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Quote of the Day: The Atheist Who Pushed Me to Serious Christianity
Now if I’d really seen [God], really there, really alive, it’d be in me like a fever. If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who watched ’em like a father and cared for ’em like a mother … well, you wouldn’t catch me sayin’ things like ‘there are two sides to ever question’ and ‘we must respect other people’s beliefs.’ You wouldn’t find me just being gen’rally nice in the hope that it’d all turn out right in the end, not if that flame was burning in me like an unforgivin’ sword. And I did say burnin’, Mister Oats, ‘cos that’s what it’d be. You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just … is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors. — Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
When I first read this passage a decade ago, it struck me like the proverbial bolt out of the blue. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are just funny stories set on a flat earth resting on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle that swims through space, and yet here was a passage that so neatly encapsulated my frustrations with my church it could have been written for me. We were a church that seemed to exist for friends to spend time together while the world church leadership dragged us further and further into political correctness.
Sir Terry was a secular humanist, and throughout many of his books there are comments that suggest that he thought the whole notion of religion was silly and should be abandoned. And yet, his words had the opposite of the intended effect on me. Yes, I completely agreed with him that the watered-down, politically correct Christianity of modern times he was mocking is ridiculous, but my response was not to leave Christianity. Rather, I found a church that does believe in declaring the truth of the Resurrected Christ no matter how uncomfortable that makes the secular world.
So thank you, Sir Terry, for helping me become a better Christian, even though that wasn’t your goal.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
No, you don’t respect their beliefs, to the point that you’ve bothered to come into this thread to state definitively that “There is no God” and belittle others for their beliefs. I’m not a religious person, but you are. If you weren’t a religious atheist, you wouldn’t feel the need to try and convert everyone around you to your cause. Do you go to regular atheist meetups? I used to. I quit going because it was a lot like church except instead of sitting around talking about how much we believe in God, we sat around talking about how much we didn’t believe in God and we were superior to everyone who wasn’t like us. You can choose this hill to die on, being a smug person with a superiority complex, but it certainly isn’t going to make you friends or persuade anyone who isn’t part of your atheist circlejerk.
I respect the people, not the beliefs. Many are very nice despite them.
Demonstrably false when you say that the people are guilty of “hopeless naivety” or are “charlatans.”
You are being disingenuous.
When it comes to salvation and such Christ is the be all and end all of Christianity. When it comes to understanding what we should believe, Paul may be more important. It’s not just that we’re limited to a relatively small amount of Christ’s words, but even those who spent considerable amounts of time with him were fundamentally wrong on some core elements of Christian practice until they were corrected by Paul at the Council of Jerusalem.
Also, Christ was not unfamiliar with Greek thought; while he also spoke Aramaic, like most people who had been living within the Hellenic cultural sphere he also spoke Greek. This is particularly clear in John’s gospel, which has countless puns that only work in Greek. He isn’t as formally schooled in Greek thought as he would have been had he been a Pharisee (the books of the Maccabees, the foremost pharasaic expression of opposition to the helenicization of Jewish culture, were written in Greek!), but it’s there in a similar way to that in which a kid growing up in Quebec today will have a degree of understanding of American culture.
Even in those gospels that feature fewer unambiguously Greek puns (Petra/ Petros, for instance, has an Aramaic analog that works almost as well), Christ’s words are still mostly transmitted in the dominant language. The documents of the Church during the centuries that preceded the general confident belief in the Trinity are in Greek and are written by people who mostly had extensive training in Greek thought. To put it another way, our understanding of what Christ said comes through multiple layers of Greek speaking and often philosophically schooled thought.
It would thus be surprising if there weren’t some truths explained in the language of those philosophers. I join MJBubba both in being excited to hear what proofs of Greek thought Skyler is referring to and in mild skepticism that they will live up to the claims, but I don’t think that Greek thought is unimportant when it comes to a sound understanding of theology.
