Posts by aqwsed12345

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@slimboyfat

A careful reading of the second-century apologists shows that their occasional description of the Logos as ἄγγελος is neither an assertion that Christ belongs ontologically to the angelic order nor a precursor of the modern Watchtower claim that Jesus is Michael. The difficulty arises from a semantic shift that separates the ancient Greek noun ἄγγελος, whose primary sense is “messenger,” from the English loan-word “angel,” which in ordinary parlance designates a created spirit of fixed rank. When the Church Fathers wished to speak of a created angel, they normally supplied an adjective such as “one of the angels” or “one of the ministers,” whereas in Christological contexts they explained why the Word may properly be called ἄγγελος, namely because he is the primordial envoy who makes the Father known. To transpose that functional title into an ontological claim is to wrench their language out of its literary and theological setting.

Justin’s First Apology VI is the passage frequently marshalled in favour of an Arian reading. The Greek, however, is syntactically ambiguous and the critical editions acknowledge competing construals. A straightforward translation, retaining the order of the words, is possible: “We worship and adore the Father … and the Son who came forth from him and taught us these things, and the host of the other good angels who follow him and are made like him, and the prophetic Spirit.” Even if that rendering is adopted, Justin is not assimilating the Son to the created order; the Son heads the clause, receives divine worship together with the Father, and is specified as the one whom the angelic host follows and resembles. The phrase “other good angels” therefore presupposes a categorical difference between leader and followers, not an identity of nature. Moreover, the same author insists only a few chapters later (XIII) that Christians worship the Son καὶ δεύτερον τάξιν, that is, in second rank, a formulation he repeats in XVI and LXI. The triadic pattern—Father, Son, Spirit—here receives explicit liturgical application, while the angels remain absent; hence scholars from Grabe through Schaff have judged that the mention of angels in VI, if taken with the verb “taught,” explains to the emperor that Christ instructs not only human beings but the angelic ministers as well. Either way, worship is restricted to the three hypostases of the Godhead.

Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho LV–LVI removes the residual ambiguity by defining his vocabulary. The Logos is “called ἄγγελος because he announces to men whatever the Maker of all things wills to declare.” The causal clause—διὰ τὸ ἀγγέλλειν—makes the point unmistakable: the title derives from the activity of revelation; it is not an index of created status. In the same breath Justin affirms that this Messenger “was God even before the creation of the world,” appeared in the theophanies to Abraham and Moses, and is now incarnate in Jesus Christ. One cannot coherently read “even God” (καὶ Θεός) as a predicate of a creature whilst maintaining fidelity to Justin’s insistence that Christians render him λατρεία, the worship owed exclusively to the one true God. To juxtapose “we worship the Father, the Son and the prophetic Spirit” with “we are not atheists” is to declare that denying the full divinity of the Son would collapse Christian monotheism.

The same semantic logic governs Clement of Alexandria. When he calls the Logos ἄγγελος (Paed. I.7) he has already laid down the hermeneutical key in Chapter 3: the Lord “ministers all good to us both as God and as man.” The word ἄγγελος serves him as a metaphor for the revelatory economy of the Old Covenant; it is forced into alien service only when modern readers isolate a single sentence and forget the ontological claims that frame it. Trinitarian theology therefore urges caution against one-liner proof-texting in patristic literature as well. Terms are plastic, context is decisive, and an author’s controlling analogy—fire from fire, light from light, rational word from rational mind—must govern the interpretation of any ontologically subordinate image.

Nor does the Arian appeal to “other good angels” reckon with the apologists’ doctrine of creation. Justin distinguishes between the Logos, “begotten before all creatures,” and the angelic race, “created” (ποίημα, κτίσμα). A being begotten of the Father’s own substance cannot simultaneously belong to the order of creatures without collapsing the apologists’ most basic metaphysical contrast, a contrast they borrowed from Scripture itself: in principio the uncreated Word is with God and is God; through him all things that came to be were made (John 1:1-3). Hebrews attributes that creative agency to the Son precisely to demonstrate his transcendence over angels, who worship him and whose very winds and flames he fashions (Heb 1:5-14). To merge Christ into the angelic host would unravel the epistle’s argument and confound the Church’s baptismal confession, already discernible in Justin’s era.

The modern identification of Jesus with Michael the archangel therefore mistakes both biblical exegesis and patristic semantics. Michael is explicitly “one of the chief princes” (Dan 10:13), a creature who, in Jude 9, does not dare to pronounce judgment in his own name. The pre-existent Christ, by contrast, receives titles, functions and honors reserved for Yahweh alone: he forgives sins, commands worship, and bears the incommunicable Name. The Church Fathers who call him ἄγγελος do so to underline this paradox of divine condescension: the eternal Word stoops to become the envoy, yet without surrendering his equality with the Sender. If that trope is flattened into the claim that Christ is merely a higher member of the angelic species, the Gospel’s central mystery—the Word became flesh—loses both its metaphysical depth and its soteriological power.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

The Arian allegation that Trinitarian theology relies on a verbal sleight-of-hand—treating Christ as an angel when convenient and not an angel when inconvenient—fundamentally misrepresents both the biblical text and the theological tradition it accuses of inconsistency. At the heart of this misunderstanding lies the Greek term angelos (and its Hebrew counterpart mal'akh), which translates to “messenger.” In both linguistic and scriptural contexts, this word denotes a function rather than a fixed ontological category. The Bible employs it flexibly, applying it to created spiritual beings like Michael, who serve as God’s emissaries in the heavenly court, and to the eternal Son, who, before His incarnation, manifests as God’s visible envoy in Old Testament theophanies. Far from being an equivocation, this dual usage reflects a coherent distinction that Trinitarian theology upholds and that early Christian thinkers, including Clement of Alexandria, carefully preserve.

