LDS Against LDS claims about Christians & keeping the commandments: the example of Philoxenos of Mabbug

[dzheremi]

I apologize, you were talking Ephesus I and I was talking talking Ephesus II.

Oh, okay. Thank you. That was not immediately obvious in the other post. Maybe you meant to put Ephesus II but forgot, or maybe I misread you. Either way, sorry about the misunderstanding.

So there are 2 versions. One from your enemies, and one from your own people.

I wouldn't really call the Chalcedonians my "enemies" or the enemies of my communion. The days of killing and dispossessing each other over Chalcedon are long over, thanks be to God. But we do have different historical takes on events beginning even before Ephesus II, stemming from differences between Antiochian and Alexandrian theology and hermeneutics. It would be a bit much to go into detail on that, but it is important to understand if you are going to bring up events or people on which there is not cross-communal agreement (that's why I prefaced the OP by warning that I was going to be referring to an exclusively non-Chalcedonian saint, because Mor Philoxenos is not considered a saint by the Chalcedonians).

You are aware that everything to do with Ephesus 2 was condemned by rome as unjust and ungodly. Rome excommunicated everyone that was in leadership at Ephesus 2. I believe, even the emperor exiled Doiscorus and under contention elected another bishop that would follow his commands. (Another hint of who was the head of the church.)

Yeah. I don't really know a nice way to put this, but what Rome does or did is irrelevant. Rome is not the center of the ecclesiological universe just because it was an imperial capital. The Eastern Chalcedonians now known as the Eastern Orthodox would eventually come to the same conclusion, albeit over different matters. We just decided it first, after Leo of Rome started sending letters to Alexandria attempting to tell us to be more like Rome, starting in 445 AD (i.e., four years before Ephesus II, and six before Chalcedon, when no one had any complaints against HH St. Dioscorus). Eventually Leo struck Dioscorus from the diptych of the Roman Church, to which Dioscorus responded in kind. (So it was very unlike the earlier approach taken by HH St. Cyril and John of Antioch, sadly.)

So Ephesus 2 was a bust.

Eh...sort of, I guess? I mean, it's usually not reckoned as ecumenical even in the OO communion (NB: it is nowhere mentioned in our prayers in the Coptic Orthodox liturgy), but in terms of what it set out to do (to determine whether or not the faith of Eutyches justified his punishment or not), it did accomplish something. It is just a fact that Eutyches soon returned to his vomit and was as a result cast out, being anathematized by name in both OO and Chalcedonian councils (for we OO, in the Third Council of Ephesus in 475, presided over by the successor of Dioscorus, HH St. Timothy II, and 500-700 bishops; I believe the Chalcedonians did so officially at Constantinople II in 553, though they may have done so earlier in other statements that I am unaware of).

But that doesn't retroactively change what Ephesus II did any more than Rome's eventually 'going of the rails' (from the OO and EO viewpoints) somehow changes the content and effect of Chalcedon, Constantinople II, Trullo, or any other council that is considered uniquely Chalcedonian.

But to me an indicator that the church was going a wrong direction, fast.

Yeah, well, considering that you are doing all this in service of the person if Ibas, who is condemned across the board by everyone who is not a Nestorian, I don't really trust your 'indicators', Peter. I think they need some work before you can trust them, too.

Ibas is an eye witness to the folly of the church in 449.
1) he is accused of crimes
2) he is acquitted of those crimes by the bishop of Antioch, who should have had the final say.

A single bishop, no matter where he's from, does not have authority over a council. For someone who talks a lot about how horrible medieval Rome was, you sure do argue like a medieval Roman Catholic. Did you get this idea from the Dictatus Papae or something?

3) the accusers go to the emperor, over the head of Antioch.

And? Antioch is a city in the emperor's empire, so where else were they supposed to go? Nisibis? Gundishapur?

4) 3 bishops chosen by the emperor find Ibas not guilty.
5) the accusers then get a governor to petition the emperor
6) the governor is given power to investigate Ibas a 3rd time, by the emperor (not the bishop of Antioch, who is totally out of the loop by now, who should have had the final say as head of the church in his area).
7) the governor reports to the emperor
8) the emperor makes the final decision (not the bishop of Antioch) and replaces Ibas with a new bishop.
9) the council of Ephesus follows the emperor's orders and excommunicates Ibas and his case is fianlly adjudicated.

The emperor did not make the final decision to condemn Ibas. That was done by the Church. I know you want to paint the two as being the same, but they're not. The many times when individual Orthodox bishops in major sees like Alexandria were replaced by imperially-placed Arians who were never recognized as legitimate by the Church should be enough evidence of that.

I use the case of Ibas to illustrate who is the head of the church in 449.

