Augustine’s Confessions
Click here to get your free Confessions.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/
I think this is a very good website that applies to the class. This website documents letters, speeches, and books from the earliest Christians, the “church fathers”. The more we know about our church fathers, the better we will understand our religion and the events that took place around the time period of the church fathers. I believe that the people who taught closest to the time of Christ were more accurate in their teachings. God has preserved his Word. Therefore, we still have the most important information correct, but the further we get away from the time of Christ, the less accurately we interpret God’s Word. There is a lot we can learn from our church fathers. They have already fought many of the battles we face today such as disagreement about the nature of Christ in the Arian controversy. I am convinced that they understood the Bible more than we do today because they were taught by direct followers of Christ. This is why I have chosen this resource to share as a deeper learning for the materials we have covered in class.
LET ME START OFF EXPLAINING WHY i HAVE CHOSEN THIS TITLE:
How many times I bursted into tears. A week ago it seemed little too detail and so far to the Golden Shore but this morning as I finally reached to the last chapter of this great book I just wished there were more pages as if I could delay the death of Adoniram and hear more great stories of him. O Father, I feel so shameful and guilty for the emotions exclaimed through my mouth many times this year; loneliness. And now I know that this book is so expedient for my pilgrimage of Christian walk.
+ When Nancy, his first wife, died he wrote his mother and sister:
“I still live alone, and board with some one of the families that compose the mission. After the Wades left, I boarded with the Bettets. After Bettets left for Rangoon, I boarded with the Cutters. After the Cutters left…I have no family or living creature about me that I can call my own, except one dog, Fidelia,…but she is now growing old, and will die before long; and I am sure I shall shed more than one tear when poor Fidee goes.
(about loneliness, page 411)
++ When Sarah, his wife, was dying, Adoniram convers with her:
“My love, I wish to ask pardon for every unkind word or deed of which I have ever been guilty. I feel that I have, in many instances, failed of treating you with that kindness and affection which you ever deserved.”
“Oh,” she said, “you will kill me if you talk so…I…should ask pardon of you…I only want to get well that I may have an opportunity of making some return for all your kindness, and of showing you how much I love you.”
“Do you still love the Saviour?”
“O, yes, I ever loved the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Do you still love me?”
“Of course.”
“Then give me one more kiss.”
then she died.
(about love, page 439)
+++ Adoniram sent emily a letter to comfort her in criticism:
“There is nothing that ought to disturb one of pure and high purpose. Before God we are indeed full of sin; but we may still feel that the path we are treading is one which the common people have neither capacity to investigate, nor right to judge.”
(hope to encourage any great Christian, dedication to Dr.Patterson, page 459)
AND THAT’S WHY…I AM UNALTERABLY CONVINCED THAT WE ALL NEED THIS SPIRIT; passion, dedication, love, sacrifice, courage, etc IN OUR CHRISTIAN WALK.
Go to the “Golden Shore” now
We are soon going to be discussing the Gnostics so I thought you might want to read this short introduction:
The Heresy that Wouldn’t Die
Though Gnostic sects faded in the early church, Gnostic ideas have had a long shelf life.
by Philip Jenkins
This world is not my home. As it stands, that statement reflects the views of a great many orthodox Christians, but a Gnostic would take it much further. From a Gnostic perspective, the material world is not just fallen but an utterly flawed creation, beyond redemption. God—or at least, the good, true God—certainly does not work in history. Escape is only available to the small minority who know, who recognize the need for liberation, which lies within. Wisdom, Sophia, is for the spiritual, the elite, and distinguishes them from the gullible herd of humans mired in the material, the victims of cosmic deception. They will remain asleep, while the true Gnostic is awakened.
Gnosticism has never gone away, however much some modern scholars lament the suppression of its hidden gospels in the late Roman Empire. The main themes survived, for instance, in the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, which explains how the world was created through the fracturing of the vessels into which the divine goodness was poured. In addition to seeking their own mystic ascent to God, believers also pledge themselves to achieving tikkun olam, the restoration of the broken world.
Within Christendom too, the fact that Christian states officially suppressed heresy just drove these ideas beyond the frontiers, into regions like Mesopotamia and Armenia. Gnostic and dualist ideas thrived across large parts of Asia in movements like the Paulicians and the Manichaeans, who taught the children of light how to liberate themselves from the evil god of this world.
Occasionally, these ideas were reimported into Europe, most famously in the Cathar or Albigensian movement, which was suppressed by a near-genocidal crusade in 13th-century France. The Cathars followed the old Gnostic ideas faithfully, offering full salvation to the “perfect” who absolutely renounced the world. These old-new movements relied chiefly on the Christian gospels, interpreting the parables in their own distinctive way. Like the early Gnostics, though, they also wrote their own scriptures, such as the Book of John the Evangelist. (”Then did the Contriver of Evil devise in his mind to make Paradise, and he brought the man and woman into it.”)
Living in a Christian-ruled society, later Gnostics defined themselves against the church and its doctrines, which provided a foil for the truly spiritual. The Cathars rejected the Roman Catholic Church as, literally, the synagogue of Satan. Catholics followed the deluded God who had created the abomination of the world in which we live and whose bloody misdeeds are chronicled in the Old Testament. Ordinary Catholic believers were the sheep, in the sense of being docile, ignorant, and uncomprehending. (Click here to read more…)
