How do you all feel about the Fatima?

Just to be clear, I classify traditional Anglicanism as a Protestant Catholic-Orthodox church. And what I mean by that is that traditional Anglicanism worships correctly and teaches the apostolic faith, and emerged, like the Hussites, Lutheranism, and Calvinism, in response to incompetence on the part of the Roman church.

But you need not fear that Anglicanism is as “narrow minded” as I am; Anglicanism has a reputation, even traditional Anglicanism, for being a broad church, and this is something I appreciate. And you will find charismatics in Anglicanism and people who support Pentecostals. You will also find other people with very different perspectives.

You should not base your opinions of Anglicanism or even traditional Anglicanism based on your interactions with myself, Stalwart or anyone else here, because we are just individuals, on the Internet. In my case I am a member of the Orthodox Church who regards Anglicanism as compatible and wants to work to support traditional Anglicans in the hope of achieving the communion that nearly happened a century ago. But that also means my perspective is going to be extremely high church, more high church than that of most members of an Anglican church (note that I have been a member of the Episcopal Church, and since I never renounced my membership, they probably still count me as a member, owing to their desperation to conceal congregational losses). I was certainly the most high church person at that Episcopal church. But I try not to be holier than thou. By high church, I simply mean that I prefer a form of Anglicanism that has an extremely rich and elaborate ceremonial, but I do respect low church Anglicans of the traditional variety as well. The only groups of Anglicans I tend not to get along with are the informal, aliturgical sort, who do not use the BCP or traditional music; I believe Holy Trinity

So please do not base your opinions of Anglicanism on me!

~

You basically have to understand that I view all non-liturgical worship as wrong; I have grave concerns about practices such as those we discussed above, which are based in part on the opinions of the Orthodox community (which by the way, is not cessationist); I expect most Anglicans would be more tolerant of non-liturgical churches and more tolerant of Pentecostalism.

One final thing: I want you to know my apology to you was unqualified and unreserved. I did not mean to cause you personal offense. Conversely, it is my belief that Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianity is fundamentally wrong, and I feel that I would be lying to myself and acting disingenuously if I revised such an opinion simply because some people might take extreme exception to it. But I do have friends who are members of such churches. For that matter, one of my best friends is unfortunately, a Mormon. And a late friend of mine, from Burkina Faso, who died in 2015, I was the best man at his wedding in 2008, and he was of the Islamic persuasion, although not particularly devout (and I did not participate in any religious aspect of the service).

 

Now, bearing in mind that I do not speak for Anglicanism, I also feel I have failed to properly communicate my views to you. I do not believe that a perfect understanding of theology is required to get into Heaven. On the contrary, the doctrine of the Orthodox church is that the Divine essence of God is beyond human comprehension and can only be reasoned about through negation (for example, God does not change, God is not circumscribed, God is not a creature, nothing came before God, and so on). This we call apophatic theology. Furthermore, I believe there exists a broad spectrum in which legitimate theological differences of opinion can occur; this is the realm of what the Greek Orthodox call theologumemna, meaning theological opinions. Beyond this however, I believe that there are red lines, where heresy occurs.

However, someone who crosses those lines in my opinion is not inherently damned. I am not of the opinion that Pentecostals and Charismatics are hell-bound. I have no idea what their eschatological outcome will be; I pray for their salvation, I do respect them as fellow Christians, and I hope they are saved through the mercy of God. When it comes to heresy, the laity in particular I view as not being in a position to know any better, so for example, with regards to the Roman Catholic church, I consider the Sacred Heart devotion, the Immaculate Conception, the Immaculate Heart devotion the belief in created grace, and the belief in absolute divine simplicity, and the beliefs surrounding the Pope (Papal supremacy and Papal infallibility) to be of a heretical nature, but I am conversely strongly inclined to believe that the greater number of pious Roman Catholic laity will be saved, and I have some reason to believe that despite the existence of these gross errors in the RC communion, their sacraments are not devoid of grace.