I realize that this is what you are trying to do, but you are incorrect. You are starting from the incorrect premise that the emperor ran the Church and then proceeding to mold 'evidence' in favor of what you have already decided. That's just silly. Again, if the emperor ran the Church, why was there still such resistance to Arianism after Constantine's baptism by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia? In fact, why did the Arian parallel hierarchy persist up until the 9th century? Why did Visigothic Spain remain Arian until the 580s, long after that position had been condemned at Nicaea, and again at Constantinople, and again at Ephesus? (And is still condemned, whenever we recite the creed.)

Your presuppositions do not seem based in reality, but instead in some kind of strange innate desire born of Mormon pseudo-historiography to paint whatever the Church did before Joseph Smith's 'restoration' as inherently bad and evil, like some sort of cabal.

And to illustrate what apostasy looks like. 3 acquittals and relentless persecution until the persecutors get what they want. Where was the Holy Spirit in all of this? Is this how the Church of Jesus Christ operates, I don't think so, it reads like a keystone cops story.

No, Peter, that's not how the Church operates, because that is an incredibly cynical and self-interested take on history. It would be like me saying "Joseph Smith was a money-digging, glass-looking, bigamist pedophiliac...where was the Holy Spirit in anything he did?", as though impugning the character of the man is the same as proving his theology, ecclesiology, and all the other things he claimed to be 'restoring' to be ahistorical and wrong. They're not the same thing. What you're doing here is not recounting history. It's basically just character assassination by someone who does not even understand anything that he is bringing up.

Of course most of the sees agreed, when the emperor speaks you better listen or you will lose your throne.

Gee, Peter...I don't know what to say to this one...I mean, my communion has only existed separately from the Western churches for 1,568 years and counting, and is the largest Church in the Middle East and Africa...I guess you're right: when the emperor speaks, we have to listen!

Spoken like a true Melkite, in the original sense of the word. Get outta here with that.

Mor was trying to pull the people back to the original church. However, emperor Justin I, dethroned Mor's bishop and friend Severus, and exiled Mor and a short time after exile he was murdered. Just another story of hundreds, of who was the head of the church in 523 when Mor was murdered. And an eye witness of the apostasy and the musical thrones associated with the time period. It continued to go downhill all the way to Wittenberg, when Luther tried to stop it, like Mor in 523 in Mabbug, about a millennia before, and about 2100 miles from Wittenberg.

No, no, no...I am an Oriental Orthodox person and I will tell you now: the departure of Mor Philoxenos of Mabbug or any particular saint in no way justifies or is even connected to either Mormon or Protestant ecclesiology or theology. Those who make such connections make them in their own heads only, as you will not find any such thing in the annals of any Oriental Orthodox church, nor the communion as a whole. When the Protestants wanted to connect with Eastern Christianity, they tried to do so by writing the then-Patriarch of Constantinople, not by digging into 5th-6th century Syriac Orthodox Christianity.

Mor and Luther were engaged in the same struggle against the apostasy.

What? No they weren't. This is lunacy. There is no indication in any of Philoxenos' writings that he thought the Church was in an 'apostasy', and he bared no relation to the Romans, unlike Luther who had been a friar prior to his excommunication. You are trying to make a connection that simply is not there.

As I remember, the reason for the thread was to point out that Mor was preaching to the people to keep the commandments, so there was no apostasy and no need for a restoration.

The reason for this thread is to show the utter bankruptcy of Mormon apologetics as concerns Christians and historical churches when it comes to things that you guys claim that we don't do, or lost the ability to do, or the authority to do, or the knowledge of, etc. If that were the case, you would not find the kinds of things you find over and over across all of Christian history. The person of Mor Philoxenos or his end are not relevant.

But what you failed to inform us of, is that Justin I, exiled and eventually murdered him for his work, which he obviously thought went against his beliefs.

I didn't inform the thread of anything like that because it's not relevant to the point I am making, and I don't want a thread that already prominently features a confessionally controversial saint to degenerate into an argument between Chalcedonians and me about those kinds of details. This isn't my first day on the internet, Peter.

As it turns out, Mor was one more a perfect example of the apostasy and the very need for a restoration

What absolute lies and rubbish! Why do you insist on 'Mormonizing' figures of the past from long before the invention of Mormonism (before it was St. Justin Martyr, then it was Ibas, now it is apparently Mor Philoxenos) when you cannot actually deal with the content of a thread? It's really foolish. No one who know any of these figures is going to take it even the slightest bit seriously, and it makes you look like a very confused man.

but only in a time and place where there were not emperor's and kings, and popes and the like that could squash a start up rival, even if that rival was invested with authority from Jesus Christ to restore his church again to the earth.

