You'd think an historian searching for very early Christian evidence of gender equality would know about Galatians 3 and I Corinthians 7, but you'd be wrong

Am I missing anything by way of obvious sources? Put another way, without Romans 16 above all, and a couple of other comparable lists of “Say hello to” greetings in other letters, would any later scholar dared have portrayed very early Christianity in the gender-equal way that modern scholars suggest? Think how easily something like Romans 16 might have dropped out of the transmission history of that document, if an early scribe had decided it was just personal stuff, and not worth preserving. If that had occurred, just what would we know or think about gender roles in early Christianity then? 


 

 

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

 

-- Galatians 3:28

For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does.

 

-- I Corinthians 7:4

Isn't "postliberal theology" oxymoronic?

Think about it.

The post-liberals rejected the preeminent role played by reason in the formulation of the modernist interpretation of Christianity, which in its turn had really been a rejection of the pre-modern rationalism of the church in favor of the so-called modern type. 

The post-liberals granted that there was an internal logic to these two interpretations, something liberal theology had been loathe to grant, but rejected the existence of a superintending logic over them all, to which they bare witness.

When one goes this route, one is separating the "logy" from the "theo" in theo-logy and jettisoning it. As a consequence, one can't really speak of a postliberal theology. In rejecting logos one is really rejecting speech and argument itself. One is left with a God about whom nothing can be said.

Had postliberalism been true to itself, however, it never would have come to exist in the first place because it would have understood this imperative to shut up.

The thing post-liberalism claimed was true of others they never quite applied to themselves, namely that the limitations of language and culture made their own truth claims impossible. In seeking to relativize the dogma of others, their own movement became a dogma, but not one successful enough that you can actually look one up in the Yellow Pages under "post-modernist churches" and attend a Sunday, or preferably some other day, service.

What post-liberalism actually does is attract certain personalities from the pre-modern or the modern camps who are susceptible of rejecting reason, Americans caught up in radical individualism being noteworthy examples. This mission field has been white unto harvest, riddled as it is with self-imposed isolation and separation from "community". Some of them doubtless call themselves "nones", and their creed, if they have one, is "Here's to the truth as perceived by you!".

The topic is recently and usefully discussed here at The Blog of Veith.

A Roman Catholic wants you to believe "sinless Mary" is biblical

Here:

Grace is presented (esp. in Paul) as the antithesis of sin.

To be full of such grace (simple logic) is to be without sin.

Mary was proclaimed by an angel as “full of grace” (Lk 1:28); therefore, she is without sin.

You will search in vain for the translation "full of grace" in Luke 1:28 in the King James Version, the New King James Version, the New Living Translation, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, the Christian Standard Bible, the New American Standard Bible, the New English Translation, the Revised Standard Version and the American Standard Version. Most of these say Mary is "highly favored".

Evidently the translators of these editions all must have been either a bunch of dummies, or a pack of anti-Catholic Protestant heretics to a man to get it so wrong, for so long.

The birth narratives of Jesus in Matthew and Luke were most likely composed to counter the calumny (to Christians) that Jesus was born of fornication (John 8:41). This became a bone of contention once Jesus' reputation had risen above mere "prophet" to deity. The solution to the charge of being a product of fornication was a miraculous birth to a virgin involving no human father at all.

But, of course, Mary then becomes the problem. She herself participated in sinful human nature, did she not, and therefore must have communicated it to her son, did she not?

So in Catholic theology a sinless Mary becomes necessary to stop the communication of sinful human nature to Jesus, based on tenous arguments such as above.

But then how did Mary escape the great chain of being? And if she did why was the birth of Jesus even necessary?

The whole thing quickly descends into more absurdity.

The Arminian Roger Olson, hostile to Augustine, does not believe God is "infinite" and is therefore outside the catholic faith

 

 

 

Here, already from a young age, which ought to tell you something (enthusiasm dies hard):

I long ago rejected the notion that God is “infinite.” I rejected it when I first heard it articulated which was probably in some seminary class. I immediately thought that the concept itself was beyond comprehension (except perhaps in mathematics) and that attributing it to God led away from thinking of God as personal, present, involved, loving and able to be affected by us. With Brightman (who I only learned about later) I thought of that attribute of God in traditional theology as an inappropriate expansion of the concept of God brought into Christian thought through philosophy, not the Bible.

