The "worship" due to Jesus

Saturday, November 22, 2008, 4:37 AM

Christ Healing the Blind Man, El Greco

There is no doubt that the NT attests in many verses that Jesus received and accepted "worship" both before his death (Matthew 14:33; John 9:38) and after his Resurrection (Matthew 28:9; Matthew 28:17; Luke 24:52).

The verb that appears in all the verses that speak of Jesus being "worshiped" (that is used very inaccurately in English), needs to be examined lexically in the context of the NT, of the LXX and of the corresponding verbs used in the Hebrew Bible, lest one completely misunderstand and conflate quite different types and degrees of "worship" contemplated in the Bible.

It is sufficient here to say that the verb for "worship", as referred to Jesus in the NT is invariably προσκυνεω (proskyneō - Strong's G4352), which appears in the NT a total of 60 times, and, depending on the context, can have one of many meanings, more or less strong:

1) to kiss the hand to (towards) one, in token of reverence
2) among the Orientals, esp. the Persians, to fall upon the knees and touch the ground with the forehead as an expression of profound reverence
3) in the NT by kneeling or prostration to do homage (to one) or make obeisance, whether in order to express respect or to make supplication
3a) used of homage shown to men and beings of superior rank
3a1) to the Jewish high priests
3a2) to God
3a3) to Christ
3a4) to heavenly beings
3a5) to demons

On the other hand, there is another verb, used both in the NT and in the LXX to express "worship" in the sense of "to serve", λατρευω (latreuō - Strong's G3000) which appears in the NT a total of 21 times, 19 times it is used for YHWH, the Lord God, and on 2 occasions, also, negatively, for misplaced and idolatrous service ("But God turned away and delivered them up to serve the host of heaven [or: stars of heaven]" Act 7:42; "They ... served created things" Rom 1:25)[#] but never for Jesus Christ.

For the different use of proskyneō and latreuō in the NT, it is interesting to examine Matthew 4:10 (see also Luke 4:8) because both verbs appear in it, and we have the possibility to see to what verbs they correspond in the cited verse of the OT (Deuteronomy 6:13) both in the Original Hebrew and in the LXX Greek.


Deuteronomy 6:13
You shall fear [Hebrew: ירא (yare' - Strong's H3372); LXX Greek: φοβεω (phobeō Strong's G5399)] the LORD your God and serve Him, [Hebrew: עבד (`abad Strong's H5647); LXX Greek: λατρευω (latreuō)] and shall take oaths in His name.

Matthew 4:10 (cp. Luke 4:8)
‘You are to worship [προσκυνεω (proskyneō)] the Lord your God and serve [λατρευω (latreuō)] only him.’

Notice that the NETBible, at Note ² sn says: "The word “only” is an interpretive expansion not found in either the Hebrew or Greek (LXX) text of the OT."

Of course the addition of the word “only” [Greek: μονω monō], referred only to latreuō, underlines further that the act of "service" is reserved exclusively for YHWH God, the Father Almighty.

[#] NOTE The verb translated in English as "to worship", in Rom 1:25,  is yet another Greek verb, σεβάζομαι (sebazomai - Strong's G4573) 1) to fear, be afraid 2) to honour religiously, to worship. It is used ONLY ONCE in the NT, but it is a variant of σέβω (sebō - Strong's G4576, in the Scriptures always used in the Middle/Passive Deponent form σέβομαι, sebomai). In Mat 15:9 and in the parallel Mar 7:7, it is used to translate the Hebrew ירא (yare' - Strong's H3372) of the quotation from Isaiah 29:13. In Acts (Acts 13:43,50; 16:14; 17:4; 18:7) it is systematically used to refer to the sebomenoi (or God-fearers), that is the "non-Jewish (gentile) sympathizer to Second Temple Judaism". Interestingly, in Acts 18:13, it is used in the accusation against Paul, in front of the Proconsul Gallio (“This man is persuading people to worship God in a way contrary to the law!”). In Act 19:27 it is used to refer to the "worship" due, according to the citizen of Ephesus, to the "great goddess Artemis".

The tragic error of Protestants: the reversal of the First Commandment of the Law

Saturday, November 22, 2008, 4:32 AM 

The tragic error of Protestants, of all denominations and flavours, can be best summed with the abusive substitution that they operate between the wholly scriptural Augustinian quip, embedded in his comment to 1 John 4:4-12 ...

