🌞 Sunny Bear 🌞

@ethanthester @5Solas2 Your “denomination” was invented in the 1600s and has de-sacramentalised and departed from the Apostolic faith in almost every regard. Your opinion is irrelevant.

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 That is correct.

LoL

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 There it is: your worldview summarised. “Just a symbol”. This is why you have symbolic baptism, a symbolic Eucharist, and a fundamentally Platonic view of matter. Nobody in the first millennium of the church believed as you did.

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 He didn't. He used an Ark to symbolize His presence. The fact that the Israelites lost it was to show exactly that. Just like how the veil was torn to symbolize God's approachability to all believers, not because God was trapped by some stones and a curtain.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 Braindead comment.

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 You seem to be limiting God. Like the Mormons believing their god is an alien that needed spacecraft.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 The veil does not symbolise God’s approachability. Man, Prot hermeneutics are something else 😂 The veil was his presence leaving the temple, to return at Pentecost.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 Oh, I know you don’t separate them. That’s why you hold to Absolute Divine Simplicity.

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 Western theology doesn't separate them like you do. Or the Gnostics. People and objects don't have innate divinity to be activated. They respond to the will and power of the One True God Almighty.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 So why would God use an ark to house his presence? Why were there such elaborate instructions for its construction? Why bother, if God could simply manifest his power?

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 No. The time they did and marched it out to battle, they lost the battle and the Ark was captured by the Philistines, because God wanted to show it was always His power, not the object that blessed them. They considered it the earthly throne of God and prayed to Him alone.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 What does Joshua 7:6 say?

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 What are the divine energies of God, and what is the distinction between his essence and his energies?

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 I understand divine energy comes from the Lord God Almighty, Creator and King of the Universe, and no one and nothing else. Which is exactly what makes me not a Gnostic.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 Did the Israelites venerate the Ark of the Covenant?

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 To glorify Him and not Moses or the staff. That act of Moses among others condemns him to never see the Promised Land. Hezekiah melted down the bronze serpent explicitly because the Israelites were venerating it instead of worshipping God for His divine act of healing.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 We don’t. We’re not Roman Catholics. We have many miracles associated with relics that the faithful can freely approach. Again, your worldview is Protestant/ Nominalist/Platonic/Gnostic so you don’t have a metaphysic for understanding the divine energies. Go read Athanasius.

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 the flesh? Did the Apostles themselves send their handkerchiefs off to the churches for healing, or did they tell people to pray directly to God for healing? And if they retain God's power to heal, why do you put them behind glas instead of touching them to the sick and dead?

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 Nobody claims relics are autonomous power sources. The Orthodox claim is simply the biblical one: God works through sanctified persons and matter. Your own examples prove it. Moses’ staff, Elijah’s mantle, Elisha’s bones, Christ’s garments, Paul’s handkerchiefs.

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 Matter is only redeemed by God. His intentional acts of power are limited to His purposes and glory. When He used Moses to part the Red Sea, was Moses eternally able to part all waters? No, God chose to act. Do you believe that Lazarus is immortal because he was resurrected in

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 Your entire Protestant worldview keeps collapsing back into a functional gnosticism where matter is spiritually suspicious instead of redeemed and restored to its rightful order in the cosmos. Read On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 No, it’s the opposite. The Incarnation is precisely the revelation that matter can be united to divine grace without becoming an idol. Christ took on flesh. Water becomes baptism. Bread and wine become communion. Oil anoints. Shadows heal. Bones raise the dead.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 Your theology keeps conceding the sacramental worldview while denying its implications.

@smurphyftw @5Solas2 Exactly! No Orthodox thinks bones possess autonomous “magic power.” The point is that God works through matter because creation is not divorced from grace. That’s why Christ heals with mud, shadows heal in Acts, Paul’s garments heal the sick, and Elisha’s bones raise the dead.

@godloveseucca @5Solas2 Where did I appeal to Jay Dyer? I just commented on the fact that your KJV only muppet got steamrolled by him in a debate because he didn’t understand basic epistemology.

@ABW1707 @5Solas2 Gotta appeal to you guys’ boyfriend “Jay dyer” when people call ortho’s out for anything. Not surprised

@godloveseucca @SchrockNat79945 @5Solas2 Nobody is claiming that the church is a building. The church is a theanthropic organisation. It is united, visible, historical, and holds normative authority to bind the conscience of believers, something that your hundreds of protestant sects cannot lay claim to.

@godloveseucca @SchrockNat79945 @5Solas2 Really? Do Oneness Pentecostals interpret John 1:1 the same way? The Roman Catholics interpret the Trinitarian implications the same way that we do? How about the Jehovah’s Witnesses? We spam the same three messages because none of you can answer it.

@SchrockNat79945 @5Solas2 @grok Good chat man, let's do it again sometime! 😂

@SchrockNat79945 @5Solas2 @grok Perspective is crazy. For me, it was the typical Prot slop convo. Historical ignorance, pride and hubris, while reinventing Christianity 1500 years later and pretending the Church somehow vanished until modern Americans rediscovered the ‘true gospel’ with a study Bible.