Straight from the Heart

A word of clarification

2012-02-26T16:34:00.002-08:00

The previous post, reviewing the teachingof The Red Book on liturgicalservices, was the third in a continuing series. The first post reviewing The Red Book was posted on February 9, and was followed by two others, not in theseries. It is possible that someonecoming upon my previous post about TheRed Book and not seeing the February 9 introduction might be confused aboutwho the authors actually were. As Iindicated in the first post, the book under review is not actually called “TheRed Book”, and its authors are not actually named “Valentinus andMarcion”. Rather, I am writing here inthe tradition of C.S. Lewis who reviewed a book about which he had nothing goodto say, and so disguised the identity of the book by giving it the fictionalname “The Green Book”, and its authors the names “Gaius and Titius”. In this tradition, I have renamed the volume“The Red Book”, calling its authors “Valentinus and Marcion”. I chose these names for the authors because Ibelieve their doctrine to be every bit as destructive as that of their secondcentury namesakes. The names are meantnot to identify, but to denounce, for my quarrel is less with them as persons(I’m sure they’re lovely) than it is with their teaching. I am sorry if I have been unclear.

The Red Book on liturgical services

2012-02-25T21:59:00.002-08:00

This post is the third in a series. Previous posts in the series can be found here and here.
In this post I examine the chapter of The Red Book which speaks of liturgicalservices—i.e. gatherings of Christians at which a set form of service is used,whether formally liturgical (using a printed service where the words areprovided in advance), or informally liturgical (with the material, to quote theauthors, “unwritten, but just as mechanical and predictable as if it were setin print”) To their credit, Valentinusand Marcion recognize both types of service as essentially liturgical, sinceeven traditions not having a set liturgy still prescribe in advance the basicorder of service.

ForValentinus and Marcion, this existence of liturgy is bad—Sunday mornings arethereby “set in concrete”, are “ironclad”, with the order of worship therefore“perfunctory”. All such set worship isunbiblical: “You can scour your Biblefrom beginning to end, and you will never find anything that remotely resemblesour [Protestant] order of worship...In fact, the Protestant order of worshiphas about as much biblical support as does the Roman Catholic Mass.” For Valentinus and Marcion and their intendedreaders, of course, the “Roman Catholic Mass” is the epitome of corruption. Their verdict is plain: “Both [Protestant and Roman Catholicservices] have few points of contact with the New Testament.”

Wehave seen that for the authors of The RedBook, anything differing from the praxis of the first century church isnecessarily a corruption. Since theEucharist (to use a later term) was part of a meal in the first centurychurches to which St. Paul was writing, this means that it must continue to beso for us today. Our authorscharacterize the worship of those early days as “marked by every member-functioning,spontaneity, freedom, vibrancy and open participation...a fluid gathering, nota static ritual.”

Unwarranteddichotomies aside (can’t rituals be vibrant?), this is a not unfair assessmentof the sacramental meals held, for example, in the Corinthian church to whichPaul wrote. But as we have said in ourprevious post, soon after this, under the authority of the apostles, the ritualelements of the meal were separated from the social ones, and the Eucharistseparated from the agape/ love feast. Bythe end of the first century, the Eucharistic partaking of consecrated breadand wine was held before dawn on Sunday, with the love feast/ social meal heldlater on that day (possibly at another location or locations).

This is crucial tounderstand, because spontaneity, open participation and fluidity stillcharacterized that social meal, the agape—but not the Eucharist. People having a meal together of courseinteract. There may be set prayers(whether a short “table grace” or more formal and lengthy prayers), but inbetween the prayers there is lots of time for talking and socializing, forsharing and spontaneity. This is where“fluidity” is possible, for social interactions are not scripted. From the late first century onwards, when theEucharist was separated from the agape meal, fluid and unscripted socialinteraction took place during those meals and were confined to them. It followsthen too that at the Eucharist held in the morning, there was no such informalsocial interaction or fluidity, but rather set ritual.

ForValentinus and Marcion, such lack of social freedom invalidates the wholeevent. They ask rhetorically, “Let’ssuppose that the authors of this book attend your own church service. And let’s suppose that the Lord Jesus Christputs something on our hearts to share with the rest of His body. Would we have the freedom to do it? If not, then we would question whether yourchurch service is under Christ’s headship.” As one reviewer of The Red Bookperceptively asked, “So, in short, [the author’s] measure for whether Jesus isin charge is whether he’s allowed to interrupt proceedings any time he thinksJesus is talking to him? Doesn’t this beg the question of whether [he] isimagining such communications?” Nicelyput.

Infact (as the above reviewer also pointed out), the Christians of those earlycenturies assembled at the Eucharist not to express their own individual ideas,share their own individual stories, or sing their own individual songselections. They came together as abody, to perform a set of corporate actions—that of listening to the Scripturesas a body, interceding as a body, exchanging the Peace among themselves, andoffering up the Eucharistic Sacrifice as a body, led by the prayers of the onepresiding. To quote our perceptive revieweragain, “The early church was collectivist; expression was NOT ‘natural’ or‘spontaneous’”. In contrast to the earlychurch, The Red Book “goes constantly wrong is in that [it] unwittingly panders toselfish individualism”.

ForValentinus and Marcion, the history of liturgy is the history of a catastrophicdownward spiral. They trace manyelements of the Protestant liturgical tradition to their origins, such as the“altar call”, the centrality of the sermon, the use of “the sinner’sprayer”. This is salutary, since itreveals these elements to be of recent vintage, and not a part of the Church’shistoric inheritance. But it does notlook at that historic liturgical inheritance in any real way. In a footnote we read, “The story of theorigin of the Mass is far beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that the Mass wasessentially a blending together of a resurgence of Gentile interest insynagogue worship and pagan influence that dates back to the fourth century.” It is difficult to know how to respond tosuch unhistorical twaddle. To find sucha combination of heated polemic and historical ignorance one usually has toperuse the pages of an Awake!magazine such as is thoughtfully provided by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Suffice it to say” that the Mass (or DivineLiturgy) was essentially the fruit of Christ’s commands during His Last Supper,and the influence of the apostles.

Onecan see this when one looks at writings before the fourth century, such asthose of Justin Martyr, who wrote in the second century. In his Apology,he describes the Sunday morning service of the church with a kind of studiednaivety, so that his hostile pagan readers can see that there is nothing to theslanders which they had heard, slanders about Christians eating the body andblood of babies. In this work, hedescribes the service is this way: on aSunday morning, the Christians of the city “gather together in one place andthe memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long astime permits. Then, when the reader hasceased, the president verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of thesegood things. Then we all rise togetherand pray. [A little before this, Justin also added the detail that after theseprayers, “we salute one another with a kiss”.] When our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought and thepresident in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings according to hisability, and the people assent, saying, ‘Amen’, and their is a distribution toeach...” (Apology, chapters 65-67).

Themain elements of the Sunday morning Eucharist that Justin knew in about 150A.D. are thus as follows:

-assembly

-Scripture reading

-homily from the one presiding

-intercessory prayer

-the exchange of the Peace

-Eucharistic Prayer of Thanksgiving

-reception of Holy Communion

Theseelements are basically the same ones as later found in the Roman Mass in thewest and the Byzantine Divine Liturgy in the east. Certain other elements would be added later tofancy it up a bit—in the Byzantine service, three hymns would be added to thebeginning, and a Creed inserted before the Eucharistic Prayer ofThanksgiving—but the essential elements, the backbone of the service, remainthe same. And let’s be clear: if Justin was offering this description ofthe service in about the year 150, then it must have predated him by about ageneration at least, for Justin gives no evidence that the service he describeswas a controversial newcomer on the liturgical field. A date of a generation before Justin puts theservice he described almost in apostolic times, given that the apostle Johndied in the last decade of the first century. In short, after the apostles separated the Eucharist from the agape, theEucharist remained pretty much the same until Justin’s day—and our own. There is no room or time for “a resurgence ofGentile interest in synagogue worship and pagan influence” to intrudethemselves (whatever might be meant by those terms). The Mass or Divine Liturgy is the apostolicway of worshipping on Sunday morning. “Every member-functioning, spontaneity, freedom, vibrancy and openparticipation” might still be found in Sunday evening agape meals (though Isuggest there was far less of that even there, since the early church did notvalue these things as do Valentinus and Marcion), but on Sunday morning, therewas what The Red Book would call“static ritual”.

WeOrthodox, whose Liturgy has not changed substantively for about a thousandyears, are delighted with such static ritual—mostly because we do notexperience it as static but as dynamic. That is, it has a power, a dynamism, it is capable of transforming usand moving us and bringing us into the presence of Christ. It is nonsense to define submission to Hisheadship as the freedom to interrupt a service. True submission to His headship is found in fidelity to the praxisestablished by His apostles. Our Liturgyis not “set in concrete” as The Red Book alleges. It is built upon a rock.

Burying the Gospel Talent in the Ethnic Ground

2012-02-22T13:29:00.002-08:00

I have lately come across an encyclical,written by a Greek Orthodox bishop to be read by his clergy in the parishes ofhis diocese. He is concerned that GreekOrthodox Education be fostered within those parishes, and he exhorts thefaithful to pursue the Greek Orthodox Education of their children with allvigour. The bishop’s intention ishonourable and consistent with his high episcopal calling. For this bishop (and all Orthodox bishops) Ihave the utmost respect. Nothing in thefollowing thoughts should be construed as intending any disrespectwhatever. I kiss his canonical hand,offering all honour: eis polla, eti despota.

Nonetheless,I would like to suggest that something is amiss in much of North AmericanOrthodoxy, and that this encyclical inadvertently witnesses to what thisis.

Theencyclical begins by stating that “Greece and Hellenism worldwide needa proper tidying and to be put in order”. This tidying and order can be accomplished, the letter goes on to say,by vigorously pursuing Greek Orthodox Education. “The aim of Greek Orthodox Education is keyand essential for the perpetuation and progress of our people, but to alsoenter and inherit the Heavenly Kingdom of God. Greek Orthodox Education helps put our house in order and it enrichesthe child’s soul. Some parents expecttheir children to be Greek and Orthodox, without taking care to teach theirchildren the Greek language, the Orthodox faith, and the Hellenic Christianideals.” For this reason, parents musttake all care to teach the children to be Greek and Orthodox and to accept “theHellenic Christian ideals” (what these ideals consist of is not stated, nor howthey might differ from, say, Slavic Christian ideals.) Parents “must speak the Greek language in thehome and actively live the Orthodox faith”. Appeal is made to the final judgment of Christ, so that these duties are“truly a matter of life and death for the perpetuation of our people and forthe inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven”.

Thebishop is, I believe, reacting to the tendency he observes among his flock toabandon the ethnic Greek heritage, and along with it, the Orthodox Faith. His remedy is to pursue the Greek OrthodoxEducation of the children more zealously, teaching them “the Greek language,the Orthodox faith and the Hellenic Christian ideals”. Notice that for him, these all constitute asingle package. Here, I suggest, is theproblem. I mention this encyclical (withsome hesitation) because I believe the problem lies not with this Greek bishopalone (whom I am sure is doing the best he can), nor with other Greek bishops,(who are doing the best they can). Theproblem is not confined to the Greek Orthodox in North America. I believe that thewords “Russian”, “Ukrainian”, “Serbian”, “Romanian”, “Bulgarian” or otherethnic tags could be substituted for the word “Greek”. The problem is not with Hellenism (for whichI have the utmost admiration); it is with ethnicism per se, the unreflective tendency to include Orthodoxy as but onecomponent in a larger ethnic package.

