#How the Early Christian Church Lost Its Divine Authority

[mindfulldsliving]

Understanding the Apostasy: Christian History, Divine Authority, and the Need for Restoration

Dispensations: The Pattern of Apostasy and Restoration What happened to the early Christian church after the apostles were gone? For Latter-day Saints, the concept of apostasy explains much about how divine authority was lost and why restoration was essential. This wasn’t merely about social or political changes; it was about the gradual erosion of core doctrines, priesthood power, and true…

[gay-mormon-wizard]

ok i have lots of questions, most are answered by mormon articles i can find on google (altho id still be interested in the queerstake perspective) but the one that i didnt feel like i understood through google was the great apostasy. like how was the priesthood authority lost in the early church, did jesus tell them everything about the temple and the afterlife but the records of it were intentionally destroyed, were they destroyed by members of the church like paul or later christan leaders or by outsiders? or is this stuff just not known? and why did jesus only tell the truth to those 2 groups of people in the whole world?

What I've been told in Sunday School is that Europe was too tumultuous and violent a place for his Church to survive as he intended it, so God commanded the priesthood officers to stop ordaining more people. In the Americas, the Book of Mormon tells the story of Moroni, the last author to write in it and the last surviving priesthood holder, who sees the extinction of the Church as he knew it when all of the priesthood holders died in a great war across the continent. After Moroni dies is when the Apostasy starts over there.

Because every European country had adopted a certain sect of Christianity as its "national religion," even if that religion wasn't forced onto all the citizens, God decided to restore his Church in North America, where there was a constitutional separation of church and state, to ensure the Church's survival.

As for the priesthood being given to other groups of people throughout the world, we simply believe that it might've happened, but we're not sure. If it did, we'll know eventually, when and if God reveals it.

That's the extent of my official mormon answer. But I, being queer, have tended to push the boundaries of mormonism, so I'm also a polytheist and a witch. So the rest of my answer is my personal opinion and it is not at all adherent to official doctrine.

I believe that many gods are real and have their own priesthoods, like the Greek gods, the Celtic gods, etc. - if there's a long history of a divine entity being worshipped and/or feared, I believe it exists. And I think that, as the Book of Mormon says, "all souls return to that God who gave them life." Like, maybe in the beginning, all of these distinct groups of divine beings were given a certain amount of human souls to take care of, and their own metaphysical "space" to build their human afterlife, and that whichever soul a god sends into the world is destined to come back home to them upon death. But humans, being selfish and narrow-minded, think that their own religion must be the best, so they believe that it's the ONLY one.

Histories kept by Native American peoples indicate that they have lived a lot more peacefully, with each other and with the land, than Europeans did. Many Native religions acknowledged a supreme being, like a "great spirit," alongside the spirits of plants and animals and the land. So I do think that certain Native tribes may have had their priesthood (of God) restored prior to European contact, just in a way that looked different, and on a group-by-group basis. And their own priesthoods based on ancestral and nature veneration were and are also real and holy, just not belonging to the Christian God, unless they later incorporated him.

Opening it up to other queerstake folks who want to add their answers!

[graciousheaven]

Who can Baptise with Water

     The authority to baptize new converts has been given by Christ to the ministers of the Gospel. As the Head of the Church, Christ has instructed them to make disciples and to baptise them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, Roman Catholicism does not side with the truth, but extends this authority to those who do not belong to the body of Christ. It claims that even a non-Christian can baptise someone in case of emergency, provided the non-Christian has a good intent and pronounces the baptismal formula, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, and pours water on the person. 

     Rome’s viewpoint promotes an obscure assimilation that raises questions; for it disregards this commandment of the Lord to those who belong to Him, “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols?” (2 Corinthians 6:14-16a). However, Rome’s disobedience to this command reveals its real identity; its assimilation with the world testifies that it does not serve the Truth but falsehood. Rome is not for Christ but against Him – as the Lord Himself says in John 14:21a, “Whoever has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me.” 

     Moreover, Rome talks about emergency as if the death of a person could take the Lord by surprise, and that in this case another man had to step in and do what God could not do on time, i.e., turning the heart of a sinful man to God before the man is swept away by death. The Lord does not need anyone to build His Church, and even less the sons of disobedience. He is not constrained by time, but rather He controls time and does everything at the time and place He has appointed. God is never late nor early, because He is sovereign. “I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all My purpose”, declares the Lord in Isaiah 46:9c-10.

     When our Lord was crucified, most of the people in the crowd, and quite possibly everyone present at Calvary, upon seeing the two thieves nailed to the cross next to our Lord, certainly thought it was too late for the two thieves. After all, they were at the door of death and were receiving the due reward of their lawless deeds. But we should never forget that at all times everything happens by divine decree. Nothing is left to chance or bad luck. Surely, everything at Calvary was taking place according to God’s definite plan at the time He had appointed. Although the sky above the heads of these two criminals looked gloomy, hope was not lost, at least for one of them, the one whom the Sovereign One had predestined for adoption before the creation of the world. 

     What man was there to help God rescue this thief from destruction? The answer is: Nobody. But the King of glory, in the twinkling of an eye, changed this man’s heart. He was a spiritually dead man and was about to depart from this world to face eternal torment in hell. But the Sovereign Lord sprinkled clean water on him and put a new spirit and a new heart within him, and instantly the man turned to His Maker and Savior and said, “Jesus, remember me when You come into Your Kingdom” (Luke 23:42). And He in whose hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:10) answered the man, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). But the other thief who was divinely appointed for wrath was given no rest. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!”, as Romans 11:33 says.

     The Lord is self-sufficient. He doesn't need anything nor does He need anyone to carry out His plans. He rules and reigns over all things. He fixes times and seasons by His own authority, and ordains the events and circumstances that govern the life of all things (cf. Matthew 10:29). Nothing can thwart His plan, nothing can prevent Him from bringing to glory those whom He chose as heirs of His Kingdom. Thus, declares the Lord in Matthew 16:18, “I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” The Lord will raise from spiritual deadness all those He chose before time began and will seal them into His eternal love according to the counsel of His will and His perfect and definite plan.  

[nerdygaymormon]

I swear when I was a kid some authority in the church said there was no soul in "fetus" (idk if there's a better word) when its conceived so there's no moral issue with getting an abortion in the early stages (aka when most people who want one get one) so now seeing all these other members celebrating around me is kind of :/ (or maybe I imagined this statement who KNOWS)

I think you're referring to a belief that used to be very common among Christians called ensoulment or quickening, which is when a spirit enters the body. Traditionally this is around the 15th week of a pregnancy and is when a woman can start to feel her baby move.

Prior to the quickening, it was thought this is not a living soul. When abortion was made legal across all of the United States in 1973, most Christian sects were in support, notable exceptions being the Catholics and Mormons.

Inside of the Mormon faith, there is an interesting story that we used to talk about in thinking of when does the quickening occur. That story is in 3 Nephi 1:12-14. Nephi is praying and the voice of the Lord speaks to him and says the Lord will be born tomorrow, and there will be these great signs to let the Nephites know He has been born.

In other words, Jesus is speaking to Nephi the day before He's born, and this causes some distress because how could Jesus not be in His body that late in the pregnancy? What does this mean about abortion?

The theory of "divine investiture of authority" was created to deal with this, which is that it wasn't really Jesus speaking to Nephi, but He gave some being, probably an angel, authority to not just speak for Him, but to speak as if they are Him.

So yes, I can believe you remember some Church authority speak about there not being a soul during the early phases of pregnancy.

I don't hear people talk much anymore about when does the spirit join the body. Since at least the 1970’s, our Church has taught that life begins at conception, and that is a basis on which many use to believe abortion is never allowed or only in limited situations, although I don't think most believe the spirit has joined those few little cells at the moment of conception. Many fertilized eggs pass without the woman even knowing, we don't say that is a lost soul. Further proof that we don’t consider it a soul, we don’t do temple work for a miscarriage.

[justforbooks]

Hildegard of Bingen, also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath of the High Middle Ages. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most-recorded in modern history. She has been considered by many in Europe to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.

Hildegard was born around the year 1098, although the exact date is uncertain. Her parents were Mechtild of Merxheim-Nahet and Hildebert of Bermersheim, a family of the free lower nobility in the service of the Count Meginhard of Sponheim. Sickly from birth, Hildegard is traditionally considered their youngest and tenth child, although there are records of only seven older siblings. In her Vita, Hildegard states that from a very young age she had experienced visions.

Hildegard's works include three great volumes of visionary theology; a variety of musical compositions for use in liturgy, as well as the musical morality play Ordo Virtutum; one of the largest bodies of letters (nearly 400) to survive from the Middle Ages, addressed to correspondents ranging from popes to emperors to abbots and abbesses, and including records of many of the sermons she preached in the 1160s and 1170s; two volumes of material on natural medicine and cures; an invented language called the Lingua ignota ("unknown language"); and various minor works, including a gospel commentary and two works of hagiography.

Several manuscripts of her works were produced during her lifetime, including the illustrated Rupertsberg manuscript of her first major work, Scivias (lost since 1945); the Dendermonde Codex, which contains one version of her musical works; and the Ghent manuscript, which was the first fair-copy made for editing of her final theological work, the Liber Divinorum Operum. At the end of her life, and probably under her initial guidance, all of her works were edited and gathered into the single Riesenkodex manuscript.

Attention in recent decades to women of the medieval Catholic Church has led to a great deal of popular interest in Hildegard's music. In addition to the Ordo Virtutum, sixty-nine musical compositions, each with its own original poetic text, survive, and at least four other texts are known, though their musical notation has been lost. This is one of the largest repertoires among medieval composers.

One of her better-known works, Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues), is a morality play. It is uncertain when some of Hildegard's compositions were composed, though the Ordo Virtutum is thought to have been composed as early as 1151. It is an independent Latin morality play with music (82 songs); it does not supplement or pay homage to the Mass or the Office of a certain feast. It is, in fact, the earliest known surviving musical drama that is not attached to a liturgy.

The Ordo virtutum would have been performed within Hildegard's monastery by and for her select community of noblewomen and nuns. It was probably performed as a manifestation of the theology Hildegard delineated in the Scivias. The play serves as an allegory of the Christian story of sin, confession, repentance, and forgiveness. Notably, it is the female Virtues who restore the fallen to the community of the faithful, not the male Patriarchs or Prophets. This would have been a significant message to the nuns in Hildegard's convent. Scholars assert that the role of the Devil would have been played by Volmar, while Hildegard's nuns would have played the parts of Anima (the human souls) and the Virtues. The devil's part is entirely spoken or shouted, with no musical setting. All other characters sing in monophonic plainchant. This includes Patriarchs, Prophets, A Happy Soul, A Unhappy Soul and A Penitent Soul along with 16 female Virtues (including Mercy, Innocence, Chasity, Obedience, Hope, and Faith).

In addition to the Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard composed many liturgical songs that were collected into a cycle called the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum. The songs from the Symphonia are set to Hildegard's own text and range from antiphons, hymns, and sequences, to responsories. Her music is monophonic, that is, consisting of exactly one melodic line. Its style has been said to be characterized by soaring melodies that can push the boundaries of traditional Gregorian chant, and to stand outside the normal practices of monophonic monastic chant. Researchers are also exploring ways in which it may be viewed in comparison with her contemporaries, such as Hermannus Contractus. Another feature of Hildegard's music that both reflects twelfth-century evolution of chant, and pushes that evolution further, is that it is highly melismatic, often with recurrent melodic units. Scholars such as Margot Fassler, Marianne Richert Pfau, and Beverly Lomer also note the intimate relationship between music and text in Hildegard's compositions, whose rhetorical features are often more distinct than is common in twelfth-century chant. As with all medieval chant notation, Hildegard's music lacks any indication of tempo or rhythm; the surviving manuscripts employ late German style notation, which uses very ornamental neumes. The reverence for the Virgin Mary reflected in music shows how deeply influenced and inspired Hildegard of Bingen and her community were by the Virgin Mary and the saints.

