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The Word of God is so rich and has been given to us with many things not explained in detailed words. There are layers of meaning meant for us to prayerfully ponder and reflect upon and build upon.I think the theology and doctrine of the church was fully established by the third century. As seen in your hundreds of words replies, with over 100 of those words being "liturgy", it's clear to me that man started overcomplicating Christianity after the time of the actual early fathers.
It was probably in response to the misinformation you posted in #286The east has mountains of complaints from the past, the west has too; what good do they do?
The Catholic Church teaches something that was never taught prior to the schism.Purgatory is just a word; it signifies the state between a Christian's death and their reception into the presence of God in the beatific vision. What one thinks it is like is a matter for the Church to teach. Eastern churches believe such a state exists but do not teach anything definitive about it. That is fine. The Catholic Church does teach something definitive about it and that is ever better.
As to teachings that are officially declared, yes those have changed before and after the schism. And will continue to be changed as we reach a fuller and fuller understanding of God's Word. Some things, like prayers for the dead, have indeed been practiced since OT times.It was probably in response to the misinformation you posted in #286
The Catholic Church teaches something that was never taught prior to the schism.
The Apostles didn't have a full understanding of their faith?As to teachings that are officially declared, yes those have changed before and after the schism. And will continue to be changed as we reach a fuller and fuller understanding of God's Word. Some things, like prayers for the dead, have indeed been practiced since OT times.
Anything you don’t understand, I am happy to clarify. Rather than just criticizing my work as being somehow academically inaccessible and the product of an MDiv education (which it is not; I learned very little about the early church in Divinity School and even less about liturgics and Eastern Christianity, the emphasis rather being on the liberal postmodern theology that has basically destroyed the United Church of Christ, causing it to lose the majority of its members and causing it to earn the derisive nickname “Unitarians Considering Christ”, rather, my knowledge of the Eastern Church and of liturgics was formed long after I had left the halls of academia and the liberal mainline church, while simultaneously working as a freelance software developer specializing in embedded systems programming, which is fun but particularly challenging, since it consists of programming the very simple computers that run anything from a television, a microwave oven or a wireless router to the process control computers such as SCADA systems used in industrial automation, or other hard real-time applications in safety critical environments. So the time I had available to study this material was negligible. Suffice it to say, if I can do it, and if my friend @MarkRohfrietsch who works in an equally demanding technical profession can do it, in terms of the advanced knowledge he has acquired regarding Lutheran theology and his ordination as a deacon, I daresay you can do it also.
No, you wouldn’t. As I believe I stated in the post, I am available to help members of ChristianForums obtain easy access to any of the materials I cite in my works (with a few exceptions, certain books which are expensive and not in the public domain, like the Oxford History of Christian Worship or the Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, or the nine volume Cambridge History of Christianity, but you will note that I did not cite those publications.
I don’t have a photographic memory, I don’t know of anyone on ChristianForums who does have a photographic memory, and the only members who have MDivs who I routinely engage in discussions with, when we have discussions, we primarily talk about issues relating to pastoral care and the proper governance of a parish church.
Now something like this is readily understandable:
It also varies from being a gross oversimplification to being wildly inaccurate. For example, it includes Eusebius of Caesarea as an early church father, despite the fact that he was a semi-Arian who protested the actions at the Council of Nicaea but then melodramatically signed the document, as if he were under duress (which he was not). His history of the church is regarded as being of dubious accuracy, his Life of Constantine is sycophantic, and smacks of being a part of the effort of Arians, led by Eusebius of Nicomedia, to cozy up to the Emperor and his family in order to bypass the Council of Nicaea, a plot in which they were successful, resulting in decades of persecutions of Christians by the Arian emperors from Constantius through Valens, and also, it was not so much St. Ambrose who was responsible for the conversion of St. Augustine as his own mother. The article also follows the Great Apostasy trope that we see from Adventists, Landmark Baptists, adherents of various other Restorationist denominations such as the Plymouth Brethren and the Churches of Christ, and which has also increasingly been adopted by fundamentalist Calvinists and non-denominational Evangelicals, many of whom take their Eschatology wholesale from John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren. Lastly, the article perpetuates the false dichotomy of Protestantism vs. Roman Catholicism, completely ignoring the existence of the Eastern churches, which is perhaps its most infuriating defect of all.
I suppose my greatest criticism of the article is that it buys into the hagiographic descriptions of certain Early Church Fathers when it suits it, and then makes an unsubstantiated claim that defending the Gospel against heresy resulted in a loss of doctrinal orthodoxy, the development of Roman Catholic theological errors, and a loss of focus on transmitting the Gospel in its pure form. In making this assertion, it does not explain why this is so; it does not mention any specific Church Fathers who defended the Gospel against heresy in a manner that was detrimental to evangelization (because there were none), and it also seeks to deflect attention away from this unsupported statement with a strategically placed declaration of the usual Nuda Scriptura argument along with a statement of the Infallibility of Scripture, ignoring the fact that for the Post-Nicene as well as the Ante-Nicene Fathers, the four canonical Gospels, and certain other writings whose canonicity was never disputed, were central to their faith, and once the New Testament canon was finalized by St. Athanasius, who the article does not even mention despite him doing that, and almost single-handedly defeating Arianism, not just at the Council of Nicaea, but through enduring decades of exile during which time he built a coalition of fellow Christian bishops who were ready, when the Arian emperor Valens was succeeded by a Christian emperor, to convene another ecumenical council and ensure that the Arian heresy was disposed of, by closing the loopholes inadvertently included in the initial version of the Nicene Creed that some Arian heretics as well as others, such as the Pneumatomacchians, who denied that the Holy Spirit was God, a person of the Holy Trinity, and the Apollinarians, who claimed that our Lord had a human body but a divine soul, and also subscribed to chiliasm.