The Greek OrthodoxChurch being the largest in North America, wesee the tendency most easily among our Greek brethren, reflected in such filmsas My Big Fat Greek Wedding. This film (one of my favourites) is anaffectionate and not disrespectful look at what it means to grow up Greek in America. Orthodoxy is presupposed, and scarcelynoticed, like the colour of wallpaper in the background. In the film, a nice but completely secularyoung man falls in love with and decides to marry a nice religious GreekOrthodox girl. Since she is “religious”,and he is not, he decides to convert to her religion for the sake of familyunity and peace. He allows himselftherefore to be baptized in the Orthodox Church (after presumably no catechesiswhatever), while remaining an unbeliever. Immediately after the baptism, he greets her jubilantly saying, “Now I’mGreek!” It is a happy Kodak moment. My point is that there is nothing in the filmto suggest that this is outrageous. Hewants to be acceptable to her Greek family, and becoming outwardly Orthodox isthe way to do this. Orthodoxy is thus onpar with Greek language, Greek customs, and Greek cuisine. The Resurrection of Christ is no more significantto him than souvlaki. It is thissubordination of Faith to culture that is problematic.

To be fair to theGreek bishop (or to any Orthodox bishop), he would never say that theResurrection is no more important than souvlaki or any other aspect of culture. As a true bishop, doubtless he would boldlyproclaim the centrality of the Resurrection and do his best to preach theGospel. But by wrapping the Gospel inethnic clothing, and by refusing to the face the option that the Gospel mightbe preached and pursued apart from that ethnic clothing, a disservice isinadvertently done to the Gospel. Faceit: multitudes of Greek young people (orRussian, or Ukrainian, or Serbian or Romanian, or whatever) will fall away fromtheir ancestral ethnic heritage. It is notwonderful, but it is inevitable. I knowof one excellent Romanian priest who speaks in his ancestral tongue to his boysover the dinner table: they reply inEnglish. And they do this not to berebellious but because, like it or not, they are becoming Anglicised by theirexperiences in school and in society around them. The odds of them finding nice Romanian girlsto marry and producing nice Romanian children are not assured. Living in greater Vancouver, odds are they will fall in lovewith non-Romanian girls. It happened tothe heroine in My Big Fat Greek Wedding; it will probablyhappen to them also.

It becomes crucialtherefore that the Gospel be distinguished and separable (not separated necessarily, but separable) from the total ethnic package inwhich it was first found. Losing one’slanguage and ancestral culture, while a cultural loss, is notcatastrophic. “The inheritance of the Kingdom of God” does not depend upon retaining anylanguage or culture; it does dependupon retaining the Orthodox Faith. Byrefusing to acknowledge that Orthodoxy is separable from culture or bypresenting them as an inseparable and essential unity with that culture, one onlyinsures that when culture is lost through passing generations, the OrthodoxFaith will be lost also. Orthodoxy in North America does indeed need to be tidied and put inorder. But this can only be accomplishedby stressing the primacy of the Gospel. “Our people” should not be defined as the omogenia of Greece,but as the entire Christian People of God, whatever their ethnicity andlanguage. We forget this at our peril,and the peril of our children.

Repost from Archive: Thoughts on "an Orthodox Defense of Gay Marriage"

2012-02-15T16:28:00.000-08:00

Since the Huffington Post has reposted Dr. Dunn's article, we thought we would repost this response from the archive on the old site. If you want to see the comments on that discussion from last summer, you can access them here.-- Mat. Donna

Jul 15, 2011
Posted By: Father Lawrence Farley
Tags: none

          There is, of course, an immense supply of nonsense and twaddle freely available online, and responding to all of it would be a task dwarfing the cleaning out of the legendary Augean Stables. Usually when I read such things and am tempted to respond, a little voice from “Firefly” plays in my head, saying, “Just keep walkin’, preacher man”, and I leave well enough alone. But when I read a post purporting to be both learned and Orthodox (the author is a Ph.D, and describes the piece as “An Eastern Orthodox Defense of Gay Marriage”, I found that I could not just keep walkin’. Despite the disclaimer, “the views expressed in this post belong solely to the author and are not representative of the Orthodox Church”, the unwary reader might think that the views are at least consistent with historic Orthodoxy. The author, after all, does have a Ph.D. in theology.
            I refer to the July 13 post of Mr. David J. Dunn, PhD, in the Huffington Post, entitled, “Civil Unions by Another Name: An Eastern Orthodox Defense of Gay Marriage”. The author’s main point, it seems, is that all marriages outside the Church are in effect “civil unions by another name”, and not marriage as the Church understands it. Mr. Dunn speaks of secular marriages such as are performed “by a judge in a courthouse” and then asserts, “strictly speaking, our theology does not recognize the legitimacy of such marriages. They are not sanctified by the Spirit in the church.” He does not suggest, however, that “people married in secular ceremonies are not ‘really’ married.” He allows that “for practical purpose we tacitly recognize these civil marriages even if they don’t quite meet our theological standards.” Mr. Dunn, drawing on the distinction between Christian marriages and non-Christian ones, asserts that “all marriages performed outside the church are civil marriages”. I assume by “civil marriages”, he means the “civil unions” referred to in his title, as opposed to true marriages, for obviously marriages performed outside the Church are civil marriages—that is what the word “civil” means. His point seems to be that they are not true marriages. Rather, “all marriages granted by the state for tax and inheritance purposes are just civil unions by another name”.
           Mr. Dunn seems to recognize only two categories for two people living together in a publicly-recognized lasting commitment: the sacramental marriages performed in the Church by the Holy Spirit, and mere civil unions performed outside the Church by the State.
            Mr. Dunn is of course entitled to his opinions and to posting them anywhere he wishes. But it is nonsense to bill them as “Eastern Orthodox”. They are utterly alien to the understanding of the Orthodox Church.
          My first clue about the eccentric nature of his “Orthodoxy” came when he referred to the Holy Spirit as “she” in his fourth paragraph. “She”? Was this a typo? Had Mr. Dunn been getting his theology from The Shack? My second clue was when he used the adjective “Constantinian” as a theological swear word.
        This, I think, reveals the ideological DNA of Mr. Dunn’s make up. When he says that, “When Constantine legalized Christianity in the early fourth century, some began to see an almost godlike authority in the state. An increasing number of Christians found it difficult to tell the difference between the things that belong to Caesar and the things that belong to God”, I know I am reading Anabaptist literature. Menno Simons would’ve been proud, and could’ve written this. Never mind that it is historical nonsense, and is the type of stereotypical pseudo-history spouted by the likes of Dan Brown. My point is that it is also a thoroughly Protestant approach.
         An Orthodox and historically nuanced approach sees value in the Byzantinesymphonia of Church and State, and in Constantine’s contribution in particular. (That is why we refer to him liturgically as “St. Constantine the Great, God-crowned and equal-to-the-apostles”. We are not referring to his personal sanctity, but to his vision of the world.) Unlike classical Protestantism, Orthodoxy sees the world as shot through with divine grace. All persons, Christian or secular, partake of the divine image, all receive life from God (He is, after all, the only source), and all human acts of kindness, Christian or secular, reflect and gladden God’s heart. The Reformed tradition asserted the contrary, and said that everything outside of the Church was tainted and sinful. “Works done before the grace of Christ and the inspiration of his Spirit,” saith the Protestant Thirty-Nine Articles, “are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ...We doubt not but they have the nature of sin.”   This is the dour voice of classical Reformation Protestantism. It is not the song of the Fathers or of the Orthodox. Obviously there is a line between the Church and the World, between this fallen age and the Kingdom. But even in this age we find God’s grace enlivening, brightening and leading all that He has created. That is why, for instance, we bless the rivers and lakes of the world at Theophany.
       This historic Orthodox appreciation of God’s grace in the world and even in the institutions of the world (such as the State), did not begin with Constantine, Mr. Dunn’s suggestions to the contrary notwithstanding. St. Paul himself referred to the State as “instituted by God” and “appointed” by Him (Rom. 13:1f). The secular civil servant he called “God’s servant” (Greek leitourgos, a term elsewhere used to describe priests and apostles). The pre-Nicene Church, for all its struggles with a persecuting State, did not fall into the error of a Manichean pessimism about the world God created. It still confessed with the seraphim that “the whole earth is full of His glory” (Is. 6:3). The State possessed a kind of divine authority from God for the restraining of evil and the prevention of social chaos. The institutions of this age (many of which were regulated by the State, such as marriage) partook of the reflected glory that God generously imparts to all that He has made.
         Thus, a Christian in today’s secular and pluralistic society will recognize not two but three possibilities for public union of persons: Christian marriage, celebrated in the Church by a priest; marriage in the world, as was celebrated and lived by all cultures and ages even before the coming of Christ; and civil unions properly speaking, which do not conform to the timeless and universal understanding of marriage, but for which the State wishes to make provision in terms of “tax and inheritance purposes”.
        The question is: what is the essence of marriage, and why should the State care about it?
        Marriage is the union of two persons who have publicly agreed to live together and care for one another for the purposes of creating family. (The fact that some married couples cannot have children is irrelevant to this definition; the historical purpose of marriage remains, even if some couples cannot fulfill it.) The children resulting from such unions are the responsibility of the parents, and can only grow in physical, psychological and emotional health if both father and mother together raise them in a healthy way, so that the children in turn learn what it means to be a man or woman, a daddy or a mommy. Usually in history, children in a family were the fruit of this co-habiting commitment between husband and wife (i.e. through sex), though of course adoption was also practiced.
       This historical link between relationship and procreation is one of the things humanizing us. Creating children through pre-arranged one-time sexual unions or through government test-tube factories (such as we find in SF stories) is recognized as less than human—that is why they became the stuff of SF stories to begin with. Whether we find it convenient in today’s culture or not, the rhyme “First comes love (or at least meeting), then comes marriage, then comes Mommy with a baby carriage” is the song and history of the world. It is what the world, at all times and in all cultures, has meant by marriage. The world has never thought of fixing or changing it, because the world has seen that it is not busted or in need of change.
          Today we have more or less completely sundered the link between sex and procreation, which is why we can talk at all about such an oxymoron as homosexual marriage. But marriage, Christians and other monotheists think, was not created by society, and cannot be changed at whim by society. It was created by God for His creation as the means of fulfilling it, enriching it, and sustaining it, and as the only authentic matrix for producing and raising children. Because it was created by God to work in a certain way, we cannot change its fundamental character or purpose, or amend it, as if it were a clause in the US Constitution. The State can, of course, come up with other models for lasting and hopefully mutually nurturative co-habitation, such as homosexual civil unions. But we should not call these models marriage or equate them with marriage as timelessly practiced, for marriage has to do with the potential creation of families through sex, and this possibility is excluded in homosexual unions.
         Thus, marriage is the historical institution that produces children, and it is because these children are the building-blocks and hope for any society that the State recognizes a responsibility to and an interest in the institution producing them. In this sense, the State indeed has legitimate business in the bedrooms of the nation (the assertion of the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that it does not is historical nonsense, though it did make for a good political sound-bite in 1970s Canada). Marriage, as we have seen, is not just a Christian or Orthodox institution. It is a human one, and one that can enrich the lives of all citizens of the State whether they are Christian or not. Thus the State has a rightful duty to regulate it and protect it, since the health and preservation of the institution forms the foundation and future of the society. If the State concludes that polygamy is harmful to the healthy raising of children, it has the right to step in. (Are you listening in the town of Bountiful, B.C.?) If the State discerns that pride of place should go to unions that produce children, it should act in accordance with this discernment.
        “Calling upon the state to protect our sacrament” (to quote Mr. Dunn again), is not “an act of extreme unfaithfulness”. It is asking the State to do the duty given to it by God for the preservation of the health of the family and the traditional understanding of gender which alone can create healthy family. It is nonsense to assert that “denying civil marriage to homosexuals does nothing to protect its sanctity”. That sanctity (or health, to use a more accurate word) is under attack from all quarters. Declaring homosexual marriages to be true marriages, equal to classically-defined marriage has the immediate result of blessing homosexuality itself, and furthering the disastrous division of sexuality from procreation.
        The full dimensions of the disaster will not be immediately apparent, so that people like Mr. Dunn can assert that allowing gay marriage does nothing to hurt the marriages of non-gays. It is true that if the State allows gay marriage in July 2011, all those people already married will not feel themselves impacted by suppertime. They will not feel their marriages impacted at all. The establishment of homosexual marriage is not a problem because of its impact on these people, or on those who will be married soon thereafter. It is a problem because it fundamentally changes the nature of our understanding of sexuality and of the complementarity of the sexes in marriage required to create and raise children who have a healthy understanding of gender roles. These changes will not be apparent in society in a year or even in a few years, and during this time liberals can truthfully and cheerfully report that those in traditional marriages still find their lives untouched. But over the course of generations, the impact will be felt, and far-reaching results never foreseen or intended will surely come. I cannot elaborate further on what these unforeseen results will be, or they would not to unforeseen. But sexuality and gender is so basic to our nature (regardless of what gay propaganda says) that such a change will certainly be broad and far-reaching.
        In this the situation somewhat resembles the liberalization of divorce laws in Canada in the 1960s. There may have been good reasons for the liberalization which made divorce easier than before. The foreseen and intended result was the support of suffering spouses and meeting the need to shorten and end that suffering. The unforeseen result was the present culture of divorce and the explosion of the number divorces after but a few years of marriage, with heart-break for the divorced spouses themselves and latent long-term instability for the children who see their worlds torn apart. Yet another result has been the rise of single-parent families with its almost inevitable financial pressure and the much-lamented “child poverty”.   These results were not foreseen nor intended, but they can be traced back to the change in divorce laws nonetheless.
        In the same way, creating a category of homosexual marriage inevitably will alter the perception of sexuality in the succeeding generations in ways we cannot foresee. It is true that the Church can remain aloof from society, and hunker down in its bunker while society around them experiences the problems traced back to its having shifted its basic foundations. We can say, “We still maintain our traditional marriage practices, even though society around us doesn’t, so we don’t care what society does.” We would score high in purity of doctrine, but quite low in being our brother’s keeper. The Church does have a stake in what secular society does (contra the Anabaptists and Mr. Dunn). That is why we Christians urge society to do things which will help all those in society, whether they are Christians or not. We urge the State to help feed the poor. We urge to State to educate its young about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. And we do this urging, not just because we are concerned that Christians be fed and saved from drug and alcohol abuse, but because we want everyone else to be fed and saved too. In the matter of fundamental truths in society, we are our brother’s keeper.
        It is true that changing the laws to allow same-sex marriage will not immediately result in a flood of such marriages, since the homosexual part of North American population seems to run at between 1 and 4%. That is not the point. The point is that we changing our cultural understanding of what gender means, and the logic of this change will work itself out in many unforeseen ways in the coming generations regardless of marriage stats in 2011 or the decades after. Our children’s children, looking back at us in a hundred years’ time, will not rise up to call us blessed.