Clement’s discussion in The Instructor (Paedagogus), Book I, Chapter 7, offers a key example of this distinction in action. Surveying the history of divine revelation, he describes how the Logos, the eternal Word, guided Israel under the old covenant through a pedagogy of fear. In this role, Clement notes, the Word “was an angel”—not in the sense of being a created being, but as God’s messenger delivering divine instruction to His people. With the arrival of the new covenant, this same Logos “has appeared” in the flesh as Jesus, shifting the divine approach from fear to love. This statement does not imply that the Logos is a creature; rather, it highlights a functional role in God’s self-revelation, first veiled in theophanic encounters and later fully disclosed in the incarnation. Clement reinforces this interpretation just two chapters earlier in Book I, Chapter 3, where he writes that the Lord “ministers all good to us both as God and as man; as God forgiving sins and as man training us not to sin.” This attribution of divine prerogatives—forgiving sins, a power reserved for God alone in Jewish theology, and receiving worship—directly contradicts the Arian notion of a subordinate, created Logos. Clement’s theology aligns with the Trinitarian affirmation of the Son’s full deity, not the Arian reduction of Christ to a mere creature. By situating the “angel” reference within the context of divine theophanies, Clement aligns with the mainstream Christian tradition, which identifies the “Angel of the LORD” as the pre-incarnate Christ, not a creature like Michael. The Arian attempt to isolate the “angel” metaphor from Clement’s broader theological framework distorts his intent and misrepresents the early Christian consensus.

This perspective is not unique to Clement but echoes across the pre-Nicene Christian tradition. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 110 AD, repeatedly calls Christ “our God” in his Letter to the Ephesians (Chapter 7), describing Him as “God existing in flesh,” both “made and not made.” Justin Martyr, around 150 AD, in his Dialogue with Trypho (Chapter 56), identifies the “Angel of the LORD” in Old Testament appearances as the pre-incarnate Logos, distinct from created angels, and inherently divine. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180 AD in Against Heresies (Book IV, Chapter 20), asserts that the Son is “eternally with the Father,” co-equal and uncreated. These early voices form a theocentric and incarnational consensus, not an angelocentric one, demonstrating that the divinity of the Son was a foundational belief long before Arius challenged it. When Arius, in the early 4th century, proposed that the Son was a created being, subordinate to the Father, he introduced a novelty that diverged from this established tradition. The fierce resistance to Arianism, culminating in the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, arose not from mere politics but from a theological necessity: if the Son is not fully God, the worship offered to Him in Christian liturgy becomes idolatrous, and His mediation of salvation—reconciling humanity to God—lacks divine efficacy.

The biblical texts undergirding this tradition draw a clear line between the Son and created angels, further dismantling the Arian claim. The “Angel of the LORD” in Old Testament narratives, such as Genesis 16:7-13, Exodus 3:2-6, and Judges 13:18-22, consistently acts with divine authority. In Exodus 3, this figure appears in the burning bush, declares “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” and prompts Moses to hide his face in reverent fear of God. In Judges 13, the “Angel” reveals a name too wonderful to comprehend and accepts worship, actions forbidden to created beings under penalty of blasphemy. By contrast, Michael, the archangel, is portrayed in Daniel 10:13 as “one of the chief princes,” a finite being among others of his kind. In Jude 9, Michael defers judgment to God, saying “The Lord rebuke you,” and in Revelation 12:7, he leads a host of angels in battle but never receives worship or claims divinity. The Epistle to the Hebrews, particularly in Chapter 1, cements this distinction by placing the Son on the side of the Creator—“the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being”—while relegating all angels to the role of “ministering spirits” who worship Him. To conflate Jesus with Michael, as some Arian interpretations might suggest, obliterates this canonical boundary and undermines the text’s explicit emphasis on the Son’s supremacy over all creation.

Thus, the Arian question—“When is an angel not an angel?”—finds a straightforward answer in Trinitarian theology without resorting to verbal trickery. When angelos refers to a created entity like Michael, it describes a finite, spiritual creature fulfilling a messenger’s role. When it applies to the eternal Logos, as in the “Angel of the LORD,” it designates the uncreated Son temporarily acting as God’s envoy, without any compromise to His divine nature. This is not a manipulation of terms but a recognition of the semantic flexibility inherent in the biblical language itself. Clement, the Scriptures, and the early Christian tradition unanimously affirm the Son’s divinity, viewing Him as worthy of worship and co-equal with the Father. The Trinitarian position honors this witness, maintaining that the Son is adored as God because He is, eternally and unchangeably, of the same divine essence as the Father. Far from a sleight-of-hand, this doctrine reflects a consistent and historically grounded interpretation of both Scripture and the faith delivered by the early Church.

The claim that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a late borrowing from earlier pagan triads rests on superficial resemblances and ignores the radically different conceptual worlds in which those systems operate. Sumerian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Hindu religions certainly speak of groups of three deities, but in every case the three are discrete gods who merely cooperate or form a celestial family, not one indivisible being who eternally subsists in three co-equal, co-eternal persons sharing a single undivided essence. In Egyptian theology Osiris, Isis and Horus remain ontologically separate; in classical Hinduism Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva are three hypostases of an impersonal Brahman that itself is expressed through countless other manifestations. By contrast, Christian Trinitarianism is a development internal to Second-Temple Jewish monotheism: it preserves the uncompromising confession that “the LORD is one” (Dt 6:4) while recognizing that the one God is eternally Father, Son and Spirit. The decisive difference is metaphysical—Trinitarianism is concerned with the unity-of-being problem inside strict monotheism; pagan triads never attempt to solve that problem because they are not monotheistic in the first place.