This is more begging the question (assuming the correctness of your premise in order to construct an argument for it, rather than constructing an argument that proves your premise). No one but a restorationist would believe that Christ gave authority to 'restore' His Church to anyone, because actual Christians don't believe in the Mormon (or other restorationist sects') idea of a 'great apostasy' that would necessitate that kind of thing to begin with.

They killed Mor, they also killed JS, but the church had roots by then and could withstand the evil ones. It's all true.

Nothing that you've written is true, beyond basic facts like "there was a council", and "this person or that person was condemned at it".

 

[Peter1000]

Oh, okay. Thank you. That was not immediately obvious in the other post. Maybe you meant to put Ephesus II but forgot, or maybe I misread you. Either way, sorry about the misunderstanding.



I wouldn't really call the Chalcedonians my "enemies" or the enemies of my communion. The days of killing and dispossessing each other over Chalcedon are long over, thanks be to God. But we do have different historical takes on events beginning even before Ephesus II, stemming from differences between Antiochian and Alexandrian theology and hermeneutics. It would be a bit much to go into detail on that, but it is important to understand if you are going to bring up events or people on which there is not cross-communal agreement (that's why I prefaced the OP by warning that I was going to be referring to an exclusively non-Chalcedonian saint, because Mor Philoxenos is not considered a saint by the Chalcedonians).



Yeah. I don't really know a nice way to put this, but what Rome does or did is irrelevant. Rome is not the center of the ecclesiological universe just because it was an imperial capital. The Eastern Chalcedonians now known as the Eastern Orthodox would eventually come to the same conclusion, albeit over different matters. We just decided it first, after Leo of Rome started sending letters to Alexandria attempting to tell us to be more like Rome, starting in 445 AD (i.e., four years before Ephesus II, and six before Chalcedon, when no one had any complaints against HH St. Dioscorus). Eventually Leo struck Dioscorus from the diptych of the Roman Church, to which Dioscorus responded in kind. (So it was very unlike the earlier approach taken by HH St. Cyril and John of Antioch, sadly.)



Eh...sort of, I guess? I mean, it's usually not reckoned as ecumenical even in the OO communion (NB: it is nowhere mentioned in our prayers in the Coptic Orthodox liturgy), but in terms of what it set out to do (to determine whether or not the faith of Eutyches justified his punishment or not), it did accomplish something. It is just a fact that Eutyches soon returned to his vomit and was as a result cast out, being anathematized by name in both OO and Chalcedonian councils (for we OO, in the Third Council of Ephesus in 475, presided over by the successor of Dioscorus, HH St. Timothy II, and 500-700 bishops; I believe the Chalcedonians did so officially at Constantinople II in 553, though they may have done so earlier in other statements that I am unaware of).

But that doesn't retroactively change what Ephesus II did any more than Rome's eventually 'going of the rails' (from the OO and EO viewpoints) somehow changes the content and effect of Chalcedon, Constantinople II, Trullo, or any other council that is considered uniquely Chalcedonian.



Yeah, well, considering that you are doing all this in service of the person if Ibas, who is condemned across the board by everyone who is not a Nestorian, I don't really trust your 'indicators', Peter. I think they need some work before you can trust them, too.



A single bishop, no matter where he's from, does not have authority over a council. For someone who talks a lot about how horrible medieval Rome was, you sure do argue like a medieval Roman Catholic. Did you get this idea from the Dictatus Papae or something?



And? Antioch is a city in the emperor's empire, so where else were they supposed to go? Nisibis? Gundishapur?



The emperor did not make the final decision to condemn Ibas. That was done by the Church. I know you want to paint the two as being the same, but they're not. The many times when individual Orthodox bishops in major sees like Alexandria were replaced by imperially-placed Arians who were never recognized as legitimate by the Church should be enough evidence of that.



I realize that this is what you are trying to do, but you are incorrect. You are starting from the incorrect premise that the emperor ran the Church and then proceeding to mold 'evidence' in favor of what you have already decided. That's just silly. Again, if the emperor ran the Church, why was there still such resistance to Arianism after Constantine's baptism by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia? In fact, why did the Arian parallel hierarchy persist up until the 9th century? Why did Visigothic Spain remain Arian until the 580s, long after that position had been condemned at Nicaea, and again at Constantinople, and again at Ephesus? (And is still condemned, whenever we recite the creed.)

Your presuppositions do not seem based in reality, but instead in some kind of strange innate desire born of Mormon pseudo-historiography to paint whatever the Church did before Joseph Smith's 'restoration' as inherently bad and evil, like some sort of cabal.



No, Peter, that's not how the Church operates, because that is an incredibly cynical and self-interested take on history. It would be like me saying "Joseph Smith was a money-digging, glass-looking, bigamist pedophiliac...where was the Holy Spirit in anything he did?", as though impugning the character of the man is the same as proving his theology, ecclesiology, and all the other things he claimed to be 'restoring' to be ahistorical and wrong. They're not the same thing. What you're doing here is not recounting history. It's basically just character assassination by someone who does not even understand anything that he is bringing up.