I have some respect for Bill Cosby, who I believe to be a charlatan in much of his preaching of family values (obviously, his treatment of various women was awful, but his efforts to improve the lives of ordinary African Americans appear to me to have been genuinely heroic and far from entirely unsuccessful). Charles Murray and his co-ideologues often call for an increased level of virtuous hypocrisy among the denizens of Belmont. While I think that the strong sense of Skyler’s claim is demonstrably false and that claim is, in itself, an explicit admission that his earlier claim that he respected beliefs was false, there is a weaker sense in which it is plausibly true; I confidently believe that Skyler respects lots of Christians.
It’s an issue of the Spirit’s relationship with the Body of Christ. If the First Council of Constantinople was the infallible word of God, if one takes the Church seriously, it behooves us to tread carefully before defacing the text. That is not to say that there cannot be clarification; after all, the Creed itself was a supplement to a considerable body of previously existing divine utterance. Thus, the Council of Constantinople was able to expand on the Nicene Creed without particular controversy. That clarification, though, came with considerable effort and did not change the meaning of the word; even if one accepts the more limited understanding of contemporary Catholicism (ie., the Father is the sole cause of the Trinity), the claim that the formulation was infallible, that a failure to adopt the novelty was grounds for excommunication, was the sine qua non of the schism. Had the Cardinal Humbert called for a Council rather than claiming to excommunicate the bulk of the Church, or had Victor II failed to support him (which might have been easier if the response had been less vehement), it seems unlikely that there would have been a split at that time.
If the schism was about anger over Iconoclasm, it is surprising that it took place centuries after Iconoclasm was defeated and split two enthusiastically Iconodule communities of faith (indeed, the East is noticably more enthusiastic about the defeat).
If the filioque was not why the schism happened, it is surprising that so many of the key actors claimed that it was.
My personal preference goes to the argument for belief in The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents. It’s something of an elaboration on the version of Pascal’s Wager found in 4th Maccabees; even if our religion is false, we should believe in it because the ethical structures we create for ourselves would be inferior.
I should note that while it is marketed as a kid’s book, not only is it one of the best books he wrote for adults, but it is, in my view, somewhat inappropriate for children. It features a child protagonist engaging in some genuinely disturbing acts and some other questions of proper actions that benefit from maturity. It is my sense that if you tell kids too persuasively that there are times to abandon basic ethical norms for the greater good they are likely to be too quick to discover justifications in their own lives.
I do not reject Greek thought as unimportant to the study of Christian theology. Many of the early Christian writers you allude to had become important voices within the Christian community precisely because of their training in Greek thought.
What I reject is the notion that they imported Greek thinking into Christian teachings. Their training in Greek thought was important because it was needed to effectively counter Greek thought and provide a thoroughgoing rejection of Greek thought. It helped that they could explain the differences in the two ways of thinking by using concepts and allusions familiar to people raised in Pagan culture.
Ah. So now you agree with me.
I don’t think that the various Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thinkers who had profound impacts on our understanding of the faith (including, among other things, helping to form the canon, shape the creed, and such) were only learning philosophy in order to refute it. There are plenty of Patristic admirers of Aurelius’ Stoicism, even if they felt that he was clearly wrong about a bunch of other stuff, just as there are many Christians alive today who are influenced by the philosophy of Sartre or the poetry of Journey, despite the sort of belief that Journey urge people to retain not really being Christian.
I think we’re on the same page that Skyler’s earlier claim sounded silly, but if all he meant by it was that early Gentile theologians were mostly people who were educated in the academic fields of the day, as he suggests in #69, I think that we are, as he suggests, on the same page.
Absolutely not.
Paul was knowledgeable of Greek thought. It does not follow that he introduced anything into Christianity that came from Greek origins. In fact, you would be hard pressed to demonstrate that Paul introduced anything new at all. And, anything you want to claim was an innovation from Paul, I am pretty confident we can show better roots for any Pauline concepts from the Gospels or John or Peter or Jewish origins than from any cockamamie Greek theory you want to advance.
The early Christian fathers had a strong affinity for Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. I believe the primary reason for this affinity was the way in which they were skeptical of the Homeric tales of the Greek Pantheon. They did not plainly say the stories were false, though they obviously thought so. What they said was that the Homeric tales were insufficient to explain the world and the nature of Man. They set about exploring for underlying moral truth. They were building up a framework for intellectual exploration of Truth, Good, and Evil. This is what led to the lengthy explorations of virtues, and that is what led to the Forms.
