B. U. G. S.

We have all these search engines, butnone of htem can answer a straightforward question.

So I talked about the absurd term “aristocracy” nd coined the wor “naciocracy.” Classical scholars actedlike they didn’t hear me when I asked them about it and absently answered, “That sounds good.”

So I predicted LibAnon would give me the answer, and he did.

Try asking a search engine a question like that!

So I just talked about he agape and got a mountain of information from Pain.

Pain says Agape means “charity.” Wikipedia says it means “love.” It could mean both.

Pain says that Arianism got its strongest foothold among the Goths. I know that the Goths WERE Arian, but his conradition does not hold. The apostle to the Goths was Wulfila, “little wolf,” a Goth who studied under Arius. He translated the New Testament into his native Gothic.

Pain’s statements on Arius’s real beliefs are enlightening to me.

I overstated it when I said Arius just looked on Jesus as just a prophet. I thought he said Jesus was between God and man.

I am even interested in those Nestorian Christians that had such a huge influence in China. I undersand they were Arian “heretics.”

Maybe I’m wrong about both. Maybe Islam and Arianism seem to have no relationship to the latest press releases, but they are more relevant than Bush’s foot odor. You don’t understand the Middle East by quoting the latest news or bitching about how silly their Paradise is.

Joe Rorke may see all this as boring. But what I am trying to understand is the present Middle East

Joe, hit BACK!

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It would be more exciting for me to breathlessly announce the latest Bush attitude towards Iran, but I am more interested in the Zoraostrian background of Shiitism, the deeply different outlooks of Islam versus our world view.

NOT SPAM

NOT SPAM

“From what I can understand through all the rewritten history, today’s Mass was formerly the Agape, the Love Feast.”

This is a common mistake made by certain sects. The Agape was separate and distinct from the Eucharist. The Agape or “Love feast” was a charity dinner (agape = “charity”) held for anyone of the public. It was free food provided for the poor and anyone who wanted it, Christian or not. The Agape was just like a Baptist church service with a potluck immediately afterwards. The Agape was one important means for preaching the Gospel to non-believers but the Eucharist was reserved for baptized Christians.

The Eucharist was very different, although both had the prayers, hymns, and a sermon. In the Agape, the meal was normal, earthly food (all you can eat) to fill the stomach. In the Eucharist, the meal was ritual, spiritual food (a piece of bread and a swallow of wine) enabling man to commune with God. The earliest Eucharist would have been very much like a high church Anglican/Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox Eucharist. There is no reason an Agape could not follow Eucharist, just as a potluck might follow one today.

Both services were presided over by the priests, and as CS Lewis rights, the Church never had priestesses. Granted one assumes that women cooked the food, thus it was them that everyone must have thanked gratefully. The priest may have given an inspiring sermon, but it always she who cooks the food that gets our special love and favor.

Over time, the Agape love feast fell out of use since it had come to be abused by those getting free food everyday who did not need the charity.

“The Middle East was never purged of Arianism. Between Constantine and the rise of Island there was one long war in which the Grreks tried to impose the Trinitarian idea on churches inthe Middle East.”

Arian had its strongest foothold among the Goths. Arius did NOT preach that Jesus was just a man or a prophet. He taught that he was God, but a being created at some time in eternity past. Nicea corrected that to say that Jesus as God was eternal, not created, and thus “begotten not made.” The east that you spoke about actually developed their Christology in opposition to Arius.

The Nestorians of Babylon and the Far East accepted that Jesus was divine, but that he was two separate persons, one divine and one human. Orthodoxy taught that Jesus was just one person with both divine and human natures. The Antiochenes that feuded so much with the rest of orthodoxy believed in essentially the same orthodox view but worded it differently to set themselves apart from the Nestorian heretics with whom they had to deal.

The view that Jesus was not divine is common to Islam and modern cults such as the Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. (Mormons believe that Jesus was not divine in the same way as God the Father, but was a man who became divine as a model for men to become divine and get their own planets and populate them with their wives; the children in turn get their own planets in an endless cosmic pyramid scheme.)

Comment by Pain