In recent years, Hildegard has become of particular interest to feminist scholars. They note her reference to herself as a member of the weaker sex and her rather constant belittling of women. Hildegard frequently referred to herself as an unlearned woman, completely incapable of Biblical exegesis. Such a statement on her part, however, worked to her advantage because it made her statements that all of her writings and music came from visions of the Divine more believable, therefore giving Hildegard the authority to speak in a time and place where few women were permitted a voice. Hildegard used her voice to amplify the church's condemnation of institutional corruption, in particular simony.

Hildegard has also become a figure of reverence within the contemporary New Age movement, mostly because of her holistic and natural view of healing, as well as her status as a mystic. Though her medical writings were long neglected, and then studied without reference to their context, she was the inspiration for Dr. Gottfried Hertzka's "Hildegard-Medicine", and is the namesake for June Boyce-Tillman's Hildegard Network, a healing center that focuses on a holistic approach to wellness and brings together people interested in exploring the links between spirituality, the arts, and healing. Her reputation as a medicinal writer and healer was also used by early feminists to argue for women's rights to attend medical schools. Hildegard's reincarnation has been debated since 1924 when Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner lectured that a nun of her description was the past life of Russian poet-philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, whose Sophianic visions are often compared to Hildegard's. Sophiologist Robert Powell writes that hermetic astrology proves the match, while mystical communities in Hildegard's lineage include that of artist Carl Schroeder as studied by Columbia sociologist Courtney Bender and supported by reincarnation researchers Walter Semkiw and Kevin Ryerson.

Recordings and performances of Hildegard's music have gained critical praise and popularity since 1979. See Discography listed below.

The following modern musical works are directly linked to Hildegard and her music or texts:

Sofia Gubaidulina: Aus den Visionen der Hildegard von Bingen, for contra alto solo, after a text of Hildegard of Bingen, 1994.

Peter Janssens: Hildegard von Bingen, a musical in 10 scenes, text: Jutta Richter, 1997.

Cecilia McDowall: Alma Redemptoris Mater.

Tilo Medek: Monatsbilder (nach Hildegard von Bingen), twelve songs for mezzo-soprano, clarinet and piano, 1997.

David Lynch with Jocelyn Montgomery: Lux Vivens (Living Light): The Music of Hildegard Von Bingen, 1998.

Alois Albrecht: Hildegard von Bingen, a liturgical play with texts and music by Hildegard of Bingen, 1998.

Christopher Theofanidis: Rainbow Body, for orchestra (2000)

Ludger Stühlmeyer: O splendidissima gemma, for alto solo and organ, text by Hildegard of Bingen, 2011.

Wolfgang Sauseng: De visione secunda for double choir and percussion, 2011.

Devendra Banhart: Für Hildegard von Bingen, single from the 2013 album Mala.

Gordon Hamilton: The Trillion Souls quotes Hildegard's O Ignee Spiritus

The artwork The Dinner Party features a place setting for Hildegard.

In space, the minor planet 898 Hildegard is named for her.

In film, Hildegard has been portrayed by Patricia Routledge in a BBC documentary called Hildegard of Bingen (1994), by Ángela Molina in Barbarossa (2009) and by Barbara Sukowa in the film Vision, directed by Margarethe von Trotta.

Hildegard was the subject of a 2012 fictionalized biographic novel Illuminations by Mary Sharatt.

The plant genus Hildegardia is named after her because of her contributions to herbal medicine.

Hildegard makes an appearance in The Baby-Sitters Club #101: Claudia Kishi, Middle School Drop-Out by Ann M. Martin, when Anna Stevenson dresses as Hildegard for Halloween.

A feature documentary film, The Unruly Mystic: Saint Hildegard, was released by American director Michael M. Conti in 2014.

The off-Broadway musical In the Green, written by Grace McLean, followed Hildegard's story.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[nicklloydnow]

"“My definition for mysticism,” Rohr said, “is experiential knowledge of the Holy, the transcendent, the divine, God—if you want to use that word, but I’m not tied to it.” Experiential knowledge, which differs from textbook knowledge, “will always be spoken humbly, because true spiritual knowledge is always partial. You know you don’t know the whole mystery. But even one little peek into one little corner of the mystery is more than enough.”

(...)

As Rohr tells it, the contemplative mind went underground during the Protestant Reformation. It was still being taught in some monasteries as late as the fifteenth century, and in isolated places such as Spain there was “an explosion of contemplation” through the mystical writings of Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross. But then came Luther’s sola scriptura and Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, both of which placed the dualistic, egoistic mind at the center. Guigo the Carthusian, a twelfth-century monk, spoke of three levels of prayer: oratio, or spoken prayer; meditatio, using the mind to reflect on a piece of scripture; and contemplatio, the wordless prayer of the heart. This is the moment, Rohr explains, when “you shed the mind as the primary receiver station. You stop reflecting. You stop critiquing or analyzing. You let the moment be what it is, as it is, all that it is. That takes a lot of surrender.” After the Enlightenment and its Cartesian dualisms, the contemplative mind—“our unique access point to God,” as Rohr describes it—“was pretty well lost.”

(...)

So many of the mistakes in American Christianity, Rohr told me, are a result of dualistic thinking, which is “inherently antagonistic, inherently competitive. You’re forced within the first nanosecond to take sides. Republican-Democrat, black-white, gay-straight . . . go down the whole list of what’s tearing us apart—the dualistic mind always chooses sides.” He is sympathetic to those who disaffiliate from religion. But he still believes in faith’s power to instill awe, to bind and heal, to return us to ourselves, to God, and to one another. At the center of that return lies the contemplative mind.

(...)

I was also reading Cassian’s Conferences and considering the author’s role as chronicler of the early Christian monastic movement in Egypt, a kind of fifth-century immersion journalist of the soul. Cassian describes Christian life as a journey toward puritas cordis: purity of heart. If that is the destination, the vehicle is silent prayer.

Ontological wonder, tenderness, puritas cordis, pondering scales of mercy: these seemed like activities worthy of my meager efforts, and I felt a similar hunger for those things among other contemplatives, those who were also leaving the barnacled, empty supertanker of Christendom and boarding smaller, more nimble vessels.

“Does mysticism need a church?” In his introduction to the Conferences, the Cambridge historian Owen Chadwick poses this as a central conundrum in early monastic thought, a question that was very much alive among the modern contemplatives. “The individual experience of the divine is overwhelming,” Chadwick writes. “It passes beyond the memory of biblical texts and every other thought. . . . Might it be that holy anarchy is nearer to God than ordered ecclesiasticism?”

Like Cassian, I was more drawn to holy anarchy. And yet, in the process of fleeing broken ecclesial institutions, didn’t the new contemplatives also constitute a body politic? What was the Universal Christ conference if not a new form of church? It’s possible to see organized religion as a necessary evil, something that could be dispensed with once individuals reach some higher plane of awareness, but that seems facile. Humans depend on patterns and structures. Forms change, but we still need them to provide some kind of continuity of thought and praxis, just as we depend on forms to build community, which is the other piece missing in the laissez-faire approach. In an essay titled “The Mystical Core of Organized Religion,” the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast readily acknowledges that “mysticism clashes with the institution.” And yet, he admits, “We need religious institutions. If they weren’t there, we would create them. Life creates structures.”

(...)

In his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton describes an incident he experienced in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 18, 1958, as he stood on the corner of 4th and Walnut Streets.

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun,” he writes.

I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes . . . It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

It is striking that Merton’s epiphany occurred not in a monk’s cell or cathedral alcove, but on a busy street in Louisville. Sartre famously said that “hell is other people,” but for Merton, and for Holmes, Bucko, McCrary, Rohr, and so many of the contemplatives I met, other people are not hell; they are portals to paradise.

One paradox of the contemplative life is the way in which it engenders, even demands, participation in a community. “The life of a Christian is not a solo act,” McCrary told me. “Jesus went to the desert alone to pray, but he was always building community. It’s a both-and.” The reverse is also true. Rohr: “How you relate to your spouse, your children, your dog—that’s how you’ll relate to God.”

The gate of heaven opens for us all, but the hinge swings outward as much as inward, leading not into some hermetically sealed chamber, but a spacious meadow where we find every person we’ve ever known, a field of solitaries loved beyond measure, a destination as near as our next breath."

[kabane52]

Why the Hebrew (Masoretic) Manuscript Tradition?

Hello, why do you use the Masoretic chronology instead of the Septuaginta? Didn't the Jews adulterate the Masoretic version?

This is a question I get a fair bit, as it has become received wisdom in many parts of the “Orthosphere” that the LXX holds a privileged position by divine command and has been elevated by the Apostles as the only legitimate text of the Old Testament. I will shortly summarize my position in bullet points before answering this question in more detail. 

-The Septuagint, while of value in many ways (see below for some), does not hold a position of unique divine primacy.

-There is no evidence for systematic corruption of the text.

-If systematic removal of Christ from the Old Testament was the intent, then the project was a colossal failure, as Christ permeates the Hebrew text as we possess it from the Masoretes.

-The Septuagint was the standard text for what we think of as “the Orthodox tradition” because that tradition is largely coextensive with the Greek speaking Christian world and the Septuagint is a Greek text. 

-Furthermore, if the Orthodox Church is truly the heir of the whole undivided Church, East and West, then the Christian West in communion with the East during the first thousand years used a translation of the Masoretic tradition, not from the Septuagint. The identification of the LXX as the only historic text of the Orthodox Church is therefore wrong to begin with.

-While the Septuagint contains many insights by virtue of its being a running commentary on the symbolic sense of the Hebrew Bible and at times preserves a superior reading, there is no reason to prefer it in principle.

-The Septuagint is not the “Bible of the Apostles” in a way that the Hebrew Bible is not. Nor is it, as is sometimes asserted, the Bible of Jesus, as the LXX was only used in the Diaspora, into which our Lord never traveled apart from the flight to Egypt in His infancy.

Onto the details:

It is sometimes stated that the Jews corrupted the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible to remove prophecies of Christ. If so, their failure is legendary, because the messianic identity of Jesus is woven throughout the Hebrew Bible just as much as it is in non-Masoretic textual traditions. In some cases, it is even more evident than it is in the LXX. Take Isaiah 9 as an example. The LXX has “Angel of Great Counsel” where the MT has “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Father Forever, Prince of Peace.” In context, Isaiah has woven a fabric of allusions to the book of Judges, in particular Judges 13 where the Angel of the LORD makes known His Name which is Wonderful. For this reason, the translators/interpreters (these Jewish sages were interpreting the symbolic structure of the text for a Gentile audience which lacked the tools for interpreting them from scratch) recognized that the figure being described was, in fact, the Divine Angel of the LORD.

But textually, the MT is a more direct attestation to the divinity of the Messiah, and it is without question the original form. Notably, it is also the form included in Orthodox liturgical tradition! I am unsure as to how it entered the liturgical tradition, given that all except the earliest generation of its architects lacked knowledge of the Hebrew language. It is possible that this allusion thus goes back to the Apostolic Age and the Jewish church of Jerusalem. That is just speculation, however.

The claim that the MT was corrupted intentionally was made by some patristic authors and ecclesiastical writers. But none of those who made such claims could read Hebrew. It is likely that they made this argument when their Jewish interlocutor based their counter-argument on their different textual traditions. But without the capacity to directly analyze the Masoretic textual tradition, these arguments were just inferences whose justification should be considered in light of the text itself. And in my estimation, the evidence does not merit any significant intentional corruption on the part of the Masoretic scribal tradition. On the contrary, the Masoretic tradition was extremely conservative and preserves readings that are highly amenable to Christian theology. Sanctity does not, apart from special revelation, grant privileged knowledge of textual critical issues like this. St. Porphyrios’ Wounded by Love documents (in the saint’s own words) some damaging mistakes the great elder made in his early days as a confessor. And at that time, he already possessed spiritual gifts of profound rarity. Sanctity does not entail anywhere near the kind of protection from mistakes that some assume it does.

