Confronting error with the truth of God's Word is not ""bashing", it is confronting error with the truth. Christians are called to confront error, not let it stand and mislead other Christians into the same error.

100% correct. Exactly right.

(*)

Update (original post is below): it's probably not worth it to continue this dialogue, and indeed (upon reflection) I've decided that to do so will only continue to harden the heart of one who is alread hard enough of heart for any two people. So with my apologies and supplications, I have withdrawn the blog post concerning the discussion at hand.

* * *

RE: this

The D man has even stooped so low as to post the contents of a private PM conversation he has with some Christian, as he refers to him. I am sure that this Christian, whoever he may be, thought that his conversations with the D man would remain private. This Christian obviously had the respect to communicate his thoughts privately, rather than publicly, on a union. I sure he must be sad and shocked that the D man would take his comments public and in doing so, try to give the impression that our union was involved.

Firstly: I made it clear that I would be re-posting a detailed summary of the conversation. The conversation continued past that point, although it has since been paused (by myself, pending an honest answer to a direct question), and this was taken as tacit approval of my intent.

Secondly: The other Christian has not kept his thoughts wholly private either, and in fact has participated in public, forum-based displays of defamation directed at both myself and at the Church.

Thirdly: The CWU was involved.

Fourthly: I am also putting into display my correspondence to the other Christian; I am as exposed as he is. I believe that things should be held up to the light, that the dark things might wither and the righteous things shine out. If the other Christian has said anything to me which he would rather not be made public, he is welcome to inform me and I will of course withhold mention of that statement. But if he has said anything of this nature, perhaps he should consider that to do so was an occasion of sin, and that it would have been better for him to hold his tongue in check.

Fifthly: I like how my name keeps changing in the False Witness Union. From "dragon" to "dragony", and then to "Dragon" (note the proper capitalization), and now to "D man". For a group that spends a lot of time complaining about how I apparently spend my every effort on insulting them, they do seem to enjoy having a go at mocking my GS username.

Sixthly: Just because you quote the Bible in your arguments does not mean you are arguing from a Christian perspective. For example...

Seventhly: If you say that celibacy is unbiblical, you are setting yourself against Scripture. Read 1 Corinthians 7 again.

This blog does not endorse Jack Chick or Islam, but this was too funny not to post.

Because, really, isn't this all a Chick tract is? A verse or two of Scripture, often taken out of context, accompanied by images that are designed to shock and frighten, or to otherwise manipulate the emotions of the reader?

(Image credit: Encyclopedia Dramatica)

Hmmn...one of my topics just got swatted by the mods. Curious. The specific charge was that the post was solely intended to offend or annoy another GS user.

Kind of like this, I suppose?

It's really funny, I find, how easy it is to find the lack of charity lurking beneath the thin veneer of anti-Catholic rhetoric. The last time I met one whose heart was so darkened by hatred, it was not a fellow Christian that I was debating. That, I think, is the most pitiable aspect of this whole affair.

At any rate, regarding my deleted post, I apologize if it caused needless offence to anyone.

Update: I see the post linked above has been deleted, by all appearances.

...is that every last human being is a sinner. All have sinned, as the saint noted, and fallen short of the glory of God. Humans are fallible and weak, struggle against concupiscence, and fall into temptation and sin. One such sin is the sin of hatred, a most wicked and terrible sin. The Epistle of John even equates the act of hating with murder, a mortal sin. It's hardly the only sin, of course, but it is relevant to mention prior to discussing what a Christian response to sin must be.

Many Christians are taught to love the sinner and hate the sin, but personally I've always felt this to be...well...an acceptable starting point for children, but not a mature attitude for adult Christians who have grown in their faith. That is because in the end, the statement "love the sinner, hate the sin" is nothing more than rubbish.

That's not to say that Christians should not hate sin. We should hate sin, and to hate sin is the mandate of the righteous. That is also not to say that Christians should not love the sinner, as we should love all people (and all people are sinners). To love is a very Christian, very Godly mandate, and we ignore it at our eternal peril.

