Pages

Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Yes, there will be global warming -- but not for the reasons many think

Lately, I've been listening to all the international hysteria as one of the longest New Age agenda items is challenged -- "global warming" cum "climate change".

As long as I've knowingly observed the New Age Movement (since 1981), there were sub-goals in addition to their New World Order; New World Religion; and New Age "Messiah"  ones.

Some of the more important subgoals were:

1.  Reduce the USA;
2.  End separation of Church & State (so as to promote New Age, New World Religion concepts)
3.  Earth reverence and worship her as "Mother Earth", "Pachamama" and/or "Goddess Gaia".

Now in the early days that I first observed, I found small paperback volumes on the perils of a coming ice age.  A few mild winters later, and it was now "global warming."  After a few then colder winters, it was "climate change."

Well, I doubt if many of those watchers have bothered to dust off their Bibles, but had they done so, they might have even found some passages supporting their "global warming" theories.  As there are the fewest copyright issues with the King James Version of the Bible, I will quote from it.  One can find very similar language in the Catholic Douay Bibles.

16 And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.
And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.
And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea.
And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.
And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus.
For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy.
And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.
And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.
And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory.
10 And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain,
11 And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.
But BEFORE all of this,  Revelation 14 tells us all were given fair warning:

And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,
Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.
And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand,
10 The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:
11 And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.
12 Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.
It appears that the prophecy warns that we were to fear only the God who created the heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters.

There has been a great deal of speculation as to who is the Beast and what is his image.  Having observed the New Age Movement as closely as I have for the past  36 years, I have become increasingly of the opinion that the "image of the Beast" is that of the "Whole Earth."

Indeed, that image was discussed as pivotal in Marilyn Ferguson's New Age coming out party volume, THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY.  Chapter 13 (page 405) of her book is even named "The Whole Earth Conspiracy."  I found  20 detailed references in the volume to "Whole Earth" concerns.  The New Age contempt for the beliefs and God of our Fathers is richly reflected in her prose:

Those of us born into the "broken-earth" paradigm have two choices: We can go to our graves with the old view, like the generations of die-hard scientists who insisted there were no such things as meteorites, or germs, or brainwaves, or vitamins-or, we can consign our old beliefs unsentimentally to the past and take up the truer, stronger perspective.
We can be our own children.

 The "spiritual values" to which the New Age cum "cultural creatives" cum "Mindfulness" crowd subscribe is clearly more Earth oriented than Creator based:

Spiritual values, indeed, are at the base of much of the ecological concern in our time, a quickening sense of the whole earth, respect for the matrix of our evolution, the nature in which we are embedded. (Ferguson, page 357)
 It is not just water conservation, nor air protection that the New Agers seek.  They  also aggressively put forth an "Earth Charter" accompanied by an even more more blasphemous "Ark of the Covenant".   Interestingly enough, they trotted that out for public display in a Vermont ceremony only two days before the "911" events of September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center was destroyed.  Al Gore had a large Whole Earth poster behind him often shown on TV as he was interviewed in his Vice-Presidential office during the William Jefferson Clinton presidency (1993-2001).

Big money and big names are associated with the Threshold Foundation.  I have mentioned this organization in earlier posts, in views of Elaine DeWar's book CLOAK OF GREEN, and histories of the powerful convergences of the New Agers as they were seeking to implement their major tri-fold agenda.  You will remember that it was James George's book ASKING FOR THE EARTH was largely about the Threshold Foundation, its pioneering conferences and its work.  Marilyn Ferguson said of its goals in THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY (p. 410)
The Threshold Foundation, based in Switzerland, stated its intent to help ease the transition into a planetary culture, "foster a paradigm shift, a new model of the universe in which art, religion, philosophy, and science converge," and promote a wider understanding that "we exist in a cosmos whose many levels of reality form a single sacred whole.
The book of Revelation is both feared and despised by the New Age/Globalist/Deep Ecology Movement.  Indeed, an important New Ager who has lyingly denied being one, "Sir" Martin Palmer an adviser of note to Britain's Prince Philip  as well as his boastful claims of heading a trillion dollar environmental fund (churches' moneys, no less) spent considerable ink faulting me for that in his 1993 book



Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day.  The New Agers and their "environmental movement" compatriots/comrades in arms may well be right about "global warming" coming.  They are, however, dead wrong about its causes.  If they want to prevent "global warming" or a "New Ice Age" as still earlier books of theirs called for, perhaps they might want to give thanks rather than blasphemies to their Maker.

Stay tuned!

CONSTANCE

432 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:11 PM

    BRAVO, Constance!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous6:13 PM



    Joshua Mailman Threshold Foundation founder

    http://www.synergos.org/globalgivingmatters/features/1210mailman.htm

    https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/fundraising-for-climate-change/threshold-foundation-grants-for-climate-change.html

    https://philanthropynw.org/events/peace-and-security-funders-group-annual-meeting

    Busy, busy people.....

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6:18 PM

    Reposting this from the last year or so.
    http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderprofile.asp?fndid=5295&category=79





    ReplyDelete
  4. As I made corrections and changes after the initial posting, please refresh your browser. I have also submitted the article to NewswithViews and there will be a few changes from the posting here -- not significant to the content, just a few items phrased differently.

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  5. Amen Constance

    ReplyDelete
  6. To all:

    I've posted some important information to the comments section of my immediately preceding post that you might want to check out.

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous9:27 PM

    Dear Constance, I googled, 'Thomas Dahlheimer Lucifer', and a plethora of links to truly sickening articles by him came up. IMHO, please consider exposing Thomas Dahlheimer. Thank you.

    The following is an example from:

    http://www.towahkon.org/SnakeisLucifer-Christ.html

    Jesus Christ was the "snake (serpent)" in the "Garden of Eden" myth. And Jehovah/Yahweh is Satan.

    By Thomas Dahlheimer

    Two posts of mine on Constance Cumbey's blog are about this topic. They are presented below.

    [Note: Helena Blavatsky (1831 – 1891) is revered by many as the Mother of the New Age Movement.]

    Blog poster Thomas Dahlheimer said...

    Mahatma Gandhi said: "Theosophy is the teaching of Madame Blavatsky. It is Hinduism at its best." Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) was a Hindu who was widely revered as the father of Yoga in the West. When writing about Satan, who is known as maya in Hindu scriptures, he wrote:

    Maya is "the delusory power inherent in the structure of creation, by which the One appears as many. Maya is the principle of relativity, inversion, contrast, duality, oppositional states; the 'Satan' (lit., in Hebrew, 'the adversary') of the Old Testament prophets; and the 'devil' whom Christ described picturesquely as a 'murderer' and a 'liar,' because 'there is no truth in him.'" (John 8:44).

    "Maya is Nature herself—the phenomenal worlds, ever in transitional flux as antithesis to Divine Immutability. In God's plan and play (lila), the sole function of Satan or maya is to attempt to divert man from Spirit to matter, from Reality to unreality." Explanation: "to attemp to divert man from Spirit" [or convince man that he is not Divine (Spirit) - the snake (serpent) in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:6) was right, he said - 'you shall be like God', or become aware that you are Divine-Spirit, Jehovah/Yahweh (Satan-maya) refutes this. Expanation: "From Spirit to matter" - meaning Satan attemps to convince individual humans to believe that they are not really One (with all other people, as One Being) and Spirit and that their bodies (made of matter) are a part of who they are." To belive we are Spirit is "Reality," and to believe that we are matter (or even partially matter) is "unreality." ref.

    The snake in the Garden of Eden was Lucifer's-Jesus's first coming. He came to set us free from Jehovah's-Satan's lies.

    [Continued]

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous9:29 PM

    Thomas Dahlheimer continues his sickening views:

    *******************************************************

    Blog poster Thomas Dahlheimer said...

    Constance Cumbey, you asked: Thomas Dahlheimer, where are you getting THAT theology -- the snake in the garden was "Jesus first coming" ??? -- that's weird, even by New Age standards.

    The answer to your question can be found by going to the Gnostic website located at: http://www.theforbiddenreligion.com/lucifer-the-liberator.htm

    {Pope John Paul II wrote: “...the return of ancient Gnostic ideas under the guise of the so-called New Age." ... "It [the New Age] is only a new way of practicing Gnosticism - "]

    Excepts from this Gnostic website read:

    Gnostics consider that the biblical myth of creation can be explained as follows: the creator satan of the world trapped Adam and Eve in his miserable world, and Lucifer, in the form of a serpent, offered them the forbidden fruit of saving Gnosis, and showed them that the creator was deceiving them. In other words, the creator said to man "but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." On the other hand, the Serpent said "You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." The bible continued: "And the eyes of both of them were opened". It doesn't say "they both died", it says "the eyes of both of them were opened", like the Serpent had said. Later, the creator says "And now man has become as one of us, to know good and evil". The creator lied. He said that man would die if he ate the fruit, but man did not die. The Serpent was telling the truth. The creator himself ended up agreeing that the Serpent was right.

    Gnostics of later times, at the beginning of Christianity, who came to be known as Christian Gnostics or Gnostic Christians, regarded Christ as the Serpent of Genesis. This was because Christ, much later than the events in the earthly paradise, came carrying a liberating message, just like the Serpent. A message which frees man from this impure world. These Christian Gnostics believe that it was this knowledge which allowed man to make contact with the other world, the one opposed to the demiurge [the Old Teststament God, Jehovah]: the unknowable world of the True God [Jesus' Father in Heaven"].

    Christ, the bearer of this message, this Gnosis, has been likened to the Serpent of Genesis, who returns to Earth for a second time to help humanity. The first coming was Serpent Lucifer [the holy "light bearer," a totally different entity than the evil Satan, the "prince of darkness"] and the second was Christ Lucifer. According to Christian Gnosis, when Christ came to the world, it was his second time, since the first time was in the earthly paradise. In both cases it was, actually, Lucifer, the Messenger of the Unknowable. In both cases, the message was the same: Gnosis that disturbs, causes changes, wakes up and liberates those who listen to it. For Christian Gnostics, the Serpent is Christ, the Saviour who came to this world twice.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous11:23 PM

    Not just wrong, but plain ole stupid, and near coma inducing views written by whom? Did someone say the name Dudheimer?

    Proud of these unsubstantial notions of yours are you, sir?

    Your messages are DOA.
    You've worked mighty hard to get things this wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  10. To all, especially 9:29 pm

    I have written about Mr. Dahlheimer before -- back in 2011 -- I think that's what inspired him to come over here.

    Here is a link to the article I did then:

    http://cumbey.blogspot.com/2011/11/fifth-seal-persecution-of-church.html

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous3:45 PM

    The Scottish Episcopal Church has voted to allow gay couples to marry in church.

    It makes it the first major Christian church in the UK to allow same-sex marriages.

    More at BBC report;
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-40190204

    ~ K ~

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous4:32 PM

    Ben Doon and Phil MacCavitee will no doubt be pleased but I dare say the rest of Scotland won't be!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous4:41 PM

    The Episcopal Church has been New Agey for sometime now ... I'm surprised MCE hasn't already joined!

    http://www.evangelizationstation.com/htm_html/New%20Age/new_age_movement_in_the_epis.htm

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anonymous4:47 PM

    James Clapper says Watergate 'pales' in comparison with the Trump/Russia scandal. Former US spy chief attacks the sharing of intelligence with Putin and says firing of James Comey ‘inexcusable’ - The former US director of national intelligence James Clapper says events in Washington now are more serious than the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, and that it is imperative investigators get to the bottom of the Trump administration’s links with the Putin regime.. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/07/james-clapper-says-watergate-pales-in-comparison-with-trump-and-russia-scandal

    ReplyDelete
  15. Faith Goldy reports, Hungary and Slovakia are taking the EU to court over its refugee distribution scheme but explains why they might not succeed.:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Av1wRkGUs > Faith Goldy: See You In Court, EU!

    Apparently, the bulk of the Hungarian and Slovakian legal arguments will center on the Schengen Borders Code, which, according to Goldy, will not help their cause.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous6:42 PM

    Imam who influenced Terrorist attack on London is on the loose in the US

    http://news.sky.com/story/preacher-who-influenced-london-attacker-khuram-butt-is-still-loose-10908040

    ReplyDelete
  17. Anonymous7:37 PM

    http://www.clubofbudapest.org/clubofbudapest/index.php/en/events


    5th INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS “GLOBALISTICS-2017”: GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT



    SEPTEMBER 25-30, 2017

    ReplyDelete
  18. Anonymous8:30 PM

    Bill & Hillary received $2.85 million selling uranium to Russians!!!

    This shows what a huge double standard, not to mention utter hypocrisy, the Globalists have in going after President Trump (especially when they know that they have zero evidence to support any of their charges against him).  Meanwhile, the Clintons remain 'protected' by both our government and the mainstream media.

    https://www.intellihub.com/bill-and-hillary-received-2-85m-selling-u-s-uranium-to-the-russians/

    ReplyDelete
  19. Richard10:30 PM

    I agree. Never in the arguments of these fanatics is there a mention of the SUN, and its effects on the Earth as a probable cause of changes in weather, etc. Nor the increasing evidence of a SECOND twin sun approaching (Nemesis?) or its causing of the planets to perturb. Nor any passing thought or word of the weather weapon and manipulation systems of various nations. Nothing. It's all the fault of man's industry.

    I don't agree with the image becoming the Earth.

    If the Antichrist is Satan incarnate and he wants only worship from all people, why would he command them to worship the Earth? Trans-humanism and AI are better contenders.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Anonymous9:56 AM

    Juncker: EU needs stronger defence arm

    EU nations must step up their military co-operation as they cannot simply rely on the US to defend them, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker says.

    "Our deference to Nato can no longer be used as a convenient alibi to argue against greater European efforts."

    "We have no other choice than to defend our own interests in the Middle East, in climate change, in our trade agreements," he said in Prague...


    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-40217085

    ReplyDelete
  21. To Richard 10:30 am

    Google "New Age" and "Earth Worship" and for openers, you'll get this:

    The Goddess in the New Age - Caroline Myss
    https://www.myss.com › Free Resources › World Religions › Goddess Spirituality
    The Goddess in the New Age: Earth-based Traditions ... rooted out, accused of non-Christian worship and practices, and executed in the hundreds of thousands, ...
    NEW AGE - What is the significance of the New Age Movement ...
    christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-r007.html
    The so-called “New Age Movement” is a strange religion, or complex of religions, ... physics along with astrology, occultism, religious mysticism and nature worship. ... In the ancient religious, pantheism—the religion of Gaia, the Earth Mother, ...
    Earth Worship – New Age | Operation Jericho Project
    https://operationjerichoproject.com/earth-worship-new-age/
    Many Earth Day celebrations include new age crystals and “how to contact the God ... In this century, and the last, so many have turned from the worship of the ...
    Earth religion - Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_religion
    Earth religion is a term used mostly in the context of neopaganism. Earth-centered religion or nature worship is a system of religion based on the veneration of ...
    Gaia Worship - The New Pagan Religion - Contender Ministries
    contenderministries.org/UN/gaia.php
    Oct 6, 2002 - The idea of Earth as a living, divine spirit is not a new one. ... Gaia is eagerly accepted by the new age movement and fits neatly into eastern ...
    New Age - All About Spirituality
    www.allaboutspirituality.org/new-age.htm
    New Age - A collection of metaphysical thought systems. Universal ... Actually, many in the New Age movement refer to the union of earth and nature as "Gaia.
    New Age - Stand Up For The Truth
    https://standupforthetruth.com/hot-topics/new-age/
    There is nothing new about New Age worship, a consistent movement since the ... a foundation for UN spiritual beliefs including humanism and earth worship.
    Our Conscious Earth (Gaia) - Shri Adi Shakti
    www.adishakti.org/our_conscious_earth.htm


    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  22. Anonymous6:56 AM

    I don't think Satan cares who or what people worship as long as it's not God.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Anonymous10:18 AM

    6:56 AM, Yes.

    The global enslaved will think they are "free" if they can worship anything but God.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Anonymous10:56 AM

    "James Comey is a witness and a warning to Christians, wake up!"

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNcEKrKzlM

    ReplyDelete
  25. Anonymous11:57 AM

    Are you kidding me, Anonymous @ 10:56 AM???

    James Comey is a poisonous snake of the highest order… a deep-water Swamp Denizen who has been highly paid to deliberately provide cover for high-level corruption by the Clintons and Obama. He is has been central to trying to destroy the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration from the start. He is as dirty as they come in DC. He had highest-level cover (the FBI no less) and was deep into an effort to eliminate Trump. Trump had to move hard, fast, and at exactly the right time to cut the head off the snake without getting bitten by the snake or being finished by the other swamp denizens.
    Comey was a minor assistant US attorney in the late 90’s. He only gained power and money by being the DOJ official who “investigated” and cleared Bill Clinton of any wrong-doing in Clinton’s totally corrupt pardon (for huge payoffs) of criminal financier Marc Rich as Clinton was leaving the Presidency. This is how Comey began his career as a creature of the “swamp” years ago, as a servant of the Clintons.
    Comey provided “cover” for the Clintons in their gaining incredible power and wealth after leaving office through pardoning a billionaire money-launderer, arms dealer and criminal. Comey was a key piece in how the Clintons upped their corruption game and gained incredible wealth through their foundation after leaving the White House. A huge part of the scheme was giving Marc Rich a free pass when he should have spent life in prison, and that is what Comey covered-up for the Clintons. This set up Comey to be part of the corruption machine, making him powerful and wealthy.
    Immediately after doing the Clinton’s dirty work as a DOJ official, Comey resigned from the DOJ and took a position as the head attorney (Counsel) of the Lockheed Martin company, a huge military contractor. While he was in that position Lockheed became a major contributor (millions) to the Clinton Foundation and its fake charity spin-offs. In return for these payment to Clinton Inc., Lockheed received huge contracts with Hillary’s state department. Comey was the chief legal officer of Lockheed throughout this period of contributions to Clinton Inc. in return for State Dept. contracts.
    In late 2012, after overseeing Lockheed’s successful relationship with the Hillary State Department and the resulting profits, Comey stepped down from Lockheed and received a $6 million dollar payout for his services.

    Much more...
    http://usdefensewatch.com/2017/05/the-inside-story-on-how-trump-dropped-the-hammer-on-james-comey/

    ReplyDelete
  26. Anonymous12:17 PM

    Beware the 'Internet of Things'

    Although the term ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) first appeared in 2005, there is still no widely accepted definition. 
    IoT includes gadgets bought by consumers, as well as products and services designed for businesses to help machines ‘communicate’ with each other. 
    For example, the term IoT can include the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags businesses place on products in stores to track their inventory, or sensors that monitor electricity use in hotels. 
    For the purposes of the report, the FTC uses the term IoT to refer to devices or sensors - other than computers, smartphones, or tablets - that connect, communicate or transmit information over the web. It is limited to the gadgets sold to, or used by, consumers.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4590176/From-spying-hacking-Expert-lists-dangers-IoT.html#ixzz4jc7l1rZm

    ReplyDelete
  27. Anonymous1:00 PM

    https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html

    ReplyDelete
  28. Anonymous1:52 PM

    11:57 AM (no doubt you've been deluded by Trump's venom as he reads his snake poem, for instance), seeing as you obviously couldn't be bothered to watch the video, judging by the beginning of your reply, and have a short, selective memory or are deliberately dishonest with regards to your void aspersions about a Comey collusion with Clinton, of whom Comey exposed (emails, etc) during the last POTUS election campaign, I am not going to bother reading the rest of your post!

    Watch the video and wake up!

    Here it is again for you:

    James Comey is a witness and a warning to Christians, wake up!"

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNcEKrKzlM

    ReplyDelete
  29. Anonymous2:42 PM

    Anonymous 1:52 PM

    You are obviously the one who is clearly DELUDED!!!

    First, you say that I "couldn't be bothered to watch the video" (when, in fact, I did watch it)... and in the very next breath you say, "I am not going to bother reading the rest of your post."

    You are going to have to post more than some youtube video to convince me that Trump is the antichrist. The burden of proof is on YOU and his other accusers!!! And you all better make sure that you've done your homework.

    Meanwhile, TIME (and documentation) will prove that James Comey is deeply in the 'bed of corruption' with the evil Clintons. Explain how 'Trump the antichrist' would be fighting AGAINST that kind of Deep State evil. Oh, wait... you can't.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Anonymous2:47 PM

    Reasons why Americans voted for Trump last November (and do not regret it 7 months later)...

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/22/20-reasons-donald-trump-2016/

    ReplyDelete
  31. Anonymous3:02 PM

    2:42 PM, "in fact", you did watch it, you say?

    Yet you've tackled none of the points addressed in the video, and (assuming one is to believe you did watch it) you're willing to dismiss Brother James Key's remarks where he states that if you cannot accept Trump as being 'the Antichrist' then at least recognize he is antichrist and anti-Christian!

    Now, with regards to your comments at 11:57 AM, I refer you back to my previous post at 1:52 PM, after which, we'll see if you are indeed cognizant enough to address (in detail and with backing up your argument) both the specific points I have raised therein, as well as your addressing in like manner those raised by Brother James Key in the said video. Otherwise, you leave one with no choice but to conclude you nothing more than vacuous and deluded (having supped at the snake oil dripping from Trump's lying lips) after all!

    ReplyDelete
  32. Anonymous3:14 PM

    "Reasons why Americans voted for Trump last November (and do not regret it 7 months later)..."

    Erm... actually (if we're to believe that presidents are truly elected and not selected behind the scenes), although I am no fan of Clinton whatsoever (though Trump was and behind the scenes still is 'great' friends with her and adulterous Bill ((no doubt Donald and Bill have a lot in common)) ), most Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, who had a final lead in the popular vote by 2.8 Million!

    Moreover, many Trump voters rue the day they voted for him, 2:47 PM

    ReplyDelete
  33. Anonymous3:26 PM

    You didn't really believe Trump was going to send his 'old buddy' Hillary to jail did you? Dear me!

    Still, I suppose your happy with Vlad Putin getting his hands in the Whitehouse bowl of governance and kneeding away at the dough of US federal politics!

    ReplyDelete
  34. Anonymous3:29 PM

    You didn't really believe Trump was going to send his 'old buddy' Hillary to jail did you? Dear me!

    Still, I suppose you're happy with Vlad Putin getting his hands in the Whitehouse bowl of governance and kneeding away at the dough of US federal politics!

    ReplyDelete
  35. Anonymous4:02 PM

    The burden of proof is on YOU, Anonymous 3:02 PM.

    I don't need to prove anything!!!

    Stop deflecting!!! Stop using Brother Key and his youtube videos as a 'crutch', and have the courage to list ALL of the reasons here on this blog why YOU are convinced that Donald Trump is the antichrist. (I didn't make that charge against him; YOU did!!!)


    P.S. FYI - Hillary's so-called 'popular vote' numbers (that she wears like a 'badge' because it's all she has left)... were greatly enhanced by ALL of those illegals who were not only allowed, but were encouraged, to vote in at least 5 states!!!

    ReplyDelete
  36. Anonymous4:20 PM

    You don't think that the Deep State Globalists are cleverly using a 'divide and conquer' scenario... spreading 'Is Trump the antichrist?' propaganda in order to play the Christians against Trump's voters and supporters, do you? (Oh, no - are they feeding the lions to the Christians? LOL)

    ReplyDelete
  37. Anonymous7:52 PM

    Anonymous 10:56 AM

    I am someone who took the time to watch Brother James Key's youtube video, and I have to say that he lost all credibility with me when he made the following statement: "James Comey, I believe with all my heart is a man with character and integrity."

    Actually, James Comey has LIED UNDER OATH. There are any number of youtube videos (which you can google) where you can watch his documented testimony that will support this fact.

    Also, President Trump is not a religious leader; he is our President. Therefore, why do Christians believe that they have the right to demand that he (or any other President) give a testimony of his religious beliefs to them? (What if we had elected a Jewish President? Would we make those same demands on him?)

    In other words, Brother James: Is that all you've got? You've got to have more than that before you decide to slander a man.


    ReplyDelete
  38. Anonymous8:48 PM

    Why President Donald J. Trump is more than likely NOT the Antichrist...

    https://search.aol.com/aol/video?q=bob+mitchell+says+donald+trump+is+not+the+antichrist&s_it=video-ans&sfVid=true&videoId=E2F5768E1EDB1E3D0087E2F5768E1EDB1E3D0087&v_t=webmail-searchbox

    ReplyDelete
  39. Anonymous11:05 PM

    Has there ever been a recent President that someone out there hasn't called the antichrist.
    Given the Antichrist is a "He" you could use the flawed logic that voteing for Hillary Clinton was safer because she being a "she" rather than a "he" tgat could bdvome the antichrist.

    Time to get back to what the Bible says about the antchrist and false christs etc
    .

    ReplyDelete
  40. Anonymous11:14 PM

    Anon 11:05 PM

    I've always said Hillary has balls. After Hillary offered Obama the VP slot when he was winning confirmed that for me. A pundit also said she has balls so going once...going twice...she does!

    ReplyDelete
  41. Anonymous12:14 AM

    Hillary is more like a shape-shifting lizard.

    ReplyDelete
  42. June 11 Sunday

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BENQRI6WU38 You Can't Understand the Globalist Deep State
    without Understanding Zbigniew Brzezinski

    Comey "exposure" of Clinton - HE REFUSED TO PROSECUTE and the issue was too public to
    just pretend it didn't exist.

    http://shoebat.com/2017/06/10/major-evidence-reveals-that-robert-spencer-is-working-with-genocidal-satanist-nazi-cult-that-plans-to-eradicate-all-christians-in-concentration-camps/

    Constance

    RAY YUNGEN NOTED REIKI SPIRITS TOLD REIKI MASTERS THAT WHEN ENOUGH ARE INITIATED SOMETHING MAJOR WILL HAPPEN. Sounds like the mass possession you suggested might happen, resulting in massacre of Christians. There are millions of them some in churches they should be
    noted and watched. This is a serious threat. (and like the harmonic convergence it might by
    the grace of God merely fizzle.)