The Masoretic tradition is the canonical text of the Christian West in its Latin translation- St. Jerome’s Vulgate. While most patristic authors used the LXX numbering, others used the numbering of the MT, such as St. Bede the Venerable. So I use the MT because I think it accurately preserves the original text, often to a letter-by-letter degree. There are cases where I think the LXX preserves a better reading, but in general, if one looks for that penned by the original prophetic authors, I think the MT is more likely to preserve those words. On the “Orthosphere”, it has become common to make claims on behalf of the Septuagint that, in my view, the evidence will simply not bear out. Claims that the Septuagint was the Bible of Jesus is nonsense. The LXX was not used in Palestinian synagogues. That the apostles quote the LXX is no more indicative of a privileged divine status for the LXX than my frequent quotation of the ESV is indicative of me thinking that the ESV has a privileged divine status. NT scholars fluent in NT Greek will usually quote English translations except where their argument depends on a particular nuance of the Greek text. And the apostles actually quote both textual traditions on different occasions.

Why, then, has the Orthodox Church used the LXX as its “standard” text? More precise than “standard” is “liturgical.” And as seen above, even this is not universally true. But answering this question is easy: this liturgical tradition was originally crafted in the Greek language, and so it relies on a Greek text of the Old Testament. It is notable that under the reforms of Metropolitan St. Philaret of Moscow, the saintly theologian commissioned an official translation of the Bible into the Russian language- using the Hebrew text of the Masoretic tradition as the basis for the Old Testament. In his catechism, he identifies the twenty-two (twenty-four when Ruth is distinguished from Judges and Lamentations from Jeremiah) books of the Hebrew canon as being the texts which are strictly canonical. The “deuterocanon” or “ecclesiastical” books are not strictly canonical but “readable”, texts from the era before Christ judged by the Church as worthy of preservation for wisdom and so only canonical in a looser, extended sense.

That the Greek manuscript tradition (that is to say, the LXX) was the textual source of biblical material in the Greek liturgical tradition is not something demanding a deeper explanation or justification than “they are written in the same language.” It is natural for people to invent theological justifications retroactively for facts which are incidental, but we must be on guard against taking those for granted. The Council of Trent did the same thing by elevating the Latin Vulgate to the “official” Catholic version of the Bible! Why was the Latin Vulgate the text used in the Latin Liturgy? Because it was Latin! It is superfluous to invent additional, deeper reasons for something which already is sufficiently explained.

More generally, no translation can perfectly capture the sense of the original text. The LXX does not capture Hebrew wordplays which permeate the Old Testament. It does not capture the numerical devices which are woven throughout Moses and the prophets, because a translation will obviously have a different number of words and letters than the original text. To those who assert the irreparable corruption of the Masoretic text, the actual product of the divinely guided prophetic hand has been lost forever. There are aspects of meaning that are strictly tied to our ability to read the text in the original language, and if a reliable original language text is lost, what Moses, the prophets, and the Spirit through them meant for our instruction is gone forever. Apart from the historical evidence (which I think verifies divine fidelity in accurately preserving the word of God), such a position raises serious theological concerns.

[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

14th September >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on John 3:13-17 for The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross: ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up’.

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

John 3:13-17

God sent his Son so that through him the world might be saved

Jesus said to Nicodemus:

‘No one has gone up to heaven

except the one who came down from heaven,

the Son of Man who is in heaven;

and the Son of Man must be lifted up

as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,

so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

Yes, God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son,

so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost

but may have eternal life.

For God sent his Son into the world

not to condemn the world,

but so that through him the world might be saved.’

Gospel (USA)

John 3:13-17

So the Son of Man must be lifted up.

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Reflections (6)

(i) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

When we had our parish pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi about two years ago, I bought a wooden cross. It is a replica of the cross that spoke to Saint Francis in the church of San Damiano in Assisi. On that occasion Francis heard the Lord call on him to rebuild his church. It is really a painting on wood of Jesus on the cross. The image is very unlike the image of Jesus on the large crucifix in our side chapel. There it is very evidently the suffering Jesus that is depicted. On this cross from Assisi Jesus looks very serene. There is no trace of suffering in his face. It is almost like the glorious Christ on the cross with his arms outstretched to embrace all. That image is very appropriate for today’s feast. This is not like the feast of Good Friday, where we dwell on the sufferings of Jesus. This feast proclaims the triumph of Jesus on the cross. What was the nature of that triumph? It was firstly the triumph of life over death. Those who put Jesus to death did not have the final say, because God the Father raised him high, in the words of Saint Paul in today’s first reading. It was also the triumph of love over hatred. Human hatred for Jesus did not have the last word, because in and through Jesus crucified, the love of God for humanity was shining brightly. In the words of the gospel reading, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. It was also the triumph of mercy over sin. In today’s first reading, the people of Israel cried out, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord’. However, when they looked upon the bronze serpent they experienced the Lord’s life-giving mercy. When we look upon the face of the Lord on the cross, we too find mercy; we experience the cross as the throne of grace. Today’s feast celebrates the good news that God turned the tragedy of Calvary into a triumph for us all. Through the cross, God’s life-giving love and mercy was embracing us all. Today’s feast also reminds us that in our own personal experiences of Calvary, the Lord is present with us in a loving and merciful way, working on our behalf to bring new life out of our suffering and dying.

And/Or

(ii) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

In the time of Jesus no one would have considered crucifixion a triumph. It may have been considered a triumph for those who were doing the crucifying; it certainly would never have been considered a triumph for the person crucified. Yet, that is what we are celebrating this morning. Jesus, in being crucified, triumphed. It was a triumph of love over hatred. As John the evangelist says in this morning’s gospel reading, ‘God so loved the world only Son’. Jesus revealed God’s love in all that he said and did, but he revealed God’s love most fully on the cross. John the evangelist would say that on the cross Jesus revealed God’s glory. That is why in John’s gospel Jesus speaks of his coming crucifixion as the hour when he is glorified. Authentic love is always life-giving and that is uniquely so of God’s love. As well as being the triumph of love over hatred, the cross of Jesus is the triumph of life over death. Jesus was put to death in the most cruel way but through his death he passed over into a new life and that life was offered to us all. The blood and water flowing from the side of Jesus in John’s gospel speaks to us of the life that flows through the death of Jesus. The cross has been celebrated in art as the tree of life. The triumph of the cross, which is the triumph of God and of Jesus over Satan and all the forces of evil and death, is a triumph in which we all share. From the cross Jesus draws all of us into the love and life of God. As he says in John’s gospel, when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself. We simply have to let ourselves be drawn.

 And/Or

(iii) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. ‘Triumph’ suggests celebration, achievement, recognition. ‘Cross’ indicates suffering, humiliation, defeat. How could any one who ended up crucified ever be said to have triumphed. It is hard to think of a greater paradox that the phrase ‘the triumph of the cross’. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find that phrase in any way strange. When we look on the cross with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and the wisdom of God. What is this power that shows itself in such degrading weakness? It is of course the power of love, the power of a love that is greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Here was a divine love that became a human love in the life and death of Jesus, a love so powerful that it was in no way diminished by the experience of rejection, hatred, and all that was most sinister and corrupt in the human spirit. The triumph of the cross is the triumph of love over hatred, of life over death.The triumph of that Good Friday is a triumph in which we all continue to share. The light that shone in that awful darkness continues to shine on all of us. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives.

 And/Or

(iv) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The expression ‘exaltation of the cross’ would have made very little sense in the time of Jesus. ‘Exaltation’ suggested glory, honour, status, whereas death by crucifixion was the most shameful death imaginable. It was the complete absence of glory, honour and status. Why did the early Christians begin to speak of the death by crucifixion of Jesus as exaltation? They could only do so in the light of Jesus’ resurrection. In today’s second reading, Paul says that because Jesus ‘was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross’, God raised him high, or highly exalted him. In that sense, Jesus’ exaltation by God followed his death on the cross. Yet, the early church understood that Jesus was already being exalted by God as he hung from the cross. When people were doing their worst to Jesus, God was standing over his Son vindicating him, confirming all that his Son lived by and stood for. It was because Jesus was totally faithful to the work God gave him to do that he was crucified. What was that work that God gave Jesus to do? Jesus’ work was to reveal God’s love for the world. As Saint John says in this morning’s gospel reading, ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son’. On one occasion in John’s gospel Jesus said, ‘my food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work’. According to that same gospel Jesus’ last words before he died were ‘it is finished’. Jesus’ work of revealing God’s love for the world, for Jews, Samaritans, pagans, was experienced as threatening by many, especially those in power. They crucified him to put a stop to his work. Yet, in killing Jesus they enabled Jesus to finish the work God gave him to do. If his life proclaimed God’s love for the world, his death proclaimed that love even more powerfully. His death revealed a divine love, a love that endured in the face of all the very worst that evil and sin could inflict on him. That is why we can speak of the exaltation of the cross. When we look upon the cross, we believing we are looking upon an explosion of love, the glorious revelation of God’s love, a love that is stronger than sin and death, a love that embraced the world and embraces each of us in a very personal way. We can each say with Saint Paul in his letter to the Galatians, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’.

 And/Or

(v) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The discovery of the relics of the true cross by St Helena, the mother of Constantine, is dated to September 14, 320. The annual commemoration of that event has been celebrated since, in praise of the redemption won for us by Christ. No one in the time of Jesus would ever have put together the two words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’. Far from being a triumph, death by crucifixion was considered to be the most degrading and terrifying form of execution. It was a way for the Roman authorities to show its triumph over all those who dared to threaten Roman order and peace. Yet, as Christians, we have no difficulty in looking upon the cross of Jesus as a triumph. Rome did not have the last word when it came to Jesus, because God raised Jesus from the dead and he made him the cornerstone of a new community, which went on to include a future Roman Emperor, Constantine. Through the eyes of the resurrection we can see the cross of Jesus as the triumph of love over hatred, of Jesus’ love over the hatred of his enemies, of God’s love over the hateful rejection of his Son. This is how John in his gospel understood the cross of Jesus. It was the glorious revelation of God’s love for the world, in the language of today’s gospel reading. Jesus himself says that a man has no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. We venerate the cross because it is a powerful manifestation of a love that is greater than any human love. That is why the earliest Christians tended to depict the crucifix as a glorious Christ with arms outstretched reigning in love from the cross. This morning we celebrate a triumph in which we all share. We are all embraced by the love of God that shines through Christ crucified. The cross has become good news for us. Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans expressed that good news very simply and very powerfully, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us’.

 And/Or

(vi) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find the phrase, ‘triumph of the cross’, in any way strange. When we look on the cross of Jesus with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and wisdom of God, the power of a love greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Our own capacity to love is very influenced by the extent to which our love is returned. It is not so with God. On the cross, Jesus revealed a love so powerful that that it embraced even those who brought about his death. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives. The Eucharist that we celebrate makes this love present to us in a special way. God so loves the world that he continues to give us his Son in the Eucharist. Not only are we the beneficiaries of the triumph of God’s love on Calvary, the triumph of the cross, but our own lives can reveal to others the triumph of the cross. The triumph of the cross shows itself in all kinds of simple ways, in the tolerance and humour we show to each other against all the odds, in the willingness to let go of old hurts, in the bearing of terminal illness with patience and dignity, in the fidelity to significant commitments when they become costly, in the loving service that endures even when it is not appreciated. We pray on this feast that the triumph of the cross would continue to take flesh in all of our lives.