The Red Book on Church Buildings

2012-02-14T11:44:00.001-08:00

In a previous post, I mentioned a volume Ireferred to as The Red Book, a volumedenouncing the practices of the historic church (both Orthodox, Roman Catholic,and Protestant) in favour of its own prescription for a house churchre-imagining of what its authors thought the first century church lookedlike. These authors I referred to asValentinus and Marcion, changing their names, as C.S. Lewis changed the namesof the authors of a volume he called TheGreen Book. In this post I wouldlike to examine their teaching about church buildings.

Forproponents of the house church, the use of a building specially set apart forthe worship and glorification of God is problematic, if not anathema. Accordingly, a chapter of The Red Book consists of a demonizationof the whole concept of church temple. “Thestory of the church building,” they write, “is the sad saga of Christianityborrowing from heathen culture and radically transforming the face of ourfaith.” It makes the obvious point the“the Church” (Greek ekklesia) refersto the people of God, wherever they may meet, not whatever building they mayuse for their meeting, and that “the Christianity that conquered the RomanEmpire was essentially a home-centered movement.” That is, from the earliest days, the Christianslargely met in the homes of other Christians. Obviously, in the first century, the Christians did not have theresources to build structures dedicated to the worship of Christ, nor, sincetheir Eucharistic worship then was incorporated into a common meal and thenumbers participating in this were small, did such structures seemnecessary. But the numbers soon grew.

Meetingin homes for the Eucharist became unnecessary in the second century because bythen the Eucharist proper (i.e. the blessing of bread and cup) had becomeseparated from a full meal. Theseparation was probably effected in the first century by the apostlesthemselves. St. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred in about107 A.D., refers in his letters to both “the Eucharist” and “the agape” (i.e.the love feast) as two distinguishable and separate events. Since terminology usually lags at leastsomewhat behind phenomenon, the phenomenon of the separation of Eucharist frommeal clearly took place earlier—that is, in the first century. That it took place with apostolic authoritymay be implied from the total lack of any evidence of controversy about theseparation, for if the apostles had not sanctioned such a separation,separating it would have evinced strenuous protest. Since we have no evidence of any such protestanywhere, we may confidently assume that the separation of Eucharist fromlove-feast took place under the authority of the apostles. The Eucharist could then take place in anylocale, and homes with dining room facilities were no longer necessary forEucharistic worship.

Thisis not to say that Christian worship instantly abandoned the domesticlocale. Building church templesespecially dedicated for worship was not high on the list of ante-Nicenepriorities, especially when the Christians were happy to fly under the Romanradar. A secular Roman report tells usthat the Christians of the early second century met before dawn on Sundaymorning “to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god”, and then met later that day foran evening meal—evidence of an early morning Eucharist and an agape lateron. Possibly the same house was used forboth; possibly not. More people couldfit in a room for the former than for the latter.

Butsoon the Christians did begin to build structures set apart for the Eucharistand the sacraments of the Church. The Red Book even mentions one ofthem—the so-called Dura-Europus in modern Syria, a former house in which itsowners knocked down a wall or two to transform a domestic dwelling into a placeset apart for Eucharistic assembly and baptism. Valentinus and Marcion state that “remodelled houses like Dura-Europuscannot rightfully be called ‘church buildings’”, but it is difficult to see whynot, since such remodelled houses clearly no longer functioned as homes as theydid before. A store-front church is achurch, not a store, and the Dura-Europos structure was a church building, nota house.

Valentinusand Marcion are emphatic that Constantinewas “the father of the church building”, so that “for the first threecenturies, the Christians did not have any special buildings”. (We have seen that for Valentinus andMarcion, Dura-Europus did not count.)

Toput it bluntly, this is a lie. The Dura-Europusstructure was, unsurprisingly, not unique. Wherever money and political situation allowed, the Christians soonbuilt structures of their own, dedicated to the worship of Christ. We know this because the pagan emperorGalerius referred to them in the so-called “Edict of Toleration” in 311, issuedalso in the names of Constantine and Licinius. Church buildings which had been seized by pagans were ordered to bereturned to the Christians: “Concerningthe Christians,” the Imperial decree ran, “we before gave orders with respectto the places set apart for their worship. It is now our pleasure that all who have bought such places shouldrestore them to the Christians, without any demand for payment”. Clearly, the Christians had erected “placesset apart for their worship”, which had been seized by pagans in times ofpersecution and which now the government was demanding be returned. It is simply untrue therefore that theChristians “did not have any special buildings”; they had enough of them evenbefore Constantinecalled off the dogs of war to figure in this edict of toleration. In fact, the church historian Eusebius writesthat even in the third century, there were “famous gatherings in the houses ofprayer, on whose account the Christians, not being satisfied with the ancientbuildings, erected from the foundation large churches in all the cities”. The Church Father Lactantius writes that thepersecuting Emperor Diocletian was disturbed that there was a Christianbasilica near the Imperial palace at Nicomedia. Dura-Europus was therefore but one of manysuch church buildings erected in the third century, well before the peace of Constantine.

Whatled these early Christians to create buildings set apart for worship? Like any such question beginning with theword “why”, we can only guess at the answer. Certainly numbers had something to do with it. As the renovators of the Dura-Europos housediscovered, you can fit more people into a building specially designed forworship than you can into your living room, and after the first century, thenumbers of Christians kept on increasing. Also, a building set apart for Christian worship would have been “owned”by the Christians corporately, not by a single individual: even though one individual held the deed ofownership of the building (to use modern terms), all the Christians worshippingthere would have regarded it as “theirs”, and held a stake in it. Thus no one person could dominate andpersonalize the gathering, putting their idiosyncratic “stamp” on it. The strong sense of corporate identity whichthe Christians had led them to create buildings which were corporately “owned”.

Thisis the unacknowledged problem with all house churches. When a person makes a building his home, it looks like his—since it is his home, itsdecoration, lay-out, and interiors all express his personality and tastes. The owner of the building is thus uniquelypositioned to dominate the gathering, even if he (or she) is not a domineeringsort of person. When the church meets atBob’s house, Bob’s views, opinions, and convictions have a tremendouslyimportant role to play in whatever that church decides. This is all the more so in the absence of anordained and authoritative clergy who themselves submit to analready-established Tradition. The modernhouse church that meets at Bob’s place inevitably becomes Bob’s church, andsuch idiosyncratic personalization of “church” is the essence of heresy. Even if Bob is not strictly speakingheretical, the fullness and catholicity of the Faith will be lacking, because forall his good intentions and piety, Bob, or any other individual, cannot expressthe fullness of the Faith. Only theuniversal apostolic Tradition can do that. The modern house church movement thus has a personalizing tendency alreadybuilt in. This unfortunate tendency isminimized when the church meets in a public building that all shareequally.

Ithink, though, that the main reason the Christians of the second and thirdcenturies began to create church buildings was not simply to avoidpersonalization of the Faith (possessing an ordained and authoritative clergywho themselves submitted to an already established Tradition, there was littledanger of that). Buildings were not juststructures to house people and keep the rain off their heads. Erecting a building was a statement—a challenge, if you like. When the Jews erected synagogue buildings,this building was an assertion of the legitimacy and truth of Judaism. A pagan temple was a statement of the powerand glory of the pagan deity worshipped there. Statements can be made in stone as well as words. And if the Christians of the second and thirdcenturies (and later) were going to commend their Faith to the world, thesestatements in stone needed to be made. To refuse to make the statement—to refuse to build church buildings andto continue to worship only in homes—would’ve been to tell the world that theChristian Faith did not possess the legitimacy of Judaism or of paganism. It was a matter of credibility before theworld—that is, of evangelism.

