Fr. Stephen Freeman
(no relation to Dr. Gordon Freeman.)
Fr. Stephan Freeman presents a wonderful apologetic for the veneration of Mary, and of the Orthodox view of individualism vs. community; of original sin vs. ancestral sin.
The Orthodox Church
There are also some Christians whose mature sexuality does not demonstrate any heterosexual drive towards marriage. When the Orthodox Church affirms its ancient and unbroken teaching that all God-blessed sexual relationships should take place within heterosexual marriage, considering all other forms of sexual liaison as canonically irregular, and as lapses from the standard of God-blessed creative communion, such men and women feel bereft by this teaching, and are often dismayed that their deepest sexual affinities find no resonance within it. In ancient times almost all the ethical reflection that the church conducted on the subject of homosexuality was based on the premise that such men and women freely elected their sexual preference, and grounded, or established, themselves within it as life developed, by force of habituation. That view no longer commands the universal agreement of scholars as it once did when the church drew up its canonical discipline and advice on the subject. Scientific studies now suggest that as many as one in ten human beings may find themselves in this life condition. Christians among them have often grown up from early school years ridiculed, isolated, persecuted for their difference, because of deep-seated instincts they have not chosen and are often unable to comprehend. The Orthodox Church is drawn, in the imitation of the Christ, to offer consolation and grace to all the children of God on their pilgrimage to the Kingdom, and finds homophobia and all forms of prejudice, verbal and otherwise, to run counter to the charity and purposes of the Lord.
Such Christians may not feel called to monasticism or to marriage, and yet do not wish to face the world alone. Although they can often be tempted to desolation, and feelings of hopelessness, they are the children of a merciful God who will not abandon them. Their affective development and their path towards security of affection within the world and to stable relationships with supportive friends is a matter of great care and concern to the Lord, and ought to be also to the wider church community. The Orthodox Church believes that it is especially appropriate for them to have the regular help and advice, the consolation and encouragement, of a spiritual father or mother, to who they can open their heart, and here in return words of grace. The deepening of friendship, affection, and love between Christ’s saints, and its transcendent unfolding into bonds of a depth that surpass what the world can imagine, is a gift to all believers. Such a mystery of love is not a prerogative of the married only, for: ‘When Christ dwells in our hearts we are rooted and grounded in love.’ [Eph 3:17]
The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture by John Anthony McGuckin
 Martin Luther |
 John Calvin |
 Ulrich Zwingli |
From Aleteia.org: A Protestant Defense of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity
From Catholic Apologetics: The Protestant Reformers on the Virgin Mary
Becoming Human
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve been doing some writing on the subject of Christian Anthropology, but after reading John Behr’s slim volume, I don’t know that I’m up to the task. I certainly can do no better than John Behr.
“The glory of God is a living human being.” This first quote alone, from St Irenaeus of Lyon, contains so much theology that one could spend a lifetime studying it. That simple sentence encompases everything we know and everything we cannot know about ourselves, our relationship with humanity, and the reciprocity between us and God.
But wait, there’s more!
Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith by Rico Vitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a fascinating book. Each of the philosophers provides some rationale for being Orthodox, finding in Orthodoxy a way to resolve — or at least come to grips with — the antimonies that are all around us. While this is no formal apologetic for Orthodoxy, yet it is interesting to find Western intellectuals coming to terms with the limitations of materialism, rationalism, and the academic method. One common theme is that the Western model of philosophy is purely intellectual, whereas for the ancient philosophers it was about discovering the right way to live, and therefore a way of life. Another theme is that the western method of doing theology is really philosophizing about theology, as opposed to theology as a lived out faith.
The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong by Thom Stark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Faith can be a fragile thing. It is possible to lose your faith when confronted by facts that don’t fit into your mental model. With that in mind, I cannot recommend this book to my Protestant friends, particularly those who are inextricably wedded to a literalistic interpretation of the bible. This book has the potential to change your perception of scripture and, with nothing to replace it, destroy your faith.
The Bible is not what we are so often told it is, particularly when we claim to be biblical literalists and interpret the text solely according to the historical-grammatical method. The fact is that no one is a biblical literalist, as the author aptly demonstrates. What are we to make of the evidence that our scriptures contain multiple points of view about who God is? About the existence of other gods? And even (God forbid) child sacrifice? The fact that we explain these away instead of taking them at face value is evidence that we are spiritualizing the scriptures, reading into them our point(s) of view.