The further assertion that the doctrine stands or falls with the historicity of Jesus, whose existence is said to be unverified, collapses against the consensus of contemporary critical scholarship. Seven undisputed Pauline letters, written within twenty-five years of Jesus’ death, presuppose his public ministry, crucifixion under Pilate and post-mortem appearances (1 Cor 15:3-8). These texts are independent of the later Gospels and are cited by scholars of every ideological stripe as primary data. Outside the New Testament, Tacitus (Annals 15.44) and the most widely accepted stratum of Josephus (Ant. 18.63-64) confirm the execution of “Christus” under Pilate and the continuance of his movement in the first century. The question is therefore not whether Jesus existed—virtually no credentialed historian denies this—but what explanatory framework best accounts for the rise of a community that worships him as “Lord” while remaining convinced that they have not abandoned Jewish monotheism. The earliest Christian answer is already visible in the high Christology of Paul (Phil 2:5-11; 1 Cor 8:6), in the Fourth Gospel’s Logos theology (John 1:1-18) and in the Spirit-Christ-Father benediction that closes the earliest preserved sermon-letter, 2 Corinthians 13:14. These texts pre-date the fourth-century councils by centuries and show that the raw materials of Trinitarian belief arise organically within the first generation of Christianity.

Pagan derivation theories also falter on the decisive role played by Scripture in the fourth-century debates. At Nicaea (AD 325) the term homoousios—“of the same substance”—was adopted precisely because the party defending Christ’s full deity, led by Athanasius, found that every attempt to express the New Testament’s teaching solely in biblical phrases was being reinterpreted by Arius to deny the Son’s co-eternity. The Nicene bishops therefore chose a non-biblical adjective to safeguard the manifest witness of the biblical text. Athanasius defended the term’s use by arguing from Scripture, not by appealing to any pagan precedent. Far from importing foreign mythology, the council used philosophical language as a fence to protect the narrative and doxological claims already embedded in the apostolic writings.

The suggestion that Genesis 1:27, 5:3 and 9:6 dictate a unitarian concept of God misunderstands the analogical logic of the imago Dei. Humankind is said to be made “in” or “according to” God’s image; analogical likeness does not imply identical ontology. To reason backwards from human singular personhood to divine singular personhood would invalidate biblical data that present a complex unity in God, such as the Old Testament “Word,” “Wisdom” and “Spirit” motifs, and the New Testament’s integrated worship of Father, Son and Spirit. Moreover, the image language functions in these texts to ground human dignity and accountability, not to supply a metaphysical definition of divine identity.

Finally, the charge that the resurrection is mythical overlooks the cumulative historical argument for the empty tomb, post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples’ belief. The unity of these three phenomena is most convincingly explained if Jesus was in fact raised; alternative hypotheses—hallucination, legend, deliberate fraud—fail to account for the transformation of skeptical individuals such as James and Paul or for the remarkable early consensus that resurrection, not mere immortality, had occurred in the midst of history. Granted the resurrection, the exaltation of Christ to the sphere of divine identity follows, as shown by the earliest Christian worship practices documented in pagan sources such as Pliny’s letter to Trajan (c. AD 112), where believers “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.”

Trinitarian theology therefore cannot be dismissed as a late pagan accretion. It represents the church’s sustained exegetical reflection on the revelation of God in Christ and the Spirit, under the pressure of maintaining Jewish monotheism while honoring the divine prerogatives ascribed to Jesus. The intellectual vocabulary of the councils was drawn from contemporary philosophical resources, but the content it expressed was hammered out in continuous dialogue with the biblical texts and against the resistance of rival proposals that could not do justice to the apostolic witness. The result is not mythology but a coherent account of God that arises from, and remains accountable to, the historical and textual foundations of the Christian faith.

FYI: Did the Trinity Come from Paganism?

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@Rattigan350

The dilemma dissolves once we notice the Bible uses the word “angel” in two very different ways. In most passages it denotes a created, finite spirit-servant of God. But occasionally Scripture applies the same Hebrew and Greek terms (מַלְאָךְ ; ἄγγελος) to God himself when he temporarily appears as a “messenger.” In those theophanies the word describes a role, not an ontological category. The “angel of the LORD” in Genesis, Exodus and Judges speaks as Yahweh, bears his Name, receives divine worship and forgives sin. He is consistently identified as God, yet distinguished from God the Father; Christians therefore recognize him as the Son—Jehovah in self-manifestation, not a creature.

Michael, by contrast, is explicitly introduced as “one of the chief princes” and “your prince” (Dan 10:13, 21), language that places him among the created heavenly host. He never wears the divine Name, is never worshiped, never forgives sin, and in Jude 9 declines even to pronounce judgment in his own authority. Revelation 12 shows him leading fellow angels—something Scripture never does with the Angel of the LORD, who commands angels because he is their Creator (cf. Heb 1:6–7). Michael’s entire portrait is creaturely; the Angel of the LORD’s portrait is divine.

When the New Testament depicts the incarnate Son it never calls him a “created angel.” Hebrews 1 deliberately contrasts the unique Son with “all the angels,” proving his superiority precisely because he is God’s eternal radiance and heir. Calling Jesus “Michael” would flatten that contrast and force us to read the chapter against its grain.

Thus there is no contradiction. “Angel of the LORD” is a divine self-revelation; “archangel Michael” is a mighty but created servant. Jesus can be the first and cannot be the second. Different senses of the same word do not make him both a creature and the Creator; they simply remind us that “angel” sometimes labels function, other times nature, and context decides which.

57

How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

by Sea Breeze in

simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

that's how they sold it.

the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

aqwsed12345

@Vanderhoven7

The Catholic Church has never offered anyone a route to heaven that “bypasses” the Cross or excuses him from the obedience of faith; she simply distinguishes between a culpable refusal of revealed truth and the misfortune of never having heard that truth in an intelligible way. When Saint John says that “he who believes not the Son shall not see life” he is speaking, as the context of both Jn 3 and 1 Jn 5 makes plain, about those to whom the Son has actually been proposed and who therefore stand before the drama of acceptance or rejection. Thomas, commenting on the same verses, adds that unbelief becomes mortal when it is “pertinacious”—that is, when it resists the truth once known to be such. The soldier on Hadrian’s Wall and the Bedouin child are not, before any act of their own, in that situation.