But it is to say that we shouldn't take "love the sinner, hate the sin" as our maxim, because it is a false maxim.

The statement would seem to imply a certain parallelism: sin/sinner, love/hate. That's well and good, but it also betrays the key context in which all things must happen: charity. Love and hate are not parallel ideas at all -- the latter must happen within the context of the former if it is to avoid being condemned as sin (as per 1 John 5). As John da Fiesole so aptly put it, "Hate and love are not parallel in Christian thought. The second greatest commandment is not, "Hate what is opposed to the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength." Christian hatred must be situated within the larger context of Christian charity" -- and as a maxim, "love the sinner, hate the sin" fails on that account.

"Sin" and "sinner" are similarly not a parallel: "what are the contraries of "sin" and "sinner"? English doesn't have a word meaning "a morally good act," and the customary "saints and sinners" pairing is actually a cIass ("sinners") and a sub-cIass ("saints"), not two mutually exclusive cIasses."

Christians already believe that we may not do evil deeds that good may come of it; there is no "by the ends" justification of the means possible within Christian thought. Loving the sinner and hating the sin is something of a logical reductio of this wider statement, and then a false one, because it ignores, and is vulnerable, to one key aspect of human nature: that we are all sinners.

And because of the false parallelism of love and hate for sinner and sin (respectively), human weakness often sees "love the sinner, hate the sin" devolve into either hating the sinner or loving the sin.

Gahdhi popularized the common phrasing of the "love the sinner, hate the sin" teaching, but his basis was in something Augustine once said: "Observe due love for the persons and hatred of the sins", which is a more mature approach to the matter. Unlike Gandhi's false maxim, Augustine's instruction doesn't assume a false parallelism; it does not contrast between love and hate, but understands that proper, non-sinful hate must emerge from directed, charitable love. It affirms that both are due, and then to every person.

Unlike "love the sinner, hate the sin", which ultimately is a courting of the lesser evil.

I don't remember the exact phrasing, but the basic gist of it was this: woe to those Christians who, in attempting to evangelize those who have studied the world, if they attempt to do so in a way that denies the knowledge that such men have amassed. They will make themselves, and by extension the faith, look foolish for having done so, and will be as a stumbling block to faith.

What's really ironic about this post is that the writer is, to the best of my knowledge, a Young Earth Creationist, and yet the subject under discussion is actually an argument against that erroneous viewpoint.

It should be noted that the Catholic Church doesn't require its members to accept one belief or another where Creation is concerned. To that end, there are a few Young Earth Creationists among the Catholic fold, as well as theistic evolutionists, Intelligent Design proponents, and evolutionary creationists (like myself). Dogmatically speaking, the Church requires only a few specific beliefs regarding Creation, the first and foremost of these being that God ordained and sustains every aspect of Creation, and that Creation is very good (c.f. Genesis 1).

The other aspect of the Catholic position is that there is no inherent conflict between science and religion, and that both the Bible and the investigation of the natural world are forms of revelation; from Scripture, we learn that God is Creator, the carpenter who fashioned all things. And from science we get the occasional glimpse into His divine "toolbox".

In the broad strokes, the historical analysis in the afore-linked blog post is correct, but what's interesting is the conclusion that is reached: that the Church fell into error over the issue of the fixed position of the Earth (geocentrism) because of the incorporation of Aristotelean philosophy into its body of wisdom.

Anti-Catholic polemic aside, this is an interesting admission on the part of the other blogger: despite the fact that many passages in Scripture suggest that the Earth is, in fact, fixed and unmoving -- God's stopping of the Sun for Joshua (which implies that the Sun moves relative to the Earth, rather than vice versa), the notion that the Earth is set upon foundations, etc. -- this interpretation of Scripture was in fact shown to be incorrect in light of the discovery that the Sun is actually at the center of the Solar System (heliocentrism), and the Earth in orbit around it.

