These kinds of consideration are why I think it is still worth talking about original sin.
Imagine a property magnate and politician. Let us suppose was raised as a sociopath by a father who taught him that being a winner was the only thing that mattered. Did he ever in full knowledge of what he was doing choose to become a sleazy slimeball who has committed, say, treason, attempted subversion of an election, sexual assault, fraud, and various other felonies? No. That's his upbringing. But nevertheless our hypothetical property magnate is a sleazy slimeball who has committed all those crimes and deserves to go to jail for the rest of his life.
It's not just the sins we've deliberately chosen that we need saving from. It is the sins that we were brought up with and have never realised are sins - it is especially the sins that we have never realised are sins - that we need saving from.
Jesus was a Jew. As an experiment, I read through this thread, mentally translating all references to Jesus being a man or being human, to Jesus being a Jew or being Jewish. I find the idea of Jesus being fully Jewish compelling.
And what I see, reading the story of Jesus and the Canaanite / Syrophoenician woman, is that we (those of us who are not Jewish) are, like her, the dogs under the table.
Jesus was a Jew. As an experiment, I read through this thread, mentally translating all references to Jesus being a man or being human, to Jesus being a Jew or being Jewish. I find the idea of Jesus being fully Jewish compelling.
And what I see, reading the story of Jesus and the Canaanite / Syrophoenician woman, is that we (those of us who are not Jewish) are, like her, the dogs under the table.
You seem to be saying that racism is an inherent aspect of Jewish identity and/or Judaism so therefore Jesus would have adopted that racism.
I reckon the writers of the Gospels could have written them however they felt. And they wouldn't have written something that made out Jesus to be learning from his 'mistakes ' or 'faux pas ' or, worse, racism.
Several recent posts on this thread have been unsuitable for Purgatory. Racism, slavery and Jewish identity are all sensitive topics to which Epiphanies guidelines apply.
This discussion topic as such is purgatorial, however, so I don't think a move to Epiphanies is the
way to go. I suggest looking for other (less fraught and hot buttons) examples which might allow consideration of whether Jesus was always right, or needed to be.
If I may be permitted, whilst treading very carefully and trying to avoid Epiphanies territory, in answer to @ChastMastr's question, as far as I am aware the Patristic viewpoint on this one is that Jesus was making a point and teaching the disciples a lesson.
I'm certainly not saying the Fathers were post-Enlightenment liberals. Far from it. But it is interesting to note that the passages about the Syro-Phoenician woman are read on days commemorating female martyrs. I'm not sure if she went on to be martyred according to tradition but I'll look that up.
Generally speaking, it's her faith that is emphasised.
I don't know whether that answers your question, @ChastMastr but generally in the Orthodox Tradition she's seen as a precursor to the Gentiles coming into the Kingdom as well as the Jews.
Jesus was a Jew. As an experiment, I read through this thread, mentally translating all references to Jesus being a man or being human, to Jesus being a Jew or being Jewish. I find the idea of Jesus being fully Jewish compelling.
And what I see, reading the story of Jesus and the Canaanite / Syrophoenician woman, is that we (those of us who are not Jewish) are, like her, the dogs under the table.
You seem to be saying that racism is an inherent aspect of Jewish identity and/or Judaism so therefore Jesus would have adopted that racism.
Err - no.
I'm inclined to think that this is a story about Jesus including those who would usually be excluded. In brief: it seems highly likely that both Jesus and the woman would have been familiar with the usual word for a dog as a racial/ethnic slur (which is by its nature exclusionary). Instead, he uses a word for a dog that is allowed indoors - to be with the household (sitting down at a meal).
These kinds of consideration are why I think it is still worth talking about original sin.
Yes.
The problem I have with seeing this story as a “teachable moment” for Jesus is this: If we look at the Gospel of Matthew, before we get to the story of the Canaanite (not Syrophoenician as in Mark) woman, we are told:
The magi pay homage to Jesus;
Jesus begins his ministry in Capernaum in fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah: “Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.”
In what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the poor in the spirit, those who mourn, the merciful, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, etc.”). He also says “You are the light of the world,” and “I have to come fulfill the Law and the prophets,” and “You have heard ‘you shall not murder,’ but I say to you whoever insults a brother or says ‘you fool’ shall be liable to judgment,” and “You have heard it said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemies, but I say love your enemies,” (some reading I’ve done suggests that “dog” was particularly used with regard to the enemies of Israel) and “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” (And yes, he also says “do not give what is holy to dogs.”)