Yet neither are they saved by a second, “natural” covenant. If they are saved it is solely because the one sacrifice of Calvary and the one bridal gift of the Church are made present to them by an anticipatory grace that elicits an implicit, seminal act of the very faith you name: faith in a God who is Father, in a mercy that forgives sin, and in a life that conquers death. The Holy Spirit can plant that seed because, as Pius XII teaches in Mystici Corporis, Christ’s merits overflow the visible enclosure of the sacramental economy and can touch those who “by an unconscious desire” are already ordered to the Church. At the instant that seed is accepted it ceases to be merely implicit, for grace is not a vague benevolence but a supernatural light; it contains within itself, virtually, the whole Creed. Should life last, Providence ordinarily leads such a soul toward the explicit confession of Jesus as Lord; should death intervene, Christ, who “enlightens every man” (Jn 1:9), can unveil Himself in the final moment so that the obedience of faith may be perfected or, if spurned, finally judged.

This is no modern novelty. Saint Justin could call the righteous pagan “a Christian unawares”; Saint Thomas could say that a man who follows the light given him “would receive further illumination, even by an angel, sooner than God would fail in what is necessary for salvation”; Pius IX and the Fathers of Vatican II repeat the same doctrine. None of them weaken the necessity of Christ or His Church; they simply refuse to bind the Almighty to the accidents of geography or history when He wishes “all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” That refusal is not sophistry; it is theologia crucis, for it confesses that the Blood outpoured on Golgotha is puissant enough to reach even those whose tongues have never formed the sacred Name, provided they do not wilfully shut their hearts against the invitation written on creation and conscience.

Therefore the Church evangelises with urgency—for explicit faith, baptism, and full communion are the ordinary road—and yet she dares to hope for the unevangelised, not because she trusts fallen nature, but because she trusts the pierced Heart of her Spouse.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@MeanMrMustard

When a Thomist speaks of the “unified reality” that grounds the human capacities for thought, love, freedom, and bodily life, he is pointing to the substantial form of the living human being: the rational or intellective soul. In classical hylomorphism every material substance is a composite of matter (the principle of indeterminacy, the stuff that can receive different shapes) and form (the principle of determination, that which makes the stuff to be this particular kind of thing and equips it for its characteristic operations). In plants and animals the form is already called “soul,” because it is that by which the organism is alive at all; in man the soul is further specified as rational, since it founds powers that rise above the merely organic—universal intellection and free choice.

DNA, neurons, hormonal cascades, and all the biochemical marvels we chart with microscopes belong to the material side of the composite. They are the structures and dispositions that the soul employs as instruments, the way a musician uses strings or pipes. Remove the soul, and the molecular patterns may linger for a while, but the coordinating principle is gone and the organism soon dissolves into a heap of tissues. Conversely, without that molecular scaffolding the soul cannot express its life outwardly: even the highest intellect needs a healthy cortex and sensory data to reason about justice or geometry. Form and matter, therefore, interpenetrate without confusion: the soul is not a ghost floating in a machine, nor is it reducible to genetic code. It is the immanent cause that makes the bodily matter to be a this living, human body—one substance, not two loosely coupled agents.

So the “something there” is not an unknown x that we posit only to cover our ignorance; it is the formal cause whose existence we infer from evident effects. Whenever we see a genuinely human act—abstract thought, free consent, moral resolve—we know that a principle proportionate to such acts must be inside the agent, because nothing can give what it does not possess. The rational soul is grasped, then, not under a microscope but by a metaphysical judgment: these acts exceed the explanatory reach of chemistry alone, therefore the living subject includes an immaterial formative principle. Aristotle and Thomas would call that conclusion science, in the strict sense of a reasoned insight into causes.

Admittedly we do not “locate” the soul the way we trace a chromosome, because the soul is not a parcel of matter; it is the very act by which matter is organized into a living, human whole. But we are not left with a pious shrug either. We can describe the soul’s powers, distinguish its immaterial operations from its organic ones, analyze its relation to the body, and even show (by philosophical argument) that such a form is incorruptible once separated from matter. In short, the Thomist claim is not that we know nothing of the ground of human nature, but that what we know is formal and metaphysical, not another layer of empirically detectable stuff. The soul is precisely that formal act which, together with matter, makes a human being to be—not merely to seem—a rational animal.

57

How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

by Sea Breeze in

simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

that's how they sold it.

the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

aqwsed12345

@Vanderhoven7

The Lord’s warning in John 8:24 is absolute: no one enters life while remaining in culpable unbelief of the One whom the Father has sent. That text has governed Catholic soteriology from the Fathers through Trent: faith in Christ, enlivened by grace and perfected in charity, is the gateway to justification. Where you and I must look more closely is the distinction—taught by Augustine, refined by Aquinas, and reaffirmed by Pius IX—that the act of faith can be either explicit or, under certain conditions, implicit. Saint Thomas puts it succinctly: “Before the coming of Christ it was enough to believe explicitly in the Redeemer as promised; after His coming it is necessary to believe explicitly in Him as accomplished—unless a person be so situated that he cannot hear the Gospel, in which case a readiness of will to believe whatever God should reveal is accounted unto righteousness”.

The soldier on the Roman frontier, the Chinaman of the twelfth century, the Bedouin infant who dies in the cradle do not disprove Christ’s sentence; rather, the Holy Spirit, “who blows where He wills,” can interiorly move such souls at the moment of conscience to accept the light available to them and, if they persevere in that obedience, dispose them for the final illumination by which Christ makes Himself known. When that happens—whether in the last heartbeat of earthly life or in a secret inspiration long before—the soul no longer stands in the state described in John 8:24, because the very grace that binds it to Christ also infuses the theological virtue of faith. It is still Christ who saves and still faith in Christ that justifies; the difference lies only in the hour and manner in which the Name is embraced.