Christians know that G-d is, and that G-d is good, and that all goodness comes from G-d. Christians also know that Man and all Creation are corrupted by sin. In that sense, the Christians thought they were out ahead of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, but that those guys had been doing as well as a poor uninformed Pagan could be expected to do, in the absence of the superior spiritual knowledge that had been given to the Jews, and in the absence of the Christ.
I mean, if you’re analyzing it in a secular fashion I think it’d be fair to say that Paul introduced the eating of pork. Pagan philosophers ate pork. Probably the early Jewish adopters of pork would have used recipes that had heretofore only been used by Greeks (at least in the Pauline sense of the term to generalize gentiles of the region). Unless I’m misunderstanding you (which is highly plausible), it only makes sense to deny that Paul introduced things if you’re saying that the guy who introduced the stuff that Paul brought to Christianity was God, which kind of begs the question.
I think it’s more that they soaked in the atmosphere of their society at that time; people who had the leisure to study did study, because what else would you do? People who didn’t, didn’t, but if you were going to study, the syllabus was Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, and such, just as Christian kids today generally learn about Animal Farm, Romeo and Juliet, and other non-scriptural classics, even if they’re home schooled. It’s probably helpful for apologetics and such, but it’s also more generally helpful for being accepted as a part of civilized society and most people aren’t cut out to be hobo hermits.
Right. I agree with this. I think that there were some who believed that Plato and Aristotle received divine knowledge (heck, I’m not sure that they didn’t get a nudge), but I don’t think that that was a strong claim on a general basis.
But eating the unclean foods was not an innovation by Paul. He prevented Peter from going back to kosher after Peter had already described his vision. See Acts Chapter 10.
Paul preached the Good News to the gentiles. But the Good News that Paul preached was the same Good News being preached by the brothers in Jerusalem, as they affirmed in the Council. See Acts Chapter 15.
If you are speaking only of which kinds of unclean foods, or talking about recipes, then that is not theological content that rises to the level of “Christian teachings.”
If you’re going to get hung up on which apostle introduced a teaching, then you have to go with Peter on dropping the food restrictions. Even after his vision, these things were dealt with in a council.
Your last thought in this paragraph shouldn’t be taken lightly, though. The critics desperately want to exaggerate differences between biblical authors to attack their credibility. It’s very important to understand that the doctrines come from God and not from men.
What is funny to me is that almost all the religions of the Levant, Greece, and in fact all the Mediterranean and middle east developed from some core religious beliefs. Judaism and Christianity take the idea of sacrifice from the ancient religions in that area. The entire story of Jesus being killed to gain favor from god is heavily influenced by these pagan forebears. Even the polytheistic trinity, Mary and the saints comes from a tradition of pagan polytheism, as does the theory of the three-in-one nature of the trinity. All these ideas are steeped in Greek and Semitic culture prior to the rise of Christianity, except that the nature of the trinity was more recent in Greek philosophy. It might (or clearly does) upset the sensibilities of some Christians, but the history is there to see.
Our culture is still deeply drenched in the culture of sacrifice, so much that we hardly see it as an option. I think this cultural blindness is the source of the anger being expressed here.
It makes no sense to kill someone to gain favor with a god, it most certainly makes no sense to kill the son of god to gain favor with that god — unless your culture has already influenced you to think sacrifice is a value to admire. It isn’t in my opinion, but several thousand years of culture make it hard for people to think otherwise.
You still knee-deep in this Skyler? For an atheist you seem to talk a LOT about God.
Let it be, go out and enjoy the summer man :)
Eh. My brother is a priest. This is my family life.
This is amazingly ignorant. It also misses the obvious source of any commonality in ancient practices.
People have been offering sacrifices from the earliest days, that’s not a Greek invention.
There is a great difference between Jewish sacrifices and the pagan practices.
The pagan religions attempt to get their God’s attention with sacrifices. The offerings are given to gods who are at best indifferent to their people’s fate.
