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Christian Discussion II: We are an Advent people


MisterOJ

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33 minutes ago, Lily Valley said:

This is one of the reasons Southern, La is such a great place.  We are currently throwing a giant party to lead up to Lent.

Helena, I'm glad you got some advise here.  I'm a Roman Catholic and have brought plenty of people to Mass.  They are often uncomfortable with being unfamiliar to the ritual.  If it was impersonal, you're right, that was probably due to the organizers.

 I am very glad that you found the ritual comforting.  Daily Mass is about half an hour.  I found my faith by attending in the mornings before work.  Honestly, the Catholic Church was the only pretty building in the town I was in.  It eased my homesickness enormously.  

My father has been going every morning for almost twenty years and it's a great source of comfort for him. 

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Just now, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

My father has been going every morning for almost twenty years and it's a great source of comfort for him. 

Talking to people like your dad brought me back to the Church.  Daily mass is a great way to meet a new Parish.  One of the parishioners of that Church bought me a copy of City of God after I'd been attending for a few months.  Yes, he handed me all 4 volumes.   He told me to become a Charismatic.  I can't say that that has happened, but it's a beautiful work.

I have been extremely pleased with how much our homilies have changed under Pope Francis.  They address the needs of our city a lot more than they used to.  I had a crisis a few years back and nearly started attending an Episcopalian Church.  There's one here that has a memorial of all of our murder victims going back to 2006.  They do some great outreach on violent crime in the city.

Thing is, I couldn't do it.  I couldn't leave the Catholic Church.   Being RC is so much about family and culture that I'd rather stay and have my disagreements.  

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7 minutes ago, Lily Valley said:

Talking to people like your dad brought me back to the Church.  Daily mass is a great way to meet a new Parish.  One of the parishioners of that Church bought me a copy of City of God after I'd been attending for a few months.  Yes, he handed me all 4 volumes.   He told me to become a Charismatic.  I can't say that that has happened, but it's a beautiful work.

I have been extremely pleased with how much our homilies have changed under Pope Francis.  They address the needs of our city a lot more than they used to.  I had a crisis a few years back and nearly started attending an Episcopalian Church.  There's one here that has a memorial of all of our murder victims going back to 2006.  They do some great outreach on violent crime in the city.

Thing is, I couldn't do it.  I couldn't leave the Catholic Church.   Being RC is so much about family and culture that I'd rather stay and have my disagreements.  

I had actually thought about leaving too but couldn't either.  I thought back to some of the nuns that tought me and a few of the priests from my parish and they showed me the beauty of the Church and of religious life and it couldn't leave that. 

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  • 1 month later...

Can anyone give some insight as to what Relevation chapter 19 (particularly verse 11 onwards, KJV) is about?

Seems like the dude on the white horse is Jesus, but why are his eyes like fire, why does he have 'many' crowns, and why is his sword coming out of his mouth? Is that some metaphor, like his words are his weapon? But I guess that doesn't make sense because it says that the sword is to smite nations with.... So it sounds like jesus is gathering the armies of heaven but what are the fowls of heaven? Angels? And why are the fowls eating the flesh of men? I guess the 'beast' is satan but who's the false prophet with him that's deceived people with miracles? And then I guess Satan and the false prophet are cast into a lake of brimstone and then everyone else is slain with jesus's mouth-sword and then the fowls get to eat all the flesh. 

Am I on the right track? How does this all fit into the christian tradition? 

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Revelation is the New Testament book which probably is the most varied as to how it "fits into the Christian tradition." As I understand it, even back when the canon of the New Testament was being set it was very controversial and just barely made it in to the official Scriptures. 

Revelation is part of a tradition of apocalyptic literature. Much of its language is symbolic and even experts do not always agree on its interpretation. But "many crowns" is probably a metaphor for rule over all the nations. 

The "fowls of heaven" are birds of prey and vultures who, in the words of the Interpreters' Bible, "are called to come and feed upon the flesh of the mighty who are to be slaughtered because they have allied themselves with that which is utterly evil. Kings and captains and fighting men and the war horses upon which they have ridden proudly are to lie dead, waiting for the fierce and ravenous vultures who are summoned for this awful feast. " 

In many Christian traditions Revelation is largely ignored. In "Dispensationalism", the stream of Christianity which focuses on end times prophecy, it becomes one of the most important books. Unfortunately on short notice I can't seem to find anything better as an introduction to Dispensationalism than the Wikipedia article -- as always with Wikipedia, you should see this as the start of research on the issue and not accept it uncritically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism

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Thanks for the response, I came across this chapter because I was analysing a separate text that alluded to this chapter. I consider myself to be reasonably familiar with the NT due to 12 years of Catholic education but we never even touched Revelation. I find the poetic symbology of war and destruction quite appealing, it's certainly much more compelling than the drab platitudinous pacifist version of Jesus. 

