Skip to main content

interesting things I learned from talking with an evangelical

He claimed both that Catholics rely upon a priest to mediate between them and God AND that God is bodily.  His reason for the former:  the passages in the Old Testament where God is depicted bodily.  Walking in the Garden with Adam; as a Pilar of Fire guiding the Israelites; etc.

It occurred to me that his two points are related.

But before describing that point, let me add that Catholics believe that they are relating directly to Jesus Christ in the Mass, even though the priest does play a priestly role in helping make Christ present bodily.

After all, if God is never present to us via a mediator, then when it says that God is truly present via these phenomena, then God is identical with them.

On the other hand, affirming that identity is to go against the claim that God is unchanging.  And if God is bodily then God could not be a Trinity.

Solution: God is truly present to His People in the Old Testament via His Creation.  But that opens the door to a Catholic understanding of the sacraments.  And it allows God to be unchanging in His nature AND bodily present, through the ministry of the priest, in the Mass.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more