Larry Devich
Saturday, May 15, 2004
No Carb diet for America
A friend sent me this via email today:
This is from the editor of a Canadian e-news service called The
Straight Goods:
"We are hoping our American neighbours will make the world a better place by going on the No-CARB Diet in 2004:
No Cheney
No Ashcroft
No Rumsfeld
No Bush."
Heh, works for me :-) ¶ 5/15/2004 10:07:00 PM 0 Comments
This is from the editor of a Canadian e-news service called The
Straight Goods:
"We are hoping our American neighbours will make the world a better place by going on the No-CARB Diet in 2004:
No Cheney
No Ashcroft
No Rumsfeld
No Bush."
Heh, works for me :-) ¶ 5/15/2004 10:07:00 PM 0 Comments
On Unity
It is probably pretty obvious that my two current obsessions are (1) the study of Roman Catholicism and (2) the evil Empire's numerous wars of conquest.
The first is profitable for me spiritually in that no matter what my final conclusion on the matter is I am focused on reading the Word of God and praying and meditating. The second is pretty uniformly detrimental to me as it leads me to indulge my tendencies to self-righteousness and rage against all authority, things not really conducive to my spiritual growth as a Christian.
Last evening and early this morning I have been reading a long essay, The Roots of the Reformation by Karl Adam. It starts out with a long and very painful cataloging of the horrible corruption and abuses that were rampant in the Roman Catholic church at the time of Luther. Indeed, the list is so long and the corruption so deep that I very nearly quit my examination of the claims of the Catholic church last night! I can certainly see where the reformers were coming from back in the early 16th century.
Yet I read on, since, this was a Catholic essay after all, I suspected that there must be some sort of correction for this horror coming up ;-) Of course there was, although it was too late to prevent the breaking of the unity of the church.
As I said the essay is pretty long, and I can't do justice to it here, that's why I linked to it instead. But a sort of conclusion lands near the middle of it, an answer to my dismay at the long list of errors in the church:
The evangelical historian Karl August Meissinger made some significant remarks in this connection in his essay on "Luther's Day": "If Luther returned to-day . . . he would find to his astonishment a Roman Church which he would never have attacked in her present aspect . . . Above all he would see . . . that not one of the abuses which were the actual occasion of his break with Rome remains in existence."
So I am brought once more back to the issue of Unity. Throughout the New Testament we are commanded to be united into one body in Christ.
Do Protestant churches encourage unity in Christ? It seems not from where I stand.
One thing that most every Protestant agrees on is the ultimate authority of the Bible. Yet if this is true, if simply reading the bible is enough, if the authority and tradition of 2,000 years of Christian history is to be pretty much ignored, then why are there literally thousands of Protestant denominations? Why is it that each of them reads the same bible and comes up with wildly diverging opinions as to what it means? Do you really imagine that Christ would have left His church with this sort of fatal weakness? I don't think so, that is why I am so obsessed at the moment with uncovering as best I can what is known of the history of our faith since the times of the apostles. As I have read I have been discovering that the early church was very much a Catholic church, and that most of what is distinctively Catholic in it dates back to very early times indeed.
As to the Holy Bible itself, where did it come from? That is a question that most lay Protestants (maybe Catholics too, I don't know) seem to be unwilling to even ask. They accept it as The Word of God as though it had been beamed down from heaven right into the hands of the apostles or something :-) I do accept the bible as the word of God, but I also recognize that the church predates the New Testament, and that really the church wrote, and gathered together the various writings of the New Testament under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Most telling of all in the issue of the authority of the Bible, at least in my own opinion, is the fact that Luther ripped 7 books of the Old Testament out, and tried to eliminate several books of the New Testament too! Read DEFENDING THE DEUTEROCANONICALS by James Akin for a nice review of what went on back then to eliminate large portions of what had been accepted for nearly 1,500 years as scripture.
Peace be with you.
¶ 5/15/2004 09:33:00 AM 0 Comments
The first is profitable for me spiritually in that no matter what my final conclusion on the matter is I am focused on reading the Word of God and praying and meditating. The second is pretty uniformly detrimental to me as it leads me to indulge my tendencies to self-righteousness and rage against all authority, things not really conducive to my spiritual growth as a Christian.
Last evening and early this morning I have been reading a long essay, The Roots of the Reformation by Karl Adam. It starts out with a long and very painful cataloging of the horrible corruption and abuses that were rampant in the Roman Catholic church at the time of Luther. Indeed, the list is so long and the corruption so deep that I very nearly quit my examination of the claims of the Catholic church last night! I can certainly see where the reformers were coming from back in the early 16th century.
Yet I read on, since, this was a Catholic essay after all, I suspected that there must be some sort of correction for this horror coming up ;-) Of course there was, although it was too late to prevent the breaking of the unity of the church.
As I said the essay is pretty long, and I can't do justice to it here, that's why I linked to it instead. But a sort of conclusion lands near the middle of it, an answer to my dismay at the long list of errors in the church:
The evangelical historian Karl August Meissinger made some significant remarks in this connection in his essay on "Luther's Day": "If Luther returned to-day . . . he would find to his astonishment a Roman Church which he would never have attacked in her present aspect . . . Above all he would see . . . that not one of the abuses which were the actual occasion of his break with Rome remains in existence."
So I am brought once more back to the issue of Unity. Throughout the New Testament we are commanded to be united into one body in Christ.
Do Protestant churches encourage unity in Christ? It seems not from where I stand.
One thing that most every Protestant agrees on is the ultimate authority of the Bible. Yet if this is true, if simply reading the bible is enough, if the authority and tradition of 2,000 years of Christian history is to be pretty much ignored, then why are there literally thousands of Protestant denominations? Why is it that each of them reads the same bible and comes up with wildly diverging opinions as to what it means? Do you really imagine that Christ would have left His church with this sort of fatal weakness? I don't think so, that is why I am so obsessed at the moment with uncovering as best I can what is known of the history of our faith since the times of the apostles. As I have read I have been discovering that the early church was very much a Catholic church, and that most of what is distinctively Catholic in it dates back to very early times indeed.
As to the Holy Bible itself, where did it come from? That is a question that most lay Protestants (maybe Catholics too, I don't know) seem to be unwilling to even ask. They accept it as The Word of God as though it had been beamed down from heaven right into the hands of the apostles or something :-) I do accept the bible as the word of God, but I also recognize that the church predates the New Testament, and that really the church wrote, and gathered together the various writings of the New Testament under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Most telling of all in the issue of the authority of the Bible, at least in my own opinion, is the fact that Luther ripped 7 books of the Old Testament out, and tried to eliminate several books of the New Testament too! Read DEFENDING THE DEUTEROCANONICALS by James Akin for a nice review of what went on back then to eliminate large portions of what had been accepted for nearly 1,500 years as scripture.
Peace be with you.
¶ 5/15/2004 09:33:00 AM 0 Comments
