“St. Michael”:
Please let me ask you a question here.
If you really believe the word “coincidence” has no possible meaning for a Theist–i.e. that there’s no sense in which anything can be called a “coincidence,” what meaning or purpose do you see in this?
brandplucked.webs.com/whoreofbabyloncatholic.htm
This appears to be a “King James only” web site, I’ve never visited it before, and I am in no way endorsing it (or the idea that the Roman Catholic Church is “the whore of Babylon.”)
But if you believe everything is directly willed by God for some specific purpose of it’s own (as you seem to be saying on this thread sometimes), wouldn’t that imply that God meant Luther, and Calvin, and Knox (and some early Franciscans, and the Seventh Day Advantists) to take Revelation 17:9 (“The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits”) to point to the institutional Church headquartered at Rome?
I believe St. Aquinas answered questions like this when he said “Not all things, however, that occur through divine providence are ordered so as to be signs of the future,” but how would you answer it?
If you believe that not everything foreseen and permitted by God is willed “per se,” it’s easy to see that all things that occur through divine providence (that God foresees and wills, either per se or per accidens) aren’t so ordered so as to be signs of the future, but if you believe there simply isn’t anything in all creation that could in any sense be considered a “coincedence” (in any sense of the word, as you seem to be arguing here), why would Luther, and Calvin, and Knox be given a pasage in Holy writ that clearly said the enemy of the Church would be centered in a city (like Rome) that was built on seven hills, at a time when the Catholic Church admits it was lagely currupt?
What divine purpose could Providence have in these circumstances, if they are not extraneous circumstances God didn’t really will of themselves (to send Luther, and Calvin, and the others any kind of message)?