There are some Eastern Orthodox, and especially Old Calendarists, who believe that everyone who is not Eastern Orthodox, or their definition of Eastern Orthodox, is damned, but this belief is wrong even by Eastern Orthodox internal standards in my opinion, because the consensus of the fathers is that God is love and will be merciful towards the heterodox. St. John Maximovitch told some Western converts not to worry about heterodox Christians because they have faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who will surely be merciful to them; rather he counseled them to focus on their own salvation.

When it comes to heresies, the only people who strike me as being at some substantial eschatological risk are those persons formally anathematized as heresiarchs, who the early church judged to be anathema. Persons like Arius or Nestorius or Valentinus. By extension, the founders of certain contemporary sects that I am forced to regard as heretical, like the Seventh Day Adventists and Ellen G. White, strike me as being in a potentially precarious position, but this is not a judgement, merely an impression, and I hope that our Lord spares them.

I have found that many Protestants who are not greatly familiar with Patristics come across someone talking about heresy, heretics, cults, and persons who are anathema, the interpretation is that these persons are viewed as inexorably damned, but this is not the case. Heresy is a matter of perspective; a heretic is someone who believes a doctrine which has been anathematized somewhere. There are some Eastern Orthodox who would regard me as a heretic because I consider Anglicans to be Orthodox, or because I object to the posthumous anathemas of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Origen, or because I regard the Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrians as also being fully Orthodox. But of those, only a tiny minority would likely consider me damned as a result, and in taking that view, they would be ignoring the Patristic counsels to the contrary. There are differences of theological perspective which do extend beyond what one might call the “Pale of Orthodoxy”, and in my opinion, love and charity is herein required.

My objection to the Charismatic mode of worship is simply because I regard it as dangerous and unnatural, some forms of it more than others; as an extreme example, I would cite the snake handlers of Appalachia. However, I do not, as I said earlier, regard even those poor souls as Hell-bound; rather, I pray that God will have mercy on them, and also persuade them to, at some point, give up their dangerous mode of worship, which is not in accord with the traditions of the Church, because sometimes they do get bit by poisonous snakes, and sometimes they die, and I find this very sad.

I hope this clarifies my perspective. Furthermore, it must be understood that Anglicanism is a very broad church, and my views, which are admittedly doctrinaire, are atypical. Many Anglicans would look upon my doctrinal positions as extreme and alien, despite the fact that I feel I can assent to the Anglican formularies without qualms.

 

I was similarly offended when Liturgyworks denounced the monumental confession and repentance of a murderer as 'tragic' because it involved a CCM song and that the man was not going to an Orthodox church. I however, held my peace, since it's not properly Christian for any of us to be divided and I appreciate Liturgy for at least apologizing for any possible offenses while still holding to his opinion (and yes, I respect his right nonetheless to hold that). I really don't want to be thrust back into the same bitterness over religious dissension I've struggled with throughout my life. That stuff needs to stay in the past.

But I must say, using dalmatians as an example of proper Christian witness seems lacking to me. The idea of a church worship service centered around dogs sounds more like the Episcopal Church, who baptizes pets. Perhaps it's another one of those crazy eastern things we narrow-minded westerners will never understand!

 

I never said that. Rather, I lamented that he was not participating in liturgical Christianity, small-o Orthodoxy as it were, such as is expressed by traditional Anglicanism.

I am not willing to apologize for my belief that traditional Anglicanism, together with the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, and a few other liturgical churches, represents the authentic apostolic form of Christianity, and that aliturgical evangelicalism and the megachurch culture, as well as things such as praise band music (CCM), is degenerate and by definition, heterodox and cacodox, insofar as it represents a different and wrong way of worshipping our Lord. That is my firm conviction, and my interpretation of the Formularies I subscribed to, insofar as they prescribe liturgical worship.