The jewish system is established by God in a different manner. He offers redemption. He brings the people out of slavery first, then sets up a sacrificial system that points to an ultimate sacrifice in Christ. The sacrifice does not seek favor, but restores what is broken. God provides the real sacrifice himself. This is a key difference.
Skyler (View Comment):
What is funny to me is that almost all the religions of the Levant, Greece, and in fact all the Mediterranean and middle east developed from some core religious beliefs. Judaism and Christianity take the idea of sacrifice from the ancient religions in that area. The entire story of Jesus being killed to gain favor from god is heavily influenced by these pagan forebears. Even the polytheistic trinity, Mary and the saints comes from a tradition of pagan polytheism, as does the theory of the three-in-one nature of the trinity. All these ideas are steeped in Greek and Semitic culture prior to the rise of Christianity, except that the nature of the trinity was more recent in Greek philosophy. It might (or clearly does) upset the sensibilities of some Christians, but the history is there to see.
Our culture is still deeply drenched in the culture of sacrifice, so much that we hardly see it as an option. I think this cultural blindness is the source of the anger being expressed here.
It makes no sense to kill someone to gain favor with a god, it most certainly makes no sense to kill the son of god to gain favor with that god — unless your culture has already influenced you to think sacrifice is a value to admire. It isn’t in my opinion, but several thousand years of culture make it hard for people to think otherwise.
This is amazingly ignorant. It also misses the obvious source of any commonality in ancient practices.
People have been offering sacrifices from the earliest days, that’s not a Greek invention.
There is a great difference between Jewish sacrifices and the pagan practices.
The pagan religions attempt to get their God’s attention with sacrifices. The offerings are given to gods who are at best indifferent to their people’s fate.
The jewish system is established by God in a different manner. He offers redemption. He brings the people out of slavery first, then sets up a sacrificial system that points to an ultimate sacrifice in Christ. The sacrifice does not seek favor, but restores what is broken. God provides the real sacrifice himself. This is a key difference.
(iPhone formatting problems, here starts Skyler’s comment)
And yet they still borrowed the idea of sacrifice from their forebears. After Abraham they decided sacrificing their children was bad, but then Christians “resurrected” the concept in a different way.
At the council, it was Paul who led the moderate antinomian position, the prevailing of which introduced the teaching to the wider Church.
Right. I’m with you on the truth being that this stuff came from God. I nonetheless feel that it’s important that the views of those who agree with Skyler remain wrong even if one brackets God out from the conversation. It’s important not only for theological reasons, but also historical and cultural; the enemies of the West have long found it important to pretend that the reason we eat eggs at Easter is not because we fasted from them during Lent, but because we’re secret pagans, that the reason we celebrate Easter at Easter is because of some pagan Goddess in England, not because of the concerns present at Nicaea, that the reason we revere multiple people as saints is that pagans had multiple gods, etc.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Skyler to accept that God is behind all Christian doctrine. I do think it’s reasonable to hope that he will be explicit about the specific myths he has bought into so that they can be rebutted. One cannot rebut claims as broad as Paul being, in general, super Greek. One can rebut specific claims made in the service of that claim.
Abraham wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea, either; something almost happening once is not the same as that thing being the regular practice of the faith.
It’s true that Christ’s sacrifice is a sacrifice of someone’s son, but there isn’t a particularly close connection to the pagan practice of sacrifice. We remember the sacrifice, but we don’t crucify Christ. His sacrifice is part of our mythology, not something we do on special occasions. There are people who refer poetically to us doing so, or say that we do so when we sin, but it’s really not a similar thing to roasting a lamb, let alone a person.
Do you have any sources for this? I believe that exploration of Neolithic religion suggests that sacrifice did not originate in the Middle or Near East.
Could you cite something in specific? There are lots of these myths about, but it’s not worth going into detail to rebut one unless it’s the one you’re thinking of. This is a fun selection.
Again, I’d really appreciate it if you could be precise about the pagan origins of the trinity. It should go without saying that an alternative reason for us respecting Mary and various other great figures in our history is because Mary and various other people in our history are worthy of respect. Do you not believe that there are great men and women in history? If so, do you believe that you believe this because that’s what some dudes taught in the Mediterranean thousands of years ago?