Also I would note the article provides no citations to back up any of its claims, and thus fails the most basic standards of academic and intellectual rigor. Everything I have asserted in this thread can be verified by reading the aformentioned books on the history of the Orthodox Church, and also through the Cambridge History of Christianity, the Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, and other sources. For that matter, I anticipate that Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and Roman Catholic members will endorse my appraisal of that article, such as my friends @prodromos @Lukaris @dzheremi @MarkRohfrietsch @ViaCrucis @Ain't Zwinglian @Jipsah @chevyontheriver @Michie and @Valletta .
Basically, Patristics is too rich and complicated a subject to be crammed into three paragraphs, since at a minimum, it concerns itself with the activity of the Christian Church during the first 500-1000 years of its existence, and even the question of how long the Patristic era lasted before, for example, the start of the Scholastic Era in the Roman Church, where St. John of Damascus is regarded as the last Early Church Father, and subsequent leaders like St. Odo of Cluny, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas and so on were not Early Church Fathers but rather Schoolmen, who would later benefit from various works of antiquity such as the writings of Aristotle being translated into Latin from Arabic, into which they had been translated from Greek and Syriac manuscripts by monks of the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East.
You strike me as someone who drinks way too much coffeeNot necessarily; it is complex.
I would ordinarily be happy to provide an overview of the different concepts but the problem is, it is a complex subject and you seem to have an aversion to long posts and there is no way I could attain the brevity you desire without misleading you as to the correct doctrine through oversimplification. And frankly I am not sure if anyone on the forum can explain the different Eastern Orthodox conceptualizations of what happens to the soul after death, since there are at least three different theories I am aware of, and the principal commonality between them is found in the liturgical services held after an Orthodox Christian reposes. Oriental Orthodoxy is similar but not identical and not as well understood in the West, and the same is true for the Assyrian Church of the East.
However since it is topical if other users want to know, and if my Eastern and Oriental Orthodox friends @prodromos @Lukaris @HTacianas @dzheremi and another new member whose name I keep forgetting don’t want to get into it, I might cover it.
For the time being I recommend Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, and for a detailed look at one of the three theories, The Soul After Dearh by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. I would of course suggest these works anyway, so I suppose no matter what I will be accused of demanding hundreds of hours of time to find and research the books, despite the fact that I have offered to assist members in accessing any of the books I recommend, and of requiring a photographic memory, despite the fact that I lack such a memory, and as far as an MDiv is concerned, my knowledge of the liturgy and of Eastern Christianity did not come from there, and indeed the seminary in question is so over the top in liberalism that I have disowned it, and one of these days I’m probably going to remove my diploma from its mounting and toss it in the garbage. The unfortunate fact is that In the US, the universities tend to have the worst divinity schools, with a few exceptions. Actually, the best Anglican, Lutheran and Orthodox divinity schools in the US are more or less free-standing institutions (such as Concordia Theological Seminary on the Lutheran side, Nashotah House and St. Joseph of Arimathea on the Anglican side, or St. Vladimir’s on the Orthodox side) or are in some Orthodox cases associated with a monastery (St. Tikhon’s and Holy Trinity).
the west has too; what good do they do?
You strike me as someone who drinks way too much coffee.
It is amusing in an absurdist sort of way, not unlike artwork of the Dadaist or Cubist schools, that you continue to derail this thread with pointless criticisms of my posting style.Can you imagine if the Gospel was written like that? If that much painstaking detail was given to every person place and thing?
It seems that perhaps odes to the dead are being called prayers for the dead.As to teachings that are officially declared, yes those have changed before and after the schism. And will continue to be changed as we reach a fuller and fuller understanding of God's Word. Some things, like prayers for the dead, have indeed been practiced since OT times.
It defined purgatory. It was already praying for the dead a millennia before.When did the church start teaching purgatory?
1274
The purgatory of Catholic doctrine. At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, the Catholic Church defined, for the first time, its teaching on purgatory, in summary two points: some saved souls need to be purified after death; such souls benefit from the prayers and pious duties that the living do for them.
Interesting we never had a discussion about the Aerial Toll houses here, which sound terrifying
I'd love to see a passage from the Psalms (or anywhere else in the OT) clearly showing prayer for the dead taking place.I have always understood that certain Psalms involve prayer for the earthly living and the departed. Psalms like 23, 86, 88, 91, 130 etc. Prayer for the departed never seemed like a big deal; it was just understood.
I figured that's what The Liturgist was talking about. I've come across the subject being discussed in The Ancient Way section. I know that the theologian Archbishop Lazar Puhalo was defrocked for speaking against the doctrine, but he later recanted.Interesting we never had a discussion about the Aerial Toll houses here, which sound terrifying
I'm not knowledgeable about them at all. I read the Soul After Death by Father Seraphim Rose a number of years ago where he goes into greater detail about them. Unfortunately, I didn't retain much detail.I figured that's what The Liturgist was talking about. I've come across the subject being discussed in The Ancient Way section. I know that the theologian Archbishop Lazar Puhalo was defrocked for speaking against the doctrine, but he later recanted.
Most people don't retain much detail.I'm not knowledgeable about them at all. I read the Soul After Death by Father Seraphim Rose a number of years ago where he goes into greater detail about them. Unfortunately, I didn't retain much detail.
It was a fascinating read, that's for sure. Too much time has passed for me to remember much, though.Most people don't retain much detail.
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