    Physicist

    cubicle and idiot aura reader. auras don't reach that far mostly an inch or so off the body.
    Think low energy plasma if that helps. outer edge of the soul. results of original type kirlian
    photography (low voltage electricity through leaves and hands but dead and inanimate objects
    show no aura) shows changes appropriate to health, damage, etc. and holes in the aura after
    a psy vamp feed. new age standards of chakra and aura health are wrong because based on
    rejection of goodness of physical creation.

    "seeing the unseen" runs in some families. I never claimed to see auras except when its abnormally charged up WHICH USUALLY MEANS SOMETHING IS WRONG. I'm not that sensitive, so it shouldn't
    be noticeable. In all cases that could be checked on there was a disease or there was evil.

    end of subject.

    Anon 4:41
    I am not interested in episcopalianism. I am not new age I have repeatedly stated these people should be persuaded away from messing with their chakras and energy system so they will not
    be empowering demons and channeling influences that mess with us. Some anon was so stupid
    they couldn't understand a flyer at my site aimed at destabilizing new age belief systems.

    Craig,

    I HAVE NOT CHANGED MY POSITION ONE SINGLE TIME whic is, that The Lamb was slain
    from the foundation of the world, not that the book was there from then, you however have
    weasled when confronted with the fact that "the one slain" refers to The Lamb in the Greek
    and argued "The Lamb" isn't repeated in Greek but the translator who knows koine Greek
    better than you I figure, chose to put "the Lamb" instead of "the one." I defer to the translator
    who has more credibility than you do. The issue is did "the one slain from the foundation of the cosmos" refer to the lamb? it did. I ASK A SECOND TIME, DO YOU DENY THAT CHRIST'S DEATH
    AND RESURRECTION WERE AGREED UPON BEFORE CREATION? sounds like you do.

    ReplyDelete
  43. Back to the topic of the post;
    I have two videos here, both of which claim to correct climate change through solar radiation management (SRM). What we are seeing with in these two videos is the argument ‘for’ spraying regardless of the actual effect.

    So which is true here?
    High altitude clouds reflect solar energy thereby reducing solar heating? – David Keith’s position
    Or
    Lack of high altitude clouds allow the earth to radiate excess heat into space? – NASA position

    http://tinyurl.com/pa6pbkw
    As David Keith states in this video, putting particles into the stratosphere helps reflect the solar energy and heat from reaching the earth.
    David Keith naively states that we could start solar radiation management, or he is lies as geoengineering (chemtrailing)has ramping up since the 60’s.

    http://tinyurl.com/ybmak62o
    NASA states High altitude clouds trap in heat. Lack of high clouds in the tropics allows for global cooling effect. So NASA is saying that by creating these stratosphere clouds, we can reduce the torrential rain problem globally? Sounds like California drought – globalized? Sounds like genocide.

    Here is a longer video overview of what they are doing and its effects.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFQ2_0QNiks

    Maybe our Physicist can weigh in on the science of SRM instead of low energy plasma?

    ReplyDelete
  44. 11:05
    Yes, and it says that the Antichrist is a MAN, literally.
    There is the spirit of antichrist and then there will be the man.

    And I for one really doubt that it's DT.

    Christine;
    An "aura" of light around a person which doesn't extend beyond "an inch or so"
    is probably an afterimage within the eye of the beholder.
    Auras shmauras.
    Chakras, shmakras
    Why would you want to synthesize Christianity with anything else? Jesus doesn't need
    help or insights from Hinduism, or Islam, or fairy tales.
    You should quit trying to do that.

    ReplyDelete
  45. Like the odor of farmland freshly fertilized with manure, there is Christine’s weekly contribution, with its fabrications, imputing incorrect assertions to individuals while simultaneously attempting to impugn their characters, all the while spewing her own brew of quasi-new age and blatant new age beliefs onto the readership, all of it mixed with the very rare valid statements. But is it really worth the effort to find the credible among the (sometimes literally) incredible?

    Christine wrote regarding the conversation she initially butted [pun intended] herself into, and continues to incessantly ramble on about:

    I HAVE NOT CHANGED MY POSITION ONE SINGLE TIME whic is, that The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, not that the book was there from then, you however have weasled when confronted with the fact that "the one slain" refers to The Lamb in the Greek and argued "The Lamb" isn't repeated in Greek but the translator who knows koine Greek better than you I figure, chose to put "the Lamb" instead of "the one." I defer to the translator who has more credibility than you do. The issue is did "the one slain from the foundation of the cosmos" refer to the lamb? it did. I ASK A SECOND TIME, DO YOU DENY THAT CHRIST'S DEATH AND RESURRECTION WERE AGREED UPON BEFORE CREATION? sounds like you do.

    So, you didn’t first argue against my assertion regarding the grammatical ambiguity, then subsequently implicitly concede that it is grammatically ambiguous? That’s meant rhetorically, as that is, in fact, what you did, as your VERY FIRST WORDS were, and I quote you verbatim: not grammar ambiguity, but that the atoning death of the Lamb was decided on before creation began, THAT was the backup plan if sin occurred, so the Crucifixion was settled on before creation, which made it as good as having happened ["THE PROPHESIED SYSTEM OF REVELATION 13 RAPIDLY ADVANCES!" @ 1:14 AM]. So, Christine, here you state the Lamb’s death was a settled issue before creation, yet your most recent comment states specifically that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. So, your position has changed. As to your subsequent concession on ambiguity, I again quote you verbatim: Craig, re syntax ambiguity Revelation was questioned because of poor writing style, but this supports its legitimacy… [same thread as above, @ 1:18 AM]. Your position changed on the issue of ambiguity, as well.

    You just make it up as you go, changing the argument, rather than explicitly conceding you were wrong/mistaken, etc.

    I was quite clear from the very beginning, and I’ve never wavered, that “the one slain” refers to the Lamb (who else would it be?!), as that was never in question and was never brought up as an issue—until you tried to make it one. It’s not my fault you have a comprehension problem. If you don’t understand something, why not just ask a question rather than going off on some wild tangent, imputing something to me that I’d never stated?

    And you conflate the real issue in this verse with something you think it is with your statement: The issue is did "the one slain from the foundation of the cosmos" refer to the lamb? it did.

    So, I’ll have to go back to the issue as I brought it up initially.

    Cont…

    ReplyDelete
  46. Cont…

    The syntactical ambiguity in Revelation 13:8 allows for one of two interpretations:

    (1) All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast--all whose names have not been written in the Lamb's book of life, the one [the Lamb] who was slain from the foundation of the world.

    (2) All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life belonging to the Lamb who was slain.

    Thus, (2) does NOT state that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, as it states nothing about the timing of the Lamb’s slaying, while (1) does. The fact that the NIV chooses to repeat “the Lamb” in English translation does not belie the fact that “the Lamb” occurs only once in the Greek. You’re making an issue out of nothing, as clearly “the one” refers to the “the Lamb”—something I’d never denied. What I DID state is in the above, which brings me to the real issue, which is: To what “from the foundation of the world” modify—does it modify the slaying of the Lamb ((1)) or those whose names were not written in the Book of Life ((2))?

    As to your very last question in your most recent comment, this has been answered more than once—the very first time in my very first comment (in its last paragraph), which I’ll quote (again) here: Thus, it’s either that the Lamb (Jesus) was slain from the very beginning, or that the book of life belonging to the Lamb was there from the very beginning, this book of life requiring the Life-Giver, Christ. Either way amounts to the same thing. No back-up plan; it was there from the beginning….

    Read more carefully, Christine, before you comment. If you are not sure, ask.

    ReplyDelete
  47. Anonymous4:19 PM

    She does that because she believes that, Paul. She believes in what she thinks she knows. Which in reality isn't the Bible as she has proven over and over. She trusts her so-called knowledge instead of the Lord, and why she posts (bludgeons) reems and streams of her nonsense. She believes in "little j" jesus and he needs her help so she adds that dandy ad mix of "beliefs" to help him out.
    Meaning: she believes in the (graven) images she has latched on to over years then cooks up in her head.
    AKA idolatry.

    ReplyDelete
  48. Anonymous4:45 PM

    More blowback for poor MCE.

    Some more of her expanded gases have escaped here at (once a week) What Toxicity Chritine Leaks.


    Craig, she won't read and learn or ask, she is here only to argue.

    Dahlheimer is almost her equal in that, both of them are ludicrous.

    ReplyDelete
  49. Anonymous7:12 PM

    Anonymous 7:52 and 8:48

    Brother James Key apparently needs to schnooker people into filling his coffers via his "gofundme" page!!! Perhaps he feels that his game of "spot the antichrist" is a surefire way to part fools from their money.... even though the game itself is as old as kitty litter.


    https://www.gofundme.com/BrotherJamesKey

    ReplyDelete
  50. Anonymous10:34 AM

    auras don't reach that far mostly an inch or so off the body. Think low energy plasma if that helps. outer edge of the soul. results of original type kirlian
    photography (low voltage electricity through leaves and hands but dead and inanimate objects show no aura) shows changes appropriate to health, damage, etc. and holes in the aura after a psy vamp feed. new age standards of chakra and aura health are wrong because based on rejection of goodness of physical creation... end of subject.


    You don't decide the end of the subject unilaterally! Although the rest of what you say is not even wrong.

    Physicist

    ReplyDelete
  51. Physicist,

    Where's that sarcasm font when ya need it!

    ReplyDelete
  52. Anonymous11:20 AM

    MCE is so past learning, and apparently feeling too, she does not even know she has been burned on several subjects, that she unwisely thinks herself expert on, and proven otherwise.

    Christine Erikson = charcoal.

    ReplyDelete
  53. Anonymous11:36 AM

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9-vd8u_7wI

    What it's like to deal with Chritine.

    ReplyDelete
  54. Marko9:43 PM

    I wonder what those who are putting themselves out on the "Trump is the antichrist" limb or the "Trump is going to save us" limb will say if Trump ends up resigning, or being impeached. Both are possible, and not just barely. (Watch or read some of Cliff Kincaid's recent stuff...)

    We would have Pence as President, which wouldn't be a bad thing, really. But aside from that, a lot of people will be eating crow.

    ReplyDelete
  55. Anonymous10:54 PM

    Belief in auras is an integral part of the occult, particularly among New Age teachings, Wicca, or witchcraft, all of which are condemned in Scripture as abhorrent to God. The Bible strongly condemns spiritism, mediums, the occult, and psychics (Leviticus 20:27; Deuteronomy 18:10-13).

    ReplyDelete
  56. Anonymous3:47 PM

    KomЯadэ эЯikson's here for her weekly "psy vamp feed" again... yawn! Her New Agey views are no doubt 'tinged' by the blind babblings of her live-in co-fornicating "ex" satanist aka "Resident Seer". She needs to reject all her false and Babylonian beliefs quickly and stop following the dark path of her "Resident Seer", for if the blind shall follow the blind both shall fall into a ditch!

    ReplyDelete
  57. I think I’d mentioned before about The Red Pill movie. It’s on my list to make time to see. The director, Cassie Jaye, started the project as a documentary to expose the presumed ills of the men’s rights movement, prejudging it as inherently misogynistic, but ended up renouncing feminism as she continued in the project. She began to recognize that feminism is not about equal rights. (Modern feminism is actually misandrist—prejudiced against males.)

    The movie has received backlash from the feminist community. It’s been apparently dismissed out of hand in some quarters, with some movie houses banning it due to feminist outrage. As but one example, here’s an interview granted by an Australian “news” segment, in which the hosts make excuses for not having viewed the film. You can clearly see the frustration in Jaye as she attempts to promote the movie against these media hacks, though she does provide a fairly good overview despite them: Australia's 'Weekend Sunrise' has many opinions about a movie they haven't seen (The Red Pill)

    Jaye was in Australia because of the International Conference on Men’s Issues. Bearing, a fairly well-known Aussie vlogger, saw the above hatchet job of an interview, and made some comments on it, injecting typical Aussie humor (language warning, though). Note carefully how the interviewers frame their opening comments (Bearing missed this: But Cassie Jaye claims she was a feminist who changed her views on gender equality while making the film… NO, she reinforced her views on gender equality, recognizing that feminism is not about equality): Idiotic Aussie TV hosts Red Pill fail!

    Remember the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign about the Boko Haram kidnapping of the school girls? Did you know that the terrorist group first had killed all the boys in that same school by burning them alive? Didn’t know that? Me neither, until I viewed this excerpt from The Red Pill movie:

    La Pildora Roja (The Red Pill) - Best Scene - Subtitulado en Español

    If this doesn’t make you cry, you’re dead. Karen Staughan, men’s rights activist, says: What are we gonna do, start a campaign “Bring Back Our Boys”? Oh wait, they’re dead. Never mind...If those girls were boys, they wouldn’t be getting [an] education. They’d be dead!...They wouldn’t be sold into slavery with the hope of escape, they’d be dead.

    ReplyDelete
  58. Anonymous3:05 AM


    Apparently, St. Paul in Romans 8 sees Creation itself as a living being, who is yearning for redemption as much as humans yearn for redemption; nevertheless, Creation's redemption is related to our human redemption and as humans, who are called to be stewards of Creation, we should be concerned with it. To deny this is to deny part of Jesus' mission - which is the REDEMPTION OF CREATION... Jesus first redeems us and we are then called, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, to help Him to carry out this mission. To see all environmentalism or conservationalism as evil or part of the New Age movement is theologically and spiritually inaccurate and self-defeating. As say that both the New Age Movement, but also White Evangelical American Christianity are the philosophcial flip sides of each other and take the opposite interpretive extremes. It would be better to enter through the Narrow Gate.

    "For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.f And by him we cry, “Abba,g Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
    I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope thath the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
    ---- We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently."

    ReplyDelete
  59. Anonymous3:24 AM

    Your points about the New Age Movement
    1. Reduce the USA;
    2. End separation of Church & State (so as to promote New Age, New World Religion concepts)
    3. Earth reverence and worship her as "Mother Earth", "Pachamama" and/or "Goddess Gaia"

    Seem concomitant with the goal of the Kremlin, who is not only attacking the US's electoral system, but also the electoral systems of many western European democracies. They want to reduce the US, but also the western alliance and western democracy. BTW WESTERN EUROPE AND THE EU IS A DEMOCRACY.

    All in the name of Religious Freedom, Jeff Sessions, the now Attorney General has argued that he considered separation of Church and State to be unconstitutional. (Read carefully from this conservative source. http://www.businessinsider.de/ap-religious-freedom-could-top-sessions-civil-rights-priorities-2017-2?r=US&IR=T)

    What do we have here, a wolf in sheep's clothing? I think so. Sessions, but also many people whom I have read here, inordinate admiration and support of the Kremlin's autocracy has me extremely worried and it should you too. You seem to support precisely the things that will bring about that which you fear: dictatorship.

    "For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened. Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. Behold, I have told you before. Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not. For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be."

    ReplyDelete
  60. Susanna12:08 PM


    Presently at Drudge:


    Gunman opens fire at congressional baseball practice...
    MEMBER OF CONGRESS SHOT Majority Whip Steve Scalise....in stable condition.

    High-Powered Rifle; More than 50 shots fired...

    Kept unloading and reloading...
    VIDEO...
    SHOOTER DEAD...
    Belonged to Anti-GOP Groups...
    'It's Time To Destroy Trump & Co'...
    MADDOW SUPERFAN...
    Left-Wing TWITTER Celebrates...
    Capitol Police prevented massacre...
    Security tightened at White House...
    HILL ON EDGE...

    ReplyDelete
  61. Susanna12:10 PM

    The shooter was a Progressive Democrat/Bernie Sanders supporter

    Belleville suspect killed in congressional shootout belonged to anti-GOP groups

    http://www.bnd.com/news/local/article156065789.html

    ReplyDelete
  62. Great article here. i have gathered a lot of content here

    ReplyDelete
  63. A few paragraphs from my website's introductory article about my indigenous peoples' rights advocacy work and related New Age hippie counterculture mission are presented below.


    Over three decades ago, in 1983, I had a half hour long, one-on-one conversation with Reverend Matthew Fox. It occurred at the annual Tekakwitha Conference. During our "talk" I told Fox about my hippie counterculture mission. At the time, he made a very positive comment about it and then asked me to "stay in touch with him." At a later time, he gave his written support for my effort to change the name of the "Rum River."

    During our meeting, Fox told me that the Roman Catholic monk and priest Thomas Merton (1915–1968) had asked him to reach out to the hippies. Merton is internationally renowned for his world-unifying interfaith dialogue with Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi mystics. Leading Christian opponents of the New Age movement consider Pope Francis' promotion of Merton's "New Age spirituality" to be the greatest threat to Christianity. Jesuit Father John Hardon (1914-2000), who authored “The Catholic Catechism” at the request of Pope Paul VI said that Merton was “not fully converted intellectually to the Catholic Faith” and that "The New Age movement mainly owes its genesis and development to Thomas Merton.”

    Fox's "new kind of hippie spirituality," (or creation spirituality - a type of spirituality that originated long ago) was promoted by the excommunicated Roman Catholic Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) and later by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard de Chardin was a silenced Catholic who did not believe in "original sin," a Catholic dogma, and many today believe he is the Father of the New Age movement. Fox's, Merton's, Eckhart's and de Chardin's common spiritualities are spreading throughout the Christian Church and will, I believe, eventually usher in a new age wherein [humanity] will be united and liberated, and [the earth] will be set free from its current ecological crisis.

    My website is located at:http://www.towahkon.org/Tomssite.html

    On my site I have a link added to the above words "the greatest threat to Christianity." The link goes to an article by Ray Yungen, an article entitled Pope Francis and the Thomas Merton Connection. It is located at: https://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/blog/?p=18379

    ReplyDelete
  64. Helena Blavatsky (1831 – 1891) is revered by many as the Mother of the New Age Movement.

    Mahatma Gandhi said: "Theosophy is the teaching of Madame Blavatsky. It is Hinduism at its best." Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) was a Hindu who was widely revered as the father of Yoga in the West. When writing about Satan, who is known as maya in Hindu scriptures, he wrote: "Maya is Nature herself—the phenomenal worlds, ever in transitional flux as antithesis to Divine Immutability.

    So New Agers believe, Maya-Satan is Nature herself! Nature and evolution are evil. The "God" who created evolution or the "survival of the fittest" process is evil. Nature is brutal and cruel and it has been that way for three and a half billion years. When the first humans came forth on this miserable earth is was not a "very good" place to be living, as the "God" who inspired the Book of Genesis said. He said his creation was "very good", it was not. To say that the New Agers worship nature or the whole earth is the antithesis of the truth.

    ReplyDelete
  65. Thomas Dahlheimer,

    I’ve never heard this concept that Satan is coextensive with Maya. In fact, Blavatsky’s words contradict your assertion (All spelling, capitalization, and italics in original; bold added for emphasis):

    “…The reader must bear in mind that, according to our teaching which regards this phenomenal Universe as a great Illusion, the nearer a body is to the UNKNOWN SUBSTANCE, the more it approaches reality, as being removed the farther from this world of Maya… (Helena P. Blavatsky The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, Vol. 1 – Cosmogenesis [Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1999 {facsimile edition of 1888 original}], pp 145-146).

    “…When the spiritual entity breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvana. He exists in spirit, in nothing; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely annihilated, and thus will die no more, for spirit alone is no Maya, but the only REALITY in an illusionary universe of ever-passing forms”(p 290).

    Thus, Maya can be described as ‘non-reality’, or, in Blavatsky’s specific definition, “Illusion”.

    Can you provide a direct quote and citation where you’ve found “Maya-Satan”?

    ReplyDelete
  66. Anonymous2:18 AM

    More Pope news from a Catholic:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crRp5_eeQLQ

    ReplyDelete
  67. Craig;
    “…When the spiritual entity breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvana. He exists in spirit, in nothing; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely annihilated, and thus will die no more, for spirit alone is no Maya, but the only REALITY in an illusionary universe of ever-passing forms”(p 290).

    I'm wondering how ridiculous and non-sensical a concept has to be before some people emrace it. I mean, if a person really reads the quote above, and finds something logical about it, that person is building on a foundation of nothing, literally.
    If it were any less ridiculous they wouldn't like it so much.
    Do they believe that it must be true because it's absurd?
    "It makes no sense, and I can't understand it, so I think I'll live by it."
    It begs the question: Is "nothing" sacred?

    ReplyDelete
  68. Anonymous10:23 AM

    My thoughts as well, paul @ 9:33 AM.

    That "whateveritis" Dahlheimer posted is something a dog wouldn't eat or roll in.
    The absolute truth of the real God isn't for those who believe there should be no accountability, while they live on God's green earth.
    The malcontents and rebellious (who hate themselves and others vehemently) may think their feet can't be held to the fire, but they will.
    They will answer, as they really do have a conscience and God will expose them, but in pretense they somehow believe God can't and won't call them to task. It is as though they do their thinking and feeling with brains and hearts made of jello...no substance....all is a big "nothing".

    But God has ways.
    They will find out He can nail jello to a wall.

    ReplyDelete
  69. paul,

    It begs the question: Is "nothing" sacred? LOL!

    But, in fairness, this is consistent with the Gnostic/neo-gnostic New Age teachings that all matter is evil and all spirit is good/divine; and, having studied this Maya concept, it's used consistently--even if Blavatsky's words could have been more precise ("He exists AS spirit" rather than "in spirit", e.g.). I re-read some portions of Blavatsky's writings, though, finding that the demon speaking through her claimed that:

    [t]he "Parent Space" is the eternal, ever present cause of all--the incomprehensible DEITY...Space is the one eternal thing that we can most easily imagine, immovable abstraction and uninfluenced by either the presence or absence in it of an an objective Universe. (p 35).

    Thus, this demon (Koot Hoomi)--presented as having Divine knowledge--was too ignorant to know that space cannot be divorced from time, thereby putting Blavatsky's words at odds with science. The time of 'transmission', 1888, was pre-Einstein, of course. It's too bad that a man's work (Einstein) proved such an 'exalted' being (Koot Hoomi) wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  70. Above comment was Craig.

    ReplyDelete
  71. maya: The delusory power inherent in the structure of creation, by which the One appears as many. Maya is the principle of relativity, inversion, contrast, duality, oppositional states; the "Satan" (lit., in Hebrew, "the adversary") of the Old Testament prophets; and the "devil" whom Christ described picturesquely as a "murderer" and a "liar," because "there is no truth in him" (John 8:44). Paramahansa Yogananda wrote: "The Sanskrit word maya means 'the measurer'; it is the magical power in creation by which limitations and divisions are apparently present in the Immeasurable and Inseparable. Maya is Nature herself—the phenomenal worlds, ever in transitional flux as antithesis to Divine Immutability. "In God's plan and play (lila), the sole function of Satan or maya is to attempt to divert man from Spirit to matter, from Reality to unreality. 'The devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil' (I John 3:8). That is, the manifestation of Christ Consciousness, within man's own being, effortlessly destroys the illusions or 'works of the devil." -- Read more: https://yogananda.com.au/g/g_maya.html

    ReplyDelete
  72. Dahlheimer,

    Your attempts to cast the OT YHWH vs. the NT Father is fallacious, as you haphazardly select this or that Scripture. Your position is refuted by the fact that the OT calls YHWH "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" (Exodus 3:6, etc.) and the NT calls God the Father the same (Matthew 22:32, etc.).

    So what do you make of the Blavatsky/Koot Hoomi scientifically false statement that "Space" can be devoid of time?

    ReplyDelete
  73. Marko7:47 AM

    Environmentalists (especially Rachel Carson and her book "Silent Spring") were guilty of the deaths of millions, because of their direct involvement in the banning of DDT. Why do we focus on the monstrous killing sprees of a few individuals here and there in history while ignoring others?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHhtlu-F5VM

    ReplyDelete
  74. Thomas Dahlheimer,

    I completely missed a comment you made a while back, a comment that details your cosmological beliefs: (11:06 AM from "Will President Trump save Europe by it uniting against him?"):

    The unqualified Absolute, or Jesus' loving "Father in Heaven," partially emanated a part of "Himself" from out of the center of "His" Beingness," it was a pure Spiritual Universe that "He" emanated. It was a manifestation of "His" Divine Son who has an intelligent consciousness and now (after being emanated) a free will.

    We are all Spirit/Divine un-created entities who are from an eternal un-created realm beyond time and space


    This is not what Blavatsky/Koot Hoomi—the ‘one’ on whom you claim to base your beliefs—states, as I’ve shown above. Continuing:

    beyond the cosmos, and we are in the Father and the Son, and we are essentially One Being. We were the Divine Son of God, the pure Spiritual Universe that God emanated. We, then, as the Divine Son of God, committed original sin. This caused the Big Bang creation of the physical universe that we now live in.

    When this occurred our awareness of who we are changed…


    Now wait Mr. Dahlheimer, you stated that it was Jehovah who created the ‘evil’ cosmos. Which is it? Continuing again:

    …We began to believe that we were separate individuals and not essentially One Being, who in the Father remained Divine, but in the Son had fallen from a realm of Divinity into a depraved state of existence.

    We had become, in part, Jehovah, the creator of the physical universe, the creator of evil matter. The physical universe is a corruption of the pure Spiritual Universe that God emanated. The physical universe is the creator…


    This is inherently contradictory, internally incoherent. Are you saying original sin = Jehovah? How can an action (original sin as a result of having free will) be congruent with a personal being (Jehovah)? How did this Jehovah come about? And how can Jehovah be creator of the physical universe, while, simultaneously, the physical universe is the creator?

