Okay, that’s my wrap up on my distaste for Edward Feser and all lazy theologians who won’t take the time to do the work they should do regarding the Christian faith and what it teaches. Feser is just one of many who are profoundly dishonest with the way they discuss the Christian faith. I was in Protestant churches for twenty-five years and never once heard mention of the early church fathers from a pulpit. You know why? Because if my Anabaptist preacher/pastor had started quoting men like St. Ignatius or St. Polycarp defending the Lord’s Supper as being truly the Body and Blood of Christ, people would have left his church in droves! Pastor Hummel (one of many such Bible-thumpers I naively listened to and believed) would have had to answer some deeply embarrassing questions about why we were not doing as the first Christians did.

The Calvinists I listened to were no better. Calvinists love to quote Augusine when he speaks about man being a depraved piece of dung, worthy only of hell, but when Augustine speaks of the Eucharist being the very body and blood of Christ? Meaaaaa…..not so much. This is dishonest selective reading of text, which Ed Feser also engages in.

I imagine that some of you are saying to yourselves, “Damn Ed, you have been pretty abusive to this guy!” My feeling is that he has it coming to him. If you are going to thrust yourself in to the limelight as a profound intellect and a leader in Christian philsophy, then it is a must to engage honest debate and the willingness to accept facts rather than act like an intellectual boor to whom all knees should bow in subjection. I hope by now I have done a fairly good and accurate job of showing just how dishonest this man has been with the handling of both scripture and facts from those who are scholars. He doesn’t want to be corrected, he appears to wish the worst upon sinners rather than seeing God have mercy on them, even after death, and he will most likely die in this condition. Yes, I am being dreadfully harsh on him because I don’t see a shred of humility in the man.

Look, I could be wrong. Maybe I might even come to like the guy if I had dinner and some serious intellectual conversation with him. I don’t think so because A.) what I have posted is not a list of my ideas, but rather information I have gathered from men and women who’s intellectual briefcases I am not worthy to carry and B.) he strikes me as a know-it-all boor. When a Greek scholar such as Dr. Illaria Ramelli states that the Greek word “aionios” does not mean “eternal,” and I find through my study that not only did the Latin translators not understand Greek, but that their errors are extant in current translations of the Bible today such as the Douay -Rheims – well, what the hell am I supposed to do? Ignore those facts as Feser does? Go along with the Roman Church, the church which once taught per Augustine that unbaptized babies go into eternal suffering if they die? THAT church? Hah!

In one his rabid, attack-dog posts against David Bentley Hart, Feser says:  “What is most striking about all of this is not its heterodoxy, and not the desperation with which it tries to bully the reader into ignoring the overwhelming weight of Christian tradition, but its sheer narcissism. For Hart, at the end of the day it is not scripture, not the Fathers, not the councils, not the creeds, not Holy Tradition, that should determine what Christians believe.”

What a load of crap!  As this series has shown, it most certainly IS scripture. It is Feser who does not wish to admit that his beloved RC church has screwed the pooch when it comes to scripture interpretation. It is most certainly the church fathers, the fathers whom Feser completely ignores! Men who openly taught Apokatastasis and were never rebuked nor called heretics by any ecumenical council, either during their lifetimes or long after they were dead. This is a serious issue because if Apokatastasis is half the heresy that Feser makes it out to be in his deranged rants, the early fathers would have called a council to declare it heresy long before Justinian vented his spleen against the teaching and closed the four theological schools which were teaching it.

It has nothing to do with the councils because there is no council which has condemned Apokatastasis. If Feser was half as diligent in examining the history of the one and ONLY ONE council which is supposed to have condemned it, he would know that Constantinople II said nothing about in this regard, and the condemnations of the thug emperor, Justinian, have been discarded, even by Roman Catholic intelligentsia such as the Catholic Encyclopedia.

There is nothing in any creed which condemns Apokatastasis.  Nothing. Show it to me, Ed.  Get off your lazy, blowhard ass and do some work.  And as for appealing to Holy Tradition – my God, that is laughable!  Holy Tradition means that what we believe is what has been believed from the very beginning. Tradition has been called “the democracy of the dead.”  It is the input of those who came before us which keeps us on the theological straight and narrow.

Now tell me, Edward, where in Holy Tradition do you find the Filioque Clause to the Creed? Where do you find Indulgences in the early fathers? Where do you find Purgatory? Where do you find “dead bread” being used in the Eucharist? Where do you find withholding the Eucharist from infant children? Where do you find the Immaculate Conception? Where do you find any of these in the early fathers? Where, Ed?

I’ll tell you where – nowhere!!  Yet the one Holy Tradition which was taught for the first 500 years – Apokatastasis – which therefore qualifies as a Holy Tradition – Oh No!  YOU and your hellist buddies, bent in revenge against the wicked, do not like this, so this Holy Tradition, taught for the first 500 years in the united church without anyone screaming “heresy” in regard to it – oh, out the window with it!

As once was said in the halls of Congress:  “Sir, have you no shame at all?”

I don’t think he does.