All I said was “That was not what we were arguing about”. I think it is a bit melodramatic of saying that I am denying your rights just because I do not see that this related to what we are arguing.
What I said was a reply to what I quoted, so only a fool cannot see the relation. Just saying "That was not what we were arguing about” sounded as if I went off-topic, i.e. you make an accusation, but don't want to discuss whether it is true or not.
This was my "melodramatic" complaint.
Idolatry is the worship of an idol or cult image, being a physical image, such as a statue, or a person in place of God.
And whether this cult is tagged as worship of a (heathen) God or as worship of a "saint" is an irrelevant detail.
In Abrahamic religions, namely Christianity, Islam and Judaism, idolatry connotes the worship of something or someone other than God as if it were God.
Yet we have I slam and Christianity ways in "folk's religion" to guise idolatry as veneration of saints. And there are strains of "official" Islam and Christian churches that condone that practice, while giving lip-service to rejection of idolatry.
Of course, the word idol and a physical image orginally went hand-in-hand. But in Judaism (OT) and Christianity (NT) started to see it has meaning more than just an image. The JudeoChristian religion started to see it as treating anyone or anything with more love than the love we owe to God. In the NT, it has evolved to covetousness. Coveting any person or any thing is idolatry. If you covet someone's wife, that is idolatry. If you covet your own wife, that is idolatry.
I don't deny that, but this does not alter the fact that it is also idolatry to kneel before the statue of a saint and worship.
Idolatry evolved to mean immorally, impurity, greed and covetousness.
Not the word idolatry "evolved", there were forms of idolatry that were immoral. Baal's and Ashtarte's fertiloty rites and similar forms in OT times, temple prostitution in NT times, or today's tantra yoga and the like.
You seem to want to make the word safe for you but not safe for Catholics.
I do
not make it "safe for me", it just happens that I see no reason why I should accuse Catholics of being covetous.
How many years did you have of Hebrew? I doubt you have had formal training in Hebrew or Greek.
I did not have formal training, bur I studied linguistics, I can read dictionaries, grammars and commentaries by people who
do have a formal training, i.e. who are experts in Hebrew and Greek.
So are you an expert in the Hitpael? Can you cite your source?
I domn't6 have to be an expert on the Hitpael to quote the meaning of a verb in the Hitpael from a dictionary. If the dictionary is wrong, cite evidence for it.
And breaking the Sabbath was literal. But you take one seriously and not the other. Do you feel that not going to church on the Sabbath is as bad as kneeling before an image?
No, there is no passage in the NT that says we non-Jewish Christians should keep the Sabbath, to the contrary it is written that everyone can follow his own opinion in that point (Rom 14:5). Do you select the commands you obey arbitrary, or do you want to follow the guidelines of the Bible what we should observe and what not?
Protestantism, especially in Germany because of Luther, had no qualms about personal vices as long as they did not practice anything Catholic.
I am no Lutheran, I was born "into" a "united" (half Lutheran, half Calvinist) Church as a son of Pietist parents. It were the Pietists that protested against this perversion of what Luther said on this point. When I was about 10, my parents again got contact to a Pietist society (they lost contact to such a society when they, like most Germans, were driven out of East Germany, the part which now belongs to Poland - do not confuse with Middle Germany, the former GDR, often also called East Germany). And later I changed to a free evangelical church and now belong to an evangelical free church, aka Baptists.
So don't blame things on me that I never accepted.
Remember, the motto of Luther is that we are "justified by faith alone". The only place this phrase is used is in James 2 where we are NOT "justified by faith alone"!
Luther found it in Rom 3:28. Whether the "alone" ("allein" in Luther's translation, "nur" in modern German) is an addition or whether he just made explicit what is implicit in the Greek is and endless debate which started just after the publication of Luther's first translation in 1522.
As to James, he has a somewhat different notion of "faith" than Paul. James condemns a faith that is just a mental conviction (see James 2:19 where the demons are said to have "faith"), while Paul speaks of the "faith working through love" (Gal 5:6). Paul and James say the same with different words, and unlike the 17-th century Lutherans you use as argument Luther agreed with them (though it took some time until Luther saw that James did not contradict him).
And what of the biggest sign of covetousness - Germany coveting the whole world so much that in the 1940's they wanted all of it! (I, too, am German but only of German descent. My last name is Ackermann.
This has
nothing to do with Protestantism.
Hitler was a Catholic, if I were like you I would attribute this attitude to Catholicism. But no, the fact is that Hitler had (secretly) left the Christian faith and had is own "God and providence"-religion.
The Reformers were all heavily predestinarian - especially Luther. Other Protestant "flavors" were persecuted, even killed, by the Reformers. It was only later that the other Protestant "flavors" (this seems to be a word game. They were not different flavors like different flavors of ice cream. They were divisions, schisms) were tolerated.
As you may know, the Baptists were among the first ones who practiced tolerance as a principle, not just some acts of tolerating other faiths because of mere tactical considerations.
But you are simplifying it, not me. True, some bishops have fleeced the flock. They are even doing it presently. But it is an oversimplification to say that it was all of them and it was the for the same reason.
I made some simplification, so let me be more precise: To say one has to be in communion with a certain bishop to be in the correct position to God meets the criteria of Acts 20:30 "to draw away the disciples after them". Any such teaching is heresy.
Yes! Kneeling can be a sign of respect or it can be a form of worship. It is an oversimplication to say that all keeling is a form of worship.
It is an oversimplification to reduce what I said o that position. It is not common to kneel before a statue just out of simple respect, it is always some worshiping involved. Whether this worshiping is directed to the statue (or the person it stands for) or whether the worshiping is said to be directed to God Almighty (as the Israelites said in respect the golden calf) is a detail irrelevant to the question whether this is idolatry.
You argued that eichon in Colossians 1:15 means "symbol".
No, I did not say
this. I tried to show the difference between
eikon (not "eichon"!) and
eidolon. And saying that a meaning is "more like"
symbol is not the same as saying it "is"
symbol.
Are you right and the rest of the translators are wrong? Even though This is how cults develop. As I say below, God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble.
Nope. The point I made was that you can't use a verse containing
eikon as if it contains
eidolon. I did not anticipate that you used a description which was not meant as a complete description of a meaning, but rather as a description of a
difference in meaning to attribute to me something that I never said.
To explain it by an example: There is no German word for "education", you always have to choose between "Erziehung" and "Ausbildung". It is quite correct to translate both words as "education" in English, unless you encounter sentences like "Es geht nicht um Ausbildung, sondern um Erziehung", where "This is not about education, but about education" would be sheer nonsense, or other other situation where the difference between the two words matters. If you ask about the difference between these two words, I could say that "Eziehung" is more like raising up of a child, while "Ausbildung" is more like training. I hope this gives you an impression of the difference in meaning, but it is of course wrong to suggest that "Erziehung" is just "raising up" (there is another German word for this) or that "Ausbildung" is just "training" (especially not in cases where it is wrong to translate training as "Ausbildung"!). Such a description is no contradiction to the correct translation of both words as "education".
If you transfer this to what I said about
eikon and
eidolon you will see that I never said the translations are wrong. But sometimes you have to look behind the translations, for there is no translation that could not be misunderstood (especially literal translation can be easily been misunderstood!).
EDIT: Mended some typos