    …Therefore, Mother Earth is also the creator, as is also Nature itself, and it is not good and it has never been good, and it is Jehovah's lie that it was "very good," before the first humans ("Adam and Eve") sinned.…

    So, the long and the short of it is that Jehovah/Satan/Maya/Nature made him/her/itself. What nonsense.

    ReplyDelete
  75. Anonymous12:15 PM

    Well, Dullheimer's here once more with his Daffy Duck style nonsensical splutterings ... once again easily and swiftly refuted by Craig and others.

    Tune in tomorrow for more heresies and New Age arrogance on the Chritine Erikson show and watch them get refuted as per usual.

    Till then, th... th... that's all folks!

    ReplyDelete
  76. Dahlheimer
    Calling the Creator of the universe a liar, is the ultimate foolishness.

    ReplyDelete
  77. Anonymous6:35 AM

    Paul @ 6:24 AM, which is why Dullheimer is an appropriate nom de plume ... for the rejection of trusting in God's truth is unwise indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  78. 6:24
    Yes. Rejecting God'struth is unwise, but to call God a liar; that goes way over the line.
    Plus, I'm trying to imagine why any god, even the false ones, would need to or want to lie.
    Not much of a god.
    Was he scared of something? Was he trying to get out of some kind of trouble? Or was it just
    for fun?

    ReplyDelete
  79. _whoops, meant to start

    6:35

    ReplyDelete
  80. Anonymous5:32 PM

    Indeed, Paul! Such false accusing the true God of the Holy Bible, Yahweh (Jehovah), is what Satan, himself lying ("ye shall not surely die"), first told Eve in the Garden, which was done so as to deceive and destroy.

    In many of the false religions, including that of Dullheimer, their 'god' attempts to denigrate the true Living God of the Holy Bible. Yet look at the alternative names of such false 'gods' (e.g., Islam's Allah is known as the Great Deceiver, Hinduism's Shiva is known as the Destroyer) and it is easy to see they are nothing more than masks of the false god of this World, Satan!

    Dahlheimer is deluded and deceived yet he is out to deceive others if he can, yet here he has proved himself time and again unable and unwilling to defend his nonsense despite having been soundly refuted over and again here. He is a liar just like the father of lies, the Devil, who is his spiritual father because Dahlheimer obeys the Devil and does the things he does!

    Yes, delusion is a mark of those given over to the Devil as we see with MCE aka Jesuitina, who has so far refused to retract her nonsense about Ecclesiastes 12 referring to chakras or her false assertions that 19th Century evangelists took the Gospel to supposed extra terrestrials, or her lauding of her lover as her "Resident Seer", claiming his 'talents' are inherited, yet such occult clairvoyance is of the Devil himself, and if Mr Tinge did not 'acquire' such evil deception through being demonically possessed due to dabbling and, as MCE admits, past Satan worship then such 'talents' if "inherited" are no doubt the result of a generational curse! Whenever challenged, rather than show humility in having been found out, she would rather insult and cuss in her arrogance and deluded hubris.

    It's hard to place a page between Dahlheimer and Erikson as they both appear to be cut from the same Babylonian cloth.

    ReplyDelete
  81. paul

    no "synthesizing" you mean SYNCRETIZING unless Physicist is because he believes atoms exist and a
    pagan started that Deut. prohibition not mention auras issue is theology and morals evil spirits and
    psychic enslavement which incl. warping energy system. psylocybin won't affect you that is just a
    witch's belief, right? I have given links to minimal support tech. studies of this.

    Physicist

    yes I can unilaterally stop a subject its called I refuse to discuss this with people who don't know what
    they are talking about. except:

    paul,

    aura isn't after image if takes effort or enhancing it to see. you are too shallow, like when you dismissed flat out possession by my biological so called mother as mere manipulation that all parents supposedly
    do. being mix matter and spirit doesn't prevent telepathy just lessen it.

    Craig,

    "Christine, here you state the Lamb’s death was a settled issue before creation, [later states] was slain from the foundation of the world. So, your position has changed. "

    that is two ways of saying the same thing. before creation was TIMELESS eternity the foundation
    was in God's mind before spoken into existence and somewhere in all that the agreement for the Lamb
    to be slain was done.

    "...first argue against... grammatical ambiguity, then ... implicitly concede that it is grammatically ambiguous?"

    I repeatedly said the ambiguity was an illusion (you invented in English) in Greek ditto because
    NT is NOT PROPER OR CLASSICAL GREEK but koine a lower class dialect (like ebonics) different rules.

    Byzantine text has to be original type because originals written in Byzantine turf! per Pickering.

    http://biblehub.com/interlinear/revelation/13-8.htm Greek "the Book of Life of The Lamb HAVING
    BEEN SLAIN from the founding of the world." (KJV/NKJV Byzantine.) "having been slain" points to "the
    founding of the world" sounds ongoing from past.

    NIV repeat Lamb to simplify because obviously The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.
    Alexandrian meant this but it is clearer in the Byz. text type. Consistent with Acts 2:23 states: “… Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God," points to Lamb being slain from the founding of the cosmos.

    "... your very last question" you say answered but you have NOT answered YES OR NO do you
    admit the Lamb's death was decreed from the founding/before creation?

    "....either...the Lamb (Jesus) was slain from the very beginning, or...the book of life
    belonging to the Lamb was there from the very beginning, this book of life requiring the Life-Giver,
    Christ. Either way amounts to the same thing."

    Not the same. the Book depends on the Lamb being slain so the latter is from foundation of cosmos.
    you obviously prefer the book from then.

    " No back-up plan; it was there from the beginning…. "

    THAT IS THE ESSENCE OF A BACKUP PLAN, WHICH BY DEFINITION IS DEVELOPED BEFORE STARTING
    SOMETHING. the backup plan was there from the beginning. No backup plan? the Fall was then an
    unexpected oops followed by a scramble to find a solution.

    ReplyDelete
  82. Christine,

    As I stated just above, your very first words on this subject were: Not grammar ambiguity…. You can, until you are blue in the face, restate that you did not claim this, but the evidence by your own very explicit words illustrates that did initially claim counter my position, then subsequently change to agreeing with my position based on your assertion that this ambiguity is (1) due to John’s poor writing, and (2) being Koine Greek. Of course, all the NT is Koine…

    Now you change your position even further to claim this is something I invented [Your statement: I repeatedly said the ambiguity was an illusion (you invented in English)] . Well, anyone can consult the various translations to see the differences—the differences I detailed in my very first comment.

    You wrote: … but you have NOT answered YES OR NO do you admit the Lamb's death was decreed from the founding/before creation? Aaaah, here you’ve reframed your stance. “Decreed” is much different than actually being slain.

    You wrote: the Book depends on the Lamb being slain so the latter is from foundation of cosmos. NOW you’re getting warmer! The implication in the last paragraph of my very first comment was just that, with my words: …this book of life requiring the Life-Giver, Christ. Either way amounts to the same thing. No back-up plan; it was there from the beginning.

    And now you even bring forth a new, and totally unrelated, position: Byzantine text has to be original type because originals written in Byzantine turf! Let me make this abundantly clear: THIS IS NOT A TEXT-CRITICAL ISSUE (Byzantine vs. Alexandrian text), THIS IS A TRANSLATION ISSUE!

    It’s time for you to, as per the KJV, ‘give up the ghost’ on this issue.

    ReplyDelete
  83. Anonymous9:51 AM

    It is time for her to quit this blog entirely, that's what time it is.
    Unilaterally stop herself from her compulsive and irrational, obsessive, need to manhandle and manipulate every subject she engages. Not just wrong, weird, beyond weird...
    Especially when speaking of biblical topics. Starts each time on the wrong biblical foot and isn't nearly finished yet. Straining at gnats, she has swallowed all the camels of Morocco by now.


    Get some professional help, lady.

    If she knows the Lord Jesus Christ and is indwelt by Him, she would have accompanying peace and take a rest from constant disputing, and she wouldn't get away with behaving arrogantly. She would self-check to prevent damage to the truth first off, and secondly, to others also.
    She would concede, and agree to disagree if need be, but No.
    Instead she proves she doesn't know Him, is indwelt by a deceitful, self-righteous spirit. Exactly what she (still) accuses her mother of! We haven't seen her mother's behavior on display here, but we have sure been witness to Mary Christine Erikson's ugly behavior here.
    She has more twists with words than a snake, and does the devil's bidding.

    ReplyDelete
  84. Anonymous11:49 AM

    Yes, parent hating MCE is an out and out New Ager with a seared conscience. She's still shacked up out of wedlock with an unrepentant "ex" Satanist, upon whom, when not putting up an "ad" for him, she heaps praise for his "inherited" 'talents' as her "Resident Seer" (her capitals, not mine)!

    As recently as TODAY she has continued her lies about chakras being real. Want proof? Check out the link below and you'll see her out to deceive young Christians if possible and prevent New Agers from coming to the truth and repenting, where her usual deceptions about the supposed 'benefits' of using witchcraft and lies to purportedly fight the New Age movement are put forth.

    In her latest claims she states she is merely "correcting an error" of Ray Yungen, and reasserts her claims Ecclesiastes 12 refers to chakras...

    http://politicallyunclassifiable.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/ray-yungen-questions-on-new-age-part-5.html?m=1#comment-form

    Her poor mother must have been an absolute saint... no doubt her hateful and rebellious daughter, MCE, pushed her poor mum to an early grave!

    ReplyDelete
  85. Christine,

    To stave off more of the same line of argumentation from you, I’m going to quote your very first statement in full (bold added):

    not grammar ambiguity, but that the atoning death of the Lamb was decided on before creation began, THAT was the backup plan if sin occurred, so the Crucifixion was settled on before creation, which made it as good as having happened.

    I state this because of your assertion just above: Not the same. the Book depends on the Lamb being slain so the latter is from foundation of cosmos. you obviously prefer the book from then.

    In your very first comment to me you state the Crucifixion was settled on before creation, which made it as good as having happened, which is exactly the point I strongly imply in the last paragraph of my initial comment, and quoted again above regarding the end result of either translation “amount[ing] to the same thing”. So, initially, though you didn’t fully understand my implication, you agreed with the point I was making, and now you are disagreeing with your own initial comment! You are now, in essence, arguing against yourself!

    ReplyDelete
  86. Anonymous6:53 PM

    @ Craig 1:55 PM: checkmate!

    Little Miss Know-it-all-Erikson Aka Miss Nigh-on-knows-nothing-Erikson is not only refuted by your excellent and succinct post but also exposed for what a divisive and double minded character she really is: even against herself!

    She is the epitome of what a double minded person unstable in all her ways is.

    ReplyDelete
  87. Christine,
    I said synthesis and I meant synthesis, as in; thesis + antithesis= synthesis
    You mix the Gospel of Jesus Christ with all manner of Hinduism and witchcraft and
    superstition.
    Your need to correct me is indicative of your indomitable hubris and your continual
    sense that everyone else is less intelligent than you. I don't care anymore that you have a
    nice little diagnosis ( Anspergers ). The fact is that you're obnoxious.


    Good bye.

    ReplyDelete
  88. "Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 3-7, 2017, found that a 'leftward movement in perceptions of what is morally acceptable has been ongoing,' with a shift in 13 of 19 issues over time (since 2001). In another section of the same poll, Gallup found that just 24 percent believe the Bible is the literal word of God—the lowest in Gallup’s 40 years of asking Americans about their biblical beliefs."

    This poll presents evidence that indicates that most Americans have accepted the truth, that Bible scriptures do not always tell the truth, and to believe otherwise is to be deceived, and maybe even dangerously insane. I am referring to the Christians who are scientific truth deniers.]

    “The precipitous decline in traditional Judeo-Christian morality on these social issues is directly related to the decline in belief in the Bible’s moral authority,” Evangelical leader Dr. Richard Land said. “Besides the shift left in these crucial social issues, the decrease in the belief in the Bible as the literal, authoritative Word of God is even more alarming. It says something alarming about our culture, when for the first time in 40 years, biblical skepticism has surpassed biblical literalism."

    ReplyDelete
  89. Anonymous10:02 AM

    @ 8:43 AM

    God is sifting the wheat from the chaff.
    This is necessary for the entire world and you'll see how productive His winnowing will be.
    And He isn't on your timetable or mine. The law of the harvest goes on till it's finish.

    If anyone wants to be chaff, chaff they will be.
    And can't say they were not warned of what becomes of them.
    Not one kernel of God's wheat will fall to the ground. The God of the Bible is God the LORD, the maker of heaven and earth is Lord of the Harvest.

    In the grand scheme of things people really do end up getting what they ask for.
    Be careful what you ask for Mr Dahlheimer, you are sure to get it.

    ReplyDelete
  90. Anonymous10:24 AM

    I have a relative with Asperger Syndrome. He improved greatly when he came to Christ. Everybody can see the change that has been taking much time, but he is still on that path to living with those behaviors in the background, not out in front of his life, years after his diagnosis. He is still prone to some of the behaviors, some have really lessened, but he is in control of himself much more than before. It keeps him humble and in need of God's grace to live beyond it. Nobody lives well, lives rightly related to God and their fellowman, that lives proudly. The proud are left to themselves, one way or another, to find their pit to fall in, and can't get out it.

    ReplyDelete
  91. Anonymous12:01 PM


    The Gospel has no need of human intellect or helps in any form of added mixtures to be relevant.
    It's power is seen in the changed hearts and lives of people, who were once born and given to be rebellious against God's rule to frailly, futily, believe that they have right to rule instead of Him. The ability and fallibility to fall short of the glory of God. All sold under sin and demanding to be "i", "me", "myself". Proof that it is magnificent power for the Gospel of Jesus to overcome and overthrow, that. Religion is full to the gills of pious "i". The New Age is not in the least ashamed of "i". Each and every little baby born is that total package and picture spelled out for us, and how we should know ourselves to be if honest, if there is anything humble about us in the slightest, helpless to be anything but, even grow up and still be anything but...But God....so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him, shall not perish, but have everlasting life.

    MCE seems only charmed by the Gospel, not changed.
    If she was truly changed by it, not vaunted in her mind to think she has out thunk it, or can in any way surpass it, she would not seek ways to add or take from it, to interject her very own individual demanding, fist shaking, "i".

    ReplyDelete
  92. Susanna3:52 PM

    The following excellent article which takes us back more specifically to the topic of this thread is by Cliff Kincaid.

    Why the Russians Conceived the Global Warming Scam
    by Cliff Kincaid on June 20, 2017

    http://www.aim.org/aim-column/why-the-russians-conceived-the-global-warming-scam/?utm_source=AIM+-+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Email%20Jun-20-2017&utm_medium=email

    ReplyDelete
  93. Anonymous5:08 PM

    I too have known people with Asperger's syndrome yet Christine comes across far more as someone with narcissistic personality disorder.

    Moreover, the content of her posts and aggressive attitude towards others have shown she has refused to come to Jesus Christ, at least on His terms. She continues to live in a way far from God's Holy edicts and actively promotes aspects of the occult and Hinduism (as Paul has rightly pointed out) even if it means twisting and tweaking Holy Scripture, science, you name it. As long as she can promote false religion and demonology all under the pretence of exposing the New Age movement, and incredulously trying to dress it all up in the garb of Eastern Orthodoxy, there's no stopping her pride.

    If Christine's strange brew isn't what this blog sets out to expose then it beggars belief indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  94. Anonymous5:22 PM

    Putin Now Denies Humans Cause Climate Change.

    by Andy Rowell

    These are dangerous days for the climate. Not only do we have a climate denier in the White House, we have one in the Kremlin, too.

    At the end of last week, while visiting the Arctic, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that global warming was not caused by humans: "The warming, it had already started by the 1930s," he said. "That's when there were no such anthropological factors such as emissions, and the warming had already started." ...

    https://www.ecowatch.com/putin-climate-change-arctic-2342441915.html

    ReplyDelete
  95. Susanna7:16 PM

    The following link was included in the aforementioned article by Cliff Kincaid:


    GREEN CROSS: Gorbachev and Global Enviro-Communism
    http://americasurvival.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Global-Enviro-Communism.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  96. Susanna7:31 PM

    Also referred to in Cliff Kincaid's article:

    The Marxist Roots of the Global Warming Scare

    The late Natalie Grant Wraga once wrote, "Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values."

    And who was this person?

    Natalie Grant Wraga (who died in 2002 at age 101) was an internationally-recognized expert on the art of disinformation. In her Washington Post obituary, Herbert Romerstein — veteran intelligence expert in the legislative and executive branches of government — described Grant/Wraga as "one of our leading authorities" on Soviet deceit.

    In a 1998 article appearing in Investors Business Daily (IBD), reporter John Berlau wrote that some of the most respected scholars on Soviet Intelligence have credited this woman with teaching them how to penetrate desinformatzia, Moscow’s term for its ongoing operation to deceive foreign governments
    .....read more.....

    http://americasurvival.org/2017/06/the-marxist-roots-of-the-global-warming-scare.html#axzz4jd0XwejH
    ___________________________________

    Note: The late Herbert Romerstein was an American government employee, historian, and writer who specialized in Anti-communism and is best known for his book The Venona Secrets, written with Eric Breindel. I have this book in my personal library.

    The Venona Project was

    a counterintelligence program initiated by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (later the National Security Agency) that ran for nearly four decades, spanning 1943 to 1980. The purpose of the Venona project was the decryption of messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union, e.g. the NKVD, the KGB (First Chief Directorate) and the GRU (military intelligence). During the 37-year duration of the Venona project, the Signal Intelligence Service obtained approximately 3,000 Soviet messages (only some of which were ever decrypted); the Signal-Intelligence yield included discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the UK and Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project in the U.S. The Venona project remained secret for more than 15 years after it concluded, and some of the decoded Soviet messages were not declassified and published until 1995...read more...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
    ____________________________________________________

    ReplyDelete
  97. Susanna7:36 PM

    P.S. In some of the aforementioned articles, a great deal is written about the influence of Maurice Strong who described himself as "a socialist in ideology and a capitalist in methodology!"

    ReplyDelete
  98. Anonymous6:23 AM

    The American Spectator
    Special Report
    The Pope’s Marxist Head of the Jesuits
    GEORGE NEUMAYR May 19, 2017

    Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, a Venezuelan Communist and Modernist, is carrying out Francis’s agenda.

    Understanding the adage that personnel is policy, Pope Francis has been planting Marxists throughout the Church, including at the top of the troubled religious order to which he belongs. In 2016, the Jesuits, with the blessing of Pope Francis, installed as its general superior a Venezuelan, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, whose communist convictions have long been known.

    Sosa has written about the “Marxist mediation of the Christian Faith,” arguing that the Church should “understand the existence of Christians who simultaneously call themselves Marxists and commit themselves to the transformation of the capitalist society into a socialist society.” In 1989, he signed a letter praising Fidel Castro.

    Turn down any corridor in Francis’s Vatican, and you are likely to run into a de facto communist: Francis has a communist running his order, a communist running his Council of Cardinals (the Honduran cardinal, Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga), a communist running the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (Margaret Archer, a British sociologist who has said that she represents the “Marxian left”), and communists such as the renegade Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and the Canadian socialist Naomi Klein drafting his encyclicals.

    It is no coincidence that the only U.S. presidential candidate who made a visit to the Vatican during the campaign was a socialist who had honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Bernie Sanders turned up at the Vatican in April 2016, having received an invitation from Pope Francis’s close Argentine friend, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo.

    “We invited the candidate who cites the pope most in the campaign, and that is Senator Bernie Sanders,” explained Sorondo, who added that Sanders’s agenda is “very analogous to that of the pope.”

    In this smug leftist atmosphere in Rome, Sosa’s elevation to the head of the Jesuits was inevitable. In the past, the Jesuits had been called the pope’s marines. Under Sosa, they are more like the pope’s Marxists, peddling his climate-change propaganda as a pretext for global socialism...

    ReplyDelete
  99. Anonymous6:24 AM

    ... But Sosa’s ambitions, like Pope Francis’s, go well beyond meddling in economies. He is also pushing a moral revolution in the Church, evident in his astonishing claim that, since none of the Apostles tape-recorded Jesus Christ, his words on adultery can be elastically re-interpreted.

    “You need to start by reflecting on what exactly Jesus said,” Sosa told an Italian interviewer in February. “At that time, no one had a tape recorder to capture the words. What we know is that the words of Jesus have to be contextualized, they’re expressed in a certain language, in a precise environment, and they’re addressed to someone specific.”

    In other words, Sosa is confident that he understands Jesus’s meaning better than the Gospel writers. Like Francis, Sosa can’t resist the mumbo-jumbo of Modernist biblical scholarship, which always manages to dovetail conveniently with liberal views.

    The Council of Trent explicitly condemned the claim that the Gospel writers were just making stuff up when recounting the words of Jesus Christ. But Sosa has no problem trafficking in that heresy.

    “Over the last century in the Church there has been a great blossoming of studies that seek to understand exactly what Jesus meant to say,” he said.

    The presumption here is extraordinary but typical of a Francis acolyte. The new orthodoxy is heterodoxy, and Sosa is wallowing in it. He is given to little sermonettes on relativism, such as this whopper:

    The Church has developed over the centuries, it is not a piece of reinforced concrete. It was born, it has learned, it has changed. This is why the ecumenical councils are held, to try to bring developments of doctrine into focus. Doctrine is a word that I don’t like very much, it brings with it the image of the hardness of stone. Instead the human reality is much more nuanced, it is never black or white, it is in continual development.
    Were St. Ignatius of Loyola alive today, the order he founded wouldn’t ordain him, and he would have wondered how a de facto Protestant ended up on the chair of St. Peter. Nor would St. Ignatius have believed the sheer sophistry that now passes for theological “sophistication” in his order.

    Fr. Antonio Spadaro, another Jesuit close to Pope Francis, tweeted out earlier this year this profundity: “Theology is not #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people.”

    Gobsmacked by the relentless leftism of Francis and his aides, Al Gore asked in 2015, “Is the pope Catholic?” The question is no longer a joke.

    George Neumayr is the author of The Political Pope.

    https://spectator.org/the-popes-marxist-head-of-the-jesuits/

    ReplyDelete
  100. Anonymous7:31 AM

    " Fr. Antonio Spadaro, another Jesuit close to Pope Francis, tweeted out earlier this year this profundity: “Theology is not #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people.” "

    Spadaro's assertions are reminiscent of Part 3 Ch.2 in Orwell's 1984, where O'Brien of the Inner Party is torturing Winston:

    ‘Do you remember,’ he [O'Brien] went on, ‘writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Winston.
    O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
    ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
    ‘Four.’
    ‘And if the party says that it is not four but five — then how many?’
    ‘Four.’
    The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five... O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
    ‘How many fingers, Winston?’
    ‘Four.’
    The needle went up to sixty.
    ‘How many fingers, Winston?’
    ‘Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!’
    ...The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
    ‘How many fingers, Winston?’
    ‘Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!’
    ‘How many fingers, Winston?’
    ‘Five! Five! Five!’
    ‘No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?’
    ‘Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!’
    Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders... For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside..., and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.
    ‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
    ‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
    ‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’...
    ‘Again,’ said O’Brien.
    The pain flowed into Winston’s body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over...The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O’Brien had drawn back the lever.
    ‘How many fingers, Winston?’
    ‘Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.’
    ‘Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?’
    ‘Really to see them.’...

    ReplyDelete
  101. Anonymous7:33 AM

    ‘Again,’ said O’Brien.
    Perhaps the needle was eighty — ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.
    ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
    ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six — in all honesty I don’t know.’
    ‘Better,’ said O’Brien.
    ...
    ‘Do you know where you are, Winston?’ he said.
    ‘I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.’
    ‘Do you know how long you have been here?’
    ‘I don’t know. Days, weeks, months — I think it is months.’
    ‘And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’
    ‘To make them confess.’
    ‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’
    ‘To punish them.’
    ‘No!’ exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. ‘No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?’... O’Brien turned away. He took a pace or two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently:
    ‘The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called... We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.’...
    ‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference — in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first?...

    ReplyDelete
  102. Anonymous7:33 AM

    ...That is what you were thinking, was it not?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Winston.
    O’Brien smiled slightly. ‘You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it.... But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of the totalitarians was “Thou shalt”. Our command is “THOU ART”. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean... His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O’Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O’Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind CONTAINED Winston’s mind. But in that case how could it be true that O’Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad.
    ‘Three thousand,’ he said, speaking over Winston’s head to the man in the white coat.
    Two soft pads... clamped themselves against Winston’s temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O’Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.
    ‘This time it will not hurt,’ he said. ‘Keep your eyes fixed on mine.’
    At this moment there was an explosion ...a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. ... A terrific painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.
    ‘It will not last,’ said O’Brien. ...
    ‘Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?’
    ‘Yes.’
    O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
    ‘There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?’
    ‘Yes.’
    And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment — he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps — of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed.

    https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter3.2.html

    ReplyDelete
  103. Anonymous7:48 AM

    http://catholicclimatemovement.global/statements-on-climate-change-from-the-popes/

    Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis accepted the reality of human-caused climate change and recognized it as a moral issue. The following are some of their most relevant quotes.

    Saint John Paul II:

    Message for the World day of Peace, “Peace with God the Creator, Peace with all of creation” (1990):
    “In our day, there is a growing awareness that world peace is threatened not only by the arms race, regional conflicts and continued injustices among peoples and nations, but also by a lack of due respect for nature, by the plundering of natural resources and by a progressive decline in the quality of life. (…) Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past. (…) The gradual depletion of the ozone layer and the related “greenhouse effect”has now reached crisis proportions as a consequence of industrial growth, massive urban concentrations and vastly increased energy needs. Industrial waste, the burning of fossil fuels, unrestricted deforestation, the use of certain types of herbicides, coolants and propellants: all of these are known to harm the atmosphere and environment. The resulting meteorological and atmospheric changes range from damage to health to the possible future submersion of low-lying lands. (…) The ecological crisis reveals the urgent moral need for a new solidarity, especially in relations between the developing nations and those that are highly industrialized. (…) When the ecological crisis is set within the broader context of the search for peace within society, we can understand better the importance of giving attention to what the earth and its atmosphere are telling us: namely, that there is an order in the universe which must be respected, and that the human person, endowed with the capability of choosing freely, has a grave responsibility to preserve this order for the well-being of future generations. I wish to repeat that the ecological crisis is a moral issue. (…) At the conclusion of this Message, I should like to address directly my brothers and sisters in the Catholic Church, in order to remind them of their serious obligation to care for all of creation.”...