Compare the Athanasian Creed:

And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated. The Father unlimited; the Son unlimited; and the Holy Ghost unlimited. The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal. As also there are not three uncreated; nor three infinites, but one uncreated; and one infinite [et unus immensus]. 

Hilary of Poitiers, On the Councils (composed in 359), thought it was a mark of safety to employ expansion in theology in order to avoid error (unlike Olson), and that the profusion of definitions appropriately mimics the boundlessness of God:

The infinite and boundless [infinitus et immensus] God cannot be made comprehensible by a few words of human speech. Brevity often misleads both learner and teacher, and a concentrated discourse either causes a subject not to be understood, or spoils the meaning of an argument where a thing is hinted at, and is not proved by full demonstration. The bishops fully understood this, and therefore have used for the purpose of teaching many definitions and a profusion of words that the ordinary understanding might find no difficulty, but that their hearers might be saturated with the truth thus differently expressed, and that in treating of divine things these adequate and manifold definitions might leave no room for danger or obscurity.

The reductionism of the Reformation is a contrary tendency.

In the Marburg Colloquy the Lutherans and the Reformed forever parted company over the meaning of the presence of Christ

Present everywhere, huh?

You can read a transcript of the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 online here.

About it Gene Veith here points to "the different approaches not just to the Sacrament but to the Bible and, above all, to Christology."

This is most certainly true, but it is the different approach to the Bible I think which is paramount, for it is from the Bible that Luther derives his Christology and all his doctrine. Its articles of faith dominate independently and are not to be put at war with one another:

"Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not require proof from another one."

Luther defends his understanding of the Holy Supper on the basis of the plain meaning of the words of institution from the Synoptic testimony, whereas the rationalistic reformers venture far and wide over the ancient fathers and the text of Scripture in their debate with Luther, but end up appealing especially to John's Gospel to argue against Luther's understanding of that Synoptic testimony.

For example, Oecolampadius of Basel opened the meeting with a salvo which takes Christ's presence at the right hand of God in heaven so narrowly and literally that for him Christ couldn't possibly be present bodily also in the Holy Supper at the same time. But for Luther, "this is my body" means both things can be true at the same time because Scripture says so, even though we cannot understand it.

In this Luther refused to make Scripture the enemy of Scripture (of course, his problems with James for example show that if he thought there were differences which couldn't be reconciled, well, then the offending Scripture must not be Scripture). 

If anyone ever doubted Luther's devotion to the authority of the text of Scripture to the exclusion of all else, one need only meditate on this excerpt from near the conclusion of the meeting:

"The important thing, as Augustine says, is that the words of the fathers must be understood in relation to Scripture. If they seem to run counter to the Scriptures, one must clarify them by interpretation, or reject them." 

Martin Luther, sovereign theologian, sovereign individual.

Elite wannabes like Thomas Kidd of Baylor are so pissed off over evangelicals' support of Donald Trump they're denying reality

 

 

'Why in the world would so many Christians support a rude and crude candidate like Trump, whose pro-life credentials seem obligatory at best, and who specializes in vilifying Hispanics? ... I frankly do not believe that most of the people identifying as “evangelicals” in these polls are evangelicals (or conservatives) in any useful sense. The sympathy for Trump is, instead, a holdover of the worst aspects of American civil religion and Bible Belt culture.'

Well, that clears it up. Y'all must be fundamentalists.

You would think that an historian worthy of the name would take care to identify Trump more accurately as a critic of law-breakers and those who excuse them, but that would get in the way of the elite agenda, wouldn't it? I mean, Christian America must forgive, must it not? Separation of church and state my sweet German-American ass!

More at the link.

Christian Piatt explores the idea that Jesus was crazy

Here.

The context of apocalyptic is glaringly missing, but it's still an amusing read, including the insane commenters, who remind me of nothing so much as the proverbial moths drawn to the flame . . .