To be clear: science and religion came into brief conflict, and at the end of the affair it was understood that a particular religious interpretation was actually incorrect. And in the end, science and religion were reconciled and found to complement each other. In Galileo's well-chosen turn of phrase, the Bible remained important to teach us how to go to Heaven, but not how the heavens go. For the latter matter, it was the work of scientists like Galileo and Copernicus that brought about a bit more revelation concerning how God had chosen to shape the universe.

Ironically, these first battles between scientists and the Bible were over biblical misinterpretations, not what the Bible actually says.

Ironically, indeed!

To this day, there need not be any inherent conflict between scientific discovery and religion, even in the field of evolutionary theory. Let's be clear about this: if it can be safely admitted, contrary to the plain meaning of the text of Scripture, that the Earth is a) not set upon foundations, b) not fixed, and c) not flat but essentially spherical, then surely it can be safely admitted that the Earth is older than 6,000 years?

That's the real lesson of the Galileo affair. There was nothing inherently wrong with Aristotelean philosophy -- the parts of it that the Church adopted were general truths, not specifically tied to the pagan religion of the ancient Greeks. (Even St. Paul was not above quoting truisms from pagan Greek poets, in his various letters, to make a point applicable to Christians.)

The other blogger asserts that Augustine was in error when he suggested that parts of Scripture might be more allegorical than literal, when of course this should have been quite plainly the case; Christ Himself made use of allegory to confer deeper teachings (we call these examples "parables"), so why wouldn't the Spirit do so as well when it inspired the authors of Scripture? Could it in fact be the case that those who oppose the theory of evolution on religious grounds are every bit as guilty of ignoring the plainly evident evidence, as discovered by science, because they cling to an incorrect interpretation of parts of the Bible?

God is Creator. Creation is very good. These statements are every bit as true in a world that emerged over the course of billions of years as they are for a world that is considerably younger.

Seek and you will find, knock and it shall be opened. These statements are also true, and in addition to being a teaching of the Lord's, they form the unspoken core tenet of the scientific method: that rational inquiry will be rewarded, by a rational universe, with a measureable, replicable outcome. We, as Christians, need not fear the discoveries of science -- truth cannot contradict truth. If God created and if the Earth is billions of years old, then God obviously created us over the span of billions of years. If God created and if humanity evolved, then God obviously used evolution as the method by which He fashioned man after His own image.

Yes, some have abused the geological record and the theory of evolution to suggest, unreasonably, that God does not actually exist. But for them to have done so is to abuse the scientific method, and to abuse science itself, for science is concerned only with the empirical; it is too limited in its categories to be a tool which can be used to pronounce upon the nature or existence of God. It only reveals what is true about the natural world and this temporal realm; anything that exists outside of that limited framework is outside the scope of science, and therefore not its concern.

Evolution does not disprove God, in other words. Nor could it. So why do some Christians irrationally fear the theory? It is asserted that it was an error to regard parts of Scripture as allegorical...but really, is it? Could not the real error be the insistence that all parts of Scripture must be understood in a literal light?

This one from a wedding in which my wife was a bridesmaid.

This is the wedding party milling about just outside the reception hall. I used HDR techniques to extract the sky colours and details from the image.

Just tripped over this in the False Witness Union, in the post on God's hatred:

There would be no salvation if God didn't love sinners enough to send his son to die for their sins against Him. I know that I hated God before I was saved. Thank God He loved me when I hated Him. Are you telling me that you can read the Gospel and tell the sinner that God doesn't love him? Maybe you should stop reading dead calvinists and start reading the Bible.

I'm not saying that God doesn't hate sin though.

Someone just won the Internet.

Update: someone attempts a rebuttal:

The only sinners that a Holy God can love are his elect in Jesus Christ who are clothed with his righteousness and cleansed by his blood

I see there has been an update to John 3:16: For God so loved His chosen elect in Christ Jesus that he gave his only Son, that the elect whom He loves should not perish but have eternal life.

The watcher wrote:

If I was a member of the Christian Union, I would call him out on this.