Specifically, what I do regret and what I am profusely apologizing to @Rexlion for is inadvertantly, due to not having read another thread he linked to, expressed my views on the subject of Pentecostal and Charismatic worship in an insensitive manner which appeared to dismiss a very good thing @Rexlion did, in terms of praying for the healing of someone, a prayer which was granted. This was an accident on my part, a result of an excess of polemical zeal, and I did not mean to tread upon Rexlion’s feelings in that way. It is my position that I never deprecate, and also, to the fullest extent possible, refrain from even commenting on, the personal religious experiences of Christians, because I regard this as a sacred space between a Christian such as @Rexlion, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, which I am not fit to judge. Had I been aware of Rexlion’s background with that healing, I would have phrased the criticism more delicately.

But in the case of the murderer and CCM, I do not apologize for my views on that, because in my opinion the contemporary music produced an undesirable outcome, that being the repentant murderer becoming nominally faithful but not uniting himself to the Church. Whether the Anglican Communion, a traditional Lutheran church, the Eastern churches, the Oriental Orthodox or even the Calvinists and Roman Catholics, it is agreed by the magisterial reformers and the Church Fathers that membership and participation in the church is of extreme importance, and that the worship of this church should be the sacred liturgy, celebrated in spirit and truth, decently and in order, based on the common aspects of liturgy handed down from the holy Apostles. I make no apologies for this view. And I should also stress the incident in question involved a very public experience, or rather, impression, of someone else’s religious experience; what I am critical of is not the conversion of the murderer so much as the interpretation of it as some sort of vindication for a form of worship music which is neither decent nor orderly. And I fail to see why this should offend anyone, because I am not talking about your own religious experiences but rather objecting to a public incident and the implications thereof, in that it appears to have been a less than optimal outcome.

Why is it that the words of the Apostle Paul cannot be heeded? Why must our churches be spoiled with rock bands and obnoxious sounds? I myself have a serious objection to all forms of CCM, but this is another matter, and we are drifting from the core topic of this thread which is of course Fatima, which is something I also have serious objections to. And I expect most members of this forum, even those who are less opposed to praise and worship music than myself, will share in the objections I have concerning Fatima, and that is all I have to say about that.

 

What I was referring to was the use of the Dalmatian lamguage, an exting Latinate or Romance language, similiar to Italian, Romansch, or Romanian, that was spoken along the Adriatic coast in what is now Croatia and Slovenia. It has nothing to do with the spotted dogs other than they hail from the same area, just as Pomeranian dogs were originally bred in the former posessions of the Swedish Empire along the Baltic coast of Germany and Poland.

The last vernacular language to be adopted by the Roman Catholic church was Galgolithic, a Slavic language closely related to the Church Slavonic language used by Sts. Cyril and Methodius in their evangelism of the Slavic-speaking peoples who had settled in the regions to the north of the Byzantine Empire. Galgolithic was, until the Novus Ordo Missae of 1969, and a few experimental services before that, the only language other than Latin (and a small amount of Greek, such as Kyrie Eleison), used in the mass and the other liturgical services of the Roman Rite of the Roman Catholic Church. The RCC did use other languages, but only in self-contained sui juris Eastern Catholic churches commonly called Uniate churches. These churches adopted the liturgy of various Orthodox churches, for the most part, and in some cases, Orthodox bishops entered into communion with Rome and thus the laity suddenly discovered, often to their dismay, that they had gone to sleep a member of an Orthodox church and awakened as a Papist. This was the case of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, for example.

 

I'm actually more on board with you in terms of worship music than you may think. I was at a loss to explain why CCM was always so man-centered and pretentious. It seemed there had been no progress in CCM to consistently produce any truly profound or reverent material, or even much with the kind of quality or sincerity in even their secular counterparts, as if often mentioned by CCM listeners and the Protestant community in general. I was wondering, "Does God really bless music? What is the historic tradition of Christian music before CCM?" This, coupled with my research into Catholic tradition, including Anglicanism, resolved a lot of questions on this matter. That being said, I'd rather have Michael W. Smith or Chris Tomlin for worship over Christian Rock, as they try to devote everything to Jesus in some way or another, and not those horrible Amy Grant "Jesus is my boyfriend/girlfriend" songs, whether or not you like the style.