My study of classical philosophy when I was studying theology was not as extensive as my wife’s (I did more early modern and postmodern stuff, whereas her thesis was on the influence of the Sybelline Oracles), but I’d be surprised if there was a theology department from a leading university that din’t require a grounding in Platonic and Aristotelian thought. That’s because much of the language of scripture and, more so, of the Church Fathers is harder to understand without that grounding. It is not because there was a lot of pagan doctrine that was adopted. I studied under a “post-Christian feminist” and many other non-Christians; St. Andrew’s isn’t exactly being defensive when it spurns popular illiterate slanders of the faith.
I’m not sure what you mean here. If you mean that we believe personal sacrifice to be an important part of life then I agree, but do not believe that the Greeks are responsible.
I don’t think you’re quite following how the Crucifixion worked. No one killed Christ in order to gain favor with Him. He loved us before the Crucifixtion just as much as He did afterward; God sent his only Son before the sacrifice, not as a result. Furthermore, it wasn’t Christians who scourged him and such. The closest thing to an exception is Judas and Judas’ decision is not one that it widely admired by the Church. It’s not even a decision that Judas felt good about.
How broadly do you mean this? If, for instance, someone gives up their Saturday afternoon to volunteer at a retirement home, would you say that this decision did not reflect a value that you admire?
You ask many questions that I can answer only by saying that I’ve read lots of books about ancient religions and that is my recollection. I’m not talking about the facile stories of mythology, but the in depth understandings, that we can now only see hints of, in those ancient religions — from the mother of the mountain, to Ba’al and others that I can’t even remember the names of. I’m not a scholar, I don’t write scholarly papers on the topic and I won’t be held to such a standard (not that you were asking).
So, in the end answering your last question will suffice to answer all the others. I only mean in the broadest terms. Yes, not working on a Saturday comes from Judaism, as does the seven day week, though others before them might have come up with that, I don’t recall. The concept of sacrificing animals and people to imaginary beings is steeped in western civilization, I don’t think all civilizations have that concept. I do not believe the idea is universal and there is nothing about it that would make it so (unless you believe in god, but that’s getting circular).
The idea of granting Mary a divine status and the frequent practice of the church of adapting pagan rituals to christian rituals cannot be so lightly dismissed as “eggs weren’t eaten during Lent.” I pretty sure eggs were eaten during Lent, as was fish, the Church being sure to make that rule so people wouldn’t be malnourished. Easter is very much named after a pagan goddess, and hares and mistletoe were worshipped by pagans. I’m not in any way dismissing the sincerity of anyone’s beliefs then or now, but it’s simply silly to say that christianity had no influences from pre-christian ideas or from post-christian pagan religions for that matter.
If you study the ancient religions of the Mediterranean area, you’ll find that where they were replaced by christianity there was a stronger tendency to grant more status to Mary. Those areas were dominated by religions that previously worshipped female deities. In other places (northern Europe for instance) Mary is recognized but not to quite the same extent.
I will agree with you 100% on that. It has never made sense to me from the earliest days of my life and I doubt I will ever see the logic behind it, not for lack of listening to people trying to explain it.
@jamesofengland
I would prefer that you not use the term “our mythology.” I completely understand that you simply mean that technically as “our teachings about our own history,” but it could be confusing. I believe that our teachings about our history are true.
Our history is well-documented. Many anti-Christians have made assertions about the alleged falsehood of some aspect of our history, only to have subsequent archaeology corroborate the traditional version.
In reply to James O.E.’s request for specifics, you wave him off with ‘there’s lots of books.’ You are convinced that the books you read are true while all of the Christian story is false, but you cannot supply even a single name of a source. You are real hazy on the particulars but rock solid convinced of your conclusion.
Your Atheism is a religion that requires more blind faith than any version of Christianity I know.
The most maddening argument ever. Okay, maybe you might call it “faith” to refuse to see something that isn’t there, but that’s pretty backwards.
And you can feel all put out by my inability to go dig through the hundreds of books on my shelves to find the right quotes to satisfy you, but you’ll never be satisfied by anything I find and I have clients that pay me that need my time more than you do.
Go attend to your clients. We understand that real life is a higher priority than Ricochet.