Jesus regularly heals the outcast (e.g., the man with leprosy) and goes into Gentile regions, including Syria, where he seems to heal any who are brought to him.
He heals the servant of the centurion (a Gentile, and a part of an occupying army), saying “In no one in Israel have I ever found such faith.”
He heals Peter’s mother-in-law, the synagogue leader’s daughter and the woman who touched his garment (so women).
When the Pharisees conspired to kill him after he healed on the Sabbath, he left the region, again to fulfill what is written in Isaiah: “Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. . . . And in his name the Gentiles will hope.”
He tells the Pharisees, “on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”
Immediately before the story of the Canaanite woman, we have Jesus telling the crowd: “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person.”
And Jesus’s comment to the Canaanite woman appears to be prompted by his disciples saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.”
There’s more, I think, but that’ll do for now. Mark is, of course, much leaner and lacking in detail, but he too makes clear that Jesus has been healing Gentiles (and women), and he too has Jesus talking about what comes out of the mouth is what defiles immediately before the story of the Syrophoenician woman.
Given all of this, I really struggle to see how the writers of Matthew or Mark intend for us to see Jesus as needing a teachable moment to learn the very thing he has already been consistently teaching, preaching and modeling. He has been clear that love God and of neighbor is the heart of the Law and the prophets, and he’s been clear that those who claim to know and follow the Law and the prophets have no excuse for not knowing that is how they should live.
And I really struggle to see how, given all the Jesus had already said about what the Law and the prophets require and that he come to fulfill the Law and the prophets, his needing to learn something about how to treat the Syrophoenician woman can be seen as anything other than his needing to acknowledge and repent of his own failure to follow the Law, i.e., sin.
All of this is easily solved if you understand Jesus to have become an aspect of the Trinity instead of always existing or preexisting as a part of the Trinity.
All of this is easily solved if you understand Jesus to have become an aspect of the Trinity instead of always existing or preexisting as a part of the Trinity.
I don’t think it is. If that’s the case, you have to deal the clear witness of other parts of the NT, which I think we have to assume reflects the prevailing understanding of much of the early church. I’m thinking of passages like the first chapter of John’s Gospel, Philippians 2:5-11, and Jesus’s own statement in John 8:54-59. You have also have to deal with passages that say Jesus was without sin, like Hebrews 4:14-15.
If Jesus became an aspect of the Trinity rather than always existing as part of the Trinity, then there seems to be little choice but to conclude that passages like the ones above just plain got it wrong. I mean, that’s the path some might take, but it seems much more fraught to me than reading the story of the Syrophoenian/Canaanite women in way that’s consistent in the rest of the NT.
Why is saying that the various statements about who Jesus is are wrong and that Jesus was learning in his encounter with the the Syrophoenian/Canaanite women that he’d failed to live up to the Law and prophets easier than reading all those passages in way that doesn’t prevent conflict?
Well, I think the passages from John are problematic, and not necessarily clear, insofar as there is very little corresponding insight from the other Gospels. John is pretty far "out there," comparatively speaking, and also suffers I think from very likely being the last of the canonical gospels to be written. I also don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that some of the NT writers did get it wrong, or purposefully embellished ideas about Jesus after the fact. These are human beings we're talking about. Some may have been strongly agenda driven. It's possible. And the answer to your concluding question is that the Bible isn't univocal. To me it's far more a daunting task to require that the Bible be wholly consistent.
I was listening to someone talking about the word 'person' with regard to the doctrine of the trinity. According to them, the Latin that the word 'persona' derives from means 'mask', as in the masks that an actor takes on and off in a performance.
Which makes it interesting that this idea has been incorporated into the Christian doctrine.
On the wider topic from earlier, I've been reading some interesting (to me at least) ways that some Buddhists and some Hindus incorporate the figure Christians know as Jesus Christ into their traditions. Of course he also features in different ways in mainstream Islam.
Of course a lot of this is speculative and unprovable as well as being unacceptable to Christians. However isn't it also possible that the mystical stories have been incorporated into narratives that were acceptable to (at least some) first century Jews and Greeks? That the gospel narratives tell us more about what was normal and acceptable to the mindsets of the readers of those documents rather than what the mystical figure actually said?