"But like a moth drawn to the flame, here I am talkin' 'bout Jesus just the same".

Red Letter Rachel is preoccupied with the wrong first person

Rachel Held Evans, quoted here:

My mother used to tell me that we weren’t the type of people to air out our dirty laundry.

What she meant was good Southern girls didn’t go around talking about their troubles or divulging their secrets.

But this is a cultural idiom, not a Christian one.

We Christians don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church.

We come as we are–no hiding, no acting, no fear.

We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door.

We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image.

We come with our addictions–to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food.

We come with our differences, be they political, theological, racial, or socioeconomic.

We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale.

We come to air our dirty laundry before God and everybody because when we do it together we don’t have to be afraid.

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". . . work out your own salvation with fear and trembling . . . whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

-- Philippians 2:12; 4:8

Peter Enns stumbles into the truth, but hasn't quite dusted himself off yet

Here:

'[T]he Jewish messianic problem is that they wait and wait and wait for the messiah but he doesn’t come. The Christian problem is that he came and it made no difference.'

------------------------------------------------

It doesn't occur to Peter Enns that maybe both religions as they developed were false to their original selves. The longed-for prophet like unto Moses of the second temple period clearly was an incorrect interpretation of Deuteronomy, just as the ascended Lord of the Gospel of John and of Paul pays little respect to the teaching of the Jesus of the Synoptics that Jesus' generation faced imminent final judgment.

When doubting the resurrection got you fined, imprisoned and dead

From Phil Jenkins, here:

'Between about 1690 and 1740, the British Isles were home to several quite brilliant scholars and thinkers who applied critical scholarship to the Bible and Christian tradition generally. I stress “British Isles” because some were Irish or Scottish as well as English. We know them collectively as the Deists. Major figures included John Toland, Thomas Woolston, Thomas Chubb, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal. Their assault on orthodoxy was many sided, but they ranged widely over both the Old and New Testaments. ...

'It was in the early eighteenth century that there came into existence a culture with the critical tools and the relative freedom to examine this question, and the Resurrection soon came under attack.

'In England, this was a central issue in the pamphlet wars known as the Deist Controversy (c.1725-35). Woolston wrote (1727-29) an attempted demolition of the literal Resurrection, together with most of the Miracle stories. The resulting legal reaction led to Woolston dying in prison . . ..'

From the Wikipedia entry, here:

The Discourses, 30,000 copies of which were said to have been sold, were six in number, the first appearing in 1727, the next five 1728-1729, with two Defences in 1729 1730. For these publications he was tried before Chief Justice Raymond in 1729. Found guilty of blasphemy, Woolston was sentenced (28 November) to pay a fine of £25 for each of the first four Discourses, with imprisonment till paid, and also to a year's imprisonment and to give security, for his good behaviour during life. He failed to find this security, and remained in confinement until his death.

A Vatican II Catholic defends "official splendor and personal austerity"

Here:

The Church is a great Spirit-powered machine for re-divinizing the world; this necessarily involves feeding the poor and making the world more beautiful. ... It is good that the Vatican be splendrous, but it is good that those who live and work in it live and work in spartan style (as Francis does, and as his immediate predecessors did, since the official Papal apartments were also spartan). Against those who would strip our altars and our churches in fits of utilitarian, iconoclastic madness, we must stand athwart. ...  It is incumbent on all of us to practice ascesis and self-mortification; but I would add that it is particularly incumbent on those who have powerful responsibilities to be reminded of their sinful nature, and of their ontological poverty. A bishop should wear liturgical garments of unimaginable splendor–and a hair shirt underneath. His cathedral should be sublime, and his bedroom poor. ... As is always the Catholic Way, we have here a beautiful both/and: official splendor and personal austerity. This should be the way. Sell the apostolic palaces and split the money between art and service to the poor.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's your ontological poverty, and then there's your existential poverty, practised by none.

Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. -- Luke 18:22

Historian Phil Jenkins discovers that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism

Here and imbedded links (he hasn't really yet thought through it):

"Engels had something like a love for the early Christians, and he imagines talking to them as fellow-sufferers who came from exactly the [same] kind of setting."