Fr. Martin Hogan.

[eli-kittim]

Was Mythicism or Historicism More Dominant In the Early History and Development of the Christian Church?

By Goodreads Author Eli Kittim

——-

Preface

There are certain things in the Bible that we all take for granted today, such as the historicity of Jesus, his execution by Pontius Pilate, and the like. We think that these “facts” were written in stone and have been known since Christianity’s inception. How can anyone seriously challenge them?

——-

Christian Origins

But early Christianity was not monolithic. It was diverse. There were many different sects that held very different views both about Jesus and the interpretation of the New Testament. Orthodoxy eventually won the day but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily represented the sect that held the hermeneutically-correct and valid Bible interpretations or that they had the correct view about Jesus. Far from it. There were, in fact, diametrically opposed views that ranged from one extreme to another, from a completely human Jesus to a phantom or a ghost that never really existed. But, as we will see, there is a middle ground where mythicism and historicism meet.

——-

Gnosticism

The New Testament is a literary creation. So it’s difficult to probe its historical antecedents. What were some of the opposing views to “Orthodoxy”? One of the most vocal of these Christian sects was centred in Alexandria, Egypt: the Gnostics. They were the first advocates of the “you-don’t-need-religion, you-need-a-relationship-with-Jesus” pitch. Although there were many splinter groups, they all emphasised a personal “gnosis” (knowledge) and acquaintance with spiritual realities rather than a preoccupation with dry religious discourses and traditions. They originated in the first century C.E. and flourished until the second century, during which the Patristic Fathers denounced them as heretics. But were they? According to Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, they were the genuine Christians of that early period whom the Orthodox Church tried to suppress!

——-

To be sure, their theology was influenced by Greek thought, but the focal point of their doctrine and practice was not based on rhetoric or dogma but rather on personal existential experience. And based on their own inimitable style, one can infer that they had better insights into the divine than their orthodox counterparts who did little more than debate the issues.

——-

Docetism

Then there were the Docetists, who held the “heterodox” (i.e. “at variance with orthodoxy”) doctrine that what appeared to be a historical Jesus was nothing more than an apparition or a phantom, and that his phenomenological bodily existence was not real. This is actually more in line with Scripture, which repeatedly talks of visions and apparitions in one form or another (cf. Lk 24.23–24; Gal. 1.11-12). These are the first mythicists who believed that Jesus never existed! There’s a great deal of Biblical evidence that supports this view. This early Christian view called “Docetism” (derived from the Greek term “Dokesis,” meaning “to seem”)——which held that Christ did not really exist in human form, an idea that was later picked up by Islam——attracted some of the greatest Biblical thinkers of Antiquity:

“According to Photius [a 9th century Byzantine Patriarch], Clement of Alexandria held at least a quasi-docetic belief regarding the nature of Christ, namely that the Word/Logos did not became flesh, but only ‘appeared to be in flesh,’ an interpretation which directly denied the reality of the incarnation” (Ashwin-Siejkowski, Piotr. “Clement of Alexandria on Trial: The Evidence of ‘Heresy’ from Photius’ Bibliotheca.” [Leiden: Brill, 2010], p. 95).

As would be expected, Docetism was eventually rejected as a heretical doctrine at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. But this verdict was issued in the 4th century. And there is a very good reason why mythicism had thitherto been on the upswing. In fact, despite this setback, the hermeneutical doctrine that gave rise to Docetism continued to hold sway over most of the church until the Reformation.

——-

The Monophysite Christian church

According to tradition, the Coptic Church of Egypt was founded by Mark the evangelist in the first century CE. Due to a Christological dispute, this “Monophysite” Christian church was condemned as heretical by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE. Instead of accepting the doctrine that Christ was fully human and fully divine, the Coptic church asserted that Christ had only one nature, and that nature was divine. In other words, just like the Docetists they denied the incarnation and therefore they can be technically defined as mythicists! A similar monophysite explanation of how the divine and human relate within the person of Jesus is Eutychianism. Eutychians were often classified as Phantasiasts by their opponents because they reduced Jesus’ incarnation to a phantasm or an illusion of some kind. Their Christology was along the lines of Docetism in that they, too, denied the full reality of Jesus’ humanity. Thus, we find that there were quite a number of sects that denied the historicity of Jesus during the early period of the church. Things started to change with the onset of the first ecumenical councils!

——-

The Alexandrian School

The early Christian church held to an allegorical (theological) Interpretation of the Bible, not a historical one. Philo’s essential approach to Biblical interpretation influenced the Christian School of hermeneutics, which also developed in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. One of its principal leaders was the Great Bible scholar, Clement of Alexandria (150-215 CE), who while acknowledging that the Bible contained various levels of meaning also realized that the non-literal (i.e. the allegorical/mystical) interpretations contained the ideal spiritual insights. Alexandrian hermeneutics were so popular that they eventually became the dominant force in Biblical interpretation up until the time of the Protestant Reformation. So, the allegorical/theological Biblical interpretation that gave rise to such views as Docetism was the mainstay of early Biblical scholarship. This method was obviously more inclined towards the spiritual, the metaphorical, and the metaphysical, dare I say the Gnostic!

——-

The School of Antioch

Sometime towards the end of the 3rd century CE, the School of Antioch was founded. It was the first Seminary, so to speak, founded in Syria that overemphasized the literal interpretation of the Bible and the humanity of Christ. This so-called “exegetical school” interpreted Scripture primarily according to its historical and grammatical sense. In an attempt to offset the earlier excesses of Biblical interpretation that could lead to various questionable doctrines, such as those of Docetism, the Antioch school became increasingly dogmatic and heavily involved in overemphasizing the literal interpretation of the Bible and the full humanity of Jesus. This led to the so-called “Nestorian Heresy,” namely that Jesus possessed two hypostases, one human and one divine! As a result of the condemnation of Nestorius (386 – 450 CE) at the First Council of Ephesus in 431, the Antioch school’s influence declined considerably and never really recovered. Many followers abandoned the school and it eventually moved to another location further East in Persia. Even though the Antiochian school’s tenets had lost traction, they were eventually taken up again by Martin Luther and John Calvin, who restored them to their former glory.

——-

Conclusion

So, the earlier Alexandrian School of allegorical interpretation at least allowed the possibility of mythicism to be considered as a viable option, whereas the later Antiochian school of literal interpretation——which influenced not only “the dogma of Christ” in the early ecumenical councils, but also modern Bible scholarship——eventually became the dominant school of hermeneutics that held to a rigid form of literalism and overemphasized the historicity of Jesus. In other words, the early church was not as adamant about the historicity of Jesus as the later Church! Thus, up until the end of the third century (the Ante-Nicene Era), and just prior to the onset of the first ecumenical council, the allegorical/metaphorical Jesus dominated the Biblical landscape. It was not until much later that the literal, historical interpretation of Jesus became the prevalent view that it is today!

——-

[xianityisafraud-blog]

Christianity is misogynistic.

Misogyny is fundamental to the basic writings of Christianity. In passage after passage, women are encouraged—no, commanded—to accept an inferior role, and to be ashamed of themselves for the simple fact that they are women. Misogynistic biblical passages are so common that its difficult to know which to cite. From the New Testament we find "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. . . ." (Ephesians 5:22-23) and "These [redeemed] are they which were not defiled with women; . . ." (Revelation 14:4); and from the Old Testament we find "How then can man be justified with God? Or how can he be clean that is born of a woman?" (Job 25:4) Other relevant New Testament passages include Colossians 3:18; 1 Peter 3:7; 1 Corinthians 11:3, 11:9, and 14:34; and 1 Timothy 2:11-12 and 5:5-6. Other Old Testament passages include Numbers 5:20-22 and Leviticus 12:2-5 and 15:17-33.

Later Christian writers extended the misogynistic themes in the Bible with a vengeance. Tertullian, one of the early church fathers, wrote:

In pain shall you bring forth children, woman, and you shall turn to your husband and he shall rule over you. And do you not know that you are Eve? God's sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil's gateway; you are she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God. It was you who coaxed your way around him whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: Man! Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die. . . . Woman, you are the gate to hell.

One can find similarly misogynistic—though sometimes less venomous—statements in the writings of many other church fathers and theologians, including St. Ambrose, St. Anthony, Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nazianzum, and St. Jerome.

This misogynistic bias in Christianity's basic texts has long been translated into misogyny in practice. Throughout almost the entire time that Christianity had Europe and America in its lock grip, women were treated as chattel—they had essentially no political rights, and their right to own property was severely restricted. Perhaps the clearest illustration of the status of women in the ages when Christianity was at its most powerful is the prevalence of wife beating. This degrading, disgusting practice was very common throughout Christendom well up into the 19th century, and under English Common Law husbands who beat their wives were specifically exempted from prosecution. (While wife beating is still common in Christian lands, at least in some countries abusers are at least sometimes prosecuted.)

At about the same time that English Common Law (with its wife-beating exemption) was being formulated and codified, Christians all across Europe were engaging in a half-millennium-long orgy of torture and murder of "witches"—at the direct behest and under the direction of the highest church authorities. The watchword of the time was Exodus 22:18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and at the very minimum hundreds of thousands of women were brutally murdered as a result of this divine injunction, and the papal bulls amplifying it (e.g., Spondit Pariter, by John XXII, and Summis Desiderantes, by Innocent VIII). Andrew Dickson White notes:

On the 7th of December, 1484, Pope Innocent VIII sent forth the bull Summis Desiderantes. Of all documents ever issued from Rome, imperial or papal, this has doubtless, first and last, cost the greatest shedding of innocent blood. Yet no document was ever more clearly dictated by conscience. Inspired by the scriptural command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," Pope Innocent exhorted the clergy of Germany to leave no means untried to detect sorcerers . . . [W]itch-finding inquisitors were authorized by the Pope to scour Europe, especially Germany, and a manual was prepared for their use [by the Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger]—"The Witch Hammer", Malleus Maleficarum. . . . With the application of torture to thousands of women, in accordance with the precepts laid down in the Malleus, it was not difficult to extract masses of proof . . . The poor creatures writhing on the rack, held in horror by those who had been nearest and dearest to them, anxious only for death to relieve their sufferings, confessed to anything and everything that would satisfy the inquisitors and judges. . . . Under the doctrine of "excepted cases," there was no limit to torture for persons accused of heresy or witchcraft.

Given this bloody, hateful history, it's not surprising that women have always held very subservient positions in Christian churches. In fact, there appear to have been no female clergy in any Christian church prior to the 20th century (with the exception of those who posed as men, such as Pope Joan), and even today a great many Christian sects (most notably the Catholic Church) continue to resist ordaining female clergy. While a few liberal Protestant churches have ordained women in recent years, it's difficult to see this as a great step forward for women; it's easier to see it as analogous to the Ku Klux Klans appointing a few token blacks as Klaxons.

As for the improvements in the status of women over the last two centuries, the Christian churches either did nothing to support them or actively opposed them. This is most obvious as regards women’s control over their own bodies. Organized Christianity has opposed this from the start, and as late as the 1960′s the Catholic Church was still putting its energies into the imposition of laws prohibiting access to contraceptives. Having lost that battle, Christianity has more recently put its energies into attempts to outlaw the right of women to abortion.

Many of those leading the fight for women's rights have had no illusions about the misogynistic nature of Christianity. These women included Mary Wollstonecraft, Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Sanger (whose slogan, "No God. No master," remains relevant to this day).

