Dear devout learners,
We are going to cover a lot of ground this week. We will then be ready to begin our work on Just Peace Apologetics. We will quickly look at prayer, creeds, God, and states of being so that we all are on the same page, or perhaps so that all know what page I am on. Should any of these topics inspire you to seek a deeper understanding I hope the books I post will help in your discovery. Here we go.
PRAYER
As Fr. Mark would say, “We pray because our Lord Jesus Christ prayed. We are prayerful because it changes us and because we seek to know God.” We use prayer for various purposes:
- To praise God, Adoration
} To the glory of God
- To thank God, Thanksgiving
- To ask of God, Petition
} For our individual needs
- To seek God’s forgiveness, Contrition
- To ask of God for others, Intercession
Our Lord gave us examples of each when he taught us to pray the “Lord’s Prayer” or the “Our Father.” He taught us this prayer for two reasons:
- To give us a set form, a perfect prayer, to pray.
- To teach us what to pray for.
The worship of God is two fold: Corporate and personal. Corporate prayer involves the rest of the Body of Christ. Personal worship includes study and prayer. Prayer can be our personal, direct, and conscious attempt to express our thoughts, hopes, feelings, needs, and concerns to our God. Though God knows our needs before we ask, it is our obligation to pray. We must show our obedience and intent to God, for we must ask to receive, knock to be let in.
OUR FATHER, THE LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
…
For thine is the kingdom,
And the power, and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.
[Saint Matthew 6:5-13 & Saint Luke 11:1-4]
“Jesus meant not only “pray in these words”, but “pray with this sequence of thought and desire”. God first, the Father, the heavenly Father, “hallowed be thy name”. His name is his character and glory, to be dwelt upon, honoured, loved, our hearts and minds to be soaked in it. And then we ask that his reign may come and his will be done. With all our wills first surrendered to his, we bring the affairs of the world to him in our requests.” - The Most Rev. A. Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury
“I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time - waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God - it changes me.” - C.S. Lewis
CREEDS
The Church Catholic recognizes three historic creeds: The Apostles Creed, the ancient creed made of belief statements; The Nicene (Nicene-Constantinople) Creed, the summary of our faith; The Athanasian Creed (Quicunque Vult), the great logical proof of the most Holy Trinity, One God.
ECCLESIA ANGLICANA
We have no doctrine of our own...
we only possess the Catholic doctrine
of the Catholic church enshrined
in the Catholic creeds,
and these creeds we hold
without addition or diminution.
We stand firm on that rock.
The Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher
Archbishop of Canterbury
GOD and ALL
In the early Church some had seen God the Son, some may have heard God the Father, and some may have seen God the Holy Spirit as a dove. We have insight into the character of God in the Holy Scriptures. Others have tried to define the undefinable, God, even further. These attributes, at least, give us a starting point when admiring and contemplating our God. Those scholastics may not be wrong, but they may be far from complete:
GOD IS:
Omnipotent - all powerful, limited only by covenant
Omnipresent - not bound by time and space
Omniscient - all knowing
Creator/Savior/Comforter - source of all that is
Immutable - communicating whenever and wherever
Perfect - complete, faultless, exact, entire
Trinity - the three persons of the Godhead
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit
Holy Scriptures gives us insights into the various states of being that are recognized by the Church. We live now as the Body of Christ, militant. We hope for the triumphant state of heaven. We rightly fear being one of the damned, cold and dark in our hearts for eternity. Here is a quick overview of the states of being:
STATES OF BEING
Triumphant - in Heaven, in the presence of God,
with the angels and saints
Purgatory - some believe there is a third state after death, a place or time of learning and purification,
[recognition, repentance, and release from sin,
like the thief on the cross, but not a necessary
belief for salvation]
Militant - of this world, in faith, striving, yearning, worshipping in obedience
Damned - in hell, in torment, the absence of God,
the absence of Love and Hope
Now, with this foundation we are ready, I think, to move on to begin our study of Just Peace Apologetics. Please join me in this journey.
In Christ’s love,
Fr. Robert Pax
BOOKS: One of the greatest influences in my life, on paper, is C.S. Lewis. Many continue to look to his apologetics to help defend their faith. I would guess that most came to Prof. Lewis through his fiction: The Chronicles of Narnia. I came to him by listening to tapes (tapes of him actually speaking) of his lectures on the four loves on a road trip with a friend. So I began with “The Four Loves.” “God in the Dock” was next, followed by “Mere Christianity.” I then explored his fiction. I suppose there is a danger of holding Lewis up too high, but I still get a thrill in finding a piece of his work that I haven’t read before.
QUOTES: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” – C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”
“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.” – C.S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain”