“Love, and do what thou wilt” (Augustine of Hippo, Tractatus VII, 8)

... with the unscriptural and abominable Lutheran quip ...

“Sin boldly, but believe more boldly still” (Martin Luther, letter [#] to Philip Melanchthon, 1521)

[#] This is the context of the sentence, in the letter than Luther wrote to Melanchthon while he was hiding at the Castle of Wartburg:

“If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly,  but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world]  we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness,  but, as Peter says,  we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.  No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.”
-- Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Volumes 1-55 (editors J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.) [Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1999, c1967], 48:281

Luther explains elsewhere how to take on the attitude of sinning “boldly”:

“Therefore let us arm our hearts with these and similar statements of Scripture so that, when the devil accuses us by saying: You are a sinner; therefore you are damned, we can reply: The very fact that you say I am a sinner makes me want to be just and saved. Nay, you will be damned, says the devil. Indeed not, I reply, for I take refuge in Christ, who gave Himself for my sins. Therefore you will accomplish nothing, Satan, by trying to frighten me by setting the greatness of my sins before me and thus seducing me to sadness, doubt, despair, hatred, contempt, and blasphemy of God. Indeed, by calling me a sinner you are supplying me with weapons against yourself so that I can slay and destroy you with your own sword; for Christ died for sinners. Furthermore, you yourself proclaim the glory of God to me; you remind me of God's paternal love for me, a miserable and lost sinner; for He so loved the world that He gave His Son (John 3:16). Again, whenever you throw up to me that I am a sinner, you revive in my memory the blessing of Christ, my Redeemer, on whose shoulders, and not on mine, lie all my sins; for "the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all" and "for the transgression of His people was He stricken" (Is. 53:6-8). Therefore when you throw up to me that I am a sinner, you are not terrifying me; you are comforting me beyond measure.”
-- Ewald Plass, What Luther Says Volumes 1-3 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing house, 1959), 3:1315

Justification/Salvation: event or process? (Protestant vs. Catholic view)

Saturday, November 22, 2008, 4:28 AM

I think it is necessary to clarify a deep, gross misconception that many Protestants entertain about the fundamental divide between the Catholic and the Protestant Doctrine of Justification/Salvation.

It can be trivialized (wrongly) by opposing Faith (Protestant) vs. Works (Catholic), whereas the real divide is Process (Catholic) vs. Event (or sequence of events - Protestant).

Let me explain why it is so and what it means.

i. Catholics do NOT believe that "good works" are their "merit" any more than Protestants do: Catholics know very well (have always known) that supposed "good works" are nothing, are mere exteriority unless they stem from God's grace, unless they are, most of all, rooted in Love that only God, the source of Love, can plant in our hearts.

ii. Catholics, though, believe that Salvation is NOT a "once and for all" event (or a series of events), the so called "Ordo Salutis" (lit. "sequence of salvation") the finicky definition of which they are quite happy to leave for the "debate over ordo salutis, most keenly evident between the Reformed and Arminian systems." (see at Theopedia). Catholics believe that Salvation is a process, undoubtedly initiated by God's Grace, which can be, though, acquired and lost more than once.

iii. Justification (Greek dikaiosyne), although God's Holy Spirit is invoked, is viewed by Protestants essentially as a forensic event, a "once for all" decree resulting in a change of relationship; this event takes place at the moment of saving faith. It is not in any way a process, nor does it result in a fundamental change in a person's nature.

The idea expressed by dikaioo ["to justify"] is "to declare righteous," not "to make righteous." ... [T]he root idea in justification is the declaration of God, the righteous judge, that the man who believes in Christ, sinful though he may be, is righteous -- is viewed as being righteous, because in Christ he has come into arighteous relationship with God. (G. E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974, p. 478)

iv. Protestants (in particular Lutherans) believe that man remains his fundamental, irrecuperable sinful self, and that God's justification only covers man with the merits of Christ, like a cloak over a sick body or, to use Luther's even more colorful image, "like white snow over a dung hill". As Luther says elsewhere:

"through his justification, man is intrinsically sinful yet extrinsically righteous." (Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, the Beginnings to the Reformation. 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 1:182; italics his)

The trouble with the Protestant doctrine of Justification/Salvation is that it is a novelty, a novum, compared with the doctrine that the Church had always entertained for 15 centuries, and (which is even more serious), a departure from tradition that is totally unsupported by the biblical sources, a personal reading adopted by the founders of Protestantism essentially for personal psychological reasons: to free themselves, once and for all, from an unbereable sense of personal guilt.