    ReplyDelete
  104. Anonymous7:48 AM

    ...Message for the World day of Peace, “Respect for human rights: the secret of true peace” (1999):
    “The promotion of human dignity is linked to the right to a healthy environment, since this right highlights the dynamics of the relationship between the individual and society. A body of international, regional and national norms on the environment is gradually giving juridic form to this right. But juridic measures by themselves are not sufficient. The danger of serious damage to land and sea, and to the climate, flora and fauna, calls for a profound change in modern civilization’s typical consumer lifestyle, particularly in the richer countries. (…) The world’s present and future depend on the safeguarding of creation, because of the endless interdependence between human beings and their environment. Placing human well-being at the centre of concern for the environment is actually the surest way of safeguarding creation; this in fact stimulates the responsibility of the individual with regard to natural resources and their judicious use.”
    General Audience, 17 January 2001:
    “Unfortunately, if we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations. Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters, disfigured the earth’s habitat, made the air unbreathable, disturbed the hydrogeological and atmospheric systems, turned luxuriant areas into deserts and undertaken forms of unrestrained industrialization, degrading that “flowerbed” – to use an image from Dante Alighieri (Paradiso, XXII, 151) – which is the earth, our dwelling-place. We must therefore encourage and support the “ecological conversion” which in recent decades has made humanity more sensitive to the catastrophe to which it has been heading. Man is no longer the Creator’s “steward”, but an autonomous despot, who is finally beginning to understand that he must stop at the edge of the abyss.“

    Further environmental teachings from JPII can be found here:

    http://conservation.catholic.org/pope_john_paul_ii.htm

    ReplyDelete
  105. Anonymous7:55 AM

    http://catholicclimatemovement.global/statements-on-climate-change-from-the-popes/

    Pope Benedict XVI: World Day of Peace Message, “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation” (2010): “Respect for creation is of immense consequence, not least because “creation is the beginning and the foundation of all God’s works”, and its preservation has now become essential for the pacific coexistence of mankind. (…) Can we remain indifferent before the problems associated with such realities as climate change, desertification, the deterioration and loss of productivity in vast agricultural areas, the pollution of rivers and aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the increase of natural catastrophes and the deforestation of equatorial and tropical regions? Can we disregard the growing phenomenon of “environmental refugees”, people who are forced by the degradation of their natural habitat to forsake it – and often their possessions as well – in order to face the dangers and uncertainties of forced displacement? (…) A greater sense of intergenerational solidarity is urgently needed. Future generations cannot be saddled with the cost of our use of common environmental resources. (…) The Church has a responsibility towards creation, and she considers it her duty to exercise that responsibility in public life, in order to protect earth, water and air as gifts of God the Creator meant for everyone, and above all to save mankind from the danger of self-destruction.”...

    ReplyDelete
  106. Anonymous7:56 AM

    Benedict XVI
    Papal Encyclical Caritas in Veritate (2009): “The environment is God’s gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations and towards humanity as a whole. (…) There is a pressing moral need for renewed solidarity, especially in relationships between developing countries and those that are highly industrialized. The technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption, either through an evolution in manufacturing methods or through greater ecological sensitivity among their citizens. It should be added that at present it is possible to achieve improved energy efficiency while at the same time encouraging research into alternative forms of energy. (…) It is likewise incumbent upon the competent authorities to make every effort to ensure that the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations: the protection of the environment, of resources and of the climate obliges all international leaders to act jointly and to show a readiness to work in good faith, respecting the law and promoting solidarity with the weakest regions of the planet. (…) The way humanity treats the environment influences the way it treats itself, and vice versa. This invites contemporary society to a serious review of its life-style, which, in many parts of the world, is prone to hedonism and consumerism, regardless of their harmful consequences. (…) The Church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere. In so doing, she must defend not only earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone. She must above all protect mankind from self-destruction. There is need for what might be called a human ecology, correctly understood. The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence: when “human ecology” is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits.” ...

    ReplyDelete
  107. Anonymous8:00 AM

    Benedict XVI
    Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and the Signs Of The Times, pp. 42-9 (2010): “In view of the threatening [climate] catastrophe, there is the recognition everywhere that we must make moral decisions. There is also a more or less a pronounced awareness of a global responsibility for it; that ethics must no longer refer merely to one’s own group or one’s own nation, but rather must keep the earth and all people in view. The question is therefore: How can the great moral will, which everybody affirms and everyone invokes, become a personal decision? For unless that happens, politics remains impotent. Who, therefore can ensure that this general awareness also penetrates the personal sphere? This can be done only by an authority that touches the conscience, that is close to the individual and does not merely call for eye-catching events. In that respect this is a challenge for the Church. She not only has a major responsibility; she is, I would say, often the only hope. For she is so close to peoples consciences that she can move them to particular acts of self-denial and can inculcate basic attitudes in souls.” Address to the Members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See (2012): “We cannot disregard the grave natural calamities which in 2011 affected various regions of South-East Asia, or ecological disasters like that of the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Environmental protection and the connection between fighting poverty and fighting climate change are important areas for the promotion of integral human development.” Angelus- November 27, 2011: “The Convention of the United Nations Organization on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol will begin tomorrow in Durban, South Africa. I hope that all the members of the international community will agree on a responsible, credible and supportive response to this worrying and complex phenomenon, taking into account the needs of the poorest populations and of the generations to come.” Address to students, November 2011: “If, in fact, man forgets in his work that he is a collaborator of God, he can do violence to creation and cause untold damage that always has negative consequences, also on human beings, as we have unfortunately seen on various occasions. Today, more than ever, it appears clear to us that respect for the environment cannot fail to recognize the value and inviolability of the human person in every phase of life and in every condition. Respect for the human being and respect for nature are one and the same, but they will both be able to develop and to reach their full dimension if we respect the Creator and his creature in the human being and in nature.”...

    ReplyDelete
  108. Anonymous8:01 AM

    Benedict XVI

    Address to the Members of the Diplomatic Corps for the Traditional Exchange of New Year’s Greetings (2010) “The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates creation. It follows that the protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, in as much as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and which comes from God. For this reason I share the growing concern caused by economic and political resistance to combatting the degradation of the environment. This problem was evident even recently, during the XV Session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December last. I trust that in the course of this year, first in Bonn and later in Mexico City, it will be possible to reach an agreement for effectively dealing with this question. The issue is all the more important in that the very future of some nations is at stake, particularly some island states.” Message to Summit on Climate Change (2009): “The Earth is indeed a precious gift of the Creator who, in designing its intrinsic order, has given us guidelines that assist us as stewards of his creation. Precisely from within this framework, the Church considers that matters concerning the environment and its protection are intimately linked with integral human development. (…) How important it is then, that the international community and individual governments send the right signals to their citizens and succeed in countering harmful ways of treating the environment! The economic and social costs of using up shared resources must be recognized with transparency and borne by those who incur them, and not by other peoples or future generations. The protection of the environment, and the safeguarding of resources and of the climate, oblige al leaders to act jointly, respecting the law and promoting solidarity with the weakest regions of the world.” Letter of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople on the Occasion of the Seventh Symposium of the Religion, Science and the Environment Movement: ”Preservation of the environment, promotion of sustainable development and particular attention to climate change are matters of grave concern for the entire human family. No nation or business sector can ignore the ethical implications present in all economic and social development. With increasing clarity scientific research demonstrates that the impact of human actions in any one place or region can have worldwide effects. The consequences of disregard for the environment cannot be limited to an immediate area or populus because they always harm human coexistence, and thus betray human dignity and violate the rights of citizens who desire to live in a safe environment.”

    ReplyDelete
  109. Anonymous8:06 AM

    http://catholicclimatemovement.global/statements-on-climate-change-from-the-popes/

    Pope Francis:
    Speech at Santo Tomas University, Manila (2015): “A second key area where you are called to make a contribution is in showing concern for the environment. This is not only because this country, more than many others, is likely to be seriously affected by climate change. You are called to care for creation not only as responsible citizens, but also as followers of Christ!” Address to the Members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See (2015): “The drafting of a new Climate Change Agreement … is urgently needed.” Address to Popular Movements (2014): “An economic system centered on the god of money also needs to plunder nature, to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it. Climate change, the loss of bio-diversity, deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness, and you are the ones who suffer most, the humble, those who live near coasts in precarious dwellings or who are so vulnerable economically that, in face of a natural disaster, lose everything.” Message to UN Convention on Climate Change (2014): “The effective struggle against global warming will only be possible with a responsible collective answer, that goes beyond particular interests and behavior and is developed free of political and economic pressures … On climate change, there is a clear, definitive and ineluctable ethical imperative to act … The establishment of an international climate change treaty is a grave ethical and moral responsibility.” Audience (2014): “Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude.”...

    ReplyDelete
  110. Anonymous8:08 AM

    ... Pope Francis:
    Statement to the Diplomatic Corps (2014): “I wish to mention another threat to peace, which arises from the greedy exploitation of environmental resources. Even if ‘nature is at our disposition’, all too often we do not ‘respect it or consider it a gracious gift which we must care for and set at the service of our brothers and sisters, including future generations’. Here too what is crucial is responsibility on the part of all in pursuing, in a spirit of fraternity, policies respectful of this earth which is our common home. I recall a popular saying: ‘God always forgives, we sometimes forgive, but when nature – creation – is mistreated, she never forgives!’. We have also witnessed the devastating effects of several recent natural disasters. In particular, I would mention once more the numerous victims and the great devastation caused in the Philippines and other countries of South-East Asia as a result of typhoon Haiyan.” Message For The Celebration Of The World Day Of Peace 2014 (2014): “The human family has received from the Creator a common gift: nature … Nature, in a word, is at our disposition and we are called to exercise a responsible stewardship over it. Yet so often we are driven by greed and by the arrogance of dominion, possession, manipulation and exploitation; we do not preserve nature; nor do we respect it or consider it a gracious gift which we must care for and set at the service of our brothers and sisters, including future generations.”...

    ReplyDelete
  111. Anonymous8:08 AM

    ... Pope Francis:
    Apostolic Exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, n. 216 (2013): “Small yet strong in the love of God, like Saint Francis of Assisi, all of us, as Christians, are called to watch over and protect the fragile world in which we live, and all its peoples.” Homily at the Solemnity of Saint Joseph (2013): “Let us protect Christ in our lives, so that we can protect others, so that we can protect creation! The vocation of being a “protector”, however, is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us [. . .] In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts! Whenever human beings fail to live up to this responsibility, whenever we fail to care for creation and for our brothers and sisters, the way is opened to destruction and hearts are hardened … Please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of goodwill: let us be “protectors” of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment. Let us not allow omens of destruction and death to accompany the advance of this world! … To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope; it is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds; it is to bring the warmth of hope! For believers, for us Christians, like Abraham, like Saint Joseph, the hope that we bring is set against the horizon of God, which has opened up before us in Christ. It is a hope built on the rock which is God.”

    ReplyDelete
  112. Anonymous8:20 AM

    http://catholicclimatemovement.global/laudatosi/

    The above link has much on Francis' Encyclical, 'Laudato Si', including its progress since its issuance in 2015. Below is the link to the full text of Francis' Encyclical, 'Laudato
    Si', which further propagates the notion of human causative climate change:

    http://catholicclimatemovement.global/text-of-encyclical-laudato-si-by-pope-francis/

    ReplyDelete
  113. Anonymous8:27 AM

    http://catholicclimatemovement.global/statements-on-climate-change-from-other-catholic-institutions-and-voices/

    Statements on Climate Change from Other Catholic Institutions and Voices

    Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, 2015 joint statement (see also the longer version of the statement):
    “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity; In this core moral space, the world’s religions play a very vital role. These traditions all affirm the inherent dignity of every individual linked to the common good of all humanity. They affirm the beauty, wonder, and inherent goodness of the natural world, and appreciate that it is a precious gift entrusted to our common care, making it our moral duty to respect rather than ravage the garden that is our home; The poor and excluded face dire threats from climate disruptions, including the increased frequency of droughts, extreme storms, heat waves, and rising sea levels.“
    Cardinal Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2015 lecture:
    “Compelled by the scientific evidence for climate change, we are called to care for humanity and to respect the grammar of nature as virtues in their own right. (…) The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has undertaken the most comprehensive assessment of climate change. (…) To care for creation, to develop and live an integral ecology as the basis for development and peace in the world, is a fundamental Christian duty. As Pope Francis put it in his morning homily at Santa Marta on 9 February, it is wrong and a distraction to contrast “green” and “Christian.” (…) Binding regulations, policies, and targets are necessary tools for addressing poverty and climate change, but they are unlikely to prove effective without moral conversion and a change of heart. (…) Despite the UN Framework Convention of Climate Change signed in Rio in 1992 and subsequent agreements, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) continue their upward trend, almost 50 per cent above 1990 levels. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has reached a level last seen 3 million years ago – when the planet was significantly warmer than it is today. Millions of hectares of forest are lost every year, many species are being driven closer to extinction, and renewable water resources are becoming scarcer. The list could go on. Certainly international agreements are important, they can help. But they are not enough in themselves to sustain change in human behaviour. As Saint John Paul II put it, we require an “ecological conversion”, a radical and fundamental change in our attitudes to creation, to the poor and to the priorities of the global economy.”
    Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2014 joint statement:
    “If current trends continue, this century will witness unprecedented climate changes and ecosystem destruction that will severely impact us all. (…) The massive fossil fuel use at the heart of the global energy system deeply disrupts the Earth’s climate and acidifies the world’s oceans. The warming and associated extreme weather will reach unprecedented levels in our children’s life times and 40% of the world’s poor, who have a minimal role in generating global pollution, are likely to suffer the most.. (…) Our message is one of urgent warning, for the dangers of the Anthropocene are real and the injustice of globalization of indifference is serious. Yet our message is also one of hope and joy. A healthier, safer, more just, more prosperous, and sustainable world is within reach.”...

    ReplyDelete
  114. Anonymous8:29 AM

    ... Cardinal Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, 2014 statement:
    “It is well known that climate change raises not only scientific, environmental and socio-economic considerations, but also and above all ethical and moral ones, because it affects everyone, in particular the poorest among us, those who are most exposed to its effects. For this reason, the Holy See has often stressed that there is a moral imperative to act, for we all bear the responsibility to protect and to value creation for the good of this and future generations. (…) The greatest challenge lies in the sphere of human values and human dignity; questions which regard the human dignity of individuals and of peoples are not able to be reduced to mere technical problems. In this sense, climate change becomes a question of justice, respect and equity, a question which must awaken our consciences.”
    Bishop Sánchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Social Sciences, 2014 lecture:
    “Today solid scientific evidence exists that global climate is changing and that human activity based on the use of fossil materials contributes decisively to this trend. (…) Therefore, a programme in the light of the Populorum progressio and Pope Montini’s further interpretations must include climate stabilization, the sustainable development of the natural environment and social inclusion focused on the centrality of the human being and the common good. (…) If current trends continue, this century will witness unprecedented climate change and the destruction of the ecosystem, with tragic consequences for us all. (…) The problem of climate change has become a major social and moral problem, and mentalities can only be changed on moral and religious grounds.”

    ReplyDelete
  115. Anonymous8:30 AM

    ... Holy See delegation at the UNFCCC, 2014 statement:
    “At this very decisive moment in the history of climate negotiations we have to come to the point where we must overcome inaction. (…) The longer we wait, the more it will cost; more victims will suffer from our inaction and the greatest weight will fall on the most vulnerable, the poorest peoples and future generations: what is at issue here is respect for their fundamental human rights. (…) Technical solutions are necessary, but not sufficient. We must also consider the central factor of education: education aimed at fostering a sense of responsibility in children and adults towards environmentally sound patterns of development, the stewardship of creation, and solidarity among people. The current lifestyle with its throwaway culture is unsustainable and should have no place in our lives.”
    Catholic Bishops’ 2014 Lima statement:
    “We Catholic Bishops from all continents have come together in Lima on the occasion of COP20 to join the efforts of world leaders as they work towards signing a just and legally binding climate agreement in Paris in 2015. (…) We recognize that much good has happened on Earth through the rightful and responsible intelligence, technology and industry of humankind under God’s loving care. And yet in recent decades many grave adversities such as climate change, with its devastating impact on Nature itself, on food security, health and migration, led to a great number of suffering people worldwide. We express an answer to what is considered God’s appeal to take action on the urgent and damaging situation of global climate warming.”
    Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga, President of Caritas Internationalis, 2014 statement:
    “When hunger and poverty turn every day into a battle for survival, climate change loads the dice against the poor… Through our model of progressing and growing – especially the use of fossil fuels – we have had a decisive impact on the natural world. Lands, forests, deserts, glaciers, rivers and seas are changing. Whether through poor harvests, arid land, acidic oceans or more extreme and unpredictable weather events (often, disastrous), the impact of the changing climate is unmistakable, is scientifically proven beyond doubt and affects us all.”
    “In a world with enough food for everyone but close to one billion people going hungry, climate change threatens to put an extra 20% of the world’s population at risk of hunger by 2050 … We have become indifferent to the damage we are doing, both to the natural world and to our poorest brothers and sisters.”
    Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2011 report:
    “We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses. We appeal to all nations to develop and implement, without delay, effective and fair policies to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems. (…) We are aware that, if we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us.”
    Catholic Bishops’ 2008 statement:
    We, Catholic Bishops from the south and the north, (…) are deeply concerned by the disproportionate impact human induced climate change is having on poor and vulnerable people living in developing countries. Poor communities in developing countries are subject to the harshest effects of climate change, though they have done least to cause it. (…) It is our moral obligation to take urgent action to tackle climate change and to do so in support of those most affected.

    ReplyDelete
  116. I found the following information in EWTN's library.

    WOMAN CHURCH, WITCHCRAFT, AND THE GODDESS
    Fr. Matthew Fox

    (Chapter 6 of the book UNICORN IN THE SANCTUARY by Randy England.)

    "His [Matthew Fox's] brand of religion is aptly called "Creation-Centered Spirituality." Creation-Centered Spirituality is focused not on God the Creator, but on god the creation."

    "Whereas Pierre Teilhard de Chardin bridges the gap between East and West, Matthew Fox champions the paganism of the West. Like Teilhard, he worships matter as his God,..."

    [Constance Cumbey wrote:] "He [Matthew Fox] shamelessly committed public blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, by telling an impressionable audience well under the spell of his hypnotic powers that the Holy Spirit was demanding they adopt ... goddess worship."

    "Witchcraft, which is often called 'the old religion,' is the worship of (or connection with) 'the goddess' or the divine which it finds [only] in nature.

    "*************

    A quote from Fox's website: God is ... ,as much beyond all words and images [the universe or creation is an image, or form] as in all forms and beings." Rev. Matthew Fox's Creation-Centered Spirituality is focused more-so on God in His creation (or God immanent) than on God beyond His creation (or God transcendent). Fox worships the God who is located, both, beyond creation and in creation (or nature). Fox has never "demanded they adopt ... goddess worship" and nether does he "worship matter", he worships the God who is both immanent and transcendent.

    ReplyDelete
  117. Anonymous10:23 AM

    Thomas Dahlheimer, you are redirected to: www.politicallyunclassifiable.blogspot.com

    You'll find the blog host there to be much more in line with your views and it'll save you the embarrassment of being proved wrong yet again!

    PS the blog host there is convinced she's always right yet is full of New Age baloney and always proved wrong. You should both get along swell!

    ReplyDelete
  118. Excellent article by Cliff Kincaid! Thanks for posting the link, Susanna. (3:52 pm)

    While the global environmental agenda can be largely a wealth-redistribution scheme, there are some "insiders" who can and did profit in more ways than one from setting up the Presidio as a kind of beachhead for New Agey, Commie "world changers".

    Here are some articles to peruse regarding that:

    Nancy Pelosi: One of Mikhail Gorbachev's most useful idiots
    http://canadafreepress.com/2006/ans-cover-news111506.htm

    Public Corruption Watch: Pelosi's Presidio Question
    https://web.archive.org/web/20051220183423/http://amicusveritas.org/publiccorruptionwatch/presidio_housing.htm

    ReplyDelete
  119. Anonymous11:01 AM

    WOW!!!!!!!!!
    Thank you Anonymous at 6:23 AM to 8:30 AM.

    All that is more than a smoking gun.

    ReplyDelete
  120. Anonymous11:22 AM

    Absolutely 11:01 AM, and there's so much more!

    ReplyDelete
  121. Anonymous8:14 PM

    Someone left a link to Christine's site earlier. Just had a look out of curiosity and found her calling Craig a liar. Absolutely disgraceful!

    Anonymous June 19, 2017 at 4:04 PM
    Craig's comment at 1:55 P.M. (www.cumbey.blogspot.com) has you checkmated. I doubt you'll be able to wriggle out of that one in a hurry!

    You're the epitome of a double minded person unstable in all her ways!

    Reply
    Replies

    Christine Erikson (aka Justina) June 20, 2017 at 10:48 PM
    you are such a blind fool. he has backed off some of his errors while pretending he never held them and generally LIED THROUGH HIS TEETH about me. Craig has exposed himself as a fraud. you are probably a witch.

    I have never changed my stance merely restated things in terms easier for his twisted mind to understand, but his twist is dishonesty not inability.

    http://politicallyunclassifiable.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/reiki-exposed-truth-about-reki-x-reki.html?m=1#comment-form

    ReplyDelete
  122. TO SUSANNA:

    The last two nights I watched 2 out of 3 evenings of a program supposedly about Catholic Rediscovery of the Bible. It made me feel like where I came in when I first discovered the New Age Movement lurking in varying denominational circles in 1981. The program was presented by Sepulcian Order priests and staffs and took place at a local Catholic church in our area. Benedict XVI and Pius X were mocked. Rather than a discovery of the Bible, it appeared to me to give doubts for its veracity and inspiration. Of course, it was virtually "St. Raymond E. Brown" (cough, cough) and the virtues of PROCESS THEOLOGY.

    The following is info from the Parish bulletin re the event I witnessed for 2 out of the 3 evening sessions. They had daytime sessions as well. I stuck around to talk with some of the attendees afterwards. Of course, so many of them thought Matthew Fox and Brian Swimme were "brilliant theologians" (more cough, cough!!!) -- pass the disinfectant.

    Monday, June 19
    Castelot Summer Scripture
    4:00 pm Eucharist
    6:30 pm Fr. Ron Witherup, “Catholics
    and the Rediscovery of the Bible”
    8:00 pm Evening Prayer
    Tuesday, June 20
    Castelot Summer Scripture
    10:00 am Book Club
    4:00 pm Eucharist
    6:30 pm Fr. Ron Witherup, “Catholics
    and the Rediscovery of the Bible”
    7:00 pm Latin 101
    7:00 pm Summer Mission Teen
    Orientation
    8:00 pm Taize Prayer
    Wednesday, June 21
    Castelot Summer Scripture
    10:00 am Card Workshop
    4:00 pm Eucharist
    6:30 pm Fr. Ron Witherup, “Catholics
    and the Rediscovery of the Bible”
    7:45 pm AA/Alanon
    8:00 pm Evening Prayer


    The long time priest there, "Fr. Joe" seems like a sincere and dedicated priest, but obviously enamoured of these "theologians."

    I would appreciate knowing what you can share about the Sepulcian Order.

    Thanks!

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  123. To Thomas Dahlheimer:

    I just viewed a video by Matthew Fox saying the Catholic Church should have named the DALAI LAMA as Pope! Did I misinterpret him on this as well. By the way, the Catholic investigation of Matthew Fox by Cardinal Ratzinger started over a paper I gave to Seattle area Catholics from the Appleton, Wisconsin published CIRCLE NETWORK NEWS and its feature article, STARHAWK TEACHES AT HOLY NAME . . ." As I recall it, as I do vividly, she wrote:

    TEACHING MINISTERS, NUNS, AND CHRISTIAN EDUCATORS WAS A NEW BUT DEEPLY REWARDING EXPERIENCE. WE DANCED THE SPIRAL, JUMPED THE CAULDRON AND FOUND OTHER NEW AND INNOVATIVE WAYS TO EXPRESS OURSELVES. ISN'T IT WONDERFUL TO FIND SUCH A SYMPATHETIC SPIRIT TO PAGANISM WITHIN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD."

    He also in that year (1982) had a Voodoo teacher present -- I suppose that was also "cool" with you.

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  124. To Susanne:

    I mistakenly wrote "Sepulcian Order." It is the SULPICIAN ORDER.

    Sorry and thanks!

    CONSTANCE

    ReplyDelete
  125. I agree with Cliff Kincaid on many things, however, I do believe the GLOBAL WARMING was more of a New Age/Global Governance/Green moves (of which there were prominent Russians, including Gorbachev" than a Russian/Communist initiative.

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  126. Thomas Dahlheimer,

    Quoting you from earlier, …Mother Earth is also the creator, as is also Nature itself, and it is not good and it has never been good, and it is Jehovah's lie that it was "very good," before the first humans ("Adam and Eve") sinned…

    Your claim at 9:32 is that Fox has never "demanded they adopt ... goddess worship" and nether does he "worship matter", he worships the God who is both immanent and transcendent. I have Fox’s book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), and while I had not read it, I’d skipped through it, highlighting some portions. For this reason, I may not mostly disagree with your assertion at 9:32—that Fox was strictly panentheistic—however, your earlier quote regarding Maya, Jehovah, Nature, and Mother Earth all being congruent is at odds with some of Fox’s specific words:

    Each meal we eat today is like a “farewell meal” of Mother Earth since, when we eat, we always eat Mother Earth. Mother Earth, then, is a constantly sacrificed “paschal lamb” whose blood is spilled for our healing, nourishment, and salvation.