@KoF Many Hindus are sympathetic to Christianity, because incarnations of God (Brahman) are abundant in their tradition, one of the best known being Sri Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. So they don't mind Christians having their own Incarnation of God, however unacceptable that is to Christians. However, for most Hindu traditions, especially Vedanta, the incarnations are merely symbols which dissolve back into the One God. This is a way of seeing Christ's relationship with God, with which I have a lot of sympathy.
The Incarnation grows throughout the New Testament. For Paul (Romans 1.1) Jesus is declared Son of God by his resurrection. For Mark, it's at his baptism. For Matthew and Luke, it's at his miraculous conception. And for John, it's from creation. There's a lot of adoptionism in the New Testament. Personally I think that even John 1 can be read from an adoptionist point of view. I would have to call myself an adoptionist, because I can't "get" the Trinity. It really makes no sense to me.
I was listening to someone talking about the word 'person' with regard to the doctrine of the trinity. According to them, the Latin that the word 'persona' derives from means 'mask', as in the masks that an actor takes on and off in a performance.
The history of the word is that it started off meaning 'mask'. As I understand it though by the time the Christological debates were settling down it had come to mean 'person' in roughly the most current sense of the English word 'person' ie an entity with a distinct morally significant capacity for relationships.
It's worth noting that most of the Christological debates happened in Greek. The early Latin speaking church fathers were rather more keen on emphasising the unity of God than the early Greek church fathers, and I think the Christology of some of the early Latin church fathers (eg Tertullian), even those not explicitly deemed heretical, would not be considered proper by later standards. The Greek fathers used a different vocabulary which more emphasised the distinct existence of each of the persons, but when it was translated back into Latin the then standard Latin terminology was kept but with the new content.
And the answer to your concluding question is that the Bible isn't univocal. To me it's far more a daunting task to require that the Bible be wholly consistent.
To be clear, I agree that the Bible isn't univocal, and I’m not necessarily looking for it to be wholly consistent. But I’ll admit I do tend to want to avoid clear and direct conflicts on core issues (like who Jesus was) unless that conflict is unavoidable. Given that there are ways to read the story in question that don’t present that kind of conflict, I just find the reading that does present conflict to be less persuasive.
And aside from the issue of who Jesus was according to various writers of the NT, I really don’t find the interpretation that it was a learning opportunity for Jesus to fit within the larger context of Matthew’s or Mark’s narratives themselves. So there it’s not about consistency between various writers; it’s about one writer telling a coherent story.
I was listening to someone talking about the word 'person' with regard to the doctrine of the trinity. According to them, the Latin that the word 'persona' derives from means 'mask', as in the masks that an actor takes on and off in a performance.
The history of the word is that it started off meaning 'mask'. As I understand it though by the time the Christological debates were settling down it had come to mean 'person' in roughly the most current sense of the English word 'person' ie an entity with a distinct morally significant capacity for relationships.
It's worth noting that most of the Christological debates happened in Greek. The early Latin speaking church fathers were rather more keen on emphasising the unity of God than the early Greek church fathers, and I think the Christology of some of the early Latin church fathers (eg Tertullian), even those not explicitly deemed heretical, would not be considered proper by later standards. The Greek fathers used a different vocabulary which more emphasised the distinct existence of each of the persons, but when it was translated back into Latin the then standard Latin terminology was kept but with the new content.
Yes. Greek 'hypostasis', I'm told, is not the exact equivalent of 'person'.
The Orthodox lay great stress on a 'monarchical' view of the Trinity. God the Son and God the Holy Spirit eternally 'proceed' from God the Father.
We aren't at all keen on the 'Western' formulary '... in the unity of the Holy Spirit.'
The 'filioque clause' - 'the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son is the main bone of contention of course.
Although plenty of 'Western' Christians don't understand that to mean what we accuse them of meaning by it and some Anglican provinces have dropped it.
It gets complicated ...
In a nutshell, the Orthodox contention is that it subordinates or diminishes the Holy Spirit and reduces him to 'the love between the Father and the Son' or some kind of impersonal and abstract 'May the Force be with you' kind of thing.