I have just sent an invite to the watcher, inviting him to re-join the Christian Union. He wants to call me out, and he is now being given the opportunity to do so.

I see that the watcher still watches me. Funny thing is, though, he was so adamant about calling me out over what he felt was a theological error on my part, and yet he has yet to take me up on any of the three offers I made to give him an opportunity to do just that. No doubt it would be beneath him to actually exchange debate with a "Romanist" -- O God, I thank thee that thou has made me a true Christian, not like this wretched Papist before me!

Anyhow, let's see what he has got to say.

Well, I see the Romanist is complaining on his blog again about Scripture.

I seem to recall registering my disgust at some anti-Catholic bigotry, but I don't recall taking any issue with Scripture, and certainly I was not complaining about it. The False Witness Union's top poster certainly lives up to my expectations of him in his opening statement.

It seems that it upsets him when Scripture is used without the person writing an exegesis on that Scripture.

Scripture does not self-interpret. I don't dispute that Scripture is good for teaching, of course, but I do remark that simply quoting Scripture isn't quite the extent of what "teaching" -- in the Biblical sense -- involves. These people do little else besides quote Scripture in support of their bigotry -- to read their websites is to read one quote from Scripture after another.

Exegesis -- interpretation -- is a necessary aspect of quoting Scripture. The Bible does not interpret itself, and each of us that reads the Bible interprets it for him or herself. The Bible itself is a rock-solid foundation, and has been since the Catholic Church canonized Scripture in 390 AD presided over by bishops validly ordained into the Holy Orders in keeping with the apostolic succession from Peter that has been the bedrock of the Church's authority in the world since its inception. But the Bible does not interpret itself to us -- we interpret it.

The watcher has his own interpretation of the verses he cites, and my objection to the absence of exegesis in his posts is that he is either not honest enough to admit that he has it, or is not honest enough to let it be seen. Either way, my objection is to his dishonesty.

He comes by that naturally since the Roman Catholic Church has long taught that only the Church can tell the common man what Scripture means.

What's the alternative? Again, the Bible does not self-interpret; we interpret its meaning when we read it. Which reality is better: each Christian interpreting for him or herself what the Bible is saying, or a centralized teaching office people by skilled academics and faithful officers of the Church who work long hours to form a cohesive, near-universal interpretation of Scripture that can be applied to different Christians in a variety of circumstances and still adequately communicate the truth of Christ?

Moreover, what makes the individual, self-styIed interpretations of Scripture that the watcher uses any more valid than the interpretations of Scripture that emerge from the CDF? In the end, the basis is the same; what metrics exist to declare one interpretation to be more valid than another?

Well, as it turns out, quite a few such metrics exist, not the least of which is consistency. In particular, there should be consistency between our interpretation of any given passage of Scripture and the wider picture that the entirety of the Bible paints; our interpretation of e.g. Romans should not be contradicted by e.g. the Epistle of James.

To achieve that kind of consistency, one requires context -- verses of the Bible cannot always be considered atomically, and must often be taken into our thoughts along with the verses that surround them. An easy example is the watcher's citation, from yesterday, of 1 Thes 4:6. This is a verse that must be considered in its proper context (e.g. 1 Thes 4:3-8). Taking the verse alone, the watcher attempted to twist the verse's meaning into suggesting that one Christian ought not to aggrieve another over any issue (which contradicts 1 John 5). In truth, the meaning of the teaching in 1 Thes 4 concerns marriage, and respect for the marital bond.

In fact, this is one of the main reasons why people were burned to death at the stake, disemboweled, and tortured by the Roman Catholic Church in the Dark ages and during the Protestant reformation.

This is little more than another petty attempt at emotional manipulation on the part of the watcher, which is a form of false witness. That's not to say that there were not many crimes perpetrated by Catholics, as the watcher describes. That much is true. But the lie is in how the truth is articulated, for the way it is articulated makes it seem as though, of all Christians, only Catholics have ever perpetrated bloodshed against other Christians.

This is, of course, not the case.