That is why Constantine (who as far asValentinus and Marcion are concerned could do nothing right) was indeed rightin building large churches. It is truethat something was lost as far as intimacy was concerned when the churchbuilding now could hold not just seventy persons but seven hundred. For what its worth, Constantine’s building projects were not thatnumerous compared to the number of actual church buildings, and lots of smallerchurch buildings remained. He wasconcerned to build spacious and beautiful structures in Rome,Constantinople, Jerusalem,and other important places; he was less concerned to splurge limited funds intiny towns in out of the way spots. Therewere still plenty of small churches, which afforded a correspondingintimacy. But the world’s attention wason the larger places, and making architectural statements there was a necessarypart of commending the Christian Faith to a still largely pagan world. This is all the more important when onereflects that a church temple erected especially for worship will continue tobe used for that purpose for generations, which would not be the case if onemet for worship in a private home. Meeting for worship at Bob’s house will cease when Bob moves away ordies; meeting for worship in a specially-built church temple will continue longafter we and Bob have gone—a further manifestation of the abiding truth of theFaith.

For us today, theexistence of buildings set apart for the worship of Christ serves yet anotherpurpose—that of carving out a place, in a militantly secular world, whereeverything speaks of the glory of Jesus, and where prayer is encouraged by oursurroundings. One can, of course, prayanywhere, and one does not need icons or outward beauty in order to communewith God. Christians have prayed (andare praying) in terrible gulag conditions. But if you’re like me, you appreciate all the help you can get. Since we are animal as well as spiritual, ouroutward surroundings do effect us, often profoundly, and an environment inwhich everything points us to God is helpful as we strive to lay aside allearthly cares and commune with the King of all. The church building itself therefore becomes part of our self-offering,something beautiful which we offer to God, an architectural hymn, a way ofsinging the Lord’s song in a foreign land. Constantinewas not the first one to sing this song. But he sang it very well, and we can still appreciate its fading echoesas we strive to sing the same song.

The Red Book

2012-02-09T15:40:00.000-08:00

In 1943, C.S. Lewis wrote a pamphlet, laterpublished under the title The Abolitionof Man. In it hereferred to a book the contents of which he found utterly repelling. Regarding the authors of the book, heaffirmed, “I shall have nothing good to say of them”. Being a man of decency and kindness, Lewisexamined the book’s content at length, but said of the writers, “I propose toconceal their names. I shall refer to these gentlemen as Gaius and Titius andto their book as The GreenBook.” He promised his readers, however, that thebook did exist, and that he had it on his shelves.

Like Lewis, I also have come intocontact with a book the contents of which I find utterly repelling. It is full of lies, mistakes, half-truths,and distortions. It breathes a spirit ofpride and arrogance, as it examines the faith and practice of Protestants,Roman Catholics and Orthodox (that is, pretty much everyone) and finds them allmistaken, misled and damaging to authentic spiritual life. It involves throughout a hermeneutic ofhistorical suspicion, for it takes for granted that the Church Fathers werehalf-pagan men who distorted and paganized the Christian Faith. (That the basic tenets of Roman Catholicismwere wrong is taken for granted, as it is in most partisan EvangelicalProtestant writing.) Much of the blamefor pretty much everything in the Church is laid at the feet of the EmperorConstantine, whom the two authors regard as essentially pagan (his mother Helen does not come offmuch better, but is described as “most noted for her obsession with relics”). Everything characteristic of RomanCatholicism, Orthodoxy, and classical and revivalist Protestantism is denouncedand jettisoned. I found the hubrisinvolved in the project completely breath-taking.

Also like Lewis, “I propose toconceal their names”, and shall refer to these gentlemen as Valentinus andMarcion, and to their book as The Red Book. (In this I am admittedly motivated not somuch by the kindness that motivated Lewis as I am by a reluctance to publicizethe volume in any way.) But I alsopromise you that this book exists, and that I have it on my shelves. (I am filing it in the “Cult” section of mylibrary. It is nestling comfortablyagainst Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.)

Onething nice I can say about Valentinus and Marcion. They appear to be quite sincere. They are doing their best to questionanything that to their mind distorts the true Christian Faith, and are preparedto jettison most of their own Protestant heritage as quickly as they havealready, like most Protestants, jettisoned the Roman Catholic heritage. They are striving to question long-standingpresuppositions, however entrenched these might be in Protestant praxis. But the one presupposition that they do not seemto question is the one fundamental to all fundamentalists—namely that the NewTestament gives us a blue-print for how to “do” church, and that we shouldfollow it slavishly today.

That is, Valentinusand Marcion have rejected the notion (probably without knowing it) that the NewTestament is rooted and situated within the flow of history. Any development that took place after thelast New Testament document was penned is simply rejected out of hand as dilutionand distortion, as a paganization of the pristine Faith. Thus they pretend that they are still in thefirst century and try to reproduce its practices. Even here they are not self-consistent, forif they really wanted to reproduce the ecclesiastical life of the first centuryand “do church” like they did then, they would not refer to the New Testamentas an authoritative body of literature, for the concept of a “New Testament”(i.e. the canon) was a much later development. They would not even read from the four Gospels, for the churches to whomPaul wrote did not read any of these Gospels, since they had not yet beenwritten. The stories of Jesus circulatedthen as part of an oral tradition (Acts 20:35 preserves a fragment of this oraltradition, one which did not make it into any of the four Gospels). Rejecting the principle of valid anddivinely-led development is therefore not “on” for the Christian, for use ofthe New Testament canon presupposes it. We can have confidence in the Church and the developments that iteventually accepted. Christ promisedthat He would guide His Church into all truth (Jn. 16:13), and there is nosuggestion that the promise had an expiry date. When Christ said that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church(Mt. 16:18), He didn’t add, “at least not until the beginning of the secondcentury”.

In future posts, Iwould like to examine The Red Bookmore thoroughly, even as Lewis examined TheGreen Book—and not simply because the book needs an answer. It doesn’t really. If one committed oneself to answering everyidiotic critique of the Faith, one would never have time to sleep. But I would like to examine it because it by examiningits mistakes, fallacies, lies, and half-truths, we may come to understand thetruth of our Orthodox Faith more fully.

Loving the Apocalypse

2012-02-04T21:39:00.000-08:00

Ever since I first became a Christian in1970, I have had a special love for the Book of Revelation. I would spend hours and hours reading everycommentary I could find in the various colleges of the Toronto School ofTheology, reaching into dusty corners of their libraries to pore over volumesthat had never before been checked out by another living soul. I was obsessed, and on fire to learn as muchas I could. (I have since had to unlearnmuch of that learning, but that is another matter.) The Apocalypse and I go way back.

Some of thisoverwhelming interest came to me from my involvement with the Jesus People. In the Jesus Movement (the womb from whence Icame), there was a great enthusiasm for all things prophetic, especially theBook of Revelation. There was, however,little understanding of the apocalyptic genre, and books like The Late, Great Planet Earth taught usto view the Book of Revelation as a series of predictions of future events(which is emphatically not the way toread that genre). Moreover, the popularapproach poured the Apocalypse, the Book of Daniel, and St. Paul’s teaching on “the man of sin” into the same hermeneutical blender, assuming that all these referred to thesame events, and from it prepared a potent prophetic cocktail. Most of the Jesus People I hung out withassumed that those apocalyptic events were soon to be fulfilled (the author of Late, Great Planet Earth more or lessset 1988 as the terminus date), and we were all living in state of highexcitement. Those were the days. We were, of course, crazy.

Next,as I kept reading, I discovered that all Christians since the days of theapostles did not, in fact, share this view, which we characterized as“pre-mill, pre-trib”. (Don’t worry aboutthe terms; it’s a long story.) APentecostal pastor, a dedicated man of faith by the name of H.A. Maxwell Whyte, introduced me to the viewof the classical Reformers, which identified the Antichrist with the Pope. In this view, the Book of Revelation containsa series of future events, stretching from the time of the apostles to theSecond Coming, with the predicted Reformation holding pride of place, as theChurch battled the papal Beast. Thisview shared with the “pre-mill, pre-trib” view the understanding that theApocalypse contained a series of predictions for which one could findindividual, specific historical fulfilments. (One of the bowl judgments of Rev. 16 was supposed to be the FrenchRevolution; I forget which one.) To usmoderns, this view sounds, if possible, even whackier than the previous one, butit can at least claim historical pedigree, since Luther, Calvin, Knox, and thetranslators of the Authorized King James Version held to it. (Read the original Dedicatory Epistle in theKJV which flatters King James as God’s instrument whose writings “hath givensuch a blow unto that man of sin [i.e. the Pope], as will not be healed”.) Never mind that this view cannot stand up toreal historical scrutiny, and that it equates “the Church” with “the westernChurch”. In its time, it was all therage among Protestants, and it won me over too. Thank you, Pastor Whyte.

AsI kept on reading both history and Scripture, however, I could not shake thefeeling that the events of the Book of Revelation bore eerie resemblance to theChurch’s early struggle with the Roman Empire, and that the Beast was theEmperor of pagan Rome.My classical Protestant view of the Apocalypse kept getting refined andretooled and revised until eventually it died the death of a thousand exegetical cuts, andI had to abandon the view of classical Protestantism entirely. I came to see that the whole Apocalypse wasaddressed to the situation of the seven churches of Asia (no surprise), andthat it was about the struggle of those churches with the power of the State, thecity that sat on seven hills and reigned over the kings of the earth (see Rev.17:18). This first century shoe hasproven to fit a great many other feet, and those who find in it a reflection oftheir own modern struggle with totalitarian power are not wrong.

AsI said, my love for the Book of Revelation goes back a long way, and when Ifirst started writing the commentaries that would at length become the OrthodoxBible Study Companion series published by Conciliar Press, I started with theBook of Revelation. Writing it was alabour of love. I am delighted to sharemy labours now with you. Those labourscan be accessed here.

What is the Language of the Church?

2012-02-02T21:58:00.001-08:00

Every religion seems to have its owncharacteristic language. For Islam, theclassic language would be Arabic. Forwestern Christianity (as history books tell us), it would be Latin. What would be the classic language ofOrthodoxy?

One is tempted to answer: Greek. The New Testament was written in Greek (the international language ofits day); the discussions and definitions of the Church’s Ecumenical Councilswere conducted and hammered out in Greek (since those Councils were all held inthe eastern part of the Roman Empire); and many of the Fathers wrote inGreek. Would the defining language ofOrthodoxy be Greek?

Close,as they say, but “no cigar”. In thedefining moment of the Church’s life, on the Day of Pentecost, the apostles didnot all speak Greek. They spoke avariety of languages, languages that were understood by “devout men from everynation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). ThePentecostal miracle of speaking in tongues revealed that all the languages ofthe earth would henceforth be equally suitable for the proclamation of theGospel. The New Testament may have beenwritten in Greek, but it was capable of translation into any other language, ina way that the Muslims say that their Qur’an is not. (To this day, Muslims insist that their Qur’an,as the ippsissima verba of Allah,cannot properly be translated from the Arabic, and “translations” of their bookdo not bear the title, “The Qur’an”, but rather “The Meaning of the Qur’an”.) Christians, in contrast, have always insistedthat the Greek of the New Testament can, and should, be translated into all thetongues of men.