Nothing in that mystery diminishes the ordinary necessity of preaching. On the contrary, it confirms it: explicit faith, the sacraments, and a life of visible communion with the Church are the ordinary road God Himself established, and charity forbids us to leave our neighbour on the perilous margin of implicit desire. But neither does the Church presume to set limits to divine condescension. She repeats the Apostle’s question—“How shall they believe Him of whom they have not heard?”—and therefore sends missionaries; yet she also trusts that the Shepherd who died for every man can reach the lamb caught in thorns beyond the edge of the pasture. To deny that possibility would not exalt John 8:24; it would circumscribe the Cross. The tradition holds both truths together: outside the Church there is no salvation, and yet—precisely because every grace flows from the wounded Heart of Christ—no man who is truly docile to grace is outside the Church in the final reckoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_of_the_unlearned#Roman_Catholic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincible_and_invincible_ignorance

84

Zechariah 12:10 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

here's a question for those who still support watchtower on this forum.

why did watchtower leave out the word "me" in zech.

zechariah 12:10 reads like this: .

aqwsed12345

@Earnest

The point at issue is not whether the Fourth Evangelist — whose gospel you rightly cite in 𝔓66 — quotes a line that contains the relative pronoun ὃν. He does. Nor is it disputed that the kaige–Theodotionic strand already renders Zech 12:10 with εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν. The question is what that ὃν presupposes in its Hebrew source and what the New World Translation does with the Hebrew so as to avoid the consequence John draws.

Hebrew Vorlage.
The Masoretic consonants are not in doubt: וְהִבִּ֣יטוּ אֵלַ֔י אֵ֥ת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָ֖רוּ, “they shall look unto me ’ēt whom they pierced.” The first-person object pronoun is the grammatical antecedent of the relative. No extant Hebrew manuscript earlier than the middle ages reads ’êlāyw (“unto him”) here. The third-person shift is a Greek phenomenon confined to revisions that wished to remove the anthropopathic force of God’s being pierced. Textual criticism therefore starts from a first-person Hebrew clause.
Kaige–Theodotion technique.
The revisers responsible for 8 ḤevXII gr took the difficult Hebrew at face value: they kept the first-person speaker but supplied a relative pronoun that Greek requires, giving εἰς ἐμὲ ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν. That wording later re-emerges in Codex L. John, when he cites the verse, streamlines only one verb (ἐπιβλέψονται → ὄψονται) but leaves the ἐμὲ / ὃν syntax intact. He is not introducing a new, theologically convenient reading; he is picking up the Jewish revision that already matched the Hebrew more closely than the older LXX.
What John does with it.
By applying the “ὃν” clause to the crucified Jesus (19:34–37) John tacitly identifies Jesus with the first-person speaker of the oracle, YHWH. That is why the citation is preceded by the emphatic witness formula of v. 35 and repeated in apocalyptic form in Rev 1:7. The Fourth Evangelist’s claim is not merely that Zechariah predicted a piercing, but that Israel’s God, now in flesh, is the one pierced.
What the NWT does instead.
The New World Translation alters the Hebrew itself: “they will look to the one whom they pierced.” By changing ’êlayʾ (“to me”) to a third-person object and relegating the first-person to a separate clause (“They will look to me and they will lament over him…”), the translators eliminate the identification between speaker and pierced one. That adjustment is not the same as John’s Greek wording, because John presupposes that ὃν refers back to the first-person speaker; the NWT blocks that link in advance. The alteration is not textual-critical (no such Hebrew reading exists) but theological, dictated by a christology that cannot admit the pierced one to be YHWH.
The charge of “corruption.”
A translation departs from the autograph when it substitutes an unattested reading in order to serve a doctrinal constraint. That is what happens in the NWT’s handling of Zech 12:10. John’s citation does not license such a move: he cites a Greek line that still implies the divine antecedent — exactly the implication the NWT strives to remove. Therefore one may affirm both propositions at once: John faithfully reproduces the kaige Greek of Zechariah, and the NWT nevertheless corrupts the Hebrew to avoid John’s theological conclusion.
On the manuscript base you list.
𝔓66 is a witness to John, not to Zechariah; it tells us nothing about the prophetic text beyond confirming that John used ὄψονται εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν. The sole pre-Christian Greek evidence for Zech 12:10 itself is 8 ḤevXII gr, whose reading, though fragmentary, aligns with the first-person Hebrew. That is the very reading the NWT sets aside.

In short, the question is not whether John wrote “ὃν.” Of course he did. The question is whether the underlying Hebrew said “me,” thereby making the pierced one YHWH, and whether a modern version may legitimately replace that with “the one” to preserve a sub-divine christology. On the combined testimony of the Masoretic consonants, the kaige–Theodotionic revision, and John’s own theological use, the answer is clear: the Hebrew says “me,” John presumes it, and the NWT alters it.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@MeanMrMustard

Your instinct to test the vocabulary against concrete specimens is the right one—Thomas would have applauded it—because in his view metaphysics must start ab esse in re, from realities that can be named and handled, and only then ascend to the heights. So let us keep our feet on the ground with dogs and poems, and only at the end lift our eyes again to the mystery of God and of the Incarnate Word.

