#Apostolic theology

[apilgrimpassingby]

What is it with Americans and reinventing ancient heresies?

Thinking the Son is a created being? Arianism in the ancient world, Jehovah's Witnesses in modern America.

Thinking the Holy Trinity is one God playing three roles rather than one God in three persons? Modalism in the ancient world, Oneness Pentecostalism in modern America.

Thinking there are modern prophets with equal authority to the Apostles? Montanism in the ancient world, the New Apostolic Reformation in modern America.

Thinking that Christians are mandated to live like Jews? Judaising in the ancient world, the Hebrew Roots Movement in modern America.

Thinking that we have a divine spark trapped in the body that needs to be freed with secret knowledge? Gnosticism in the ancient world, Scientology in modern America.

Why does this happen? I thought it was something about American Christianity for a long time, but then I realised that L. Ron Hubbard, who wasn't Christian and doesn't seem to have been one at any point in his life, straight-up reinvented Gnosticism. What is it about Americans?

[walkingthroughthisworld]

The Lure of Eastern Orthodoxy

Michael Horton and Scott Clark discuss why evangelicals and even Reformed are attracted to the claims and the church of the Eastern Orthodox churches in Office Hours from WSC.

[scobbe]

I’ve just been confirmed by the laying on of hands from an Episcopal bishop so I’m officially Anglican now. Dreams really do come true.

[gnosisandtheosis]

To mark International Women's Day, the Apostolic Johannite Church youtube channel has uploaded a talk from Conclave 2023 by Rev Angie Wisk-Nowell entitled Women's Ordination - A Reclamation.

I can't recommend this video enough. Not only Rev Angie's talk but the subsequent discussion are incredibly important.

[mostlyfrommemory]

Some Thoughts on Truth

While I was working my way through college I noticed a phenomenon that happened with alarming frequency. Things that I had been taught in high school as fact were now being challenged and subjected to heavy source criticism. Post-truth: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. It…

[trberman]

Part 2 | A Faithful Critique of "4 Reasons the Apostasy is a False Doctrine of Mormonism"

Introduction and Recap In the previous article – I critically examine a video by God Loves Mormons counter-cult ministry group produced and published to their YouTube channel. This video is titled “4 Reasons the Great Apostasy is a False Doctrine of Mormonism.” In my critique, I identify several logical fallacies Bradley Campbell employs: Begging the Question: The video assumes its…

[mindfulldsliving]

Responding to Tom Knoff: Early Church Councils, Scripture, and Apostolic Authority Through a Latter-day Saint Lens

Tom Knoff’s article highlights a pressing issue: how the early Church councils inform our ability to face today’s theological challenges. Drawing from the councils at Nicaea and Constantinople, he argues that their reliance on scripture and precise doctrine was central to confronting heresies like Arianism. The Church has long faced challenges in clarifying and defending the person and nature of…

[take-note-of-this]

The Apostolicity of the Church

[biblepreacher]

War & Politics: Can Christians Serve in Political or Military Vocations?

Having argued that Jesus is Lord, which gives him alone the right to order his Kingdom, and that there is one authority over all to which we must answer, which means there aren’t different standards for “secular” and “religious” spheres, and having argued that God has both reserved vengeance for himself, now it’s time to ask the question that has divided how Christians engage with questions of…

[bristolchurch]

Ephesians 4:11 - Gifts NOT Offices

The interpretation of Ephesians 4:11 as gifts rather than offices is based on several arguments. Here are a few: The context of the passage: The broader context of Ephesians 4 emphasises the unity and diversity of the Church. Paul urges the Ephesian believers to maintain unity in the faith, while also acknowledging that each member has been given different gifts and roles for the benefit of the…

[portraitsofsaints]

Happy Feast Day

Saint Ignatius of Antioch

35-107

Feast Day: October 17 (New), February 1 (Trad)

Patronage: Against throat diseases, the Church in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa

St. Ignatius of Antioch is one of the five "Apostolic Fathers," and was the third Bishop of Antioch. He was a disciple of St. John the Evangelist and is known for explaining Church theology. Ignatius was arrested by Roman soldiers and taken to Rome where he was sentenced to death at the Coliseum for his Christian teachings, practices, and faith. On his way to being martyred in Rome, he wrote letters to the early Christians, which we still have today, that connect the Catholic Church to the early, unbroken, clear teaching of the Apostles given directly by Jesus Christ. He urged the Christians to remain faithful to God, warned them against heretical doctrine, and provided them with the solid truths of the faith.

Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase. (website)

[mariacallous]

A growing Christian supremacist movement that labels its perceived enemies as “demonic” and enjoys close ties to major Republican figures is “the greatest threat to American democracy you’ve never heard of,” according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC, a civil rights organization that monitors extremist groups, released its “Year In Hate And Extremism 2023” report on Tuesday. A significant portion of the report, which tracked burgeoning anti-democratic and neo-fascist movements and actors across America, is devoted to the New Apostolic Reformation, “a new and powerful Christian supremacy movement that is attempting to transform culture and politics in the U.S. and countries across the world into a grim authoritarianism.”