    Can Mother Earth expect a salvation today comparable to the tradition of the paschal mystery? Can she expect to be spared death by way of a sacrificial offering? Is the nailing of Mother Earth to the cross not expiation enough with which to awaken the human race? And might not a new Israel, one that goes toward the ends of the earth and welcomes all God’s creation, emerge from such a restored covenant? After all, the first covenant in the Scriptures is not that between God and Israel but between creation and humans—it is the rainbow (see Gen. 9:12-17). The rainbow is neither Jewish nor Christian, neither Islamic nor atheist. It belongs to all creation. It is a cosmic covenant. And it is a direct progeny of Mother Earth and her wonders of sunlight and rain, earth and sky. If the Cosmic Christ can awaken us to the power of Mother Earth to revivify ancient rituals such as Passover, how much else can be renewed by a Cosmic Christ perspective?

    23. Redeeming Redemption—The Cosmic Christ as Redeemer of Cosmic Pain

    The Good News we yearn to hear and that Mother Earth herself yearns to feel is that salvation is about solidarity: solidarity with God, neighbor, and all of God’s creatures. The idea of a private salvation is utterly obsolete. Only a Newtonian worldview of piecemealness could have spawned the popular heresy that salvation is an individualistic or private matter. In a world of interdependence there is simply no such thing as private salvation…
    (pp 150-151).

    Continued:

    ReplyDelete
  127. Continuing:

    Mr. Dahlheimer, the way I read this is both panentheistic (God/Christ immanent, implying God transcendent) as well as an assertion of universal salvation for all the spirit inside all matter. On that I’d think we’d agree. However, “Mother Earth” here is both the ‘inner spirit’ of the outer physical matter of “Mother Earth”—not strictly that Mother Earth is the same as Jehovah/Satan/Maya/Nature as you claim.

    The way I understand Blavatsky and Bailey is that matter is to be used as a means to an end. Quoting Bailey in this regard:

    …The development of spirit can be only expressed as yet in terms of the evolution of matter, and only through the adequacy of the vehicle, and through the suitability of the sheath, the body or form, can the point of spiritual development reached in any way be appraised… (A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, [Philadelphia, PA: George S. Ferguson/Lucis Publishing, © 1951 Lucis Trust (1925, 4th ed 1951), pp 49-50]).

    I quoted this in an article I wrote a while back (Panentheism and the Trinity), noting this is quasi-pantheistic (footnote 25). The way I see it, for New Agers this is the very reason to preserve the earth, as matter—the ‘evolution of matter’—is integral to the ‘salvation’ of the immanent aspect.

    ReplyDelete
  128. Constance,

    For me, it's not an "either-or" thing with New Age and Communism. They are much more interrelated than that - they are both part of the larger attempt to destroy the world that is, and replace it with a better one, which at its core is rooted in the war between God and Satan. Hence, we have the phrase used by Christopher Story: "Satanic Leninist World Revolution", which I think best describes the "capsule" in which all the utopian schemes can be placed - New Agers, Communists, Environmentalists, and all the other Coercive Utopians dreaming and planning for a united geopolitical/religious world. They all have the same goals of destruction and re-creation. This capsule full of destroyers is more than JUST New Age.

    ReplyDelete
  129. Marko,

    I refer you to my second book, A PLANNED DECEPTION. I think you are perhaps misunderstanding and consoequently mischaracterizing my work. I quote from page 12 of the first chapter as follows:

    One can easily see where the area of Jungian archetypes
    and acting out an end-time drama is an area in which
    occultists, atheists, and agnostic humanists can find
    common ground. The occultists of all New Age
    persuasions could easily support such a figure because
    they believe it is their Christ as they define it. The atheist
    could participate because he would feel it would contribute
    to the furthering of human progress on the planet, with people
    being discharged of their ideas of a coming deity
    once and for all. The Humanist could participate because would further the aims of their manifestos. In fact, maybe the Humanists and the New Agers are really not so
    apart at that. Didn't the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II read "we stand at the dawn of the new age"? 12 Many recognizable New Agers and occultists appear as signers
    the 1973 document, including Isaac Asimov; Archie Bahm, and Lester R. Brown of the World Watch Institute. Likewise, the 1933 original Manifesto was not without occultist influence. Oliver L. Reiser, a Lucis Trust activist par excellence, appears as a signer to that original declaration.



    Many who would have seen the New Age Movement which appears to be the grand synthesis of about everything else, MUCH EARLIER, had then not been diverted by the "all is Communism" theories. Communism is atheistic. Lucifer's aim was to be worshiped as God. The BLUE BOOK of the John Birch Society's organizer ROBERT WELCH actively promoted a coming SCIENTIFICALLY BASED new religion. Unfortunately, it appeared to me that it diverted many until the New Agers which was the grand synthesis had just about all in place.

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  130. Robert Welch himself appeared to believe in and welcome the coming of a "New Age" -- from THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK (downloadable from InternetArchives.org), we read:

    "For each age is a dream that is dying,
    Or one that is coming to birth. "
    For the last fifty years our age has been a dream that was dying. To this very group, at
    this very moment, I am proposing that we turn our faces forward instead of backward,
    begin to make even our defensive actions fit into a constructive design, and do our part to
    usher in a new age that is coming to birth. . . .

    "I first broke through the intellectually restricting bonds of the unusually narrow Southern
    Baptist fundamentalism, in which I was raised, more than forty years ago. I loved
    everything about it except the specific details of its dogma. As a result of its teachings I saw myself as the inheritor of all the labor and sacrifice that had gone before me, by men who had used this God-given "upward reach. " They had used it to provide the moral
    codes, the humane traditions, the accumulation of knowledge, and the material comforts,
    to make me so fortunate an heir of so many ages -- to whatever extent I was equal to my
    inheritance. I felt myself bound by a gentleman's code, which is just another way of
    expressing continuing human brotherhood or loyalty, to live up to the standards and carry
    on the ideals of men who had died hundreds and even thousands of years before I was
    born . . .

    "The substance of my conscience, as I believe it is really the substance of the conscience
    of every man in this room, was gratitude and a corresponding sense of responsibility.
    Gratitude, if you will let me paraphrase Henley's line without the slightest implication of
    blasphemy -- gratitude to whatever God there was, and gratitude to all of the noble men
    of the past, for the life and the environment for that life which was given me; and
    responsibility, to God and man, to be worthy, so far as I was able, of the human race at its
    best. And gentlemen, what firmer foundation can we possibly need for the faith on which
    to build our new age and with which to inaugurate the dream that is coming to birth?


    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  131. Constance (@ 1:07 AM),

    I’ve read a fair bit of Fr. Raymond E. Brown, finding him quite elucidating and well-researched. I state this from the point of view as one best described as a Protestant. Yes, he was somewhat controversial in a few areas, and I don’t always agree (especially when he promotes some specific RCC doctrines that I feel are read into the text); however, as far as I know, he was not a process theologian. I’m willing to be proven wrong on the latter. The Wikipedia entry, describing Brown as centrist, seems about right to me.

    As the Gospel of John is my favorite book of the Bible, I write about it quite a bit, and I quote from Brown copiously. He wrote his Anchor Bible commentary at a time when there were scant few, finding insights none had found previously—at least not that I’d seen regarding these specific instances. Given that, I’d much rather quote him as opposed to one who’s quoting him, as I’m a firm believer that the trailblazer should receive due credit for their original insights.

    ReplyDelete
  132. Marko9:37 PM

    Constance,

    If I misrepresented your work, I apologize - that was not my intention.

    I think your characterization above of Communism as little more than a diversion is incorrect. Communism has killed far more people than the New Age (up to the present anyway) has killed. Tens of millions of people (100 million being the highest estimate I've seen), if they could speak, would certainly object to their deaths being chalked up to a phenomenon labelled a "diversion".

    Also, many, perhaps most, communists were atheists, to be sure, but the heart of Communism is not the disbelief in the existence of God, but the denial of His rightful place in the world, turning away from Him and saying "We will be our own gods!" That is a faith, a creed, a belief.

    Listen to Whittaker Chambers in "Witness", from the introduction, titled "Letter To My Children":

    The revolutionary heart of Communism is not the theatrical
    appeal: "Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to
    lose but your chains. You have a world to gain." It is a
    simple statement of Karl Marx, further simplified for handy
    use: "Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary
    to change the world."

    Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie
    that binds them, even unto death, is a simply conviction:
    It is necessary to change the world. Their power, whose
    nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large
    measure, the rest of the world has lost that power, is the
    power to hold convictions and act upon them. It is the same
    power that moves mountains; it is also that part of mankind
    which has recovered the power to live or die - to bear
    witness - for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith
    that inspires men to live or die for it.

    It is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith.
    Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation
    under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be
    as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like
    all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision.
    Other ages have had great visions. They have always been
    different version of the same vision: the vision of God and
    man's relationship to God. The communist vision is the
    vision of Man without God.


    So the "two great faiths of our time" (a phrase also from that same piece) are Communism and Christianity, or, belief in Man vs. belief in God.

    Given that definition above of Communism from one of the great witnesses of its power, Communism and the New Age have much in common.

    Is it not the case that all things New Age can be reduced to the same fundamental belief (Man replaces God and therefore Man *is* God) as Communism? When someone says "There is no God", logically and by definition that person has made Man into a god, whether he believes so or not (and most, if not all, would not).

    My reductionism is not mainly an attempt to oversimplify (which in certain regards it obviously does), but only to show the similarities between Communism and the New Age.

    The conviction that "it is necessary to change the world" is a powerful one. To fight it, Christians must regain the mostly-lost conviction that their faith is worthy of living and dying for. Chambers believed that in leaving Communism for Christianity, he was joining the side that was currently losing. I don't see much in the Christianity of today that would cause me to disagree with him.

    But in the end, the very end, Christ, and those who remain standing in Him after all the enemy can throw at them, will be victorious, no matter how much "Progress" can be achieved by Man's thoughts or works.

    ReplyDelete
  133. Susanna10:04 PM

    Dear Constance 1:07 AM

    The Sulpician Order is a society of apostolic life of the Catholic Church named for the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris. Both the order and the church are named in honor of Saint Sulpitius the Pious who was a 7th-century bishop of Bourges.

    While the entire Sulpician order should not be made to suffer for the questionable views of a few of its members, it has nevertheless been claimed by some that the center for the dissemination of Modernist thought was the Seminary of Saint Sulpice.

    " St. Raymond E. Brown" ( cough, cough ) is a member of the Sulpician order and one of the "Scripture scholars ( cough, cough) to emerge from this particular order.

    Brown was one of the first "Catholic scholars" to apply historical-critical analysis to the Bible. Many regard his "historical - critical" analysis as neither historical nor critical.

    Brown remains controversial among traditionalist Catholics because of their claim that he denied the inerrancy of the whole of Scripture and cast doubt on the historical accuracy of numerous articles of the Catholic faith. Some conservatives were angered at his questioning of whether the virginal conception of Jesus could be proven historically.......

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_E._Brown

    _______________________________________________________

    Echoing what Hans Kung wrote in his book DOES GOD EXIST? Brown places the divinity of Christ in doubt when, in a detailed 1965 article in the journal Theological Studies, he examines whether Jesus was ever called "God" in the New Testament. He concluded that "Even the fourth Gospel never portrays Jesus as saying specifically that he is God" and "there is no reason to think that Jesus was called God in the earliest layers of New Testament tradition." He argued that "Gradually, in the development of Christian thought God was understood to be a broader term. It was seen that God had revealed so much of Himself in Jesus that God had to be able to include both Father and Son."

    Thirty years later, Brown revisited the issue in an introductory text for the general public, writing that in "three reasonably clear instances in the NT (Hebrews 1:8-9, John 1:1, 20:28) and in five instances that have probability, Jesus is called God," a usage Brown regarded as a natural development of early references to Jesus as "Lord".


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_E._Brown
    __________________________________

    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  134. Susanna10:05 PM

    cont.


    The same argument I have used against similar pronunciamentos by Kans Kung in the past applies to Brown as well......In the Catholic Old Testament Canon known as the Septuagint, the word KYRIOS ( LORD) is the Greek equivalent of Jahveh, Adonai and Shaddai.........and the use of the same Greek word KYRIOS ( especially frequently by St. Luke and St. Paul ) to refer to Jesus Christ amounts to Jesus being called GOD in the New Testament - especially since the Hebrew equivalents in the Old Testament were never used to refer to anyone BUT God!!!!

    This is why we Catholics recite the prayer Kyrie Eleison at Mass during the Liturgy of the Word to this very day:

    Kyrie Eleison - Lord have mercy

    Christe Eleison - Christ have mercy

    Kyrie Eleison - Lord have mercy

    Brown's work was controversial among traditionalists who objected to the elements of his work that they regarded as casting doubt on the historical accuracy of numerous articles of the Catholic faith. His critics included Lawrence Cardinal Shehan and Father Richard W. Gilsdorf, the latter of whom postulated that Brown's work was "a major contribution to the befogged wasteland of an 'American Church' progressively alienated from its divinely constituted center."...


    Just a little aside here........ the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris was at one time said to be a hotbed of heresy - especially in the 19th century. Among the alumni of the Seminary of St. Sulpice is included Alphonse Louis Constant.....a.k.a. the infamous 19th century French occultist Eliphas Levi.

    ReplyDelete
  135. Susanna10:20 PM

    Marko and Constance,

    Communism began as "Utopian Socialism" - a messianic political ideology masquerading as a religion and called Saint-Simonianism after the man who inspired it in the early 19th century....Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon.

    It has been noted that Saint-Simonian ideas exerted a significant influence on new religious movements such as Spiritualism and Occultism since the 1850s.

    It is also to be noted that among the commie critters to morph out of this strange witch's brew was none other than the infamous French occultist/magician Eliphas Levi.

    ReplyDelete
  136. Susanna,

    Some of Wikipedia’s contents are a bit biased against Brown, not fully articulating his position. I do think he’s correct that 1st century writers, coming from a strict monotheistic background, were a bit apprehensive in calling Jesus God (theos) outright, thus preferring Lord (kyrios) instead. Importantly, the Pauline writings forthrightly proclaim the Father as God, while calling Jesus “Lord”, thus illustrating this apprehension. Of course, today we don’t have this problem, as we are well-versed in Trinitarian thought. Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Scripture does not reveal the Trinity. However, we have to admit that it sure would be easier had the NT writers been more explicit in calling Jesus God (some verses like John 20:28—which, I believe, was written late 1st century—notwithstanding)! But, then again, calling both Jesus and the Father theos simultaneously could be construed as ditheism (two Gods). Before anyone attempts to flame me, please digest my words: it’s a bit anachronistic to think that 1st century readers were staunch Trinitarians. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the NT does an excellent job of delineating Father and Son, while portraying each as God, thus implying Trinitarianism.

    To the assertion that Brown casts doubt on the divinity of Christ in 1965 and the implication that it was “[t]hirty years later” that he slightly amended his position, his 1st volume of the Anchor Bible commentary on John, which was written in 1966 (The Gospel According to John I-XII, The Anchor Yale Bible; [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966]), shows that to be both inaccurate and inflated. Quoting comments regarding John 1:1c (“and the Word was God”):

    [F]or a modern Christian reader whose trinitarian background has accustomed him to thinking of “God” as a larger concept than “God the Father,” the translation “The Word was God” is quite correct. This reading is reinforced when one remembers that in the Gospel as it now stands, the affirmation of 1:1 is almost certainly meant to form an inclusion with 20:28, where at the end of the Gospel Thomas confesses Jesus as “My God” (ho theos mou). These statements represent the Johannine affirmative answer to the charge made against Jesus in the Gospel that he was wrongly making himself God (10:33, 5:18) (p 5).

    In the following, Brown references his ’65 work:

    The NT does not predicate “God” of Jesus with any frequency…See our article treating all the pertinent texts in TS 26 (1965), 545–73. Most of the passages suggested (John 1:1, 18, 20:28; Rom 9:5; Heb 1:8; 2 Pet 1:1) are in hymns or doxologies—an indication that the title “God” was applied to Jesus more quickly in liturgical formulae than in narrative or epistolary literature. We are reminded again of Pliny’s description of the Christians singing hymns to Christ as God. The reluctance to apply this designation to Jesus is understandable as part of the NT heritage from Judaism. For the Jews “God” meant the heavenly Father; and until a wider understanding of the term was reached, it could not be readily applied to Jesus. This is reflected in…John 20:17 where Jesus calls the Father “my God”; and in Eph 4:5–6 where Jesus is spoken of as “one Lord,” but the Father is “one God.” (The way that the NT approached the question of the divinity of Jesus was not through the title “God” but by describing his activities in the same way as it described the Father’s activities; see John 5:17, 21, 10:28–29.) In vs. 1c the Johannine hymn is bordering on the usage of “God” for the Son, but by omitting the article it avoids any suggestion of personal identification of the Word with the Father [ED: that is, the lack of article in front of theos illustrates that the Father is not the same person as “the Word”]. And for Gentile readers the line also avoids any suggestion that the Word was a second God in any Hellenistic sense. (p 24).

    ReplyDelete
  137. This short video is important, as it contains a clip of Obama brazenly proclaiming anyone who votes a US citizen! I’d not seen this before (Obama clip starts @ 1:31): New Report Shows That There Were Likely Millions of Illegal Votes in the 2016 Election

    On an unrelated note—except that it references Trump, though from one year ago, pre-election—I think this video does a great job explaining some politics of which I’d not been aware. I had no idea why we were so friendly with Saudi Arabia, but now I know: The DECLINE of American Empire

    ReplyDelete
  138. Susanna,

    Thanks -- my reading of Tuesday and Wednesday night is that the same ugly forces that were invading Catholic circles and Protestant circles alike are alive and well. The Supulcian priest lecturer happily told the audience he was doing many of those presentations "all over the world". He was personally the keeper of the Raymond E. Brown estate. One of their upcoming seminars in the Detroit area has Bishop Thomas Gumbleton as part of the faculty. Attendance at that one is a few hundred dollars as I recall.

    The speaker (Fr. Ronald D. Witherup, PSS, STL, PhD) and the Castelot faculty looked to me like they were developing loyal local followings with their annual lectures. Before the Wednesday evening session, I talked to an Indian gentleman, a retired engineer whose father had been an an attorney. He had been "hooked" on the Castelot lectures for years.

    In the history that Fr. Witherup gave with his handouts, things weren't going so well for their gang in 1870 when Vatican Council I "issues its Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith emphasizing the Scriptures as inspired by the Holy Spirit with God s the 'author'."

    They got a break, he said, with Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus. In 1902 Pope Leo XIII established the Pontifical Bible Commission.

    They had major setbacks when Pope Pius X gave and attempted to enforce his efforts to stop Modernism. Per the handout's Timeline, between 1902 and 1958 there was a "tug of war between Roman authorities of the Holy See AND CATHOLIC [er, ah] SCHOLARS over Biblical interpretation that "put many Catholic biblical scholars under a cloud of suspicion to the eve of Vatican II."

    He referred to a document that the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued in October 2014 that I would like to get my hands on, "The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture".

    The bottom line with him (Witherup) as I observed from him and the laughing along crowd was that there may have been little of each in Scripture.

    Moreover, he made an interesting comment that the audience laughed at one point that they must never "never go back to Adam & Eve and ORIGINAL SIN."

    I think this is just about where I came in when I discovered the mess known as "New Age" and various other names. "Gnosticism" covers a lot of it. I deduce from what I saw is that these forces have near cult-like followings in all the cities where they are having their Castelot seminars and they are clearly on the march and believe they have Pope Francis' full support.

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  139. Susanna:

    Here is a link to the Castelot Summer Scripture info:

    It is more of the "We are the Church" genre.

    http://www.wearethechurchconferences.com/castelot-summer-scripture.html

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  140. Susanna2:46 PM

    Constance,

    Here is the document from the Vatican website. It is in French, but the English version is available from Amazon.

    http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/pcb_doc_index.htm
    _______________________________________________

    Ispirazione e verità della Sacra Scrittura (22 febbraio 2014)
    [Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2014]
    [French, German, Italian, Spanish]


    Ispirazione e verità della Sacra Scrittura (22 febbraio 2014)

    http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/pcb_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20140222_ispirazione-verita-sacra-scrittura_fr.pdf


    ____________________________________________________________________

    Here is a sample in English.

    https://issuu.com/catholictruthsociety/docs/b._the_inspiration_and_truth_of_sac/4

    ______________________________________________________________________
    ________________________________________________

    ReplyDelete
  141. Susanna3:41 PM

    Craig,

    Re:Some of Wikipedia’s contents are a bit biased against Brown, not fully articulating his position. I do think he’s correct that 1st century writers, coming from a strict monotheistic background, were a bit apprehensive in calling Jesus God (theos) outright, thus preferring Lord (kyrios) instead. Importantly, the Pauline writings forthrightly proclaim the Father as God, while calling Jesus “Lord”, thus illustrating this apprehension.

    Respectfully, which first century writers?

    I am talking about the inspired authors of the Gospels and of the inspired authors of the other books of the New Testament, and in the Bible "Kyrios" was the term used to refer not only to JAHVEH, Adonai and Shaddai in the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament but also to Christ in the New Testament.

    I am aware of the occasional Wikipedia bias, but Wikipedia included a direct quote from Brown which I was referring to.

    The term "ho theos" is precisely the argument Hans Kung used in his book DOES GOD EXIST? to place the divinity of Christ in doubt by saying that "Jesus is never directly called "God." He completely ignores the use of the word "Kyrios" in reference to Jahveh and to Christ. Also the Johannine reference to THE WORD being God. Kung almost won for himself the "hat of Arius" in addition to losing his mission canonica which authorizd him to teach as a Catholic theologian.

    Please understand that while I respect your position as a non Catholic Christian I would like to point out that I was not speaking for the whole of Christianity but as an orthodox/traditional ( not Modernist ) practicing Roman Catholic about a controversial Roman Catholic priest whose opinions I am not obliged to accept. If you will carefully reread my post, I said that the problem traditional CATHOLICS have with Brown is that he places numerous articles of the CATHOLIC ( not non-Catholic ) faith in doubt. And as you know, the Septuagint is the Roman Catholic Old Testament canon, not the Hebrew Bible.

    Like Kung, Brown cherry picks whatever goes tandem with his modernist leaning "exegesis" (cough cough). The bottom line is that if Jesus isn't God, then we are not redeemed and we are still in our sins!!! It is as simple as that.

    Nevertheless, in what appears to be his intellectual pride, Brown states:

    "Even the fourth Gospel never portrays Jesus as saying specifically that he is God" and "there is no reason to think that Jesus was called God in the earliest layers of New Testament tradition." He argued that "Gradually, in the development of Christian thought God was understood to be a broader term. It was seen that God had revealed so much of Himself in Jesus that God had to be able to include both Father and Son."

    REALLY???

    Then apart from references to Jahveh and Christ as "Kyrios," what is one to make of John 1:1-5????

    1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome[a] it. John 1:1-5

    And what about:

    Before Abraham came to be I AM ( I AM being the translation of Jahveh which was never used to refer to anyone BUT God!!!) After which the Pharisees rent their garments and wanted to stone Jesus for blasphemy.

    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  142. Susanna3:43 PM

    cont.

    Again,

    Brown remains controversial among traditionalist Catholics because of their claim that he denied the inerrancy of the whole of Scripture and cast doubt on the historical accuracy of numerous articles of the Catholic faith.

    The following is NOT from Wikipedia.

    Father Raymond E. Brown; The Modern Catholic Heretic

    The Catholic Scholar Who Rejected Much of the New Testament

    http://www.ukapologetics.net/13/brown.htm
    ______________________________________________

    The following is from EWTN:

    Raymond E. Brown

    http://www.ewtn.com/v/experts/showmessage.asp?number=370304
    ______________________________________________

    From Catholic Culture to which I subscribe: A must read.

    Traditional Catholic Scholars Long Opposed Fr. Brown's Theories
    https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=525
    ______________________________________________

    Also from Catholic Culture..

    A Wayward Turn in Biblical Theory

    http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=8154&repos=1&subrepos=0&searchid=441843
    _____________________________________________

    ReplyDelete
  143. Susanna3:52 PM

    P.S.

    Re: Before anyone attempts to flame me, please digest my words: it’s a bit anachronistic to think that 1st century readers were staunch Trinitarians. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the NT does an excellent job of delineating Father and Son, while portraying each as God, thus implying Trinitarianism.

    With no intention of flaming you ( :-) )....Then why did Jesus command the Apostles to "make disciples of all nations BAPTISING THEM IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER AND OF THE SON AND OF THE HOLY GHOST?" The 1st century readers were not staunch Trinitarians it was in the sense that the word Trinity was not immediately used in reference to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They may not have used the word "Trinity," but they were staunch Trinitarians in terms of the THREE PERSONS in whose names they were baptized!

    ReplyDelete
  144. Anonymous3:53 PM

    Would anyone care to comment on this? Has anyone seen this yet?

    http://phibetaiota.net/2017/01/graphic-electoral-reform-act-of-2017/

    ReplyDelete
  145. Susanna6:00 PM

    Constance,

    Regarding all the so-called approval Raymond E. Brown reportedly received from various Churchmen:

    Answer by Fr. John Echert on 12/12/2001:

    An assumption regarding error on the part of Christ--the Word of God Incarnate--is philosophically and theologically untenable and unacceptable. An assumption of error on the part of Sacred Scripture is heresy. Father Brown subscribed to both. These and other wrong assumptions color and cast a pall of suspicion upon much of his work, in my view. The issue is not whether Fr. Brown has the personal favor or esteem of certain Churchmen but the principals that guided his work.

