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mawarannahr posted:I think cessationism is held by a minority of Christians today, as Catholics and Orthodox comprise the majority of world Christianity, and a chunk of Protestants are also continuationists. You're misunderstanding continuationism and the very specific concept of "gifts of the spirit" in this context.
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Jan 15, 2024 18:16
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Azathoth posted:You're misunderstanding continuationism and the very specific concept of "gifts of the spirit" in this context. Can you say how? I only just heard about this here, just skimming through the Wikipedia article now and I don't see how it doesn't still apply to Catholics and Orthodox who believe in saints who can prophecy and heal. The whole idea of cessationism seems to be a Protestant reaction to Catholicism.
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Jan 15, 2024 18:20
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Yeah, I will ask you to elaborate on "how" because if mawarannahr is misunderstanding it then I may be misunderstanding it as well. That excerpt I posted does note "tongues" and "faith healing" in specific but those seem to be just two examples; Wikipedia elaborates further to include quote:These abilities, often termed "charismatic gifts", are the word of knowledge, increased faith, the gifts of healing, the gift of miracles, prophecy, the discernment of spirits, kinds of tongues, interpretation of tongues. To these are added the gifts of apostles, prophets, teachers, helps (connected to service of the poor and sick), and governments (or leadership ability) which are connected with certain offices in the Church. These gifts are given by the Holy Spirit to individuals, but their purpose is to build up the entire Church. quote:Others are found in the Old Testament such as:
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Jan 15, 2024 18:44
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mawarannahr posted:Can you say how? I only just heard about this here, just skimming through the Wikipedia article now and I don't see how it doesn't still apply to Catholics and Orthodox who believe in saints who can prophecy and heal. The whole idea of cessationism seems to be a Protestant reaction to Catholicism. There is a difference between God giving someone a prophecy or using them to heal and someone having prophecy or healing as a gift of the spirit, which means that a person can exercise that gift of their own volition (sorta, it's complicated) but the gist is that it is the difference between God grabbing someone and using them and someone living a perfect life so they can ask God to do things for them and because of their great personal holiness, God listens to them and does what they ask whereas if you or I were to ask the same God would be like "lol no, get holy scrub" The early church example is Montanus, founder of Montanism, who in the 2nd century had two prophets who were giving new prophecies. They were declared heretics because that sort of thing didn't happen anymore back then. They founded their own church after that, but it did not survive. As I pointed out, there is a lot more tied up in this than "do miraculous things happen" because most if not all Christians say yes to that. This is a very specific concept within a specific movement and it needs to be understood as such. The generalizing that you're doing to "gifts of the spirit" as "anything miraculous" is the root of the disconnect.
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Jan 15, 2024 18:44
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Azathoth posted:There is a difference between God giving someone a prophecy or using them to heal and someone having prophecy or healing as a gift of the spirit, which means that a person can exercise that gift of their own volition (sorta, it's complicated) but the gist is that it is the difference between God grabbing someone and using them and someone living a perfect life so they can ask God to do things for them and because of their great personal holiness, God listens to them and does what they ask whereas if you or I were to ask the same God would be like "lol no, get holy scrub" Didn't the whole idea of cessationism arise as a reaction to Catholicism though? It doesn't seem like they call themselves continuationists (probably because there was no real reason to define themselves in opposition), but if the cessationists defined themselves in their disagreement with the established Catholic doctrines, I'm not sure how you can say "well it's different now."
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Jan 15, 2024 18:51
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:Yeah, I will ask you to elaborate on "how" because if mawarannahr is misunderstanding it then I am misunderstanding it as well. That excerpt I posted does note "tongues" and "faith healing" in specific but those seem to be just two examples; Wikipedia elaborates further to include If you pray hard enough, God will not teach me how to make a structurally sound shed overnight, as is suggested in the craftsman gift. I cannot pray to God to know how to perform open heart surgery, no matter how little sin I have. I cannot lay my hands on someone with cancer and have it go into remission. I can study hard and pray and learn to do those things, and thus have those as "gifts of the spirit" I suppose, just like the circumstances of my life might lead me to be gifted at music or public speaking, but I am not going to go from pitting out my sport coat and stammering through a speech to eloquence because I live a sinless life and ask God real hard.