When I said “nature” is the set of essential properties while “essence” is the underlying reality that grounds those properties, I was not offering a mere re-labelling exercise. Think of a living oak. We can draw up a botanist’s checklist—lignified tissue, photosynthesis, acorn reproduction—and that description is certainly true of the oak. Yet the description is not what makes the tree be a tree. Behind the checklist lies a formative principle that actually organizes matter into roots, trunk, leaves, and powers of growth. Aristotle called that principle the form, and when form organizes matter into a complete, self-subsisting whole we call the result a substance. The Thomistic tradition reserves the word essence for that formative principle considered precisely as the source of intelligibility—that by which the oak is an oak. Nature, in turn, names the ordered set of capacities that flow from that essence: absorbing water, synthesizing sugars, pushing out new rings each spring. Essence is therefore not a conceptual filing cabinet but a real, interior cause; nature is that cause in act.

Nature isn’t just a tally of traits; it’s the dynamic principle that governs how a thing operates, flowing from its essence. Essence, meanwhile, isn’t merely the sum of those traits either—it’s the metaphysical core, the “whatness” that makes a thing intelligible as itself, distinct from everything else. Think of essence as the internal blueprint, and nature as how that blueprint plays out in reality. They’re not redundant; they’re two sides of a coin, with essence being the “what it is” and nature the “how it acts because of what it is.” A thing’s operations reveal its nature, which is grounded in its essence.

The same distinction holds for us. A newborn, an adult philosopher, and a comatose accident-victim all share the same essence, rational animality. In a newborn the intellect and will are only radically present—as the rose is present in the living root—but they need not be on public display for the essence to be whole and operative. If the powers were absent even radically, the child would not be a human being in the first place. Hence neither a severe cognitive disability nor the sleeper’s inactivity nor prenatal immaturity robs the subject of humanity. What matters is the intrinsic principle that grounds the capacity, not the momentary performance statistics.

You’re right that “two legs” doesn’t define humanity; a legless person is no less human. Thomism would say that’s because legs are accidental, not essential. The essence of a human is “rational animal”—a composite of animality (life, sensation, motion) and rationality (intellect and will). This isn’t a category in the nominalist sense, where we just slap a label on a set of traits we observe. It’s a metaphysical reality: what makes a human human is this inherent capacity for reason, even if it’s not always exercised. A mentally handicapped person or a fetus doesn’t lose humanity because the essence—rational animality—remains intact as their defining principle, even if accidents like injury or development impede its full expression. “Actualizing” a nature doesn’t mean ticking off a checklist of displayed traits; it’s the living out of those essential capacities, whether fully realized or latent. A fetus has the intrinsic potential for reason, which is what counts, not its current performance.

Now for dogs and cats. A dog’s accidents—number of legs, color of fur—can vary wildly without touching its dog-essence. If you amputate a leg, you impair the animal but do not transmogrify it into a cat. Why? Because the essence, the formative core, remains. That is why Aristotle speaks of “that which acts, acts according to what it is”: the canine essence elicits barking rather than meowing, pack instincts rather than solitary ambush, even when the creature’s accidental equipment is damaged. So yes, dogs have a nature: call it “caninity.” It’s the essence that makes a dog a dog—sentient, corporeal, with a specific mode of animal life distinct from, say, a cat’s “felinity.” Both are mammals, sure, but their essences differ in form: a dog’s nature inclines it to pack behavior and certain sensory aptitudes, while a cat’s leans toward solitary hunting and agility. A three-legged dog doesn’t cease to be a dog because its essence isn’t tied to leg count but to that deeper form—its “dogness”—which persists despite accidental variations like color or size. The distinction isn’t just taxonomic; it’s real, rooted in their being, not our naming conventions.

A poem stands in striking contrast. Ink and paper have no inherent tendency to rhyme, to scan in pentameter, or to conjure images of moonlit seas. Those features arrive only when a mind imposes them from without. A poem therefore possesses no self-subsisting nature the way a dog does; its “whatness” is accidental, borrowed, unable to act or grow of itself. A poem isn’t a substance like a dog or a human—it’s an artifact, a product of human craft. Its “essence” isn’t intrinsic but extrinsic, imposed by the poet’s intellect onto matter (words, rhythm). Its nature is its formal principle as a poem—what makes it a poem rather than prose or gibberish—but it’s not a substantial nature. It’s an accidental form, dependent on a mind to shape it, unlike the intrinsic essence of a living thing that drives its operations from within. A poem’s “whatness” is real, but it’s tethered to human intention, not self-subsistent being. The Thomist places such items in the category of artifacts, where the form is extrinsic and perishes the moment the organizing intelligence or the supporting material is withdrawn.

Those creaturely examples also expose the contingency of everything around us. An oak, a dog, a man—all are composites in which “what it is” and “that it is” remain distinct. I might never have existed; I could cease to exist tomorrow. This composition of essence (potency) and existence (act) cries out for a first reality in which the two are no longer separable, otherwise nothing contingent would ever be. God, says Aquinas, is precisely ipsum esse subsistens—Being itself, not merely a being. In Him, essence and existence are numerically one; He is sheer actuality, with no unrealized capacities, no admixture of limit or defect. That is what “pure act” (actus purus) seeks to capture. When we predicate power, knowledge, or goodness of God we are not stacking independent properties like stickers on a suitcase; we are naming distinct aspects of a single, limitless act of being.

For us, “what we are” (essence) and “that we are” (existence) are separate; I’m a human, but I might not have existed. In God, they’re identical: His essence is to exist, pure actuality with no potentiality or limitation. His nature and essence align as one eternal act of being, not a set of traits we compile but the ground of all reality. Concrete example? Think of God as the “why” behind everything existing—He’s not a thing among things but the source that doesn’t need a source, unlike dogs, humans, or poems.

Your worry about “essence” being just a set of attributes misses this: in Thomism, it’s not a descriptive bucket but a principle of intelligibility. For humans, it’s not about listing “rational” and “animal” like ingredients; it’s the unified reality that grounds those capacities. For God, it’s not attributes like omnipotence tacked on—it’s His sheer is-ness that entails them. This isn’t vague; it’s the bedrock of a system where language tracks reality, not just our perceptions. Christology leans on this: “fully God” means the Son shares that divine essence completely; “fully human” means He assumes our essence completely, uniting both in one person without blurring them. It’s not sloganeering—it’s metaphysics with teeth, meant to hold up under scrutiny like yours.

