featured – Page 81 – Restless Pilgrim

Who’s your daddy? St. Justin Martyr

January 14, 2012 pilgrim 2 comments

In the JP2 Group we’re doing a mini-series on Christian worship in the Early Church. It is for this reason that I recently posted several blog entries about St. Justin Martyr, an Early Church Father and one of the first great Christian apologists.

However, I realized as I was finishing up yesterday’s post that I haven’t actually written an introductory post about this great man. I had done this previously when we were studying St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Polycarp of Smyrna. So today I’m going to remedy this, providing a little bit of information about St. Justin’s life.

Who was this man whose writings we’ve been studying?

Searching For Truth

What we know about St. Justin mainly comes from his own writings. He was born in about AD 103 to Pagan parents in Flavia Neapolis, modern day Nablus on the West Bank. He had a great love of philosophy and studied various philosophical systems:

“…I surrendered myself to a Stoic Philosopher…but when I had not acquired any further knowledge of God (for he did not know himself, and said such instruction was unnecessary)…I left him…

A Peripatetic Philosopher… asked me for money. For this reason I left him, believing him to be no philosopher at all….

I came to a Pythagorean Philosopher, very celebrated – a man who thought much of his own wisdom… He said, ‘What then? Are you acquainted with music, astronomy, and geometry?’ Having commended many of these branches of learning, and telling me that they were necessary, he dismissed me.

In my helpless condition it occurred to me to have a meeting with the Platonists, for their fame was great. I thereupon spent as much of my time as possible with one who had lately settled in our city…and I progressed, and made the greatest improvements daily. And the perception of immaterial things quite overpowered me, and the contemplation of ideas furnished my mind with wings, so that in a little while I supposed that I had become wise; and such was my stupidity, I expected forthwith to look upon God, for this is the end of Plato’s philosophy.
– Dialogue With Trypho, Chapter 2

Church Fathers

Great Apostasy Questions

May 12, 2015 pilgrim 7 comments

A while back, I produced a post in which I listed some Canon Questions, some specific questions I ask when talking to non-Catholics about the Table of Contents found in their Bible. Following my post concerning my recent encounter with a Jehovah’s Witness, I’ve decided to do another post similar to my Canon Questions, but this time concerning the “Great Apostasy”, the belief that that the Church effectively disappeared from the earth some time after Christ’s death.

Groups like the Mormons hold to the Great Apostasy and use this as an explanation for the significant differences between their doctrine and the doctrine of historic Christianity. Muslims hold to this narrative too, to justify the teachings of Muhammad which stand in stark contradiction to the New Testament. Additionally, most Protestant groups, while typically not holding such a radical version of this doctrine, usually hold to some variation of it, saying that somewhere along the line the Church went off-track in a rather major way.

Catholicism

The Divine Eucharist

May 27, 2015 pilgrim 6 comments

This last weekend I was in LA to attend a debate between Dr. James White and Shaykh Mustafa Umar on the divinity of Christ.

Despite Dr. White’s rather scathing view of Catholicism, even denying it the classification of “Christian”, I jumped at the opportunity to see him in-person. You see, I have consumed a lot of his material over the years. His apologetics material concerning the Watchtower, Mormonism and Islam have been of considerable help to me in my own encounters with members of those groups. Not only that, but my understanding of Reformed theology is almost entirely drawn from his various videos which are available online.

The debate itself was constructive and enjoyable, despite having a rather disappointingly truncated Q&A session at the end. After the debate, the line for Dr. White was considerable, but I did get a change to speak to Shaykh Umar. Although I found the Shaykh’s answers to my questions unconvincing, I found him to be down-to-earth and very pleasant.

Aside from announcing that I’ve ticked off another bucket list item, I wanted to do a quick post about this last weekend because I wanted to briefly mention a line of argumentation used by Dr. White during the debate…

Catholicism

Let’s talk about love

February 3, 2013 pilgrim 3 comments

clement The Second Reading at Mass today is one of those better known Scripture passages, St. Paul’s praise of the virtue of love, found in his First Letter to the Corinthians.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, …“. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to quote the rest of this passage as you will have certainly heard it at…every…single…wedding…you have ever attended 😉

It is my guess that St. Paul’s great hymn of love was the inspiration for a section of an epistle written by St. Clement of Rome at the end of the First Century. A few decades after St. Paul’s death, St. Clement wrote a letter to that same troublesome Corinthian congregation to address that community’s latest round of problems. Some young whipper-snappers had usurped control of the church and deposed their clergy. The Bishop of Rome wrote to them, urging the members of the church to obedience and to brotherly love.

Qur’an Cover-to-Cover: Day 7 (“The heights” and “The Jinn”)

December 14, 2016 pilgrim Leave a comment

Today I’m going to be looking at two chapters of the Qur’an, one long (#7) and one reasonably short (#72).

Surah 7 – “The heights” (Al-Araf)
Mankind is reminded to follow Allah and also reminded of the cities which He destroyed to punish unbelieving people. The scales of judgement which weigh good deeds are also recalled.

The fall of Satan is described, in an almost identical pattern to Surah 38 (“The letter sad”). The narrative continues, however, describing the Fall of Adam and Eve. Allah told them “do not approach this tree, lest you be among the wrongdoers”. The nature of the tree or the consequences of eating from it were not really explained. Rather than saying that they will be like gods (as in the Genesis narrative), Satan promised that if they eat the fruit they will “become angels or become of the immortal”. Once they have eaten, they recognize their nakedness and sew together leaves as clothes. God arrives and chastises them. We don’t see “the blame game” which we see in Genesis, where Adam blames Eve (and ultimately God) and Eve blames the serpent.

Apologetics

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

May 14, 2013 pilgrim One comment

Do Catholics know the Bible?

I remember the first time I heard the Bible at Mass. By that, I don’t mean the first time I heard a Reading from Scripture in the Liturgy of the Word. No, I’m referring to the first time I heard some words from the lips of the priest and thought to myself “Hey, that’s straight from Scripture”.

Now, I knew some of the more prominent features of the liturgy such as the Gloria, Sanctus and Kyrie came from Scripture, but I thought that was pretty much it. It turns out I was very wrong…

So when was the first time I “heard the Bible at Mass”? Well, I was an altar server and went to wash the priest’s hands prior to the Eucharistic prayer. The priest came forward and, as I poured water over his hands, he said the words “Lord, wash away my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin”. I recognized those words! I had been reading through the book of Psalms at the time and recognized the verse from Psalm 51:

Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin – Psalm 51:2

Sound familiar? 🙂

After that experience, I began to pay closer attention to the words of the Mass. Again and again I found that virtually everything that was said came from Scripture. In fact, now whenever I have non-Catholic Christians attend Mass with me, I invite them to keep a tally of the number of Scripture quotations or Biblical allusions they hear.

So do Catholics know the Bible? Well, maybe better than they think…

Catholicism

« 1 … 79 80 81 82 83 … 137 »

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31