Category Archives: Opinion

Orthodoxy and Homosexuality

Posted on by
1
Book cover for "The Orthodox Church" by John Anthony McGuckin

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

Link: http://amzn.com/1444337319

Anthropology in Poetry and Prose

Posted on by
Reply
Becoming Human by John Behr

Becoming Human

Becoming Human by John Behr

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!

View all my reviews

Divine Silence in the Face of Evil

Posted on by
Reply
A woman cries at the funeral of Christians killed in Maaloula.

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.”

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/64403.htm

Repristination and the Plan of Salvation

Posted on by
4
The Harrowing of Hades, fresco in the parecclesion of the Chora Church, Istanbul, c. 1315, raising Adam and Eve is depicted as part of the Resurrection icon, as it always is in the East.

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.

Bibliography

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.

Book cover for "The Orthodox Church" by John Anthony McGuckin

The Orthodox Church

Salvation and the Veneration [honoring] of Saints

Posted on by
Reply
The Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles

The Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles

Book cover for "The Orthodox Church" by John Anthony McGuckin

“It is a great mistake to think that the soul finds Christ nakedly and alone. The Lord always comes to us in the family, and through the medium of the love of other members of the communion. He came to his world through the Holy Virgin. He comes to us in faith, even to this day, through the ministry of those who have loved us and nurtured us, and formed our minds and characters in a thousand ways. He comes to us in the Scriptures, directly, yes, but also through the countless hundreds of thousands who have transcribed, collected the texts, and preached them to society over centuries. There is no direct and solipsistically solitary path to the Christ. If we find Christ we find the heart of love and communion. Those who wish to find the Lord alone, and possess him alone, have not found the true Lord. In some places in the world superstition may indeed have perverted the cult of the saints, so that it has degenerated into a disturbingly non-Christian phenomenon. Orthodoxy does not generally manifest that social condition. If it does appear, the clergy correct it energetically. The Orthodox veneration of the saints is widely understood by all levels of the faithful, educated or not. And the celebration of the saints is deeply integrated with the sense of the church as a communion of word and sacrament. This has been a pattern of Eastern Christian life since the earliest centuries, when the tombs of the martyrs grew into being the local parish churches.
“Orthodoxy, in its heard, does not understand a personalist attitude that issues in the form of a latent (or not so latent!) hostility to the saints, and finds it to be defective in its comprehension of the communion of salvation. It is difficult to express the significance of family to those whose experience of earthly families has been insignificant, or worse, damaging. But the action of the saints, still philanthropic and still assisting the lives of Christians on earth, is a fact of authentic Christian family life, and for the Orthodox is part of their very faith-confession that Christ has saved hot a host of solitary righteous people, but rather an elect communion of beings: humanity and angels, who are brought together in him and through him in a bond of love that constitutes the New Being of the Kingdom.” (McGuckin 2011)
Bibliography
McGuckin, John Anthony. The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

 

 

a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing

How to explain the Russian thinking on homosexuality?

Posted on by
Reply
Russian attitudes on homosexuality (1998 - 2012)

Russian attitudes on homosexuality (1998 – 2012)

“If protecting individual rights (including the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’) is not the main task of a government, what is?  Older governments, including the government of what is now called Byzantium, would have replied, “justice”, including as one of its main components the promotion of virtue.  That is, rulers were concerned to discover what was just and virtuous behaviour and then to outlaw unjust and unvirtuous behaviour.  Obviously since rulers were fallen, they often made a mess of it, like all men make a mess of everything.  But attaining virtue remained the goal.  The question for them was not, ‘What are my rights as a citizen?’, but rather, ‘How should I live as a citizen?’  The focus was on the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice.

“I am not saying, of course, that there is no overlap between the two approaches to law, or no commonality between the ancient way of looking at society and our modern one.  And I am as happy as anyone else living in the west to have the freedom to speak (or blog, like I am now) and not fear the policeman’s knock on my door.   But I am aware that our modern American way is not universal or of any great antiquity.”

Fr. Lawrence Farley

– See more at: http://www.soundingblog.com/index.php/culture/pop-culture/whats-with-russia.html#sthash.6EZGth6I.dpuf

 

Evidence from Silence

Posted on by
Reply
Dormition of the Theotokos

Dormition of the Theotokos

“In the fourth century, bishop Epiphanius noted, cautiously, that nobody knows if or whether Mary died, nor if she was buried, nor the location of her grave.” Philip Jenkins, “Why Mary?”

Several years ago, while I was still Lutheran, my pastor noted a number of interesting things about Mary. In particular, he mentioned that although there were church all over the holy land commemorating various persons and events, there were no churches where Mary died, nor was anyone claiming her gravesite, or claiming to have her bodily relics. This is so unusual that it must mean something. We cannot be dogmatic about it, but it does support the position of most of the world’s Christians that there was a miracle attached to her death, such that her body was lost. How and in what way we don’t know, except for the evidence preserved in the liturgy and in the apocryphal writings.

Mt Athos: Myths, Contradictions, and Incongruities.