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Jan 15, 2024 18:52
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Azathoth posted:If you pray hard enough, God will not teach me how to make a structurally sound shed overnight, as is suggested in the craftsman gift. I cannot pray to God to know how to perform open heart surgery, no matter how little sin I have. I cannot lay my hands on someone with cancer and have it go into remission. I don't understand how you are defining these terms in those ways, it would be helpful to point to some sources where you are getting your definitions. I'm mainly working backward from the position of cessationism as LAB posted. You have obviously thought about this stuff a lot more than I.
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Jan 15, 2024 18:54
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mawarannahr posted:Didn't the whole idea of cessationism arise as a reaction to Catholicism though? It doesn't seem like they call themselves continuationists (probably because there was no real reason to define themselves in opposition), but if the cessationists defined themselves in their disagreement with the established Catholic doctrines, I'm not sure how you can say "well it's different now." At the time that was staked out, the Charismatic movement had not yet arisen so I think it is important to differentiate between how modern folks use the terms and how it has evolved historically.
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Jan 15, 2024 18:57
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mawarannahr posted:I don't understand how you are defining these terms in those ways, it would be helpful to point to some sources where you are getting your definitions. I'm mainly working backward from the position of cessationism as LAB posted. You have obviously thought about this stuff a lot more than I. I'll try to work on this later, I'm just going from memory of previous readings while phoneposting.
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Jan 15, 2024 18:58
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So first off I appreciate the answer you provided to my original question of "how askance do most Christians look at continuationism" because even if not "very" it seems another possible accurate answer is "it is contentious at best." But w/r/t to this particular paragraph:Azathoth posted:The early church example is Montanus, founder of Montanism, who in the 2nd century had two prophets who were giving new prophecies. They were declared heretics because that sort of thing didn't happen anymore back then. They founded their own church after that, but it did not survive. This strikes me as begging the question by taking the word of the Church ("prophecy doesn't happen anymore, so it's heresy") as rule, no? Per this example it was not the Spirit itself saying the Spirit no longer provides gifts, it was the church, and the church speaking "for" the Spirit on this would also be considered heretical if they had been on the wrong side of the power dynamic here.
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Jan 15, 2024 19:00
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Azathoth posted:If you pray hard enough, God will not teach me how to make a structurally sound shed overnight, as is suggested in the craftsman gift. how does bird build nest  edit: Azathoth posted:If you pray hard enough, God will not teach me how to make a structurally sound shed overnight, as is suggested in the craftsman gift. I cannot pray to God to know how to perform open heart surgery, no matter how little sin I have. I cannot lay my hands on someone with cancer and have it go into remission. I would argue that you are arguing against a specific idea of how a gift of the spirit might manifest. It is true that you cannot pull a random person off the street and tell them to pray very hard and then unleash them in an operating theater. But -- since you bring your argument back around to eloquent rhetoric -- there are plenty of people who compose music or speeches or create art because they feel "inspired," they attribute the creative process to something outside of or beyond themself. I would suggest that the sense of "being guided" in action to be more accurate to the spirit of the Spirit's gift; and because it is a gift, it is not simply a common denominator in the experience of human life. Not everyone has the oratory gift; that does not mean that nobody does. LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 19:02
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:So first off I appreciate the answer you provided to my original question of "how askance to most Christians look at continuationism" because even if not "very" it seems another possible accurate answer is "it is contentious at best." But w/r/t to this particular paragraph: The other side of this is that if the door isn't closed on prophecy, where are all the prophets? Off the top of my head, the most famous ones I can think of are Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus and I'm sorry but I don't think making vague statements that in hindsight can be interpreted as predicting something is exactly what prophecy is. Alternatively, something like The Prophecy of the Popes exists but that's clearly someone writing up a prophecy for things that already happened then claiming that it miraculously predicted the events. Or the prophecies from Our Lady of Fatima, which are a combo of straight up wrong (WW1 didn't end when predicted) and apocalyptic imagery that doesn't clearly predict anything but can retroactively be applied to events.