[apenitentialprayer]

European Christianization and the Eternal Fate of Pagan Ancestors

”The relationship between the living and dead members of their clan has long been seen as an essential one in early medieval society. The dead constituted an age class that continued to have a role and to exercise rights in society. Archaeologists have suggested that the rich grave goods in burials of the ate fifth and sixth centuries were evidence of this importance in Reihengräberzivilization, in which ancestors played the role of intermediaries between the clans and tribes (Stämme) and the gods. Kurt Böhner and others have thus suggested that Christianity, which greatly lessens the role of the dead, must have had a fundamental impact on the place of the dead in in Merovingian society: “The profound change that Christianity brought with it is shown most clearly with relationships with the dead. Although these were once ancestors of many clans and tribes in which they lived on and enjoyed divine or quasi-divine veneration, they now entered the eternality of Christ.” As evidence of this essential transformation in relationship between the living and their ancestors,  Böhner cites the famous passage from the Vita S. Vulframni in which the Frisian duke Radbod, about to be baptized, asked Wulfram, the bishop of Sens, whether there were many Frisian kings and princes in heaven or in hell. Wulfram answered that, since these praedecessores had not been baptized, they were surely in hell. Hearing this pronouncement, the duke determined not to be baptized, saying that he could not do without the company of his predecessors. This text, whose importance for historical ethnography Herwig Wolfram has emphasized, seems however to contradict other archaeological evidence which, as we shall see, places in doubt Böhner’s interpretation both of the process of Christianization and of the account in the Vita Vulframni.

Radbod died in 719 and, it can be assumed, joined his damned ancestors. Around the same time or shortly before in the Rhineland near Alzey, Frankish nobles were founding a funerary chapel that served to preserve the memory of their pagan ancestors and, in a functional sense, to Christianize them retroactively. The church in question was Flonheim, and the careful archaeological study of the site by Hermann Ament suggests that the theological response to Radbod’s question presents only part of the eighth century reality. On December 29, 1876, the parish of Flonheim was destroyed by fire. During reconstruction between 1883 and 1885 it was discovered that the church stood on the foundations of a much older building, within which were found ten Frankish burials. The oldest portion of the church was a tower, the upper part of which was Gothic; the lower, Romanesque of ca. 1100. The foundations of the Romanesque portions of the tower, a crypt, were older still; and directly under this oldest portion of the old church, was a particularly rich Frankish burial. Ament’s examination of grave goods and his reexamination of the nineteenth-century report of the excavations demonstrated that the graves were part of a larger row cemetery, traces of which had been found in the 1950s elsewhere in the village. Moreover, the ten graves appear to be those members of a wealthy clan. That in the Merovingian period a family would erect a mortuary chapel in which to bury its members would hardly be remarkable; examples are common, particularly even earlier ones in the more Romanized areas of Europe. What is remarkable, however, is that Ament’s dating of the burials, particularly of grave 5, the one directly under the tower, is so early that the burials must predate the erection of the church (first mentioned in 764/767) and, in the case of grave 5, the conversion of Clovis. Ament compares this grave -in its depth (greater than the others at Flonheim), in its furnishings, and in its relation to other graves- to grave 319 at Lavoye. The rich furnishings of grave 5 include a famous golden-handled sword and other weapons and ornaments which both in their forms and variety argue for a date conclusively for a date contemporary with the tomb of Childeric (481). Ament sees grave 5 as a founder’s burial, like that at Lavoye. Around it, in the sixth and early seventh centuries, other clan members were buried. When the chapel was built, the importance of this founder’s burial was still recalled, and its builders included the other clan graves within the confines of its walls. The erection of a chapel over the graves of a clan and the particular position given to the clearly pre-Christian burial both strongly suggest that the continuity between pre-Christian and Christian members was not broken by baptism. In fact, on a physical, structural level, the founder was given a burial infra ecclesia after the fact, thus including him in the new Christianized clan tradition. Ament has compared the situation at Flonheim to those at Arlon, Speiz-Eingien, Morken, and Beckum and suggests that these other Merovingian churches containing Frankish burials may well be similar to Flonheim; for the chapels also appear to postdate the earliest burials. The American archaeologist Bailey Young has compared these apparently ex post facto Christianizations to observations of Detler Ellmers on Swedish cemeteries and suggests that the practice of assimilating pre-Christian ancestors into the Christian cult of the dead may be detected there as well. In Sweden, with the coming of Christianity, churches were generally built near the preexisting sepulchers of prominent families, and the last furnished burials are therefore older than the actual cemeteries. Elsewhere, pagan remains were moved into Christian burial places. The most famous Christian reburial in the North is that of the Dane Harold Bluetooth’s pagan parents Gorm and Thyre at Jelling. Harold first buried his parents in a wooden chamber covered by a large mound surrounded by standing stones in an outline of a ship, giving them a traditional pagan burial. After his conversion around 960, he had his parents’ remains removed to a church. Excavations of the present stone church (ca. 1100) indicate three previous wooden churches and a large, centrally placed grave containing the disjointed remains of a man and a woman obviously reburied there after the disarticulation of the skeletons. Harold’s runestone explicitly announces that the monuments he created were dedicated “to his father Gorm and his mother Thyre,” although it goes on to say that Harold “made the Danes Christian.” In both Frankish and Scandinavian situations, the archaeological evidence seems to contradict the explicit statement of Wulfram. How is the historian to resolve this contradiction? I would suggest that it arises from two sources. The first is the difference noted above between the intellectualized articulation of belief by clerical elite and the actual societal practice, lay and clerical. The second is the way the specific circumstances of Radbod’s aborted conversion color both the question and the response, making them part of a discussion of salvation in modern Christian terms, when the real issue is ethnicity and hegemony in eighth century Frankish terms. In the case of Flonheim and similar burials, the meaning of the construction of a Christian church over a pagan tomb is implicit: the ancestors have been conjoined in the new cult as they were in the old. Conversion is not an individual, but a collective, act that involves the entire clan and people, a fact long recognized about two groups of Franks - those of Clovis’s generation and their descendants. The collective nature of conversion implicitly applies to a third group of Franks as well, their ancestors. Although Gallo-Roman authors like Gregory of Tours have emphasized Clovis’s conversion, that does not mean the Franks had lost respect for or interest in their pre-Christian ancestry. Witness the literature of Merovingian Frankish genealogy, the Liber historiae Francorum, among others. Retroactive conversion is not articulated; indeed, it would be difficult to reconcile that orthodox Christianity. But in the symbolic and ritual structure that solidified and expressed the values of Frankish-Christian civilization, a place was found for their ancestors. Here, as in the example of the ritual humiliation of the saints I mentioned earlier, the physical juxtaposition presents a meaning in a Wittgensteinian sense which was apparently accepted by the lay founders of the church at Flonheim as well as by its clerics. Perhaps, although we cannot be sure of how much they knew of its origins, even the monks at Lorsch, to whom the church was given in the 760s, perceived this meaning. Thus the Franks of Flonheim, pagan and Christian, could keep each other company in the next life but not, apparently, Radbod and his pagan ancestors. It is tempting to cast this distinction in terms of the supposed two stages of conversion, the first represented by a maximum accommodation to  pagan tradition; the second (and this being the case with Radbod), an insistence on an inner meaning of Christianity. In fact, this approach will hardly suffice. Frisia was, in the early eighth century, hardly into a second phase of conversion; it was at the first stage of a process that would take generations. Rather, we should consider the specific context of the efforts to convert Radbod and his Frisians. Wulfram’s contact with the duke was part of the Frankish effort to subjugate the Frisians, an effort in which conversion was specifically conversion to Frankish Christianity. After Pepin II defeated Radbod in 694, he sent Wilibrord to convert Radbod and his people. Wulfram’s efforts were part of this mission. Pepin’s intention was specifically to establish a Frankish political and cultural basis in order to pacify the region. Conversion and baptism at the hand of a Frankish bishop would have meant, then, the acceptance of a specifically Frankish ethnic identity and the rejection of Frisian autonomous traditions, political and cultural. Radbod would really have cut himself off from his ancestors, but not merely by being assured of heaven while they languished in hell; for he would have become, in a real sense, a Frank. A similar break with their ancestors was demanded of the Saxons during the eighth century. It is hardly happenstance that the earliest condemnations of traditional Germanic burial sites in favor of church cemeteries was specifically directed at Saxon Christians: “We order that the bodies of Christian Saxons be taken to the church cemeteries and not to the burial mounds of the pagans.” Likewise, the famous Indiculus superstitionum was directed specifically at those “sacrileges at the tombs of the dead” performed by the Saxons. In the case of both the Frisians and of the Saxons, the bonds uniting the conquered people to their independent ancestry had to be broken because they were a source of anti-Frankish ethnic and political identity, not simply because they were pagan in a narrow religious sense. In the entirely Frankish contexts of Flonheim, Arlon, Spiez-Einigen, and Morken, though, conversion did not mean the rejection of a cultural and political tradition. It meant instead the confirmation of tradition through the acceptance of a new and more powerful victory-giver, Christ. The benefits of such a conversion could be shared with the past as well as with the future. - Patrick J. Geary (Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, pages 35-41)

[savedfromsalvation]

Compiled by Jim Walker

The Biblical view of women

The God of the Bible decrees that woman must submit to the dominance of man.

"The social and legal position of an Israelite wife was inferior to the position a wife occupied in the great countries round about... all the texts show that Israelites wanted mainly sons to perpetuate the family line and fortune, and to preserve the ancestral inheritance... A husband could divorce his wife; women on the other hand could not ask for divorce... the wife called her husband Ba'al or master; she also called him adon or lord; she addressed him, in fact, as a slave addressed his master or subject, his king. The Decalogue includes a man's wife among his possessions... all her life she remains a minor. The wife does not inherit from her husband, nor daughters from their father, except when there is no male heir. A vow made by a girl or married woman needs, to be valid, the consent of the father or husband and if this consent is withheld, the vow is null and void. A man had a right to sell his daughter. Women were excluded from the succession."

-Roland de Vaux, archaeologist and priest

Blue words represent Bible quotes

Burn The Daughter!

"And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire." (Leviticus 21:9)

Comment

A priest's daughter, if found to have lost her virginity without marriage, can receive the death penalty, but in the form of incineration.

How many fundamentalist priests who so easily condemn others would carry out the burning of their daughters if they found them "whoring"?

(See also Genesis 38:24)

Cut Off Her Hand!

"When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her." (Deuteronomy 25:11-12)

Comment

A wife would naturally wish to come to the aid of her husband in any way she could if he desperately struggled with an opponent, but the Hebrew law specifically forbade a wife to help her husband in distress if that support consisted of her grabbing the enemy's genitals in an effort to stifle his onslaught. The penalty? Amputation of the hand that fondled the genitals!

Only in an overly obsessive male dominated culture could men create such atrocious laws. As such, the penis ranked sacrosanct in the minds of men (as it still stands today). If a male lost his penis for any reason, he would lose the right to enter a congregation of God. (See Deuteronomy 23:1)

Female Births Get Penalty

"Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean." (Leviticus 12:2)

"But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying threescore and six days." (Leviticus 12:5)

Comment

A woman who gives birth to a child must undergo a purification ritual lest her "uncleanness" contaminate others. This not only entails her isolation, but also payments to priests for the ritual acts. Thus the male dominators had even made birth dirty.

Notice here that if a woman bears a female child, her isolation must last twice as long as that if she gives birth to a male child!

(See also Psalms 51:3-5)

"The Bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's emancipation."

--Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Female Inferiority

"But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God." (I Corinthians 11:3)

"For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man." (I Corinthians 11:8-9)

Comment

The Bible's decree of male supremacy has kept woman inferior to men for centuries. For the religious, it comes as a sad fact that a human must have a penis to receive any respect or power within the Church.

All woman should realize that such phrases in the Bible has justified for many Christian men, not only their supremacy but a reason to sexually abuse women.

