on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
No, your obfuscation is abysmal.
ChatGPT / your verification claimed
"There is no widely available documentation or media coverage to verify this story"
This is false the media report is linked above. End of story.
Plus you give no apology for misquoting me as claiming "extensive coverage". I won't hold my breath.
on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
What's your point? It was in the media, it's documented and available to anyone who searches, ChatGPT was wrong and you failed to verify. End of.
ChatGPT didn't say the media report was questionable. It said there was no media report at all, there's a difference.
As I say, it's possible (though unlikely) the story was a complete fabrication, or indeed (your latest iteration) that the woman exaggerated or lied (although there is nothing intrinsically implausible about the pope having a JW cousin) but that's not the claim that was originally made.
most people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
In a previous thread you posted a response of thousands of words within ten minutes. That is humanly impossible. That’s not a matter of opinion it’s a fact, just as a human can’t run faster than a car or a train.
Dünzl doesn’t dispute the part politics played in the formulation of the Trinity, in fact he spells it out in detail. He argues that God used the church to reach the Trinity doctrine despite that history of political intrigue.
I’ll let Dünzl’s own summary of the politics and his argument that God used the church to arrive at the Trinity despite/through the politics and philosophy of the day speak for itself.
The political interference in the theological debate is also likely to provoke scepticism: wasn't Emperor Constantine already less concerned with the quest for truth than with the unity of the empire on a religious basis? Didn't the stubborn efforts of his son Constantius to achieve a theological compromise aim at the lowest common denominator on which the parties in dispute were to agree? Wasn't it mere chance that because of a military emergency, rule in the East of the empire fell to the Spanish Theodosius, who was orientated on Nicaea, so that he had the opportunity also to realize his church-political goal there? Does the Neo-Niene faith thus represent just a further and last variant in the power-play of theological ideas - a variant which was able to establish itself for political reasons?
And if we turn once again to the content of the debate: don't the self-confidence and the sharp (often also unjust) polemic of the opponents, the deliberate distortion and exaggeration of opposing positions, the almost sophistic pedantic and sophistic interpretations of difficult biblical passages, prove repulsive over wide areas? We must not note such abuses on just one side of the parties in dispute - an ideologically coloured painting in black and white will not do justice to the historical evidence.
A look at the history is sobering. But at the same time it presents a challenge. In view of the problems I have mentioned, those who imagine that God's ways with human beings are all too straightforward and simple (or despair of them because they are indeed not so straightforward) are called on to break up customary religious schemes of thought and extend their own horizons so as to be able to do theological justice to reality. The risk of monotheism does not consist in making an arbitrary selection of reality in terms of one's own ideology, bracketing off disturbing problems and allowing only what fits, but in tracing back the complexity, the perplexing diversity and interlinking of phenomena to a last (albeit 'impenetrable') principle which is not one factor among many but the incomprehensible ground of the whole.
That the history of revelation is not played our untouched by external influence as it were in a 'vacuum' in the history ideas is not a defect but a touchstone of the monotheistic view of the world. The philosophical systems of Middle and Neo-Platonism or the Stoa are not simply to be dismissed as non-Christian intellectual constructions which had to be overcome: rather, they are of decisive importance for the communication of God in the sphere of history, which is not a clean sheet, but is already shaped, and its content determined, by ideas. The legacy of ancient philosophy has entered into Christianity (likewise into Judaism, Islam and modern philosophy) - but that does not amount to 'contamination with inauthentic intellectual material'; rather, it is material for fruitful controversy which will always move between the poles of assimilation and demarcation.
most people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
The difference is I have read Dünzl’s book whereas all you have done is give ChatGPT a prompt along the lines “refute this claim from a Catholic perspective”. Or am I wrong? Have you read Dünzl’s book?
Because I clearly didn’t say that Dünzl’s book was
merely a candid exposé of political and personal factors overriding theological truth
What I said was that Dünzl argues that God worked through the politics and intrigue to arrive at the Trinitarian formulation late in the 4th century. JWs and Dünzl would agree the formulation of the Trinity was late and a result of politics. Where they differ is whether God was behind the process or not.
on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
ChatGPT said: “ There is no widely available documentation or media coverage to verify this story.”
