Antioch Abouna

The Prince of Peace, the Dogs of War and the "Fox" on the side ...

2011-12-23T23:04:00.002Z

The devastating blasts in both Damascus and Baghdad remind us that whatever is happening in the Middle East, it is certainly not simply a matter of human rights being defended by noble rebels. Of course in Syria, the rebels have been quick to point the finger at the government for an alleged black op. aimed at discrediting their own cause.

Since 9/11 most of the conspiracy theories peddled by Islamists have centred around similar accusations; namely that the destruction of the Twin Towers was orchestrated by the US Government in order to justify a "crusade against Islam." At the time and since the western media have not given any credence to such ridiculous and immoral accusations yet now when the same accusations are being made by destabilising elements in Syria all we get from the BBC is that "we have been unable to investigate such accusations." One has to ask whether or not the BBC has made any corresponding attempt to investigate the claims of US complicity in 9/11? Of course not! No democracy would do such a thing. I don't believe so either ... but neither do I believe such a thing of the Syrian government.

The key to understanding all of this is in the fracture in Islam between extreme Sunni and Shia elements ... Christians being caught in the Middle from Egypt to Baghdad. This is fairly good coverage of this ... here.

Everybody mostly now forgets that before the Gulf Wars there was a long and bloody conflict between Iraq (at that time largely Sunni led by a secular Baathist regime which persecuted its Shia and Kurdish citizens) and Iran (Shia ... with a long grudge match against the Sunni). It is no accident, therefore, that we are now witnessing the return of Al Quaeda (Sunni) backed insurgencies in BOTH Syria and Iraq simultaneously.... the Americans now having left Iraq and about to leave Afghanistan. In Egypt the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood are mobilising to Islamicise one of the few secular, democratic multicultural states left in the Middle East.

Why does the west get this so, so wrong, time after time? I have referred before on this Blog to two possible answers to this question. Western leaders ... stupid or cunning? In the Telegraph article linked above Fraser Nelson refers to the lack of concern in the UK Foreign Office about the plight of Christians being caught in the middle of this terrible internecine strife. It's hardly surprising if the naive liberal narrative of the so called "Arab Spring" is to believed. It leaves the sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shia extremists out of the picture altogether. So, I must reluctantly conclude, "cunning, not stupid." That being the case, WHO is the "fox on the side" and what is his game? I genuinely don't know the answer to that question ... but it is the only question worth asking right now.

In the meantime Christians in the Middle and Near East are preparing to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, God Himself who became Incarnate in order to bring an end to sin and death. The real danger now is that we shall be pushed out by the Salafists who want a "pure" Egypt and Sunni insurgents in Syria and Iraq for whom Christians are simply seen as an alien element ... even though the Church predates Islam there by several centuries. Will the west lift a finger to protect us? I think not. The land of our Lord's birth and its environs may well become a "Christian free zone" within a generation ... something that not even the Ottomans achieved.

It's Just Not Fair!

2011-12-01T11:42:00.000Z

The national strike by public sector workers might not have been a "damp squib" (David Cameron) but a minority vote call out was reflected in the numbers marching on our streets yesterday. It is extremely unlikely that the Coalition Government will improve on its offer to moderate the impact of pension reform, if only because the public piggy bank is empty. The government, in my view, has the economic argument with many years ahead of us of privation in the face of a global financial meltdown. It has, however, lost the political argument because the reforms are seen by many, including myself, to be unfair.

At the same time that low paid public sector workers are having their pay capped to 1% increases and are expected to pay more and work longer for the same benefit, the rich are largely untouched by these financial severities. Indeed with bonuses and salary increases approaching 50% in some sectors of City financial institutions, the claim that "we are all in it together" is manifestly absurd. If there is one thing you do not do in Britain it is to compromise our sense of "fair play" and if any government thinks that it can get away with squeezing the public sector and not at the same time discipline and reform the contemptuous fat cat scams that characterise parts of the private sector, it had better guard its electoral back.

For sure, we all know that sacrifices have to be made but when a highly privileged class of bailed out failures in the banking industry keep lining their own nests in the belief that they can sail through the present crises unscathed, then "It's Just Not Fair!" becomes a warning rather than a lament. The warning is in fact spiritual as well as temporal and political. Our Lord warned that it was exceedingly difficult for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven ... difficult but not impossible. The "difficulty" lies in the false worship of attachments to possessions and materialism as an ideology. As a down to earth Cheshire baboushka once remarked to me many years ago:- "Eh Father, there are no pockets in a shroud." There will be an accounting ... but at that time it won't be on a balance sheet.

Syria is not Libya

2011-11-14T00:55:00.000Z

The west is making preparations for military involvement in both Syria and Iran. Superficially some may think that such action, particularly in relation to Syria is comparable to the intervention and overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya. It is not. Libya was and is a uniformly Sunni Islamic country. Syria is not. Gaddafi had no friends in the Arab world. Assad may have few such friends now as well but Iran (also threatened) is a different matter. The Iranians are neither Arab nor Sunni and they are aligned with Syria.

If (God forbid) Syria should descend into civil war can the west be sure that Iran will not intervene if Syria is threatened? Maybe Hezbollah (Iran backed) will start agitating again in the Lebanon. How will Israel feel then? If Iran is herself attacked it will be a gift to Shiite propaganda that the Arab League is pro-western in this matter. Such sentiments are already being expressed by pro-Government demonstrations in Damascus (hardly insignificant in size and passion). We know that Al-Quaeda has no time for what it sees as quizling Sunni regimes whom it excoriates as doing anything to protect western oil revenues and the wealthy lifestyles that minority Sunni political classes enjoy in the modern, technocratic yet still feudal Gulf states. So, with Syria imploding, Iran exploding and yet more oil being poured on Islamist propaganda fires am I still to believe that the west is only concerned with human rights issues? As usual with Blairite interventionism one has to ask quite seriously whether western politicians in realpolitik terms are stupid or cunning. Straightforward they certainly are not. And this is in my name? More from the invariably reliable Robert Fisk ... Independent article.

Are Science and Religion Compatible?

2011-10-28T21:03:00.000Z

I was invited to speak in favour of this motion at Manchester University tonight. This is the transcript of my initial contribution:-

I address you as an Orthodox Christian priest ... by which I mean I belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church as found today in Greece, Russia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but now also in the west. This is important because not all Christians take the same approach to theology; and in this regard we Orthodox Christians do not get involved in so called “proofs for the existence of God.” Tonight, however, I am addressing something quite different than proving the existence of God, but rather the question: Are science and religion compatible?

1. Let me begin by pointing out firmly that bad religion and bad science are not compatible. But what do I mean by “bad religion” and “bad science”?

2. Bad religion seeks to challenge science in part or in whole as an alternative explanation for how the world works. Religion, however, has no competence to explain why the wind blows, why my eyes are blue or what happened at the moment of creation. These questions, these explanations, belong to science and science alone. The world is full of bad religion transgressing its limits, quite aside from the terror and violence of which it is sometimes capable. In creationist museums in the southern states of North America, for example, humans walk with dinosaurs in 6000 BC, whilst elsewhere some religious leaders, influenced by both “bad science” and “bad religion” continue their relentless efforts to infiltrate secular institutions in order to suppress scientific freedom. Unfortunately, fundamentalism is on the rise again, particularly in the west; and this is not good either for religion or for science.

3. Bad science, however, commits its own errors in turn. Bad science seeks to characterise all religion as “bad” - that is - superstitious, redundant, lazy, fundamentalist, obscurantist, unconcerned with evidence and meaningless in its information content. Now if ALL religion were like that then I would readily join forces with the atheists. Happily, however, not all religion is like this.

4. Bad science goes on to declare anything that cannot be measured and theorised as infantile thumb sucking or incomprehensible gobble-dee-gook. Emboldened, it then breaches the limits of the scientific method by asserting its own faith statements, namely, that the Cosmos is without purpose and that human morality has little if no transcendent, universal grounding. Therefore, with bad science masquerading as religion, the most one can hope for in a pointless universe is merely the chance of an excess of happiness over misery; and if intractable misery is to be our lot then stoicism is the best option in the face of such suffering and unhappiness. One cannot and should not hope for anything more.

5. Now, let’s get more positive. What about good science and good religion? Good science does not trespass the boundary of its own sphere of operation - which is to account for the world as it is. With the understanding that good science brings, as it is constantly revised and refined in the face of new data and discoveries, human society becomes better adapted to its environment and the blessings of scientific progress become clear. There is, therefore, a certain evolutionary relevance of science in the remarkable development of the human species. Without good science we would all still be stuck in the proverbial cave, sacrificing our first born to appease the rain gods. Once we understand the importance of good science for all of humanity, perhaps some will not feel so threatened by science as a whole.

6. Good religion produces holiness, compassion and justice through a relationship with the divine. Now I am definitely NOT saying that such transparent goodness ONLY comes from an explicit faith in God ... far from it. According to Judaeo-Christian-Islamic teaching we are ALL made in the image and likeness of God; and we should expect to see the goodness of God in ALL human life, irrespective of religion. But some of us, perhaps many of us, can only be transformed by goodness through a personal, loving relationship with God. Science can describe this search for goodness and this relationship with God in its evolutionary aspects in terms of human psychology and personal and community behaviour, including the striving for altruism and self-sacrifice. Good science can even explain goodness in naturalistic terms through neuro-chemical processes in our brains and the emergence of consciousness, but good science cannot judge one way or the other whether the God at the other end of this putative relationship exists or not. Neither can religion “prove” such a God or its insights into how to live in the world and relate to others as being eminently sound. However, what good religion can do is offer an invitation and an example, as the psalmist says, to:- “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8)

7. Now all of this has nothing to do with the disastrous attempt of bad religion to explain the world and its natural operations with revealed faith rather than scientific enquiry. Orthodox Christianity say against this:- “God does not explain anything. Things explain God.” What do I mean by this statement?

Orthodox Christians do not believe in God in order to satisfy their ignorance about the world; in short, to give them a comforting bogus alternative to the operations of science. We need to start the other way round, with the operations of science and seek to understand how thereby creation reveals God. One of our 7th century saints, Maximos the Confessor, put it like this:

“The Word conceals Himself mysteriously for our sakes within the rational principles of creatures and thus He reveals Himself accordingly through the visible things as through some written signatures as a whole in His fullness from the whole of nature .... the Invisible in the visible, the ungraspable in tangible things.” (Ambigua 33)

So whenever science discovers something about the natural world, that itself is a hymn of praise to the Creator, even if science itself must not put it in those terms.

8. With the aphorism:- “God does not explain anything, things explain God” clearly understood, religion and science can then walk side by side and contribute each other’s truths (with a small “t”) to the one Truth of humanity (with a capital “T”) in all its diverse forms. That unifying Truth affirms the reality and the relevance of both good science and good religion. We can all be empowered to seek that fullness of Truth in our different paths without attacking each other but by listening and learning with humility and grace.

9. Believers will say that the one composite Truth has its ultimate source in God. However, accepting that this ultimate source is in God is not necessary in order to discover some important aspects of the Truth by using all those diverse and complementary means that we have developed whether scientific, artistic, humanistic or religious. Truth is one and it must not be allowed in human terms to destroy itself from within through futile competition between its several parts. Good science and good religion, therefore, are indeed compatible. We each have personal responsibilities to advance that harmonious interaction by the way we live our lives. We each make our own personal choices, but I deeply believe that humans together can choose to advance both good science and good religion for the benefit of us all.

A Very Old Fashioned Atheist

2011-10-26T22:48:00.004Z

I attended a disappointing debate tonight at Manchester University ... a face off between the atheist Professor Peter Atkins and the Christian apologist and philosopher, Dr. William Craig. I say disappointing because Atkins proved to a very old fashioned atheist, not in any way a match for the erudition and sparkling brilliance of Craig.

Atkins is one of the last of a dwindling breed of positivist atheists of the old school in whose company we might number Bertrand Russell and Freddie Ayer. Atkins is a chemist so we should not be surprised that, without quoting him, he should venerate the great Laplace who famously declared concerning God: "I have no need of that hypothesis."

For Atkins "God" is simply a ridiculous competing explanatory principle for the world that science and science alone must decode. On this ground he was as equally excoriating of philosophy as theology. So "God sneezes and the east wind doth blow." This is very old hat "God-of-the-gaps-stuff." Apart from a "Christians eat babies" type horror story at the end of the debate about a fundamentalist pastor instructing his faithful to throw away their pill bottles he had only one theme, and that belonged to Laplace. Of course we also had some extraordinarily blind asides. Consider Voltaire's "As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities." So, who exactly were the architects of the "Reign of Terror" then? Be careful of that old lady who believes in faeries .... she may be prove to be an axe murdress!

Anyway my main point is that there seems to be an intellectual deterioration in these atheists. They have become irrational angry old men, somewhat disoriented by the fact that religion has not withered on the vine as they had once hoped. Reduced to emotive rhetoric and unsubstantiated declarations on the folly of religion and the impossibility of miracles Atkins failed even to evoke sympathy in his hearers (judged by the length of the applause; unaccountably the floor was not allowed to speak). No wonder that Dawkins would not debate with Craig. I doubt whether any of these popularising atheists (old or new) would have proved his match. Bring it on!

A Future for British Orthodoxy

2011-10-07T17:09:00.003Z

This blog has been inactive for a long time. I apologise to those readers who have come here occasionally expecting to see something vaguely interesting. The truth is that the three years until the summer I had been writing, albeit with much help, a series of 100 lectures forming part of our E-quip Diploma Orthodox Christian education program. This, combined with other teaching duties in the church dragged me away from the blogosphere. With E-quip now in place and the assistance of a deacon, Father Christopher and Subdeacon Emmanuel, I am now able to return to this blog and perhaps offer you something interesting to ponder from time to time.

British culture is strange and I speak as an Englishman. We have a reputation for being anti-intellectual yet our history has contributed some of the best minds on the planet. We were on the ground floor of the Industrial Revolution and yet we seem strangely ambivalent about its fruits, especially in the modern era. We have no written constitution and seem strangely deferential to the ruling class rather to the right or to the left. However, our radical tradition from religion through politics to humour is as strong as ever. Of course we could be simply conflicted and messed up, not really sure what path we should follow, continually vacillating between different traditions and options. Personally I take a more positive position. Putting this all together I think we treasure personal freedom and are suspicious by nature of absolutism and fanaticism. We are not without passion and commitment but this is rarely clothed with rigid ideology or unquestioned dogma. We are only slowly roused to action yet when crises present themselves, we rise to our best.

I present this little vignette of our culture because I want to make a point about Christianity here in these islands. With the possible exception of Celtic sectarianism (which arguably has roots in disagreeable English attitudes and actions) imposed religious conformity simply does not work in Great Britain. We do not believe things because someone of great importance has told us that we should. We make our own mind up. Yet, for all this, we have a deep and strong feeling for traditional expressions of faith and life which are nonetheless open and in dialogue with contemporary culture. For centuries (perhaps since the 14^th) the British have known that something has gone radically wrong with the Christian Church. Many at the Reformation thought that they had found the answer. Protestantism particularly appealed to that idiosyncratic and rebel streak in our national psyche. Many who still think about these things have concluded in more recent times that these reformed traditions have not proven durable. From the melancholic abandoned Welsh chapels of the revival to the steady post-war decline in all the denominations it can be clearly seen that Christianity in its more usual variants lays flat out and unconscious, unable to stir itself and stand against a new, aggressive secularism and atheism. Notwithstanding the fact that our historic antipathy towards Rome remains intact only by virtue of lingering national prejudices, few seriously expect Christian renewal to come from that direction. The two cultures, national and religious remain too disparate.

Orthodox Christianity from which we might and should expect much has not yet woken up to the parlous spiritual state of this nation. However, there are hopeful signs that some Orthodox with a different national, cultural and linguistic heritage are indeed waking up to the fact that this is not a nation whose way of life and mores is any longer informed, influenced and guided by its historic heterodox confessions. Now is the time, therefore, when we, as the Catholic and Apostolic Church of these Isles need to rise to the occasion and present Christianity as it truly is; not a dead and failing institution but a vibrant, compassionate, historical and fresh expression of the God who for our sake took flesh and the humanity of every culture and place in order to redeem it. At its generous best, Orthodox Christianity has a character which is supremely fitted to the best of our own British culture and although this applies to every nation under heaven the Orthodox Church must not be slow in recognising the possibilities presented to it by God in order to connect with that right here and right now.

Not Exactly “Bah Humbug!” but …

2010-12-16T16:23:00.001Z

Orthodox Christianity has a complicated attitude towards western Christmas. First there's the date. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to put people right on this when they have said:-“Oh, your Christmas is later in January isn't it, the 6^th I think?” “Er no,” I reply. “We use the New Calendar so our celebration is on the same day as yours.” True, Easter (which we call Pascha) is usually on a different date and the same across the whole Orthodox world (except Finland for reasons I won't go into now) but Christmas (which we call Nativity!) is celebrated on two different days across the Orthodox Church. In the Slav and some other traditions Christmas is celebrated on the civil calendar on the 7^th of January (not the 6^th) but this is only because the Church in Eastern Europe, Russia, Mt. Athos and Jerusalem did not change the Church Calendar when the civil calendar, starting in the 16th century in Western Europe advanced 11 days to take account of inaccuracies in the astronomical measurement of the year which had accumulated over the centuries. As of now this gap and the reckoning has widened to 13 days which is why Old Calendar Orthodox churches celebrate the Nativity of our Lord 13 days after 25^th December on 7^th January. Remember though that even there the Church Calendar is still showing 25^th December. Confused yet?!

The complications don't end with the date. Please don't say to an Orthodox priest (particularly):- “Oh I suppose this must be your busiest time of year,” because it isn't. Far from it; is one of the slowest and easiest times of the year … except of course a priest is never off duty. Pascha (Easter) is a time when we have more services; here in Manchester in my parish at the last count some 15 services across nine days. At the Nativity (Christmas) I shall have just 4.

It’s not that the Orthodox don't believe in Christmas for goodness sake! The birth of Christ, the feast of the Incarnation is a major feast of the Lord and at the heart of our faith but we don't go in for wall to wall carol services and all the commercial razzmatazz but now makes of Western Christmas a feast of Mammon. There are some theological differences as well though and it must be conceded that notwithstanding the importance of the Incarnation it is the death and resurrection of Christ at Easter that provides the main driving force of Orthodoxy’s confession of faith. Since culturally, this has never been quite the same in the West and particularly in northern Europe, the Christian perception of Christmas has been obscured by the rather bloated growth of a secular sentimentality concerning the birth of the “baby-Jesus.” Even that is gone now to be replaced by an orgy of consumption in a secularised version of the feast. So there is something of a muted “Bah Humbug!” coming from the Orthodox direction here. Won’t you let us give us your Christmas back please?