So all this bears directly on the Incarnation. When the eternal Word assumed a human nature, He did not tack divine attributes onto a Galilean rabbi, nor did He dilute His Godhead into some tertium quid. Rather, the one divine Hypostasis took to Himself—united to His person—a complete human essence: body, soul, intellect, will. Everything that makes God God and everything that makes man man is present, intact, in the single subject who speaks from the manger, from the mount, and from the cross. “Without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” Chalcedon insists, precisely because only such an unconfused union secures real divinity and real humanity and therefore real redemption.

If you press me for an “example” of actus purus, I can only warn that every finite analogy will limp. Yet an echo can help: picture white light cascading through a prism. The colors—red to violet—are distinct participations; the white is indivisibly all wavelengths at once. Each color expresses something truly present in the source, yet the source transcends any single hue. Likewise, creatures manifest limited reflections of being; God is unbounded Esse itself, containing every perfection formally, not fragmentarily.

Thus, the Thomist map: essence is the intrinsic formative principle, nature the ordered dynamism that flows from it; accidents hover at the surface, mutable and secondary. Dogs and cats manifest their essences by what they do; a poem receives its ephemeral “form” from outside; a human embryo is already human because the rational essence is present implicitly; God alone simply is. On that scaffolding the confession “fully God, fully man” stands firm, not as rhetoric but as metaphysical precision wedded to revealed fact.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@MeanMrMustard

You’re absolutely right that both sides often bring a flood of verses and that foundational assumptions shape how those verses are understood. But your reply—“to people just reading the Bible, that looks a lot like reading your meaning into the scriptures”—is exactly the crux of why method matters, and why “just reading the Bible” is never as neutral or self-evident as it seems.

You insist on brevity and “common definitions,” but these are never neutral or self-standing. As soon as we talk about “God,” “person,” “nature,” or even “Bible,” we are already interpreting. The very act of choosing which verses matter, how to relate the Old and New Testaments, how to weigh historical background, what to do with paradoxes or mystery—all of this is interpretation, whether we admit it or not.

The problem isn’t with “walls of text” but with the illusion that one can bypass centuries of reflection, debate, and suffering for the truth, and simply start fresh “just reading” as if no one ever did so before. The reason Christians “spit out scriptures” isn’t to overwhelm, but because the Christian revelation is organic, woven together over centuries, and the heart of the faith is not reducible to a slogan. Every heresy in Church history began with someone “just reading the Bible” and refusing to listen to the faith community that wrote, transmitted, and preserved it.

To your point: yes, there’s a danger of “reading your meaning” into the text. But there’s an equal danger—much greater, in fact—of pretending that “plain reading” is free from assumptions. Protestant, Catholic, Unitarian, or skeptic: every reader comes to the Bible with a context, a tradition, and a set of inherited questions. The Catholic view at least admits this openly and seeks to check interpretation against the living faith of the Church, guided by the Spirit, not the ever-shifting impressions of individuals or the fashions of the age.

If anything, the example from Matthew 24:36 actually confirms the point I am making: the “plain reading” approach only appears simple if one ignores the complexities of the text, its canonical context, and the theological claims Christianity has always made about Christ. Of course, someone who picks up a Bible and reads, “the Son does not know, only the Father,” may initially think this means Jesus is not God. But for nearly two millennia, the entire Christian tradition—across language, culture, and denomination—has been wrestling with how the Scriptures as a whole present Jesus: as both truly God and truly man, possessing a human intellect and will as well as a divine intellect and will. The point is not to “read in” our conclusions, but to interpret each passage in the light of the whole, refusing to allow one verse to negate the fullness of what the Gospels reveal.

To treat the verse in Matthew as if it were a gotcha—“aha, the Trinity is refuted!”—misses how doctrine develops. The Church’s response is not to ignore or explain away such passages, but to wrestle with their meaning: Christ, as man, could say He did not know, precisely because in His humanity He freely accepted the limitations of human knowledge, while in His divinity, nothing is hidden from Him. This isn’t an arbitrary harmonization, but a reflection of what the Church has always confessed: “true God and true man.” It is only shallow proof-texting that refuses to hold these truths together, that seeks the “plain meaning” at the cost of the mystery.

Your sarcasm about the Pope “overlooking” Matthew 24:36 makes my point for me. Of course the Church knows these verses—she has prayed, pondered, and preached them for centuries. If the truth were as simple as a single verse, there would never have been a controversy. But the very existence of centuries of debate, heresies, and councils testifies that Scripture is not self-interpreting, and that genuine understanding requires patience, humility, and reverence for the depth of God’s self-disclosure.

So, yes, let’s begin with definitions. But let’s not pretend that slogans or isolated texts settle the matter. What is required is not less thought, but more: a willingness to let the fullness of revelation question our assumptions, and to receive with humility the faith that was handed down—not as a quick fix, but as a living mystery to be entered into, not mastered. That is why the Catholic Church never “mic drops” with a verse, and why her interpretation, for all its apparent “walls of text,” has endured while so many shallow certainties have faded away.

You want conciseness? Here it is:
The doctrine of the Trinity cannot be built on “one-liners,” nor destroyed by them. It is not an invention of clever theologians, but the Church’s humble attempt to confess what is given in the totality of revelation—a mystery that is only distorted by shortcuts and proof-texting, whether for or against. The Catholic method—always open to reason, history, context, and tradition—recognizes that no one reads the Bible in a vacuum. Every community brings its “wiggling” and “squinting.” The question is not whether we interpret, but whose interpretation bears the mark of fidelity, depth, and fruit over centuries, not just the loudest meme or the shortest post.