Solovyov’s Antichrist

Saturday, November 22, 2008, 4:23 AM 

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (1853 - 1900), was a Russian philosopher and theologian (and also poet, pamphleteer, literary critic).

The story of the man is interesting in itself. He started from materialism, went on to some form of transcendental philosophy, to some quasi-Gnosticism, to Orthodoxy, to dream of Sobornost. He ended up convinced (just over 100 years ago) of the inevitability of Christian Eschatology in the most obvious sense, with Anti-Christ and all, and the Second Coming, the Parusia, NOT as a mystical metaphor, BUT an event in time (even more imminent today, 100 + years after he wrote his book on eschatology and the Antichrist).

He is one the few Christian authors, in recent times, to openly confront the eschatological issue of the Second Coming.

At the end of his life, having written mostly philosophical and theological treatises and essays, he realized that the form of “conversations”, with the addition of a "short story" would be the best way to make sure that his thoughts did not just reach the intellectual elite, but would be understood by as many people as possible.

In this respect his last book, that he completed in the year he died, 1900, and was published posthumous, in 1904, Three discussions. War, progress, and the end of history, including a short story of the Anti-Christ is of central importance. It is also his spiritual testament.

This is the essential “profile” of the book. Each "conversation" has a "protagonist", a "reference figure":

1. The protagonist of the First "conversation" is the General, opposed by the Prince, and the theme is war. The General represent traditional Christianity, which sees the State and the Church harmoniously united, and war as a "necessary evil". The Prince, a thinly veiled image of the famous writer Tolstoy, is the advocate of absolute pacifism, of absolute non resistance to evil, which he identifies with the essence of the "christian message".

2. The theme of the second conversation is progress, and the protagonist is the Politician, who, in a horizon where there is only room for lip service and formal homage to God, is firmly and optimistically convinced that "progress" (material, scientific, commercial etc.) will bring about the solution to all the problems that have haunted mankind in the past. War, famine, diseases, in his optimistic view, will disappear, and universal peace will reign, as by magic. But, at the end, the confident certainty of the Politician is disturbed by Mr. Z, with his quotation from the words of a character in Turgenev's Smoke, that "progress is a symptom".

3. The third "conversation" starts by taking up Turgenev's quotation, and, at the Politician's question, Mr. Z (a character representing the author Solovyov himself), explains ominously:

"I believe that progress, a visible and accelerated progress, is always a symptom of the end."

This is also the theme of the third conversation: the end of universal history, or, otherwise said, the end of the world.

4. The "Short story of the Antichrist", that Mr. Z announces in the third conversation, pretending that he has heard it from an old monk, is in fact a realistic account of the probable last phase of history, when the Antichrist will reign, and, when everything seems lost for mankind, only the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will defeat him completely.

Solovyov thought that the form of "short story" would make more acceptable to the public the recount of a story that, he firmly believed, was essentially the accurate description of the forthcoming last act of history.

I believe that, with few inessential differences, the last act of history will not be much different form what Solovyov described.

Links

• Three discussions. War, progress, and the end of history, including a short story of the Anti-Christ. - with this link you can actually Read Online the scanned book, in its English translation of 1915, @ archive.org
• "A Short Story of the Anti-Christ" - the text by Solovyov, with introduction by Fr Addison Hart and comment from  Hans Urs von Balthasar, @ goodcatholicbooks.org.

A rational synthesis of ToE (Darwinian ToE in a Nutshell)

Monday, October 13, 2008, 1:41 PM

Charles Darwin, his Galapagos and his Beagle

Let's define what we mean (explicitly or implicitly) when we are talking "evolution" that would be "true" or "un-true". These are the three main "ingredients", straight from Darwin's The Origin of Species.
i. All live forms derive from an elementary life form, by means of the two following fundamental "mechanisms.

ii. Non-oriented Variation (as Darwin calls it) or, as we normally refer to it nowadays, Random Mutation.

iii. Mutations express themselves in such a way that only the "advantageous" ones are "passed on" by Natural Selection.

Let's see what Wikipedia says (we could get more authoritative sources, but for the present purpose it is more than sufficient).

