[orthodoxbeacon.com] Religion of Peace

Coptic Christians Slaughtered in Egypt as World Looks Away

from orthodoxbeacon.com by The Editor

The Australian writes:

Twelve Christians were murdered in Egypt. Two hundred and thirty-two people wounded. The death toll will surely rise as victims succumb to their injuries. And that’s just in the past few days. In the same time period, more Christians were killed in Egypt at the hands of Muslims than people killed in Syria or in Libya as a result of protests, riots and resistance.

Two churches in Cairo were burned in recent days. Over the past few months church property has being gutted, vandalised and violated with graffiti. Churches have been blown up.

An entire community – the Christian community in the new Egypt – is under attack. And the world remains relatively silent. There has been no significant religious outcry, political redress or diplomatic pressure to stop the attacks. There has been almost no media coverage as Egypt’s Muslims systematically, over the past few months, set about massacring Egypt’s Christians.

Read the full article here.

Justification connected to Charity

lovely quotes from McGrath's Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification

pg. 31
Augustine has an all-embracing understanding of justification, which includes both the event of justification (brought about by operative grace) and the process of justification (brought about by cooperative grace). Augustine himself does not, in fact, see any need to distinguish between these two aspects of justification; the distinction dates from the sixteenth century.

farther down pg.31
Man's righteousness, effected in justification, is regarded by Augustine as inherent rather than imputed, to use the vocabulary of the sixteenth century. A concept of ‘imputed righteousness’, in the later Protestant sense of the term, is quite redundant within Augustine’s doctrine of justification, in that humans are made righteous in justification. The righteousness which man thus receives, although originating from God, is nevertheless located within man, and can be said to be his, part of hsi being and intrinsic to his person. An element which underlies this understanding of the nature of justifying righteousness is the Greek concept of deification, which makes its appearance in the later Augustinian soteriology. By charity, the Trinity itself comes to inhabit the soul of the justified sinner, although it is not clear whether Augustine can be said to envisage a ‘state of grace’ in the strict sense of the term – that is, a habit of grace, created within the human soul. It is certainly true that Augustine speaks of the real interior renewal of the sinner by the action of the Holy Spirit, which he later expressed in terms of participation in the divine substance itself. However, it seems most prudent to state that Augustine’s theological vocabulary was not sufficiently developed to allow us to speak of his teaching ‘created grace’ in the later sense of the term.

later on p. 32
For Augustine, justification includes both the beginnings of man’s righteousness before God and its subsequent perfection, the event and the process, so that what later became the Reformation concept of ‘sanctification’ is effectively subsumed under the aegis of justification. Although Augustine is occasionally represented, on the basis of isolated passages, as understanding justification to comprise merely the remission of sins, it is clear that he also understands it to include the ethical and spiritual renewal of the sinner through the internal operation of the Holy Spirit. Justification, according to Augustine, is fundamentally concerned with ‘being made righteous’.


Paulus apostolus

I Corinthios 13:1-3
si linguis hominum loquar et angelorum caritatem autem non habeam factus sum velut aes sonans aut cymbalum tinniens
et si habuero prophetiam et noverim mysteria omnia et omnem scientiam et habuero omnem fidem ita ut montes transferam caritatem autem non habuero nihil sum
et si distribuero in cibos pauperum omnes facultates meas et si tradidero corpus meum ut ardeam caritatem autem non habuero nihil mihi prodest

et

Galatas 5:5-6
nos enim spiritu ex fide spem iustitiae expectamus
nam in Christo Iesu neque circumcisio aliquid valet neque praeputium sed fides quae per caritatem operatur