MMM. Well, then none should havce to repudiate ‘em. And, if you’re in a parish where the Prologue of Ochrid is read every week (or even read at home, every day) then such pronouncements on history get read once a month or more.

A liberal Christian blogger will make fun of those who say X just as surely as someone will, in fact, say X. Now, I’ll grant they may not be “official”, but I’ve got enough Orthodox pronouncements to cite on our own history.

My point is we can’t know the mind of God to make such pronouncements. If the Church gets to decide, then I’d be happy to hear Ptr Bartholomew announce “From today’s reading from Ochrid, because of Our sins, God allowed the Muslims to invade our city.” Or the feast of the “Protection of the Theotokos” or any of the numerous wars God or a given saint is said to have won for “us” or “allowed ‘us’ to loose” (Which is the same as saying God won Constantinople for the Muslims… another thing you won’t hear (unless your talking to Muslims).

We decide pretty much only based on our Politics.

I don’t think it’s a non-question: the individual speaker is pretty much all we’ve got.

The usual argument in the Roman Church, used when an historical person says something considered (by current lights) to be heterodox, is to say, “well, he was speaking as an individual not as a (priest/bishop/teacher, etc). I think that’s a real cop out: for the individual is all we have.

Are we then at the point to which politics has arrived? Must the Church clearly and explicitly repudiate and condemn each and every pronouncement by each and every blogger, pastor, priest, bishop, deacon, preacher, evangelist, etc., lest they be accused of somehow “participating” in their mistake? That would take a rather large staff of people combing through every newspaper and every blog, lest they miss a pronouncement by someone that is iffy and might need to be so condemned, so that the news media might not attack the Church for failure to immediately condemn and repudiate.

Now, if you wish to cite the medieval period, then I will agree. Almost every religious group in Europe and the Middle East participated in some type of condemnation of each and every other group! All those groups, with the exception of the jihadists and uberfromm among them, look back and shudder at those centuries.

My argument is (and was) that picking out an isolated preacher and then making him/her the straw man against which to rail is easy, but not very convincing. There are NO major Christian groups today issuing declarations of God’s judgement based on a natural event. You can find individuals doing such. And, no, I am not going to spend my time reading every blog and newspaper to find them so that I can condemn them.

My point was that liberals have been having “fun” doing just that. And they do it not from a sense of justice but from the desire to set up a straw man to beat against as a type of morality play. So, I would argue that this particular blog of yours is posing a non-question precisely because NO major Christian group is issuing those judgements.

The question is who gets to decide?

Theodocy postings go live tomorrow…

I got no clear hits on China, Iowa, from known leaders. I say known leader on purpose. I found several blogs from individuals who speculated, or even declared, judgment. But, I can find you individual blogs on almost any subject.

HOWEVER, I found multiple hits from liberal blogs accusing leading conservative preachers of having proclaimed judgment about Indonesia (or China or whatever). Of course, no names were named. I then went to snopes.com, the famed urban-legend-busting site. There they referenced several e-mails that were sent out, post Indonesia tsunami disaster, speaking of God’s judgment on Muslims. However, none of those e-mails came from the person to whom they were atributed.

In fact, I would argue that, at best, liberal blogs have taken a couple of pronouncements from a couple of tele-evangelists and blown that up into a firestorm of condemnations every time there is a disaster. In passing, I would not mind some links to the judgment stories of the past to which you are referring. It seems that “everyone” knows them, but I cannot seem to find them.