(See also I Cor. 14:34-36, I Timothy 2:8-15, I Peter 3:1-7, Ephesians 5:22-24, Col. 3:18-19)

Jesus Will Kill Children

"Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works." (Revelation 2:22-23)

Comment

If anyone thinks Jesus represents only a peaceful loving soul, then think again. For an act of adultery, Jesus would kill innocent children for the adultery of others; hardly fair justice, love, or the concern for human beings.

Some apologists claim that "children" refers to the followers of a cult of Jezebel and not to children birthed from Jezebel. However, if this proved the case, the situation would appear even more horrific, for a cult of believers could number in the dozens, hundreds, thousands, or more. The deaths of these multitude of cult believers (which would include children within its membership) would only make the moralistic problem far more atrocious.

"It's interesting to speculate how it developed that in two of the most anti-feminist institutions, the church and the law court, the men are wearing the dresses."

--Flo Kennedy

Kill The Witches!

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Whoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death. He that sacrificeth unto any god, save to the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed." (Exodus 22:18-20)

Comment

These verses attest to the power of belief as they led to the slaughter of thousands of defenseless people throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

Understand that these verses not only authorize the executions but they explicitly command them.

Verse 18 justified the burning of women in Europe judged as witches. In early America, the Salem witch trials resulted in the deaths of women and men.

Verse 19 refers to bestiality, a sin considered worthy of death. Christians used verse 20 to justify religious wars, Crusades and the slaughter of unbelievers throughout Europe. And the condemnation of heretics still goes on.

Rape My Daughter

"Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing. But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go." (Judges 19:24-25)

Comment

Judges 19 describe a father who offers his virgin daughter to a drunken mob. When the father says "unto this man do not so vile a thing," he makes clear that sexual abuse should never befall a man (meaning him), yet a woman, even his own flesh and blood, or a concubine belonging to a perfect stranger, can receive punishment from men to do what they wish. This attitude against women still persists to this day and we have the Bible, in large part, to thank for this attitude against women.

Verse 25 describes the hours long gang rape of the poor concubine. The Bible gives not one hint of compassion or concern for the raped girl. Considering that many people believe that every word in the Bible comes from God, it should not surprise anyone why people still use these verses to justify such atrocities.

Silence The Woman!

"Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." (I Timothy 2:11-14)

Comment

Another case where the Bible makes it quite clear that women live for man and must submit to them.

"Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over women it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being. For the Jews, Mohammedans and Christians among others, man is master by divine right; the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female."

--Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex 1949

(See also I Cor. 11:3-12, I Cor. 14:34-36, I Peter 3:1-7, Ephesians 5:22-24, Col. 3:18-19.)

Stone The Woman!

"If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;" (Deuteronomy 22:22)

"Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you." (Deuteronomy 22:24)

Comment

(Read also Deuteronomy 22:13-21)

The discovery of a bride lying with another man can yield disastrous results.

If the wife's parents can produce tokens of the damsel's virginity and spread the cloth before the elders of the city, the husband has to pay the bride's father one hundred silver shekels and he may not send his wife back to her parents as long as she lives. But if the bride's virginity does not satisfy the requirements, the husband can get rid of her by letting the men of the city stone her to death.

From a practical level, these designed laws regulating women's virginity protected economic transactions between men rather than for the sake of morality. (See Virgin's Worth below)

"Virgin" Mistranslation

"Therefore the LORD himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:14)

Comment

Perhaps the most famous mistranslation of the Bible, the word virgin here comes from a mistranslated Greek word for virgin.

The original Hebrew version uses the word "almah" which means "young woman" which may or may not refer to a virgin. Of course the context of the original Hebrew Isaiah does not refer to a virgin at all, as scholars the world over agree, but only refers to a young woman.

Later, the author of Matthew 1:22-23, quoted from the mistranslated Isaiah version, and thus the error turned into a world-wide belief.

Today a few of the modern bibles such as the Revised Standard Version, have corrected this mistranslation and have replaced the word virgin with "young woman." (Isaiah 7:14, RSV)

Apparently either God makes errors or the Bible does not come from god, but rather from fallible men.

Virgin's Worth

"If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silvers, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days." (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

Comment

The belief some get about the Biblical law leads them to think that it represented a great advancement in morality. However, if we look at this law in the social and economic context, it becomes evident that it did not come from any moral ground, but rather to protect men's property rights of their wives and daughters.

This law says that since an unmarried girl, a non-virgin, no longer serves as an economically valuable asset, her father must receive compensation. As for the legal requirement of the man that caused the economic problem, his marriage in that society gave him practically unlimited power over their wives. Such forced marriage can hardly serve as a concern for the poor girl's welfare.

Wives, Submit Yourselves!

"Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything." (Ephesians 5:22-24)

Comment

These words of Paul describe another instance for the calling of the submission of women to their husbands. Note that the all inclusive "everything" could allow husbands to submit their wives to anything, including rape, beatings, slavery, etc.

(See also I Cor. 11:3-12, I Cor. 14:34-36, I Timothy 2:8-15, I Peter 3:1-7, Col. 3:18-19.)

Women Shall Not Speak

"Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church." (I Corinthians 14:34-35)

Comment

If one ever wishes to find an explanation of woman's inferiority to men, one only has to look in the Bible. Paul makes clear and delineates the importance of woman recognizing her place, "ad nauseam."

(See also I Cor. 11:3-12, I Timothy 2:8-15, I Peter 3:1-7, Ephesians 5:22-24, Col. 3:18-19.)

"The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire... Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up."

--Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Women's Sorrow

"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." (Genesis 3:16)

Comment

Not only does the Woman get blamed for the Fall, but God decides to multiply her sorrow, plus, she must submit to her husband like a slave.

Religionists have used this verse as justification and "reason" for the pain and punishment (sin) of childbirth and the sin of mankind. And to this day many Christians, Jews and Islamics place women lower then men in the ranking of Godly order. If ever there existed a more cruel justification against women, it could not have done as much damage as from belief in Genesis 3:16. Because of the belief in the Fall, countless Christians have branded the entire human race as depraved.

Before the advent of male dominated religions, cultures around the world respected women and worshipped goddesses. The Old Testament records the brutal slaughter of surrounding cultures and slowly throughout the centuries, the goddess religions faded away in place of the belief-system of a jealous, scatological, male war god.

"Christianity teaches that the human race is depraved, fallen, and sinful." --D. James Kennedy (Why I Believe, World Publishing, 1980)

Rip Up Pregnant Women

"Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up." (Hosea 13:16)

Comment

Throughout the Bible, God smites those who do not believe in him or those who do not follow his commands. Here we have the grotesque description of infants dashed to pieces and pregnant women ripped up. Whatever rebellious nature an infant's father or mother may have had, it bears no justice to an innocent child or to an unborn fetus who could not possibly have rebelled against God, much less understood him.

Anyone who claims to love such a God, must accept infanticide as one of God's ugly revenges.

(See also Psalms 137:9)

The Wicked Woman

"Give me any plague, but the plague of the heart: and any wickedness, but the wickedness of a woman." (Eccles. 25:13)

"Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die." (Eccles. 25:22)

"If she go not as thou wouldest have her, cut her off from thy flesh, and give her a bill of divorce, and let her go." (Eccles. 25: 26)

"The whoredom of a woman may be known in her haughty looks and eyelids. If thy daughter be shameless, keep her in straitly, lest she abuse herself through overmuch liberty." (Eccles. 26:9-10)

"A silent and loving woman is a gift of the Lord: and there is nothing so much worth as a mind well instructed. A shamefaced and faithful woman is a double grace, and her continent mind cannot be valued." (Eccles. 26:14-15)

"A shameless woman shall be counted as a dog; but she that is shamefaced will fear the Lord." (Eccles.26:25)

"For from garments cometh a moth, and from women wickedness. Better is the churlishness of a man than a courteous woman, a woman, I say, which bringeth shame and reproach." (Eccles. 42:13-14)

Comment

Ecclesiasticus of the Apocrypha does not appear in most Bibles. However, in Catholic Bibles, the inferiority of woman still appears in the verses of Ecclesiasticus. These verses give only a sampling from this book that lowers the status of women.

[pamphletstoinspire]

A CLARION CALL TO THE MINISTRY OF INTERCESSION

The Ministry of Intercession

“Ministry” is the English translation of the Latin word ministerium, which means “service.” In its sociological usage, it is applied to institutions or establishments that give aid and services to people. Its Christian understanding is defined by the manner in which Jesus exercised His mission among men: He “came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28; cf. Mark 10:45; John 13:1–17). Christian ministries are thus selfless services rendered to people in the name of God for the salvation of souls and for the glory of God. Such services are driven by Christian love and for the sole purpose of higher values.

Intercession is the act of intervening between parties with a view to reconciling differences, or mediating in order to obtain favor from one of the parties for another. It is an interposing or entreaty on behalf of another person. Intercession in a Christian sense means, therefore, to stand between a needy soul and God, praying for God’s mercy and gracious considerations. It is a vicarious supplication where one is given to agonize in prayer for the welfare of others.

As a ministry, intercession becomes an organized service in which people can individually or collectively send ceaseless prayers to the presence of God and entreat His help for distressed souls or situations. It acts as a form of spiritual legal aid for needy souls, which argues their cases in the divine council. In spiritual warfare, the ministry of intercession stands out as a manifest way of resisting the kingdom of darkness.

Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:18–19).

Not everybody can be a literal missionary by going to the nations and spreading the good news of the kingdom or can engage in the formal ministry of spreading the gospel and saving souls. But one can become a missionary nevertheless through the ministry of intercession. There are so many places, for instance, where the gospel has been impeded or where some political policies have impaired the message of salvation.

There are situations and conditions that need the urgent attention of heaven. These situations are such that one may not be able to reach and tackle them directly or even do anything directly to change them in order to save people from unnecessary suffering, break yokes, and bring restoration.

Believers can handle such problems through the ministry of intercession. One can become a missionary like St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who, without ever being a missionary in the conventional sense, brought many souls to God through a hidden, simple life of prayer.

The salvation of souls is the Master’s supreme concern. In Ezekiel 34:6, He complains: “My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.”

Through the ministry of intercession, one participates actively in the redemption of the world, in seeking the lost sheep of the Master. A single person who opts to be an intercessor can make a great difference. People who really believe in the power of intercession, graced with a passion for souls, can greatly influence the divine council in favor of lost souls. Accordingly, the apostle James points out: “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects” (James 5:16).

Even souls gained through preaching and teaching of the word may not be retained without constant intercessions on their behalf. Intercession is a ministry that the Christian Church cannot do without.

Sometimes we need to go beyond our own problems and ourselves when we pray. We need to realize that we should pray for sinners, for backsliders, and for those who do not even know they need prayer or divine help. Praying for divine intervention in the lives of those who are at the brink of eternal damnation and the lives of the wretched of the earth is a very noble missionary service. Intercession is indeed a very profound way of extending the ministry of Jesus and saving souls. When Fulton J. Sheen was describing the profundity of passion for souls, he said: “What nobler work could there be than zeal for souls? What finer way to spend oneself and be spent than in drawing souls to the love of their Lord and their God?”

Who wants to be an intercessor? Who cares for lost and perishing souls? Is there really someone who can go before the Lord and pray until tears flow for wretched souls? It is only this kind of prayer that can heal our wounded world and battered humanity. It takes hot tears of men and women passionately dying for souls to bring down the mercy of the Father on sinful men and women and on the world. It takes kneeling knees and upraised holy hands to draw down the power of God to heal, to break yokes, to restore, to console, and to bless. You are called to be a member of this noble class: an intercessor.

The Early Church and the Ministry of Intercession

The Church, the sacrament of salvation instituted by Christ, would not have survived the mortal persecutions that confronted her at a very tender age, and buoyantly flourished nonetheless, if the community of believers was prayerless and slumbering. The Church knew that her Master succeeded in establishing her because He was and remained a great intercessor, who never slept with two eyes closed.