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Jan 15, 2024 19:16
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I think being locked in an asylum, or burned at a stake, for saying you might have received a prophecy has had a pretty good chilling effect on people being willing to admit the receipt of that particular gift.
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Jan 15, 2024 19:20
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I think being locked in an asylum, or burned at a stake, for saying you might have received a prophecy has had a pretty good chilling effect on people being willing to admit the receipt of that particular gift. Write down the prophecy, date it, and put it in a sealed envelope, give it to a trusted friend and tell them to open it the day after the prediction. If my buddy did that a couple times and the predictions kept coming true, it would be pretty conclusive proof they're on to something. But if I open the envelopes and they're just full of vague nonspecific predictions that I need to puzzle over to fit into actual events, that's pretty solid evidence that my buddy isn't channelling God.
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Jan 15, 2024 19:27
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Azathoth posted:Write down the prophecy, date it, and put it in a sealed envelope, give it to a trusted friend and tell them to open it the day after the prediction. If my buddy did that a couple times and the predictions kept coming true, it would be pretty conclusive proof they're on to something. But if I open the envelopes and they're just full of vague nonspecific predictions that I need to puzzle over to fit into actual events, that's pretty solid evidence that my buddy isn't channelling God. Or God knows what you're up to and isn't going to let you facts and logic your conclusion, just like when the Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him.
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Jan 15, 2024 19:30
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A person could do that, sure. But I'm just answering your question by observing the way the risks of saying "hey, I might be a prophet" have historically massively outweighed possible benefit. People don't want to get called crazy and/or killed because they maybe got a prophecy in their dreams last night. Better to be like, "whoa, weird dream" and forget about it.
LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 19:32
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mawarannahr posted:Or God knows what you're up to and isn't going to let you facts and logic your conclusion, just like when the Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. Then your prophecy isn't coming from God, but rather yourself, and so isn't actually a prophecy. It seems like a peculiar kind of torture to be given an accurate understanding of future events by God but only if you don't act on it. If that were happening, I'd expect something more demonic than divine.
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Jan 15, 2024 19:33
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Azathoth posted:Then your prophecy isn't coming from God, but rather yourself, and so isn't actually a prophecy. It seems like a peculiar kind of torture to be given an accurate understanding of future events by God but only if you don't act on it. If that were happening, I'd expect something more demonic than divine. I'm not sure where you're going with this. I think the scripture heavily implies you can't determine the legitimacy of prophecy by this kind of experiment.
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Jan 15, 2024 19:37
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The prophetic is the apocalyptic mode of critique/criticism.
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Jan 15, 2024 19:59
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Oh, also, re: nobody wanting to be called "a prophet" and be crazy/get killed, and therefore being unwilling to accept a "gift" of prophecy,Azathoth posted:Absent willing human partners, God will [...] keep looking. It's hard enough to hire in many mundane fields these days. I would imagine the desirable applicant pool for this one, in this age, to be... small.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:01
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Bar Ran Dun posted:The prophetic is the apocalyptic mode of critique/criticism. Would you elaborate? 