The "E" Word and the "P" Word

2010-09-04T22:41:00.000Z

In the first case I refer of course to "evangelism." This has become a very difficult word to use in polite Christian circles today. We Orthodox, sadly, may have very confused notions about "evangelism" regarding it as synonymous with that other great unmentionable, "proselytism." When words have become debased in common usage, it is often helpful to turn to the dictionary for a more unbiased definition:-

"Evangelism" - preaching of the gospel
"Gospel" - etymology: "godpsel" (Old English: good news)*
"Proselytism" - (from "proselyte") - convert from one opinion, creed or party to another
*an exact translation from the Greek "evangelion" = good news
(source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

According to these definitions, "Evangelism" is a word with which the Orthodox should be entirely comfortable. Is the gospel not to be preached? Does not the Liturgy itself bid us to pray for "evangelists"? How the preaching the gospel is accomplished, however, is an entirely different matter and to this question we shall return shortly.

As to "proselytism"; well, notwithstanding the habitual response of the Orthodox ("we don't proselytise"), this also is a word with which we should have no problems. For example, regarding those whose "opinion, creed or party" is not Orthodox Christian, should we not work for their salvation by prayer, faith and good works? If we cannot agree on that then presumably there are some Orthodox who really don't mind if others perish in heresy or unbelief. Is that consistent with our faith in God who "desires that all men should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth?" (1 Timothy 2:4). At one time no Christian blinked at the idea that pagans should be proselytised or that those of any other faith or none should come to know Christ. Has this changed? If it has then the Church (the fullness of which is the Orthodox Church) has forsaken Christ's Commission:- "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." (Matthew 28:19) I cannot believe that we have forsaken that teaching, or at least, I hope not!

What then is the difference between "evangelism" and "proselytism"? Personally I don't think that there is much fundamental difference, except perhaps in that "evangelism" is a proclamation of the gospel and "proselytism" is a focussed commending of that gospel to individuals and groups. We now turn to the question of HOW we Orthodox evangelise and proselytise.

It is commonly quoted today in the Church whenever this issue is raised that St. Seraphim of Sarov's teaching exclusively and only applies. He said, you will recall:- "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved." Now, no one can disagree with this. It must come first. If we do not have the Holy Spirit, if we do not know Christ in all humility and gentleness, then we should keep our mouths firmly shut to all save our confessor before whom we should repent until we are cleansed and filled with the Holy Spirit. However, to claim that all has been said when this teaching has been followed is just plain false. A selfish spirituality in which we keep the knowledge of God to ourselves and do not share it with others will soon corrupt itself from within as the heart becomes fearful, withdrawn and cold. We should rather be like the Prophet Jeremiah: "Then I said, ' I will not make mention of Him, nor speak anymore in His name but His word was in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones I was weary of holding it back, and I could not.'" (Jeremiah 20:9)

The falsity of wordless evangelism is also exposed by the practice of the Church. Aside from all the ancient Enlighteners whom we commemorate, in more recent times there have been many Orthodox evangelists who have been quite open about preaching the gospel to any who will hear in any environment. Consider the New Martyr St. Kosmas the Aetolian, Equal-to-the-Apostles (1714 - 1779) who went about Greece preaching the gospel from village to village in the closing decades of the Ottoman Empire. Metropolitan Kallistos has called this saint the "John Wesley" of the Orthodox Church, (in fact John Wesley was his contemporary). Or what about St. Nicholas of Japan (1836 - 1912) whom God used to establish the Japanese Orthodox Church? St. Nicholas even sent out his Japanese missionaries in pairs to witness to Christ and taught neophytes in catechetical groups led and run by newly converted Japanese believers, (much again like the early Methodists with their "classes.") Then more recently still there is Hieromonk Cosmas, Apostle to Zaire (from Grigoriou Monastery on the Holy Mountain: 1942 - 1989). He exemplifies the long term nature of our commitments and centredness on God when it comes to evangelisation. I close with a quotation from this modern day Orthodox evangelist for it neatly summarises our Orthodox way of doing things:-

"The missionary is free and when he is open to the grace of God, the Holy Spirit will speak riches in his heart and indicate to him what to do, gradually and in correspondence to the development of the work. Let us leave room for prayer to act without rushing the situation with narrow logic, absolute measures or the assessments of critics at each stage."

So we should not be embarrassed or dismissive about either the "E" word" or the "P" Word. There are ample precedents for the Orthodox engaging in both evangelism and proselytism. Let us just make sure though that we really are doing it in the Orthodox Way!

The Old Hat Which is Deism

2010-09-02T12:56:00.002Z

So Stephen Hawking has discovered that he does not need the "God hypothesis" to account for creation out of nothing. Spontaneous generation is all that is required ... but you see his "nothing" is not my "nothing" because he is working from an assumption of Deism, whereas I am not.

Hawking on the BBC

This is a classic case of an atheist/former agnostic not knowing much theology. The "God-who-lit-the-blue-touch-paper" is the Deist god .... completely incompatible with most of the worlds major religions ... particularly those which subscribe to the creation 'ex nihilo' (out of nothing) belief.

The Deists, who came to prominence after the Enlightenment, believed in a god who kick-started the Universe but who then left it to its own devices having given it laws to regulate itself. Unsurprisingly these people rejected any form of interventionist god ... so prayer, miracles and the Incarnation (for Christians) went out of the window. The Deists, however, still THOUGHT they needed their god to start the whole thing off.

All that Stephen Hawking is saying is that this is unnecessary .... and I agree with him .... because, although I am an Orthodox Christian and a priest, I am not a Deist.

A spontaneous creation merely describes and explains HOW the Universe came into being. The favourite explanation today is that a quantum irregularity in the substrate vacuum superinflated and the resultant energy field eventually condensed into the baryonic matter that each one of us is made of.

Now, only a Deist god would be needed to nudge that quantum irregularity UNLESS superinflation was built into the irregularity itself. So the "nothing" of which Hawking speaks is not the "nothing" of which (primarily) monotheists speak. Strictly speaking (and here words are inadequate) we believe in "being" from "non-being," ... and whatever that seething quantum vacuum is, it is not "non-being."

So, sorry Stephen, get to grips with the theology please. At least I make an effort with the science.

The Dormition of the Mother of God

2010-08-14T10:23:00.001Z

The feast of the Dormition probably dates from the late fifth century (though it may be earlier). It refers to an actual event remembered from the beginning but not celebrated liturgically until somewhat later. It was always celebrated in Jerusalem on the same date as now. In Egypt it was celebrated on January 18th. Later it spread to other places, some choosing August 15th and some January 18th. In the 7th century, however, the Byzantine Emperor Maurice decreed that the Dormition was to be celebrated everywhere on August 15th, Later the Pope adopted the same date for the feast in the West, and it has been celebrated on that date in both East and West ever since.

In the West the feast is called the Assumption, for both Roman Catholics and Orthodox believe that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven. There is, of course, no mention of this in the New Testament. The story comes from apocryphal sources but it has a secure place in the memory and Tradition of the Church for all that. We believe it, because it accords with the experience of the Church and her theology of Incarnation and Resurrection.

The Old Testament tells us that Enoch and Elijah were assumed bodily into heaven. We believe, however, that Mary, being sanctified by grace was chosen because of her purity to be the Mother of God. This purity and God-bearing in her womb, together with her total dedication to her Son fitted her in this life to share immediately in the resurrection of her Son and so she, like Enoch and Elijah before her, was assumed into heaven. This Assumption attests to the fact that she has been deified, that is, her humanity has been glorified by God and united with him. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are promised that we also shall all be deified, achieving the likeness as well as the image of God, and receive Resurrection bodies (though for most of us all this will happen beyond this life). The Mother of God is therefore our example and inspiration. She is the first to receive her crown of glory as Queen in heaven, but no less shall we with her be kings and queens also by the saving work of God.

Although Orthodox Christians believe in the Assumption of the Theotokos, it has never been made into a dogma of the Church (as it has in the Roman Catholic Church). This is because the Dormition or Assumption is something that follows on from the resurrection of Christ but is not part of our public preaching of salvation by Christ, which dogma can only can be.
Indeed apart from "Theotokos" or "God-bearer" which is a title defending the Incarnation, the Orthodox Church has generally avoided formulating doctrines about the Mother of God. "Theotokos" requires that we believe that she is the Virgin Mother of our Lord and God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who is both God and Man. The Dormition is perhaps best summed up in one of the great hymns sung at Vespers for today (it is the last idiomelon of the aposticha):

"When you were translated to him who was born of you in an inexplicable manner, O Virgin Theotokos, there were present James, the brother of the Lord and first of the Chief Priests, and Peter, the honoured head and leader of theologians, with the rest of the divine rank of Apostles, clearly uttering divine words, praising the amazing divine mystery, the mystery of the dispensation of Christ God, and with joy preparing your body which was the God-receiving originator of life, O most glorified one, while the most holy angels looked on from on high, struck with astonishment and surprise, and saying one to another; Lift up your gates and receive the Mother of the Maker of heaven and earth. Let us praise with song her sanctified, noble body, which contained the Lord, invisible to us. Therefore we, too, celebrate your memory, O all-praised one, crying; Exalt the state of Christians and save our souls."

Returning to this Blog!

2010-08-14T10:19:00.000Z

I am sorry that I have been unable to post here for some months. I am now returning to this task and hopefully I shall be able to write some engaging, thought provoking and discussion stimulating pieces. I am starting with a straightforward piece ... my sermon for tomorrow on the Feast of the Dormition.

Global Warning! (mine them, don't fear them)

2010-01-29T18:18:00.001Z

There is a danger facing us on this planet perhaps even more severe in its implications for humanity than the global warming. It concerns the global depletion of resources and the impact this will have other seemingly ever increasing population.

Sustainable development has been an issue for decades and yet we do not seem to have made much progress in dealing with it. When I was a teen report was published by the Club of Rome called ' The Limits to Growth ' (1972). This has been updated at least twice since other writing is still on the wall. We cannot keep on living as we have without endangering the ecosystem upon which we depend, but if we must as a species continue to grow numerically and economically, then we cannot look to the earth as an infinite resource for us to plunder indefinitely.

I think we need to advance on two fronts. We must learn to live within our needs upon the earth so that the human family might flourish safely whilst at the same time recognising that if we are to have a long-term future there will come a point when we have to look for resources elsewhere. It is either this or we radically reduce population size through mandatory birth control or we let disease famine and war achieved the same result. Neither alternative is at all acceptable in my view. At the moment everyone is talking about sustainable development and this is right and good. It must be where we concentrate our efforts both to avoid the excesses of global warming and to be morally responsible agents of care for creation. However the other question that we must address is where our future resources are to come from if we are not to regress into a low maintenance Stone Age society. We have nearly exhausted the Earth’s treasures already, so the inescapable conclusion has to be faced. In the future our natural resources will have to be sought ' off-world '.

The solar system is the new frontier. Eventually there will be new prospectors but this time the untamed wilderness will be the asteroid belt and the sands of Mars not the wild West. Many people are curiously reluctant to face this issue but the logic of expansion is inescapable if population collapse is to be avoided. One thing is for certain. These new frontiers will not be opened up by governments. History has shown that whereas governments have often funded such ventures, (think of Columbus and the King of Spain), it has always been intrepid explorers and entrepreneurs that have broken the new ground.

We need now not only to curb our greed but to extend our reach. There is no incompatibility between these options. There seems no logical reason why the human enterprise should not continue to expand to the stars. Indeed our divine destiny might be precisely this: to be priests of the WHOLE of creation; to co-work with God in a transformation of truly cosmic proportions. Preserved by divine grace and energised by human dreams, is this not a worthy goal for our species 10,000 years hence?

God does not Explain Things; Things Explain God

2009-10-29T12:00:00.003Z

Humans have always tried to understand the world around them, if only to survive, and to value their place in it in order to enjoy life as beings conscious of death. In this context the theology of primitive animist faiths can be seen as a certain science; an early attempt to explain how things are by virtue of their familiar or indwelling spirits. By explaining natural processes both predictable and unpredictable within such a rational framework the world became safer, even tameable within certain limits. Eventually the sense emerged through observation of higher organising principles at work in the world, maybe even a “Highest Principle” and so a Supreme Spirit or High God was “born” out of an existing and enduring spirit pantheon.

Monotheist religions took these developments to their logical conclusion, ONLY the High God could serve the purpose of integrating a created Cosmos as a whole, the lesser spirits being demoted into avatars, angels and other created subordinate servants or manifestations. At this stage, however, it is still the One-God-Who-Is-One who explains how things are. If the wind blows, it is his breath. If the ground trembles and swallows you up, it is his anger. If the stars shine it is because he has provided guides both navigational and astrological for his children. At some point of mature reflection, however, most if not all monotheisms wake up to the fact that there are ways of understanding how the world works that do not involve the all too easy and, frankly, rather demeaning (to God) idea that he has to be invoked to explain the unexplained. If God only exists as a stop gap explanation for our ignorance about the world then he is no God at all. For God to be God He must be the God-of-the-Whole or no-God-at-all.

So, difficult though it may be for all of us in varying degrees to accept, God does not explain anything at all. We do not believe in God to satisfy our ignorance about the world; in short to give us a nice and comforting alternative to science with its seemingly Godless explanations and “theories.” If we are thinking like that we do not truly believe in God nor do we receive the world as it truly is. We need to start the other way round. God does not explain things, things explain God. Many fathers make this approach to the Cosmos and its Creator explicit but perhaps none more so than the great St. Maximos the Confessor. In Ambigua 33 he says:-

“The Word becomes thickened […] concealing Himself mysteriously for our sakes within the logoi of creatures and thus He reveals Himself accordingly through the visible things as through some written signatures as a whole in His fullness from the whole of nature and undiminished in each part, in the varieties of natures as one who has no variation and is always the same, in composites, as One who is simple, without parts, in things which have their beginning in time, as the One without beginning, as the Invisible in the visible, the ungraspable in tangible things.”

The key idea here is the “logoi of creatures” ... what I am referring to in the shorthand of this article as “things.” These “logoi” function for St. Maximos as written signatures of God-in-creation; the disclosure of God in the being and beauty of things. So, as we discover more about the being and beauty of things through science, poetry and mystical contemplation and in so doing we discover or “explain” God. St. Maximos is clear, however, that it is Christ the Word of God, the Logos of God who is concealed and then revealed within the logoi of creatures, the self same Christ who is the Logos Incarnate. To use the theological terminology of St. Gregory Palamas, we might say that the energies of God in creation are disclosed Incarnate in the Word.

Orthodox Christians with this faith do not suppose that science or the arts are alternative truth perceptions to theology. The more we discover and know about the world the stronger and deeper in Christ revealed in the very sinews and flesh of our humanity and in the very physicality of Creation itself; its terrible and majestic glory ... signatures of God, vehicles of God indeed.

Which Christ?

2009-09-24T22:36:00.003Z

This might seem a rather strange question. After all, we all know who Jesus is don’t we? Well do we? The sacrificing Christ of Catholicism is very different from the prophesying Isa of Islam. Christ the global teacher or avatar is very different from Jewish Messiah yet to come. The Christ who dies instead of me to appease God’s wrath on account of my sins is very different from Jesus the charismatic healer. From an Orthodox point of view all these “knowings” are perceived through a distorting lens. Doubtless all these traditions (some closer to Orthodoxy than others) are being sincere and indeed the depth of the piety is not in doubt. The difficult truth perhaps for many moderns to accept is that someone might be sincere .... yet wrong. But on what basis might a hypothetical impartial observer judge one account be better or more truthful than another?

All these views justify themselves in relation to a sacred text, some interpreting the same text differently, some using different texts. Catholicism perhaps is closer to Orthodoxy in one regard, but not, of course, necessarily in others. This concerns the sufficiency of any text and its susceptibility to just one interpretation. Catholicism is not “Sola Scriptura” and neither is Orthodoxy. We claim that our perception of Christ concerns the mind of the Church stretching back both to Christ Himself and the Church of the Old Covenant (Testament). We insist that the Scriptures are the authoritative core of Tradition but not its exclusive limit. It is the Church herself as the pleroma (the fullness of Christ), and that precisely in her continuity with the People of God all the way back to Genesis, which gives us the confidence to know and see Christ clearly.

The divergence between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in respect of Christ and the Church concerns Rome’s innovations which lie outside the received and ecumenical phronema (mindset) of the Church in her historical trajectory. That phronema is essentially a consensual, conciliar reality of a people gathered before the God who manifests Himself especially and definitively in Christ. No one bishop can determine that ... nor can a show of hands or the latest take on a particular biblical text. It is much more to do with the universal and inclusive prayer from the People that ascends to God and returns with the truth from the Holy Spirit. So, neither synods nor the papacy, neither a text nor a Godly opinion that has the last word but rather Christ Himself in the Church ... much less easy to define and nail down of course, but in the end both true and eternally secure.

So, outrageous though this sounds to some, it is empirically defensible to claim that true knowledge of Christ; authentic, unadulterated, undistorted actual knowledge of “He Who Is” exists fully and exclusively only in the Orthodox Church; the Church of both St. Patrick and St. Panteleimenon, (for in Christ there is neither East nor West). The ecumenical task of Orthodoxy is to call ALL peoples (Christian and non-Christian alike) into this common ground of truth concerning the Saviour. Some may choose of course to remain outside this saving grace. That is their prerogative, their choice, their call. Moving the boundaries of the Church however to include them is not a loving thing to do for it sacrifices truth to expediency and in the end loses its own integrity and, therefore, serves and saves no one. “Which Christ?” – indeed! Choose wisely, choose well.

Booo!

2009-08-04T09:46:00.004Z

In recent times there have been countless headless chickens running round the courtyard under a sky that seems to have been perpetually falling in. Alarmist predictions about total economic collapse, falling asteroids, decimating pandemics and the like have far outlasted the millennial transition, usually most noted for such scare mongering.

It’s not of course that these risks do not exist. Life is and always has been beset by dangers numerous and unseen. Part of the population, however, seems stuck in the nursery where nothing bad could or should happen. Then we have the bogus experts whose careers have been built on keeping the various bogeymen at bay, real or imagined. These have a vested interest in pandering to the fears of the worried well and the various other Chicken Littles of this world. They compete for attention with some politicians for whom the fear of terrorism, disease or natural disaster can be meal ticket to electoral success and social control. Those who are really trying to help, the professionals in the field, are continually hindered in their work by the panic inducing reactions of the risk averse and their cynical manipulating guardians.

Then there are others of course who just like a good scare. They include the sociopaths and misanthropes who relish the effects of disasters and the bored for whom the excitement of danger, any kind of danger, is far preferable to the monotony of conventional modern living ... which is why peace time armies have never been short of naive young men. But what of you and me? Go on admit it! We all like a good scare from time to time! Disaster movies attest to the universal human fascination, the adrenalin pumping thrill of everything going “belly up.”

Bad religion has also sometimes cynically used this fascination with death and destruction, both the dread and the relish, in order to control its adherents. The sociopaths have rejoiced at the pains of the damned, sadists have enjoyed their torturing of heretics, preachers have used the fear of hell to convert their hearers and the profane have shocked with their blasphemies. Mercifully such things are entirely absent from Christian Orthodoxy because we are not concerned to control and unregenerate mass of reprobates but rather we would have God restore freedom and dignity to humankind in the face of the demonic forces that oppose Him and us.

