What Does Cf Mean In Quotes

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Ephesians 4, 14). Having a clear Faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching', looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an 'Adult' means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth.

[E]volution is not a cause, but the description of a process … Can we in any way explain the origin of species? Are we to suppose that each species, or what we regard as a species, originated in the fiat of an almighty power? Or are we to suppose that we are to go indefinitely backwards, and affirm that a chain of secondary causation is to be continued indefinitely backwards? … The treatment of evolution as a cause, capable of leading us on indefinitely, tends to shut out the idea of a First Cause; its treatment as a possible mode of sequence, leading us a step or two onwards, still leaves the mind directed towards a First Cause, though ‘Clouds and darkness are round about Him.’ [cf. Psalm 97] … Remember, Evolution does not mean a cause.

The simplest type of computational loop occurs when the system, at some stage, arrives back in exactly the same state as it had been in on a previous occasion. With no additional input it would then simply repeat the same computation endlessly. It would not be hard to devise a system that, in principle (though perhaps very inefficiently), would guarantee to get out of loops of this kind whenever they occur (by, say, keeping a list of all the states that it had been in previously, and checking at each stage to see whether that state has occurred before). However, there are many more sophisticated types of 'looping' that are possible. basically, the loop problem is the one that the whole discussion of Chapter 2 (particularly 2.1-2.6) was all about; for a computation that loops is simply one that does not stop. An assertion that some computation actually loops is precisely what we mean by a Pi-1 sentence (cf. 2.10, response to Q10). Now, as part of the discussion of 2.5, we saw that there is no entirely algorithmic way of deciding whether a computation will fail to stop-i.e. whether it will loop. Moreover, we conclude from the discussion above that the procedures that are available to human mathematicians for ascertaining that certain computations do loop-i.e. for ascertaining the truth of Pi1-sentences-lie outside algorithmic action. Thus we conclude that indeed some kind of 'non-computational intelligence' is needed if we wish to incorporate all humanly possible ways of ascertaining for certain that some computation is indeed looping. It might have been thought that loops could be avoided by having some mechanism that gauges how long a computation has been going on for, and it 'jumps out' if it judges that the computation has indeed been at it for too long and it has no chance of stopping. But this will not do, if we assume that the mechanism whereby it makes such decisions is something computational, for then there must be the cases where the mechanism will fail, either by erroneously coming to the conclusion that some computation is looping when indeed it is not, or else by not coming to any conclusion at all (so that the entire mechanism itself is looping). One way of understanding this comes from the fact that the entire system is something computational, so it will be subject to the loop problem itself, and one cannot be sure that the system as a whole, if it does not come to erroneous conclusions, will not itself loop.

There is no physical description of Christ in the Gospels, and so we are unable to know whether he was physically attractive or not. Of course, the specifications for what constitutes physical beauty are culturally conditioned and so change from place to place and from time to time. Christ's beauty then does not stem from physical attractiveness. It's rather the 'harsh' beauty of a God Who has given Himself so completely in love that it takes Him to the most ignominous death, on the Cross. Bruno Forte writes: 'Christ, the crucified God, is the place where beauty happens: in His self-emptying, eternity is present in time, the All Who is God is present in the fragment of Christ's human form (cf. Phil 2:6ff.). It is the cross that reveals the beauty that saves'. Christ is beautiful because He is Love incarnate, and, in a world disfigured by sin, that love is necessarily manifest in His suffering for others. This means that in our broken, marred condition, the shape of deepest beauty is cruciform.

He is, for instance, the only evangelist who has John the Baptist spell out in practical terms what it means to “bear fruits that befit repentance” (3:8), and he does this in terms of economic relations (3:10-14). The term ptochos (“poor”) occurs ten times in Luke, compared to five times each in Mark and Matthew.4 Not only the word ptochos, but also other terms referring to want and need abound in Luke. The same is true of terms referring to wealth, such as plousios (“rich”) and hyparchonta (“possessions”) (cf Bergquist 1986:4f). “If we did not have Luke,” comments Schottroff and Stegemann (1986:67), “we would probably have lost an important, if not the most important, part of the earliest Christian tradition and its intense preoccupation with the figure and message of Jesus as the hope of the poor.” Mazamisa (1987:99) summarizes, [Luke's] concern is with the social issues he writes about: with the demons and evil forces in first century society which deprived women, men and children of dignity and selfhood, of sight and voice and bread, and sought to control their lives for private gain; with the people's own selfishness and servility; and with the promises and possibilities of the poor and the outcasts.