Attacked in the comments at one point, he responds:

". . . the early Christian movement was very diverse in its theologies. By the way, one common explanation for the ebionites was that they were the remnants of the original Jewish followers of Jesus, including the bulk of the Jerusalem church, who never accepted Paul's innovations."

Keep it up Phil! You are on the right track! Too bad you didn't train in philology . . . it wouldn't have taken you this long to figure out that Pauline Christianity is a double-edged sword leaving us with two forms of materialism which now war for our imaginations, even though you'll probably become bored and get side-tracked away from this also.

Jewish Christians renounced the material, as did Jesus, believing the kingdom of God was coming down to earth from God, right quick like, as they say in the holler. Paul's Gospel by contrast baptized entrepreneurialism and made free-enterprise and Judaism safe for the world. Hence the tithers of today, and the spread of the congregation on the synagogue model.

Historians would be better engaged figuring out what went wrong there with Paul. Albert Schweitzer figured out what went wrong with Jesus.

Phil Jenkins says some silly things about the Gospel of Mark

Here:

It’s obvious to assume that Mark, a skilled and thoughtful writer, did not mean to end the book thus, and that an original ending has been lost. But that is where the story gets puzzling. If we assume the standard theory of the composition of the gospels, then Mark wrote about 70. Perhaps a quarter century afterwards, his book was used by both Matthew and Luke, who incorporated virtually his whole text, and it is clear that neither author knew any other or fuller ending. If an ending was lost, it vanished very early indeed, if it was ever written. At least by the second century, various editors added their own conclusions to satisfy what they felt to be the gaping hole at the end of Mark, and one survives in the KJV as Mark 16.8-20. ...

If it really was meant to end at 16:8, Mark may be the greatest anti-Christian, anti-Jesus movement, tract ever written. It could scarcely have been so highly regarded as it was, still less accepted as the basis of other traditions. ...

It’s very likely indeed that the next scene would have been something very much like John 21, with a Resurrection appearance (a) to Peter (b) in Galilee. If the ending of Mark’s gospel actually did exist and then was lost, this is presumably just what it would have looked like. (Rudolf Bultmann was one famous scholar who argued this).

-------------------------------

First of all, Mark is not a "skilled" writer. His Greek is everywhere clumsy, as John C. Meagher noted long ago, may he rest in peace. The almost laughable uses of kai, euthus, and gar represent just three examples well known to students of Mark's style, if it can be dignified as style. Mark has some facility with Greek as a second language, and evidently is using it to communicate to a special audience of similarly situated individuals, perhaps in Rome.

Matthew and Luke "incorporated virtually his whole text", but not in the verbatim manner this suggests. Those authors frequently change details of Mark's content, and improve upon his Greek significantly. This means they are correcting Mark as much as they are using him.

The absence of a proper ending which then fails to show up in Matthew and Luke indeed shows the early absence of the ending, but it is also another reason why Matthew and Luke felt the need to write their own compositions. They believed Mark to be inadequate, and inadequate on a number of levels. Luke especially shares this attitude about the inadequacy of the previous accounts with which he is familiar, and presumably "John" would not have written his account subsequent to the Synoptics if he thought they were adequate, else he had not departed from them so radically.

The use of Mark as architecture for composition by Matthew and Luke pays respect to Mark, it is granted, but was Mark really "so highly regarded"? The dearth of early manuscript evidence for Mark speaks against it. A highly regarded gospel would be copied more often from the beginning, and more copies would survive from that time than do.

Finally, the suggestion that what we have at the end of John, as hinted at by the Gospel of Peter, constitutes what is missing from Mark is plausible. However, students of the Fourth Gospel know that John is not a unity either. The prologue, the story of the woman caught in adultery, and the final chapter all look like additions, which means that the narrative ending we are looking for in Mark has its basis only in material which is itself mainly the phenomenon of later editorial activity, some of which was not canonized. Not firm ground to stand on.

Anti-protestant silliness on the Pericope Adulterae from Joel J. Miller

Joel Miller here on John 7:53ff., the favorite New Testament cudgel of liberals everywhere:

"[W]hat should we make of the faith of all those Christians that lived before this reconstruction [which excludes the pericope from John], including great exegetes like Augustine or Chrysostom, or pastors who led the church before even the canon (let alone this imagined reconstruction) was settled?"