It was clear to the early Christians that the ministry of spreading the gospel, which was entrusted to them by the Lord, would not survive the heavy enemy artillery unless they could “lift up holy hands” (see 1 Tim. 2:8) to the heavenly sanctuary. They knew, therefore, the source of their strength and survival — intercession — and exploited it to the full. Thus, before Pentecost, they were gathered in the upper room and “with one accord devoted themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:14). Because they had been saturated with passionate prayers during this time of waiting in the upper room, Pentecost became a great harvest of souls. Following the Pentecost experience, the apostles began the ministry of intercession in earnest, having been equipped with the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

The Acts of the Apostles helps us to appreciate the commitment of Jesus’ early disciples to the ministry of intercession: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:42). That means that they continued with the tradition that the Master had handed over to His apostles.

Their central preoccupation revolved around three cardinal traditions:

(1) the teachings of the Lord handed over to the apostles (the Word);

(2) the breaking of bread (the Eucharist) which was the sacrament of unity, love, and the real presence of the Lord in their midst; and

(3) prayer (the vehicle to attend the divine council).

Through prayer they made themselves always present at the divine council, where they obtained the grace to expand the number of those who believed and to dismantle the roadblocks of the forces of darkness. Accordingly, “fear came upon every soul; and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles” (Acts 2:43). Through the ministry of intercession, they were able to move the hand that moves the universe, overthrow spiritual territorial powers, and hoist the emblem of the Master, marked with the blood of the Lamb and the power of the Resurrection. Because they maintained the tempo of the required commitment and did not relent in participating in the divine council through constant prayers and flooding heaven with tearful petitions for the salvation of souls, the Pentecost anointing continued to flow generously.

The power associated with the ministry of the early believers was made amazingly manifest after Peter and John were released by the Jewish authorities, following their arrest after the healing of the cripple at the Beautiful Gate. When they gave to the other disciples the report of their encounter with these authorities, who were resisting the power of God, they called upon the name of the Lord as a team of intercessors with one mind and one voice. They pulled their spiritual energies together and besieged the divine council: “And now, Lord, look upon their threats, and grant to thy servants to speak thy word with all boldness, while thou stretchest out thy hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of thy holy servant Jesus” (Acts 4:29–30). Heaven responded with a blessed assurance. The evangelist Luke reported the consoling manifestation that confirmed the response of the divine council to their supplication: “And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31).

Intercession was the Glory of the Early Church.

There are so many instances of the early Christians’ commitment to the ministry of intercession and how this paved ways for the expansion of the Church and the harvest of souls. The story of the experience of Peter in prison will, however, suffice for these pieces of evidence that indicate the place of intercession in the life of the first-century believers.

After he had killed James the brother of John, Herod arrested Peter and put him in prison, intending also to kill him, “but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the Church” (Acts 12:5). The early Church was a praying Church. She had no other defensive or offensive weapon more effective than prayer. She knew that her advantage was “not by might, nor by power, but by [God’s] Spirit” (Zech. 4:6). Thus, while Peter was in prison, believers were in the divine council, wrestling with the intrigues of the accuser and asking the Supreme Judge for justice. They knew that it was “the time when kings go forth to battle” (1 Chron. 20:1) and not the time to slumber or to get drunk. They thus blew the war trumpet, gathered their army, and went to battle. The experience of Joshua, the successor of Moses, was then repeated with the apostles.

When Joshua gathered his army and marched out to take over Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. He went up to him and asked, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” The man replied, “No; but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come” (Josh. 5:13–14). That is to say, “If you are for the Lord, then I have come to lead you to battle. But if you are against the Lord, I am here to command the Lord’s army against you.”

Whenever the army of the Lord gathers for battle, the Lord always sends His angel to lead it to battle. It was this same experi­ence that the disciples of the Lord had when their army filed out for battle against the spiritual forces personified in Herod. The Master sent His angel to lead them in battle even though they were not conscious of this like Joshua. As the commander of the army of the Lord, this angel went into the prison and released Peter unconditionally.

The intercession of believers has the power to obtain the services of heaven. The early Church was always in contact with heaven and always present in the divine council. This was how they made heaven always present in the world of their time.

Do We Still Wonder Why the Church Appears Today More or Less Feeble and Battered?

Do we still wonder why demons can perch comfortably on the pews of our churches? Pope Paul VI sadly noted, “It is as if from some mysterious crack — no, it is not mysterious — from some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God” and has sometimes even infested its sanctuary.

Believers have grown more and more ignorant of their roots and neglected their source of strength. They have grown too fat to go to war and too busy and distracted to appear in the divine council. The devil has used the enticements of the world as a lullaby and soothed them into drowsiness and stupor. When it is the time for kings to go to war, they stay at home like David (2 Sam. 11:1), romancing the devil.

As a result of this situation, the devil has been enjoying a field day, wreaking havoc in the world and steadily dragging millions of souls to destruction. Would that the Church, the Body of Christ, might rediscover herself and exploit her powers once again. Would that believers might reclaim their dignity and measure up to their calling.

Written by: CHARLIE MC KINNEY

[tpanan]

My Sunday Daily Blessings

June 27, 2021

Be still quiet your heart and mind, the LORD is here, loving you talking to you..........

Therteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Roman Rite Calendar) Lectionary 95, Cycle B

First Reading: Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24

God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome, and there is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of the netherworld on earth, for justice is undying. For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him.

But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to his company experience it.

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 30: 2, 4 5-6, 11, 12, 13

"I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me."

Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 8: 7, 9, 13-15

Brothers and sisters: As you excel in every respect, in faith, discourse, knowledge, all earnestness, and in the love we have for you, may you excel in this gracious act also. For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor,  so that by his poverty you might become rich. Not that others should have relief while you are burdened, but that as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their needs, so that their abundance may also supply your needs, that there may be equality.

As it is written:    Whoever had much did not have more,        and whoever had little did not have less.

Verse before the Gospel: 2 Timothy 1:10

Alleluia, Alleluia

"Our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed death and brought life to light through the Gospel."

Alleluia, Alleluia

Gospel: Mark 5: 21-43,

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a large crowd gathered around him, and he stayed close to the sea. One of the synagogue officials, named Jairus, came forward. Seeing him he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, saying, “My daughter is at the point of death. Please, come lay your hands on her that she may get well and live.” He went off with him, and a large crowd followed him and pressed upon him.

There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.” Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?” But his disciples said to Jesus, “You see how the crowd is pressing upon you, and yet you ask, ‘Who touched me?’” And he looked around to see who had done it. The woman, realizing what had happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.”

While he was still speaking, people from the synagogue official’s house arrived and said, “Your daughter has died; why trouble the teacher any longer?” Disregarding the message that was reported, Jesus said to the synagogue official, “Do not be afraid; just have faith.” He did not allow anyone to accompany him inside except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they arrived at the house of the synagogue official, he caught sight of a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. So he went in and said to them, “Why this commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but asleep.” And they ridiculed him. Then he put them all out. He took along the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and entered the room where the child was. He took the child by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum,” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” The girl, a child of twelve, arose immediately and walked around. At that they were utterly astounded. He gave strict orders that no one should know this and said that she should be given something to eat.

**Meditation:

Do you approach the Lord Jesus with expectant faith or with skeptical doubt? People in desperate or helpless circumstances were not disappointed when they sought Jesus out. What drew them to Jesus? Was it hope for a miracle or a word of comfort in their affliction? What did the elderly woman who had suffered miserably for twelve years expect Jesus to do for her? And what did a grieving father expect Jesus to do for his beloved daughter who was at the point of death? Jesus gave hope where there seemed to be no human cause for it because his hope was directed to God. He spoke words of hope to the woman (Take heart, daughter!) to ignite the spark of faith in her (your faith has made you well!).

Ephrem the Syrian (306-373 AD), an early church Scripture scholar and author of hymns and commentaries, reflected on the miracle of the woman who was healed of her flow of blood:

"Glory to you, hidden Son of God, because your healing power is proclaimed through the hidden suffering of the afflicted woman. Through this woman whom they could see, the witnesses were enabled to behold the divinity that cannot be seen. Through the Son's own healing power his divinity became known. Through the afflicted women's being healed her faith was made manifest. She caused him to be proclaimed, and indeed was honored with him. For truth was being proclaimed together with its heralds. If she was a witness to his divinity, he in turn was a witness to her faith... He saw through to her hidden faith, and gave her a visible healing."

Jesus also gave supernatural hope to a father who had just lost a beloved child. It took considerable courage and risk for the ruler of a synagogue to openly go to Jesus and to invite the scorn of his neighbors and kin. Even the hired mourners laughed scornfully at Jesus. Their grief was devoid of any hope. Nonetheless, Jesus took the girl by the hand and delivered her from the grasp of death. Peter Chrysologus (400-450 AD), an early church father who was renowned for his preaching at Ravena, comments on this miracle:

"This man was a ruler of the synagogue, and versed in the law. He had surely read that while God created all other things by his word, man had been created by the hand of God. He trusted therefore in God that his daughter would be recreated, and restored to life by that same hand which, he knew, had created her... He [Jesus] who laid hands on her to form her from nothing, once more lays hands upon her to reform her from what had perished."

In both instances we see Jesus' personal concern for the needs of others and his readiness to heal and restore life. In Jesus we see the infinite love of God extending to each and every individual as he gives freely and wholly of himself to each person he meets. Do you approach the Lord with confident expectation that he will hear your request and act?

Lord Jesus, you love each of us individually with a unique and personal love. Touch my life with your saving power, heal and restore me to fullness of life. Help me to give wholly of myself in loving service to others.

Sources:

Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States, second typical edition, Copyright © 2001, 1998, 1997, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; Psalm refrain © 1968, 1981, 1997, International Committee on English in the Liturgy, Inc. All rights reserved. Neither this work nor any part of it may be reproduced, distributed, performed or displayed in any medium, including electronic or digital, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

**Meditations may be freely reprinted and translated into other languages for non-profit use only. Please cite copyright and original source.Copyright 2021 Daily Scripture Readings and Meditation, dailyscripture.net author Don Schwager

[gduncan969]

The Covid-19 Lost Sheep

Matthew 18:12 - 14 “What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying? And if he should find it, assuredly, I say to you, he rejoices more over that sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”

John 10:12 “But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep.  I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own. As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.”

