 104:5

childeye 2 · 2025-11-02T00:26:55-0500

Fervent said:
I prefer to stick as close to the way terms are used in ordinary conversation as possible, and free will is only tangentially related to moral culpability.

As I said and you conveyed that you confirmed, it's not even a will. So why assert it exists?

Fervent said:
Are you saying that Jesus' words imply people will not be held blameworthy?

I'm saying that there's a just reason why Jesus said people will be judged by what measure they use to judge others. And I'm saying that he qualified his meaning by saying the merciful will receive mercy. And I'm saying that we are justified by grace through faith. And I'm saying that the apostles who said we are all sinners also spoke of being found blameless by God.

Fervent said:
If there is only one possible outcome, then there is no decision.

I'm talking about choosing between options like turning the other cheek or returning evil for evil. If we look at the course of mutual distrust, we can see why grace and faith are more reasonable than cynicism.

Fervent said:
Voluntary implies freedom, though that freedom may be couched as unforced decision or acting of one's own initiative. Both of those framings imply the ability to not act/choose what becomes the actual choice that is made. Live options are necessary for there to be a decision or initiative to act.

In a moral/immoral context it's about caring or not caring how one's actions affect others. If I volunteer to sin, I'm deceived or drawn away from reality through vain imaginations. Since God is the Truth, as a matter of pragmatics any act of sin is based on first believing something untrue. The freedom to sin is therefore based on a lie.

The Liturgist · 2025-11-02T00:26:55-0500

My chief objection to Barth on this and on other points is that unlike even John Calvin, he disregarded the role of tradition or church history in formulating his “neo-orthodox” Church Dogmatics.

As a member of a “paleo-Orthodox” church I would say was a futile exercise, because The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by St. John of Damascus, written in the eighth century, covers the same ground as Church Dogmatics but does this in 75,000-100,000 words, slightly more if you include the entire Font of Knowledge including the Philosophical Canons and the heresiological treatises on Iconoclasm, Nestorianism, Islam and so on, whereas Church Dogmatics is around 6 million words long, in German, and will expand to more words in other languages which have less of a tendency to compound words together.

Indeed when you compare the length of Church Dogmatics to Calvin’s Institutes or the Summa, well, I really hope Dr. Barth was using a typewriter, because otherwise, ouch. Indeed the high cost of books likely contributed to the brevity of The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which was meant to convey in one volume material previously addressed only partially by different volumes such as De Incarnatione by St. Athanasius, the Conferences of St. John Cassian and so on, or in a less comprehensive manner, for example, by De Fide (On the Faith) by St. Epiphanios of Cyprus, which is a brief summation of Orthodox theology compared to the various heretical sects of the first, second, third and fourth centuries that he catalogued in the rest of his work, the Panarion* (Medicine Chest, or as I would translate it, First Aid Kit), of which De Fide is the coda.

Indeed I would argue that for Calvinists, Barth was reinventing the wheel versus the Institutes of John Calvin in the same way that for Roman Catholics, one could argue that later systematic theologies reinvented the wheel of St. Thomas Aquinas. This is not to say all new works of systematic or dogmatic theology are wrong; the early Church Fathers organize their thoughts in a manner which can be, as pointed out by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, alien to the modern reader, and thus somewhat disorienting, and obviously there is a need for volumes arranged in a modern manner, hence the still very concise works such as Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, a favorite of mine, or another favorite of mine, Mere Christianity by CS Lewis.

That being said, I am grateful for one thing, and that is, that by starting from the Scriptural text alone, Karl Barth did manage, in 13 volumes, to validate several essential church doctrines and disprove certain false doctrines advocated by the Restorationists, yet also insofar as he and other Calvinists who did the same thing nonetheless disagree on certain key points, also managed to prove the need for tradition as means of ensuring harmony with the Apostolic Kerygma.

I would also like to thank my pious and excellent Roman Catholic friend @Xeno.of.athens for his useful and comprehensive replies to the OP, which were intelligent, concise and offered in a spirit of helpfulness.

*All of which would be regarded as heretical on CF.com, for they consist of incontrovertibly wrong belief systems like Manichaenism, Marcionism, Docetism, Valentinism,

Apple Sky · 2025-11-02T00:21:26-0500

Strong in Him said:
The earth turns on its own axis - it doesn't roll around the sky.

I thought the earth is hurtling through space. Do all the stars move with it ?

The Earth is constantly moving through space as part of a complex system of motions at astonishing speeds. It is not stationary.

Psalms 104:5
He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.

Fervent · Saturday at 11:56 PM

In what context?

Fervent · Saturday at 11:51 PM

childeye 2 said:
In my first post, I said any comments I made on the will would be strictly in the moral/immoral context. I realize you are not under those limitations, which is why I'm qualifying my statements as I go.

I prefer to stick as close to the way terms are used in ordinary conversation as possible, and free will is only tangentially related to moral culpability.

childeye 2 said:
The reason I prefer the moral/immoral context is because for many people free will implies being held responsible, culpable, accountable, blameworthy. That runs counter to Jesus who on his cross said forgive them Father for they know not what they do.