Fear and anxiety are indeed extremely potent human emotions and we have a complex and ambiguous relationship to both. The gospel, however, sets quite a different standard for fear. There is a godly fear which approaches God with reverence and awe. Against this I do not speak but there is another servile fear which has no place in Christian living. It is a fear of life, a fear of the “other”, a fear associated with punishment, a dread of death. The existence of this fear betrays an attenuated or absent sense of the love of God. Such Perfect Love casts out fear, (1 John 4:17-19). It assures of what St. Paul taught from his own experience when he wrote:- “For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's.” (Romans 14:8).

So whereas we can all enjoy the occasional good scare our hearts at deep level must know both the security and assurance that can only come with an abiding knowledge of both God’s love and providence, His own very Presence with us and in us. Against such there is no law, no threat, no ensnaring danger but only the perfect peace and glory of the saints. Perhaps it is this that this generation misses most of all.

For All the Saints ...

2009-06-13T19:39:00.003Z

From the Profession of Faith at Chrismation…

"I believe and confess that it is proper to reverence and invoke the saints who reign on high with Christ, according to the interpretation of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Church; and that their prayers and intercessions avail with the beneficent God unto our salvation. It is well-pleasing in the sight of God that we should do homage to their relics, glorified through incorruption, as the precious memorials of their virtues."

The saints personalise Christianity. There are versions of Christianity around which reduce Church life to a set of doctrines, good in themselves, but because they are not enfleshed in the lives of real people, such Christianity remains, abstract, dry, formal, conceptual. Think back to your time at school. I guess it's not the lessons you remember directly, rather the teachers who, for you, embodied and made accessible what they taught. So it is with saints. If you want to know who the Holy Spirit is, read the account of Motovilov's conversation with Fr. Seraphim. If you want to understand the place of monasticism in the life of the Church, read St. Athanasios' Life of St. Antony the Great. If you value the healing work of God, don't even read about it, just invoke the prayers of St. Panteleimon, St. Swithun or some other unmercenary healer. The saints make real, vivid and personal what we believe and how we live by those beliefs.

Secondly, the saints warm the fellowship of the Church. Being the friends of God, they are our friends as well. As friends, we should get to know them, develop a personal relationship with them. We can do this in ordinary tangible ways. Their icons are our portals into their fellowship. Their incorrupt remains are memorials of a faith and a life that is literally death-destroying by the power of God. Their prayers, when invoked, avail with God for our salvation. They are mighty intercessors before the Lord and many are the miracles that have been wrought by their prayers. It is right that we should develop personal attachments to those particular saints who speak to us, those to whom we feel drawn. In this way is the Church built up within one fellowship, the Communion of Saints, here and beyond the grave.

Thirdly, the saints provide us with living testimonies of a redeemed humanity. They show that Christian perfection is not an absurd or inaccessible goal. They are the ones whom God has touched and made whole. They shine with the uncreated light of the Godhead, irradiating their humanity with the new life of the Kingdom against which even death itself has no power. They are mirrors, as we behold them, of what we could be. They inspire us towards this goal, theiosis, the promise of a new humanity, a New Creation, transcending even the biological necessities and chances of evolution towards something sublime and true, the Love of God made visible, the birth pangs of a new age in which God shall be all and in all.

Who then could do without the saints? No-one truly calling themselves Christian. The saints are the keys toward the re-conversion of these islands to Christ. Let us honour them in our generation that others by their example, fellowship and prayers may also become Friends of God.

In the Name of God, go! (a message to our MP's)

2009-05-19T11:28:00.003Z

After Charles I, king of England, was executed in 1649, the Rump Parliament prevented Oliver Cromwell from convening an interim council to formulate a new constitution. Cromwell was the dominant figure in the victory over Charles I, but the Rump Parliament was a more conservative assembly than the body that had agreed to execute the king and abolish the monarchy. In 1653, after learning that Parliament was attempting to stay in session despite an agreement to dissolve, Cromwell's patience ran out. He dismissed the assembled members with this speech. The "shining bauble" referred to is the parliamentary staff, which must be present, by convention, in order for Parliament to sit.

April 20, 1653 - Oliver Cromwell, Republican usurper but in this matter a "good egg."

"It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money; is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? is there one vice you do not possess? ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth? ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves become the greatest grievance. Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God's help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do; I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place; go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!"

Frankenstein or Christ?

2009-05-02T13:39:00.003Z

The story of Frankenstein touches something deep inside us. The longing for immortality so cruelly expressed in this enlivened cadaver and in all the other failed human resurrections from Tutankhamen to Lenin persists. The tragic aspect concerns what we know of all such human attempts at immortality from cryogenic freezing to elixirs of life, from transhuman cyborgs to Frankenstein zombies: they are all doomed to fail. Yet humans still strive to make themselves immortal and each fatal setback does not seem to put them off. What they and we resist is the notion that THIS life does not bear within it any seed of immortality, either accessible by science or religious experience. This life always has limits from life spans to the distant but nonetheless finite trajectory of the universe. All turns to dust in the end. We still of course labour and exult in the wonder of this creation for all that, and rightly so. A creation with limits still has inestimable value and our place and calling within it reflects that. In Christian terms though this creation is dying and any attempt at amelioration is conditioned by that perspective. If then we attempt to build a human centred utopia from the raw materials of this world we shall only see corruption. This is the inexorable logic of the Frankenstein myth. Eternal life cannot be moulded from the stench of human corruption. Immortality is from God or it is from nowhere.

Of course this is the point where Christians part company with humanistic fellow travelling idealists of all sorts. On this we insist that the resurrection of Christ is our ONLY grounds for hope in eternal life; His, that is God’s, victory over death which He has imparted to our humanity in the Incarnation and sacramentally through Holy Baptism and the Eucharist. As we die to ourselves in His death, his resurrection life breaks through into our own. As we drown the old Adam in the waters of baptism so the Risen Christ is manifest in our members within the Church, the Body of Christ, (no Frankenstein body here!). As we eat of the Body of Christ and drink of his Blood in Holy Communion we taste of the goodness of the Lord in the Food of Immortality. As we embrace Christ in His embrace, as we drink freely of the Spirit outpoured for us we find, as it were, a fount of living water bubbling up inside of us to eternal life. As we die to ourselves we are born again (or from above) to a life in God that has smashed death and rendered it senseless. As we surrender this creation to God we receive in its stead a New Creation where the waters of God’s regenerative and healing Love remake and renew all things.
So Frankenstein or Christ? No contest.

Trouble in the Garden

2009-03-04T11:32:00.004Z

The story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden which is rehearsed in the Orthodox Church on Cheesefare Sunday just before the beginning of Great Lent raises the issue again of how we make sense in Christian terms of the Fall in the light of what we know now about hominid evolution. I believe that the Fathers can shed some useful light on these issues which may be an unusual insight for some since these teachers lived in an age that knew nothing of Darwin and microbiology!

Eden is about immortality and its loss or rather we should say that the Fathers of the Church held that the potentiality for immortality could have been fulfilled in Eden through obedience, (which in this context means loving fellowship with God, not craven submission but the responsibility of intimacy), but in fact this potential was tragically not realised. That's the post-fall point about the skins to cover the couples' nakedness and their need to hide from from God.

So the Orthodox insist, contrary to much Christian teaching elsewhere, that there WOULD have been a time when humanity matured through intimacy with God to the point when the fruit of both trees could be eaten .... which in Orthodox terms is deification. Satanic temptation always works with a TRUTH (you will be like God) upon which the lie (from the Liar - the Devil) is parasitic ... "take a short cut instead ... cut Him (that is God) out." The expulsion from Eden was actually for human protection, not imposed as a punishment, so that the curse of this alienation and loss from God would not have become embedded for all eternity in death. Christ, undoes that curse through his death and resurrection and so now, through repentance, we may obtain the blessing .... that is to EAT of both fruits .... which of course is the Eucharist. There is ample patristic evidence for all of this.

Listen to St. Irenaeus:-

"Man was a little one, and his discretion still undeveloped, wherefore also he was easily misled by the deceiver."

Listen to St. John Chrysostom:-

"Partaking of the tree, the man and woman became liable to death and subject to the future needs of the body. Adam was no longer permitted to remain in the Garden, and was bidden to leave, a move by which God showed His love for him … he had become mortal, and lest he presume to eat further from the tree which promised an endless life of continuous sinning, he was expelled from the Garden as a mark of divine solicitude, not of necessity."

[Hom. in Gen XVIII, 3 PG 53 151]

Listen to St. Cyril of Alexandria :-

"Adam had heard: ‘Earth thou art and to the earth shalt thou return,’ and from being incorruptible he became corruptible and was made subject to the bonds of death. But since he produced children after falling into this state, we his descendents are corruptible coming from a corruptible source. Thus it is that we are heirs of Adam’s curse."

[Doctrinal Questions and Answers, IX, 6 in Cyril of Alexandria, Selected Letters]

St. Irenaeus again ...

"God the Son became Man in order to regather in Himself the ancient creation, so that He might slay sin and destroy the power of death, and give life to all men."

[Against the Heresies, III, xix 6 ANF]

and finally the fruit of redemption in St. Macarius ...

"the inner being of believers who through perfect faith are born of the Spirit shall reflect as in a mirror the Glory of the Lord, and are transfigured into the same image from Glory to Glory."

The patristic witness to the truth of the Incarnation and its attestation in Scripture is clear. We were created neither to be dumb, nor infantile, not repressed by guilt, nor fearing punishment, nor oppressed by the devil or anything dark. We were created to achieve the fullness of Christ, the maturity of the Lord of Glory .... yes, knowing both good and evil and partaking in eternal life .... BUT NOT WITHOUT GOD. THAT's Hell.

Finally, how is this all compatible with what we know about the evolution of life and the human species in particular?

Let us consider how myth works:-

(1) Myth is not falsehood. It is a way of telling a truth.
(2) The myth may reference a key event or events from which this truth is itself extracted.
(3) The mythological overlay is the imaginative "wrapping" ... it has no necessary permanence as a vehicle for telling that truth.

So, in the myth of the Minotaur we probably have an historical place, (Knossos Palace, Crete) and geopolitical historicity, (the breaking of Athenian-Minoan tributary relations) ... but the mythic story itself is not historical, albeit that it references a historical events and truths.

Applying the same genre logic to Genesis in the light of hominid evolution we may legitimately and gainfully speculate that at some point in the development of our species conscious moral agency became a critical aspect of human social and spiritual relations. THAT is when the realisation dawned in the human psyche that things were not as they should have been.

This is often characterised in human mythology as the loss of a Golden Age (approximating to Augustinian Christian theodicy) or the inability of humans to ascend to the gods (approximating to the Irenaean Christian theodicy). The persistence of this sense of loss and restoration (fall and redemption) in many different religions (perhaps persisting in the Jungian collective subconscious) underscores the universal importance of the truth(s).

The difference the Incarnation makes is that God does something about it! He comes and unites the human to the divine and offers the possibility again of immortality .... but we still have to repent and we still have to grow in Him. Now, however, the curse of death is removed and by the Cross we have access to eternal life (the Resurrection).

Oh to Work for the Inland Revenue / IRS!

2009-02-07T18:31:00.003Z

Christianity is not for "good" people. Good people crucified Jesus. Good people defend God's honour by force. Good people kill the souls others with their oppressive religious duties and expectations. Good people fast twice a week and give tithes of all that they possess …. and then look down on those who don't. Good people don't eat with tax collectors, prostitutes and other heinous sinners. Good people keep themselves pure. Good people never experience any doubt …. isn't that frightening? Good people are blameless. To paraphrase an Archbishop. Good people don't dream. They sleep the sleep of the righteous. How can God save good people? Well with God, anything is possible.

Christianity is not for evil people. Evil people will use religion to suit their own ends. Evil people will put on the mantle of religion to bless bombs, to curse enemies, to demonise those who oppose them. Evil people will cast away the mantle of true religion and persecute those who hold to what they hate. Evil people do not want God. They have themselves. Cast not your pearls before such swine!

But, if a "good" person should repent, if an "evil" person should repent, then Christianity …. CHRIST! is definitely for them. Such a person will not lift his or her eyes toward heaven. Rather with a godly grief he will confess: "God be merciful to me a sinner!" And God will not disappoint in His mercy. Oh, then, to be a publican! Oh to have his grace, his self knowledge, his hope. Here are the truly great, despised by the world but magnified in the kingdom of heaven, the truly humble. Their humility is not an affectation, a pretence, a bargain with the Almighty; it is a painfully wrought true understanding of the human heart.

Who can bear such knowledge? Wouldn't we rather think a little better of ourselves? You know, the typical English disease:- "not too bad, not too good, moderation in all things, a little bit of God when you need him." To these the Son of Man says:- "I know your works. You are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth!" (Revelation 3:5-16)

Some people say that we don't like looking at our true selves because we are frightened what God will think of us; others that we secretly hate God and just go through the motions; others that it is too upsetting to our self esteem, others that we resist the call to change, preferring comfort instead. I don't think that there is just one answer to that question but the key is honesty. I recall, a long time ago now, an alcoholic at his wits end coming into church, (not here), and sitting alone. In a long conversation, I asked him if he could pray. His reply was disarming. "If I can't be honest with myself, how can I be honest with God?"

"Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

Happily our God is big enough for such problems, but we are not small enough to see the solution. One of history's great tyrants, Napoleon Bonaparte," is buried in a mausoleum in Paris where visitors have to bow their heads to view the body. In a monstrous parody of Christian worship, we recognise what we often neglect in our relationship with God. We have to get down in order to be raised up. We have to lose everything in this life in order to gain heaven.

This is why our Lord drew close to the poor. They were already pretty low down. This is why he drew close to children. They were already nearer the Source. This is why he drew near to the despised. There only hope could be God. Marx saw in all of this the opiate of the people. We see the glory of an eternal kingdom. Oh then to be a publican; to pray the Jesus prayer:- "God be merciful unto me a sinner." Only in this manner can we be saved. So, as we draw near to the beginning of the Fast of Great Lent with the Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of St. Ephraim ringing in our ears, let us always keep before us the great truth that these prayers can only be truly prayed with a humble and contrite heart. In this life we shall never cease to need to repent.

Metanoia - Change Your Mind

2009-01-10T23:32:00.003Z

“Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17)

The Greek term for repentance, metanoia, does not mean being sorry for one’s sins. In fact it actually means “a change of mind.” It means gaining a whole new life outlook. Specifically in relation to God it means leaving everything behind that hinders our relationship with God and reaching out for all those things that will bring us closer to God. In a Christian context that means Christ Himself ... the one who is both God and Man, the One who restores that relationship through self sacrifice. That is His Mind, which if we are to be Christians, must be ours as well.

Listen to St. Paul ...

Philippians 2

5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, 7 but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. 9 Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, 11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

By which we learn that repentance is the acquisition of humility and that requires both understanding and action.

"Repentance," says Basil the Great, "is salvation, but lack of understanding is the death of repentance."

First then, understanding ... we may need to relearn repentance because although a change of mind will involve sorrow for one’s sins as evidence of repentance sorrow alone is not repentance. Sorrow can become maudlin, self pitying, impassioned. Far more important is actually changing one’s mind in accordance with that presented by Christ ... and that we need to understand ... and then practise.

It is often said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Metanoia is doing something about our alienated existence ... like the prodigal son, returning home to his non-judgemental all loving father. As it says in the gospel .... “I will ARISE and go to my father...”

There must be action ... change and it must be sincere.

Earlier in St. Matthew’s gospel Jesus confronts a group of hypocritical and conniving Pharisees and Sadducees who make a show of coming to John the Baptist for his baptism. He challenges them with the true consequences of metanoia ... “bear fruits” he says “worthy of repentance.”

That’s how it is ... is there humility, is there true change, is there a new life, a new orientation, a new mind? If there is there will be fruits in compassion born out of humility, justice flowing from mercy and righteousness and peace .... all in short supply it seems in our world today, especially, sadly in those lands where this message was first heard. But what of us?

Here’s a conundrum ... we need to change, but what if we ourselves hinder our own changing. What can be done? We may want to change but we feel impoverished in spirit ... we lack the capacity, the power to follow through on our choice for God. So many things can hold us back .... habit, addictions, poor self esteem, lack of true deep seated desire.

God can and will help us with this but he does need a little step on our part, a beginning ... a down payment on transformation ... a step of faith; but whatever we must do we must do it NOW.

The other element of the gospel extract today expresses this urgency. “The Kingdom of God is AT HAND.” We may not have another chance. We can’t prevaricate. We must act while we can; while we have the light.

Let us then choose God, choose life, choose joy, but NOW, not later. Then we shall enter the joy of our Lord. Then we shall know his Love and show that Love in the world. Then we shall have the mind of Christ. Metanoia.

St. Gregory the Theologian on the Incarnation

2008-12-26T11:39:00.001Z

"The very Son of God, older than the ages, the invisible, the incomprehensible, the incorporeal, the beginning of beginning, the light of light, the fountain of life and immortality, the image of the archetype, the immovable seal, the perfect likeness, the definition and word of the Father: he it is who comes to his own image and takes our nature for the good of our nature, and unites himself to an intelligent soul for the good of my soul, to purify like by like.

He takes to himself all that is human, except for sin. He was conceived by the Virgin Mary, who had been first prepared in soul and body by the Spirit; his coming to birth had to be treated with honour, virginity had to receive new honour. He comes forth as God, in the human nature he has taken, one being, made of two contrary elements, flesh and spirit. Spirit gave divinity, flesh received it.

He who makes rich is made poor; he takes on the poverty of my flesh, that I may gain the riches of his divinity. He who is full is made empty; he is emptied for a brief space of his glory, that I may share in his fullness. What is this wealth of goodness? What is this mystery that surrounds me? I received the likeness of God, but failed to keep it. He takes on my flesh, to bring salvation to the image, immortality to the flesh. He enters into a second union with us, a union far more wonderful than the first.

Holiness had to be brought to man by the humanity assumed by one who was God, so that God might overcome the tyrant by force and so deliver us and lead us back to himself through the mediation of his Son. The Son arranged this for the honour of the Father, to whom the Son is clearly obedient in all things.

The Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep, came in search of the straying sheep to the mountains and hills on which you used to offer sacrifice. When he found it, he took it on the shoulders that bore the wood of the cross, and led it back to the life of heaven.

Christ, the light of all lights, follows John, the lamp that goes before him. The Word of God follows the voice in the wilderness; the bridegroom follows the bridegroom’s friend, who prepares a worthy people for the Lord by cleansing them by water in preparation for the Spirit.

We need God to take our flesh and die, that we might live. We have died with him, that we may be purified. We have risen again with him, because we have died with him. We have been glorified with him, because we have risen again with him."

I bought a grave today

2008-12-11T22:05:00.002Z

Nothing exceptional in that of course but it rarely makes it to the top 10 of conversation starters at Christmas parties. In life we are surrounded by death and now can watch it unfold on our TV screens yet still for many this is psychologically still foreign and awkward territory. It’s the winter draught whistling under the ill fitting door. We know it’s there, we feel it but we try and ignore it. So, buying a grave was salutary; it put things into perspective once more. Monks can help us with this one I think. They live in the habit in which they will be buried ... straight into the earth without a coffin. Later their bones will be disinterred and kept in the monastery ossuary for all to see. This life is just a way station on the route to eternity, pleasant or unpleasant in its final destination. Again something we would prefer to ignore, the judgement. Perhaps it’s something we actively resist ... that there is a reckoning. All of which seemed rather distant from the soothing secular soft furnishings of the funeral home. Should Christians spoil the illusion? No, I think not. Life will do that eventually. We can do two things though. We can be prepared ourselves and we can be a sign of contradiction to those who sleep. We should remember that we are the only faith that places death and its resolution in God at the centre of life. We above all should be comfortable with the grave as an ordinary piece of consumer expenditure.