Isthere then no language that Christians can claim as characteristically theirown? I believe there is. It is the language of Canaan,and by this, I do not mean Hebrew. Whatdo I mean by “the language of Canaan”? Read all about it here, in my article postedon “The Sounding” blog.

Launching "The Sounding"

2012-01-29T17:18:00.000-08:00

Early in February, the Orthodox Christian Network (or OCN) will relaunch its blog, "The Sounding". The OCN, headquartered in Forth Lauderdale, Florida, is a media agency of the Episcopal Assembly of North and Central America, an inter-jurisdictional assembly of Orthodox bishops that come together to coordinate Orthodox life on this continent. It uses modern media to raise the awareness of the Orthodox Faith in the minds of the general population. (The bishops of our own OCA are an integral part of this Episcopal Assembly.)
The OCN's blog is entitled "The Sounding" in reference to a nautical term about measuring the depth of the surrounding waters. The blog aims to do precisely that--to probe the depths of the Orthodox Faith. Along with other authors, clergy, laity, and bloggers, I will be one of the regular contributors to the blog, posting once a month. You can find the blog here at: http://blog.myocn.com/. A video promoting the blog may be found here. I hope that you will look at the new blog regular, and that you will enjoy my own posts there.

What's Wrong with Gay Marriage?

2012-01-25T16:03:00.001-08:00

Thebest place to access the views, questions, prejudices and challenges of theWorld is, I believe, the office water-cooler. The next best places would be the HuffingtonPost and (for Canadians), the CBC. The water-cooler however retains its pride of place as the site moreoften visited by the common man who, if he retains his common sense, tends toavoid the Huffington Post and theCBC. Anyway, it was at the officewater-cooler that the common man (in this case, a woman) was expressing thecommon view on gay marriage, and asking with some anger, “If two guys love eachother, why can’t they get married?” Theanger accompanying the question indicated that the speaker thought that the traditionalprohibition of gay marriage was morally abhorrent (my phrase, not hers), and shewas reacting angrily, I suspect, because she discerned in the opposition to gaymarriage just one more wretched example of how those wretched Christians arewretchedly imposing their narrow, irrational, bigoted and wretched views on therest of us. In the old days, we wretchedChristians were blamed for incestuous orgies (what else would all that secrettalk about “the Kiss” and “brothers and sisters” mean?), and for cannibalism(“eating the Body and the Blood”? Ehwhat?) Now we wretched Christians areblamed for the sin—rapidly becoming the hate crime—of “homophobia”, which is apparentlydefined as any dissent from the secular view that homosexual orientation andlife-style are equally on par with heterosexual orientation andlife-style. The Secular Inquisition hasmade its ruling; such dissent is no longer allowed in polite society. Enthusiasm for Gay Rights is required, andmarching in the Gay Pride Parade is acceptable as sufficient evidence of such enthusiasmfor those aspiring to political office.

So,what is wrong with gay marriage? It’s a reasonable question for water-coolerphilosophers: if two guys love eachother, why can’t they get married? Thequestion strikes us as reasonable only because we are modern. Ancient people (that is, earlier than 1960),be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim or pagan, would have regarded the phrase“homosexual marriage” as essentially oxymoronic, a contradiction in terms. Yes, pagans too. Pagans such as those living in the Roman Empire in the time of Christ generally had noproblem with homosexuality (word had it that even Socrates could swing bothways), but they separated it entirely from marriage. Pagans, in other words, though not theslightest bit illiberal, could at least think. They had no problem with a man fornicating (or “hooking up” as we callit today) with any number of women, or with any number of men, or any number ofboys. But all this sexual activityhad nothing to do with marriage. Marriage, as ancient pagan, Jew, Christian, and Zoroastrian knew,involved man and woman, and resultant babies whose legitimacy was rooted in thelegal obligations the biological parents owed to each other. Accordingly a pagan man might have a wife andlegal heirs, as well as other women (and men or boys) on the side. Presumably he had the sense to keep them areasonable distance from each other. (Wethink of the toast: “To our wives andsweet-hearts—may they never meet.”) Forthe ancients, marriage was the institution in which babies were produced andfamily happened.

Itis therefore difficult to answer the question, “what’s wrong with gay marriage”because we have forgotten what marriage is, and we have forgotten this becausewe live in a culture of contraception, one which has pretty much sunderedsexual activity from its usual result, which is procreation. For us moderns, love is a feeling, andmarriage is simply one way of celebrating this feeling. Why shouldn’t gay men who have the feelingalso be allowed to have its celebration? Marriage has nothing necessarily to do withchildren, but rather with this feeling of love. Children are not necessarily a part of the package. They are considered optional, and not a partof marriage’s essence.

Donot misunderstand the use of the phrase “culture of contraception”. Like Fr. John Meyendorff (in his book Marriage: an Orthodox Perspective) andother contemporary Orthodox ethicists like him, I accept that artificialcontraception can be used responsibly by devout Orthodox Christians. I do not agree with Pope Paul VI’s encyclicalHumanae Vitae which famously outlawedartificial birth control for Roman Catholics, nor do I agree with his view thateach sexual act must be open to the possibility of procreation. (I do not even think that this view isself-consistent, since it allows for Natural Family Planning, which preciselyaims at allowing a sexual act without the possibility of procreation. It uses calendars more than rubber, but thegoal is the same.) My problem is notwith contraception as a practice, butas a culture. We now no longer assume that sex and babiesgo together, and if sex (or “hooking up”) results in pregnancy, we areshocked. Our reigning culture, throughcountless movies, novels and popular songs, teaches us to expect that sexualactivity is always: 1) free fromemotional complexities; 2) expected of all adolescents and adults, so that a“Forty Year Old Virgin” is lamentable and a fit subject for a comedy, and 3)not likely ever to result in pregnancy. When any of these taught expectations are not fulfilled, we aresurprised. You’re pregnant? What’s wrong with you? I wanted us to keep having sex. Who said anything about babies?

Theancients stood outside this culture of contraception (partly perhaps becausethey lacked the technology for such a culture). For them, marriage, defined as the union and partnership between man andwoman, had as one of its main goals the production and rearing ofchildren. That is, marriage (or“family”, to give it its other name) was the factory wherein the human race wasmanufactured. It was in the family thata child had the safety to grow and learn what it was to be a man or a woman,and how men and women were expected to behave, and to treat one another. Books were not often produced to teach that,nor were they really required. Childrenlearned by watching. They watched Daddy andlearned what it was to be a man, and a father, and how men should treat women,children, and other men. They watchedMommy and learned what it was to be a woman and a mother, and how women shouldtreat men, and be treated by them. Justas according to Hilary Clinton, “it takes a village to raise a child”, soaccording to the witness of human history, it takes both a dad and a mom toeffectively transmit gender roles. Asingle gender alone cannot do the job, because gender roles are not concepts tobe learned, but realities to be absorbed, and one needs to observe thecomplementarity of both genders interacting to absorb the differences properly.

Genderis basic to human nature, and its lessons, learned by watching, usuallyreinforced the basic way they were created. Thus nature and nurture alike contributed to their healthy adultfunctioning as men and women. That ishow society replenished itself, and maintained stability and equilibriumthroughout the centuries. (It is alsowhy the State has a stake in the institution of marriage.) Sometimes nature slips up (though I suspectwhen one cuts through the barrage of propaganda one finds that instances oftrue sexual inversion are comparatively rare). Sometimes nurture slips up, the Daddy and/or Mommy do a supremely badjob of imaging healthy gender roles and of raising emotionally healthychildren. But the general theory, whichholds that both nature and nurture have a role to play, seems to have workedout in practice and produced generation after generation of stable and healthychildren. If the theory werefundamentally unsound, the race would have lost its stability long ago, and wewould not be here. Family as factory forthe manufacture of the human being, I suggest, has been doing okay. And the transmission of gender roles is amajor cog in the machine producing healthy men and women.

Itis just here that the concept of gay marriage becomes problematic. The problem is not only that nature decreesthat two gay men cannot reproduce and that their sexuality can never result inchildren. Our culture of contraceptionfinds no problem with that, since it has already separated sex fromprocreation. Two gay men can havechildren by adoption (see note below). But though nature can be side-stepped like this, nurture cannot. Two gay mencannot image or transmit by example to the adopted children what it means to bea man or a father, because they do not know or experience it themselves. Two gay women cannot image or transmit byexample what it means to be a woman or a mother for the same reason. To be sure, they can transmit many otherworthy things—things like compassion, courage, a good sense of humour, andsocial conscience. But the crucialingredient of gender role remains beyond them, and that lack makes itimpossible for them to fulfill the historic role and task of being fathers andmothers, which is one of the purposes of marriage. Children raised in such an environment willretain a skewed understanding of human nature—one which sunders procreationfrom the essence of marriage and which remakes the concepts of masculinity andfemininity according to utterly new (and untried) canons of the brave newhomosexual world.

Thisdoes not mean, of course, that if society allows Gay Marriage, and a Justice ofthe Peace or some liberal clergy pronounce them “man and spouse” then thewheels will fall off western civilization by a week next Thursday. But it does mean that changes will have beenput into place which will eventually work themselves out in many unforeseenways in the generations to come. Genderis sufficiently basic to human nature that messing with it and altering thenature of marriage so fundamentally will produce many far-reaching changes. The family factory is not that busted, and ifwe “fix” it or tamper with it, the resulting human product will be altered inmany unforeseen ways. Obviously I cannotelaborate in which ways, or they would not be unforeseen. But fifty or a hundred years after puttingthe leaven of gay marriage into the lump of what it means to be a family, wemay be confident that the lump will be pretty thoroughly leavened. And this resultant bread (to continue tometaphor) will not be Wonder Bread. Itwill not (as Wonder Bread originally advertised) build strong healthy bodies twelveways, nor contribute to the health of our civilization. Why should Gay Marriage be disallowed? Because it eventually will alter what we meanby family, men, and women, and this alteration will not be for the better. If and when that happens, those gathering atthe water-cooler generations hence will not look back on us with favour.

Note: I note in passing that this means that child-rearing in a homosexual world mustof necessity be culturally parasitical–or if you like, dependent upon others. That is, ‘gay’ couples can only rear childrenbecause ‘straight’ couples have them for them. This is not the case for adoption on the part of ‘straight’ couples; itis only accidently dependent uponothers, whereas in the case of homosexual couples it is dependent upon others necessarily and essentially.

Back to the Catacombs

2012-01-16T10:07:00.000-08:00

Fr.Alexander Schmemann, in his essay “AMeaningful Storm”, described the history of the Church as consisting of aseries of layers. The earliest layer (andmost fundamental, I would suggest) is that of the early church, a time of paganpersecution when the Church lived its life in the catacombs as a hounded andillegal sect. (Well, it lived in thecatacombs metaphorically speaking—the Sunday service never was actually held inthe catacombs, which were places of burial.) Then came the second layer, after the Peace of Constantine, when thefirst Christian Emperor called off the dogs of persecution and gave the Churcha privileged place in the sun, beginning the long and glorious Byzantineexperiment of Church-State symphonia. After about a millennium, when the Empiresuffered increasing reversals and eventual overthrow in 1453, this was followedby the third layer, characterized by the growth of national churches in thevarious territories of what used to be the Byzantine Empire. It has been called Byzance après Byzance, (Byzantiumafter Byzantium)when the double-headed eagle of Byzantine Rome made a reprise role among thenewly-formed nations in the Balkans.