As an Orthodox Christian I'm on board with all of that but think we can take things too far. To hear some Orthodox speak anything and everything that goes wrong is something to do with the 'filioque clause.' If I stub my toe it's because of some medieval Pope or all the fault of Charlemagne.
I tend to think the difference between the 'Eastern' and 'Western' positions on this one are more a question than emphasis than anything else, but I do come down on the Orthodox side. I certainly have no time, though for those 'zealots' who think that Catholics aren't proper Christians because of it or that all Protestants are Nestorians or some other ancient heresy in disguise.
At rock bottom, my problem with saying that Jesus held racist attitudes and then got "schooled" by this woman, attractive as it might be to the bits of me that want to think I could get the better of him (as if!)... my problem is simply this: I see nowhere in the Gospels any hint that he is the kind of person who could be racist, or even hold un-examined racist attitudes that he later recognized and gave up. It just doesn't fit his character as sketched. It's rather like those legends that say he got angry with a playmate as a child and zapped him dead; it's just not consistent with his character anywhere else in all four Gospels. And so I can't believe it. Whatever is going on in that story, it isn't racism.
@Gamma Gamaliel I'm not Orthodox, nor even orthodox, but I agree with the Orthodox view of the filioque. Aside from the simple and demonstrable fact that it is a late addition to the Nicene Creed, it completely inverts the Trinity. That the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father, makes the Father on some way "senior" in the Trinity. I agree with you that the procession from the Father and Son (filioque) turns the Spirit into the love that binds the Father and Son, and a quote from St Augustine. The filoque did more than anything else to bring about the Great Schism, because the Bishop of Rome insisted on its inclusion.
At the inauguration of the present Archbishop of Canterbury, the filioque was left out of the creed. I don't know if it was done in the name of ecumenism, but it proves an important point. The Western Church can live without the filioque, but the Eastern Church can't live with it. So my opinion is that it should be dropped as a grand ecumenical gesture. It would take much more than this to unite the Church, but it would be a large trust builder.
@Lamb Chopped I don't think Jesus could possibly have had racist attitudes. He saw the divine in all beings. In the same way, he had no misogynist way of thinking. Yet he belonged to a culture that was both racist and misogynistic. To refer to Gentiles as dogs or swine was common currency in his time. He is recorded as using those terms to describe people from outside his culture, and may have used that terminology in an odd the cuff conversational way, we probably can't know.
It's his actions that count. He healed the daughter of the Canaanite woman, or at least her faith did, as with the servant of the Centurian. He told of the Good Samaritan. Racism could never play a part in the life or dealings of such an exalted soul as Our Lord Jesus.
We are getting off topic but I'd love to see the Western Churches drop the 'filioque' clause. It serves no purpose to retain it.
At the same time, it'd nice to see the Orthodox reciprocate rather than recriminate and acknowledge that not everything that happened in the West after 1054AD was an unmitigated disaster. And that not everything that happened before that was all sweetness and light.
But I know what would happen. Just suppose the Pope and all leaders of mainstream Protestant churches agreed to drop the filioque clause on 3rd February 2025. You'd get Orthodox saying, 'Those wicked, evil Western churches. They didn't drop the filioque clause until 2025. We never had it in the first place. Nerh nerh na nerh na ...'
If I may be permitted, whilst treading very carefully and trying to avoid Epiphanies territory, in answer to @ChastMastr's question, as far as I am aware the Patristic viewpoint on this one is that Jesus was making a point and teaching the disciples a lesson.
I'm certainly not saying the Fathers were post-Enlightenment liberals. Far from it. But it is interesting to note that the passages about the Syro-Phoenician woman are read on days commemorating female martyrs. I'm not sure if she went on to be martyred according to tradition but I'll look that up.
Generally speaking, it's her faith that is emphasised.
I don't know whether that answers your question, @ChastMastr but generally in the Orthodox Tradition she's seen as a precursor to the Gentiles coming into the Kingdom as well as the Jews.
That’s what I’d generally understood/ supposed—thank you!
It feels like a circular argument to say that, despite a fairly straightforward reading of the biblical text that shows one thing, this can't be true because Jesus Christ is Lord and wouldn't do that kind of thing.
Johnny is a good lad.
But I heard Johnny say that he nicked chocolate from the corner shop
Ah well, he must have been at the verge of starvation because Johnny is a good lad.