Gee, Peter...I don't know what to say to this one...I mean, my communion has only existed separately from the Western churches for 1,568 years and counting, and is the largest Church in the Middle East and Africa...I guess you're right: when the emperor speaks, we have to listen!

Spoken like a true Melkite, in the original sense of the word. Get outta here with that.



No, no, no...I am an Oriental Orthodox person and I will tell you now: the departure of Mor Philoxenos of Mabbug or any particular saint in no way justifies or is even connected to either Mormon or Protestant ecclesiology or theology. Those who make such connections make them in their own heads only, as you will not find any such thing in the annals of any Oriental Orthodox church, nor the communion as a whole. When the Protestants wanted to connect with Eastern Christianity, they tried to do so by writing the then-Patriarch of Constantinople, not by digging into 5th-6th century Syriac Orthodox Christianity.



What? No they weren't. This is lunacy. There is no indication in any of Philoxenos' writings that he thought the Church was in an 'apostasy', and he bared no relation to the Romans, unlike Luther who had been a friar prior to his excommunication. You are trying to make a connection that simply is not there.



The reason for this thread is to show the utter bankruptcy of Mormon apologetics as concerns Christians and historical churches when it comes to things that you guys claim that we don't do, or lost the ability to do, or the authority to do, or the knowledge of, etc. If that were the case, you would not find the kinds of things you find over and over across all of Christian history. The person of Mor Philoxenos or his end are not relevant.



I didn't inform the thread of anything like that because it's not relevant to the point I am making, and I don't want a thread that already prominently features a confessionally controversial saint to degenerate into an argument between Chalcedonians and me about those kinds of details. This isn't my first day on the internet, Peter.



What absolute lies and rubbish! Why do you insist on 'Mormonizing' figures of the past from long before the invention of Mormonism (before it was St. Justin Martyr, then it was Ibas, now it is apparently Mor Philoxenos) when you cannot actually deal with the content of a thread? It's really foolish. No one who know any of these figures is going to take it even the slightest bit seriously, and it makes you look like a very confused man.



This is more begging the question (assuming the correctness of your premise in order to construct an argument for it, rather than constructing an argument that proves your premise). No one but a restorationist would believe that Christ gave authority to 'restore' His Church to anyone, because actual Christians don't believe in the Mormon (or other restorationist sects') idea of a 'great apostasy' that would necessitate that kind of thing to begin with.



Nothing that you've written is true, beyond basic facts like "there was a council", and "this person or that person was condemned at it".

If you think I don't tell the truth, read this:
Philoxenus of Mabbug - Wikipedia

This is the most important part about Mor:

With the support of Emperor Anastasius, the Miaphysites ousted Flavian in 512 and replaced him with their partisan Severus. Of Philoxenus's part in the struggle we possess not too trustworthy accounts by hostile writers, such as Theophanes the Confessor and Theodorus Lector. We know that in 498 he was staying at Edessa; in or about 507, according to Theophanes, he was summoned by the emperor to Constantinople; and he finally presided at a synod at Sidon which was the means of procuring the replacement of Flavian by Severus. But the triumph was short-lived. Justin I, who succeeded Anastasius in 518 and adhered to the Chalcedonian creed, exiled Severus and Philoxenus in 519. Philoxenus was banished to Philippopolis in Thrace, and afterwards to Gangra in Paphlagonia, where he was murdered in 523.[3]

Wikipedia sure could be wrong, so tell me if this is not true.

 

[Ignatius the Kiwi]

Hey Peter are Mormons morally superior to every Christian over the last 1900 years?

 

[Peter1000]

Hey Peter are Mormons morally superior to every Christian over the last 1900 years?

The members that go to the temple have gone there to commit to Jesus Christ that they will live a life that is above the normal Christian life. We make covenants with Jesus Christ that we will do certain acts that assure this way of life is an ongoing commitment.

Their lives are generally very moral. Marriages, where the husband and wife commit to be faithful, not only to the end of their life, but for all time and all eternity. That is why the divorce rate among temple recommend holders is much lower than the rest of the population. Yes, lower than members that do not hole a current recommend.

We covenant not to commit adultery, we covenant to give to Jesus liberally to build up his church throughout the world. We covenant to follow him, no matter what. We covenant to live the way he has commanded us to live and to do his will.

So for these members it is like they are priests in a parish. We usually look at priests as working closely with the Lord daily and being of a higher moral character.

So you use the word "superior", and it would not be an appropriate word, but we that are recommend holders do try very hard to live a moral life. I suspect you try to also.