The Orthodox Church in NorthAmerica, of course, while inheriting all this layered history, neverexperienced it directly, being far from the territory of Byzantium. North America did, however, experience waveafter wave of immigration, and became a kind of receptacle for a whirlpool of pietyand practice from the Old World. And though some would minimize the Christianfoundations of America, it can make a credible claim to have been a Christiannation: Abraham Lincoln called itscitizens on three separate occasions to “a day of humiliation, prayer andfasting” in times of national crisis; the motto “In God We Trust” is famouslyinscribed on its currency; and Christian holy days still offer the occasionsfor its public holidays. Even north ofthe USborder, in the previous generation of the ‘50’s, pretty much everyone went to“the church or synagogue of their choice”. It wasn’t exactly Byzantiumor Holy Russia, but it sure felt Christian (especially, one imagines, to itsJewish population).

As anyone can see who hasn’t justemerged from a long snooze like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, things havechanged. Our long kick at the Byzantinecan is over, and we now live in a militantly post-Christian culture. Witness the notorious 1989 “work of art” by American Andreas Serrano “PissChrist”, consisting of a picture of Christ in a container of urine, andshow-cased in the Vancouver Art Gallery. Witness the current debate over homosexual marriage— for it doesn’tmatter which side “wins” the debate; the very fact that it can be held revealsthat a Christian cultural consensus has been lost. Culturally-speaking, it is always open seasonon the Christians, for Christian symbols and beliefs can be openly mocked in away no others can in North America. (If you doubt this, ask yourself what thereaction would’ve been to a “Piss Mohammad” art exhibit, and whether or not anart gallery of a major city would have allowed it to be shown.)

So what does this mean? I would suggest it means that it is time to “returnto the catacombs”. Please don’tmisunderstand me: this does not mean that we opt out of publicdebate, or cease to vote, or refuse to run for office. It does not mean that we no longer value thegood things in North American culture (including the freedom of speech todebate unpopular things). It does notmean that we eschew patriotism, as if love of country and love of God weresomehow incompatible. (Byzantium at least taught us that.) It does not mean that we fill the moat, pullup the drawbridge and retreat into a frightened and paranoid huddle, fearingany contaminating contact with the world.

What then does it mean? Life in the catacombs simply means that weacknowledge that to be a confessing Christian involves embracing a life that isnow in open conflict with the reigning values of our culture. And, I further suggest, this involves thefollowing:

1. We must at all costs retainthe world-affirming sacramental approach of Orthodoxy and refuse to adopt acultish mindset. In a lecture inDelaware in 1981, Fr. Alexander spoke of the need to live “between Utopia andEscape”, avoiding the extremes of imagining we could create Utopia through ourown efforts, or of making a retreat from the world, escaping into closedcommunities dedicated to re-creating Byzantium, Holy Russia or some other mythicalversion of our past. It is significantthat the liturgies of the early church reflect a world-embracing concern forall, giving thanks for everything and offering it back to God in a spirit ofpeace and joy. One would never knowthese liturgies were prayed by people under threat of arrest and death. In “the catacombs” especially it isimportant to remember that “the whole earth is full of His glory” (Is. 6:3),and to retain the joy of living in God’s world.

2. We must recover a sense that to be baptizedmeans that we have come out of the world, and now belong not to this age, butto the age to come. Theattitude to overcome is that which equates being a Christian with being a respectable member of anearthly culture. In fact Christians havealways been “a third race”—neither Jew, nor Greek (i.e. Gentile of any kind, bethat American, Canadian or any other people), but the Church of God(see 1 Cor. 10:32). We must recover asense of being different, of being, as St. Paul says, “blameless and innocent,children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perversegeneration, among whom you shine as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15). Baptism brings us out of one culture and intoanother; it is an act of spiritual emigration from this world to the next. All immigrants know they have left one countryand entered another. We too must recoverthis sense of distance from the culture around us.

3. Finally, living as a catacomb people willgive us a particular love for others who share that space, even if they are notof our jurisdiction—even if (dare I say it?) they are Christians who are notyet Orthodox. Don’t get me wrong—ourecumenical mandate to heal the schisms remains. Bluntly put, we still need to offer the fullness of the Faith to all wholove Christ, and pray for them to become Orthodox. But living as part of anincreasingly-marginalized Christian minority means the things we share withnon-Orthodox Christians are more important than the things which separate us,and nothing drives that point home like persecution targeting all who confess theHoly Name. It is possible that what theWorld Council of Churches could not accomplish, increased hostility fromoutside the churches will.

Inconclusion, one might think that a “catacomb” existence would be a cramped one,darkened by fear and hopelessness and depression. I assert the opposite. The catacombs (as the early church knew) areillumined by the light of Christ, and made spacious by His joy which swells theheart. And when things get really bad,we have been told to straighten up and lift up our heads, because ourredemption is drawing near (Lk. 21:28). Life in the catacombs will be just fine, because in the catacombs or outof it, we live as glory-bound children of God.

E Pluribus Unum?

2012-01-10T17:09:00.001-08:00

The Latin phrase e pluribus unum is found on the seal of the United States, adopted by an Act of their Congress in 1782. It was considered de facto as their national motto until 1956, when the motto “In God we trust” was officially adopted. E pluribus unum means “out of many, one”, referring to the many individuals and states becoming one single nation. It was, and is, a good motto.

The phrase could be taken also as God’s call to the many Orthodox jurisdictions in North America. There are many such jurisdictions, such as the Greek Orthodox, the Antiochian Orthodox, the Serbian Orthodox, the Romanian Orthodox, and my own Orthodox Church in America (aka “the OCA”). The list is, sadly, an impressively long one, containing both numerically large jurisdictional bodies and small ones. Each has its own gathering of bishops, its own infrastructure, its own methods of fund-raising, its own ecclesiastical department of external affairs, whereby it relates to other Orthodox and Christian bodies. And each of them acknowledges, at least formally, that the current status quo of many jurisdictions co-existing on the same geographical territory is uncanonical and needs to the changed. The ancient norms, enshrined in the canons, assumes and calls for one bishop per city, so that all Orthodox Christians in a given geographical locale are not simply sacramentally united (i.e. in communion one with another), but organically united as well, looking to one and the same bishop, and sharing the same ruling presbyterate. Having differing groups of Orthodox in the same area divided into ethnic groups is clearly contrary to the canons. From this verdict there is no dissenting voice. The bishops of all the Orthodox jurisdictions can read, and all agree that the canons require this sort of unity. We didn’t get into this jurisdictional mess overnight, but we do need to get out of it. In the terms of the old American motto, the “pluribus” needs to become “unum”.

Some Orthodox have suggested that the time for such jurisdictional unity is not yet, because Orthodoxy on North American soil is too young and immature. In this view, we need to wait until we mature more and meanwhile stay under the protection of the various mother churches in the Old World. I regard such a view as utter gas, and scarcely worth a sensible reply. We have, in fact, been on North American soil for over two hundred years, and if after that time we are still too immature to run our own organizational show, we should simply pack it in and let the adults in the non-Orthodox churches be the ones to serve Christ here. We Orthodox are, as a matter of fact, quite capable of discerning the will of Christ for the New World (as others call our home), and of striving to fulfill it.

But if all the bishops and theologians and seminary professors agree that such canonical unity is desirable and is God’s will, then why don’t we have it? In a word, because as a whole, American Orthodox don’t really want it. If we truly desired jurisdictional unity, we could have it by next week. It would require courage in dealing with the mother churches of the Old World, and humility in dealing with one another. The fallenness of the human heart and our long-entrenched stubbornness would provide lots of opportunities for patience in working with each other. But it could be done more or less immediately, if we as a total group possessed the political will for it. Why don’t we have such a political will? That is the real question, and the answer to it reveals what is really wrong with Orthodoxy in the New World.

I am a Canadian, and can speak of the Canadian situation with greater ease and certainty than the American (or Mexican) ones. But I believe that an analysis of the Canadian situation will have some applicability further south as well. Up here in Canada, Orthodoxy is tribal. That is, it defines itself and therefore survives (i.e. funds itself) in ethnic terms. No one is simply Orthodox. The Greeks are Greek Orthodox; the Serbs are Serbian Orthodox; the Romanians are Romanian Orthodox. (The O.C.A. are an embarrassment, because they have since 1970 famously and self-consciously chosen to buck this tribal trend.) This analysis and theory can be tested in a thousand ways. For example, in my neighbouring Vancouver, the church hall of the large Greek church has the names of famous Greek philosophers ingrained in wood on the four walls. Not St. Athanasios (I give him a Greek spelling for his name, although in fact he was African); not St. Gregory Palamas. Not St. Kosmos the Aetolian. Aristotle, and Plato and Sophocles. What matters fundamentally in the church wood is not faith, but famous Greek ancestry. Or take the church sign outside the local Serbian church—the lettering (in Cyrillic script) is painted overtop the Serbian flag.

This Canadian experience finds cultural confirmation in American films. When in the film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” a nice American boy converts to Orthodoxy and is baptized (in a pink wading pool, no less), he exults afterward to his fiancée, “Now I’m Greek!” Orthodoxy is being defined in exclusively ethnic terms. The church finds its core membership and its financial support on this basis. Who needs evangelism when one has abundant immigration?

I believe that this is the real reason for our corporate lack of urgency in pursuing Orthodox jurisdictional unity. Such a unity would inevitably involve some dilution of our various ethnic self-presentations to society, and a change in our various jurisdictional self-understandings. A change from the status quo is considered by some as too risky, as possibly imperilling financial survival. It is easier to give lip service to our “spiritual” and sacramental unity and live with what we have.

The problem, however, is that what we have does not give adequate expression to the Gospel. It consists too much (I won’t say entirely; that depends upon individual bishops, pastors and congregations), of presenting ourselves to the world rather than Christ. We are famous for our Food Festivals (with a church tour tacked on for those who might be mildly interested in such exotica), not for proclaiming Christ as the Saviour and hope of the world. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that he preached not himself, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and as himself as their servant for Jesus’ sake (2 Cor.4:5). In making our main message not Christ, but Orthodoxy (i.e. ourselves in our various ethnic dresses), we are doing exactly the opposite of what the apostle did, and preaching not Jesus Christ as Lord, but ourselves. The reluctance to trumpet the Gospel and to call our neighbours to repentance is deeply ingrained in North American Orthodoxy (the exceptions to this will forgive me), and the reluctance goes far up the hierarchical ladder. In reading the Ecumenical Patriarch’s well-written primer and presentation of Orthodoxy to the common man, entitled Encountering the Mystery, I could not find a single instance of our primus inter pares calling his neighbours to repent, forsake their former religions, and become disciples of the risen Son of God. I did, however, find a long section explaining the history and significance of the office of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. It is easy to preach ourselves. Preaching Jesus Christ as Lord to a hostile world is a lot trickier.