Emerging out of the charismatic evangelical tradition, the NAR adheres to a form of Christian dominionism, meaning its parishioners believe it’s their divine duty to seize control of every political and cultural institution in America, transforming them according to a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.

NAR adherents also believe in the existence of modern-day “apostles” and “prophets” — church leaders endowed by God with supernatural abilities, including the power to heal. In 2022, a handful of these “apostles,” the report notes, issued what they called the Watchman Decree, an anti-democratic document envisioning the end of a pluralistic society in America.

The apostles claimed they had been given “legal power and authority from Heaven” and are “God’s ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth,” who “are equipped and delegated by Him to destroy every attempted advance of the enemy.”

And who’s the enemy? Basically anyone who does not adhere to NAR beliefs. NAR adherents see their critics as being literally controlled by the devil.

“There are claims that whole neighborhoods, cities, even nations are under the sway of the demonic,” the report states. “Other religions, such as Islam, are also said to be demonically influenced. One cannot compromise with evil, and so if Democrats, liberals, LGBTQ+ people, and others are seen as demonic, political compromise — the heart of democratic life — becomes difficult if not impossible.”

This rhetoric has become increasingly widespread among Republican lawmakers, including former President Donald Trump, who last year referred to Marxists and atheists as “evil demonic forces that want to destroy our country.”

That Trump would use NAR-inspired rhetoric is unsurprising considering his relationship with Paula White-Cain, an NAR figure who delivered the invocation at Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and at the kickoff of his 2020 reelection campaign, as noted by Paul Rosenberg in Salon. White-Cain also delivered the invocation at Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. — the event that eventually became the insurrection at the Capitol.

The attack on the Capitol was largely inspired, the report suggests, by NAR’s theology of dominionism. “NAR prayer groups were mobilized at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as supporting prayer teams all over the country, to exorcise the demonic influence over the Capitol that adherents said was keeping Trump from his rightful, prophesized second term,” the report states.

Major Republican figures took part in such events on or around the day of the attack. Mike Johnson, who is now the speaker of the House, joined the NAR’s “Global Prayer for Election Integrity,” which called for Trump’s reinstatement as president, in the weeks leading up to the attack on the Capitol. Johnson has also stated that Jim Garlow, an NAR leader, has had a “profound influence” on his life.

Ultimately, the SPLC report is an attempt to ring the alarm bells about the NAR, ”the greatest threat to U.S. democracy that you have never heard of.

“It is already a powerful, wealthy and influential movement and composes a highly influential block of one of the two main political parties in the country,” the report continues. “So few people have heard of NAR that it is possible that, without resistance in our local communities, dominionism might win without ever having been truly opposed.”

The SPLC’s report, according to a press release, also documents 595 hate groups and 835 antigovernment extremist groups in America, “including a growing wave of white nationalism increasingly motivated by theocratic beliefs and conspiracy theories.”

“With a historic election just months away, this year, more than any other, we must act to preserve our democracy,” Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center and SPLC Action Fund, said in a statement. “That will require us to directly address the danger of hate and extremism from our schools to our statehouses. Our report exposes these far-right extremists and serves as a tool for advocates and communities working to counter disinformation, false conspiracies and threats to voters and election workers.”

[poetryqueer]

you know the one thing i keep on coming across in studying early christianity is the crisis of jesus' absence, like nowadays its pretty clear how jesus plays into christian theology so on so forth, but directly following the apostolic era there's this crisis of trying to adapt christian theology to this increasing distance from jesus with the people who knew him dying and the people who knew them dying, and anyways there's this continued need to fill this gap left by jesus being not physically present and i think it could be really useful to have a term for this crisis in the christian faith. personally, i think calling this the jesus hole could be- [gets dragged out from the patristics conference]

[iustuspeccator]

About Me

This is a side blog so I don't annoy my irl friends with Christian discourse lol. I'm Bel. My identity is foremost Christian and then, in no particular order: Lutheran, queer, trans, white, USAmerican. Also some other things but these are the perspectives I cannot speak outside of.

I am a first year seminarian and candidate for ministry! My current ministry interests are expressions of future church life, pathways to Christianity for the (interested) un- and de-churched, reclaiming Christianity from the American right-wing, and intra- and interfaith ecumenism. (Phrasing borrowed from Amos Yong.)

My ongoing theological/historical interests are forgiveness, the Judaic roots of Christianity, universal salvation, universalism/religious plurality, queer theology, the Apostolic Age, Patristic Age and Reformation. This doesn't mean these are areas of expertise but rather areas of exploration and questioning.