I disagree. As various Shipmates have pointed out, there's a 'consistency' in Christ's actions and demeanour as recorded elsewhere in the Gospels. Even in this incident there are hints of what might be called mitigating factors, m'lud.
For instance, as others have cited, the use of a term meaning 'lap dogs' or pet dogs rather than mangy hounds is a case in point.
A quick aside to mine Host ... are we still OK to discuss this particular passage?
The story is certainly problematic but by anyone's standards pretty extraordinary, both in terms of the Gentile woman's initial approach - showing clear faith and expectation - desperation? - despite knowing there'd be a strong possibility of rejection given the social conventions of the time - and of Christ's response.
It's not the only 'difficult' scriptural passage or incident. There are loads of them. It seems to me that we can run to equal and opposite extremes in our approach to passages like this. We can air-brush them out and ignore them, hoping they'll go away, or we can say, 'Heck, this is a difficult one. It's so difficult that I'm not even going to bother with the Christian faith and will reject the whole thing.'
In practice, we all cherry-pick to some extent.
We may not be able to neatly the up all the loose ends but we can certainly tie up some of them.
It's a funny thing with the 'filioque', because almost everyone I speak to about it - not that this happens all the time of course - agrees with the Orthodox position.
I understand some Anglican provinces have dropped it and that many RCs wouldn't die in a ditch over it either.
But, yes, the Gentile woman in the Gospel story had bags of faith.
I'd happily drop the Filioque not because I'm particularly convinced of the Orthodox position but because all descriptions of the Trinity are so metaphorical and paradoxical that I'm pretty damned sure they're a long way from the real truth (if such there be) which I suspect is too weird and non-human to get a grasp on using concepts we evolved with to function as humans. So arguing over a small aspect of it seems a bit like arguing whether a measurement made with instruments with a resolution of 1mm is 0.99997mm or 1.0000066mm....
But yes, I do have a lot of sympathy with Jonathan Swift's satirical squib 'Gulliver's Travels' where in Lilliput the 'Big End-ians' and 'Little End-ians' go to war over which end of a boiled egg is the right one to open first.
Like I say, I'm not convinced of whether it should be left in, taken out, or that it matters. It seems to require a difficult to defend sureness of the ability of your theological formulae to be more than metaphorical approximations.
That’s the great thing about beliefs — one doesn’t have to get in the way of the other. Theoretically, everyone *should* be able to be happy. But, no. It’s too bad people treat this stuff as if it could be known.
Comments
Imagine a property magnate and politician. Let us suppose was raised as a sociopath by a father who taught him that being a winner was the only thing that mattered. Did he ever in full knowledge of what he was doing choose to become a sleazy slimeball who has committed, say, treason, attempted subversion of an election, sexual assault, fraud, and various other felonies? No. That's his upbringing. But nevertheless our hypothetical property magnate is a sleazy slimeball who has committed all those crimes and deserves to go to jail for the rest of his life.
It's not just the sins we've deliberately chosen that we need saving from. It is the sins that we were brought up with and have never realised are sins - it is especially the sins that we have never realised are sins - that we need saving from.
And what I see, reading the story of Jesus and the Canaanite / Syrophoenician woman, is that we (those of us who are not Jewish) are, like her, the dogs under the table.
You seem to be saying that racism is an inherent aspect of Jewish identity and/or Judaism so therefore Jesus would have adopted that racism.
Do you really want to go there?
Several recent posts on this thread have been unsuitable for Purgatory. Racism, slavery and Jewish identity are all sensitive topics to which Epiphanies guidelines apply.
This discussion topic as such is purgatorial, however, so I don't think a move to Epiphanies is the
way to go. I suggest looking for other (less fraught and hot buttons) examples which might allow consideration of whether Jesus was always right, or needed to be.
Hostly beret on
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
I'm certainly not saying the Fathers were post-Enlightenment liberals. Far from it. But it is interesting to note that the passages about the Syro-Phoenician woman are read on days commemorating female martyrs. I'm not sure if she went on to be martyred according to tradition but I'll look that up.
Generally speaking, it's her faith that is emphasised.
I don't know whether that answers your question, @ChastMastr but generally in the Orthodox Tradition she's seen as a precursor to the Gentiles coming into the Kingdom as well as the Jews.
Err - no.