If we come face to face with the obvious differences of opinion within scripture regarding fundamental things, what are we to do? For many, having no explanation and unable to integrate what they know into their religious perspective, they lose their faith. I don’t think that is what the author is trying to do, yet the author exposing these issues without providing a completely satisfactory solution.
Most of what Thom Stark describes is known to the Christian world — just not the Protestant world, and in particular the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. For most of the world’s Christians, the Bible is Sacred Scripture because the Church says it is. The Bible was written within the Church, declared to be scripture by that same Church, and interpreted within and by that Church on the basis of a living Holy Tradition (also known as the general consensus of the Church Fathers).
When Peter wrote that Paul’s letters were scripture, which ones? Paul wrote at least four letters to the Corinthians; we have only the second and the fourth. Again, in Ephesians 4:15,16 Paul tells the Ephesians to read in church the epistle he wrote to the Laodiceans. The missing Pauline epistles were determined by the Church not to be scripture, while others became part of the New Testament.
Thom Stark contrasts the literalist, historical-grammical hermeneutic with three other hermeneutical methods of dealing with problem texts, each of which come up wanting. These are the allegorical, the canonical, and the subversive readings.
Stark recognizes that those employing the allegorical method recognize the problematic nature of some texts (particularly the genocidal narratives of the conquest of Canaan), yet argues that when this reading becomes the traditional meaning, it prevents people from confronting the problem texts directly, and dooms us to repeat the conquest narratives (as in the Crusades, the Colonial era, and Manifest Destiny) instead of learning their lessons.
The Canonical Method recognizes that the scripture was created within, by, and for the community of faith. Stark argues that the determination of what is and is not scripture was not created by the faith community, but by the elites within that community. The argument seems to be that because the process was not democratic, it may be that the elites chose those scriptures most amenable to their point of view and the maintenance of their status. This is a highly problematic argument, as it reads the modern western culture back into the situation as it existed in the past. Moreover, it ignores the fact that in the early church, bishops were sought out for persecution; some early records show that the term of a bishop was typically in the low single digits, and bishops often died as martyrs. To be elevated to the position of bishop was, in many cases, a death sentence. And finally, the idea that the Holy Spirit moved within the community of faith apart from the bishop was foreign to the early church.
The Subversive Method points out that in many cases a meaning can be given to a text that subverts its obvious meaning. In some cases this is justified; the Revelation of St. John is full of coded language suggesting the end and judgement of the Roman Empire. Even Jesus’ call to ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God” has a subversive message—since everything ultimately belongs to God, nothing rightfully belongs to Caesar. But it is possible to subvert the subversive message to justify confiscatory taxation, as took place in the Byzantine Empire, and under the Medieval popes. It is also possible to use scripture to justify racism, slavery, polygamy, and the subjugation of women.
Stark offers an alternative approach: viewing certain texts as condemned texts. Their status as scripture would be precisely because of what they reveal about us, and about what they fail to say about God. Under this reading, the text is valuable as an example of what not to do and how not to think. For example, few Fundamentalists think the fatalistic message of Ecclesiastes is an example for us to follow, but rather an example of just where an idolatrous and hedonistic life ends up. So too we don’t accept Satan as a role model to follow, even though his seven-fold “I will” is recorded in the book of Isaiah.
What Stark fails to recognize is the vibrancy of Holy Tradition as a guide for the interpretation of the text. The fathers recognized the problematic nature of some of scripture; not only that, but they wrote about it, and we use their writings today to help us deal with the same problems. We don’t hide these texts away, we don’t pretend they don’t exist, and we don’t explain them away. Just as the church has determined the canon of Sacred Scripture, so too the church has passed on the methodology of dealing with problem texts. This methodology is different on a case by case basis. In fact, there are competing hermeneutics within Holy Tradition, just as there are competing views about God within Sacred Scripture. None of this is either a revelation or a problem for the Orthodox. All the hermeneutics described by Stark are present to some degree or another, in some place or another, within Holy Tradition.
I finish this review as I began. If you are a Fundamentalist or Evangelical Protestant, avoid reading this book, as you lack the cognitive framework for dealing with the information.