The Fool in His Heart

2008-09-29T21:12:00.004Z

Why Atheism is irrational and Agnosticism is not.
Why Theism is established both with reason and beyond reason.

My definition of atheism – the categorical denial of the existence of a deity or deities.

My definition of agnosticism – the inability to be able to know one way or the other whether or not a deity or deities exist.

Under these definitions an atheism committed to positivism will regard an agnostic as a cowardly, misguided or delusional atheist. No matter, I am sticking with these definitions as the claim that positivism is a sufficient description of reality and reality talk is a self defeating position .... bound that is to undermine itself.

So why is atheism (thus defined) irrational?

What is “irrational” though? ... Irrationality is the absence of rationality. What is rationality? Rationality is the conjunction of logical thinking and evidence by the mapping of the former to the latter in a model building process.

Why then is atheism the violation of such conjunctional mapping?

Consider the supposed evidences for theism. One might be the adaptation of life to survival in a given environment. Life has tenacity. To what do we attribute this tenacity? An atheist might simply reply that genes are selfish in their programming for survival. A theist might contend that such apparent selfishness is rather indicative of a grander purpose to life and that this purpose is divinely inscribed in this tenacity.

Now there is no empirical test available to us which might either verify or falsify such a purpose upon which a Creator divinity might be based. An atheist will respond that this absence effectively renders any evidence for God either ill conceived, foolish or dangerous. On this view nothing can be relied upon which cannot be either verified (conclusively) or falsified (conclusively). An agnostic however will regard such not-knowing according to empirical testing as simply that – not-knowing. An atheist must go further and demand that not-knowing in the only truth test that counts as effectively false or nonsensical. As such it is a delusion or a lie to be unmasked and exposed. The true atheist will have an evangelical zeal to extirpate religion as an evil meme in human society. Too much is at stake to allow it to go unmolested. I use an emotive word because atheism is impaled on a dilemma that the very rationality with which it seeks to expose by religion is itself denied by the religion with which it must engage. The temptation will always be to persecute or legislate it out of existence. After all, if you cannot use “reason” what is left?

The American Constitution starts off with a startling piece of Enlightenment epistemology ... “We hold these truths to be self evident.” What it goes on to say is that Creator has endowed humans with “inalienable rights.” So we have not quite left even deism behind just yet! Now if it religion is patently irrational why is this not a “self evident” truth of reason? Why notwithstanding 70 years of evangelical atheism in the Soviet Union do so many Russians still live such delusional lives of faith? Can self evident reason applied to evidence be so obscure, so ineffective in delivering people from the monstrous lie of religion?

Maybe the agnostics have a stronger case than the atheists because their position is rationally defensible whereas the ideological fundamentalism of those who KNOW that there is no God inflates itself well beyond the reach of reason. For an agnostic to be content with not-knowing accommodates both the lack of evidence (in their perception) and a certain epistemological modesty. It is a position of integrity even if theists will be bound to differ on the significance of any evidence presented.

I recall a recent interview on British TV between Dr. Robert Winston the famous physician and Orthodox Jew and Dr. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and militant anti-theist. Winston professed his surprise at Dawkins’ indefatigable certainty with which professes his atheism. It is this certainty that renders, in my view, the appropriateness of the title “fundamentalist” for Dr. Dawkins and the irrationality that is the handmaiden of all fundamentalisms.

Finally, why is theism both rational and beyond reason? It is rational in the sense that certain evidences COULD be interpreted as indicative of a deity or deities. A theist, however, recognises the ambiguity that keeps an agnostic in a state of un-knowing. For example, it is often said by believers that the beauty of creation is a hymn of praise to the Creator. But is the smallpox virus part of that hymn, juvenile leukaemia, the evisceration of a zebra by a lioness? There is rationality both in the denial and acceptance of creative beauty and purposefulness. So we must conclude that is there is anything plausible to be said beyond agnosticism, one must move beyond reason without descending into irrationality.

Is such a transcendent rationality possible? Not of course if an empirically falsifiable rational modelling of reality is as much as CAN be applied to the question of truth. But there may be modes of rationality that move beyond that. Such a reasonable approach would intuit transcendent significance to natural phenomena ... NOT as causal explanations but as an infrastructure of meaning within and beyond the phenomena themselves. Music, for example can be explained rationally in its emotional impact on human music makers and hearers but a transcendent rationality will look beyond such features to an echo in the Divine Wisdom that connects us to a powerful sense of Ultimate Meaning, if you like, God. This is the source of course of the great power of transforming art. It cannot simply be enough to explain the process. The purpose or the significance of the experience must be accounted for. It is the very height of irrationality to deny even the possibility of a transcendent ground (God) in such meaning. The same argument can be applied to every field of human endeavour and experience that moves beyond itself toward something ineffable and beautiful, whether this concerns the birth of a child or the track of sub atomic particles in the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

So, I maintain that indeed atheism is irrational and agnosticism not. Further I propose that theism is a plausible option for an honest agnostic who is prepared to reconsider reality from a different and perhaps unaccustomed perspective. For a fundamentalist atheist though such a conversion (short of a miracle of God) is not possible. One’s breath should not to be wasted. Irrationality is like that. With God though, all things are possible. So, as much as it must infuriate him, we should pray for Dr. Dawkins. It’s the only rational course of action.

The Monastic Call

2008-09-12T22:12:00.008Z

Christian monasticism was born in the deserts of Egypt at a time when the way of Christ was consolidating its position in the cities. The apparent success in the gospel’s appropriation of the Empire was a blessing not unmixed with danger. The early monastics flew into the desert not to escape the city and its newly respectable churches but rather to seek salvation at a time when increasing wealth and prestige might have been the undoing of the Church through a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle!) compromise with worldliness. In this manner the Church’s integrity in both desert and city was preserved. The monastic stood for the gospel’s untameable power, in short for God and the possibilities of an entirely unheard of life in Him beyond the city gate. In the desert wastes new lives were transformed and the gospel returned in power to the cities.

Beyond the limits of ancient maps it was sometimes written:- “Here be dragons.” Indeed this was the truth that the first monks encountered in the desert, a place of combat with adversary powers, with Satan himself. Like a trained athlete the monk entered the arena and faced the ancient foe, for all mankind. The abbas and ammas (fathers and mothers) of the desert pioneered the old ways of sacrifice and martyrdom but in a new setting and circumstance.

Today we have a new setting and circumstance in the west. Orthodox Christians find themselves living in increasingly secular societies that deny the place of ANY religion in the public domain. The State requires that faith be privatised as the price of its freedom. Of course, there is an important truth in this distinction between the personal and the civic sphere. In times past Christians have sometimes been tempted to enlist the power of the State in the repression of dissent and too often the Church has transgressed into aspects of life that could and should never be constituted as ecclesial domains, whether in the sciences, the arts or politics. However, the danger now is that the State will in turn transgress and claim the right to replace God as the arbiter of all that is good and true. When such a State is Godless the fruits will be Godless. We saw this in the brutal totalitarianism of the Soviet Union but it can happen in so-called western liberal democracies as well.

In this new setting for monasticism the call of the angelic life has a profound opportunity and challenge. By its very distinctiveness and isolation from worldliness monasticism is presented with a renewed prophetic vocation by its ability to present a transformation of the common life in God. The city is now the desert where the spiritual meadow must bloom.

In short I think that monasticism will help to restore the credibility of Christianity again in the west. Familiarity with innocuous, adaptive heterodoxy, the bourgeoisification of the Christian tradition has bred a certain contempt and hardness of heart toward the gospel in our culture. Only an Orthodox Christian witness that is both radically obedient to God and warm in its love for Him will now make a difference.

How can such lights be kindled? Only by becoming such a Light oneself. Monastics are born in parishes so the Church must herself once again nurture and value those who take the All-Holy Mary’s assent with utter and complete seriousness. “Let it be unto me according to Thy Word.”

Just an Ordinary Connection

2008-08-02T11:41:00.004Z

To hear some Christians talk you would think they had a “hot-line to God.” They are so convinced that God is in daily, direct communication with them, to suggest otherwise would be to compromise on the glorious intimacy that faith and grace bestow. So overweening is this confidence that rarely do they stop to ask:- “Am I hearing right? Is this God or Satan? Is this perhaps me talking to myself? There is no room for such doubts on the hotline. Moreover, if God is speaking so clearly to me should I not like the prophets open my mouth and tell others, “thus saith the Lord”? And if my hearers reject my word are they not rejecting the very Word of God Himself? And aren’t there terrible consequences for such rejection? The logic is inexorable isn’t it? If I am the Lord’s anointed, you should take heed to what I say in his Name. If you do not you place your soul in peril. It is but a short step here from this pride, this hubris, this prelest to the Jonestown massacre and every other craziness that emerges from the cults and sects who assume an infallibility that even the Pope never claims. It even infiltrates Orthodoxy in the rush of young and inexperienced monastics to become “elders” for sycophantic devotees, (usually of the opposite sex).

Against this we must set the standards of the Church for true prophecy which are:-

(1) Counsel must be in accordance with the Scriptures in Holy Tradition as interpreted by the Church not the alleged prophet.
(2) In respect of foretelling the only test is retrospective in terms of previous utterances. Did these things come to pass? Even then, there is no guarantee that future pronouncements will be unalloyed by sin and pride.
(3) Is the speaker living what he or she prophesies? In other words is he or she a servant or a manipulator, subtle or overt?
(4) Is the prophecy received, tested and authenticated in the church? If not then flee from such a voice as from hell itself.

With this in mind we should not say that we have a “hotline to God” that rather that we have “an ordinary connection.” True, God speaks to us. He does answer our prayers, although not always in ways we would like. However, in this life our sin and laziness always generate “noise on the line.” Repentance deals with this interference progressively. We should therefore have a more measured sense of what we and others are able to hear. Sometimes it is the “Word of the Lord.” Sometimes it is not. Discernment is called for.

By Any Other Name

2008-07-08T23:15:00.004Z

Some unenlightened Orthodox folks annoy me by referring to the “English church.” They mean the Church of England and however much this might delight a beleaguered Anglican bishop right now the reference just ain’t Orthodox.

There is no “English” Church ... just in as much as there is no “Greek” Church or “Roman Church” either no matter how often these phrases are carelessly used. The Church most definitely exists but the use of a preceding adjective defines nothing at all other than location.

It is simply GPS pseudo-Orthodoxy.

Orthodox ecclesiology may rightly speak (as in New Testament terms) of the Church IN or AT such and such a place or such and such a city. The only admissible adjectives for the Church then are Catholic and Orthodox, by which we also mean, One, Holy and Apostolic. These are terms referring to the ecumenicity of the Church, (the old meaning of the whole world), her unity, her mission, her universality and her inclusiveness ... but not a mention of geography or culture as defining the Church as a local denomination or branch. We have no such concept in Orthodoxy.

So, I indeed beg to differ. The ORTHODOX Church is the “English” Church and every other nation under the sun so let’s drop “English” shall we? What we must say is that the Orthodox Church must express itself locally in the language and culture of its indigenous people. The infusion of its life SHOULD draw on the whole of humanity in God and not any one part, but, most definitely in such a way as to embed the Church WHERE IT IS respecting local traditions and whatever is good and true .... as Pope St. Gregory once counselled St. Augustine of Canterbury.

So I pray and work for the day (however many decades distant) when the Orthodox Church will once again become the Church IN England, (not OF England!)

Kepler's Eye

2008-05-09T22:24:00.003Z

The Kepler NASA Mission, due to launch in 2009, will place a telescope in solar orbit specifically to look for near earth sized planets orbiting other nearby stars. This has to be (in my book) the singularly most exciting development in our exploration of the Cosmos since our decision to send humans to Mars. Please do visit the Kepler web site here.

For all of you (including myself) who want to participate in a small but significant way, NASA is offering an unlimited opportunity for the public to place their names and short messages on a DVD that will be launched with the telescope. This is what I have said ...

Kepler will open up the possibility of detecting earth-sized extrasolar planets. The scientific, social, cultural, spiritual and (eventually) economic implications of this new Copernican endeavour cannot be underestimated.

So long as humans think of themselves and their world as unique they will remain impoverished and myopic in the Cosmos. Evidence of earth-like planets will translate a well founded supposition into reality. The resultant transformation in understanding of our place in the Cosmos could, arguably, both unite humankind and provide that necessary spur to move offworld and explore.

May we not repeat the same mistakes in the Cosmos as we have on earth but rather develop those finest and highest qualities of which our species is so eminently capable. I am a theist, so may God "make it so."

Revd. Fr. Gregory Hallam

Orthodoxy is Scary!

2008-05-03T13:29:00.006Z

“What a strange idea Father!” some might say. Well it’s not as strange as you might think. Such a huge gap has now opened up between Christianity as practised in the Orthodox Church and other Christian traditions that I regularly encounter a certain “culture shock” from those who encounter Orthodoxy for the first time. This is much more pronounced amongst those who already have some Christian background. “Why such long services?” “You don’t have any of the songs that I love in your church.” “I am just confused; there’s simply too much to absorb,” and so on and so forth.

On the one hand this distinctiveness is useful for it marks out Orthodox Christianity as something quite different from what one usually encounters and not just another rather unusual “flavour.” On the other hand if we don’t help people gently into the fullness of the truth we stand accused as those who “bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. “ (Matthew 23:4)

It is instructive to observe what that great Orthodox Christian pastor and Enlightener of Japan, St. Nicholas (Kasatkin) required of his converts ... principally four things only before baptism: a familiarity with the Nicene Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and regular attendance at Church services and meetings. This was sufficient for the neophyte. Good as though it is, they didn’t have to read Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s “The Orthodox Church”, stand in the nave for three years or learn Russian.

If we have to be restrained in what we “serve up” to converts, in like manner we must insist in our dealings with enquirers that NOBODY finds out all that there is to know and understand about Orthodox Christianity, even in a lifetime. The idea that it must be all “understood” first is erroneous and heavily conditioned by western heterodox ideas about Christian truth.

It is far more important that Christian living keep pace with Christian learning and for the two to interact in a mature and spiritually guided way. For this to happen the neophyte has to “unlearn” not only what he thinks Christianity is all about but also how a living faith is acquired and deepened. Some are simply just not ready for that change in perception. Some are. The wisdom of a pastor and a catechist is to recognise this and to know the practical difference with its implications for an individual soul.

True Hope

2008-04-02T20:43:00.004Z

People often assume that Christians believe much the same thing about the death and resurrection of Christ. Of course there may be differences of emphasis but it is much the same story with much the same meaning.

Actually there is some truth in that .... IF it is only the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions that are under scrutiny. Since many people in the west are only aware of these traditions and assume that this is all that there is, the witness of Orthodoxy never shows up on the radar.

So, what is this fundamental commonality between most non-Orthodox traditions and where does Orthodoxy differ? With Pascha (Easter) approaching in the Orthodox Church it is crucial that we acquaint ourselves with these issues because they touch upon the whole meaning of the gospel, its preaching and celebration.
In the "west" the Christian story goes something like this. It doesn't matter on this score whether you are a Protestant or a Roman Catholic. The story and the meaning are much the same.

In Eden humans disobeyed God and broke their relationship with Him. For this they were cast out of Paradise as a punishment and suffered death as a consequence of their sin. This fall corrupted (more - Calvin or less - the Scholastics) human nature thereafter and made reparation with God a human impossibility on account of the gravity of sin (which includes the transmissible guilt of Adam and Eve), its disabling power and God's judgement upon man's transgression. Only God Himself could put humanity back into a right relationship with Him (justification) and impart holiness (sanctification). This He did by suffering the punishment for our transgressions - death - in the sacrifice of His Son for the salvation of the world in our place, propitiating God in respect of the offence of original and subsequent actual sin. By this means Man was restored to a right relationship with Him and was accounted worthy of eternal life made available to him in and by Christ's resurrection.

Notice here that death is both a consequence and a punishment for sin; that someone must bear the punishment justly due for our transgression and that only when Christ has appeased the Father is eternal life possible. The resurrection has no saving significance beyond that which has already been achieved on the cross. The life of the redeemed at best bears the hope of fellowship with God or perhaps (for Roman Catholics) the Beatific Vision. Any transforming union with God can only be characterised by spiritual contemplation not an ontological change in our human nature.

In Orthodoxy however we have a very different account.

In Eden humans chose a demonically inspired autonomy from God and by that choice death entered the natural order and human life specifically. God in his mercy and love removed them from Paradise into this world lest this physical death be compounded by an eternal spiritual death. Now subject to suffering and death, human alienation from the divine life becomes the raw material for Satan's attempt to subvert humanity finally from God. This corrupting influence of the fear of and flight from death makes of sin an ever present reality for the children of Adam and Eve. However they remain free to choose between God and Satan and this outworking of salvation in history eventually enables a Virgin to conceive by the Holy Spirit the Saviour who is both God and Man. This incarnation which includes the whole dispensation of Christ from his birth to his resurrection unites our human nature to God and redeems it. As we repent and live ascetically for God in the power of the Holy Spirit the resurrection victory of God over the opposing powers (which led to the death of Christ), we partake of the divine life of the Trinity, the energies of God, and are transformed in an ontological union with God from one degree of glory to the next, (the ascension of our humanity). This salvation process starts in this life and is consummated in the next.

Notice how death is not a punishment from an outraged God in Eden, nor is our banishment. Everything is done out of love. There is no divine anger to placate, no debility of our will, no meaning in the death of Christ without the resurrection (but every meaning with it!). All of the life of Christ saves us and this is by the incarnation gathering everything that is ours into God where it is transformed into the divine image and likeness. Moreover the Holy Spirit is the divine personal agent of our transformation and everything is a coordinated work of the Holy and Blessed Trinity. The Ever-Virgin Mary becomes the model of what it is to be a Christian. She broke down the wall of opposition to God in her own life and womb and by her own gracious response to God. This is what it is to be saved in the Orthodox Church, to be an Easter people.

Finally let us consider the consequences of a faith lived in the first (non-Orthodox) and second (Orthodox) instance. For non-Orthodox Christians the resurrection is something of an afterthought, not in itself as such but in salvation terms. It's difficult to see how the resurrection of Christ actually saves anyone if the death alone has healed the breach between humanity and God through a vicarious (if not substitutionary) punishment. God becomes a threat to be averted in the condition of sin. Of course this is always characterised as an initiative of love but it is the wrath of God that HE HIMSELF must first avert ... which rather begs the question... "Why does God place Himself under such an exterior necessary constraint?" He literally CANNOT forgive without the shedding of blood but notice that it is not death which is addressed here but the offence of sin. In the second Orthodox account is the CAUSE of the disease (death) that first must be addressed if there to be BOTH forgiveness and an enduring change, (regeneration).