I'm inclined to think that this is a story about Jesus including those who would usually be excluded. In brief: it seems highly likely that both Jesus and the woman would have been familiar with the usual word for a dog as a racial/ethnic slur (which is by its nature exclusionary). Instead, he uses a word for a dog that is allowed indoors - to be with the household (sitting down at a meal).
The problem I have with seeing this story as a “teachable moment” for Jesus is this: If we look at the Gospel of Matthew, before we get to the story of the Canaanite (not Syrophoenician as in Mark) woman, we are told:
There’s more, I think, but that’ll do for now. Mark is, of course, much leaner and lacking in detail, but he too makes clear that Jesus has been healing Gentiles (and women), and he too has Jesus talking about what comes out of the mouth is what defiles immediately before the story of the Syrophoenician woman.
Given all of this, I really struggle to see how the writers of Matthew or Mark intend for us to see Jesus as needing a teachable moment to learn the very thing he has already been consistently teaching, preaching and modeling. He has been clear that love God and of neighbor is the heart of the Law and the prophets, and he’s been clear that those who claim to know and follow the Law and the prophets have no excuse for not knowing that is how they should live.
And I really struggle to see how, given all the Jesus had already said about what the Law and the prophets require and that he come to fulfill the Law and the prophets, his needing to learn something about how to treat the Syrophoenician woman can be seen as anything other than his needing to acknowledge and repent of his own failure to follow the Law, i.e., sin.
If Jesus became an aspect of the Trinity rather than always existing as part of the Trinity, then there seems to be little choice but to conclude that passages like the ones above just plain got it wrong. I mean, that’s the path some might take, but it seems much more fraught to me than reading the story of the Syrophoenian/Canaanite women in way that’s consistent in the rest of the NT.
Why is saying that the various statements about who Jesus is are wrong and that Jesus was learning in his encounter with the the Syrophoenian/Canaanite women that he’d failed to live up to the Law and prophets easier than reading all those passages in way that doesn’t prevent conflict?
Which makes it interesting that this idea has been incorporated into the Christian doctrine.
Of course a lot of this is speculative and unprovable as well as being unacceptable to Christians. However isn't it also possible that the mystical stories have been incorporated into narratives that were acceptable to (at least some) first century Jews and Greeks? That the gospel narratives tell us more about what was normal and acceptable to the mindsets of the readers of those documents rather than what the mystical figure actually said?
The Incarnation grows throughout the New Testament. For Paul (Romans 1.1) Jesus is declared Son of God by his resurrection. For Mark, it's at his baptism. For Matthew and Luke, it's at his miraculous conception. And for John, it's from creation. There's a lot of adoptionism in the New Testament. Personally I think that even John 1 can be read from an adoptionist point of view. I would have to call myself an adoptionist, because I can't "get" the Trinity. It really makes no sense to me.
It's worth noting that most of the Christological debates happened in Greek. The early Latin speaking church fathers were rather more keen on emphasising the unity of God than the early Greek church fathers, and I think the Christology of some of the early Latin church fathers (eg Tertullian), even those not explicitly deemed heretical, would not be considered proper by later standards. The Greek fathers used a different vocabulary which more emphasised the distinct existence of each of the persons, but when it was translated back into Latin the then standard Latin terminology was kept but with the new content.
That's 'cause you did all the hard work of thinking for me!
To be clear, I agree that the Bible isn't univocal, and I’m not necessarily looking for it to be wholly consistent. But I’ll admit I do tend to want to avoid clear and direct conflicts on core issues (like who Jesus was) unless that conflict is unavoidable. Given that there are ways to read the story in question that don’t present that kind of conflict, I just find the reading that does present conflict to be less persuasive.
And aside from the issue of who Jesus was according to various writers of the NT, I really don’t find the interpretation that it was a learning opportunity for Jesus to fit within the larger context of Matthew’s or Mark’s narratives themselves. So there it’s not about consistency between various writers; it’s about one writer telling a coherent story.
Yes. Greek 'hypostasis', I'm told, is not the exact equivalent of 'person'.
The Orthodox lay great stress on a 'monarchical' view of the Trinity. God the Son and God the Holy Spirit eternally 'proceed' from God the Father.
We aren't at all keen on the 'Western' formulary '... in the unity of the Holy Spirit.'
The 'filioque clause' - 'the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son is the main bone of contention of course.
