DYFJ?
Do You Follow Jesus, or do you follow what everyone else is doing?
(more…)In 1054 AD the Eastern Orthodox Church left the Roman Catholic Church…or did it?
(more…)John, the last of the Apostles, died in 101 AD, the only one to have passed due to natural causes, this brings an end to the Apostolic Age and brings with it the turmoil that is the 2nd Century.
(more…)It would be interesting to see what Christianity, indeed our world, would be like had there never been a diaspora in the early church, but there was. In fact, there were two.
(more…)I want to lay out a few things before we start. (more…)
Birth, in the Eastern Church, is a Trinitarian event. Man provides the sperm, woman the egg, and God the Immortal Soul. From the time of conception all three are present in the woman’s womb. For this reason abortion is not permitted in the Eastern Church for it is not just a life that is being rejected, but the gift of the Immortal Soul from God.
If a life ends before Baptism can be performed the soul still goes through the process as Christians, they will just have a harder time of it without the benefit of Baptism and Confession. All must repent of unconfessed sins at their personal judgement. More on that later.
We are all sinners, it’s in our nature and nothing can be done to change it. God realized this and provided for us a way to reach Him regardless of what we have done…repentance. We show our repentance though Baptism and confession of our sins, either here or in the afterlife. Jesus’ purpose on earth was not to create Christianity, it was to teach us how to live, how to love God, and how to love and treat each other. It is by going against these teachings that we sin; it is by realizing that we have sinned, that we regret it wholeheartedly, and that we ask God to forgive us, that our sins are erradicated, now and forever.
At some point in time we will die, die to this world. Our lungs will cease to breath, our heart will cease to pump, our cells will cease their reproductive processes, eventually to decay into their base components, returning to the matter from which our parents created us…all but our eternal soul. Our soul cannot perish in this world for it is not of this world. It contains no matter, no atoms, no mesons, no quarks. It was created by God and implanted into our mortal bodies. It cannot die because it is the energy of life itself, not belonging to this universe, or to any universe. It was created outside of space and time, and it is to there that it must return.
It is that process of returning whence it originated that we will cover in the next installment.
As always, please feel free to ask questions.
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