At the entry Evolution, wikipedia distinguishes between the different sources of Variation (of the phenotype, of which the main part results from results changes in the genotype) on one side, and the different Mechanisms of (statistically) stable modification of the genotype (viz. the genetic constitution of a cell, an organism, or an individual, i.e. the specific allele makeup of the individual of a species), on the other side.

V. Looking more in detail at Variation, Wikipedia identified three modalities, "[a] random mutations in genetic material, (viz., except for viruses, DNA) [b] migration between populations (gene flow), and [c] sexual reproduction.

[a] Mutations are random "changes in the DNA sequence of a cell's genome and are caused by radiation, viruses, transposons and mutagenic chemicals, as well as errors that occur during meiosis or DNA replication."

[b.] gene flow through migration may introduce a change in the allele makeup of the population affected but the allele makeup of the species as a whole does not change, at most it can get diversified in variants (or races) with more or less marked morphological differences.

[c] sexual reproduction is, essentially, a "reshuffling" of genes, which does not add new information to the gene pool (like the reshuffling of a deck of cards does not change the "information contents" of the deck itself)

So, in conclusion, the only modality of Variation that introduces "novelty" in the genotype of a a species is Random Mutation. We can express it as:

V = RM ("The essential process of Variation, that introduces new information, is Random Mutation)

M. Looking more in detail at the different Mechanisms of modification of the genotype, Wikipedia identified three modalities: [d.] Natural selection, [e.] Genetic drift, and (again) [f.] Gene flow.

[d.] Natural selection is "the process by which genetic mutations that enhance reproduction become, and remain, more common in successive generations of a population."

[e.] Genetic drift is "the change in allele frequency from one generation to the next that occurs because alleles in offspring are a random sample of those in the parents, as well as from the role that chance plays in determining whether a given individual will survive and reproduce." So, in synthesis, we may say that, "when selective forces are absent or relatively weak, allele frequencies tend to "drift" upward or downward randomly".

[f.] Gene flow is, again, "the exchange of genes between populations, which are usually [viz. apart from interspecific hybrids] of the same species". As already said, the allele makeup of the population affected may change, but the allele makeup of the species as a whole does not change.

So, in conclusion, the only Mechanism that may significantly alter the genotype of a species, in its interaction with environment, is Natural Selection. We can express it as:

M = NS ("The essential Mechanism that alters the genotype of a species is Natural Selection") 

Miracle, Magic, Mystery

Thursday, November 8, 2007, 6:27 AM [General]

miracle An event that appears inexplicable by the laws (more correctly, "regularities") of nature. This is only part of the definition. The other essential requirement is that (by explicit declaration, or by significant correlation), a reasonable inference may be made that the inexplicable event is associated with the intention of an intelligent (or at least sentient) being. The intelligent being to whom the intention behind the event is attributed may be (but not necessarily) an invisible entity (e.g. an angel, a demon, a god or the god of monotheistic religions). The intentionality of the event is more fundamental than its inexplicability: an ordinary natural event, if suitably rare (e.g. a thunderbolt striking a specific house) can be considered a miracle if the event has been declared with sufficient accuracy prior to its occurrence, because a presumed connection between the prior knowledge and the event can be reasonably established.

magic the purported capacity to control or forecast natural events, effects, or forces by recourse to charms, spells, and/or rituals and/or by invoking invisible entities.

mystery an event, ordinary or extraordinary, in which is declared to be and/or perceived to be the presence of an entity, or state of reality which cannot be explained by recourse to its phenomenal appearance.

More on the “real presence”

Tuesday, January 1, 2008, 1:03 AM [General]

As I have already clarified, the notion of “real presence” is entirely vague and emptily “mystical”

For a proper understanding of the foundation, value and meaning of the Eucharist, we need to turn to the very words of our Master and Saviour:

"But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in. […] And you say, `If any one swears by the altar, it is nothing; but if any one swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.' You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by everything on it; and he who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it; and he who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. (Matthew 23:13, 18-22)

Likewise I ask today’s “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites”:

For which is greater, the wafer or the Resurrected Jesus Christ, seated at the right hand of the Father Almighty? Well, then, whoever believes that Jesus Christ has been truly raised and is seated at the right hand of the Father Almighty, will also believe that it is Jesus Christ who, in conformity with the will of God, the Father Almighty, sanctifies and “transubstantiates” the wafer, in the Spirit.

Go back to Transubstantiation and "Real Presence"