Redating the New Testament by John A.T. Robinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Bishop Dr. John A. T. Robinson (1919-1983) was a thoroughgoing theological modernist. He began writing this book as a theological exercise, as “little more than a theological joke”. At some point he asked himself “why any of the books of the New Testament needed to be put after the fall of Jerusalem in 70.” He notes that none of the books make any reference (actual or metaphorical) to the destruction of Jerusalem as a past event. He contrasts this with the apocryphal books, with their use of the earlier destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians standing in for the recent Roman actions. (Robinson contrasts the restrained style of the canonical books with the more flamboyant and detailed post-event writings of II Baruch, II Esdras, and the Sibylline Oracles.) Ultimately he supports the (then shocking) conclusion that none of the New Testament books were written after 70 A.D. (C.E., for those with scholarly pretensions).
One of Robinson’s contributions is to draw attention to the chains of inferences and preconceptions that are used by those arguing for the late dating of the canonical New Testament scriptures. That there is no reason to accept the late dates becomes increasingly clear as these preconceptions are dealt with and swept aside.
What is also clear is that Robinson (as a theological modernist), has no conception of the church or tradition as an authority. He, like most western theologians since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, view the authors of scripture primarily as competing individuals rather than as part of the Church. He has difficulty accepting the authors of scripture as people who cooperated in the proclamation and promulgation of the Gospel.
To the western scholar and theologian, the questions of who wrote what and when are quite important. However, for the Eastern Church, the question of who wrote what is subordinate to the question of inspiration and canonicity. Where the modern scholar might look askance at seeming interpolations such as the ending chapter of the Gospel of Mark, within the Eastern Church this interpolation is not a problem, because the Church determined that the supposed (and probable) interpolation is part of inspired scripture. Thus the question of whether the apostle Peter wrote the epistle of II Peter is unimportant, despite its being the subject of never-ending speculation on the part of the theological liberals.
Yet Robinson does the Church a great service by laying bare the ephemeral nature of the claims that many of the New Testament writings were not written by their ascribed authors. He notes that the claims based on statistical word counts, diction, and style are all over the map, pointing to the probability that their differences can be ascribed as much to differences in the preconceptions used to construct the statistical algorithms. He notes as well that “there is an appetite for pseudonymity that grows by what it feeds on.” Once you assume pseudonymity, you see it everywhere. He argues against a tradition of pseudonymity on the basis of historical church writings which reject books on that basis, and mention the deposing of a bishop who wrote such a pseudonymous book. He notes as well the Pauline attitude towards those circulating books claiming to be written by him. (II Thess 2:2; 3:17).
Whether you are a scholar or merely a theological dilettante (like me), you need to have this book in your library.
A woman cries at the funeral of Christians killed in Maaloula.
The problem of the existence of evil and death, given the power and goodness of God, is called theodicy. Even young children sometimes ask questions about whether God created evil and, if He did not, how and why He allows evil to exist. This is a profound question, one that has been wrestled with by young and old, by the simple and the educated, by both saint and sinner alike. And yet there is another more profound question.
Why is God silent in the face of evil? Metropolitan Nahum of Strumica makes mention of this, the Divine silence, in connection with Christ’s own suffering and death. “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth” (Acts 8:32). Christ himself was silent in the face of this great evil being done to him. He did not object, he did not present a defence, he did not protest his innocence. All of which made the act of the Jewish and Roman leaders even more monstrous.
I do not have a satisfactory answer to the existence of evil, at least not an answer that will satisfy once and for all. Neither do I understand the Divine silence in the face of evil, especially the evil done to the Church, which is his body. Yet I also know that Christ is most present with us during times of suffering. He suffers with us, and we suffer with Him. In Mark chapter 13, Jesus tells us to give no thought as to what we will speak when we are called to give an account of our faith, for the Holy Spirit will speak through us. Perhaps God speaks through and with the voice the martyrs. If this is true, then the voice of the martyrs speaks not truth to power, but truth with power.
Job himself suffered, and no satisfactory answer for his suffering was given him. Yet Job spoke truth with power when he said: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me” (Job 19:25-27).