The Trinity is not an escape from “just reading the Bible,” but the mature fruit of reading the whole of Scripture in the light of Christ, with the mind of the Church. If that requires a few more paragraphs—or centuries—so be it. Truth deserves the patience to be sought and received, not just asserted.

57

How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

by Sea Breeze in

simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

that's how they sold it.

the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

aqwsed12345

I already answered this video on the previous page, but let me repeat what the Church taught even before the Second Vatican Council, here is the Letter of the Holy Office, August 8, 1949, addressed to Archbishop Cushing of Boston, published with the approval of Pope Pius XII.

In His infinite mercy God has willed that the effects, necessary for one to be saved, of those helps to salvation which are directed toward man's final end, not by intrinsic necessity, but only by divine institution, can also be obtained in certain circumstances when those helps are used only in desire and longing. This we see clearly stated in the Sacred Council of Trent, both in reference to the sacrament of regeneration and in reference to the sacrament of penance (Denzinger, nn. 797, 807).
The same in its own degree must be asserted of the Church, in as far as she is the general help to salvation. Therefore, that one may obtain eternal salvation, it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church actually as a member, but it is necessary that at least he be united to her by desire and longing.
However, this desire need not always be explicit, as it is in catechumens; but when a person is involved in invincible ignorance God accepts also an implicit desire, so called because it is included in that good disposition of soul whereby a person wishes his will to be conformed to the will of God.
These things are clearly taught in that dogmatic letter which was issued by the Sovereign Pontiff, Pope Pius XII, on June 29, 1943, On the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ (AAS, Vol. 35, an. 1943, p. 193 ff.). For in this letter the Sovereign Pontiff clearly distinguishes between those who are actually incorporated into the Church as members, and those who are united to the Church only by desire.
...he mentions those who "are related to the Mystical Body of the Redeemer by a certain unconscious yearning and desire," and these he by no means excludes from eternal salvation, but on the other hand states that they are in a condition "in which they cannot be sure of their salvation" since "they still remain deprived of those many heavenly gifts and helps which can only be enjoyed in the Catholic Church" (AAS, 1. c., p. 243). With these wise words he reproves both those who exclude from eternal salvation all united to the Church only by implicit desire, and those who falsely assert that men can be saved equally well in every religion...

Thus a non-Catholic can be saved if they are united to the Church by "desire and longing," which can even be implicit (that is, not conscious or explicit), particularly in the case of "invincible ignorance." Such implicit desire means the person has a sincere disposition to do God's will as best as they know. However, this does not mean that all religions save equally; rather, it recognizes God's mercy for those who do not formally belong to the Catholic Church but seek God sincerely according to their knowledge.

Hence the Church has never taught a simple syllogism—“Muslim, therefore damned”—because she has never reduced salvation to a census of labels. What she does teach, unchanged from Trent through Vatican II and Dominus Iesus, is a double truth held together like the two poles of one mystery. First, every man who is saved is saved only because the merits of Christ are poured into his soul and embed him, visibly or invisibly, within Christ’s Body, the Church; the objective necessity of that incorporation will never be revoked. Second, the same Redeemer, “who wills all men to be saved” (1 Tim 2:4), can touch a conscience that suffers invincible ignorance of the Gospel and elicit there an implicit but real assent to the light given; if that man dies in the state of grace, he is not excluded from the Beatific Vision. Pius IX supplied the classical formula: no one is saved who, knowing the Catholic Church to be founded by God, refuses to enter; but those who, through no personal fault, do not know her, yet strive to do God’s will as they understand it, may attain eternal life by the interior working of grace. Aquinas had already sketched the principle when he distinguished between the necessitas praecepti of baptism and the necessitas medii that God can supply extraordinarily when the sacrament is physically or psychologically inaccessible.

Within that framework it is possible for a Muslim to be saved, not because Islam possesses a parallel salvific apparatus, nor because its denial of the Trinity is rendered harmless, but because the Holy Spirit can translate the fragmentary shoots of natural religion—fear of the Creator, sorrow for sin, rudimentary trust in divine mercy—into supernatural virtues that secretly bind the soul to Christ. Yet such a path is precarious, for it must fight the gravity of serious doctrinal error without the ordinary helps of the sacraments. Hence the Council’s stark warning: “very often men, deceived by the Evil One, become vain in their reasonings” (LG 16). So the Church can both honor whatever is good in Islam and still confess that its faithful stand, objectively, in need of the fullness of truth and means of grace entrusted to Peter’s barque.

Would the Pope, then, betray his office if he addresses Muslims without an explicit altar-call? No more than Paul betrayed his when, at the Areopagus, he first praised the Athenians for their altar ad ignotum deum before announcing the resurrection. Evangelization is always a two-step art: one names the seeds of the Word already present, then one invites to the harvest. John Paul II, in the very speech you quoted, did both: he began with shared theism so that his hearers would recognise him not as an enemy of their souls but as a fellow worshipper of the Almighty; and he ended by confessing, without ambiguity, that Christians acknowledge Jesus as “Lord and Saviour”—a title that implicitly calls every listener to decide. The call to conversion need not roar; sometimes it must be woven into the grammar of respect so that it can be heard at all. But the mandate itself is never suspended: the Church “must proclaim Christ to all nations” (Ad Gentes 7), for in the final accounting each man will be judged by the measure of grace he has accepted or refused.

Therefore Catholics may neither consign all Muslims wholesale to perdition nor lapse into a soft pluralism. We hold instead a Thomistic tension: Christ alone saves, the Church is his universal instrument, and yet the reach of his mercy is not shackled by the visible frontier of the sacraments. From that tension flows both the urgency of mission and the courtesy of dialogue—the two lungs, as John Paul liked to say, by which the Church breathes in the modern world.