But tricky or not, it remains our task. The current jurisdictional disunity witnesses to and reveals our underlying weakness. We need to become truly Orthodox Christians first, and Greeks, Romanians, Americans and Canadians second. Pride in ethnic heritage is good, but it is not a fruit of the Spirit, and in this case the good has become the enemy of the best. We need to recover a burning desire to preach Jesus Christ to the mass of North Americans who do not know Him, and those who do not worship Him in the fullness of the Orthodox Faith. If this is our deepest desire, we will not fear to sacrifice the current jurisdictional status quo for something else. Our hearts will be anchored in Christ, not in our national pedigree. E pluribus unum. Out of many, we can become more truly one, and out of that unity, we can more effectively help our North American neighbours encounter the saving mystery of Christ.

The "Occupy" Movement

2012-01-02T23:00:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has not been comatose for the last several weeks has heard of the “Occupy Movement”, which began with the call to “occupy Wall Street” and then spread to other cities in the U.S. and Canada. I suspect that whether or not one’s city has had their main street or social venue “occupied” depends largely upon the relative size of the city. My own neighbouring city of Vancouver has been occupied. The town of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, I think, has not.

In my area, the Occupy Movement has fizzled somewhat; the movement has moved on (as movements are wont to do). I suspect it had a bit to do with the cold weather that comes in a Canadian winter, and also with the (correctly) perceived lack of public support, which made the occupiers unwilling to defy court orders to disband. The occupiers occupied major venues in public spaces, (the Vancouver occupiers camped in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery), and this effectively meant that those public spaces were no longer public. The public was very patient, (one might say “long-suffering”), but eventually they wanted their public spaces back, especially when they could not discern any real reason for their loss. I predict that when the history books documenting the significant events of the 21^st century are written up, the Occupy Movement will be consigned to a small foot-note. Even now it is becoming something of a joke. I remember seeing a poster exhorting, “Occupy Mordor—because one ring should not be allowed to rule them all”. For now, before it vanishes into historical oblivion, I would like to ask the question, “What is the meaning of the Occupy Movement in North America, and what, if anything, is wrong with it?”

People of my vintage will recall that the first people to occupy anything in America were the university students, who occupied the offices of the university big-wigs, such as those of the university dean or president, inspired by the protests used by those striving for justice in the American Civil Rights Movement. The occupation was then called a “sit-in” because it consisted of the protesters sitting in the offices of those in authority and refusing to leave until their demands were met, provoking arrest and forcible media-covered removal. The media was indeed happy to cover the sit-ins, which meshed with the hippie movement of that time. (It was followed, culturally speaking, by “love-ins”—which one imagines involved postures other than sitting, and issued fewer demands.) The sit-ins were part of an evolving culture of student protest, fuelled by youthful objection to American involvement in the war in Viet Nam. In these protests, the protesters had an argument which, even if delivered through a bull-horn loudspeaker, had least possessed coherence. They articulated a position, made specific demands, and invited a response. The inconvenience occasioned by their sitting in was intended to provoke this attention and response. Since the situations they were protesting were widely regarded as unjust, the protesters often felt the warm glow of self-righteousness. They were, in their own view, standing up against a powerful and unjust regime at great personal cost. Sitting in and marching and burning draft cards and incinerating the American flag and dodging the draft were all a part of the same protest movement.

These sit-ins are, I believe, the cultural ancestors of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Those sitting in on Wall Street have a message—namely, that the greed of Wall Street (vaguely defined) has gotten the American economy into a tremendous mess, so that the greed of the rich 1% of the population, aided and abetted by the government (“The Man” in the words of their 1960’s ancestors) resulted in much misery for the other 99%. It remains a valid point. But this fairly basic message (“greed is bad”) seemed not to be followed by any concrete demands that anyone could easily discern. This being the case, the occupation grew by reason of its very lack of concrete demands, as everyone with a grievance against anything joined in. In the Occupy Vancouver tents one found the perennially homeless, some students protesting high tuition fees, and people protesting the enforced pasteurization of milk. The local Canadian Union of Public Employees also joined in with their banners, though they had no discernible demands. It seemed as if everyone who was young or unemployed or angry or some mysterious combination of any of the above felt this was the place to be—at least during the day. Some of them went home to their warm houses at night. But they were back in the morning. Getting a warm night’s sleep, however, did not produce a more coherent or unified message, nor any concrete demands, much less any suggestion as to how the demands might be met. It seemed as if their message was, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore”, but couldn’t articulate what exactly they were mad as hell about. It looks as if they were simply angry at the fact that people as a whole were greedy, and some people—about 1% of the human race—were able to do something about it. This observation is correct, but occupying public space more or less indefinitely will not change it.

I am not here advocating defeatism or suggesting that the oppressed masses should love their chains. But I am advocating realism, and the recognition that we live in a fallen world. The misery caused to the 99% by the 1% in America feeds directly off the stupidity of the American banking system and the mess they made in the economy. This situation is new (especially for Americans), but the fact that the rich occupy (no pun intended) a privileged place in the world is hardly front-page news. In this fallen world, the rich have always oppressed the poor, and the strong have always oppressed the weak. More powerful races and tribes have often beaten up on weaker races and tribes, and nations with better armaments have usually always made life difficult for their weaker neighbours. (Ask the Scottish, the Welsh or the Irish.) This is not wonderful, and especially not wonderful for the poor, the weak and the less well armed, but it should not be unexpected, given the fallen state of the human heart. One can say to the rich and powerful, “Please do not oppress me”, and if their fallen hearts have been touched by the grace of Christ, they may indeed decide not to oppress. As Christ said, with God all things are possible, and sometimes the camel does indeed go through the eye of the needle. But not often. That is why it is ultimately useless for the protesters to protest what is, after all, the universal human condition. If one says, “I will not leave my tent here on Wall Street until the rich decide not to oppress the poor”, one will be there for a long time. The truth is that Man is greedy—and also angry, lustful, devious and lazy. A quick look at the world news will confirm this, as will a quick internal examination of conscience. This cannot be altered by hunkering down self-righteously on Wall Street. It might be altered somewhat by hunkering down prayerfully in church.

This then is my first observation about the Occupy Movement—that what it is protesting is simply the fallenness of the human race. It is not wrong to protest this, though it is mostly futile. But there are, I suggest, two things that are wrong with the movement.

First of all, the Occupy Movement divides the human race into Them and Us, the 99% and the 1%, the Oppressors and the Oppressed. This leads to a tremendous sense of self-righteousness for the 99%. This defiant sense of self-righteousness is dangerous spiritually, because those protesting the fallenness of the human race are not less fallen than anyone else. Whether the sin is greed or lust or anger or deviousness or laziness, we are all a part of the 100% of those afflicted by sin. The division of the world into two very unequal parts promotes a fanciful view of humanity. It says, “You 1% are evil, and I, as part of the 99%, am pure”. It would be more accurate to say, “We are all 100% of us equally fallen, but you are fallen in such a way as to make life economically difficult for me”, but that does not produce a Pharisaical warm glow. Avoiding a dichotomy which places us among the unfallen and pure is the safer path. The world will one day indeed be divided into a true dichotomy of sheep and goats, but that time is not yet, and none of us have the wisdom to make that division. Meanwhile, dividing the world into Us and Them contributes to our blindness and the inability to see our own sins.

Secondly, the Occupy Movement, entrenched in self-righteousness and committed to protest, misses the true opportunities that exist to change the world. We cannot persuade all the rich and powerful of the world to share their wealth and instead store up for themselves treasure in heaven. But we can help some of the other 99% by sharing what we have. It is just here that the dichotomy of 1% / 99% especially betrays us. It is true that 1% of the world owns most of the world’s wealth. It is also true that you and I in North America , as part of the 99%, have more wealth than others—such as the others in Africa, and even in your occupied home town. I could sit in my tent and protest the hard hearts of the 1%, or I could leave my tent and walk the streets and help those others of the 99% who have less than I. The Lord’s words were not directed merely to the super rich. They were also directed to me. On the day when He divides the world into two groups, placing one group on His right hand and the other one on His left, He will not ask me, “What did you protest?” He will ask me, “What did you do?” Now is the time to make sure that I can offer Him an acceptable answer. It is not about the sins of the 1%, nor about their missed opportunities. It is about my sins, and the opportunities now given to me.

"Take Up and Read" part 2: How to Read the Scriptures

2011-12-31T16:48:00.001-08:00

In our previous article about the importance of reading the Scriptures, we mentioned how a child’s words, providentially overheard by Augustine of Hippo, led to his conversion as he took up and read the Scriptures. “Take up and read” (“tolle, lege”, the words actually heard by the great North African teacher) should continue to resonate in our hearts too. If our lives are to bear fruit for Christ, we also need to take up and read the Bible, and make this a part of our daily life. The question is: how do we read the Scriptures? What things should we bring to our reading? I would mention four things.

1. The first thing we bring to our reading is a heart of humility and prayer, asking God to teach us through what we read. That is, we must read the Scriptures on our knees (spiritually speaking), or not at all. The most dangerous thing in the world is the read the Bible with a proud and unteachable spirit. God will not touch or teach with the person who approaches His Word in this way. “The Lord regards the lowly, but the haughty He knows from afar” (Ps. 139:6). Rather, “this is the man to whom I look: he that is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at My Word (Is. 66:2).

To be lowly and humble involves a willingness to be corrected. We all come from a secular culture, and we have absorbed many things from it, some of them true, some of them false. Because Scripture is not only the word of men, but also the Word of God, it stands apart from all the other literature of the world, in that its teachings are always true and reliable. Thus, when we read the Scripture we can expect some of our cherished beliefs to be blessed and confirmed, and some of them to be contradicted. Humility means the willingness not only to be confirmed when we are right, but also contradicted when we are wrong. As St. Augustine is reported to have once said, “If you only believe the parts of the Gospel you like, it is not the Gospel you believe in, but yourself.”

This faith in the reliability of Scripture is not Protestant fundamentalism (as some have imagined), but historic Orthodoxy. To quote St. Augustine more fully, “I have learned to hold those books alone of the Scriptures that are now called canonical in such reverence and honour that I do most firmly believe that none of their authors has erred in anything that he has written therein. If I find anything in those writings which seems to be contrary to the truth, I presume that either the codex is inaccurate, or the translator has not followed what was said, or I have not properly understood it.” We see here the mind of all the Fathers, east and west, and their saving willingness to be corrected from the Bible. As children of the Fathers, their willingness must be ours as well.

2. As well as imitating the humility of the Fathers, we read the Scriptures as those who have listened to their sermons and been instructed by them. We read the Bible, as it were, sitting in their lap, interpreting it in ways consistent with their interpretations. This is because before the apostles ever set pen to paper and wrote the New Testament, they also taught their churches through the living word, and these words were kept in those churches as oral tradition. The Fathers represent and carry this apostolic Tradition, and so Scripture can only be interpreted in ways consistent with what the Fathers have preserved.

This does not mean that we are to become patristic fundamentalists, so that for us exegesis becomes archaeology, a mere wooden repetition of what the Fathers have said. We are allowed the same freedom that they enjoyed. But it does mean that their basic approach is paradigmatic for us, and their basic conclusions authoritative. For example, if the patristic consensus about the New Testament is that it teaches that Jesus is divine, then any other conclusion is out of bounds. We cannot follow the creative heretics of the so-called “Jesus Seminar” in their Christological conclusions about the New Testament. We have sat and still sit at the feet of the Fathers.