The psalmist cries out with us against the evil of this world. “Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are of a clean heart. But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Ps 73:1-3). This is perhaps the clearest expression of the problem of theodicy, which becomes a problem when we take our eyes off of God and focus one our neighbor’s continuing good fortune in the face of their own sin. When we cease repenting our own sins and focus on the sin of our brother, the goodness of God seems far away. The psalmist continues his protest against God until something changes. “When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me; Until I went into the sanctuary of God” (Ps 73:16-17).
When reading this, I cannot help but think of Peter the disciple walking on the water, until he takes his eyes off of Jesus and focuses on his immediate circumstances. He begins to sink, until he cries out to Jesus, who pulls him from the water and places him back in the boat, which reminds us of Noah’s Ark, which is a type of the church.
I have no answers to the problem of evil. I only hope that when my time comes, that the Holy Spirit speaks through me as powerfully as He speaks through one of the new martyrs of Syria: “I am a Christian, and if you want to kill me for this, I do not object to it.”
The Harrowing of Hell. This representation of Christ’s descent into Hell shows Him breaking down the gates of hell and restoring Adam and Eve to Paradise.
My first indication that something was seriously wrong with the various Protestant communions was when I read the Didache (aka The Teaching Of The Lord To The Gentiles By The Twelve Apostles.) This document very likely preserves the order of the church in Jerusalem; scholars now believe to be a first century document, likely before A.D. 70, placing it well within the apostolic era.[1] Here was a different expression of Christianity, one completely foreign to me, yet one the apostles did not seem to have a problem with.
One thing that struck me is that although the Didache contains a great deal of information about how to live and worship as a Christian community, it contains nothing of what I recognized as doctrine. I compared this to the Apostolic Traditions, written by Hippolytus in the third century to preserve the church order and practices in use in Alexandria; once again, it contains nothing of what we today would call doctrine. Finally, I came across the Apostolic Constitutions, a second or third century work containing fourth and fifth century interpolations, a document preserving the church order of Asia Minor. This work is more extensive than the first two, yet only the sixth book against Heresies contains any doctrine—and apart from a creedal portion in Section III entitled An Exposition of the Preaching of the Apostles, most of the work consists of a description of various errors or of the prescriptions of the apostles. What we would term the doctrinal portion of this work is surprisingly brief.
I found a similar concern in the epistles of the apostle Paul. The first two thirds are usually concerned with correcting certain matters of theology, while the latter third is concerned with matters of church order, and with prescriptions for holy living. The epistles to the Corinthian Church are even more explicit, mixing prescriptions for church order and discipline, theology, and exhortations to holy living throughout these letters. How we live as Christians mattered to the apostle. We are to live out our faith; we are to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Other New Testament authors say the same. James tells us to resist the devil (Jas 4:7). In his exhortation to holy living, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews write: “Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin” (Heb 12:4).
I now had three different church orders from different regions: one from the apostolic era, one from the era prior to Constantine, one from after Constantine, and all saying basically the same thing. What I had was an expression of Christianity that I could not deny, yet could not explain either. These Christians were concerned with how one lived in community with each other and before the world, and with how they were organized and worshiped as church. These two were not separate areas, but were commingled together in a manner I found confusing. As I was working at Lutheran seminary at the time, I raised these issues with some of the professors. The basic answer I got was that we could not repristinate, a word that means to restore something to its state of original purity. This was an implicit admission that we no longer believed and worshiped in a manner like the early church. Somehow they were alright with that, but I couldn’t make sense of it.
The attempt to “revive the faith of a pristine church” is the functional definition of repristination. In Lutheran history, repristination was an attempt to restore historical Lutheranism over and against the Prussian Union, which attempted to unify the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Germany. Although the founder of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (C.F.W. Walther) is historically identified as part of this movement, today the term is generally used in a perjorative sense, for a romantic attachment to a golden age.
Interestingly, that was the same argument used to explain all the changes in Lutheran practice and worship from the time of Luther. It also became clear that neither Luther, Melanchthon, nor Chemnitz would have been welcome in most Lutheran churches, as they believed, taught, and confessed a different faith than did modern Lutherans. Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi.[2] Not only did Lutherans not worship the same way as the ancient church, they didn’t even worship the same way as the Lutheran Reformers. That indicated that they had a different doctrinal understanding than did the Reformers, who had a different doctrinal understanding than did the ancient fathers of the church. It became clear that the argument against repristination was a tacit admission that the Lutheran faith had changed.