    And I am not convinced that Cardinal Ratzinger was such an enthusiast with regards to Fr. Brown. The Cardinal has taken issue with the application of the historical-critical method as practiced today, and has criticized modern biblical scholars in general for failing to objectively assess their own biblical methodology for validity.

    God bless, Edward

    Father Echert


    http://www.ewtn.com/v/experts/showmessage.asp?number=338948

    ReplyDelete
  146. Susanna6:21 PM

    While it pains me to have to warn my Protestant friends about an unorthodox "Catholic" whose views were a hair's breadth away from heresy if not actually heretical, I feel that I am compelled to do so in light of the many years he taught at Union Theological Seminary which is a Protestant seminary!

    For example, the virgin birth of Christ is not only a dogma of the Catholic faith, but also a dogma of orthodox Protestantism. It is in the Bible! Period! Regardless of whether or not Mary had other children besides Jesus, orthodox Catholics and Protestants believe that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary. While Mary's humanity bears witness to the humanity of Christ,Her virginity bears witness to Christ's divinity.

    In his first Union Theological Seminary lecture, in 1971, Father Brown sounded a well-publicized call for "a scholarly reassessment" of the historical accuracy of Jesus' conception and virginal birth.

    To protect himself lest he be accused of a denial of the Virgin Birth, Fr. Brown asserted artfully that he accepted the dogma because the Catholic Church teaches it, even though "the Church through its official teachers has made the decision that a minority New Testament view, however scarcely attested, was a true evaluation of what God did in Jesus."

    Nevertheless, Fr. Brown, in writing, teaching, and lecturing that resonated in schools and colleges, in seminaries, in pulpits, and in many chanceries, insisted that "the scientific controlled evidence derived from a study of the New Testament left the historicity of the virginal conception unresolved.".....read more...


    http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=525
    _______________________________________________________________________

    ReplyDelete
  147. Susanna6:28 PM

    The following article which I am dubbing "MODERNISM 101", also refers to Father Raymond E. Brown's modernist errors.

    Modernism

    Modernism consists in the substitution for the supernatural and objective in religion of the natural and subjective.

    The Catholic believes that God, Who utterly transcends or surpasses every created or
    creatible thing, whether material or spiritual, became man in Jesus Christ. The
    Modernist believes that there is no reality beyond the natural observable world; that all assertion of the supernatural is merely the result of internal feelings (religious sentiment); that Jesus Christ was merely a man like you or me, albeit a man of extraordinary character; that the dogmatic assertion that he was God is an invention(or a gloss) which was contrived, or thought up, amongst the early Christians in the centuries following his death.

    For the Modernist, God is not something outside ourselves, utterly independent of us, utterly beyond our ability to know (transcendent), to whom at the end of our lives we will have to give an account. He is something subjective and immediately present to us (immanent), which each of us can attain by means of this religious sentiment.

    The Modernist Modus Operandi

    How does the Modernist work? Here is a summary of his method of procedure
    taken from Pius X’s encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis 1 .
    § He insists (whilever he remains within the body of the faithful) that he is a
    faithful Catholic.
    § He is devious.
    § He does not say the things the Church says in quite the way that the Church
    says them and, if he does use the Church’s words, he means something
    different to what the Church means.
    § He uses the language of subjectivism which, with its imprecision and its
    ambivalence, is an apt vehicle to confuse the hearer.
    § He has no difficulty holding two contrary intellectual positions at the same
    time.
    § His intent, whether knowingly or not, is to confuse his hearers, to make them
    believe that he is a faithful Catholic while leading them to a different, and
    non‑Catholic, position.
    § In the face of criticism he expresses himself as hurt, or as misunderstood.
    To understand Modernism and its multitude of deceits thoroughly, one must read
    Pius X’s encyclical and read also that Pope’s condemnations of the various Modernist
    positions on teaching and revelation in his Decree Lamentabili 2 .


    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  148. Susanna6:34 PM

    cont.

    Modernists

    There are two sorts of Modernist, the latent and the patent. George Tyrrell S J [1861‑1909], Modernism’s earliest ‘saint’, must ever be the paradigm of both. Tyrrell kepthis radical views hidden at first, disguising what he was saying under Catholicappearances. Later, when the Church’s theologians could see where he was going,he became outspoken, and his heresy, patent. All the efforts in charity of HerbertCardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, to move him to return to the
    Catholic fold having failed, his condemnation and excommunication became a
    necessity for the protection of the body of the faithful.

    Much the worst sort of Modernist is the latent Modernist, the one who pretends to be
    a Catholic, though he is not, and remains within the body of the faithful. Typical of these was the Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin, whose gobbledegook blend of theology,
    history and science was absorbed via his proscribed writings by millions who lacked
    the education and the training to think critically. Another, and far more dangerous Modernist, was the late, much praised, scripture scholar, Fr Raymond E Brown S S.

    Brown was the worst of heretics, one who poisoned the faith for millions while
    bishops and theologians heaped praise upon him.
    Here is an instance of Brown’s
    scriptural analysis reproduced in a publication of Sydney’s Catholic Adult Education
    Centre—

    [A]s the early Christians reflected on Jesus’ life, the great ‘moments’ of that life (theresurrection, the baptism, and eventually the conception) became key occasions for clarifying who he was: the Messiah or anointed King of the House of David and the unique Son of God through the Holy Spirit. It is because the Infancy stories were very effective in conveying the message that Jesus is both Son of God and Son of David that they were readily included in the written Gospels.

    Consider the implications that flow from these elements in this paragraph: (i) the use of the word ‘moments’ in inverted commas; (ii) the statement that the early Christian‘reflected on’ Jesus’ life; (iii) the absence of initial capitals for the Resurrection and the Baptism of Our Lord; (iv) the use of ‘the conception’ instead of ‘the Incarnation’; (v) the use of ‘eventually’ in the same phrase; (vi) the expression ‘key occasions for clarifying who he was’; (vii) the use of the word ‘stories’; (viii) the argument that ‘because these stories were very effective in conveying a message’ they were included in the Gospels.


    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  149. Susanna7:01 PM

    cont.

    Brown used these verbal techniques deliberately to cast doubt on the authenticity of what is contained in the Gospels, to imply that they do not represent the truth about Jesus Christ, to assert that they were concocted by later ‘believers’, and to deny that Christ was conceived miraculously and that He rose from the dead. Yet nowhere does he say any of these thing explicitly! The Modernist is devious.

    http://www.superflumina.org/PDF_files/Groome_1_modernist.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  150. Anonymous9:08 PM

    http://www.naturalnews.com/2017-06-21-weather-channel-founder-tells-cnn-climate-change-is-a-hoax-and-31000-scientists-agree.html

    ReplyDelete
  151. Susanna,

    Let me start this comment by stating that I’m a staunch Trinitarian. In fact, I defended the Trinity on another site, one which routinely specifically denounced the Trinity, to the point that the individual who runs the blog specifically invited me to debate Sir Anthony Buzzard, who was scheduled to speak at a gathering back in February of this year. I declined for a number of reasons (mostly timing conflict with my job and lack of resources to fund a trip to Florida).

    Regarding our exchange here about Brown, I did and do understand your position as a traditional Catholic, as opposed to both a ‘modernist’ Catholic and a non-Catholic. And I did read all of your initial comment regarding Brown, to include the Wikipedia quote attributed to him, before my initial comment in this exchange. However, it seems you did not read my entire comment @ 11:49AM, which explicitly quoted Brown from his 1966 commentary on John’s Gospel, specifically John 1:1c (and the Word was God). In the two selections cited, Brown clearly affirms Christ’s Deity. In the first of the two quotes, Brown compares 1:1c with 20:28, illustrating the former should be understood with the latter in mind. In the second of the two quotes, Brown was explaining the important distinction between the use of ho theos and theos (without the article), the latter found in John 1:1c (and my bracketed note was added for more explanation).

    Brown’s assertion that ho theos was rarely predicated of Christ is absolutely correct. Certainly the term is used of the Father much more so. Of course, this doesn’t mean it was never used of Christ, as Brown makes abundantly clear.

    I don’t have his 1965 work to read him in full context, so I’ve no idea if his 1966 commentary amends an earlier stance or not. However, to your point about kyrios meaning “God”, I suspect Brown wished to specifically speak on (ho) theos, though that’s mere speculation, I admit.

    In any case, the scope of my defense of Brown was limited to what I initially addressed—nothing more, nothing less. I’ve not specifically read anything about Brown denying the Virginal Conception/Birth or bodily resurrection of Christ, so I won’t speak to those issues. If Brown did deny either of those outright, I’d call him a heretic!

    Regarding what I wrote about the Trinity in my 11:49AM comment, take note of the bold: it’s a bit anachronistic to think that 1st century readers [let me add: and hearers] were staunch Trinitarians. And, unfairly, when you quoted me you omitted: Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Scripture does not reveal the Trinity. However, we have to admit that it sure would be easier had the NT writers been more explicit in calling Jesus God (some verses like John 20:28—which, I believe, was written late 1st century—notwithstanding)!

    Was Brown a “Modernist”, as in devious? From what I’ve read—his works on the Johannine corpus—I don’t see it. And the individual’s response to the Brown quote @ 6:34PM I don’t find convincing. That’s not to say Brown may not have been wrong, or even a “Modernist” necessarily—I just don’t see it in that one quote in isolation.

    ReplyDelete
  152. Here’s a lengthy selection from Brown’s commentary on John’s Gospel, illustrating Brown’s further affirmation of Christ’s (the Word’s) Deity, while simultaneously affirming the Incarnation—to juxtapose with the quote @ 6:34PM re: “the Incarnation”. It’s important to put Brown in full context, as he sometimes takes a while to complete his thoughts/arguments. A lot of the ellipses omit references to others’ work Brown engages with (Bultmann, Kaseman, etc.). Bold added for emphasis:

    ---------------
    “Verse 14a describes the Incarnation in strongly realistic language by stressing that the Word became fleshDoes the mention of flesh in John 1:14 represent a kenotic element…?

    “Is there a polemic intent in vs. 14a? Certainly its theology would not have been compatible to Gnostic or Docetic strains of thought. No line in the hymn gives sharper expression to the difference between the Prologue’s concept of the Word and that of the Stoics and of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Greek who admired the logos as formulating the orderliness of the world aspired to be joined with God in His universe. The suggestion that the ultimate encounter with the logos of God would be when the logos became flesh would have been unthinkable. The Prologue does not say that the Word entered into flesh or abided in flesh but that the Word became flesh. Therefore, instead of supplying the liberation from the material world that the Greek mind yearned for, the Word of God was now inextricably bound to human history. Yet, while 14a would not be acceptable to some of the schools of philosophical or theological thought in the Hellenistic world, we cannot be certain that it was written against such views. [ED: I think John’s prologue was written as a polemic.]

    “Let us turn now to the attitude toward revelation implied in “The Word became flesh.” The title, “the Word,” was appropriate in vs. 1 because the divine being described there was destined to speak to men. When the title is used for the second time in vs. 14, this divine being has taken on human form and has thus found the most effective way in which to express himself to men. Thus, in becoming flesh the Word does not cease to be the Word, but exercises his function as Word to the full

    “Verse 14b and the succeeding lines show that, if the Word has become flesh, he has not ceased to be God. In 14b this is given expression in the verb skēnoun (‘make a dwelling; pitch a tent’) which has important OT associations. The theme of ‘tenting’ is found in Exod 25:8–9 where Israel is told to make a tent (the Tabernacle—skēnē) so that God can dwell among His people; the Tabernacle became the site of God’s localized presence on earth. It was promised that in the ideal days to come this tenting among men would be especially impressive. Joel 3:17 says, ‘You will know that I am the Lord your God who makes his dwelling [kataskēnoun] in Zion.’
    -----------------

    I have yet to find any evidence that Brown adhered to Process Theology, the idea that God is affected by His own creation (is passible) and is, thus, reactive.

    ReplyDelete
  153. Anonymous10:23 PM

    https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/reimagining-liberal-international-order-by-javier-solana-2017-06?referrer=/RdxTdXUnre

    It looks like Javier Solana (from his artificially high position/non-position) is still stuck on stupid.

    Dreamers like him are not waking up everyday in the real world, evidently.

    ReplyDelete
  154. Well, Craig & Susanna,

    I don't know about Raymond E. Brown and HIS process theology per se, but the admoinistrator of Brown's estate, as Fr. Witherup sure seemed to make it clear that he (Witherup) was.

    And, ANTHONY BUZZARD, another interesting man from an interesting family with interesting agendas, as I see it. I first learned of his father from Sir Kenneth Grubb's book, CRYPTS OF POWER.

    I was not very much satisfied with the work of the Churches, whether
    the World Council of Churches or the British Council of Churches, in
    international peace and justice, severely limited as it was by financial
    stringency. I kept in touch with those at Chatham House and in other
    quarters who were studying the lie of the land. In 1956 four men met
    privately to discuss chiefly the alleged distinction between the tactical
    and strategic use of atomic weapons. They were Admiral Sir A.
    Buzzard, lately Director of Naval Intelligence, Professor P. M. S.
    Blackett,10 the distinguished scientist, Mr. Richard Goold-Adams and
    Mr. Denis Healey, later Minister of Defence. Eventually they had a
    pamphlet produced, On limiting atomic war.
    Anthony Buzzard attended an international consultation at Bossey.
    The Chateau de Bossey is a conference centre near Celigny, on the
    north-western side of Lake Leman, belonging to the World Council of
    Churches. Buzzard was anxious that something should be done in
    Britain to carry the discussion further, and in July 1956, Dr. George Bell,
    then Bishop of Chichester, wrote to me to introduce him. I saw Buzzard
    and listened very carefully to his words. His approach was new to me and
    I said little, but pondered much.
    Later Buzzard and I met Healey and Goold-Adams and I agreed to
    consider seriously the holding of a small conference. I was impressed by
    the account which Colonel Leghorn of the U.S.A. had given me of the
    volume and thoroughness of the work being done on the tactical atomic
    weapon question by such men as Kissinger, Wolfers and Nitze, all of
    whom and many others of their colleagues, I came to know later.
    The Brighton Conference met in January 1957 in a hotel. No organised
    or recognised body convened it. Buzzard, Healey, Goold-Adams and I
    simply wrote to the people we knew on a list we had compiled of names in
    the services, Churches, politics, universities and press, not only in
    Britain but in the U.S.A. and the Commonwealth. The Conference met
    with sixty to seventy persons present. . . .


    The account goes on to say how that group formed the International Institute of Strategic Studies. They prevailed on Great Britain to give up its nuclear deterrent. Grubb was the younger brother of Norman Grubb who was the chronicler of Abraham Vereide and the Fellowship Foundation - International Christian Leadership. His brother Kenneth was a founder of the World Council of Churches.

    AND, Anthony Buzzard appeared at an interesting time to work with people I do believe were trying to shut down my work from within posing as "Discernment" related ministries and coordinating a conference. They flew from various locations to meet in Atlanta for a planning committee meeting and it was Buzzard who picked them up at the airport and drove them to their meeting.the

    I do believe that the Washington FEllowship Foundation in concert with the recently deceased Paul Nathaniel Temple had much to do with that and its financing. I believe that both sides of the Atlantic were being worked both for the Global Governance projects and the New World Religion aspect. As Barbara Marx Hubbard put it in 1988 "now all the resonating core groups with OUTWARDLY DIFFERENT PURPOSES ARE MERGING AND BLENDING AND COMING TOGETHER TO DO THE ONE WORK."

    Check out my articles on the Hi Jacking of Evanglicalism on line for background on the Paul Temple USA side of the Atlantic for more of my thoughts and even suspicions on this.

    Constance

    The

    ReplyDelete
  155. To all:

    Time for me to retire for the night. I will be doing my internet radio program in the morning at www.themicroeffect.com at 10 am Eastern Time, 7 am Pacific time. Join me there and call in live to 208-935-0094.

    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  156. Excerpts from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

    Brahma: "While Brahma is often credited as the creator of the universe and various beings in it, several Puranas describe him being born from a lotus emerging from the navel of the god Vishnu."

    "Brahma, ...., is sometimes viewed as a form (sarguna) of the otherwise formless (nirguna) Brahman, the ultimate metaphysical reality and cosmic soul..."

    A quote from Fox's website: God is ... ,as much beyond all words and images [formless Brahman] as in all forms and beings [Brahma 'viewed as a form']."

    Wikipedia: "Brahma does not enjoy popular worship in present-age Hinduism,..."

    There are no Gnostics who worship the Creator, or Jehovah-Brahma. No good person would worship the god who created evolution. "Survival of the fittest," or nature itself, is cruel, hateful and mean, it is full of death and corruption. However, it sometimes appears as "an angel of light", or very beautiful, and it has some good qualities.

    Spirit/Vishnu/Brahman (or Jesus' Father in Heaven) is a never-born eternal loving cosmic soul and Jehovah-Brahma is a born (or 'created'\emanated) entity, and is "sometimes viewed as a form", or as the universe\physical creation/matter/maya/nature/Mother Earth.

    ReplyDelete
  157. Dahlheimer,

    Despite your continued efforts in this vein, you cannot avoid the fact that “Mother Earth” is not always used in the manner in which you use it, i.e., that it’s just, according to you, another name for Maya, Jehovah, physical creation, matter, or nature. The extensive quote of Matthew Fox I sourced at 9:07 and 9:09 AM proves you wrong.

    Isn’t all matter destined to destruction, according to your neognostic / New Age / Theosophical beliefs? That’s what both Blavatsky and Bailey assert. Given that, and Fox’s claim that Mother Earth is waiting for her salvation, Mother Earth cannot be strictly congruent with Maya/etc.

    ReplyDelete
  158. Constance,

    I read your previous, recent comments regarding Buzzard with interest, given my indirect interactions with him (via his work and those promoting it) and my near-direct interaction. It made me even more suspicious of the intents and purposes of the anti-Trinitarian blogger—an individual with a doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford (hence, no dummy), and 'former Christian'. This individual still affirms Jesus (he prefers Yeshua) as the Messiah/Christ, yet denies His Deity—at least Deity on par with God the Father. The discussions were sometimes quite heated with his followers and sometimes, seemingly, he himself (he made every effort to appear to keep his cool—and he may have, as tone in the written word is sometimes difficult to discern).

    I'm content with knowing that you have now backed off your initial claim that Brown promoted Process Theology. Since I'm not a fan of guilt-by-association—and I suspect you aren't either—I won't automatically ascribe that belief to Brown via Witherup absent proof. That’s only fair. Nor do I wish to indict Brown on hearsay; I’d much prefer to read his works in full context. That’s not to say that some of the charges against Brown won’t stick; however, I remain unconvinced that the charge that he cast doubt upon the Deity of Christ can be proven, as evidenced by the lengthy quotes I provided above.

    ReplyDelete
  159. It’s time for me to call this as I see it: The Islamisation of Europe is a multi-faceted scheme, one of which is wealth redistribution at the expense of the European taxpayer, i.e. middle class. Along similar lines, see this latest video by Black Pigeon Speaks regarding the disposition of those displaced by the Grenfell Tower fire: The DANGEROUS PRECEDENT of Unbridled Charity

    ReplyDelete
  160. Craig
    Just watched the Black Pigeon Grenfell Towers video. I can't understand why so many people could feel so guilty for being productive and hard working and basically honest. The U.K. is what it is because of the British work ethic, not because they're opressing or stealing from these arab freeloaders. Just the contrary.
    And I can't understand why there's a general feeling that we owe these vermin a dang penny, much less everything we've got.
    Charity is always good. Charity is the highest impulse in the human heart. But we're told to be as "wise as serpents", along with "as harmless as doves".
    Don't people realize that Islam is invading Europe and then U.S. ?
    Don't they realize that war has been declared by Islam on the west ?
    What's it going take to wake these bleeding hearts up ?

    I'm beginning to think that it's not charity at all, but just cowardice.
    So, I guess terrorism is working.

    ReplyDelete
  161. Susanna9:46 PM

    Constance,

    Fr. Brown's errors are meticulously documented in "The New Biblical Theorists: Raymond Brown and Beyond" by Msgr. George A Kelly.


    https://www.amazon.com/New-Biblical-Theorists-Raymond-Beyond/dp/0892831669

    ReplyDelete
  162. To illustrate, hopefully, that I’m not biased in favor of Raymond Brown—that I’m attempting to remain objective—I direct readers to this website by Catholic apologist Dave Anderson, who critiques him using others’ reviews of Brown’s works (and Anderson interjects his own thoughts):

    Fr. Raymond Brown’s Hermeneutical Heresies

    However, I note that not one reviewer claims that Brown casts doubt on the Deity of Christ and none accuse him of promoting Process Theology.

    ReplyDelete
  163. paul,

    I’m reminded, in part, of some lyrics of The Clash’s “London Calling”:

    …but I have no fear
    ‘cause London is drowning
    And I live by the river

    The song ends with a guitar mimicking S-O-S in morse code.

    Are you aware that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, is a Muslim? Are you aware that he was sworn in by putting his hand on the Koran, as illustrated in this video, as opposed to the Bible, which is custom?:

    Sadiq Khan MP Swears in.

    Under the video is the following note by its uploader:

    Sadiq Khan takes the oath on the koran.However ,Sadiq Khan has to pick up and the replace the koran himself as the other person is not allowed to touch it,even though it appears to have an outer sleeve.This is because the person swearing in the MP's is a non muslim and viewed as unclean and dirty,a kafr.

    Dhimmitude in the mother of Parliaments.


    There are only a few comments accompanying the video, and they are worth reading.

    The problems with the West are legion, however, feminism is one of its largest, if not THE largest. Another part is the social brainwashing which has been going on for decades. Part of this brainwashing in schools includes negative portrayals of whites in general and white men in particular (for the record, I’m white). This breeds white guilt and white ethno-masochism. Unfortunately, this is promoting an undercurrent of white supremacists; however, it’s also promoting a more valid white ‘nationalism’, which routinely gets labeled white supremacy. This, then, results in a stifling of conversation and more white guilt/ethno-masochism, along with hatred against whites by non-whites. This, in turn, leads to whites (and other races) tolerating the intolerant.

    Black Pigeon Speaks is probably my favorite YouTube channel; however, I caution that he speaks as a secularist, and sometimes—not often—uses vulgarities to get his points across. With this in mind, I direct you to a video I’ve referenced once before:

    Why Women DESTROY NATIONS * / CIVILIZATIONS - and other UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS

    Essentially, when, in general, men allow women to usurp their role as leaders, civilizations collapse, as women’s freedoms lead them to ever-leftward political leanings. The West has, in essence, become matriarchical rather than patriarchical. Now, of course, this is secular culture I'm speaking of, not Christian. It’s because of society’s shift from Biblical morality to ‘anything goes’ that we are at this point of near-collapse.

    ReplyDelete
  164. Constance Cumbey said...
    I am still trying to sort out the confused genealogy of Javier Solana who was written up when I first discovered him as the "Nieto" (grandson) of Salvador de Madariaga. He was reportedly the son of Nieves Mathews. Joaquin Roy's book on the A to Z of the European Union says he is the GRANDSON of Salvador de Madariaga. Javier Solana endorsed Joaquin's book. HOWEVER, I want to be strictly accurate. Now, I discovered that my long ago article on Solana's confused genealogy had a visit from Nieve Mathew's (Madariaga's elder daughter). For the sake of accuracy and honesty, I'm copying what she posted to my article here again.
    So it appears to me that most likely Javier Solana is a great nephew of Salvador de Madariaga. My thanks to Mathilde for helping to clear the confusion. It is a mystery to me also but I want to be accurate in my information.

    CONSTANCE

    I am the goddaughter of Nieves Mathews. This is all mindlessly erroneous. Nieves was NEVER married to Francisco Solana. Javier Solana is her cousin. Nieves married Paul Mathews in 1939. He was her only husband. They had a son, Christopher P. Mathews, who was born in Bristol, UK, on October 19, 1939. On February 1, 1943, Nieves's only daughter, Beatrice, was born. Those are her only two children. How the whole Solana confusion started is a mystery to Beatrice and Christopher, who are second cousins to Javier, not siblings. They are the direct and only grandchildren of Don Salvador de Madariaga--who is the great uncle of Javier Solana.
    # posted by Anonymous Mathilde Archibald de Vega : 10:20 PM


    1:50 AM Delete

    ReplyDelete
  165. Constance, once some priests who then get into seminary teaching buy an idea it can infect more people.

    paul

    you don't know what hinduism is. It is NOT chakras, that is info from Indian civ exploited to screw one's mind, aka illumination hinduism is worship of vedic false gods plus some mystical philosophical stuff (some is in the charismatic and/or contemplative scene) ramped up to look better to Brits.

    if chakras weren't real and manipulating them make you more vulnerable to evil spirits and self deceptive states, why would demons work on getting us to do this? if they don't exist they are harmless waste of time and nothing to argue against christians doing for a placebo effect. idiot.

    LEAVE CHAKRAS ALONE NOT BECAUSE THEY DON'T EXIST BUT BECAUSE THEY DO EXIST.

    an effort to refute Eccles. 12 as relevant a few years ago referred to the life force that animates the body, an occultic mystical concept itself (which is probably accidentally correct). AND NO ONE CUAGHT IT!

    some clairvoyance is physical since animals see and react a lot of "spiritual" is just a more attenuated form of material.

    as for the Gospel, chakras and MArs are not part of it neither is the politics on this blog you need the Gospel followed by the Bible to sort these things out, and to do spiritual warfare. so why do you talk in terms of mixing it? I suppose you think salvation requires understanding EU politics? or when and if we get into WW3?

    you who denounce viciously any serious weapon against new age practices that discredits them possibly
    with them and with deceived Christians, SOUND LIKE PANICKED WITCHES!

