http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/the-pontificator-posts-again-and-its-worth-the-read/

The Pontificator Posts Again - And It's Worth the Read

Many of you know of my long friendship with Roman Catholic priest and blogger, Fr. Al Kimel, a.k.a. The Pontificator. I would not be writing today except through his generosity and encouragement. Earlier this year he ceased writing. But he posted an article today that I heartily commend. It makes me long for more such thoughtful and careful work from the heart on Pontifications. A quote:

I do not believe God to be the absolute predestinarian of Augustine, Calvin, Beza, and Bañez. I do not believe God to be a God who has eternally decreed, before prevision of irrevocable rejection of divine love and forgiveness, the eternal salvation of some and the eternal reprobation of the rest. I am convinced that for all of his greatness, St Augustine went tragically astray on this matter of predestination and that his theory has had pernicious repercussions on the spiritual lives of Western Christians. The theory of absolute predestination calls into question, at the most fundamental level, the identity and character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

Go here for the whole article.

http://pontifications.wordpress.com/2007/12/15/disbelieving-the-predestinarian-god/

Go here for the whole article.

 

This entry was posted on December 16, 2007 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Fathers, Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholic, The Journey of Faith, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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One Response to "The Pontificator Posts Again - And It's Worth the Read"

1. %2Fs.wordpress.com%2Fi%2Fmu.gif width=32> fatherstephen Says:
   December 16, 2007 at 8:47 pm

   I could not be in greater agreement with Fr. Al's article. What I particularly like about it is that he strips away all need for the obscurity of rational construction. He quotes Hans Urs Von Balthasar:

   Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the "work" of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it; to believe against all the evidence of experience ("credere contra fidem" like "sperare contra spem"), against every "rational" concept of God, which things of him in terms of impassibility or, at best, totally pure goodness, but not in terms of this inconceivable and senseless act of love.

   I find my recent post on "keeping it real" to be a far less sophisticated statement of the same thing.

   Fr. Al's article is Christianity at its heart and to the point. It is Orthodox and in its fullness.