When we consider that in the first account humanity has to carry the burden of Adam and Eve's guilt as well as their actual sin it is little surprising that western culture through off this guilt ridden morbidity in the Enlightenment. However, without the saving Incarnation and Resurrection, the spiritually eviscerated remnants of Christianity in the West could offer little more than humanism with a Christian veneer. When faced with bondage to the devil and the corruption of death (the unacknowledged realities here) non-Orthodox Christians eventually either rejected God altogether as an intolerable psychological burden or settled for a truce, an uneasy peace punctuated by the occasional radiance of a religious revival in which something once lost was dimly remembered and partially recovered. for a time at least.

We are now at the end of this degenerative process in the Christian west and I doubt whether anything of the former Easter glory can be recovered. The future for all Christians in the west lies in recovering something of the grandeur and hope of the original Christian vision ... a world utterly transformed by the resurrection power of the divine love. Many have hung onto this paschal hope outside the Orthodox Church. It is now time for the Orthodox Church in the west to put her own own in order and get ready to welcome these scattered and disorientated western children of God both inside and outside the other Christian traditions.

Why do the Innocent Suffer?

2008-02-29T20:18:00.003Z

The law of "how it should be" is a God implanted sense that all humans have of life's beauty and triumph. Yet we live in a good creation where hurricanes do not discriminate, where evil befalls the good as well as the wicked, where all that is beautiful is in some sense marred. It is as if some spanner has got stuck in the works.

Atheists of course use this as argument against there being a benevolent creator God. With so much senseless waste and misery should we not rather charge this "God" with being a lousy and incompetent designer?

Let us consider this issue raised in that great novel "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Doestoevsky? Here is a short extract from Chapter 35.

Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

That is the beauty of our humanity that we rage against injustice, that we storm heaven with our protests, that we in no way ever consent to the instrumentalism of sacrificing the one for the many.

Now look what God does.

To mend creation he sacrifices himself for all. He places HIMSELF in the breach of death, the place of horror ... and he vanquishes that, closes the breach, brings resurrection to the fallen.

So, slain we live - with our death in Christ.

Somehow, somewhere in the distant past or perhaps a "time" before time or in realm beyond this something became not as it should have been through the very freedom that God imparted to it. And so it is that everyone dies.

Be thankful though that everyone dies .... yes that even the innocent die, NOT because this is itself good but because the world has to be transformed and it cannot be transformed without eternal life exploding out of this merciless death. We scream that this should not be so. Our outrage though was born in a place from which we have been excluded. To see this longing and revolt resolved we need to return to God who can do nothing other than raise the fallen ... and with them creation itself (Romans 8:18-25).

So, why does not God or the angels lift us out of this? By now it should be clear that just as Christ did not call on legions of angels to deliver him, neither can we. VERY occasionally though, the devil oversteps the mark and uses natural death to try and subvert God's plan. This is when the angels intervene. If Christ indeed had faced death before his appointed "hour" (a continual refrain of St. John's Gospel --- "my hour has not yet come") then the angels would have intervened for Him as well.

No, we all have our God appointed hour and that is when we shall taste the bliss of resurrection and when one more piece of creation will be healed. The devil's tactic though is to encourage us to doubt God's wisdom in allowing innocent suffering. He insinuates that Christ should not have died. But when we lift high the cross the devil always scuttles away howling.

Faith is kicking him in the arse/butt as he so richly deserves.

Sharia? No thanks!

2008-02-08T08:52:00.000Z

Under existing UK law Muslims are already allowed discretion in certain limited circumstances to use their own services and procedures; notably in matters of banking, stamp duty and divorce mediation. This is right and proper for primary legislation is not thereby being subverted. There is one law in Britain that covers all its people.

Sometimes laws are passed that pull against the consciences, religiously informed or otherwise, of some of its citizens. These tensions may be resolved by the democratic process and a sensitive application of derogation for certain groups ... Catholic and Orthodox medics opposed to abortion for example cannot be constrained to perform them.

What we certainly do not need though, in any shape or form, is the application of sharia law for a section of the population. This is divisive, inequitable and erosive of the common values that a singular law must uphold. Far from promoting social cohesion as the Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams believes, this would fragment and antagonise disparate social and religious groups.

Moreover, that a Christian Archbishop should call for the introduction of any element of shariah beggars belief. He knows what happens long term in societies that cow tow to Islamic pressure for shariah. We see this going on in Nigeria right now, especially in the north of the country. Dhimmitude (social repression) of a Christian minority may not be on the cards just yet, but this move would be the thin end of a very long wedge.

Mercifully, judging the reactions of all parties in Parliament, this naive and dangerous suggestion will sink without trace. More worrying though is that the most senior cleric of the Anglican Communion should entertaining such crazy ideas. Sorry Abp. Rowan, I had thought better of you than this.

Hut Burning for God

2008-01-15T23:58:00.000Z

In the Orthodox Church a fool for Christ is no jester or attention seeker, quite the reverse. Such a person feigns madness so that the curious and the flatterers will not poison the soul with self regard. The interior life of that person is far from
insanity. Radical Christian living has showered the soul with proven spiritual gifts of healing, good counsel and prophecy. Mostly these gifts remain hidden until God brings them out into the open for the benefit of others. Even so, such “fools” are disturbing people to have around. Amidst the insanity of the world one is forced to ask in the presence of such people:- “What is normal?”

Consider for example a 17 year old youth who becomes a “hut burner.” No this is not another lamentable example of anarchy and pyromania! Introducing St. Maximos Kavsokalyvia who died on the monastic holy mountain of Athos at the ripe old age of 95 in 1365 AD ... but not before he had burnt down quite a few of the rudimentary poor huts that he built, destroyed and rebuilt for himself. They thought him mad of course. “There goes that old fool the hut-burner” they would say; so much so that he became known as Maximos the Hut Burner (Kavsokalyvia, feast 13th January). Of course this was part feigned madness, part straight forward sanity only appearing as madness. It is this last aspect that interests me.

Jesus said:- "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head." (Matthew 8:20) Our Lord wasn’t complaining. This was his choice, not to be encumbered by even the ordinary good things of this world, most would say basic necessities. Why? So he could single-mindedly do the Father’s will.

The minute we can become attached to anything it lays claim on us. Subtly at first and then with great momentum we let “things” come between God and us. It’s more comfortable that way of course. We like security, absence of want, the ability to plan and rely on those plans. But what, if like Job, all these are snatched away? What then? What will save us when we have lost everything?

Some people choose to lose everything to gain Christ, to throw away even the roof over their heads in order to put him first. This is madness to the world of course but radical Christians like St. Maximos remind us that the world is not saved by conventional living but only by costly personal self sacrifice.

Each Christian has quite a lot of “hut burning” to do. Ask yourself, ‘what matters to me most?’ If you can lay that aside for God you have burned a hut. You will warm yourself by its embers for a while but then there will be another hut to be consigned to the flames: and so it goes on until there is only God and a radiant life.

This is a Synchroblog where bloggers exchange links on the same topic. The current subject is “God’s call to the fools.”

Select one of these posts from the pop-up list and click “Go read it!”

Christ is born. Glorify Him!

2007-12-25T08:42:00.000Z

An old story is told about a drunk who fell into a pit. The sides of the pit were so steep and he was so inebriated that he could not get out. He cried in alarm to anyone who would hear him.

A Jew walked by, stopped, took out the Psalms and quoted:-

“I am reckoned among those who go down to the pit; I am a man who has no strength” (Ps 88:4)

“My son,” he said, observe God’s Law and you will not stumble.” With that he walked on by.

A Muslim walked to the edge of the pit, peered over and declaimed: “You are a drunk, an unbeliever. First submit both Allah and to his laws, then you will know Paradise.” In disgust, he also walked away hurriedly.

A Hindu approached, a sage. “Your karma is now set by this deed. There is nothing you can do. Accept death and on your next rebirth perhaps your soul will make more progress.” The sage calmly walked away.

A Buddhist monk approached and with compassion he looked down on the man and tried to teach him to meditate. “Try to extinguish your desires … for earthly freedom, even for life itself. With desire comes suffering. With the right mental attitude you too can attain nibbana.” The monk retreated from the pit with a beatific smile on his face.

The drunk man grumbled noisily to himself in the pangs of his pain that all men were the same. With much difficulty he slumped and forward and fell into a fitful sleep.

Suddenly he was rudely awoken by a rough fellow gently shaking him. This man had let himself down into the pit with a rope.

The descent was so difficult beset with sharp stones, briars and obstacles that his hands and body were bleeding.

He took a spare rope, tied it round the drunken man’s waist who fell silent in disbelief. The drunk felt himself dragged to the side of the pit whereupon his rescuer strapped them both together and raised them up on a pulley fixed into the edge of the top of the pit for that purpose.

As they both stood out of the pit into the sunshine, unshackled, the drunken man, who was now a little more sober, looked round. The stranger had gone but there was a rather odd charge that lingered on in the air. He did not feel alone.

He looked back into the pit and thought thankfully about the great sacrifice this Man had made to save him.

No Teddy Bear's Picnic

2007-12-01T22:32:00.000Z

The imprisonment of Gillian Gibbons in a Sudanese jail for allegedly insulting the prophet of Islam when she agreed to a child’s naming of teddy bear “Mohammed” is outrageous. Of course everyone has been falling over backwards in UK government this week to appease the Sudanese with weasel words such as “saddened” – “shocked” – “concerned” but all this does is indicate weakness. When the representative of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, no less, called for the expulsion of the Sudanese ambassador and all David Milliband, the Foreign Secretary can do is wait four days before calling him in for a chat; one does wonder what is going on.

Appeasement is never a pretty sight even in ‘Real Politik.’ So why do we want to keep the Sudanese sweet? Well, for the same reasons I suspect that we have dithered and made feeble gestures whilst Sudanese militia have murdered and raped their way through Darfur; for the same reason that the crucifixion of Christians and the execution of animists in Southern Sudan has barely raised an eyebrow in Whitehall … in a word, Pakistan.

“Pardon me,” you say, “Pakistan?!” For some unaccountable reason Pakistan and Sudan have made common cause with each other … and we don’t want to upset the applecart in Pakistan do we? More appeasement. Meanwhile the innocent Gillian Gibbons languishes in house arrest somewhere well away from the baying barbaric mob who are roaming the streets of Khartoum calling for her execution. Apparently it’s all a western inspired Christian anti-Islamic plot! Is that really the best we can do? Teddy bear terrorism?

Of course what should have happened was the immediate expulsion of diplomatic staff and the termination of all trading arrangements. Not doing this on the basis that it would antagonise the Sudanese and put Gillian in further peril of flogging was an extremely foolish reaction. Consider the propaganda gift to the Sudanese government … “look how merciful we are, we could have flogged her.” This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Only an administration whose first priority was to defend the western alliance with Pakistan would have been prepared to pay such a price, or of course one that lacked balls.

So is this how we keep the Taliban at bay … by allowing their equivalents space to terrorise with their fanatical barbarism elsewhere whether in Saudi Arabia, Sudan or Malaysia and protect their governments who can’t control their own mobs or hate preaching clerics? We can barely do that ourselves so what chance have we to insist on rational and humane treatment of our citizens abroad? This has been a bad week for freedom and justice and the UK government is deeply implicated in its calculating cowardice. A line has to be drawn.

The Curious Case of the Shrinking "God"

2007-11-30T18:18:00.000Z

This sounds like a lost Sherlock Holmes story doesn’t it? Instead, think of this as the unhappy story of how God has shrunk in the west, certainly in the 20th century but with roots in medieval Europe. Of course, God has not actually shrunk! He is the same, today, yesterday and forever ... but people? Ah, that’s different. That’s where God has been shrunk into nothingness. His sovereign rule, which is and should be over every aspect of human life, has been progressively cut down in extent by a secularising and atheistic mindset.

The first shrinkage took place in medieval Europe. This was the time of the ascending power of an increasingly centralised and powerful papacy. Inevitably the Pope came into conflict with the rising monarchs of increasingly powerful nation and city states. We all know what happened in England when a certain monarch wanted to dispose of an inconvenient wife! Interestingly, without the support of sympathetic German princes it is unlikely that Luther would have got very far with his revolt against Rome. Of course some of the Protestant Reformers also tried to impose a Christian theocratic state on their hapless subjects but by the time we arrive at the close of 18th century there rise up revolutionary movements right across Europe seeking to banish God entirely from the political order. In America of course this had also happened but constitutionally, peacefully and not inspired by atheism. This former colony had been established by those fleeing from religious discrimination and repression in Europe. The original intention in America, therefore, was to give no favoured position to one particular religion. Only later had God come to sit rather uncomfortably on Capitol Hill, which is why the Bush presidency has been such an exceptional anachronism to many. It look longer in Britain for the Established churches of the Union to see their influence weaken on the national scene but certainly by the 1960’s this process was also virtually complete.

The first shrinking was an understandable reaction against religious tyranny but it was based on a complete misreading of the Scriptures. Anyone who think that God as no place in national and political life should read the 8th century prophets .... Amos, Hosea, Michah and Isaiah (first part). In these books the prophets assert God’s judgement against injustice and idolatry in the corridors of power but theirs was a witness of a spiritual conscience, not, as in the west, a contest between the Church and State as two irreconcilable antagonists. What we have now in Europe is a feeble witness of Christians who have surrendered to the State almost the whole of their prophetic conscience, of God’s claim to sovereignty over ALL aspects of human life. The Byzantine ideal was a symphony of Church and State as both accountable to God in their respective jurisdictions. That ideal died with the fall of Constantinople. This balance between State and Church, between leadership and prophecy has been elusive ever since.

The second shrinkage lay in the natural sciences. Again, the root of the problem is to be found in medieval Catholic Europe and the inability of some churchmen to embrace revolutionary ideas arising from explosion of science. These battles may have started in earnest with Galileo but, distressingly they have persisted into modern times. Some Christians are still fighting over Darwin and atheism has readily used such rearguard actions as evidence that Christianity remains antithetical to truth and progress. Whereas at one time most leading scientists were believers and saw their profession as revealing God’s handiwork; now such witnesses are muted and slight. Occasionally religion merits some analysis in a science journal. Usually many of the facts presented are plain wrong, the comments predictably bizarre and prejudicial and the overall feeling is that a sewerage pipe has broken somewhere nearby. Christianity is now commonly thought to have nothing to contribute in this sphere of human activity and even when the ethical dimensions of controversial research might warrant such input. God, finally, has been banished from the Cosmos.

The third and final area of shrinkage has been in personal life. Whereas once most people looked to religion as a source of ethical inspiration, guidance and self discipline it is now regarded as an intrusive threat to personal autonomy. Inevitably, if Man is the measure of all things, God must be banished as the righteous Judge of all our actions and if there is no such thing as sin, then we need social adjustment to society not salvation from God. This last change is the most troubling of all. If the State is now the arbiter of all that is good and true then human freedom has no safe resort, no court of appeal. Personal autonomy then becomes a sham as humans acquiesce to a new slavery; that of their own passions stalking the corridors of power.

So, with God denied a place in both society and personal life where is there left for him to go? It is as if he has disappeared in the centre of a black hole. Nothing visible in human life of Him remains and people soon forget when they be distracted by the allurements and pleasures of this world. But take care, God will not be denied. He can be no more shrunk than the ocean drained by an egg cup. As human life without God collapses there will only be God left, not this time as a Saviour but as an implacable Judge. The day is not far off when this will come upon us and all will be laid waste. People will cry out but their will only be silence in return. Then Christ will come again. Happy will they be who bear not the mark of the beast but who welcome their Lord.

“Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you. Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world. But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. To Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.” (1 Peter 5:6-11)

Finding Our Way Home

2007-11-08T21:28:00.000Z

Our bodies are seldom in a uniform state of health, particularly as we mature. Our minds may be in good shape but perhaps that waist line is unruly. Our digestion may be good but perhaps there is a little arthritis to contend with. It is the same with any Church community. It will have its healthy strengths and its relatively infirm weaknesses.

This variable diagnosis extends all the way through to our personal lives and our walk with God. We may be reasonably informed about our faith but how is it with our prayer life? We may be faithfully present at the services but do we find it more difficult to relate our faith to our daily lives? In the same way that we need the specialist advice of a good doctor for our physical and mental health we need the counsel of an experienced spiritual father or mother to keep us on an even keel as far as our spiritual lives are concerned.

Such spiritual guides are not easy to come by. In addition to his or her spiritual maturity such a person must have some natural and personal empathy with us as persons. As Orthodox Christians, if we don’t have a spiritual father or mother, we really need to pray and work hard toward acquiring one. This person probably will not be our parish priest, (the roles can be too easily confused), but our priest may be able to help by recommending someone.

Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) has written very powerfully on this matter.

"The Spiritual Father in Orthodox Christianity"

God throws a double six!

2007-10-02T15:40:00.000Z

Albert Einstein once quipped that "God does not play with dice." He was profoundly disturbed by a new science that he himself had played a part in developing. The physics of chance or technically, quantum mechanics, is a now a well established theory that denies our ability to measure anything with perfect exactitude. We may, therefore, talk of the probability of a particle being at such and such a position and having this or the other momentum but more than this eludes us. The strangeness of quantum theory is revealed in the realm of the very small but has implications also for the inflation of such larger scales structures as galactic clusters after the Big Bang creation.

Hitherto science had been accustomed to allow for chaotic behaviours in such complex arenas as global weather systems and species population trends. Here, uncertainty and randomness affecting the ability to predict remained a problem within classical physics and was addressed by chaos theory. With the advent of quantum theory, however, indeterminacy was revealed to be part and parcel of reality itself. Theorists might still argue whether this concerned our ability to speak of nature rather than nature itself but the practical result was the same. We had to get used to a “fuzzy world”, predictably fuzzy in the maths, but practically speaking a landscape shrouded in shifting mists and ill-defined shapes.

For centuries, science and philosophy ... and religion as well for that matter, had worked on a deterministic understanding of the Cosmos. Laplace famously said (and I paraphrase) that were we able to know and measure every physical component of the Cosmos we could perfectly describe its past and reliably predict its future. If he had allowed for chaotic behaviours in his tidied system of inputs and outputs his confidence might have been well placed. So long as this view prevailed, it was thought that "God was in His heaven and all was right with the world." Now, however, in quantum theory, chance had struck at the very heart of reality itself. Einstein recoiled from such a prospect, declaiming that “the Lord God does not play dice.” Doubtless he believed, as had all the determinist philosophers and scientists before him that God had ordered all things in a uniform and predictable manner. The deity’s table manners were impeccable. But then came a new set of diners who did not obey the usual rules of etiquette. There was bound to be trouble.

The first dent in the deterministic account of creation was made by Max Planck who in 1900 realised that radiation came in little packets or quanta and not in a continuous stream. It was some 26 years later that Werner Heisenberg worked out the implications of this for measurement. Measurement means interacting with a system or object measured, but to do that one has to impart energy to that which is measured and this changes it from its initial state. A sensor fitted to a car engine to measure its fuel efficiency will given an erroneous reading if only because it has itself changed the mass of the car. The uncertainties inherent in measurement really show up in the realm of the very small. Shorter wavelengths are required for finer measurements but these come with higher energies that change that which is being measured. Heisenberg called this the “Uncertainty Principle” and it makes the exact state of the Universe in all its parts elusive NOT because our measuring instruments are inadequate but simply because no act of measurement could ever in principle achieve what it attempts. We may only speak of probabilities.