If things ever do return to normal once this pandemic runs its course, one of the most urgent tasks for the Church of Jesus Christ will be to send out search parties into the highways and byways to find the sheep that have strayed from the fold and bring them back into the fellowship.  If the polls are correct (and early indications suggest they are) about a quarter of those who were regularly attending services before the shut-down have stopped attending altogether either in person or on-line even although the churches are now partially open.  There are doubtless many reasons why they have quit and some may even argue that just because they no longer attend church doesn’t mean they have given up on the Lord Jesus.  That may be true for some but for the majority I fear it may not.  The Lord calls us over and over again to “love one another” (John 13:34-35; John 15:12, 17; Romans 12:10; Romans 13:8; Galatians 5:13; Ephesians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 3:12, 4:9; Hebrews 10:24; 1 Peter 1:22, 3:8; 1 John 3:11, 23; 1 John 4:7,11,12; 2 John 1:5—Yes! That’s how many times the New Testament commands us to love one another.)  Loving one another goes far beyond a friendly smile on a Sunday morning, good though it is (though hidden behind a mask).  It requires involvement in each other’s lives, not the prying kind of involvement but the caring kind that says, “I just want to know you are OK and that I’m here to help, if you need me”.  It’s the kind of involvement that wants to know and share each other’s struggles and challenges and do what we can to help.  It’s the kind that sees each other as a family held together by “bonds that cannot be broken”, bonds that are stronger than any others outside of the family of God.  Many of those who have given up on the Church are not coming back unless the shepherds go out and find them and the shepherds are those in the Body who love one another enough to care where we are all headed. We are all well aware of how easy it is to let our responsibility to love one another slide—remember, Christian love is an action, not a feeling—and if we don’t halt the slide we will gradually drift apart and fall into old bad habits, ending up as withered branches on the vine (John 15:1) with little or no contact or relationship with the Lord and our fellow believers.  The fate of such branches is simply to be cut off and burned! This is why the Lord joined us to his Body through baptism in the first place, after we made our commitment to follow Him and it is why He warns us that the path to glory in this marathon of life we are all engaged in is steep and narrow while the path to destruction is broad and easy (Matthew 7:14).  Modern medicine has shown that when a human body loses a member—a finger or a toe or even an arm or leg—quick surgery to reattach it can save the lost member because there’s still life in it that can be restored. In the same way, when the body of Christ loses a member, quick action by the Church can restore him or her to fellowship within the Body as a member with a particular use in the Body.  However, the problem right now is that no one, including church leaders are aware of which members of their local bodies have wandered off and left the Church because under the current restrictions there’s no easy way to find out.  We have not been allowed to meet and even now we must distance ourselves from each other!  This is one of the many hidden dangers of closing churches.  Even among those members that haven’t wandered, many are lonely, depressed, fearful, frustrated and even angry, not just at the virus or their government but at their church for failing to meet their need for caring fellowship.  It puts tremendous pressure on the church leadership, especially the pastors, who are trying to be good citizens and tend their flocks while their  hands are tied by rules that forbid them from doing so.  It also puts pressure on the rest of us to make the effort to stay in contact with others in our local bodies to encourage one another but even here we are restricted in our ability to do so.   

What can be done?

When this all started, we were told that the churches had to close to do their part to “flatten the curve” so that our medical services would not be overwhelmed and hospitals would be able to cope with the enormous number of cases that were expected.  However, the curve flattened off in April and the enormous number of cases and deaths never materialized.  New information has come to light showing that over 90% of the deaths attributed to this virus are associated with nursing home and chronic care patients who also had other serious medical issues. Also, the unexpected consequences of the shut down such as depression, anxiety, fear, anger and suicide may be causing more harm than the virus itself.  There is now a growing number of protest rallies against the shut down spreading across the world as a battle-weary public, fed up with the multitude of contradictory instructions given them to follow, displays its frustration at being told how we must now live. This frustration is evident in the Church as the lock-down continues to prevent the Church from fulfilling its ministry in the manner ordained by God under a threat of severe punishment if the rules are disobeyed.  However, our first duty is always to God and it’s to Him, not government, we must turn for direction.  Whilst He has told us in His Word to be “subject to the authorities” (Romans 13:1) we must never forget He is the ultimate authority and always comes first.  Whatever our struggle and despite appearances, He is still the one in control who “has given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.“ (1 Peter 1:4). The damage being done to the Church cannot be allowed to continue and I believe it is time for Church leaders everywhere, both locally, nationally and internationally, to tell governments that the current restrictions to ministry cannot and will not continue. The Church cannot continue to be denied its ability to meet together and must do whatever it takes to fulfill its God-given mandate to preach the full gospel of Jesus Christ in season and out of season, a gospel which sees this plague stopped in its tracks and people set free not just from the virus but from all that binds them whether that be physical illness, depression, anxiety, fear or any other thing.  The world is looking for answers in the midst of all the confusion surrounding this pandemic and If the Church will rise up in demonstration of the power of the Holy Spirit and bring relief, there will be a harvest for the Kingdom of God such as has never been seen before.  First, though, the Church must fall on its knees in repentance for past failures to be the salt and light to the world the Lord has made us.  As a chemist, I used to wonder how salt can “lose its savor” (taste) as Jesus speaks of (Matthew 5:13) but later decided the only way this can happen is if it never gets out of the package. I do not believe that the Canadian or Provincial governments acted with malice towards the churches when they cavalierly decided that churches are non-essential.  Rather, it may well be that they saw the churches as nothing but well-meaning bland and tasteless organizations unable to demonstrate the power (light) of the Gospel they preach so they designated us as non-essential. That may be a hard pill for all of us in the Church to swallow but its about to change!

[davidrmaas]

Shadow or Substance?

SYNOPSIS:  The types and “shadows” of the old covenant find their substance in the Son, according to the book of Hebrews.

The epistle to the Hebrews develops its exhortation to persevere on the theme of fulfillment, what God has accomplished in His Son, Jesus Christ. God's past incomplete word has been superseded by the complete one "spoken" in His Son.

This letter was likely sent to a congregation with a significant complement of Jewish believers; most likely, it was in or near the city of Rome. The church had experienced persecution and was facing the possibility of renewed persecution (Hebrews 2:15, 10:32-34, 12:4, 13:24-25).

Consequently, some members began to withdraw from the assembly and contemplated a return to the synagogue. Returning to Judaism was one way to avoid persecution. Unlike Christianity, Judaism had legal standing in the Roman Empire. The government exempted Jews from certain requirements imposed on other groups. This included participation in the imperial cult (Hebrews 10:24-31).

In its early years, Christianity was perceived by Rome to be a Jewish sect. However, beginning in the middle of the 60s A.D., the Roman government began to view Christianity as a new and distinct religion. Eventually, it lost any legal protections it might have enjoyed previously. Following the destruction of the Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, the divide between church and synagogue became much more pronounced and scattered congregations found themselves on Rome’s radar screen.

The concern of the author of Hebrews was not theological but pastoral. His purpose was to prevent members of this assembly from leaving the faith and he strongly urged them to faithfulness and not to return to their former lives under Judaism (Hebrews 2:1-3, 3:6, 12-14, 4:1, 11-13, 6:1-12, 10:26-31, 35-39, 12:3-17, 13:9).

The book of Hebrews opens with a paragraph that sets the tone of the Letter.  It begins, “in many parts and many ways long ago God spoke to the fathers in the prophets; upon these last of days he spoke to us in a Son.” God did speak in the past but only partially, here a little, there a little. But with the advent of Jesus, He now speaks with finality in His Son (Hebrews 1:1-4).

God’s earlier word was true but promissory and incomplete. It prepared the way for His final and ultimate revelation in the Son. In this thematic passage, the author introduces angels and begins the first of a series of comparisons by which he contrasts what God has done in the past with what He is now doing in the Son.

Thus, the Son “became superior to the angels by as much as going beyond them, he inherited a more excellent name.” The purpose in the first chapter is not to digress into a discussion about the nature of Christ or angels, but to demonstrate the superiority of the Son over them.

The comparison of Chapter 1 leads to the first exhortation of the Letter, “If the word spoken through angels became firm and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense, how shall we escape if we neglect” the superior word spoken in the Son? The author refers to a Jewish tradition that the Law or Torah was mediated to Moses by angels (Hebrews 2:1-4).

The purpose is not to disparage angels or the Law, but to point out the far greater danger of ignoring the vastly superior revelation now available in the Son. The author is arguing from the lesser to the greater.

Angels are God’s ministers and glorious. The Law was given by God and is just and excellent. Yet the word spoken through the Son is vastly superior to any word given through angels. Rejecting the superior revelation in Jesus will result in far greater punishment than disobedience to the Torah.

The Author next compares the Son to Moses, to Aaron, the Son’s Melchizedek priesthood to the Levitical priesthood, his sacrifice to the repeated sacrifices of the Tabernacle, and the Old Covenant to the New. In each case, he does not disparage the Old but demonstrates the clear superiority of what God has done in the New, in the Son (Hebrews 3:1-6, 5:1-10, 7:1-27, 9:26).

A dire warning against forsaking the Son follows each contrast. The comparison with angels ends with a warning not to “drift away” from the word spoken in the Son. The comparison to Moses produces a warning against being hardened through the deceitfulness of sin and unbelief (Hebrews 2:1-4, 3:1-4:16).

The initial description of his superior priesthood is followed by a dire warning against “falling away” and, thereby, going beyond the pale by once again publicly crucifying the Son and holding him up for public ridicule (Hebrews 6:1-8).

The more detailed exposition about the priesthood of Jesus, his superior sacrifice, and the New Covenant inaugurated by him is followed by a fourth warning against the dreadful fate that awaits those who desert the superior faith found in the Son:

(Hebrews 10:25-31) – “Anyone having set aside a law of Moses…dies. Of how much sorer punishment do you suppose he shall be accounted worthy, who has trampled underfoot the Son of God and esteemed the blood of the covenant a profane thing…”

The Law was incomplete and not without shortcomings. The fact that a new priesthood of a different order was necessary indicated the need for a change of law – “For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law”). There is a setting aside of the former commandment because of “its weakness and un-profitableness, for the Law was unable to perfect anyone” (Hebrews 7:11-22).

Jesus became the “guarantee of a better covenant”; he is the mediator of a “better covenant legislated on better promises.” If the first covenant had been complete or “faultless” there would have been no need for a second (Hebrews 8:7-13).

The Old Covenant with its system of sacrifices and offerings was ordained by God and the priests who served in the Tabernacle did render divine service, but only as “glimpse and shadow of the heavenly realities”, “copies” or “patterns” of the heavenly and real things (Hebrews 8:5, 9:9-10, 9:23).

In contrast, Jesus did not enter into the “copy” but into the very presence of God, “for the law having a shadow of the good things to come, not the very image of the things, can never with the same sacrifices year by year, which they offer continually, make perfect those who draw near” (Hebrews 9:24, 10:1).

In the case of this congregation, the temptation was not to revert to a grossly sinful or pagan life but to regress to the synagogue, to re-embrace the “shadow” of the Heavenly Reality revealed in Jesus. But this would amount to a rejection of God’s appointed high priest and the now open way of salvation, a retreat to the Old Regime already made obsolete by the New and vastly superior covenant established by the Son.

The underlying theme is one found throughout the New Testament: fulfillment. The Old has been superseded by the New. The Old was partial, consisting of shadows and types. The substance is found in the New. It is in Christ, not the Torah, Temple, or a Territory that “all the promises of God are Yea, and in him Amen!” (2 Corinthians 1:20).

Jesus is the interpretive key that unlocks the Hebrew scriptures, not vice versa. God defeated Sin, Satan, and Death, not on the altar of the Jerusalem Temple, but on Calvary outside the Temple and the city of Jerusalem.

As Paul wrote, we are “filled full in him who is the head of all principality and authority, in whom we have also been circumcised with a circumcision not made by hand…having been buried together with him in our baptism, we also have been raised together through our faith in the energizing of God, who raised him from among the dead.”

Though we were “dead in our offenses and by the uncircumcision of our flesh, he has brought us to life together with him, having in grace forgiven us all our offences, having blotted out the handwriting against us by the decrees…and having taken away the same nailing it up to the cross…Let no one, therefore, be disqualifying you in eating and in drinking, or in respect of feast, or new moon, or Sabbath, which are a shadow of the things to come, whereas the substance is of the Christ” (Colossians 2:9-17).

There is nothing inherently wrong with using Hebrew names, worshipping on Saturday, being circumcised, or keeping a kosher diet. Such things are matters of indifference to one’s standing before God. One does not sin by refusing to eat pork or to work on the Sabbath.

Where a line is crossed is when we begin to teach or believe that such things are still necessary to be full members of God’s covenant community, when we compel others to adopt Jewish customs and lifestyles, when we find it necessary to make the vastly superior revelation found in Jesus Christ conform to the partial revelations of the past, when reverting to the shadow becomes necessary for the completion or understanding of Christian faith.

If the fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan has arrived in the person of Jesus Christ, why return and embrace the shadows that he casts? In the final analysis, doing so is not a fuller revelation but regression to that which was always partial, fragmentary, and promissory, and not without fault.

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(Originally posted on disciplesglobal.org)