3. Consistent with this patristic approach, we read the Old Testament to find Christ there. That is, the Old Testament, as well as the New Testament, points towards Jesus Christ, His Cross, His Resurrection, and His Church. This is how the apostles interpreted the Old Testament, and it points the way for us also. The Kingdom of God proclaimed by the prophets does not find its fulfillment in Zionism in this age, but in the preaching of the Gospel and the salvation offered the whole world by Christ. This means that we read the Old Testament differently from the Jews. Jews believe the ultimate fulfillment of the prophecies lies with the exaltation of the Jewish race, with a reestablished Temple and a triumphant nationalism. We assert that the Old Covenant finds its fulfillment in the Body of Christ, in the Church of God in which there is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, but a new creation (Gal. 6:15), and in a salvation which transcends literal altars, and national boundaries, and the distinction between Jew and Gentile. As St. Justin the Philosopher said in his debates with his Jewish friend Trypho, Moses and the Prophets now belong to us.

4. Finally, we read the Scriptures with all our powers, including that of the mind. Reading in humility and hoping to be taught by God does not excuse us from sweat or scholarship. Scholarship is not to be despised, but all of its useful tools must be utilized, including Bible atlases, concordances, inter-linears, word studies, commentaries, scholarly journals, lexicons. The Fathers themselves prized such scholarship (that was one of the reasons Origen got a lot of fan mail), and they bequeath this love of learning to us also. The Lord tells us to love the Lord our God not only with all our heart, soul and strength, but also with all our mind (Mk. 12:30). Part of humility is the recognition that we need all the help we can get. God will bless us and enlighten us, but not if we use supposed piety as an excuse for laziness. Study involves work.

In many icons where a bishop is portrayed, he is portrayed as holding a Gospel. It is not accidental that our leaders are portrayed as holding this Book. We are “people of the Book”, a people for whom loving Jesus also means loving the Scriptures which His providence has given to the Church. Like St. Augustine and all his other episcopal colleagues, we also are called to take up the Book and read.

A Christmas Meditation

2011-12-22T09:39:00.000-08:00

In becoming incarnate as a baby in Bethlehem long ago, God revealed a change in His modus operandi. That is, in all His previous visitations (such as His appearance to Israel on Mount Sinai when He gave them His Law, or His theophanies to Isaiah in the Temple or to Ezekiel by the River Chebar), He came to us from the outside. While residing in heaven, (I am aware of the limitations of using such spatial metaphors and language), He spoke to us on earth from a distance. The old dichotomies, held by Jew and pagan alike from time immemorial, remained intact —dichotomies such as heaven/ earth, spiritual/ physical, divine/ human. God remained out there, in heaven, far away, and we remained on earth, at a safe distance. Indeed, the whole apparatus of Law, priesthood, sacrifice and Temple was created to maintain this distance, allowing us on earth to have limited communion with the heavenly God. Despite all the talk about God’s Presence in His Temple, everyone in Israel knew that God did not reside in His Tabernacle or Temple like a man resided in his house. Even Solomon, who spent a fortune building and beautifying the Temple, knew this: “Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You—how much less this House which I have built!” (1 Kg. 8:27). God remained transcendent. His visitations to men and contact with them were visitations from the outside.

God is the God of the unexpected—which is abundantly proven by the fact that He chose to be born of a virgin. He didn’t have to choose such a biological beginning. Jewish expectation was that the Messiah would be born pretty much like everyone else, and the passage in Isaiah 7 often quoted was not interpreted by them as referring directly to the Messiah. In the Hebrew, the text said, “Behold, an almah—a young woman—shall conceive”, and it seemed to refer to events in the eighth century B.C. The word almah was translated into Greek as parthenos, a virgin, and Christians have ever since St. Matthew seen that this could not be a coincidence. But the point is that Jews did not expect their Messiah to be born of a virgin. In choosing a virgin birth for His Son God was not acting simply out of desire to fulfill Jewish expectation. He was doing the unexpected. After such a beginning, it should have come as no surprise to find Him continuing to do unexpected things, such as dying in disgrace on a Roman cross and rising from the dead shortly thereafter.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing God ever did in Israel was this change of modus operandi. For the incarnation meant that now God had invaded and was visiting us from the inside, and that the healing and salvation of the world would occur from the inside out. Everything in Israel’s sacred history had primed them to look upward and outward. Even the posture of prayer taught them this: one prayed by lifting up one’s hands and looking up to heaven. (Kneeling and bowing the head had no liturgical pedigree in Israel.) One looked up to find God, expecting to hear His voice thundering from heaven. When signs came, they came from heaven (see Mk. 8:11), and Jews were trained to think of God as enthroned in heaven far above them.

They were therefore singularly unprepared for His change of approach, and to find that God had come to live beside them. Now God could be found in their midst—going to the same school that they went to, working in the carpenter’s shop that they frequented, attending the same wedding in Cana that they attended, eating and drinking in their presence and teaching in their streets (Lk. 13:26). Poor little drummer boys could approach God on the first Christmas day and say, in the words of the Christmas song, “I am a poor boy too”. God had become a poor boy, a carpenter, a field preacher with nowhere to lay His head. He was now in their midst, Emmanuel, sharing their lot and their load—truly, the God of the unexpected.

This change of approach, this invasion from within, means that the old dichotomies have been overcome and overturned. No more is heaven incompatible with earth, the spiritual incompatible with the physical, God incompatible with Man. In Christ, divinity and humanity dwell as one, and matter has become potentially spirit-bearing. That is the point of the Church’s sacraments. They are physical, and work-a-day and common; they are also Spirit-bearing.

All the sacraments are drawn from our daily existence. Daily and common things like baths, meals of bread and wine, and oil (used as a daily cosmetic—it was only when one fasted that one refrained from daily anointing one’s head—see Mt. 6:17) became the “stuff” of sacraments. In a kind of incarnational extension, these common daily items and activities became the God-ordained means of accessing spiritual power. To receive the new birth, now one took a bath (i.e. received baptismal immersion). To receive spiritual strength and life, one had a meal of bread and wine in the Eucharist. To receive the Holy Spirit and healing, one was anointed with oil. The Church’s life was scandalously secular, in that it used these secular parts of life to a new spiritual purpose. Because of the incarnation, matter was now sanctified, and the physical world saved. Invasion and help and salvation had come—not from the outside, but the inside. God did not appear again on a fiery mountain and speak with the voice of thunder. He appeared as a baby, as one of us, and spoke with a baby’s cry. This is the true scandal and miracle of Christmas.

Admittedly, such a change of modus operandi was of course hard to keep up with. Many in Israel could not keep up, and so rejected Christ’s claim to divinity, and sank into hardness of heart. Keeping up with the God of the unexpected requires spiritual flexibility. Or, to use the Biblical term, humility. Christmas challenges us to be willing lay aside our expectations, our prejudices, our demands. We come as poor boys and girls to God, who has Himself become a poor boy for us in a manger. By coming to Him in humility, (the same way He came to us), we allow His spiritual invasion of the world to reach and heal our hearts also. Christ is born! The saving invasion has begun.

"Take Up and Read": the Importance of Reading the Scriptures

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Perhaps the most important words Augustine of Hippo ever heard came from the mouth a little kid playing a game. The child kept repeating in childish imitation of a teacher, “Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege!” “Take up, and read!” On impulse, Augustine took up the nearest book and began to read the words of St. Paul from Romans 13: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” It was all over for him. These words of Scripture provided the internal shove necessary for him to commit his life to Christ. Even in the days before Gideon Bibles, Augustine owed his conversion to reading the Scriptures.

We who are converted, who strive daily to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh, also need to take up and read. Why? For at least two reasons.

First, all of our Orthodox worship presupposes our familiarity with the Bible, its stories and images. When the Bishop visits, the choir takes up the song as he enters, “The prophets proclaimed you from on high, O Virgin: the Jar, the Staff, the Candlestick, the Table, the Uncut Mountain, the Golden Censer, the Tabernacle, the Gate Impassible, the Palace, the Ladder and the Throne of kings”. The hymn-writer who wrote this verse thought his hearers would recognize these images from the Old Testament. He assumed that all Christians knew of the jar which contained the manna, which was kept in the Holy Place and mentioned in Exodus 16. He assumed that all Christians knew of the uncut mountain prophesied in Daniel. He expected the hearers of the hymn to recognize these images as types and foreshadowings of the Mother of God. It is safe to say, however, that many if not most Orthodox today do not remember these stories with enough familiarity to instantly understand their significance when they hear the episcopal hymn. And that is a shame, because it means that much of our Church’s catechetical richness is lost to us. We are the poorer for it. There is a chasm fixed between our liturgical texts and our understanding of them, between the Fathers teaching and our capacity to receive that teaching. But the chasm is not unbridgeable. We can easily cross it by studying the Scriptures.

There is another even more important reason for studying the Scriptures than enhancing our appreciation of our liturgical hymnody. St. John Chrysostom once said, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is a great abyss.” By this he meant that if one does not know the Scriptures, it is easy to fall into the abyss of worldliness. If this was true in the days of St. John Chrysostom, when the secular world had a distinctly Christian tinge to it and when most of the population of Antioch and Constantinople went to church on Sunday, how much more true is it today, when most of our Canadian population does not go to church, and when our culture is correspondingly hostile to the Christian Faith. In the days of Chrysostom, if you followed the crowd, you would most likely find yourself in church. If you follow the Canadian crowd today, you will likely find yourself in more dangerous places.

St. Paul urged us to “not be conformed to the world, but to be transformed by the renewal of our mind” (Rom. 12:2). Phillips translates this as “don’t let the world squeeze you into its own mould”. As you may have noticed, the world is very good at squeezing, and it exerts its pressure on us every time we turn on the television, listen to the radio, or open a book or magazine—even (or perhaps especially) if the television, radio or book is about “spirituality”. The proper response to this squeeze is not to externally cut oneself off from the world, entering a monastery, or living in a self-constructed fantasy world of fundamentalism, or refusing any contact with the culture around us. The answer is internal. The Lord promised His disciples that if they drank any deadly thing, it would not hurt them (Mk. 16:18). Similarly, we can ingest our culture and live in our world and not be hurt if we have first swallowed the antidote to the world’s lies—namely, the truths of Scripture, as interpreted by the rest of apostolic Tradition. As the Psalmist, says, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to Your Word. Your Word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against You.” (Ps. 119:9,11) Ingesting the Scriptures can keep us safe.

This means, of course, that we approach our reading of the Scriptures for the purpose of transforming our lives, not just gaining intellectual or academic knowledge. Academic knowledge is wonderful, but that knowledge needs to not stay in our heads. It needs to sink down the further saving twelve inches, from our heads into our hearts. St. Paul said that the Scriptures were given “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim.3:16). If we read only to gain head knowledge, we read amiss, and our reading is dangerous, for then we might suppose ourselves to be holy when we are only learned. Being learned is great, but on the Last Day, our Lord will not inquire about how learned we were. He will inquire about how holy we were, about whether or not we let the world squeeze us into its own mould. If we reply to Him that, well, yes, we did let the world squeeze us into its mould, but we wrote some great treatises on the Maccabean dating of the Book of Daniel, we will find that this reply does not impress.

Here then is why we should read take up and read: to enrich our experience of worship in this age, and to be safe in the age to come.

Welcome to the New Edition of "Straight from the Heart"

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I am now posting on the blogger account, rather than on my old Shaw account. Older posts can be found here. More to follow soon!