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Jan 15, 2024 20:01
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If you read the hagiographies of Orthodox saints even in the last 200 years they're constantly prophesying mundane stuff like when someone is going to arrive in the village. They also do healing.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:06
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mawarannahr posted:If you read the hagiographies of Orthodox saints even in the last 200 years they're constantly prophesying mundane stuff like when someone is going to arrive in the village. They also do healing. I stand corrected in a very interesting way! I guess insofar as rarity I was moreso thinking of indeed the "apocalyptic" variety prophet over the local wiseperson kind. LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 20:08
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Is there a language barrier or something here or does the English word for prophecy only refer to knowing about future? My very Lutheran and not at all Charismatic teachers back in Confirmation School taught that prophecies are "just" messages from God and may or may not concerns future events. They cited lots of Old Testament prophets, too. The very few Pentacostal-adjancent teachings I've heard seemed to agree.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:15
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These are examples of solid prophetic critique: “That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.” “The history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of class struggles.” “We can be cynical about the end only so long as we do not have to see it, only so long as we feel safety in the place in which our cynicism can be exercised. But if the foundations of this place and all places begin to crumble, cynicism itself crumbles with them. And only two alternatives remain -- despair, which is the certainty of eternal destruction, or faith, which is the certainty of eternal salvation. . "The world itself shall crumble, but, my salvation knows no end," says the Lord." This is the aternative for which the prophets stood. This is what we should call religion, or more precisely, the religious ground for all religion.” “Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand Workin' in the dark against your fellow man But as sure as God made black and white What's down in the dark will be brought to the light” This isn’t testable in a scientific sense, one can’t put it in an envelope, its Truth is existential. One tests it by living in and maybe dying in it. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 20:19
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I personally define a prophet as a person who speaks out for or on the behalf of (a) God. By this definition everyone here is or has the potential to be a prophet. But the particular context in Christian doctrine being argued against, as I understand that, is a person receiving accurate future Divine revelation from of course, their God specifically, because that's the only one. edit: I have a number of semi-connected thoughts on Divine tools and the gifts of the Spirit and the church fathers outlawing these things but this is not the time; LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 20:19
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I personally define a prophet as a person who speaks out for or on the behalf of (a) God. By this definition everyone here is or has the potential to be a prophet. But the context in Christian doctrine being argued, as I understand that, is a person who received accurate future Divine revelation from of course, their God specifically. What is revelation? It’s Latin translated from Greek, apocalypse. If a person tears the veil because God has used them to speak that’s the prophetic, in the most literal sense.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:33
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Bar Ran Dun posted:If a person tears the veil because God has used them to speak that’s the prophetic, in the most literal sense. So this reminds me of a paragraph on defining miracles in "The Power of Miracles and Process Theism" quote:The foregoing may seem ambiguous on whether a miracle is defined by objective conditions (what God has willed and caused) or subjective conditions (whether people take it that God is manifest in the event), but it is no more ambiguous than the traditional concept. On either concept, people will call the event a miracle only if it seems to them to be a striking manifestation of God (or God's will) for human affairs, but in calling the event a miracle they are claiming that God played a special role in the event. If God did not play such a role, then people would be wrong in calling the event a miracle. If an event occurs in which God plays the requisite role but no one notices it, then no one will call it a miracle, though it is one. Thus, an event's status as a miracle depends on its satisfying only the objective conditions. But an event's being recognized as a miracle and the significance of a miracle for the religious life depend on its being noticed, so in the foregoing paragraph I spoke of those events which satisfy the objective conditions and in which it seems to people that God's will is strikingly manifest. and invites me to suggest that the answer to Azathoth's question of "where have all the prophets gone" could then be in part, they still occur and exist, but are not recognized as such because they may fill the objective requirement but not overcome the subjective bias. Because if I am understanding both you and Valiantman correctly, there is indeed a common definition of "prophet" that is relatively frequently realized but does not necessarily match the idea of prophetic gift in popular modern perception.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:45
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mawarannahr posted:I'm not sure where you're going with this. I think the scripture heavily implies you can't determine the legitimacy of prophecy by this kind of experiment.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:46
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Nessus posted:If you can't use track records, how are you supposed to determine which prophecies are valid? If the methods are essentially the same as you would use to assess a reasoned argument, at what point is prophecy as a divine intervention shading into just "I reflected a lot on something and had an idea/insight, but I did it while praying instead of while staring at a rock or sitting under an apple tree"? What I was trying to say is you can't set up an experimental design to assess prophecy or some other miraculous ability because he will know and gently caress with you just because.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:48
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mawarannahr posted:What I was trying to say is you can't set up an experimental design to assess prophecy or some other miraculous ability because he will know and gently caress with you just because.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:52
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Nessus posted:That's not very cash money of the Lord, we're just trying our best down here 
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Jan 15, 2024 20:56
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I would argue that you are arguing against a specific idea of how a gift of the spirit might manifest. It is true that you cannot pull a random person off the street and tell them to pray very hard and then unleash them in an operating theater. But -- since you bring your argument back around to eloquent rhetoric -- there are plenty of people who compose music or speeches or create art because they feel "inspired," they attribute the creative process to something outside of or beyond themself. I would suggest that the sense of "being guided" in action to be more accurate to the spirit of the Spirit's gift; and because it is a gift, it is not simply a common denominator in the experience of human life. Not everyone has the oratory gift; that does not mean that nobody does. Most of the churches I've been around believe people have gifts given to them by God, but through Grace, not works. Charismatics (at least the church my Grandma went to for years before she passed) believe that those gifts can be granted or enhanced by actions they themselves take. I think that's where Azathoth was going with "if I'm holy enough I'll be able to survive poison, etc." It's not that the gifts don't exist or cannot be granted by God, but that they're granted through God's power and not our own, and that's where Charismatics, at least in my experience, differ.