Although plenty of 'Western' Christians don't understand that to mean what we accuse them of meaning by it and some Anglican provinces have dropped it.
It gets complicated ...
In a nutshell, the Orthodox contention is that it subordinates or diminishes the Holy Spirit and reduces him to 'the love between the Father and the Son' or some kind of impersonal and abstract 'May the Force be with you' kind of thing.
As an Orthodox Christian I'm on board with all of that but think we can take things too far. To hear some Orthodox speak anything and everything that goes wrong is something to do with the 'filioque clause.' If I stub my toe it's because of some medieval Pope or all the fault of Charlemagne.
I tend to think the difference between the 'Eastern' and 'Western' positions on this one are more a question than emphasis than anything else, but I do come down on the Orthodox side. I certainly have no time, though for those 'zealots' who think that Catholics aren't proper Christians because of it or that all Protestants are Nestorians or some other ancient heresy in disguise.
But that's another issue.
At the inauguration of the present Archbishop of Canterbury, the filioque was left out of the creed. I don't know if it was done in the name of ecumenism, but it proves an important point. The Western Church can live without the filioque, but the Eastern Church can't live with it. So my opinion is that it should be dropped as a grand ecumenical gesture. It would take much more than this to unite the Church, but it would be a large trust builder.
@Lamb Chopped I don't think Jesus could possibly have had racist attitudes. He saw the divine in all beings. In the same way, he had no misogynist way of thinking. Yet he belonged to a culture that was both racist and misogynistic. To refer to Gentiles as dogs or swine was common currency in his time. He is recorded as using those terms to describe people from outside his culture, and may have used that terminology in an odd the cuff conversational way, we probably can't know.
It's his actions that count. He healed the daughter of the Canaanite woman, or at least her faith did, as with the servant of the Centurian. He told of the Good Samaritan. Racism could never play a part in the life or dealings of such an exalted soul as Our Lord Jesus.
At the same time, it'd nice to see the Orthodox reciprocate rather than recriminate and acknowledge that not everything that happened in the West after 1054AD was an unmitigated disaster. And that not everything that happened before that was all sweetness and light.
But I know what would happen. Just suppose the Pope and all leaders of mainstream Protestant churches agreed to drop the filioque clause on 3rd February 2025. You'd get Orthodox saying, 'Those wicked, evil Western churches. They didn't drop the filioque clause until 2025. We never had it in the first place. Nerh nerh na nerh na ...'
That’s what I’d generally understood/ supposed—thank you!
Johnny is a good lad.
But I heard Johnny say that he nicked chocolate from the corner shop
Ah well, he must have been at the verge of starvation because Johnny is a good lad.
For instance, as others have cited, the use of a term meaning 'lap dogs' or pet dogs rather than mangy hounds is a case in point.
A quick aside to mine Host ... are we still OK to discuss this particular passage?
The story is certainly problematic but by anyone's standards pretty extraordinary, both in terms of the Gentile woman's initial approach - showing clear faith and expectation - desperation? - despite knowing there'd be a strong possibility of rejection given the social conventions of the time - and of Christ's response.
It's not the only 'difficult' scriptural passage or incident. There are loads of them. It seems to me that we can run to equal and opposite extremes in our approach to passages like this. We can air-brush them out and ignore them, hoping they'll go away, or we can say, 'Heck, this is a difficult one. It's so difficult that I'm not even going to bother with the Christian faith and will reject the whole thing.'
In practice, we all cherry-pick to some extent.
We may not be able to neatly the up all the loose ends but we can certainly tie up some of them.
Getting back to the Syrio Phoenician woman. I too see the story more as a testament to her faith.
I understand some Anglican provinces have dropped it and that many RCs wouldn't die in a ditch over it either.
But, yes, the Gentile woman in the Gospel story had bags of faith.
But yes, I do have a lot of sympathy with Jonathan Swift's satirical squib 'Gulliver's Travels' where in Lilliput the 'Big End-ians' and 'Little End-ians' go to war over which end of a boiled egg is the right one to open first.
Like I say, I'm not convinced of whether it should be left in, taken out, or that it matters. It seems to require a difficult to defend sureness of the ability of your theological formulae to be more than metaphorical approximations.
😉
I think it was Voltaire who said that a belief in the Trinity was the most illogical thing humanity had ever been asked to take on board.
So let's not bother with it at all then ...