Schrödinger and Dirac then went on to describe all the uncertain aspects of a particles position and momentum in terms of a probability wave, a dynamic map of possibilities for a particle. Worse than this from an intuitive point of view, the particle is the probability wave itself. So, in this fuzzy description of matter and energy one can only talk of the probability that a particle will be at such and such a place when measured. The act of measuring itself collapses the wave function and one then has something which is classically “there.” How such observation achieves this is still a mystery. Look in the box and Schrodinger’s cat is famously dead rather than alive or alive rather than dead, but before then this thought experiment declares that it is neither dead nor alive but in a superposition of both states. If you are not disturbed by that; you are not listening!

There are other tasty morsels in this Danish quantum pastry. Particles may interact, separate and forever remain entangled such that each particle’s state changes instantaneously with that of its partner, no matter how distantly separated. Practical experiments have confirmed this effect over a few kilometres. Although the so-called “Copenhagen” interpretation of quantum mechanics remains controversial in some aspects, the fact is that the theory simply works. It describes the real world perfectly in all its delightful fuzziness. Without it we wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to build lasers, computers and a whole raft of contemporary electronic equipment. So give thanks for uncertainty and distressed felines and Einstein’s when you are next at the supermarket checkout!

Nothing of course is ever so simple so a qualification must be made at this point. The collapse of the wave function is but one interpretation of the transition to classical reality and this, as we have seen, involves observation or, more strictly, an act of measurement. There are other interpretations of quantum theory where the wave function does not collapse. Some of these involve the universe branching out into unnumbered imperfectly cloned copies of itself corresponding to differing outcomes in a classical sense. This supposed infinite number of unobservable parallel universes where all possible states can be manifested, has been criticised on the grounds that it is both inelegant and untestable. The idea that there exists an infinite number of “you’s” reading this article identical in all respects except the precise colour of the spots on your tie (or at least that particular infinite set of “you’s” wearing spotted ties rather than striped ties) stretches credulity somewhat no matter what explanatory power it might have to account for this world as we observe it. The implications of such gross redundancy in creation might comfort those who shrink from thinking of this Cosmos as in any way special but it seems to me that this raises far more issues for science and theology than it apparently solves. If anything can happen and, given enough time, actually does, (Tegmark), then the Multiverse loses all interest as a place where anything happening anywhere is actually significant. Science, in word, disinvents itself by the removal of deselection. Why observe reality when you can imagine reality however you like it? I cannot help but think that this is an explanatory dead end, so let us move on.

Returning now to our review of quantum theory let us examine some of its cosmological applications.

The Universe only becomes classically predictable at large scales where probabilistic effects either collapse or are too insignificant to impact on the system as a whole. Even in classical systems simulations only ever approximate to their corresponding realities when chaotic elements are recognised. In extreme macrocosmic conditions, such as those connected with a black hole, uncertainty prevails yet again but on a very different and larger scale.

Others had theorised about black holes long before Einstein developed his geometrical theory of gravity in his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, most notably a clergyman and scientist, John Michell in 1784. Too dense even to allow light to escape and warping space time round its event horizon, a black hole is a cosmic censor where information can leave our Universe for good. In a truly deterministic Universe you should be able in principle at least to track and measure every natural phenomenon. Black holes dismiss that confidence. It would be trying to calculate the volume of water in a tank that had sprung an inaccessible and unpredictable leak.

A black hole is also an object that shows how empty space is not so empty at all. Quantum theory predicts and both particle accelerators and black holes show that the vacuum of space is in truth a seething mass of virtual particles and antiparticles dividing and violently recombining so as to account for the presence of radiation and gravity. Near a black hole event horizon, one virtual particle partner may fall into the black hole never to be seen again, the other might escape by staying this side of the horizon and becoming a real particle in the process. Stephen Hawking predicted this behaviour which would show a black hole to be not exactly black but a radiator of energy. These effects have been seen. They are not fancies. Eventually over a very, very long time, even a large black hole will evaporate away completely in this fashion.

So what happens to all that information in the form of humans, stars, fridges, and other associated junk that fell into the black hole in the first place? Well it has gone and gone forever. The Universe has suffered a massive information loss. One simply cannot get from the Universe’s initial phase to its final condition simply by the application of classical laws to a deterministic system. Not only is there colossal information loss on the way but also huge areas of uncertainty systemic to the Universe’s behaviour itself. Goodbye Universe as Machine, hello Universe as the Missing Sock Drawer. Some things you just NEVER will be able to find, no matter how hard you try!

We live in a Universe where anything could happen, and, more controversially according to some, given enough time, probably will. We live in a Universe where only probable outcomes are truly predictive. What sense then does God make of all of this and in all of this? In what sense now could He be said to be in control, to know perfectly the outcomes of different possible trajectories of chance and choice? Of course, God can always be projected onto the back cloth of eternity, surveying with perfect wisdom and serenity the outcome of all this chaos, randomness, indeterminacy and freedom. In that sense he would be the Perfect Observer although it is difficult to see how God could interact with His Creation as that Observer without submitting himself to the Uncertainty Principle precisely in his intervention. Must omniscience simply be a matter of knowing everything beforehand? I think not if that comes at the price of compromising human and cosmic freedom. God is smarter than that.

I want to suggest a different and I believe more fruitful model of omniscience, not based on the polarities of foreknowledge and ignorance but rather upon His personal knowledge of the principle co-players (the Cosmos and Life) and His own predictive abilities. Moreover this model suggests that God is more like an Internet Author with an evolving script incorporating the input of other artists rather than a solitary master car engineer where we all have to do is "read the manual." Frankly I believe that this is a more creative view of God ... a more noble one and in greater conformity with Scripture and Tradition than that boring old predictable deity of Blake who must either leave well alone (in deist mode) or be forever tinkering with the machine (the 'bête noire' of Richard Dawkins).

We need to articulate a new theology of creation that takes seriously the New Physics and that interactive model of divine-human cooperation that we see in the biblical covenants. I suppose when the Universe was seen as a Machine theologians fell to describing that covenant in terms of law, transgression and repair. This, however impoverished the notion of covenant by emphasising predictability, cause and effect at the expense of relationality and subjectivity. It was a mechanical juridical view; elements of which are present in Scripture but hardly emphasised to this extent. The New Physics however encourages to take the more rounded view of Scripture itself more seriously. How does it do that?

A God that throws dice takes seriously the Universe’s own story. He grants creation contingent freedom to develop without external or internal constraint. This is a Universe that IS predictable once a certain course is set but that setting could just as well be chaotic and accidental as measured and purposeful. Richard Dawkins takes this undetermined and chaotic aspect to be evidence against the sightedness of the Watchmaker, against any purpose or teleology in the raw data of life’s trajectory. However it seems to me that this is merely a matter of scale, (aside from the fact that he is still seeing God as Machine-Maker). It may indeed be that the accidental demise of the dinosaurs and the fortuitous mutation in key hominid genes contributed to the rise of homo sapiens but it by no means follows that the openness of causation is a design flaw. Rather on the scale of the history of the Universe itself, such chaotic processes are a necessary aspect of fecundity itself. If laws tightly constrained genetic mutation, if wandering asteroids had “life protection protocols” built into them why not halt hominid development and save the dinosaurs? If, however, branching possibilities and destruction are given aspects of diversity and creation itself (as they clearly are in the earth’s biosphere) then God must allow his creation a truly radical and comprehensive freedom.

Many believers do not find this an entirely comforting or comfortable prospect. If humans are made in the divine image and likeness then how might we contemplate that the Universe might one day swat us out of existence as summarily as a folded newspaper crushes the back of a fly? If for example, a gamma ray burst happened within a few hundred light years of earth, immediately the radiation cone hit, half the world’s life would be erased star-side. It might be comforting to think of God personally managing such unstable stars so that they behave themselves in our vicinity but I cannot go along with that or any other version of cosmic censorship. It makes the Universe an irrational plaything of Olympean deities and that is neither my faith nor my science. Must the Universe therefore reveal itself to be an even more merciless and amoral entity than we ever allowed for when we thought it was a Machine with some operational malfunctioning? In a word, I believe, yes.

As a species, we do indeed live in a very risky and precarious situation on any reasonable long term view. Interestingly we might significantly reduce that risk by moving off world to colonise the galaxy. That way humans would always survive, somewhere at least. However there is another aspect of this risk assessment and it has to do with voluntary sacrifice. If survival is not the be all and end all of existence then submitting to great personal risk for a consequent creative and life giving potentiality is a more integrated approach to life. Moreover it most readily applies to the Christian idea of the God who lays down his life for the World. If God is an Artist rather than a Machine Maker then this truth is even clearer to see.

If God is a Creative Artist and Lover He must work with his own created materials ... you and I. He seeks to make his canvas and pigments responsive to His touch. He labours over His creation risking all as any Great Artist must to perfect His creation. He is acquainted with sacrifice. If part of his creation is lost he enters into that loss, that place of abandonment and gives it a new fecundity and possibility of regeneration. This is precisely what happened of course in the death and the resurrection of Christ. St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:18-25) even makes a connection between the redemption of human tragedy, corruption and death and the regeneration of creation itself. In this humans are a microcosm of universal possibilities where death is not seen as an end but as a beginning.

18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. 19 For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; 21 because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation groans and labours with birth pangs together until now. 23 Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. 24 For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.

This can be the only possible credible faith response to a creation that does not follow the rigid and unbending dictates of determinism, a creation that has the freedom to fall into bondage and corruption, a creation where God has so valued the creative potential of making “mistakes” as to provide the means by He himself may enter those mistakes and in his own flesh make them good. A dice throwing God is no stranger to Orthodox Christian theology, no matter how uncomfortable that might at first appear.

(Transcript of a lecture given by Fr. Gregory to students at Manchester University, St. Anselm's Hall of Residence, courtesy of St. Peter's Chaplaincy, Tuesday 16th October 2007, (c) Fr. Gregory Hallam)

What do you seek?

2007-10-02T15:02:00.000Z

What do we say when people come looking for God in Orthodoxy? Do we hurry them into our "all singing, all dancing" catechumenates with their shiny Powerpoints © and inspirational testimonies from those who swam the Bosphorus / Orontes / Moskva before them, (delete as appropriate). Or, better, do we sit them down, or rather stand them up and invite them to "come and see." There are huge transitions to negotiate in becoming Orthodox but the first and most important is to learn how to encounter the Living God in this Church and having met Him, to repent.

I was wondering just now why so some people I have chrismated over the last 12 years haven't stayed the course. Most have but many haven't. I think that there is a tendency buried deep in the fascination with Orthodoxy to discover spiritually "the lost treasure of the Incas." This glittering prize has been dreamt of and lives spoilt in its pursuit over many generations. "The pearl of great price" .... "The best kept secret in (X)" ... "Orthodoxy - the Real Thing!" ... you know what I mean. Expectations are raised that becoming Orthodox will deliver on this great treasure. I will find my goal, my marriage will get sorted out, I will discover true peace; all this and more. Well, maybe.

Actually, becoming Orthodox is much more pedestrian than being on a treasure hunt and disillusionment lies not far behind any pedestal worship. Orthodoxy is simply being a Christian and in the most personally profound and challenging way. If you are not prepared then to change on becoming Orthodox and every day for the rest of your life then you will not find what you are looking for with us. If also you are looking for a sinless Church without any blemish then look not toward us but rather to yourself and learn first from your own heart.

Take time then to assess what you really want when you approach the Orthodox Church. There will always be a welcome for you but please, don't fool yourself. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God, (Hebrews 10:31) and that's what happens when you knock on that door. You don't want to be anywhere else though believe me. The smell of sulphur is too strong. Take your medicine. Glory shines from the cross.

Scandalous!

2007-09-18T09:55:00.000Z

For the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy and Life-Giving Cross

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ..... For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
(1 Corinthians 18, 22-25)

I am just half way through reading Martin Palmer’s "The Jesus Sutras." It is a fascinating read. Palmer chronicles the first exposure of China to Christianity (albeit of the Nestorian heretical type) in the 7th century when missionaries from (probably) Baghdad brought the gospel to the magnificent Tang dynasty in a newly resurgent, open and united China. By all accounts these Christian missionaries were well received and allowed to work openly and without hindrance for 200 years before a subsequent Emperor shut down all “foreign religions” (including Buddhism).

Laying aside Palmer’s own politically correct anti-Roman prejudices and dealing with the facts it becomes abundantly clear that a presentation of the gospel that freely used Buddhist and Taoist language eventually succumbed to syncretism in which the Christian elements were eventually all but eclipsed. It is clear that these Chinese missionaries tried to present the gospel in terms accessible to a highly literate and advanced religious philosophical culture, which was and is a worthy aim. However, the gospel presented was too selectively skewed towards those sophianic (wisdom based) elements congenial to Buddhism and Taoism. Eventually these Christian communities lost their way and further compromised by their geographical and spiritual isolation from Orthodox Christianity succumbed. The fundamental error they made was to downplay the cross and the resurrection, precisely the centre of gravity of the whole Christian without which there is no good news at all. The scandalous elements of God-in-the-flesh dying and rising to destroy death gradually fell away from view.

Could such a thing happen again? Of course it could. It has happened many times before. The absence of the Cross turned Islam from a heretical mish-mash of Jewish, Christian and animist elements back into an old fashioned Semitic law based faith. The absence of the Cross turned secular post Renaissance humanism into a deist, Unitarian philosophy. The absence of the Cross in postmodern Christian pietism turned this into a semi-gnostic New Age spirituality. Some would argue even that the 19th century German pantheistic idealism of Hegel (the philosophical grandfather of Marx himself) drove the Russian theologians of the pre and post Revolutionary period toward a disincarnate and esoteric sophiology.

The scandalous aspect of Christianity, so vital to it being transformative good news is centred on the death and resurrection of Christ the Incarnate God-Man. Anything short of this simply isn’t Christian nor does it have the power to change the world. During the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy and Life-Giving Cross let us recall precisely that ... that it is Holy and Life-Giving for us all.

The Dormition (15th August)

2007-08-14T10:41:00.000Z

Although there is no historical record in Scripture concerning the death of our Lady, her repose is within the living memory of the Church and the revelation concerning these things imparted to us by God. On account of the lack of a primary witness in Scripture, however, the Dormition (Assumption) is not part of the public dogma of the Orthodox Church, (in the way it is with the Roman Catholic Church for example).

This does not mean that it is any less significant for us. Quite the contrary; the repose of the Theotokos is a great source of consolation and hope to us that we, with her, may enter the glory of the resurrection of her Son. The Dormition celebrates the great promise of the gospel that we may be glorified in Christ by living and dying well in the Faith and Life of the Church.

"Of the Church" is apposite here. Notice how the Church gathers around the bier of the Mother of God; St. James, the first bishop of Jerusalem leads the assembled company with St. Peter presiding at the funeral rites. The saints of God and the angels join the company of praise and intercession. Christ Himself, carrying the soul of his Mother tenderly, (as tenderly as she once carried Him), is the glory and central focus of the icon in the mandorla of heaven.

The Mother of God is one of us, born into this world under sin and yet not sinning, (Orthodox do not believe in the Immaculate Conception of our Lady which has too much to do with distorted Augustinian understandings of the transmission of original sin). Her perfect obedience to the Word of God and her Son is the portal of her entry into the heavenly kingdom, the first of many to be glorified in Christ. Her ascension prefigures our own if we, by grace, achieve that purity of heart which is our transparency to God and His transparency to us whereby he deifies us. This purity is no mere moralism. It is a completely changed life which is capable of sharing in Christ's death-destroying life. Let us pray that we one day will be received by Christ even as here He receives His Blessed Mother, the Ever-Virgin Mary. Amen.

Visibility

2007-08-14T10:19:00.000Z

Coming back from a pilgrimage last weekend I took a parishioner to see a truly remarkable sight, a wayside shrine to Our Lady on the Derbyshire moors overlooking Errwood Hall above the Goyt Valley. The Grimshaws of Errwood Hall were a notable Victorian wealthy family who converted to Roman Catholicism and who endowed parishes in Buxton (St. Anne), Whaley Bridge, my hometown (Sacred Heart) and extraordinarily, Levenshulme, on the very road where our Orthodox Church now stands. St. Mary’s moved from Clare Road much later but there was a convent of poor Clares there at one time, hence the name.

I have known this shrine since my boyhood as I grew up in this area. It was only recently however that I became better acquainted with the history. It still moves me that such an eloquent witness to the Incarnation (so Orthodox in composition as well!) should stand on a busy tourist road leading down from the moor to the Goyt Valley below. It is immaculately maintained and always has fresh flowers in the niche. I can only surmise that some parishioners from St. Anne’s in Buxton keep it so; praise God.

Of course in Greece, Russia and Eastern Europe you see such shrines all the time although in Greece and in the Greek islands they usually have a much more sombre significance marking the places where drivers have plunged to their deaths from accident hotspots on dangerous roads. Nonetheless, the principle is the same. Mark the place. Make Christ, His Mother and the saints visible. Hallow the ground.

I was once at a meeting – I shouldn’t give too many details to maintain privacy – when a gentleman started complaining bitterly about the inappropriateness and “littering” nature of an improvised shrine on a local road erected by grieving relatives for the loss of a loved one in an accident. This astonished and saddened me. It wasn’t (isn’t I should say, it’s still maintained 2 years later) a religious shrine but the basic idea of keeping a light, flowers and a photograph in place is thoroughly Orthodox in ethos. It hallows the memory and connects not just the family but the community as a whole with a “presence in absence.” It is sacramental in character; it makes spiritual things visible in a society that is embarrassed by such a witness; an amnesiac culture that would rather efface all such reminders from its common mind.

It seems to me that we Orthodox (as well as any other Christians of like mind) should start to make the artefacts of our faith visible again. It might be the dynamic visibility of a public procession, the static witness of a permanent public shrine, the temporary imagery of our faith in the media. Of course, this will be resisted. Our increasingly hard bitten secular society would rather tear down such landmarks ... but time after time after time, we must rebuild them. Lest we forget.

Orthodoxy - the Glory and the Shame

2007-08-02T22:39:00.000Z

By the grace of God I am an Orthodox Christian; moreover I am also by the grace of God a priest serving God and His People in this Church. It was not the church of my baptism, that being the Church of England whose priesthood I also served for 12 years before becoming Orthodox. Grateful as I am to God for my nurturing in the Christian faith within the Anglican Church, I am aware that the last 12 years of my growth in the Orthodox Church have exceeded all my expectations and established me more securely in this Church than any other. Indeed without intending to offend my fellow Christians in other churches I truly believe that this is the one holy catholic apostolic Church that we see in the New Testament and unfolded through Christ in the Old. I cannot even begin to imagine being anywhere else. I shall die in this Church.

I say this because I want you, dear reader, to understand how much the Orthodox Church means to me. It is here that I have discovered the full depth and riches of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. It is my God-bearing family, and I a sinner find myself here amongst saints. It is a humbling thing to come home to God in Orthodoxy, knowing that if I can only repent, I also shall see the glory of the Lord.