The church has an eschatological horizon and is, as proleptic manifestation of God's reign, the beachhead of the new creation, the vanguard of God's new world, and the sign of the dawning new age in the midst of the old (cf Beker 1980:313; 1984:41). At the same time it is precisely as these small and weak Pauline communities gather in worship to celebrate the victory already won and to pray for the coming of their Lord (“Marana tha !”), that they become aware of the terrible contradiction between what they believe on the one hand and what they empirically see and experience on the other, and also of the tension in which they live, the tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” “Christ the first fruits” has already risen from the dead (1 Cor 15:23) and the believers have been given the Spirit as “guarantee” of what is to come (2 Cor 1:22; 5:5), but there does not seem to be much apart from these “first fruits” and “pledge.” Like Abraham, they believe in hope against hope (Rom 4:18) and accept in faith the Spirit's witness that they are children and heirs of God and therefore fellow heirs with Christ—provided, says Paul, “we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom 8:17). God will triumph, notwithstanding our weakness and suffering, but also in the midst of and because of and through our weakness and suffering (cf Beker 1980:364f). Faith is able to bear the tension between the confession of God's ultimate triumph, and the empirical reality of this world, for it knows that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Rom 8:37) and that “in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (8:28). Nowhere has Paul portrayed this unbearable (and precisely for this reason bearable!) tension more profoundly than in 2 Corinthians 4:7-10: But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. Our Christian life in this world thus involves an inescapable tension, oscillating between joy and agony. Whereas, on the one hand, suffering and weakness become all the more intolerable and our agonizing, because of the terrifying “not yet,” intensifies, we can, on the other hand, already “rejoice in our sufferings” (Rom 5:2). This means that our life in this world must be cruciform; Paul bears on his body “the marks of Jesus” (Gal 6:17; cf Col 1:24), he carries “in the body the death of Jesus,” and while he lives he is “always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor 4:10f) (cf also Beker 1980:145f, 366f; 1984:120).

This does not necessarily mean that every directive found in the Old Testament still has binding authority on those in the new covenant. Jesus, for example, insists that divorce and remarriage—a practice explicitly sanctioned in the law of Moses—must be set aside (cf. Mark 10:2-9; Matthew 19:3-12). Why was it permitted in the Old Testament? Jesus explains, “For your hardness of hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (cf. Matthew 19:8). In other words, the law permitted a practice that was not originally part of God’s plan because of Israel’s sinfulness.

His meaning becomes clear if we recall the story recounted by all three Synoptic evangelists, in which children were brought to Jesus “that he might touch them”. Despite the resistance of the disciples, who wanted to protect him from this imposition, Jesus calls the children to himself, lays his hands on them, and blesses them. He explains this gesture with the words: “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mk 10:13-16). The children serve Jesus as an example of the littleness before God that is necessary in order to pass through the “eye of a needle”, the image that he used immediately afterward in the story of the rich young man (Mk 10:17-27). In the previous chapter we find the scene where Jesus responds to the disciples’ dispute over rank by placing a child in their midst, taking it into his arms and saying: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Mk 9:33-37). Jesus identifies himself with the child—he himself has become small. As Son he does nothing of himself, but he acts wholly from the Father and for the Father. The passage that follows a few verses later can also be understood on this basis. Here Jesus speaks no longer of children, but of “little ones”, and the term “little ones” designates believers, the company of the disciples of Jesus Christ (cf. Mk 9:42). In the faith they have found this true littleness that leads mankind into its truth. This brings us back to the children’s Hosanna: in the light of Psalm 8, the praise of these children appears as an anticipation of the great outpouring of praise that his “little ones” will sing to him far beyond the present hour. The early Church, then, was right to read this scene as an anticipation of what she does in her liturgy. Even in the earliest post-Easter liturgical text that we possess—the Didachē (ca. 100)—before the distribution of the holy gifts the Hosanna appears, together with the Maranatha: “Let his grace draw near, and let this present world pass away. Hosanna to the God of David. Whoever is holy, let him approach; whoever is not, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen” (10, 6). The Benedictus also entered the liturgy at a very early stage. For the infant Church, “Palm Sunday” was not a thing of the past. Just as the Lord entered the Holy City that day on a donkey, so too the Church saw him coming again and again in the humble form of bread and wine.

Purgatory as Process Nothing unclean shall enter it. — Revelation 21:27 “In following the Gospel exhortation to be perfect like the heavenly Father (cf. Mt 5:48) during our earthly life, we are called to grow in love, to be sound and flawless before God the Father ‘at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’ (1 Thess 3:12f.). Moreover we are invited to ‘cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit’ (2 Cor 7:1; cf. 1 Jn 3:3), because the encounter with God requires absolute purity. “Every trace of attachment to evil must be eliminated, every imperfection of the soul corrected. Purification must be complete, and indeed this is precisely what it means on the Church’s teaching on purgatory. The term does not indicate a place, but a condition of existence” — St. John Paul II (General Audience, August 4, 1999).