    Craig

    I NEVER CHANGED MY STANCE. reframing is restating, not changing stance "do you have H2O" is reframed as "do you have water?"

    "... you state the Crucifixion was settled on before creation, which made it as good as having happened...the point I strongly imply in... my initial comment,"

    liar. you stated agianst this that between decreed and dead is a difference. you argued for the book not the Lamb's slaying being from the foundation, since the book depends on the Lamb's death, BUT THAT IS WHY
    the book is AFTER the foundation.

    " ... the end result of either translation “amount[ing] to the same thing”."

    AGAIN YOU LIE. you did NOT say this about translations but that either the book or the Lamb's death being from the foundation amounted to the same thing, WHICH THEY DO NOT.

    you say I misunderstood but agreed NO. your main point was no backup plan but what's arranged
    before or during start is by definition a backup plan, and YOU MAKE GOD OUT TO BE AN IDIOT BY DENYING HE MADE A BACKUP PLAN. you don't need supernatural wisdom or foreknowledge to compute the liklihood of the Fall.

    "...Not grammar ambiguity…" yes I deny ambiguity that goes against the predetermination of the Cross (outside of your warped mind). any ambiguity in Greek is an ILLUSION NT Greek is not Classical or modern different rules. you say text issue new and unrelated and is irrelevant to translation. idiot, text determines translation. (you presented Greek text yourself.)

    YOU HAVE NO CREDIBILITY WITH ME never refuted me and I REFUTED YOU REPEATEDLY. enough of you
    and your self satisfied phony graciousness. I will ignore you.

    BTW prewrath rapture doesn't involve two second comings, just a hover in the sky with Jesus.

    ReplyDelete
  166. Christine wrote: I will ignore you.

    I sincerely hope you will live up to that statement. It would have saved me hours of writing to refute your comments in response to my initial statement addressed to someone else. You’ve promised to ignore me previously, yet you have not. Should I call you a liar? Nah, I won’t resort to ad hominem as you are wont to do when you lose arguments.

    I don’t wish to rehash any of the original and ensuing argumentation, but I do want to challenge you on your newest assertion that the translational issues are because of differences in the Greek text—that the difference between the Byzantine text, which underlies the KJV, is different from the Greek text underlying modern versions to the extent that it accounts for the different translations.

    From this link is the Byzantine text:

    καὶ προσκυνήσουσιν αὐτῷ πάντες οἱ κατοικοῦντες ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, ὧν οὐ γέγραπται τὸ ὄνομα ἐν τῷ βιβλίῳ τῆς ζωῆς τοῦ ἀρνίου τοῦ ἐσφαγμένου ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου.

    And from that same link is the critical text underlying the newer versions (Westcott and Hort / [NA27 variants]):

    καὶ προσκυνήσουσιν αὐτὸν πάντες οἱ κατοικοῦντες ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, οὗ οὐ γέγραπται τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ βιβλίῳ τῆς ζωῆς τοῦ ἀρνίου τοῦ ἐσφαγμένου ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου.

    Perhaps you can show me, as well as all the readers here, how the differences support your claim? Let me save you some work—you can’t. The differences are very slight: plural pronouns vs. singular pronouns (αὐτῷ vs. αὐτὸν and ὧν vs. οὗ) and the omission/addition of a pronoun (αὐτοῦ). Essentially, the differences amount to ‘whose names are not written…’ vs. ‘whose name is not written…”. Otherwise, the two are identical.

    ReplyDelete
  167. Craig said 9:09 AM

    "I quoted this in an article I wrote a while back (Panentheism and the Trinity), noting this is quasi-pantheistic (footnote 25). The way I see it, for New Agers this is the very reason to preserve the earth, as matter—the ‘evolution of matter’—is integral to the ‘salvation’ of the immanent aspect.

    Currently, the earth's life supporting ecosystem is serving a good purpose. When everyone attains enlightenment there will no longer be a good purpose for the earth's life supporting ecosystem to exist. The Hindus believe that a planet's life supporting ecosystem will come to an end when its inhabitants' level of morality and spiritual attainment (or lack of it) ether gets too good or too evil. It is a balance of good and evil that keeps the earth's life supporting ecosystem in existence. The earth has never been in a "very good" state of existence, as it says in the book Genesis. The earth and the whole creation (or the universe) cannot be "liberated from its bondage to corruption," as the "word of God" says it will be in the book of Romans. If it were to be "liberated from its bondage to corruption," it would cease to exist. Because of a scientific discovery, Christians no longer believe that the earth is "firmly setting on a foundation [standing still] and shall never be moved." So why do Christians still believe that after "God was finished creating the universe," including the "Garden of Eden", his word in Genesis expresses the truth, when it says it (his finished creation) was "very good". Up until the time of "Adam's original sin," all the animals were suppose to have been vegetarians (that would have been good, or even "every good"), However, scientific discovery has proven this so-called Biblical "truth" to be a lie.

    ReplyDelete
  168. Anonymous10:10 AM

    It's rather suspicious that whenever MCE leaves her cockroach droppings, Old Dullheimer crawls out of the woodworks to leave his too!

    ReplyDelete
  169. Thomas Dahlheimer,

    Thanks for responding. But what you’ve done is uncovered the crux of the matter—pun intended. According to your theology, it is necessary for earth to be freed from the ‘shackles’ of its ‘outer shell’, matter. This is what Matthew Fox was getting at in his statement that there is no “private salvation”. In the Theosophical schema, for all to be “one” again, earth itself must also be part of this “one”, which means that the ‘outer earth’ must “evolve” so that ‘inner earth’ can be fully divinized, and the ‘inner earth’ is only fully divinized when the exterior shell is fully evolved.

    That’s why I contend that Theosophy / New Age is quasi-pantheistic. You may deny that you worship the earth, buy you cannot deny the fact its evolution is integral to your own full salvation. Even those who have supposedly reached Nirvana/salvation are waiting for the time when “all is one again”, which means they await the time when all others, including the earth, have attained full divinity—a release from the outer shell, i.e. matter.

    This, then, supports Constance's assertion that New Agers engage in earth worship.

    ReplyDelete
  170. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  171. Craig, New Agers believe that neither the "inter earth", which is spiritual, nor the "outer earth", which is matter, will attain "full divinity", nor do we believe that both will attain divinity, we believe that only humans attain divinity. If, as you stated, the "inter earth" has not yet attained "full divinity" (whatever that means) as expected by New Agers, would not worship of the whole earth constitute idolatry in the minds of those who worship it? Besides, I do not believe that Constance Cumbey was referring to the "inter earth" when she stated that New Agers worship the whole earth. And I also do not believe that you believe she was referring to the "inter earth". There is no such thing as attaining "full" divinity, there is only attaining divinity. The "inter earth" has not attained divinity, as you suggested we New Agers believe (we do not believe this to be true) , and we believe that it never will attain divinity, nor will it ever attain "full divinity" (whatever that means), as you have also suggested we believe. I think you were being quite deceptive in your above response.

    ReplyDelete
  172. Thomas Dahlheimer,

    Let’s back up a bit, then. You’ve claimed that “original sin” (whatever that was exactly) resulted in the Big Bang, i.e. Jehovah/Maya/nature/Satan. Blavatsky states the following (SD = Secret Doctrine):

    1) Wherever there is an atom, there is life (SD 1, p 258), which means all things have life.
    2) An atom is “immutable and imperishable” (SD 1, p 542).
    3) Deity is within every atom (SD I, pp 1-3): “Deity is an arcane, living (or moving) FIRE, and the eternal witnesses to this unseen Presence are Light, Heat, Moisture,”—this trinity including, and being the cause of, every phenomenon in Nature” (p 2-3).

    Of course, all matter is made up of atoms; hence, all matter contains “Deity”. This is the essence of the immanent aspect of panentheism in Theosophy and all other forms of Gnosticism.

    By the implication of all three points above, all atoms have the same makeup—they are all of identical “Deity”. So, what happens to the “Deity” inside of the earth?

    ReplyDelete
  173. Susanna5:44 PM

    Craig,

    Actually I did read what you said about "the Word." What I meant by my question which I should have made clearer is what else are we to make if it if John is not saying that Jesus is God?

    Re: Brown’s assertion that ho theos was rarely predicated of Christ is absolutely correct. Certainly the term is used of the Father much more so. Of course, this doesn’t mean it was never used of Christ, as Brown makes abundantly clear.

    I haven't read all of Brown's writings, but as a Catholic - and a Catholic priest at that - whose Old Testament is officially the Septuagint, Brown should have realized that KYRIOS which was the Greek equivalent of Jahveh, Adonai and Shaddai in the Septuagint Old Testament canon was frequently predicated of Christ - especially by St. Luke and St. Paul in the New Testament. Moreover, as a former Pharisee who studied at the feet of the famous rabbi Gamaliel, St. Paul would have known exactly what he was doing in referring to Our Lord as "Kyrios."

    As for placing the divinity of Christ in doubt, just by casting doubt on the virgin birth of Jesus, Raymond E. Brown cast doubt on the deity of Jesus. The whole point of Christ being born of a virgin was to show that He was the Son of God, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, truly God as well as truly man, consubstantial with the Father in terms of His divinity.

    Specifically, in his book Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine (1985), Fr. Brown again put the Virgin Birth — a central dogma of the Catholic faith — in the category of "doctrines for which there is slender basis in Scripture."

    https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=525
    ______________________________________________________________________

    This is not "guilt by association." This is guilt by the very words he wrote himself.

    "A Slender Basis"

    In point of fact, Fr. Brown in his first Union Theological Seminary lecture, in 1971, sounded a well-publicized call for "a scholarly reassessment" of the historical accuracy of Jesus' conception and virginal birth.

    Specifically, in his book Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine (1985), Fr. Brown again put the Virgin Birth — a central dogma of the Catholic faith — in the category of "doctrines for which there is slender basis in Scripture."

    Such was Fr. Brown's reputation and his influence as a pioneer in modernist Scripture scholarship that many Catholic "biblical scholars" followed his lead. Some of them took more "far-out" positions than Fr. Brown himself, charging that a number of New Testament revelations, especially those related to Saints Matthew's, and Luke's infancy narratives, were mythological, just nice stories to underscore a certain truth.


    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  174. susanna5:47 PM

    cont.

    Fr. Brown and many of those Catholic exegetes who followed him hold that it is "very uncertain" that angels appeared to Mary and Joseph; that there appeared a star interpreted by magi from the east as a sign of the birth of the King of the Jews, and that they followed it to Bethlehem; that angels appeared to the shepherds; and that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth.

    Also on the Raymond Brown "doubtful list" was that Herod learned about Jesus' birth and then ordered the slaughter of children in Bethlehem, and that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fled to Egypt to escape slaughter. And, as Marian scholar Gerard Morrissey, author of The Hardest Cross: Doctrine and Vatican Policy, pointed out recently, if anyone doubts all that, he must also doubt St. Luke's four canticles — the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis (Simeon's words at the Presentation), and the Gloria in Excelsis.

    Morrissey in his soon-to-be-published book. For the Love of Mary: Defending the Church from Anti-Marianism, devotes several chapters to an examination of Fr. Brown's mythological anti-Marianism with its obvious implications. He notes, for example, that if the Angel Gabriel never appeared to Mary at the Annunciation, the beautiful words of the Hail Mary, "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee," were never spoken. Further, if the Blessed Virgin received no word from the Angel Gabriel, she could never have said in reply: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word."

    To protect himself lest he be accused of a denial of the Virgin Birth, Fr. Brown asserted artfully that he accepted the dogma because the Catholic Church teaches it, even though "the Church through its official teachers has made the decision that a minority New Testament view, however scarcely attested, was a true evaluation of what God did in Jesus."


    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  175. Susanna5:52 PM

    cont.

    Nevertheless, Fr. Brown, in writing, teaching, and lecturing that resonated in schools and colleges, in seminaries, in pulpits, and in many chanceries, insisted that "the scientific controlled evidence derived from a study of the New Testament left the historicity of the virginal conception unresolved."

    A Rebuttal

    Morrissey tells us that Fr. Brown, while believing that "it is likely that Matthew and Luke teach the Virgin Birth," also asserts that the Virgin Birth is only a "minority view in the New Testament." Why? Because other books of the New Testament, for example, the Gospel of Mark, make no mention of the Virgin Birth.

    To this, Morrissey offers a well-reasoned rebuttal for Catholics troubled by Brown's reasoning:

    "Suppose a family member suddenly takes seriously ill. Nearby is a doctor's office. So we ask Raymond, a family member, to go for the doctor. Before leaving, Raymond tells us: 'Our family believes that this man has a special knowledge of medicine. Since the family believes this, and I want to be loyal, I believe it also.

    " 'However, I'm not sure that this man is a licensed doctor. Perhaps he is, but it's possible he is not. Yes, he has two plaques on his office wall. One says he graduated with honors from Harvard Medical School. The second plaque says he was licensed five years ago to practice medicine in our state. But, perhaps these statements are not historically true: they may be a literary device by which the man is communicating an important truth — that he is interested in helping sick people.

    " 'One reason we have to doubt whether this man is a licensed doctor is that none of the other tenants in the building has a plaque on the wall supporting such a claim. The silence of other tenants means that either they deny that he is a doctor, or that they are ignorant of the fact. In other words, it is only a minority view within his own building that he is licensed. Would such denial or ignorance by fellow tenants be possible if the man were really what his plaques claim?"'


    The rest of the family, Morrissey stated, would logically respond to Raymond as follows:

    • "The reason our family is convinced the man has special knowledge of medicine is precisely the fact that he claims to be a licensed doctor who graduated from Harvard Medical School."

    • "If the claims made by the plaques in his office are not historically true, then the man is a liar and a fraud — and our family would not go to him."

    • "The 'silence' of the other tenants does not mean that this is only a 'minority view' in the man's own building that he is a licensed doctor. If anything, such silence indicates that the rest of the tenants accept the man's claim — since if they do not, at least some of the tenants would have made a statement or taken some action to warn the unsuspecting public."


    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  176. Susanna6:04 PM

    cont.

    Pertaining to the defined dogma of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, Pope John Paul II, writing after Fr. Brown and the others set forth their arguments, officially rejected their position in July, 1996 when he stated:

    "The uniform Gospel witness testifies how faith in the virginal conception of Jesus was firmly rooted in the various milieux of the early Church. This deprives of any foundation several recent interpretations which understand the virginal conception not in a physical or biological sense, but only as symbolic or metaphorical: it would designate Jesus as God's gift to humanity. The same can be said for the opinion advanced by others, that the account of the virginal conception would instead be a theolo-goumenon, that is, a way of expressing a theological doctrine, that of Jesus' divine sonship, or would be a mythological portrayal of Him.


    "As we have seen, the Gospels contain the explicit affirmation of a virginal conception of the biological order, brought about by the Holy Spirit. The Church made this truth her own, beginning with the very first formulations of the faith.

    "The faith represented in the Gospels is confirmed without interruption in later Tradition. The formulas of faith of the first Christian writers presuppose the assertion of virginal birth, a real, historical virginal conception of Jesus. . . . The solemn definitions of faith by the ecumenical councils and the papal Magisterium, which follow the first brief formulas of faith, are in perfect harmony with this truth."

    A Befogged Wasteland

    St. John's University professor emeritus Msgr. Kelly in his The Church's Problem With Biblical Scholars declares that when Fr. Brown questions the doctrine of the virginal conception, "and says what he earlier called infallible, is really fallible, after all," Brown leaves his audience, if not himself, "in a squirrel cage running round and round in a circle always returning to the same place, doubt."

    Msgr. Kelly stated that the new modernist proposals are often only theories which contradict understandings from the earliest Christian days.

    Scripture scholar Fr. Gilsdorf, whose excellent two-part series in The Wanderer some years ago commenting on Fr. Brown's book, 101 Questions on the Bible, debunked many of Brown's theories, including his concept of "an ignorant Jesus," urges that before reading Fr. Brown, Catholics should forearm themselves by an open-minded reading of orthodox critics of Brown.


    "Begin with Msgr. Kelly, then Cardinal Shehan, Fr. Miguens, Fr. Most, and Fr. Laurentin," Fr. Gilsdorf says.......


    https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=525
    _________________________________________________________

    When all is said and done, my problem with Father Raymond Brown has nothing to do with the notion that his modernist beliefs were sincerely held. I do not doubt that he was very sincere. My problem with Father Brown is that he continued to insist on calling himself a Roman Catholic priest at the same time he held these beliefs.

    ReplyDelete
  177. Anonymous10:23 PM

    Same ole spew eh Christine? Can't ever seem to get over yourself, can you?

    Do yourself a favor and ignore not just Craig, but all of us, the whole blog. Ignore the whole thing and find somewhere else where you might be able to get over yourself since you can't and won't even attempt that here.
    Posts like yours above, like countless others you have posted here over a long period of time, remain in the same ole vein, and those pathetic examples are why I don't believe a word of what you post. Ever.
    You literally hate everybody because of your ugly discourse (other places too) and never seem to arrive at a place of common ground or even a simple truce to agree to disagree.
    That's twisted, ma'am.
    Just like you still love to hate your mother. Still able to twist off about her also aren't you?

    Can you take the truth?

    Jesus gives peace to any heart and mind he indwells. And you obviously have no peace whatsoever in your heart and life because your posts only have, and continue to reveal that what I'm saying to you is the truth.

    The multitude of things you don't want to get over, are the proof of your soul's deeply entrenched bitter root.
    And your soul looks to be in peril. Hebrews 12:14-17
    God has been merciful to warn you.

    ReplyDelete
  178. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  179. Craig you wrote:

    "Blavatsky states the following (SD = Secret Doctrine): ) An atom is 'immutable and imperishable'. (SD 1, p 542).

    My comment: Blavatsky believed, and all people today who are theosophists, and everyone who is of either one of the two Eastern religions (Hinduism and Buddhism) as well as all Gnostics, believe that the universe/matter will come to an end. So, Blavatsky believed that eventually all atoms will perish.

    "This is the essence ["an atom is .. imperishable", NOT] of the immanent aspect of panentheism in Theosophy and all other forms of Gnosticism."

    My comment: Atoms are not divine, but they have divinity in them. Christians believe that Jesus is in them and that He is divine, but Christians do not worship each other. And, likewise, New Agers do not worship the earth nor do they worship the universe. The spirit of the earth and the spirit of the universe will be set free from matter when all of humanity attains divinity. The spirit of the earth and the spirit of the universe are currently in a fallen and corrupted state of existence and are therefore not worthy of worship by anyone. When they are finally back in their original state of existence, and are pure and divine once again, all humans will have already attained divinity, and that which is divine does not worship anything else that is divine, including the liberated spirit of the earth and the liberated spirit of the universe.

    "By the implication of all three points above, all atoms have the same makeup—they are all of identical “Deity”. So, what happens to the “Deity” inside of the earth?"

    My answer: When matter comes to an end, the presents of divinity that was in it will be in the restored, original and pure spiritual universe that existed before It
    corrupted Itself, which caused matter to come into existence.

    ReplyDelete
  180. Susanna,

    To your first question, re: “God” in the Gospel of John, I’m still not exactly sure what you’re driving at; so, I’ll answer the best I can. The simple fact is that the fourth Gospel does proclaim Jesus as God, and Brown doesn’t hesitate to affirm this. Regarding 8:58—since you mention this in your first comment—Brown states, “No clearer implication of divinity is found in the Gospel tradition, and ‘the Jews’ recognize this implication [they find it blasphemous]” (p 367). If your point is that had the fourth Gospel not proclaimed Jesus as God we would then run the risk of Jesus as non-Deity by Brown’s accounting, I would point you to Morrissey’s rebuttal to Brown that you just cited.

    As to the Kyrios (Lord) issue, we must take each specific context individually. For example, in the Septuagint of Genesis 31:35, kyrios is a translation for adonai, but the referent is Laban, as Rachel is addressing her father by this title. And, while most times “lord” is used of God in the LXX, we cannot necessarily import “God” into each and every occurrence of “lord” in the NT. To do so would be to fall prey to an exegetical fallacy. The term has a sufficiently wide range of meanings—unlike ho theos—that many times there’s some ambiguity of meaning in NT contexts. Do those calling Jesus by this title actually mean “God”?

    A seemingly surefire example would be one in which there is a Septuagintal quote in the NT, which in the OT is a clear referent for God—e.g., one in which the original referent is YHWH—with its NT referent clearly as Jesus. But is this really definitive? To illustrate that it’s not, let me explain how I argued for Christ’s Deity on that non-Trinitarian site I mentioned above.

    While I don’t recall exactly where I began, one of the verses I cited was Mark 1:2-3, in which, assuredly, the original referent in the OT for “Prepare the way for the Lord” is YHWH; yet, in this instance the referent implies Jesus. End of story, right? Nope. While they affirmed Christ as Messiah, they denied His Deity while affirming His agency (shaliach). That is, their contention was that Christ was acting in YHWH’s stead, and that, as agent, He was endowed with duties and responsibilities like any agent today, as in a power of attorney. They compared this to OT examples of “gods”, such as Psalm 82:6, as well as the Judges.

    Undeterred, I kept going, citing Brown, in whose work I’d first read about this agency idea, the following in reference to John 5:17-18:

    In particular, as regards men, divine activity was visible in two ways: men were born and men died on the Sabbath. Since only God could give life (2 Kings 5:7; 2 Macc 7:22–23) and only God could deal with the fate of the dead in judgment, this meant God was active on the Sabbath . . . God has kept in His hand three keys that He entrusts to no agent: the key of the rain, the key of birth (Gen 30:22), and the key of the resurrection of the dead (Ezek 37:13). And it was obvious to the rabbis that God used these keys even on the Sabbath (p 217).

    Continuing…

    ReplyDelete
  181. Continued…

    Hence, since John 5:17 could be construed as implying that Jesus was doing these very things—an insight I’d not seen anywhere in exegetes of John’s Gospel previously—the implication was that Jesus was/is, in fact, God. This was in addition to ‘the Jews’ explicit claim that Jesus calling God “His own Father” was tantamount to a claim of Deity and, hence, blasphemy in ‘the Jews’ eyes. To my way of thinking, Brown unequivocally, masterfully affirmed Jesus’s Deity! [I had very recently used Brown’s quote above in an article I’d just written, pursuing this thought even further, at the time I began interacting on that other blog, so it was fresh in my mind.]

    I’m not volunteering as a Raymond Brown apologist, so I’ll keep the rest short.

    Regarding the Virginal Conception/Birth (VC/B) issue, I think Brown’s phrasing that it has “a slender basis in Scripture” is disappointing. However, it’s not incorrect to state that the VC/B is only found in Matthew and Luke. This is poor phraseology, but not heresy—and I mean heresy according the RCC. The VC/B is certainly found in Tradition—no doubt on that—but, to state that it’s not mentioned much in Scripture is a true statement.

    Yet, I don’t find an appeal to Tradition as an example of historical affirmation of the VC/B an adequate basis for further confirming it—and this is not specifically because I’m not Catholic. I’ll explain by analogy: If I’m asked for an alibi, and my alibi is that I was home watching TV on this particular evening, and when asked for corroboration, I say my brother was with me, would the detectives find this adequate? Similarly, if Church Tradition is based upon Matthew and Luke, and nothing else, then there’s no independent corroboration.

    To be clear, I unequivocally affirm the VC/B, as it’s clearly in Scripture. That’s evidence enough for me! But, I can certainly understand non-Christians being nonplussed. While I don’t know Brown’s motives, I’ve a suspicion he was looking at these issues from the perspective of an objective third party, not a Catholic. That is, his attempts were to assess Catholicism from the outside. If this is the case, I don’t see this as necessarily dangerous; to the contrary, I see it as a healthy way of confirming one’s belief system. If, at the end of the exercise, the belief system remains intact, then one is even more assured of one’s faith!

    However, as to your claim that Brown stated that the angelic appearances to Mary and Joseph were “very certain”—as opposed to clearly laid out in Scripture—I find this concerning, as it points to an in/errancy issue. But, I disagree that this necessarily casts doubt on Christ’s Deity. Calling this “very certain” points to at least ‘most likely’ affirming it—certainly not denying it—and when placed alongside Brown’s unequivocal affirmations of Christ’s Deity in John’s Gospel, any doubt is alleviated.

    ReplyDelete
  182. Susanna1:36 PM

    Craig,

    Regarding John in the Gospel, I meant to ask rhetorically ( sorry for my lack of clarity ) that If John was not directly calling Jesus God in the first chapter when he said "the Word WAS God," then what was he calling him?

    Regarding what you said about context with regard to Kyrios, your point is well taken, but it is nevertheless true that in the Septuagint, Kyrios was the Greek equivalent of Jahveh, Adonai ( Lord ) and Shaddai and that Kyrios was in turn predicated of Jesus in the New Testament - especially by St. Luke and St. Paul, a former Pharisee who zealously persecuted Christians before his conversion..

    We will have to agree to disagree on Brown's modernist biblical exegesis. What he did was to abuse the historical critical method in order to promote a more "scientific" and "demythologized" Gospel bereft of miracles and clear sense of the direct intervention of God in human history.

    What I mean by his having abused the historical critical method is that he made use of a method called "form-critical analysis." If a person begins biblical exegesis by assuming (on grounds that are never adequately communicated to us) that any reference to miracles and the supernatural cannot possibly be historical, but is to be relegated instead to the realm of "fantasy" or "mythology," then every instance of the supernatural in the Gospels are going to automatically be relegated to the realm of fantasy or myth. Far from "demythologizing" the Scriptures, Brown merely substituted a fictitious narrative of his own when analyzing the Gospel narrative.