Please also understand that I am a thinking, feeling, striving man, flesh and blood. I did not leave my critical faculties, my God given mind at the door upon entering holy Orthodoxy. I am no crypto-fundamentalist. I submitted to God as one who heals and strengthens me, who calls upon me to love him with all my heart, my mind, my soul, my strength. I cannot do that if I am an automaton, if submission simply means blind belief, unquestioning practice and a disabled conscience. God did not give me all my faculties for them to remain dormant. Serving Him means using them, transformed by His grace to their fullest extent.

By now you are probably feeling that there is a gathering storm here; that Father has lost the plot, that he is going to instruct Orthodoxy rather than be instructed by Orthodoxy, that he is reverting to type; an anguished crypto-Protestant Christian in reality, unable to accept the treasure that has been entrusted not only to him but also through him for and to the others in his care. Far from it! God forbid! If I speak against anything that the Church has handed down under inspiration of the Spirit, cease listening to me at that point. But, as you can probably gather by now; I am not an entirely happy man. How so?

Firstly and positively it must be said that I believe that Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy alone has kept the faith “once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). It contains within it all that is necessary to set people free, to unite them with God and hallow all that is good and true. This is Orthodoxy – right belief, true glory. But there is another neglected “Ortho--,” OrthoPRAXY, meaning right or true action of practice. It is by our Orthopraxy that we fulfil and prove our Orthodoxy and it is here that I am troubled; first of course by myself.

Understand please that I am not here to “fix the Church.” If the Church is to be fixed it is I who must be fixed first. I am fixed by all the usual means ... it is the same for all Orthodox Christians: faith, repentance, denying oneself, following Christ, serving God in my sisters and brothers, acquiring the Holy Spirit. That’s not the problem. The problem I carry is that I cannot do my job properly as a priest of this Church because of certain dysfunctions, certain shortcomings in Orthopraxy in the Church at large. As I said, it is not my job to fix these. I am not the Holy Spirit nor am I a bishop charged with addressing such matters. I only ask that my concerns be heard so that I, together with my fellow ministers of the gospel both lay and ordained may become more faithful and effective stewards of the mysteries of God both in His Word and by His Sacraments, in living out the Gospel in the world.

What are these problems of Orthopraxy that hinder me in my work? The first has a fancy name. It is called phyletism. It first reared itself in 1872 when the Bulgarian patriarchate established a bishopfric in Constantinople (Istanbul) open only to Bulgarians. This was interpreting Orthodoxy simple as a national phenomenon, an adjunct of cultural identity rather than a subsistence in Christ in whom there is neither east nor west and certainly no earthly national sovereignty. Since then things have deteriorated fast. Because there has been no resolution of the issue as to who has the responsibility for the governance of Orthodox churches in the west, (although Constantinople claims that), all the Orthodox churches now more or less operate simultaneously on the same territory. The canonical requirement that there be just one bishop for one city or region has now been effectively abandoned.

The consequences of phyletism have been dire in the waste of resources, the rancour of competitive nationalisms and occasional out breaks of turf and culture wars. This means that as a pastor of an Orthodox community in a large northern city in England where there are only 5 functioning Orthodox parishes I have no fellowship with my fellow clergy and there is no collaborative work between these communities. “Well Father,” you might say, “What have YOU done to remedy that?” A lot actually, but eventually you stop knocking at the door when there is no answer or it is slammed shut in your face. It is not as if this is an isolated example, a little local difficulty. Estonia, Ukraine, London, (Sourozh – Amphipolis) ... it doesn’t take too long to chronicle recent examples of this dysfunctionality. It’s no use pretending that “things are not too bad really” and “let’s not wash our dirty linen in public.” I might be a little bit more restrained if steps were being actively taken to address these problems nationally and internationally; but I don’t see it and neither do most other observers. So, in this matter, I cannot do my job properly. Can somebody help?

The Orthodox Christian faith is simply the gospel and the gospel life in worship and witness. This faith and life is for all. Those who gathered in Jerusalem at Pentecost to hear the Apostles preach ... “the Parthians and Medes and Elamites, those dwelling in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya adjoining Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” did not assemble to divide the Church up amongst themselves, they did so (to continue the quotation):- to “hear them (the Apostles) speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.” Notice that - “in our own tongues.” In short they were diverse peoples in language and culture but united in the Word; they heard and were understood. The drive to mission therefore starts and returns to this point time after time. It is the Holy Spirit that makes this possible. This is what our own (Antiochian) Patriarch Ignatius once said about this Spirit-filled mission of the Church when he was Metropolitan Archbishop of Latakia:-

“Without the Holy Spirit God is far away.
Christ stays in the past,
The Gospel is simply an organisation,
Authority is a matter of propaganda,
The Liturgy is no more than an evocation,
Christian loving a slave mentality.
But in the Holy Spirit ...
The cosmos is resurrected and grows with the birth pangs of the kingdom.
The Risen Christ is there,
The Gospel is the power of life,
The Church shows forth the life of the Trinity,
Authority is a liberating service,
Mission is a Pentecost,
The Liturgy is both renewal and anticipation,
Human action is deified.”

Now I cannot do my job as a mission priest as effectively as I might because many Orthodox still think in terms of cultural reinforcement rather than gospel mission. This means that credibility for evangelism is continually undermined by such attitudes. Too often many Orthodox resort to the mantra “we don’t proselytise” when what that actually means is “we don’t want to present the gospel outside our own community to ANYONE unless they become exactly like us or at least tolerate a foreign language.” So instead of the Pentecostal principle of Church mission other deadly inward looking principles are substituted such as:- “Keep the community together, teach them (the British that is) Greek, Slavonic, Arabic, whatever which of course reinforces the idea that Orthodoxy is ‘just for us.’” You see how this ties into phyletism? It perpetuates this heresy by refusing Orthodoxy to new cultures and keeping by it as an artefact of nationality and an overseas culture. It’s hardly surprising that your average interested British person concludes that Orthodoxy is lovely but not for me ... because in this expression, it isn’t. Of course I CAN still do my job within a loose association of like-minded communities across most of the jurisdictions but this is a car firing on 1 or 2 cylinders, not 4. It is a vehicle that is not going very far and that, neither smoothly nor fast.

Finally I cannot do my job effectively we have lost the facility of speaking to the indigenous, that is, western culture. This is frequently written off as irredeemably Protestant or intractably Catholic. Such despair (for that is what it is) is used to justify lack of engagement within these cultures, losing in the process all possibilities of transforming them. Such churches then wonder why they are losing their young people but this only prompts further retrenchment as it seems to offer yet further proof that integration is dangerous and, therefore, impermissible.

This impacts on my ministry because the ethnically enclosed Orthodox communities that could offer so much from the wealth of their experience and history simply refuse to help. We need, for example, services written for the British Orthodox saints of the first millennium. We need theological assessments of contemporary issues raised in the west concerning human sexuality, the role of science, bioethics, community development and other social aspects of our culture. Even where there is such engagement, usually amongst predominantly convert communities in the US, the results are not always Orthodox in breadth and scope. Too often such contributions are compromised by the reactive neo-fundamentalist positions of those who see themselves as in flight of all things liberal and who have mistakenly supposed that Orthodoxy is the last and only refuge from these positions that they have rejected in their former churches. So in Orthodoxy, apparently, one can hate gays, believe in a 6 day creation, spit at the very mention of women deacons and pursue with legalistic fervour the minutiae of calendars and fasting, despising those who are not “true Orthodox” who have sold out to “the opposition.” Frankly, you might as well be Amish ... except that Amish are much nicer people. I will be able to do my job properly when our theologians who truly teach from the Scriptures and the Fathers enter the arena of theological debate, in English and for a western audience. Then we shall be able to present Orthodoxy as it actually is rather than the hateful distortion it has become in some quarters.

So, do you still love Orthodoxy Father? You bet! It’s just those who despoil Orthodoxy and refuse God’s call that I find difficult. I need them to support me in “speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God” not undermine me in so doing. Of course I could respond to this situation by ignoring them. There’s one big problem about that. They are my brothers and sisters in the body of Christ. I could no more ignore them than ignore myself or God. So, we have to work this one out together. But the first step is honesty and this is the genesis of this article. What happens next depends ...

Not Waving but Drowning

2007-07-28T13:04:00.000Z

The recent exceptional flooding in the UK over a sustained period with water and sometimes electricity deprived to over 340,000 people has shown how crises can bring out both the best and the worst in people. Acts of heroism in rescuing endangered people have contrasted mindless and dangerous vandalism and greed in the poisoning or hijacking of precious water supplies. If this was a "real" emergency with widespread social disorder such sociopaths and looters would be shot on sight. Perhaps some brain dead monkeys haven't just quite realised yet what happens when survival becomes the name of the game. It's only when we skirt disaster like this that the stress fractures and fault lines in our social fabric become clear. Civilisation is a fragile disequilibrium at the best of times. It only needs a nudge and it falls over quite easily; perhaps even more easily when water comes out of tap rather than the local brook and food from the supermarket rather than the back garden.

The people of God over 4000 years have had their own "rude awakenings" so we should be alert to this issue by now. Century after century civilisations have come and gone, repression and violence has waxed and waned. A story is told of one of the fathers on Mount Athos who led a secluded eremitical life in his cell. He rarely received visitors but questioned one day one of his spiritual sons:- "And which empire my child today rules the known world?" That's an extreme example but the point is clear. For Christians human tragedy and glory are known alike and are in many ways unremarkable. We are prepared for both but unsettled by neither. We stand ready to greet Christ in the needy and respond to him in distress. Behold, the Bridegroom comes and we shall be ready ... will we not?

Sense in the senses

2007-07-27T21:39:00.000Z

One of the most gruesome sights I can recall on TV (of a non violent nature) was of a speed eating contest. Donut after donut after donut, it never seemed to stop; bulging cheeks, inflated bellies, an obscenity of excess. This got me thinking about sensory overload, the gluttony of the overwhelmed senses. There is seemingly just no getting away from this assault on our inner life. The background noise that makes us fearful of silence, the visual drenching that leaves us blind, the adrenaline rush that demands attention but offers only diminishing returns.

Two things tend to happen at this point. Some switch off entirely and, stupefied, retreat into a frightened corner. Others, more wise, guard the senses and seek a place of retreat where the “is-ness” of things and God himself can be allowed to room to breathe in our souls. Here we can savour creation and God; we can truly “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Not overwhelmed by our passions we can attend to God and truly enjoy both Him and His world. I suppose it’s the spiritual equivalent of “chew your food” and the rationale of fasting. A piece of fruit that is eaten in a leisurely attentive fashion satisfies much more than a voracious and tasteless swallowing and gulping. In the former food is encounter, in the latter, food merely fuel.

Consider the Divine Liturgy, the Eucharist and how much care and reverence attends the feast. We do not take Christ lightly, we prepare, we wait expectantly, we greet Him, we receive Him lovingly. In his great book “For the Life of the World” Fr. Alexander Schmemann reminds us what a holy event eating is and should be. This touches upon not only Holy Communion but any good thing that we consume. It is that fatal separation of the physical and the spiritual that lies behind our peculiarly western sickness; the deadening idea that nothing common is holy. Left to our passions and our own devices in a God-erased world, that which is truly good turns to sickening dust and ashes in our mouths.

How then can we regain our senses unless we first train them? We cannot. We must, particularly as Orthodox Christians, exercise restraint in order to appreciate God, each other and the good things He has given us. We must give him thanks before, during and after we consume and measure what we want by what we need. If not, we shall not only finally destroy ourselves but also the very planet that we live on. We must once again in Christ become priests and not destroyers of creation.

The time is short. Even as we live so shall we die and dying well, that is to ourselves, so shall we live forever in God the Giver of all good things. Glory be to Him for all his many and excellent gifts! Savour them well.

"Apparently Intelligent?"

2007-07-04T20:48:00.000Z

On a number of occasions in recent days the media when reporting on the failed terrorists attacks in London and Glasgow referred to the alleged perpetrators as "intelligent", "apparently intelligent" and "well educated."

Now this was no mere description but in the context of the commentary an expression of surprise - as if intelligence or a good education and terrorist actions (in contrast to, say, planning) were incompatible.

This seems to be a common error in liberal societies to assume that only the deranged, the intellectually feeble or the impressionable resort to premeditated violence. How this view can be maintained in the light of the long history of human intelligent malevolence is the real surprise here.

However, when we consider the prevailing assumption here that education and material enrichment promote civilised values, the contrast with a Christian analysis of the problem becomes startlingly clear. In the Christian assessment of human bestiality it is the contrast between humility and arrogance, wisdom and knowledge, impassioned rage and repentant transformation that brings understanding. One has to know how ordinary people, whether intelligent and well educated or not, can so easily be corrupted when the conditions are right ... and the conditions are "right" at this time.

We face outworking of a long process in the post colonial period. We have victors and victimhood, a clash of cultures and aspirations if not civilisations. We have very intelligent extremely well educated trouble makers who want to destabilise the whole world in the pursuit of a global Islamic theocracy. This is not some little local problem. This is a struggle for the soul of the planet ... and most can't see it, or refuse to see it.

It goes without saying (or should) that this battle, therefore, is subtle, spiritual and deep. It is not to be engaged only with natural vigilance and cunning but also with a guileless pursuit of justice, peace and freedom. One wonders really whether our rulers realise this, whether they understand the true nature of the struggle here. I really do hope so. Much depends on it.

Orthodoxy Lost and Found

2007-06-15T20:40:00.000Z

Helen and I have just come back from a short vacation break in mid-Wales. We dodged the showers and savoured the delights of the Welsh countryside and renowned hospitality of an artistic Celtic culture. Where, however, was God in this fair land of green clad hills and ancient springs? I suppose I mean, where was God in the culture, for He was everywhere to be seen in the landscape. In human terms though there was a curious vacancy, of a time long forgotten, of as Peter Berger once said “a rumour of angels” but now barely heard. There were of course churches and chapels to be seen.

The churches in rural mid-Wales are pretty, compact, well maintained on the whole. They seem nonetheless to suffer from a certain cultural disconnection except when hosting concerts for the tourists in tourist areas. Does God matter though to the Welsh? The chapels have fared even worse. Village after village after village embarrasses itself with the crumbling facades of the long gone 19th century Welsh revival. It’s as if the dragon roared but the fiery embers were always destined to grow cold and forgotten. But why? Why could not the fire of Christ ignite Welsh culture beyond the immediate generation of those original (largely) Methodist apostles? Why is Wales now seemingly so neglectful of the faith of David, Non, Seiriol, Illtyd, Dyfrig, Gildas, Dwynwen, Melangell, Gwenfrewy, Winefride, Beuno, Asaph and countless others?

The same questions could and should be raised for England, Scotland and perhaps to a lesser extent Ireland, north and south. Why have the landmarks of sanctity in the lives of the Christian heroes of these lands been erased from the public mind, confined to the private realm of the dwindling faithful and the secular archives of the historian? Why has Christianity become disconnected from the culture and replaced by a secular mind more entertained by New Age fripperies and the gods of multiculturalism? As Anglo-Catholic priest Fr. Eric Mascall once wrote as a title to a book:- “Whatever happened to the Christian mind?”

The trouble is that the Orthodox know the answer but few seem to understand the question. We say, of course, that Britain has both forgotten the treasure (our Orthodox faith) and where she has buried it (in the distortions of Rome and Geneva). The incomprehension of the post-Orthodox Christian in the face of this answer is understandable for too many years have passed since the burying and the earthworks have now all but gone. The preachers of the Welsh Revival and all the other revivals of British Non-Conformity faced the problem of Christianity’s decline during the Industrial Revolution but they didn’t do their homework; they didn’t look for the buried treasure but rather they mistook fool’s gold for the real thing. They can’t be blamed for this. They were children of their time drawing by godly revolt from a contaminated source, mistaking its corruption for purity, its artifice for authenticity. The writing was on the wall no sooner had the wall been built.

There are some Orthodox who say that British (or if you like, English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish) Orthodox Christianity is dead and incapable of being revived. These claim that only through a fresh infusion of Orthodoxy with a very clear “country of origin” sticker attached will the real thing be recognised once more. I beg to disagree ... most profoundly! It is no solution at all to point a lost soul to a foreign country just because he has got lost in his own. We need to need to repaint the signs; not have them repositioned in a new direction. St. Arsenios of Paros, a Greek saint of the 19th century knew this full well. He said presciently ...

“When the Church in the British Isles begins to venerate her own Saints then the Church will grow.” St. Arsenios of Paros (+1877)

This is the remedy for the amnesia of the British. Let them see their own saints again ... not just in the churches (that they may never frequent) but in the countryside, in the cities, in the towns. We need to reconnect Christ and Culture the Orthodox way. We need to roll back of the desert of secularism by touching the heart, by restoring the memory, by energising the will. We need to get out there and make Christ visible again.

"Physician, heal Thyself" (Luke 4:23)

2007-06-08T08:04:00.000Z

Plenty of folk have remedies for reforming their religion. If a spirituality doesn't suit, get a new one. If your pastor isn't to your taste, find one that is. If you disagree with your denomination, maybe strike out and form a new one. How far this is from New Testament teaching concerning the Church! The Church is simply the believers in one place, one body, partaking of the breaking of the bread, the apostles' teaching and fellowship and prayers, (Acts 2:42). She isn't our 'plaything' ... our pet project, our 'bete noir', our favourite punch bag. Self appointed 'popes' abound, self righteous architects of a better, more modern and relevant Christianity ministering only to their own egos and desires.

Hear what the Athonite elder Paisius said about this:-

"If one hopes to help the Church, one would be better to correct oneself, and not others. If you correct yourself, then a small part of the Church will be corrected. And it is obvious that if everyone did that, then the Church would be brought into perfect order. But people today are occupied with everything possible except themselves, because it is easy to fix others, but it requires effort to fix oneself."

Let us endeavour by grace first to "fix oneself."

A Modest Little Proposal

2007-06-03T22:54:00.000Z

Should the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church ever reunite a new conciliar structure would be required to serve the unity of the Church. The details are difficult to foresee but the general shape might just be discernible.

Each autocephalous church would be represented by its patriarch or pope. The Bishop of Rome would facilitate this body by convening and presiding in love. Any participating hierarch could petition Rome for a meeting and should this be supported by the other churches, the Pope would call his brothers together.

There would be one rule. Any decision would only be effective if it had the unanimous assent of all. “Never the Twelve without Peter; never Peter without the Twelve.”

Clearly there are huge questions left unresolved by this proposal ... the balance of primacy and authority amongst the brethren and with Peter, the relationship to the faithful and Tradition, the linkages between the Pope’s own apostolic role and that of an Ecumenical Council, the day by day administration of the Church to name but a few. Nonetheless, these can be worked out if the questions of primacy and conciliarity have first been satisfactorily resolved in a spirit of love and truth.

There remain also significant challenges to be faced in the mentality and wounded history of both churches. How can we seek that honesty and generosity of spirit that might recover through forgiveness and reconciliation that primordial Christocentric unity that Christians once had across the Oikumene? Only the Holy Spirit can forge such a new mindset. For this to happen, contrary forces are going to have to “move out of the way” ... on both “sides.”

