shadman's old Musings

This is a comment I posted on a Jehovah's Witness' Yahoo 360 blog some time back, in response to a posting he still currently has on his site questioning the Trinity. I was turned onto this site by a friend who asked me what I thought of his post. I felt and still feel that he asked some really good questions and I really, truly felt, and still do, that he needed to enter into a discussion about the questions he asked, since he obviously does not understand Christian teachings. Its doubtful that he understands his own JW teaching either since it didn't take me long to discover that his questions came directly from one of his JW pamphlets, “ Should You Believe in the Trinity? ”, but I was hoping that he really wanted to discuss the topics he raised. Sorry, that was just a little sarcastic because JW's usually don't discuss or debate anything, and he was certainly no exception since all he did was delete my comments. Most unfortunate, but not unexpected. W

A friend of mine asked me a question about baptism a week or so ago. He has sat under the teaching that baptism is required for salvation as well as the teaching that baptism is ceremonial in nature. His question is one that has been around for a long time, and in some respects the questions is nearly as old as the church is. Is salvation really that simple: repent and believe? Or are there things I must do as well? Is baptism a work or a sacrament, a rite of observance that must be performed to seal the repentance and belief? It also reminded me of something I had recently taught in my little weekly Bible study, but we'll get to that in a few minutes. There are in fact three views on baptism: The first is that baptism is a means of salvation. This is normally called the Roman Catholic view, but I'm more familiar with it as a view held by the churches of Christ, usually the Boston and Indiana versions. The second view is that baptism is a sign and a seal of the new

I seem to have forgotten to post this from my Yahoo 360 blog. Posted Sept 13th .... I sometimes troll for Christians or interesting people on the Yahoo 360. Some times I run across an interesting person or something that peaks my interest. This happened as I was looking at a friend of one of my Yahoo 360 friends. Here is an excerpt from the blog of a friend of a friend, ... There is a Gospel known by the name the Gospel of Barnabas, which the church banned in 492 AD by the order of Pope Gelasius. It was confiscated everywhere. But there was still a copy of that Gospel in the library of Pope Sixtus V. Fortunately a certain Roman Monk called Framarino managed to bring it out. He had found the letters of Ireneus, where the came upon the name of the Gospel of Barnabas mentioned as a reference. His curiosity urged him to look for that gospel. When he became a close friend to Pope Sixtus V, he got that copy of the gospel and found in it that there would come a time when it would be claimed t

I noticed something really unusual in my last blog – I started a discussion about the Trinity, and I didn't bother to define it. Shame on me! Even though I really won't get to discussing it this time around, I really should start by defining what it is so that we all understand what the term really means, from an Orthodox Christian perspective. So let's do that right now, shall we? I'll use as my working definition what James White used in his book, The Forgotten Trinity , Within the One being that is God, there exists eternally three co-equal and co-eternal persons, namely, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. (from The Forgotten Trinity ) So, what exactly does this mean? Let's start with De 6:4: Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! Any definition of the Trinity starts with the fact that God is ONE being, not three beings. First and foremost, Trinitarians are Monotheistic (James 2:19; 1 Cor 8:6; 1 Ti 2:5-6), they are not tri-the

The Trinity is a very misunderstood topic, and unfortunately those misunderstandings usually begin with the church. A theological battle or sorts was waged in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and is still being waged today, to help codify what the church had always taught but had never realized it needed to codify. There are four streams of thought on the Trinity: 1) the orthodox view, One God, three persons; each co-equal with the other; 2) One God where Jesus is either a subordinate or lesser god, or a man; 3) that each, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each separate gods, and 4) that God is one being that manifests Himself as three different beings at different times, sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son and sometimes the Holy Spirit. I subscribe to view number one, the orthodox view, which was believed from the beginning. Believe it or not the church fought off the other three views for the first three centuries, which is why it sought to codify the biblical view with a dev