Fr. Anthony McGuckin, in his book “The Orthodox Church”, brings up the issue of repristination when discussing the mystery of marriage. While the Pharisees had a contractual understanding of marriage, similar to that found in modern civil law. Jesus expressed a different understanding of marriage, one of intense, interpersonal communion. The Pharisees came to Jesus and tested him by asking if it was lawful to divorce one’s wife for any reason. Jesus answered with a reference to the orders of creation, and the covenant God made with humanity when He instituted marriage. “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt 19:5-6). Of this, Fr. McGuckin writes:
Over and against the economies that were necessary for society where hardness of heart was the common order of the day, Christ begins to set a new standard for his church, which itself goes back to the more fundamental creation covenant, which he has come to restore and repristinate in his church. The Mosaic law of contractual divorce is made to give way to a higher ‘law of one flesh’, that is communion. It is God who bonds a man and a woman in a mystical union that grows out of the union of flesh. This psycho-physical bond is a profound sacrament of the love Christ has for his church.” (McGuckin 2011)
We humans seek to justify our departure from the truth by telling ourselves that we cannot repristinate, that we cannot return to the state of original purity, that we cannot return to Eden. And yet this is countered by St. Irenaeus and his discussion of the economy of salvation as one of recapitulation, as the restoration of the natural order of things, as the reopening of the gates of paradise so that whosoever will may come.
The Protestant urge for the restoration of the early church is an admirable thing. And yet that restoration is nothing without repristination, without a return to Eden and the restoration of the state of original righteousness.
McGuckin, John Anthony. The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
[1] There are differences of opinion about this. Some date the Didache as early as 50 A.D., while others date it as late as the 4th century. The reason for an early date rests on a number of pieces of evidence. First, the Didache uses the ‘Two Ways’ description of Christianity; the Way was an early way of referring to Christianity (Acts 9:2; 19:9; 19:23; 22:4; 24:14; 24:22). Second, the Didache does not reference the different factions surrounding different apostles, suggesting an early date. Third, the Didache does not reference the growth of heresies, also suggesting an early date. Fourth, the Didache refers to itinerant apostles, prophets and teachers, and ways of determining their legitimacy. This was a problem in the earliest church, suggesting an early date. Fifth, it appears that Bishops and Deacons were, at this time, chosen by their congregations rather than the later tradition of election, then ordination by the bishops. Sixth, there is no reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Seventh, after the martyrdom of St. James in 63 A.D., the historian Eusebius writes that the Jerusalem Christians were warned to leave Jerusalem due to its imminent destruction. The Jewish historian Josephus writes that this flight of Christians occurred in 64 A.D. (Jewish War 2, 20, 1) This flight from Jerusalem is not referenced in the Didache.
[2] Lex Orandi – the law of prayer; Lex Credendi – the law of belief. Loosely translated, this states that the law of prayer is the law of belief. The way you prayer (and worship) is the way you believe. This is transitive, in that the way you believe is reflected in the way you prayer. Thus a change in the way you pray and worship reflects a change in your beliefs, while a change in beliefs is reflected in the way you worship.
The Orthodox Church
The Holy Trinity by Dumitru Staniloae
Because it is without beginning, supreme existence is eternally happy in and of itself without needing to develop at all. In order to reach this state and unite themselves with supreme existence, created beings need to make an effort of their own free will. They can only progress through that freedom that has been given to them as they follow laws that are an expression of the good will of God, or of supreme Reason. But once reason has been given to them, they can use it to oppose the good that supreme Reason and its laws demand of conscious things. They can use reason in a distorted manner to justify orienting themselves toward deceitful goals, or to promote their own egoism. Goodness desires to rest in a free harmony established among conscious things and between them and God. But selfishness opposes the good, and therefore opposes God. It ruptures the Reason that brings harmony among all things, and between everything and God. This shows once again the creation too must contribute something if it is to have unity with God. But the Holy Trinity, in which the most perfect harmony and love reside, helps creation makes its contribution. The Son of God Himself helps humanity realize this unity. The Father uses the Son, just as He uses Reason, for the sake of creation.
You can order The Holy Trinity by Dumitru Staniloae directly from the Holy Cross Bookstore, or from Amazon.com.