    Form-critical theory assumes that the early Christians took ideas and scenes from the Old Testament and shaped them into their own stories about Jesus. And again, it does so on grounds that it never quite gets around to explaining to us in any rationally convincing way.

    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  183. Susanna1:38 PM

    cont.

    The weakness of this reasoning.

    Underlying Brown's conclusion that Matthew's Infancy Narrative was created imaginatively by Christians from parallel stories about Moses in the Jewish Midrash tradition there appears to be, among other things, an error of anachronism. Brown, to be sure, is aware that, according to the historical evidence, "most" of these Jewish stories cannot be dated prior to the 80s, the time when he supposes that Matthew’s Gospel was published, but he is unaware that all of these Jewish stories appear to have been fashioned after the time when the episodes in Matthew 1-2 could already have been in circulation. The curious fact is that Brown, while he likes to examine all of the historical possibilities behind an episode, completely overlooks the idea that the Jewish stories may have been created imaginatively from the parallel accounts now recorded in the Gospels. And this kind of oversight is typical of form-critics. As I indicated in a previous article12, the episodes in Matt 1-2 were known by the Virgin Mary from the time that they took place, and she could easily have recounted these events to Matthew the Apostle as early as the gatherings in the Upper Room before the first Pentecost or at any time thereafter. Josephus wrote down the Jewish stories about the birth of Moses around the year 90 A.D., which would be up to sixty years after the time when some Christians and also some non-Christian Jews could have known the episodes that Matthew has recorded. Brown goes along with Bultmann, Dibelius, and a host of other non-Catholic form-critical scholars, in believing that "no one of the four evangelists was an eyewitness of the ministry of Jesus," and that the Gospel of Matthew was composed by someone else in or near the 80s.13 Form-critics readily grant that a complex tradition of imaginative Christian stories could have developed in less than sixty years, but they take no account of the same possibility for the Jewish tradition that Brown is citing here. Yet some Jews had a motive for creating these stories. We know from the Acts of the Apostles that a heated debate between Christians and Jews over the facts about Jesus took place beginning from the time of the Resurrection of Jesus, and this debate could have motivated some creative persons to counteract the true accounts of the Infancy of Jesus with parallel stories about the birth of Moses. In fact, form-critics do assume that the stories in the Jewish Midrash tradition were invented, but their method prevents them from realistically considering the hypothesis that the Jewish stories were based upon the Christian tradition.
    ......

    http://www.rtforum.org/study/lesson26.html
    ________________________________________________

    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  184. Susanna1:41 PM

    cont.

    Once Brown sawed off the branch upon which he was sitting with regard to his placing the historicity of the virgin birth and the infancy narratives in doubt, his saying "unequivocally" that Jesus is God rings more than a little hollow

    We can say whatever we want about the application of "ho theos," "Kyrios" "the Word," etc., but to place the historicity of the virgin birth of Christ in doubt is to implicitly place the divinity of Christ in doubt.

    Echoing C.S. Lewis in his book MIRACLES, Msgr. McCarthy writes:

    201. True historians do not assume in advance what could have taken place and what could not have taken place, using rationalism as the basis of their judgments. Rather they use the instruments of their profession to determine what did take place, and, if what took place was miraculous, they accept it as miraculous. Catholic form-critics do not deny categorically that miracles could have taken place, but their method tempts them to deny miracles wherever Catholic dogma does not forbid, and always to retain a measure of doubt regarding the rest. True historians do not, like form-critics, deny that Jesus was born in Bethlehem on the basis of an unproved assumption that Jesus must have been born in Nazareth. When true historians read a sober account like that of Matthew's Gospel, they do not assume, using weak plausibilities to justify their assumption, that he made up events to smooth out his story; they need historical evidence which, in fact, is not there. A fundamental mistake that Catholic form-critics almost universally tend to make is that they do not attempt to show concretely and with respect to the particular passages that they are analyzing how their conclusions as Catholic form-critics do not carry with them the rationalist presuppositions of the method. If the first two chapters of Matthew are adjudged to present a complex of imaginative stories, what does this judgment do to Christian faith? How can a Catholic accept that these episodes regarding the early childhood of Jesus are imaginary, and that Christians could blithely fabricate such accounts as though they were true without being liars and deceivers? Catholic form-critics like Father Raymond Brown do not say that the composers of these stories were liars and deceivers, but neither do they squarely face the implications of their conclusions and provide adequate answers.

    http://www.rtforum.org/study/lesson26.html
    ______________________________________________________

    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  185. Susanna1:52 PM

    cont.

    Regarding Father Raymond Brown's form-critical approach to the Virginal Conception of Jesus
    http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt133.html


    Brown, who was a disciple of Rudolph Bultmann, paid lip service to the credal formulas in order to avoid formal censure while casting doubt on the inerrancy of the Scriptures and on the divinity of Christ.

    As a believing Catholic, Brown accepts the virginal conception of Jesus as an object of faith, but, as a form-critic, he here (as quoted in the preceding paragraph) doubts its historical truth. The problem is that Catholic faith is an undoubting affirmation of the reality of the objects of faith, that is, of their historical truth, and it does not allow for a pluralism which negates the unity of truth or for a fideism that relegates the objects of faith to a non-real world of religious belief.

    This problem runs through the whole gamut of Catholic form-critical scholarship, in the sense that Catholic form-critics like Father Brown, while they do not deny the dogmas of faith, never address and resolve the deep undermining of the faith that is implicit in their form-critical reasoning, because they have not succeeded in establishing a truly Catholic form-critical approach. The Second Vatican Council did not water down the constant teaching of the Church that the Sacred Scriptures are wholly inerrant. Catholic historical critics, using their method of interpretation, have simply misrepresented the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on biblical inerrancy precisely where it says that “the books of Scripture are to be affirmed as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error the truth as God wished it to be set down in Sacred Writings for the sake of our salvation” (Dei Verbum 11).5 .

    5. According to “the modern analysis of how New Testament christology developed,” Brown avers that “New Testament christology developed backwards, from end to beginning” (VCBR, p. 43). This means that the idea that Jesus was the divine Son of God developed only later in the minds of believers and was then pushed back to earlier happenings. Thus, he says, in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, the Christology has been moved back to the infancy of Jesus in the womb of Mary, since the Angel Gabriel is said to proclaim Him to be the Messiah and the Son of God (pp. 43-44). Brown thus characterizes the virginal conception of Jesus as “the idiom of a christological insight” (VCBR, p. 28), but this scholarly idea is merely a copying of Bultmann’s supposition that the divinity of Jesus reported in the Gospels began to be invented in the imagination of believers from the time of the crucifixion of Jesus. What Brown calls an “insight” Bultmann calls a fantasy, and Brown nowhere refutes Bultmann by showing that this “insight” is not a fantasy...


    http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt133.html
    _____________________________________________________

    You say Brown affirms Jesus as "God?" So did the bishop known as Arius who was the author of the heresy that bears his name......Arianism. Apparently, Arius had a problem with "God becoming man." For Arius, Jesus was "a man who became god." For Arius, Jesus was not God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made "consubstantial with the Father" in terms of His divinity. Had Arianism prevailed, it would have resulted in the paganization of Christianity because worship would have been directed to a creature instead of the Creator.

    ReplyDelete
  186. Susanna2:28 PM

    Craig,

    Re: Yet, I don’t find an appeal to Tradition as an example of historical affirmation of the VC/B an adequate basis for further confirming it—and this is not specifically because I’m not Catholic.....To be clear, I unequivocally affirm the VC/B, as it’s clearly in Scripture.

    Sacred Scripture is the WRITTEN TRADITION of Roman Catholicism. Therefore, from a Catholic point of view, you ARE appealing to Tradition - the WRITTEN TRADITION - as an affirmation of VC/B.

    I think it is unfortunate that the Catholic rule of faith is spoken of in terms of "Scripture and Sacred tradition." It would be better spoken of in terms of two facets of the SAME TRADITION....the WRITTEN Tradition and the LIVING ORAL Tradition. While everything in the ORAL Tradition is not explicitly found in the WRITTEN Tradition, the two cannot contradict one another. That said, I would go as far as to add that the Scriptures are so authoritative that if Scriptures were contradicted, the Scriptures would prevail.

    ReplyDelete
  187. forgive my PUNishment here, but it appears to me that perhaps, er ah, our good friend Christine could use a good CHAKRAabsorber.

    Sorry, but I couldn't resist it.


    Constance

    ReplyDelete
  188. Thomas Dahlheimer,

    I concede that I may misunderstand the convolutions of SD 1, p 542 (item #2 of my comment @ 4:45PM); it makes more sense that the ‘Deity’ within each atom is “immutable and imperishable”. The way I understand the end goal in Theosophy is the destruction of all matter so that the ‘Deity’ within matter can be freed, but also that all can be at-one with Brahman; thus, essentially, all the ‘individual’ ‘Deities’ can be One, Monadic DEITY. This is basically what the Kabbalah teaches, and Blavatsky specifically recognizes the Zohar (SD 2, p 247).

    The way I construe your presentation, it seems the ‘Deity’ within “Mother Earth” is ‘lesser-than’ the ‘Deity’ within humans. This sounds contradictory to me, as all ‘Deity’ within matter is, according to Theosophy, all part of the same Life-Force and all interconnected.

    You wrote: When matter comes to an end, the presents of divinity that was in it will be in the restored, original and pure spiritual universe that existed before It corrupted Itself, which caused matter to come into existence.

    This is self-contradictory. How does the “presents of divinity” “corrupt Itself” when it was a “pure spiritual universe”? How did the “pure spiritual universe”—which implies non-corruption—corrupt itself? Stated another way, how can corruption even exist in a “pure spiritual universe” (is this “pure spiritual universe” congruent with Brahman, or is it the place in which Brahman dwells?)? What was this ‘corrupting’ exactly (can you define/describe it?), and how did this “cause [the not “very good”, per Jehovah] matter to come into existence”? Essentially, I’m going back to—borrowing the subtitle of Blavatsky’s first book—your cosmogenesis, which I find unsatisfactorily and self-contradictorily explained.

    ReplyDelete
  189. Susanna,

    I found Brown’s 1965 Theological Studies article online Does The New Testament Call Jesus God?. It is, by necessity, a bit technical, though readable to the layperson. I’ve read the intro and conclusion, skimming much of the material in between [though I’m familiar with some of the exegesis of some of these verses, having referenced these in my exchanges on that non-Trinitarian site], and I think if you give it a careful, objective reading (including footnotes) you’ll find that some of the claims about this work, and about Brown’s stance on other related issues, are inflated. Brown addresses the NT use of kyrios for Jesus, comparing it with the NT use of theos for God the Father, being more generous than I’d speculated he’d be in my above comments.

    He’s correct that the NT describes Jesus’ inherent Divinity in functional rather than ontological terms—as opposed to later creedal developments. This isn’t to deny Jesus’ ontology as both God and man, this is just explaining how the NT describes Christ.

    The claim that Brown was a “Bultmann disciple” is overstated. Both may have been form-critics, but that term isn’t as narrow as portrayed, though the methodology does have some holes. Brown engages with and specifically disagrees/refutes Bultmann quite often, most especially his “demythologizing”. I have found this in his Anchor Bible commentary on John, and it can be found in small measure in the above article. I have Bultmann’s commentary on the Gospel of John, and though I’ve only read small portions, I’m familiar with his overall stance. I’d say the most controversial aspect of Brown’s commentary on John is his position that parts of the Gospel are redacted by members of a “Johannine community”—a position I do not hold, and a position that’s fallen out of favor in recent scholarship.

    On the criticisms regarding Brown’s stance about the infancy narratives, look at what’s implied on page 28 of the above pdf at footnote 65 and the text with which it relates. The way I read this, when coupled with the criticism you’ve supplied, Brown unequivocally affirms the veracity of the claims, but believes these to be a later development of the oral tradition preceding the actual writing of Matthew and Luke. Assuming that I understand this correctly—the important point is that he affirms this being true. That is, footnote 65 certainly implies Brown’s belief in the Virginal Conception. To phrase a bit differently, Brown doesn’t necessarily question the veracity of the VC, he believes this to be a later development of the oral tradition which lead to the writing of the Gospels. Could this be because Brown sees the Gospels as focusing on Jesus’ three year ministry in roughly chronological order, and that the infancy narratives, though true, do not fit within this narrow construct? To be sure, I’m speculating, having not read the original material.

    If your last paragraph @ 1:52PM regarding Arianism is an implication that Brown either explicitly or implicitly promotes this heresy, you are very wrong. Having engaged with Arians on that non-Trinitarian site, I’m well familiar with some of their methodologies, one of the most important being their exegesis of John 1:1-14. Brown’s exegesis is right in line with standard orthodoxy and is in no way congruent with Arianism.

    ReplyDelete
  190. Anonymous3:54 PM

    Christine,

    Delighted if you prefer to ignore me. It allows me to explain where you are wrong without the resultant flurry of non-sequiturs.

    Regarding auras,

    One test... involved placing either one or two persons in a completely dark room and asking the alleged psychic to state how many auras she saw. Only chance results were obtained. James Randi conducted another test for a television special, offering $100,000 for successful results. The psychic challenger selected ten people she maintained had clearly visible auras, and agreed that the auras would extend above the screens behind which-unseen by her-the people were to stand. Unfortunately, in choosing which screens supposedly had people behind them, the psychic got... four out of ten correct guesses - very close to chance. From:

    http://www.csicop.org/si/show/aura_photography_a_candid_shot

    I expect you think you really can do it. So did they.

    No replies, now...

    Physicist

    ReplyDelete
  191. Anonymous4:01 PM

    Christine Dear,

    At each end of the rainbow lies a pot of gold. Happy hunting.

    ReplyDelete
  192. Shout Out:
    Thanks to both Susanna and Craig for the dialog.
    Seriously, I enjoy it.
    It could be some of the last rational, civil discourse left on earth
    for all we know.
    And it's relevant, and pertinent, and you'll notice neither party threatens
    to behead the other.
    That's pretty cool I'd say.

    In case you just stopped in:
    Susannna is a Roman Catholic who loves the Lord.
    And Craig is an unabashed Protestant who also loves that same Lord.
    That is; that Lord in the Bible just as he appears in the scriptures when one reads
    the whole thing, and doesn't, like Christina, drag a whole passel of folklore
    into it and confuse trhe whole picture.
    This is not like Sunni vs. Shia where they bomb and kill each other.
    This is not like yada yada yada yada where they hate each others guts, no.
    This is not even like U.S. politics today where they RESIST and propagate
    false reports, no.
    This is just a simple rational, Christian dialog. God bless it and
    God bless Craig and Susanna and Constance Cumby, et al.
    And, oh, if you believe in Jesus Christ, they're going to want to cut off your head.

    Have a nice day!

    ReplyDelete
  193. Susanna9:48 PM

    Thank you Paul for your kind words. I am glad that you can see that Craig and I enjoy engaging in Christian dialogue. I think very highly of Craig and regard him as a very devout Christian who loves the Lord as I do. He is also rather proficient in Greek. :-)

    Stay tuned. There is more to come.

    ReplyDelete
  194. Susanna10:14 PM

    Craig 8:08 AM

    I have read Brown's Does The New Testament Call Jesus God? and my position remains unchanged. I will not presume to speak for the Protestant communion, but Brown's modernist exegesis which is an abuse of the historical critical method is not acceptable to traditional Catholics......especially his critics among the traditional Catholic clergy. Moreover, Brown professed to be a Catholic priest. Therefore, as a Catholic, I feel I have the right - as well as the duty - to challenge whatever he taught that places Catholic teachings in doubt - many of which are also key Protestant doctrines. I wouldn't do this if he were a Protestant. I am more than content to allow the Protestants to police their own. But I digress.....

    In addition to predicating "Kyrios" of Jesus and in addition to the phrase "the Word was God" in the Johannine Gospel, Jesus Himself says "I and the Father are one," (John 10:30) and "Before Abraham came to be, I AM" (John 8:58). The Hebrew equivalent of I AM is JAHVEH which is never used to refer to anyone BUT God.. Also significant are passages that apply the title "the First and the Last" to Jesus. This is one of the Old Testament titles of Yahweh: "Thus says Yahweh, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, Yahweh of armies: ‘I am the First and I am the Last; besides me there is no god’" (Is. 44:6; cf. 41:4, 48:12). In Philippians 2:6, Paul tells us that Christ Jesus "who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped" (New International Version). So Jesus chose to be born in humble, human form though he could have simply remained in equal glory with the Father for he was "in very nature God." This title is directly applied to Jesus three times in the book of Revelation: "When I saw him (Christ), I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me, saying, ‘Fear not, I am the First and the Last’" (Rev. 1:17). "And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: ‘The words of the First and the Last, who died and came to life’" (Rev. 2:8). "Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense, to repay every one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the beginning and the end" (Rev. 22:12–13).

    ******************************
    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  195. Susanna10:19 PM

    cont.

    Re: . The way I read this, when coupled with the criticism you’ve supplied, Brown unequivocally affirms the veracity of the claims, but believes these to be a later development of the oral tradition preceding the actual writing of Matthew and Luke.

    This is a perfect example of the subtle way in which Brown paid lip service to the Creedal claims and then placed their Scriptural historicity in doubt.

    Moreover, right out of the box in Does The New Testament Call Jesus God? Brown also begins by paying lip service to the creedal statements but then muddies the waters by questioning the "manner of understanding." Either Jesus is God or He is not. If He is not, then we are not redeemed and we are still in our sins. The Resurrection was the miracle Jesus promised as the sign that he was who He said he was. Namely God Incarnate. St Paul said that if the Resurrection were not a historical fact - if it did not really and truly happen - then we among all men were to be pitied.

    12Now if Christ is preached, that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised; 14and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. 15Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; 17and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 1 Cor 15:12-20

    Another example is his improperly separating the "functional approach" to Christ from the "ontological approach" when both are to be found together in Scripture and professed in the Nicene Creed. Abusing the functional approach is often part and parcel of the neo-modernist approach called "doing theology from below" ( also Christology from below) which erroneously rejects the idea of an objective public divine revelation transmitted directly by Christ to Peter and the Apostles. Brown does not appear to begin with and recognize the authority of special revelation. He seems to begin with and give the greater authority to human experience, culture, science, philosophy, “the best of contemporary thought," etc.

    cont.

    ReplyDelete
  196. Susanna10:23 PM

    cont.

    From Brown's work which we are discussing:

    THIS ARTICLE has a very limited goal; perhaps we can best make this clear by stating what the article does not intend to discuss. First, this article will not raise the question of whether Jesus was God. This question was settled for the Church at Nicaea, where it was clearly confessed that the Son was God and not a creature; he was "true God of true God." The recognition that such a belief is still the hallmark of the true Christian is found in the Amsterdam Confession of the World Council of Churches, which stated that the World Council is composed of "Churches which acknowledge Jesus Christ as God and Saviour." Yet, if we take for granted that Jesus was God as confessed at Nicaea, there still remains the question, to what extent and in what manner of understanding and statement this truth is contained in the New Testament. A development from the Scriptures to Nicaea, at least in formulation and thought patterns, is recognized by all. Indeed, the council fathers at Nicaea were troubled over the fact that they could not answer the Arians in purely biblical categories.1

    As contemporary scholars2 have so well shown, by the time of Nicaea there had been a definite progression from a functional approach to Jesus to an ontological approach. And so, it is perfectly legitimate to push the question about the divinity of Jesus back before Nicaea and to ask about the attitude of the New Testament toward the problem.
    .........

    http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/26/26.4/26.4.1.pdf

    _____________________________________________________

    Since the Catholic Christian rule of faith has always been Scripture and Sacred Tradition, the only one who seems "troubled" over the alleged "fact" that the Council Fathers "could not answer the Arians in purely biblical categories" is Brown himself. Again, the reason I mention the Catholic Rule of Faith is because Father Brown presented himself as a Roman Catholic priest. If the Protestant Rule of Faith is Sola Scriptura, then the Bible had BETTER call Jesus God!!! Otherwise, where else is a good Protestant going to learn about his salvation?

    And then there is this:

    The limited nature of the topic we are treating does not diminish its importance, especially in ecumenical relations. In Protestant-Catholic dialogue a preference on the part of some Protestants for avoiding the phraseology "Jesus is God" is quite evident.

    http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/26/26.4/26.4.1.pdf
    ________________________________________________

    ReplyDelete
  197. Susanna10:28 PM

    cont.

    I am not taking a shot at you here because I believe you are a good Protestant Christian with whom I am having a discussion about one particular "Catholic" biblical scholar, but I am sure that there are many other good orthodox Protestants who might have a few things to say to liberal Protestants who "prefer" to avoid the phraseology "Jesus is God."

    While "fear that an exclusive emphasis on the divinity of Christ may lead to a failure tp appreciate His humanity," this is no justification for considering Christ's humanity at the expense of His divinity!

    Moreover, just the fact that Brown would have the temerity to hint that the Creed of Nicaea "evolved" in the sense that it might not be identical to the Creed proclaimed in the Gospels is troubling. He implies in his "nuanced" modernist way that there is something of a dichotomy between the Creed of Nicaea and the Sacred Scriptures...a dichotomy between the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history. 

    This sure smacks of neo-Arianism to me! - albeit "carefully nuanced!!" Especially since Arianism was the chief heresy for which the Nicene Creed was intended to serve as a remedy to begin with.

    And here Brown refers to Bultmann:


    ......The uneasiness about calling Jesus God arises on several counts.

    First, it has been argued that the statement "Jesus is God" is not a biblical formulation. It is to this problem that our article will be directly addressed. At the outset we may call attention to articles by such distinguished scholars as R. Bultmann4 and V. Taylor,5

    who conclude that the New Testament exercises great restraint in describing Jesus as God and who do not favor the designation......


    http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/26/26.4/26.4.1.pdf



    .....A frequent patristic interpretation is that Jesus is trying to lead the man to a perception of his divinity, i.e., that Jesus is showing the man what he is really (and correctly) implying when he addresses Jesus as good. One cannot but feel that such an exegesis is motivated by an apologetic concern for protecting the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus.

    http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/26/26.4/26.4.1.pdf


    What "patristic interpretation?" When referring to "patristics," he doesn't specifically quote any of the Church Fathers that I can see - especially the Apostolic Fathers - except perhaps to Athanasius in a footnote near the beginning at the bottom of page 545.

    ReplyDelete
  198. paul,

    Thanks for your kind words. I enjoy engaging with Susanna because I know that we’re basically on the same page theologically, and that any disagreements won’t result in any sort of ad hominem. I will say that it’s rather ironic that I’m defending a professing Catholic exegete (and a Jesuit at that!), while Susanna is criticizing him.

    Susanna,

    For the record, my proficiency with Greek is mediocre at best, really. My vocabulary is poor. What I possess is quite a few very handy tools—one in particular that parses all the words and has a great search function. If I had to take any first level test without my tools, I’d likely flunk or barely pass. However, I have studied grammar and syntax—second year material—which greatly assists in exegeting and understanding scholarly material (with great effort, I should add). I just wanted to say that, as I don’t like to take any undue credit.

    ReplyDelete
  199. Anonymous12:39 AM

    "While "fear that an exclusive emphasis on the divinity of Christ may lead to a failure tp appreciate His humanity," this is no justification for considering Christ's humanity at the expense of His divinity!"

    Amen to that Susanna.

    ReplyDelete
  200. Susanna,

    With all due respect, you’re not fairly representing that paper. In the second paragraph of the article, Brown lays out the limitation of the piece—and all articles must necessarily be limited in some manner—specifically stating that “the New Testament attitude toward the divinity of Jesus is much broader than the scope of this article.” He goes further: “To treat such a question, one would have to discuss all the important Christological titles, e.g., Messiah, Son of God, Lord [kyrios], Saviour, etc…” Brown goes even further: “Even more important, one would have to analyze the descriptions of Jesus' actions and miracles; his attitudes toward the Temple, the Sabbath, and judgment; his self-assurance in his proclamations and teaching; his sinlessness; etc…”

    Essentially, in this article Brown is answering the question, “Does the NT call Jesus ‘God’ (theos)?” And he concludes by answering the question in the affirmative, without reservation:

    The question that forms the title of this article must be answered in the affirmative. In three clear instances and in five instances that have a certain probability Jesus is called God [ED: theos] in the New Testament (p 565).

    For Brown to state that “Jesus is God” is not found in Scripture is analogous to saying that “Jesus is man” is not found in Scripture. Both are true statements only insofar as they are borne out in the corpus of Scripture, but neither is explicitly stated in such simple form. And to claim one without the other is error [Brown calls the former “semidocetic”]—the first denies His humanity, the second His divinity. Jesus is man, but He is not merely man; Jesus is God, but he’s also man.

    Now let’s continue with Brown in his conclusion:

    The use of theos of Jesus which is attested in the early second century was a continuation of a usage which had begun in New Testament times. Really, there is no reason to be surprised at this. "Jesus is Lord" was evidently a popular confessional formula in New Testament times, and in this formula Christians gave Jesus the title kyrios which was the standard LXX translation for YHWH. If Jesus could be given this title, why could he not be called theos, which the LXX often used to translate elohim? The two Hebrew terms had become relatively interchangeable, and indeed YHWH was the more sacred term.

    Here Brown affirms that Jesus was called kyrios in the NT and that this term was tantamount to theos. I don’t know how he can more clearly affirm the Deity of Christ! Especially given the paper’s limited scope.

    You are missing what Brown is saying here. The NT does not, strictly speaking, speak in ontological terminology. The term homoousios (as opposed to Arius’ homoiousios) is not in Scripture. Had this been explicitly stated in Scripture, there never would have been an Arian controversy. The differences between Athanasius and Arius had to do with interpretation, since Scripture does not explicitly claim that Father and Son are of the same ‘substance’/‘essence’. This is why Arius preferred the iotahomoi- vs. homo-ousios—his opinion is that the Son was lesser than the Father.

    ReplyDelete