Then pull just one book off the shelf and give us the summary of one version of one of your “Pagan origins of Christianity” theories. I am skeptical that you actually have anything that holds up to even a lay Christian review, much less a review by historians.
Imperial Abuse of the Church
I used Iconoclasm as an example of how the Eastern Roman Emperors continually toyed with the eastern church and used it as a state organ. If the state is dictating who is to be elected as Patriarch or what the true faith is to be then the church is no longer serving in its mission of bringing God to this world but rather as a mouth piece of princes. If the divine truth is dictated by Princes looking for convenient solutions to their worldly problems then differences are going to occur and they will become more pronounced the longer said state intervention occurs.
There are many examples of this abuse occurring to the Eastern Church (and many Eastern Roman Emperors attempted the same with Popes, but with less frequency and success). First is Heraclius who had Monothelitism created as a means of courting the support of Miaphysites, who were the religious plurality in the Levant and Egypt, during the Islamic invasion of the Eastern Roman Empire. The attempt failed and only created more confusion within the Church.
Second is the Isaurians. Literally instituting a heresy because of superstition is a terrible thing, taking territory from the See of Rome and giving it to Constantinople (literal state intervention in the faith) and in typical Eastern Roman Emperor fashion the Isaurians had countless icons destroyed and countless religious leaders exiled or executed. All of this for the sake of gaining revenue and “favor from God” in defeating the iconoclastic Muslims.
Third is the case of Photios which directly relates to the issue of the Schism of 1054. A military officer (Photios) gets consecrated as the Patriarch of Constantinople in 857 by an excommunicated man (Gregory Asbestas) because the Emperor has issues with Patriarch Ignatius not giving Communion to an incestuous man (Bardas). Talk about petty. Photios then proceeds to excommunicate the Western Church because Pope Nicholas will not accept his ordination as Patriarch (because the true Patriarch Ignatius had his seat usurped) and uses the Filioque as his excuse for said excommunication (and he uses far harsher words than what Humbert states in his excommunication to Patriarch Michael).
Filioque
As it relates to the Nicene Creed the Creed changed between the First Council of Nicene and the First Council of Constantinople (as it relates to the Holy Spirit and statement on Christ). Am I to believe that the Second council “defaced” the Creed by changing to be more precise on the Holy Spirit (as the point was to deny the Macedonian heretics)? I don’t think so and I doubt you would say the same either. The Filioque is recorded in usage by the late 500s AD. If such was a truly heretical issue, one of great theological debate and disunity, why was it not dealt with or even brought up in an Ecumenical Council?
After all each Ecumenical Council was called as a means of clarifying the faith. From Nicene and the refutation of Arius to refuting the Iconoclasts (the West didn’t need to rejoice over Iconoclasm because it was not suffering from it like the East was as the West stood steadfastly against such heresy) at the 7th Council in Constantinople Ecumenical Councils are created as a means of refuting heresies and yet no Ecumenical Council was called to deal with the Filioque. This is because it was not a theological issue and did not contradict the dogma of the Church.
As to its theological value the Filioque may I ask you what you believe is to be in error with it. In the bible it is mentioned several times that the Holy Spirit proceeds from Jesus Christ, the Son. John 16:7-15
John 15:26
Acts 2:33
According to the written word the Holy Spirit pretty clearly states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from Jesus Christ. How then does such insult Trinity? It does not, it does not take away from the Person of the Father but rather clearly states a relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Son. As a statement of faith there is nothing wrong with the Filioque.
True Cause of the Schism
The true source of the Schism was the abuse of the Church by the Eastern Roman Emperors. Treating the Church as a state organ by appointing political lackeys into the position of Patriarch and countless other Bishops while also messing with Church territory and dogma served to create division which was foreshadowed with Photios and came to a head in 1054 AD (it was a process of numerous slights over several hundred years). A Church divided cannot stand if a substantial portion of it is being used as a state organ. It creates disunity in both religious belief and purpose.
This seems like a perfectly sensible reason for criticizing Constantinople. I’m sure you can see the obvious reasons that Popes wouldn’t use this argument, however, and the equally obvious reasons that this was not the cause.