I like to argue, a word which here means to make reasoned statements to prove or refute an argument, especially for the purpose of learning. I do not like to fight. I value source citation, precision in language, and sincerity. I want to really stress again that arguing is fun for me, so if I'm arguing on your post and it's not fun for you, just block me. Or if you want to continue the discussion but it's not fun, let me know and I'll adjust my tone.

Thanks for reading, peace be with you.

PS the cat in my header is Patches and that's her laying on one of my Bibles while I read a different one because I couldn't make her leave <3

[apenitentialprayer]

i've read that mormons and JWs are considered heretics because they don't affirm the trinity, so i was wondering what the sort-of 'cut off' point is. like would the ACOE be considered heretics because they say mary isn't the mother of God, only the mother of christ, for example

Alrighty, this is a big one. So, as far as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the (mainstream) Latter Day Saints movement go, things are.... a little more complicated in terms of whether their doctrine is "heresy" or if they are just plain non-Christian (and thus wouldn't count as heretical).

The crux of the argument that they are not Christian is that they do not affirm the Nicene Creed, which was articulated during the Councils of Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD). While Mormons and JWs can affirm the most primitive of Christian creeds ("Christ is Lord"), the Nicene Creed very quickly took on the status of the σύμβολον, or symbolum in Latin; the "symbol of faith," the creed whose affirmation is itself a verification of one's Christian identity. That's why during the Council of Trent, for example, the Tridentine Fathers invited Protestants to participate in the Council on the condition that they could still affirm the Creed.

Of course, Mormons and JWs do not see it that way. They self-identify as Christians; and each group doesn't see themselves just as Christians, but as restorers of a purer, more original Christianity that had existed before the creation of that Creed.

But, anyway, if the conclusion of this argument is accepted, and members of the (mainstream) Latter Day Saints movement and Jehovah's Witnesses are not considered Christian, they by definition cannot be considered heretics; per the Baltimore Catechism, heretics are "baptized Christians, but do not believe all the articles of faith" (Q 1170).

The Assyrian Church of the East affirms the Nicene Creed, have Apostolic Succession, and have limited intercommunion with the Catholic Church. And, Christologically, they have an interesting situation going on. The Assyrian Church has not formally accepted the dogmatic Christological definitions of the Council of Ephesus (431). And, on that alone, the ACoE would seem to fit into the Baltimore Catechism's definition of heretic.

But over 1550 years after that split, the leaders of both the Assyrian Church of the East and the Catholic Church signed a document that affirmed that both Churches saw the other's Christological doctrines as valid, and that both theologies were expressions of the same Apostolic faith. You can read the full document, which is not very long, here.

But to abstract the discussion of heresy for a moment (bold of me to do, admittedly, after saying the last ask was a little vague); we need to make a distinction between formal heresy and material heresy. As Pope Benedict noted in 1993, which itself was an echo of the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia's description of heresy, the defining characteristic of formal heresy is pertinacia, which can be translated as "stubbornness." What makes a person a "heretic" in a condemnable sense is this pertinacia, this holding fast to falsehoods in defiance of correction by proper authority.

So while the first generations of Protestants may be considered formal heretics, Pope Benedict noted that this does not reflect the actual social and religious conditions of Protestants living today, who are simply living out their Christian faith in the traditions that have arisen since the Reformation. They may be material heretics, and the doctrines of Protestantism may be considered heretical from the Catholic viewpoint, but being a Protestant does not automatically incur the guilt of heresy.

And, in all honesty, most Christians alive today (and most Christians in all ages) have in all probability been material heretics - i.e., they hold some wrong or incorrect opinions concerning the faith, but simply out of ignorance and not in defiance of proper authority. And that is not a sin.

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

"The Trinity only occurred 300 years in" a fully developed and complete image of what we now call Trinitarian theology definitely is the result of 300 years of meditation, prayer, reading of scripture, studying of philosophy, and etc. But

A conception of God as a complex being is evident in the prophets. Without any type of document hypothesis (and i also reject the 4-source document hypothesis so. yeah), Second Temple Period Jews had to then go and find a way for that complex portrait of God throughout the entire Tanakh to somehow be consistent with having One Divine Being.

God as triune in some sense is present in the apostolic writings themself: the Father is clearly God; Jesus is clearly God; the Holy Spirit is clearly God. Did that mean they had a Niceno-Constantinopolitan conception of the trinity, full on with hypostatic unions and etc. No. That's absurd. That would come to be after centuries of discussion, debate, prayer, scripture reading, conflict, and sometimes, unfortunately, violence. But to be a Christian is to believe that the Spirit will guide the church, both as individuals and as a corporate institution.

God is Love. I don't know how other people interpret this phrase (and i really should ask some people) but for me: God cannot be Love (which is inherently other-centered) is God is only one person. Multi-persons is necessary for God to be Love.