They are always trying to propose faulty solutions to how we can 'save' CCM, but the solution is more clear when you understand traditional worship. I myself prefer well sung hymns like "Take My Life and Let It Be", over cheesy Christian pop worship.

 

I'm sorry, Liturgyworks, that you and I were using such divergent definitions of the word "cult." That makes it hard to communicate effectively. I think that in the minds of most US Christians, "cult" is most commonly used to indicate a church that is not truly Christian in its most basic doctrinal beliefs to the degree that the Gospel message (of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ only) is obscured by their doctrines and teachings. It therefore is a rather incendiary, insulting, and divisive word to apply to any denomination which does communicate that Gospel message but which teaches less-essential things with which we disagree. I'm sure you don't mean to wave a red flag under anyone's nose, however that is how I took it. I apologize for my outburst.

 

Mod: edited.

 

Mod: both posts edited. Could we take a timeout to cool off? There is no need to make personal references toward fellow members.

 

I will go sit in the corner, facing the wall....

 

I want you to know that I love you as a Christian brother, and that I am truly sorry if my views caused offense. If you would like perhaps we could converse via PM and come to develop our Christian relationship and reach an understanding of our views.

 

My opinion is that Fatima was a hoax. It contradicts the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and should be seen as a childish story about Mary. The "lady" appearing said there was nobody to make sacrifices for sinners - apparently forgetting Jesus' total and complete sacrifice on the cross.

See: "In August of 1917 Our Lady told the children, "pray much and make sacrificehttp://www.rosary-center.org/fatimams.htms for sinners, for many souls go to hell because there is no one to make sacrifices for them." (see: http://www.rosary-center.org/fatimams.htm)

Anybody who has any grasp of Christian doctrine at all knows that this claim is SATANIC. JESUS' SACRIFICE WAS THE ULTIMATE AND COMPLETE SACRIFICE FOR THOSE WHO TRUST IN HIM, NOT HIS MOTHER.

 

I would agree that Gudalupe is an authentic vision.

 

There is also the probability that these phenomenon are evidence merely of 'old wineskins' being unable to contain 'new wine'. The Holy Spirit is a particularly heady brew for those who have had little experience in developing the fruit of the Spirit before trying to exercise the gifts of that same Holy Spirit. In my limited experience of such things I have provisionally concluded that most 'violent shaking', 'ecstatic fits', 'bizarre utterances and actions' and other attention attracting behaviour, usually come 'out of' people with great experience of unrighteousness or enslavement to sin, and little experience of the last and most valued of the fruit of the Holy Spirit, namely 'Self Control'.

Far from being evidence of demonic possession, it may in fact be evidence of demons suffering dispossession of their former residence.

No one likes being evicted and some tenants leave in a temper damaging or destroying the landlords furniture.

You may guess however from what I have written that I take a dim view, like youself, on churches where these kinds of behaviours are 'encoraged' and even sought or applauded as being in some way superspiritual or to be emulated. I regard them as 'recovery' spasms which should pass with time and be replaced in due course by the spirit of a sound mind 2 Tim. 1:7 and a 'godly, righteous and sober life, to the glory of God's holy Name.'
.

 

Seems like absurdity and as Calvin says, "One does not honor the Madonna by making her greater than her Son."

 

An interesting question!
I wonder what the answers will be now!

 

Whatever Calvin may have said - I do not like this terrible person.

 

Same here

 

Btw:

This thread may be "old" for others.
But it is new to me and to other newcomers.
And still worth talking about.

 

I like Fatima, because this apparition made atheists and people of all walks of life believe in life after death.

An indulgence is granted only with humility (you can't tell anyone), an act of goodwill (visiting a grave with sincerity), confession and the reception of Christ in the Eucharist.

The three shepherd children of Fatima were Catholics and nine-year old Francesco received the Eucharist before he died.

If you sincerely believe this is a miracle for the world, then why not consider becoming Catholic?