Again, these seem like perfectly reasonable “The Orthodox Church was bad” arguments, but not like arguments that these things were the cause of the schism.
This comes closer; there was an excommunication of Nicholas issued by the other four Patriarchs, but it was not one that was communicated before the target died. Subsequent popes were fine with Photius. I don’t think it’s really accurate to describe the filioque as an “excuse”. See below.
Do you base that on my having explicitly distinguished between the two cases at length? If so, I commend your comprehension of my comment.
It wasn’t a widespread heresy for centuries after that. You mention the Photian schism above, a couple of centuries before the split. Even in 870 the Catholic 4th “Ecumenical” council summoned in response did not defend the Filioque. In 880 the Greek 4th Council of Constantinople condemned the addition without the papal legates or the Pope feeling that this was something that needed to be responded to.
By the 7th Council in Constantinople, I assume you mean the Second Council of Nicaea, which is close to Constantinople but is generally separated for these purposes in order to keep the numbering clear. This was in 787, centuries before the filioque would rise to that sort of a level. As above, the Church did take some actions regarding the filioque; four patriarchs excommunicated the fifth for permitting it to be preached in Bulgaria (no accusation was made that he believed it himself), then there were two councils assembled to respond to the questions arising from this, one of which ignored the preaching (which had mostly ceased at that point) and the other of which condemned it.
It was not until the problem became more widespread than backwaters that a fully supported ecumenical council was called for; the Schism would have been a pretty good time for it. Maybe a century earlier it would have been ripe, but with a council having already pronounced on it and without much controversy, it isn’t particularly surprising that it took a while to heat to the point where a Council was clearly called for. As in my previous comment, I fully agree that it is a great shame that they were not able to organize one.
Could you expand on what you believe this passage is saying? I can’t rebut a claim unless I understand it.
Unless my eyes deceive me, this says “who proceeds from the Father”, as was agreed by the entirety of the Church at Constantinople. For the best part of a thousand years, the statement in John 15:26 was assented to by every Pope, as well as by every other mainstream part of every mainstream church.
Is it your claim that “sent by” and “proceeds from” are synonymous?
If I say “I have poured out this water, would you like a glass of it?”, you might say yes. If I say “This water proceeded from me, would you like a glass of it?” you would be more unusual if you assented. If you read Titus 5, you will see that this is clarified further; the Father saves us through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out through Jesus Christ. As Catholics and Orthodox alike teach, the sole source is the Father.
Why do you believe that Eastern Catholics do not say the filioque? Why do you believe that the Creed was written to say “from the Father” rather than “from the Father and from the Son”? If you don’t understand why there’s a debate, I put it to you that you probably shouldn’t be advocating for a side in it.
You wanna find an 11th century source for this claim?
Just for clarity, is it your position that no Pope has ever been installed under the influence of a secular leader? Or, perhaps, that the Western Patriarchate has been immune to doctrinal influence from secular contexts? I’m not saying that it’s a good thing (although I think that I’m more comfortable with the model of secular/ ecclesiastical relations found in scripture and the practice of the church than you are). Just that while specific moments of politicking
In case it’s unclear, I also believe that our beliefs are accurate. ;-) I switched to mythology after “truth claims” felt a little academic for the context, but maybe I had the order reversed there. If it appeared that I was failing to draw a distinction between the stuff I believe and the stuff that Skyler believes, it was mostly because I felt like I didn’t have sufficient clarity about the specifics of his claims to be able to make a point by point rebuttal and didn’t want to overstate my case.
My understanding is that I’m a little more moderate on Skyler’s claims than you are. I think, for instance, that when Paul talks about seeing through a glass, darkly, he’s quoting Plato and not in order to rebut him, but in order to show the truth in Platonic thought. I don’t think that he’s taking on Platonic novelties there; Ecclesiastes and Job have pretty strong emphases on our ignorance that includes the concept Paul puts forward. If Skyler’s specifics are just about the language used, or about the idea that there are plenty of things that pagans and Christians have in common (all theistic religions posit a god, for instance), they’ll be less silly than if he digs up something to support the claim that the reason that we revere the greatest among us is because Pagans worshipped multiple gods.