Primitive Christian Worship: Or, The Evidence of Holy Scripture and the Church, Against the Invocation of Saints and Angels, and the Blessed Virgin MaryTyler, James Endell
Religion
Primitive Christian Worship: Or, The Evidence of Holy Scripture and the Church, Against the Invocation of Saints and Angels, and the Blessed Virgin Mary
Tyler, James Endell
Christian saints -- Cult; Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Devotion to; Worship -- History -- Early church, ca. 30-600
Is it possible to conceive that any Christian would thus ascribe the
same religious worship to a host of God's creatures, which he would
ascribe to God, as GOD? "We are accused," said Justin, "of being
atheists, of having no God. How can this be? We do not worship your
false gods, but we have our own most true God. We are not without a God.
We have the Father, and the Son, and the Good Angels, and the Holy
Spirit." If Justin meant that they honoured the good angels, but not as
GOD, that would be no answer to those who called the Christians
atheists. The charge was, that "they had no God." The answer is, "We
have a God;" and then Justin describes the God of Christians. Can the
army of angels be included in that description? If they are, then they
are made to share in the adoration, worship, homage, and reverence of
the one only God Most High; if they are not, then Justin does not answer
the objectors[35].
[Footnote 35: And surely if Justin had intended to represent the
holy angels as objects of religious worship, he would not so
violently have thrust the mention of them among the Persons of
the ever-blessed Trinity, assigning to them a place between the
second and third Persons of the eternal hypostatic union.] {109}
To evade this charge of impiety, some writers (among others, M. Maran,
the Benedictine editor of Justin,) have attempted to draw a distinction
between the two verbs in this passage, alleging that the lower degree of
reverence expressed by the latter applies to the angels; whilst the
former verb, implying the higher degree of worship, alone relates to the
Godhead. But this distinction rests on a false assumption; the two words
being used equally to convey the idea, of the highest religious
worship[36].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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