Posted on by
Reply

Skiti Agiou Andrea Σκήτη Αγίου Ανδρέα

Ever since I’ve become Orthodox, I’ve heard about Mt. Athos, it’s intriguing history, its spectacular setting, it’s magnificent architecture. But what I find most interesting are the myths, the contradictions, and the incongruities.

First, Mt. Athos is both a mountain and a peninsula. What Orthodoxy calls the Holy Mountain is in fact not the single mountain itself, but the entire peninsula.

Second, the Holy Mountain is often described as primitive and pristine. It is often said that the only way to get to Mt. Athos is by ferry, that the only way to get around is by walking, and that the sound of internal combustion engines is never heard on the Holy Mountain. This is not true. A search on Google Maps reveals quite a few roads on Mt. Athos. A great number of these roads connect the harbors to each other, and roads criss-cross the interior, leading up to and past the various sketes and monasteries. There are even pictures of cars driving these roads up to monasteries in the interior, with one showing what appears to be a vehicle fleet belonging to the ACS Courier service. It is clearly possible to drive to the Greek town of Ouranoupoli, from which roads radiate into the interior of the Holy Mountain. I don’t know if these roads are blocked or guarded in some way, but given the pictures of cars driving on Mt. Athos, the possibility exists. In addition, Mt. Athos has the Elikodromio heliport, and even concrete roads. With curbs, no less. <https://www.google.com/maps?q=mt+athos&sll=36.930821500000015,-76.2397205&sspn=0.42162902326964075,0.7033899703359611&t=h&dg=opt&z=18&iwloc=A> . And finally, Mt. Athos has a branch of the Agricultural Bank of Greece, complete with ATM. So, not as primitive and pristine as we’ve been led to believe.

Third, Mt. Athos was supposedly chosen by the Virgin Mary herself.  She was traveling with John the Evangelist to visit Lazarus in Cyprus, and the ship was blown off course. After setting foot on the shore, she blessed it and asked her Son for the area to be her garden. A voice was heard from heaven, saying: “Let this place be your inheritance and your garden, a paradise and a haven of salvation for those seeking to be saved.” From that moment on the site was consecrated to the Virgin Mary and off limits to women. The oddity that a site consecrated to the Virgin Mary would be off limits to those of her gender has been often noted. This presents a theological problem, in that it separates the Virgin Mary from other women in a manner that has more in common with Roman Catholicism than Eastern Orthodoxy.

Fourth, although the site was consecrated to the Virgin Mary in the first century, it was inhabited by both pagans and Christians during the reign of Emperor Constantine, and pagan temples and statues of Zeus existed in the fifth century. The area was deserted early in the ninth century, following raids by the Cretan Saracens. It was not until late in the ninth century that the Emperor Basil I declared via a Chrysobull (Golden Bull, or declaration) that Mt. Athos was declared to be a place of monks, and that no laymen, farmers, or cattle-breeders were allowed to live there. So the present condition of Mt. Athos did not exist for most of the first millennium. This suggests that the prohibition against women setting foot on Mt. Athos is representative of European Medieval thinking regarding the status of women, rather than a feature of Orthodox monasticism.

Fifth, the monks of Mt. Athos come under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bishop Bartholomew. And yet the monks regard themselves as “the non-negotiable guardian of the Holy Tradition.” In other words, while formally under the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch, the monks of Mt. Athos consider themselves an independent authority and arbiter of Holy Tradition. It has been said that some of the monasteries, in protest against the ecumenical tendencies of Patriarch Bartholomew, have censured him. There are even accounts of their having stripped him from the Diptychs, which is tantamount to their breaking communion with their Patriarch. If so, this makes them schismatics.

To be honest, I don’t know what to make of Mt. Athos. On the one hand, there have been a great number of saints on the Holy Mountain, even in the 20th century. On the other hand, there does seem to be a certain arrogance that adheres to the monks of Mt. Athos (collectively, not individually). I don’t know what to make of the monks of Mt. Athos, and their status within the canonical Orthodox church. They seem to be setting themselves apart, setting the stage for some sort of showdown. I pray they come to their senses.

 

Spiritual Combat, Social Cohesion, and Monasticism

Posted on by
Reply
St Anthony the Great, founder of Christian Monasticism

St Anthony the Great, founder of Christian Monasticism

The experience of the early church is somewhat analogous to that of soldiers in combat — men (and women) who are motivated and held together by social cohesion. The early church lived within the Roman empire, and the presence of occupying soldiers served as an ever-present reminder that violence and death was never far away. The New Testament reflects this reality, and the language of warfare is often used as a description of the spiritual life.  The apostle writes: “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds)” (2 Cor 10:3-4). And again: “This charge I commit unto thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that thou by them mightest war a good warfare; Holding faith, and a good conscience” (1 Tim 1:18-19). In his epistle to the Ephesians, the apostle exhorts them to put on their spiritual armor, reminding them: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph 6:12).

