"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
We are now drawing to the end of my suggested Do’s and Don’ts of leading Bible study (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4). Let’s pick up where we left off yesterday..
DON’T: Shoot people down
Sometimes you’ll ask a question or someone will be sharing and they will say something which is just objectively incorrect.
Love is patient, love is kind, …
This is exciting news 🙂 My friend Jenna has been accepted into the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, an order of nuns who care for terminal cancer patients who can’t afford care. I’ve known Jenna for over three years now and, trust me, she’s going to be a seriously epic kind of nun:
Before Jenna can join the nuns, however, she has to expunge her student debt. So, if you’d like to help get her to the convent, I’d invite you to visit the website below, read her story, look at the pictures and make a donation:
As one of her friends put it, the sooner we can get her to the convent, the sooner we can get her praying for us and the sooner we can get holy 😉
The article Get thee to a nunnery first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net
My course through the Qur’an continues today with chapters 86, 54 and 38. I’m tackling fewer chapters in this post because Surah 38 is quite long and I have quite a lot to say about it…
Surah 86 – “The morning star” (At-Tariq)
This chapter begins by reminding man from what he was made. In the same way that Allah created them from nothing, He is able to give them life again on Judgement Day. The authority of the Qur’an is reasserted, as is God’s control over the events of life.
Questions
Q1. What does aya 4 mean when it says “There is no soul but that it has over it as a protector”? Is it saying that every soul has a protector? If so, is this Allah or an angel?
Q2. Does semen really emerge “from between the backbone and the ribs”? sperm production is far lower than that.
This week’s Readings focus on the distinction between the kings of this world and the LORD. The Gospel asks us the question: what do we owe to our rulers and what do we owe to our God?
In the First Reading we learn that it is the Lord, and not the King of Persia, who is subduing the nations. In the Psalm we are told repeatedly to give the Lord the praise which He is owed. In the Second Reading we hear the response of the Thessalonians to God’s great grace. Finally, in the Gospel we are told in no uncertain terms – give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but give to God what belongs to God…
I could tell I was tired this morning… During the Divine Liturgy I went into autopilot as we sung the Creed, which unfortunately meant that I sang loudly “I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and the Son“. Oops!
In case you are unaware, in Eastern Christianity, the last part of that sentence is not included in the Nicene Creed. This creed was the product of two Ecumenical Councils, Nicaea and Constantinople, so technically we should call it the Nicene-Constantinoplean Creed.
The argument surrounding the clause “and the Son” is known as the “Filioque Controversy”, since “Filioque” is the Latin word which was added to the Creed in the West. This controversy dates back to the Great Schism of 1054. The history surrounding it is a little complicated, but the long and the short of it is that one of the reasons much of the Eastern Church broke communion with Rome was due to the addition of this word to the Creed in the West.
However, my purpose in this post isn’t so much to speak about the Filioque, but to talk about another slip up I made today when I sang “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…”
Back when I lived in San Diego, I often attended the San Diego Orthodox Young Adults Group. Once when I was hanging out with them, one of my Eastern Orthodox friends asked me why the Catholic Church made so many changes to the Creed. What did he mean? There were changes in addition to the Filioque?! That was news to me! However, he then pointed out that in the West we say:
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
In the East, however, the phrase in bold, “God from God”, does not appear!
I spent a little bit of time digging into this issue and I was rather surprised to find out that there were actually quite a few creedal variations in the ancient Church. In fact, you could go as far as to say that all the ancient versions differ at least to some degree from the official text given at Nicaea and Constantinople.
For example, the Councils used the first person plural throughout: “We believe… We confess… We await…”. However, the Byzantine Churches changed it to the first person singular: “I believe… I confess… I await”. Historically, the Latin Church did the same, although until relatively recently, English-speaking Catholics would say “We”. However, following the liturgical reforms of 2011 and retranslation of the Roman Missal to represent more faithfully the Latin text, all Catholics now say “I” instead.
Another textual variation in the Latin text is the one mentioned by my Eastern Orthodox friend. It is true that, in addition to the Filioque clause, the Latin liturgical text has another difference. In the Latin, it reads “Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero”, which translates as “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”. It turns out that the clause, “God from God”, although not found in the Creed from Constantinople, is actually found in the earlier creed from Nicaea. For some reason, this was retained in the Latin. The Armenian text includes this and other variations as well.
So what should we conclude? I’m not really sure, but I think we can acknowledge two things. The first is simply that there is more variation in the “Nicene Creed” than we commonly think, and the second is that I need to make sure I have a nice cup of tea before I attempt to sing any complex theology in the mornings.
UPDATE: Michael Lofton just recorded a livestream with even more details on this subject:
Monday marked the end of this month’s “Theology On Tap”, a Diocesan Catholic young adult event, this time hosted by the JP2 Group. Our opening speaker at the start of the month was the incomparable Paul J Kim and the series of talks was brought to a close by Michaelene Fredenburg.
Michaelene’s talk was entitled “Invitation to healing: reaching those touched by abortion”. Abortion is certainly a very sensitive subject and Michaelene handled it beautifully and delicately. She didn’t present a theological treatise as to why abortion is wrong, but rather presented insight into the life of someone who has been affected by abortion and offered some guidance as to how to sensitively help that person.
It’s inevitable that most people reading this post will have been affected in some way by abortion, either directly or indirectly. For this reason, if you were unable to make it to this last “Theology On Tap” session I would encourage you check out her website at AbortionChangesYou.com.
(In related news, the ex-fiancée of Aerosmith singer Steve Tyler has recently spoken about the abortion she had, It’s truly worth reading. Tyler himself having spoken about this earlier in the month)
Quite some time ago I remember reading an article at Called To Communion where I was presented with the positive case for Catholic salvation and I had my mind blown. I hadn’t realized quite how many non-Catholic concepts had crept into my brain.
During this past Lenten season I sent an email to Nick over at Nick’s Catholic Blog. Nick writes a lot on the subject of justification so I asked him to write a post putting forward the positive case for the Catholic view of salvation. The Protestant identity is often a negative one i.e. “Not Catholic” and I didn’t want to see Catholic soteriology go in the same direction i.e. “Not Sola Fide”. Here’s what he wrote:
If you’d like to understand more about the Protestant Reformed view of salvation and Penal Substitution, Joe recently did an article on this subject over at Shameless Popery.