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Jan 15, 2024 21:05
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Thank you!
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Jan 15, 2024 21:19
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Miracle also when read most literally isn’t what most people think it is. It’s from miraculum. mīror - to be astonished culum - to turns the verb into a instrumental noun It is “that which astonishes”. A miracle doesn’t have to be supernatural, what makes a miracle a miracle is that it is astonishing or causes wonder. So when folks are talking about being in wonder, let’s say when looking at our planet from space, that’s the experience of seeing a miracle in the most literal sense of what the word means
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Jan 15, 2024 21:21
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Miracle also when read most literally isn’t what most people think it is. It’s from miraculum.
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Jan 15, 2024 21:22
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Freddie Mercury I think has the best modern understanding of miracle taken from his Zoroastrianism. https://youtu.be/2DaY8-Mui0I?si=6Kr21OHqz3qRRrSR
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Jan 15, 2024 21:26
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I thought the consensus I had gathered from thread-goers here is that "hell" is not only a sort of Christian/Catholic theological idea, but also the modern concept of it is heavily derived from the literature written by like, Dante and Faust. Is the idea of a "hell" much more common than that? I think that a lot of common understandings of it are. But Hell as a place may have little point in scripture but a great deal in cultural understandings of Christianity since... if not the inception then at least since the creation of the idea of Catholicism, distinct from the Roman Catholic Church. I'd say that most major denominations believe in a hell. But this also extends to both Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam to greater or lesser extents as part of cosmology. None existence is usually postulated, and it's not particularly something I'm worried about, but it's still a punishment. No God can love without asking for certain behaviours from people, and no person is ever going to be able to love absolutely, so that's kind of where I am looking into it from. Essentially, one cannot be loved just for ourselves. We can only be loved for our actions and, to a lesser extent, our intentions. Bar Ran Dun posted:That’s a common idea for what “hell “ points to nothingness / non-being. It's common in some denominations, and it's the "least worst" option. But if it's just none being that still a scary concept to most. Also I know I'm a bit far back, but I've appreciated The Oh Hellos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du5q8lkXpw0 Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 21:32
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Josef bugman posted:Essentially, one cannot be loved just for ourselves. We can only be loved for our actions and, to a lesser extent, our intentions.
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Jan 15, 2024 21:48
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Nessus posted:Can you elaborate on this part? I would like to know your thinking because my own views is that this is not the case, not even in a theoretical 'well, this CAN be done, but in nearly all cases it isn't' kind of way. Sure, I'd say that we usually love things based on their actions as opposed to simply "existing". We cannot be loved for who we are because who we are requires doing and action and being. We cannot be loved for "ourselves" because, ultimately, our personhood tend to be made up of actions and those can be bad. Instead we should love the best bits of ourselves and attempt to improve them and work on the worse bits. Nobodies perfect ofc, but we can still improve.
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Jan 15, 2024 22:09
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