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3 hours ago, Ormond said:

Revelation is the New Testament book which probably is the most varied as to how it "fits into the Christian tradition." As I understand it, even back when the canon of the New Testament was being set it was very controversial and just barely made it in to the official Scriptures. 

Revelation is part of a tradition of apocalyptic literature. Much of its language is symbolic and even experts do not always agree on its interpretation. But "many crowns" is probably a metaphor for rule over all the nations. 

The "fowls of heaven" are birds of prey and vultures who, in the words of the Interpreters' Bible, "are called to come and feed upon the flesh of the mighty who are to be slaughtered because they have allied themselves with that which is utterly evil. Kings and captains and fighting men and the war horses upon which they have ridden proudly are to lie dead, waiting for the fierce and ravenous vultures who are summoned for this awful feast. " 

In many Christian traditions Revelation is largely ignored. In "Dispensationalism", the stream of Christianity which focuses on end times prophecy, it becomes one of the most important books. Unfortunately on short notice I can't seem to find anything better as an introduction to Dispensationalism than the Wikipedia article -- as always with Wikipedia, you should see this as the start of research on the issue and not accept it uncritically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism

Ormond,

Indeed.  In Orthodoxy there is discussion of the fact that Revelation is "barely" canon and as such almost never incorporated into our services.

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I dont think Revelation is recognized as canon in Eastern Orthodoxy?

Princeton Prof. Elaine Pagels is always interesting on Revelation and written a few bestsellers as a biblical scholar. Here she is on a radio show, I think NPR.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

I am presently in Portland, Oregon at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, working for That All May Freely Serve, one of the pro-GLBTQ groups in the denomination.

Saturday night right before the moderator's election featured a band from a church in Salem, Oregon singing songs in Spanish with no translation, and a presentation by an Interracial couple (who looked to be about 70) of what their experiences in the church as a Black woman and White man had been. The husband talked about his privilege as a white male.

In the moderator's election that followed the Assembly chose two co-moderators, both women, one of them African-American.

Years ago it used to be a common joke to call the Presbyterian Assembly "The Republican Party at prayer." Don't think that works any more! :)

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2 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I am presently in Portland, Oregon at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, working for That All May Freely Serve, one of the pro-GLBTQ groups in the denomination.

Saturday night right before the moderator's election featured a band from a church in Salem, Oregon singing songs in Spanish with no translation, and a presentation by an Interracial couple (who looked to be about 70) of what their experiences in the church as a Black woman and White man had been. The husband talked about his privilege as a white male.

In the moderator's election that followed the Assembly chose two co-moderators, both women, one of them African-American.

Years ago it used to be a common joke to call the Presbyterian Assembly "The Republican Party at prayer." Don't think that works any more! :)

Over the weekend, I noticed on my PCUSA calendar that the General Assembly was supposed to start this week. I haven't really heard anything about it in my little corner of the world. Is there any big votes expected this year?

And, that's pretty cool about the co-moderators thing. Well done, delegates.

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I think divestment from corporations making most of their profits from fossil fuel extraction is one of the most controversial issues this year. I will probably be testifying before a committee about a proposal for the church to make a strong statement against "reparative therapy" that claims to change sexual orientation.

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1 hour ago, Ormond said:

This is getting too far off US Politics so this is the last I will post in this thread on this topic. Please start another thread if you want more--

I was answering a question from the Kitten Guard where he was specifically asking about what the Gospels said about this. You can definitely say that the Gospels mention Jesus had brothers and sisters.

And actually the existence of his most famous sibling, James, who led the church in Jerusalem after Jesus's death, is about as sure as anything you can say about Jesus, because of a mention of him in passing in the works of the Jewish historian Josephus. (There is a longer passage about Jesus in Josephus, but that one has probably been tampered with by later Christian copiers of Josephus's works.) 

https://clas-pages.uncc.edu/james-tabor/ancient-judaism/josephus-james/

Man, this was a hard thread to necro.

Anyways, that’s interesting point that I had never heard about before. And I was always under the impression that there still wasn’t a consensuses that Jesus had biological siblings. Don’t some scholars claim that the texts actually can be interpreted to mean step siblings, cousins, other family members and the people he socialized with? Furthermore, don’t different sects have different conclusions on this issue?

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