Are you saying that Jesus' words imply people will not be held blameworthy?

childeye 2 said:
We make choices moment by moment. The term voluntary wouldn't denote the presence of options if the term is intended to describe an unforced decision or to act of one's own initiative.

If there is only one possible outcome, then there is no decision. Voluntary implies freedom, though that freedom may be couched as unforced decision or acting of one's own initiative. Both of those framings imply the ability to not act/choose what becomes the actual choice that is made. Live options are necessary for there to be a decision or initiative to act.

childeye 2 · Saturday at 11:46 PM

Fervent said:
Not all choices are black and white,

In order for something to be voluntary, there must be a real option on the table. If there is only one possible outcome, there is no freedom. You seem to be trying to define free will in a way that is totally foreign to the basic understanding of it by setting moral weight on the options where no such weight need be laid. The concept of free will doesn't speak to right and wrong, only the real possibilitiy of selecting any of the available options at the moment of a decision.

In my first post, I said any comments I made on the will would be strictly in the moral/immoral context. I realize you are not under those limitations, which is why I'm qualifying my statements as I go.

The reason I prefer the moral/immoral context is because for many people free will implies being held responsible, culpable, accountable, blameworthy. That runs counter to Jesus who on his cross said forgive them Father for they know not what they do.

We make choices moment by moment. The term voluntary doesn't typically denote the presence of options; The term is usually intended to describe an unforced decision or to act out of one's own initiative.

Fervent · Saturday at 11:44 PM

Where is the link between the Trump order and what the VA has decided to do? Is it actually a consequence of how the order is worded, or is the VA just using it as a smoke screen to cut coverage?

Nevermind, it was in the story just buried under a whole bunch of unnecessary background. The classification as a reproductive organ is questionable, and the move seems to affect their ability to be short listed rather than cutting benefits.

Mercy Shown · Saturday at 11:31 PM

HIM said:
It is not that difficult. Rest from work and focus on God and His

So I can buy things on Sabbath, correct. Like a new bible in a Christian book store? I have a nice lake by my House so I like to take a swim after church and stretch out in the sun while enjoying nature around me. Now even though the bible says I should not kindle a fire, I can ignore that, correct, since I love a good fire in the wood stove on a cold sabbath day? What about the dishes and meal prep? Can I do that on the sabbath? One thing that I love to do is but on some earbuds and listen to gosple music while I mow the lawn on my riding mower. Some one told me I should only listen to Christian music on sabbath but what about classical music. Thank's for your answers in advance.

Mercy Shown · Saturday at 11:23 PM

Studyman said:
The Jesus "of the Bible" said to Live By every Word of God. So at the very least, a man should consider every Word. While Paul says "Let each man be convinced in his own heart", the Bible also says the heart of man is evil above all thing. And Jesus said to "take heed" we are not deceived by the "many" who come in His Name. And He told those whose sins HE forgave, "now go and Sin no more".

So clearly a person should consider all these Scriptures when interpreting God's message to us though them. The philosophy that there isn't a correct interpretation, or that men are free to create their own religion based on their own private interpretation is not all all what the Bible teaches. Men should adopt Jesus' teaching, as HE adopted His Fathers. In this way there is unity.

I appreciate your zeal for God’s Word and the importance you place on taking Scripture seriously. You’re absolutely right that Jesus calls us to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. At the same time, Scripture also shows that even those who diligently studied the Law—like the Pharisees—often missed the heart of what God was saying because they approached it without humility or dependence on the Spirit (John 5:39-40).

Paul reminds us that “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). So while study is vital, true understanding comes when the Holy Spirit illuminates the Word in our hearts (1 Cor. 2:10-14). None of us have perfect understanding; we “know in part” (1 Cor. 13:9). That’s why Christians are called to speak the truth in love and bear with one another in humility (Eph. 4:2–3), seeking unity not by claiming superior insight, but by submitting together to Christ as our Teacher (Matt. 23:10).

So I fully agree that we should take heed not to be deceived, but I also believe that spiritual pride can deceive just as easily as spiritual neglect. The safest place for any of us is at Jesus’ feet, asking Him to open our eyes to His Word and to give us the grace to walk it out in love.

Oompa Loompa · Saturday at 11:19 PM

RocksInMyHead said:
What are you smoking? Can I have some?

While the President appoints federal judges (including Supreme Court justices), they're all under the jurisdiction of the Judicial Branch. See Article 3 of the Constitution.

That is actually very informative. Thank you.

wing2000 · Saturday at 11:14 PM

"The last nine months have been a waste of time."

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wing2000 · Saturday at 11:12 PM

Always in His Presence said:
No pretending there - it's a win. - Because of the Trump tariffs - the world's dependence on China for rare earth minerals (AI, Batteries, Magnets) is only a fraction of what it was and lessening. No one can be held hostage by their wanting to control this industry, now there are multiple sources being expanded.

There is progress but we are still heavily dependent on China.

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