"Anti-Catholics of Chick's ilk often wish to portray the Catholic Church as bent on bloodshed and their own religious forebears as opposed to religious violence. But this is erroneous. Both sides have things to apologize for. Religious violence tainted every stream within the Protestant Reformation. To cite a few cases: Henry VIII executed St. Thomas More, Elizabeth I executed St. Edmund Campion, John Calvin executed the heretic Michael Servetus, Martin Luther advocated the killing of Anabaptist leaders and the burning of Jewish synagogues, and Anabaptists seized the town of Münster in 1534 and killed many people before their attempt to establish a "New Jerusalem" in the town fell apart the next year. Protestants have the same fallen human nature as Catholics and are just as prone to violence."

People have been killed by a variety of other Christian denominations for the simple crime of being Catholic. I can't deny that some terrible stuff has been perpetrated, throughout history, by Catholics, but neither will I deny that Protestants and others gave as good as they got (so to speak). The Westminster Confession, Elizabeth 1's persecution and execution of Jesuits at Tyburn, the torture and execution of Catholics in Calvinist Scotland, the intense animosity of American anti-Catholicisim that even led, for a time, to anti-Catholic mob violence (and found a welcome home in, amother other places, the KKK), and various other persecutions of Catholics all across Europe during and after the Reformation cry out to heaven for justice as loudly as any Catholic action.

They were attempting to bring the Scriptures to the common man in his native language and the Roman Catholic Church would not allow this. Possessing a Bible in the common language or reading Scripture was prohibited. People like Tyndale, gave their lives to bring the Scripture to the common man.

The watcher's memory is rather short -- I have already demonstrated that these statements are a demonic lie.

This was how the Roman Catholic Church maintained their power and control over the masses. They use their traditions and philosophies to keep them in bondage to the Church today.

This is an interesting statement coming from the man who has excommunicated other Christians from his high, holy presence for the simple crime of saying "Hey, we didn't exactly treat that WtFDragon fellow that well on our union." In truth, those kept in bondage today are the ones who cower before the borderline-autistic attitude and the wall of context-less quotes from Scripture that are the hallmarks of the watcher's discourse, and those who have been taken in by the numerous malicious lies of his anti-Catholic ilk.

God's Word is plain and clear and truth.

I could not agree more with this statement -- indeed, God's word is plain and clear truth. I affirm this as readily as any other Christian. What is funny is how quickly those other Christians will race to deny the plain and clear truth of Scripture the moment you point out just how very clearly the Eucharist is justified, as a doctrine, from the text of the Bible.

Truth, for the watcher, seems to be rather subjective. Or, rather, it would seem to be the case that he is claiming sole authority to dictate what the meaning of Scripture is. Precisely who granted him the gift of infallibility in this regard, I am not sure.

With the Holy Spirit as our guide and interpreter, the truth of God's Word is revealed to the true believer.

And the Spirit is the guide of the Church's interpretations of Scripture, and of her formation of doctrine. As Jesus promised, so Christ delivers; the Catholic Church has always understood that it is guided by the Spirit, and that its teachings do not originate from the men and women who make it up.

Only the prideful would think that we could add anything to what God has said with our finite minds and understanding.

Very true.

And only the ignorant would think that God has finished speaking to man simply because the last page of the Bible has been recorded. Christ promised that He would send for us the Spirit, to guide us -- how can the Spirit guide us if it does not, at times, teach us things? And how can we truly be guided if we do not take those teachings and proclaim them?

In a sense, there is nothing new in what the Church calls Sacred Tradition that is not already spoken in Scripture. In another sense, that same Tradition is the means by which the Spirit continues to reveal Christ's truths to the Church. The message of Christ is fixed and complete, yes, but the world in which we live is not static; at each new turn, the Church must expand her teaching to encompass a new discovery, or to reject a new atrocity. Out of those responses emerge the revelation of Sacred Tradition, which at once is in harmony with the revelation of Scripture and is, in its own right, a revelation of the Spirit.