The early church saw itself as an army engaged in a spiritual battle. They were persecuted by the Roman Empire, which was a physical manifestation of the spiritual battles they faced together. This united them in common cause. Luke describes the situation of the primitive church in this manner:

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. …Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. (Acts 4:32, 34)

A study by the Strategic Studies Institute (Wong, et al) entitled Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War puts it this way:

Social cohesion appears to serve two roles in combat motivation. First, because of the close ties to other soldiers, it places a burden of responsibility on each soldier to achieve group success and protect the unit from harm. Soldiers feel that although their individual contribution to the group may be small, it is still a critical part of unit success and therefore important.

…This desire to contribute to the unit mission comes not from a commitment to the mission, but a social compact with the members of the primary group.

…The second role of cohesion is to provide the confidence and assurance that someone soldiers could trust was “watching their back.” This is not simply trusting in the competence, training, or commitment to the mission of another soldier, but trusting in someone they regarded as closer than a friend who was motivated to look out for their welfare. In the words of one infantryman, “You have got to trust them more than your mother, your father, or girlfriend, or your wife, or anybody. It becomes almost like your guardian angel.”

The presence of comrades imparts a reassuring belief that all will be well. As one soldier stated, “It is just like a big family. Nothing can come to you without going through them first. It is kind of comforting.” One soldier noted, “If he holds my back, then I will hold his, and nothing is going to go wrong.” Another added, “If you are going to war, you want to be able to trust the person who is beside you. If you are his friend, you know he is not going to let you down. . . . He is going to do his best to make sure that you don’t die.” (Wong, et al. 2003, 10-11)

Sebastian Junger, in the book War, describes the bond that unites people who have engaged in combat.

When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at — you’d have to be deranged — it’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.

It’s such a pure, clean standard that men can completely remake themselves in war. You could be anything back home — shy, ugly, rich, poor, unpopular — and it won’t matter because it’s of no consequence in a firefight, and therefore of no consequence, period. The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the rest of the group, and that is almost impossible to fake. (Junger 2010, 233-234)

As the apostle notes, the church of Jesus Christ engages in warfare against “principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” But whereas the armies of this world mete out death and destruction on a horrific scale, the armies of the Lord are content to die with Him, and for Him. Therein lies the fundamental difference between the armies of this world and the armies of the Lord. In his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges writes of “the narcotic of war that quickly transforms men into beasts”, and of “the ecstatic high of violence and the debilitating mental and physical destruction that comes with prolonged exposure to war’s addiction.” (Hedges 2002, 87) Whereas war turns men into beasts, engaging in spiritual battle has the opposite effect — it turns individuals into persons, and persons into sons of God. War is about death and desolation, whereas spiritual battle is about re-creation, sanctification, and ultimately about salvation.

Soldiers may enlist for reasons of ideology and patriotism, but men do not fight and die for an ideology. They will, however, fight and die for each other. (Junger 2010, 243) Chris Hedges, embedded with the Marines prior to the invasion of Iraq, reports the following conversation:

No one ever charges into battle for God and country. “Just remember,” a Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel told me as he strapped his pistol belt under his arm before we crossed into Kuwait, “that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting for each other, just for each other.” (Hedges 2002, 38)

It would be easy to say that the early church was the same way — that early Christians were motivated more by their love for each other than their love for the Lord. There are two factors to consider here. First, the primary motivation of the primitive church was the living memory of Jesus as proclaimed by those who knew him in his life, death, and resurrection. This apostolic witness, which was later written down for subsequent generations, was the primary motivation for the growth of the church. It must be understood that for the early church, this was not a matter of ideology, nor of mythology, but the passing on of eye-witness and personally verifiable accounts. The primitive church was filled with people who were eyewitnesses of the risen Lord. The apostle John reminds us of what he personally witnessed, saying that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (Joh 1:14). Jesus was not the subject of a dead ideology; instead, He is the risen Lord of all. The author of Hebrews notes of Christ: “both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren” (Heb 2:11). Our Lord was made man, and remains yet a man; as Chalcedon says, He is: “consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; made in all things like unto us, sin only excepted.” (P. Schaff, NPNF2-14. The Seven Ecumenical Councils 2005, 388) What was true of Christians in the early church is true of us today: we are His brothers, which makes us all brethren in Christ.

But secondly, we must not discount the degree to which the teachings of the apostles and the witness of the martyrs and confessors served to create and reinforce the social cohesion of the early church. There is a clear historical distinction to be made between the early church and the post-Constantine church. After the edict of Milan that made Christianity legal, it became socially respectable and financially advantageous to attach oneself to the church. The witness of Christ and for Christ was weakened, as was the essential brotherhood of all believers. The desire to recover the living witness and brotherhood of the early church in all its intensity was (and still remains) the primary reason for monasticism.

Bibliography

Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.

Junger, Sebastian. War. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2010.

Schaff, Philip. NPNF2-14. The Seven Ecumenical Councils. Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2005.

Wong, Leonard, Thomas A. Kolditz, Raymond A. Millen, and Terrence M. Potter. “Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War.” Strategic Studies Institute. July 2003. http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub179.pdf (accessed August 9, 2010).