Well, what should we make of the faith of all those Christians that lived with a Gospel of John without the passage, including the readers of:

Papyri 66 (c. 200) and 75 (early 3rd century); Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (4th century), also apparently Alexandrinus and Ephraemi (5th), Codices Washingtonianus and Borgianus also from the 5th century, Regius from the 8th, Athous Lavrensis (c. 800), Petropolitanus Purpureus, Macedoniensis, Sangallensis and Koridethi from the 9th century and Monacensis from the 10th; Uncials 0141 and 0211; Minuscules 3, 12, 15, 21, 22, 32, 33, 36, 39, 44, 49, 63, 72, 87, 96, 97, 106, 108, 124, 131, 134, 139, 151, 157, 169, 209, 213, 228, 297, 388, 391, 401, 416, 445, 488, 496, 499, 501, 523, 537, 542, 554, 565, 578, 584, 703, 719, 723, 730, 731, 736, 741, 742, 768, 770, 772, 773, 776, 777, 780, 799, 800, 817, 827, 828, 843, 896, 989, 1077, 1080, 1100, 1178, 1230, 1241, 1242, 1253, 1333, 2193 and 2768; the majority of lectionaries; some Old Latin, the majority of the Syriac, the Sahidic dialect of the Coptic, the Gothic, some Armenian, Georgian mss. of Adysh (9th century); Diatessaron (2nd century); apparently Clement of Alexandria (died 215), other Church Fathers namely Tertullian (died 220), Origen (died 254), Cyprian (died 258), Nonnus (died 431), Cyril of Alexandria (died 444) and Cosmas (died 550) ?

What were those Christians, chopped liver?

"Rather than a collection of texts written in and for the church and recognized as valid by that church, biblical books and even minute passages now become arbitrated by scholars."

Well, no. The above collection of texts without the pericope is arbitrated as valid by scribes, who presumably were themselves Christians. But apparently their voices don't count as the voice of the church to Joel Miller.

"If the church doesn’t validate the text, who does? In this instance, scholarly consensus is consulted to 'uncanonize' a portion of generally received scripture."

Sorry, no. The absence of the pericope suggests churchmen "uncanonized" it long before contemporary scholars did. Martin Luther did nothing different. Joel Miller just doesn't want to face it.

"Sola Scriptura becomes queer indeed when ideas from outside Scripture are determining what goes into it."

Well, if some extra-Biblical principle was at work excluding the pericope from the manuscript evidence, it pre-dated the Reformation by a thousand years and was operating in scriptoria funded by churches all over the place. What's with the anti-protestantism, Miller?

"[I]nerrancy becomes equally queer when ... Christians have been hearing a bunk passage read from the lectionary and expounded from the pulpit for centuries."

Just because there are obvious suspect passages like John 7:53ff. and the famous 1 John 5:7f. and Mark 16:9ff. based on the manuscript evidence doesn't "bunkify" the rest of John, 1 John or Mark anymore than the selectivity exercised by lectors in churches for 1,900 years has.

No one suggests Matthew 10:23 isn't original to Matthew just because it's avoided by the church like the plague.

The Orthodox Are Insane To Assert That "All War Is Evil"

The supper of God is our flesh, not his.

 

As here in the comments section:

Orthodoxy continues to uphold the ancient Christian teaching that all war is evil.

If it were true that all war is evil, the Orthodox would have to stop worshiping Jesus, who believed in war with all his heart and preached it, a final war in which the Son of Man would imminently descend from heaven leading the armies of God to judge the world in righteousness, saving the few but consigning the many to the flames of Gehenna. The vision of it which animates Jesus' entire ministry commanded people to flee from its coming not just for their own good but as a sign of their repentance, abandoning their very lives with all its encumbrances, including "goods, fame, child and wife".

It matters that Jesus did not think that human beings would or should take this war into their own hands, but the failure of that war to materialize means that Jesus' statements about pacifism in the face of that war are as historically conditioned as his failed predictions of that war.