That’s wrong, it was in the Canberra Times (clipping linked above), described as a “compact” broadsheet not a tabloid, and can still be found, including the clipping, on many sites. I don’t trust the news on most things these days. This article has a photo of the woman wearing a JW convention badge and direct quotes. I guess they could have staged the photo and made up the entire story, but it seems more likely that the pope did happen to have a cousin in Australian who was a JW and this was the woman in the photo, which in itself is not terribly remarkable. So yes, ChatGPT is completely misleading in this reply as in many others. If you “separately verified” what it said you clearly did a lousy job.
I remember seeing her interviewed on broadcast news at the time, either BBC or Sky and I can’t find any video of that now. You can believe it or not, the ChatGPT response remains wrong either way.
The broader point is clear, yes JWs have a significant presence in Italy, the second largest Christian church in Italy (until it was overtaken by the Romanian orthodox church as a result of immigration) and the Catholic Church is cognisant of them, including a previous pope Benedict who was related to a JW. Your response is a mixture petty nitpicking or simply wrong.
Also you misquoted me. I said “some media interest” which you changed to “significant coverage”.
on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
ChatGPT gets facts wrong and claims certainty while doing it.
An example of media coverage of the former pope’s Jw cousin here:
https://jwtalk.net/uploads/converted_files/145934=8022-PopesCousin2005-08-21.pdf
I was basing my comments on the size of JWs in Italy on the publication quoted below, and while it’s true that the Romanian Orthodox Church has now overtaken JWs because of immigration, they are still much bigger than other Christian groups such as Pentecostals, Waldensians, Mormons and so on.
Today, of all the Christian churches and denominations in Italy, Jehovah's Witnesses are the largest Christian community after the Catholic Church. Although the Witnesses make up less than 1% of Italy's population, this percentage represents a quarter of a million active adherents or "publishers" -making Italy the country with the largest number of Jehovah's Witnesses in the whole of Europe, and the fifth largest in the world (after the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria).
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/resources/pdfs/978-1-4438-9446-3-sample.pdf
A fuller comparison can be found here.
on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
Italy is a country where JWs have done particularly well in spreading their message. JWs are the largest Christian religion in Italy outside of Catholicism so they probably do pay some attention to them. I remember when Ratzinger was elected pope there was some media interest in the fact that his cousin was a JW. I think she lived in Australia, if I remember correctly, and some journalists asked her for comment and she gave some very general statements.
most people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
Sea Breeze I’ve just finished reading a book about the development of the trinity doctrine by the Catholic historian Franz Dünzl. It’s a very candid account of the long and winding road to the orthodox formulation of the trinity. He argues that full orthodoxy was not achieved until the Cappadocian fathers in the late forty century. Dünzl does not shy away, but describes in detail the part that politics, intrigue and personalities played in the development of the trinity doctrine. He argues this doesn’t negate the trinity doctrine but that God allowed politics to play out in a way that resulted in orthodoxy.
most people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
Thanks for the response, vienne, I didn’t realise that Russell himself rarely used the name Jehovah. Yes Rutherford definitely had his own style (to wit, and so on). I find it quite difficult to read. I wonder if Franz did have some input on some of the later books that got into the weeds of typology and so on, and perhaps had a more dense writing style characteristic of Franz.
Out of interest I compiled a graph of the frequency of the name Jehovah in the Watchtower magazine per decade. There was a dramatic increase after the 1940s.
(As you say, if I wish to pursue this topic further I should start another thread.)
most people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
Catholic doctrine ossified long before our era but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t shaped by individuals at crucial junctures, it’s just that the crucial pivots where politics shaped doctrine in the case of the Catholic Church occurred much earlier, in decades such as the 360s (when the Trinity doctrine took shape), rather than the 1960s when Franz promoted 1975.
If you ask ChatGPT a more open question such as “was Catholic doctrine shaped by politics and influential individuals in the history of the church” you’ll get a different answer than, say, a prompt that says, “give me a cogent refutation of these points from a Catholic perspective” along with pasting others’ posts into the machine.