 

Christianity is absurd without the coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven. 

So the vision of Him as warrior, with armies of his own to bring wrath on the human race and prepare a feast of dead flesh for the buzzards, died hard:

Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. ... And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. ... Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, "Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great." And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him who sits upon the horse and against his army.

-- Revelation 19:11, 14f., 17ff.

Food for buzzards, that's what we are. That's the supper of God, not the communion.

For Most Protestants, It's Mary's Perpetual Virginity Which Is The Problem

Philip Jenkins, here, who notes the Feast of the Nativity of Mary on September 8th:

As recently as 1950, Pope Pius XII stated that “we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” ... [F]or most Protestants (and some Catholics), the ideas I am describing – the whole Marian lore – is so bizarre, so outré, so sentimental, and so blatantly superstitious that it just does not belong within the proper study of Christianity. If anything, it’s actively anti-Christian. Even scholars prepared to wrestle with the intricacies of Gnostic cosmic mythology throw up their hands at what they consider a farrago of medieval nonsense. ... [T]hat response is profoundly mistaken. If we don’t understand devotion to Mary, together with such specifics as the Assumption, we are missing a very large portion of the Christian experience throughout history. It’s not “just medieval,” any more than it is a trivial or superstitious accretion.

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That's right. The perpetual virginity of Mary is no more outrageous than the virgin birth of Christ, except that for Protestants it conflicts with the evidence that Jesus had brothers during his lifetime. To them the Romanists engage in special pleading when they say that the plain sense of these texts isn't the plain sense and should be understood in the light of the much later "apocryphal" evidence which maintained Mary's perpetual virginity and that his "brothers" must have been only his nephews or cousins.

More to the point, however, missed by most commentators, is that Jesus' rejection of normal family relationships is paramount in the Synoptic narratives mentioning his brothers and mother, and is rooted in his apocalyptic worldview of an imminent end of the world. Being tied down by a wife and children or a mother and a father and siblings, or a job or possessions or the cares of this life generally, all will hold you back and keep you from escaping from the wrath which is to come, and come soon. To repent is to turn your back on all this. The historical development is that when this Apocalypse he preached failed to materialize, this part of the teaching was transformed into an idealization of celibacy and virginity.

Paul Was Not An Inerrantist

some signatories to the '78 Chicago Statement

Otherwise why try to persuade?

James McGrath, here:

"[Paul] doesn’t simply make statements of fact, or issue commands. He seeks to persuade. He corrects himself at times. He writes like we would expect a human being writing letters to write, not as we would expect God causing his words to flow through a human vessel to write."

------------------------------------------

Or why the need to add to Paul with creeds, confessions and systematic theologies if Paul is the sine qua non or the terminus ad quem?

Deny Communion To George Zimmerman?

And you thought The Inquisition was over.

Story in blue, here.

Interesting Description Of Catholic Right Wing

Interesting description of the American Catholic right wing (seen here in the comments):

• Libertarian in economics -- The Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan

• Pro-torture -- Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President of The Acton Institute, and Raymond Arroyo, EWTN News Director

• Pro-preventative war -- George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Richard John Neuhaus, First Things

Interesting description of inter-war period Catholic Europe:

• Grandmothers of Bolshevism -- Oswald Spengler

Joel Miller Misunderstands "Martyr" From Every Angle

Joel Miller, here:

"Coptic Christians have long tattooed their wrists with small crosses, little blue-green marks that silently profess their faith. It’s not without irony that the word witness in Greek is martyr. Copts are often harassed by Muslim neighbors for their markings, and reports of Christian girls forced into Muslim marriages include references to having their crosses cut out or burnt off with acid."

Not only did Greek "martyr" not have the sense Christians later came to invest it with but had instead a long judicial pedigree which informs the main sense of "witness" in the New Testament itself, the idea of actually craving to be tortured and killed for Christ like Ignatius is probably the last thing on the Copts' minds when they get a small tattoo on the wrist. It's like an identity card you flash to identify yourself to a fellow Christian, or to a westerner you assume is Christian, in a country where you need all the friends you can get.