Many will probably not be very popular for supporting such explorations and the temptations to further schism will be great (especially, sadly I feel amongst the Orthodox). Remaining as we are though is simply not an option. Christian unity in truth is never a luxury but a vital component of preaching and living out the gospel. It’s about time we took this challenge more seriously; in the Orthodox constituency at least.

The Trinity - Knowing God

2007-05-31T23:15:00.000Z

I guess that thousands of volumes have been written and millions of sermons have been preached concerning the doctrine of the Trinity over the last 2000 years. Don’t worry. I am not about to try and condense these into a grossly inadequate summary here. There is a much simpler starting point and it has to do with experience.

In truth, the Orthodox Church has it right when she claims that the Trinity is a doxological reality in the Church; that is it concerns worship, and therefore, experience. It was an encounter with the living Christ that convinced a group of monotheist Jews that Christ was God along with the Father. It was the experience of being filled with the Spirit at Pentecost that convinced these disciples that God remained present with them in this Gift and that they should ascribe Godhead to the Holy Spirit also. Interestingly, when St. Basil the Great wrote much later on the Trinity he justified giving glory TO the Father, TO the Son and TO the Spirit he in part appealed to the received practice of worship. This is a source in Tradition for the Orthodox along with the Scriptures and the witness of our God-bearing fathers and mothers in the faith.

Bearing this perspective in mind, when those claiming to be Christians deny the Trinity, one cannot help but conclude that they have not encountered the living Christ who saves; they have not been filled with the Pentecostal Spirit who imparts holiness. It isn’t that they are being wilfully contentious or difficult, it’s just that the experience of God-with-us, tripersonally, has not been present. Therefore, when confessing the Trinity, merely arguing about it one way or the other achieves little or nothing. The way to the Trinity is an invitation to know God personally. There is no other sure route.

Sharks without Daddies, Sky without Theology

2007-05-23T12:48:00.000Z

You heard it here first. Sharks do not need salvation! They are utterly sinless. All that bad press from Mr. Spielberg and others is just a put-up job. Sharks are pure ... and that's official. Or at least according to SKY TV News. Not that I blame SKY specifically for theological illiteracy. The error of confusing IMMACULATELY conceived (that is, without taint of original sin according to Roman Catholic dogma) and VIRGINALLY conceived (that is, without a daddy in traditional Christianity as a whole) is commonplace. It is sloppy journalism though. I don't know anything about cars but I wouldn't dream of commenting on carburettors unless and until I had researched the basics. So, until then with SKY we chant: "Hail O long-toothed one! Your bite saves us!"

The real story of course is that female sharks, under certain circumstances, can give birth without the aid of a male. Right on selachimorphae sisters! Down with shark patriarchy!

Seeing What's Really There

2007-05-21T08:48:00.000Z

Tony Blair's former press officer, Alistair Campbell famously once intervened when the Prime Minister was asked a question about faith and politics. "We don't do God," he stated curtly. Well, modern liberal secular politicians, even if believers, don't generally "do God" but that doesn't mean that belief is irrelevant to how leaders lead and the projects they pursue.

Both Blair and Brown are practising Christians. Tony is your fairly typical middle-of-the-road liberal Anglican with a social conscience, somewhat emasculated by Thatcherism, but also, and untypically, with an old-fashioned imperial "let's teach Johnny-foreigner civilised values" foreign policy. Gordon is a son of the Kirk, (presbyterian Church of Scotland), brought up in a strict Sabbatarian, Protestant work ethic, social-justice-prophecy environment. He is able, therefore, to square the circle of capitalism, self reliance and international development without worrying too much about the Calvinist inconsistencies between the various strands of his thought.

From an Orthodox Christian point of view, this got me thinking. What would an Orthodox Christian Prime Minister look like in a British context? What would be his or her agenda. Would he or she "do God" ... explicitly or implicitly?

Moscow and ROCOR reconciled

2007-05-18T12:46:00.000Z

It is an occasion for great rejoicing that the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the (originally) old White-Russian emigre church has now enterred into canonical communion with the formerly Red-accommodating/resisting Moscow patriarchate. This sympathetic observer is mindful of the following spin-off questions.

(1) What of the other "Russian" jurisdictions ... the Exarchate based in Paris under Constantinople, the ROCOR refuseniks (who are now getting even more entrenched in isolationism) and the much troubled Orthodox Church in America (OCA - the old Russian Metropolia established BEFORE the Revolution)? Should they or could they consider loosening something of their jurisdictional autonomy?

(2) The question broached in (1) is not at all likely to be positively answered unless Moscow can show by its actions that its presence outside of Russia is not just for Russians but rather, in the best tradition of Russian missionary activity, for all those who wish to worship and serve God in their own native tongue and culture.

Time will tell.

Going Up?!

2007-05-15T10:07:00.000Z

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, famously declared on reaching the heavens that he had found no god. We take this so much for granted nowadays that unless Gagarin was being supremely ironic, we laugh to think that anyone could have thought that God was "up there." That the Soviets saw this as an atheistic propaganda coup is astonishing!

[I am grateful to Trevor in the first comment on this article that Gagarin was almost certainly not the author of this comment, (ed. Fr. Gregory)].

John Lennon probably wasn't being ironic either when he wrote this piece of theological drivel for his 1971 "Imagine" album:-

"Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today..."

So, clearly, as late as the 1960's and 1970's, many people still presupposed that God's existence depended on some ancient long superseded celestial topography. How extraordinary!

However, as this article makes clear, ["Is Heaven the Sky?] "God living in the sky" was precisely what the ancients supposed. This is the cosmology of Genesis and how irrelevant it is now to what we know about this planet and the Universe in which it is set.

On the 16th May, the Church celebrates the Ascension of Christ. This is a vitally important feast for Orthodox Christians as it affirms a central truth of our faith. Simply put, it is that in the resurrection of Christ, our humanity has been refashioned, glorified. This is a new creation of God in which even the physicality of our new bodies is not constrained by the spatial and temporal limits of the spacetime continuum in this Cosmos, (as we might say today).
.
We must not suppose, therefore, that Christ literally ascended into the clouds and had to use an oxygen mask, then later a vacuum sealed space suit. What nonsense is this! Rather, Christ ascended to the Father, taking our humanity, glorified with him and in him. This is why Christ came, to complete the work that the Father had intended for our good in creation.

What might, therefore, characterise an ascended humanity, aside from its already mentioned discontinuous existence in an unspecified transcendent state? First and foremost this would be a humanity that had left sin, suffering and death far behind.

The biblical way of referring to this is the "New Jerusalem" but again we must put away all carnal and this worldly descriptions of this paradisal state. Jesus himself said concerning marriage:- "When they rise from the dead they will neither marry nor be given in marriage but will be like angels in heaven" (Mark 12:25). This by the way is the most striking difference between Paradise in Islam, (also the faith of Jehovah's Witnesses), and that of the Orthodox Church.

Clearly a world in which there was no sin, evil, suffering or death is NOT in any way like our own broken creation. That is why, eventually, Christ had to leave it physically in order that he might open up the new reality of the Kingdom of God fully to his followers ... that, indeed, we might ascend to "where" he had gone before. To this end he promised to send the Spirit from the Father at Pentecost ... for knowing what and where we are called to be does not solve the HOW of acquiring that state. The Church then became the gathering of a new humanity, one in which the advances hitherto of evolutionary adaptation seem tame in the extreme. The Ascension is not so much "up" therefore as "one vast leap forward" for humankind. All that is required from us is a life consecrated to Christ that we might become by grace what he is by nature ... ASCENDED!

And God created Gliesians

2007-05-12T21:26:00.000Z

Part Two - Divine Images

Observation has shown recently that only 20.5 light years away there is a planet 1.5 times the diameter of earth with 5 times its mass orbiting much closer in to a cooler star. On account of its close, tight orbit, although its year is only 13 days, the surface temperature should be remarkably earthlike. This appears to be a rocky world so we might surmise the presence of surface water without which life (as we know it) seems improbable. Have we at last found another earth? Well, hardly. There are a lot of "ifs" and "maybes" here but this is probably the best candidate yet for an earth-like planet in our galactic neighbourhood.

Now, just suppose that this planet did have life, even (stretching the probabilities) intelligent life. How would Christian theology respond to such a situation? Doubtless there would be some "creationist" Christians who would deny any significance to such a "find." For them humans and humans alone are made in the divine image.

I suspect that Orthodox Christians would have a much more open and inclusive theological approach ... or at least I hope so. We are approaching the feast of the Ascension of Christ. Orthodoxy believes that in this ineffable event Christ took our humanity into the heart of God where it acquired the deification by grace that Christ had by nature. The compatibility of God and humanity is presupposed by this teaching but why should such compatibility be limited to humanity? Whatever the divine image is in humans it is clear from the Scriptures that we are made in God's image not God in ours. There is every reason to suppose, therefore, that if Gliesians exist, God made them, loves them and takes them to himself. God's character and actions are not quixotic but have all the dependability that his love confers upon them. I suspect that the Divine Logos will have had many incarnations on many different worlds ... or at least I am not constrained by my faith necessarily to think otherwise.

I will leave the last word with Alice Meynell in her wonderful poem, "Christ of the Universe."

With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord's entrusted Word.

Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens he guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way,
Or His bestowals there, be manifest.

But, in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

Oh be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The infinite forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Cosmic Wonder and Human Scales

2007-05-12T18:55:00.000Z

Part One - Big Bangs

15 million years before the first dinosaurs walked the earth, a star in a distant galaxy, (NGC 1260), some 150 times the size of our sun, exploded in a devastating supernova explosion. Last September the light reached earth and for 200 or more days has outshone in brilliance any previously known supernova, much brighter in fact than that of its host galaxy.

The power of this dying star, anonymously catalogued as SN 2006gy, is the power of birth. Supernovae account for the presence of heavy elements in suns such as our own given that they are too small and cool to have produced them by our their own fusion processes. Life without supernovae would not be possible.

Moreover we have our own SN 2006gy ticking away to destruction just 7500 light years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. A little smaller perhaps at 120 solar masses, this star, Eta Carinae has already had a mini-eruption, observed in the 19th century. Being much nearer, when this star fully explodes, you will be able to read a book by its light at night time and it will be plainly visible during the day. It could happen at any time; although it may have already happened and its radiation would now be racing across the stellar void so that it can "happen" here. Life on earth is probably safe. The supernova would have to involve a gamma ray burst on a very narrow trajectory cone to to threaten us here ... but you get the point. The Cosmos is a dangerous violent place. It has to be if the building blocks of life (the "dust" of Genesis) are to be in place waiting the "breath of God" (Genesis 2:7).

In a now-famous statement, at the end of his book "The First Three Minutes", (1977), the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg wrote that "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." In effect Weinberg was claiming that science paints a picture of our universe as a vast purposeless place in which we can see no evidence of a point for ourselves as human beings. Weinberg has now joined the likes Richard Dawkins and other atheistic scientists in an evangelical crusade against religion; yet, as a Jew and unlike Dawkins, he remains wistful for the passing of what he must deny. But is the conclusion - that the Universe is cold, violent, purposeless and devoid of God, rational?

I submit that this question cannot simply be resolved by observation and the explanatory power of scientific theory. We need such methods and operations to understand physical phenomena but it is quite a step to deny the legitimacy of existential questions as if these were simply the lazy and unwarranted speculations of "dust refusing to be dust." It seems strange to me that cosmic wonder should so readily escape those who behold the stars, those who hold life in their hands. Ever since I can remember I have had an intuition about God from the wonder of creation. I gaze at the novas remains of a nebula and I am at once "homo adorans" ... which is why I find Weinberg's melancholy before the apparently cold cosmic vastness so incomprehensible.

Actually I think that we have two problems here. The first concerns the God bearing potential of creation. The Protestant Reformation denied this. It stripped away the sacramental character of the physical realm. It demystified the material world, banishing the spiritual to the private and mental sphere. All science in the west has been conducted in this context since. It has non too subtly shaped popular perceptions of the Cosmos as God-less. Pietism has been its bedfellow. Some (but not all) scientists who are believers sometimes seem to pursue their scientific work quite independently of their spiritual lives; much in the manner of the divorce between public-fact and private-feeling.

The second problem concerns the impoverished vision of the pietist's God who could barely manage to create a good souffle let alone the Cosmos we see through our telescopes. From an Orthodox point of view, his "God" is just too small or rather we say that the true God is beyond all conceptions of size and temporality. Likewise in the "nothing-buttery" of the atheist for whom by definition nothing can exist "outside" the Universe (since the Universe is "everything") the conclusion has been presupposed in the very act of enquiry. How is this a rational open ended approach to the question of why there is anything at all, not just the actual vast Cosmos we see (and the others perhaps that we cannot)?

I guess I am just asking for a bit more humility, not just of the Copernican sort that accepts our smallness in the Cosmos but also of the existential and philosophical sort. There are no knock down incontrovertible arguments for or against the existence of God from creation but there is wonder. Our response to who we are and what we are cannot be exhausted by our ability to explain physical phenomena. Even the biggest bang of the largest supernova cannot match the enormity of the deepest questions that such wonder evokes.

All the King's Horses and all the King's Men

2007-05-07T13:52:00.000Z

Humpty Dumpty ... who done it?

“Well, he sure weren’t pushed! Guess the old ellipsoid got a bit careless!”

Notes from the police file ...

PRIDE ... he was a top-of-the-wall kind of guy. He needed to be there and he needed others to see how improbably he had achieved the great feat of his ascent.
PERILOUS DISEQUILIBRIUM ... but then, it only took a wobble, no great thing to start with, but then a helpless fall to a scrambled fate.
IRREVERSIBLE ENTROPY ... Humpty learned all too soon the lesson of increasing entropy, the tendency to disorder. No earthly power could mend that logic.

Humpty has things to teach us about maintaining the integrity of the Church and her faith. If pride gets “in the works” as it were, people start thinking that they know better than their forebears; that they need to remake Christianity after their own image (desires, inclinations, opinions) or to appeal to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Sometimes this involves removing key elements or adding new ones. The result is that the whole enterprise is destabilised. Instead of more people being drawn into the Kingdom of God through repentance and transformation, the “Church” (for this is no church) shrinks both in extent and depth. Instead of God being at the centre, man once again takes centre stage and all is shattered.

A little later in this process of decline some people wake up to the real and dire situation in which they find themselves. However, although they see Humpty broken at their feet they wrongly surmise that he is not broken beyond repair. They make the serious error of not understanding entropy, of supposing that the shattering is reversible. Re-forming Humpty is a noble but hopeless task. Vainly do they attempt to mend the poor fellow by, for example:-

(1) Putting a belief back that had been formerly abandoned. However, by now the interconnections and morphology of belief have changed. The former faith has been reconfigured. There are no spaces for the “missing piece.” You can see this classically with the Orthodox understanding of the resurrection. If the west was to return to that, its understanding of the cross would have to change. Its understanding of the cross would have to change because its belief concerning God and Man remained unreformed. Its understanding of God and Man would then have to change because the divine nature and the human predicament would otherwise remain seriously distorted ... and so on, and so on. Beliefs cannot be “re-tweaked” by human intervention and manipulation once compromised. This also applies to just about every other aspect of Christian life and worship. Once the Orthodox Christian ethos has been lost it cannot be conjured back from this starting point of fracture. The king’s horses and men have tried ... and failed, miserably.

(2) Copying what they remember of Humpty before his fall, in effect starting all over again with a “new egg.” For how many years, centuries even, have disillusioned Christians left their churches to form their own new churches wherever, supposedly, all would be made well again? And when this fails, (as fail it must), what then? Where then? Sadly, too often this meant the end of the line for these Christians, a damaged faith and no church or simply atheism as a new fundamentalism replacing former certainties. But must such an enterprise be doomed to fail? Well, to be fair, not necessarily. Consider though what needs to happen for it to succeed. EVERY aspect of Orthodox Christianity would need to be re-constituted from scratch. This would require extreme humility from the church leadership. If, for example, a prevailing idea had been that Mary should have no prominent place in Christian piety and worship and if the New Church research revealed that indeed she had always had an honoured place in the Christian assembly then that would have to change, without compromise, prevarication or qualification. Who would have the grace to respond to that challenge? Historically it has happened as in the recent case of the Campus Crusade for Christ groups in America that embarked on a long period of exploration and discovery that led them eventually into the Orthodox Church through the reception of their own transformed communities. You can read an account of such a journey by Fr. Gregory Rogers in his article “From Evangelical to Orthodox”. Nonetheless such bloc conversions from churches outside Orthodox en masse are exceptional and rare. It can be a hard lesson to learn that Humpty cannot humanly be put back together again.

If these are the problems associated with the Humpty strategy for Church reform what may we characterise as the tried and tested way? The answer will not satisfy some because it involves sacrificing a key part of the western heterodox Christian mentality, independence. This can be very difficult for some people to do. Consider the so-called Continuum or continuing Anglican churches. These bodies, on both sides of the Atlantic comprise Christians who have grown weary and disillusioned with contemporary Anglicanism and who have often shown a long interest in either Orthodox or Roman Catholic Christianity. However, so often when the crunch comes, (doubting the resurrection or some key aspect of Christian dogma, the priesting of women etc.), these Christians do not follow up their interest in Catholicism or Orthodoxy and especially if they are not promised some form of “special treatment” that allows them to keep cherished aspects of Anglican spirituality and life. Independence is a spirit far stronger in such cases than humility. The irony of course is that it is precisely this spirit of independence that led their former ecclesiastical allegiance into rejected unwelcome paths in the first place. Be that as it may, the Continuum remains a dead end ... being neither accountable to anyone else nor being in communion with anyone else.

So to return to the key question, what is the tried and tested way? Simply, to return home as quickly as possible; not temporising or shrinking behind a wall of cowardice, rationalising that godless anxiety in all the countless ways that make delay seem to the responsible thing to do. If saving truth lies in such and such a direction, saving faith means that you delay not but rather trust God, pick up as far as you can all those for whom you are responsible and who wish to travel with you AND MOVE, now, today.

There is a wall that Humpty has neither scaled nor will ever scale.
There is a Humpty that is full of new life.
Let neither the king’s horses nor the king’s men distract you from finding that “egg” entire, whole and complete.

Raised For Us

2007-04-28T14:45:00.000Z

One of the most significant differences between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Christian cultures concerns the resurrection. Characteristically the west, which has not been Orthodox now for a millennium, focuses on the death of Christ as a reparation to God for the alienating consequences of the Fall of Adam. In this account the resurrection can only function as a vindication of Christ’s atoning sacrifice and a future pledge of immortality for the believer. The resurrection has no existential, personal aspect for the believer in the present.

This has profoundly affected western culture. There are now simply no cultural manifestations of the resurrection left in tact after the corrosive generations of mounting scepticism and secularism have taken their toll. So, chocolate eggs go on sale before Lent and TV program schedulers see nothing incongruous in showing Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” (Channel 4) on Easter Day. Too many Protestant Christians and almost everybody else haven’t a clue that Easter lasts for 40 days and Jesus is popularly thought to be a dead hero rather than a living Saviour.

The absence of any saving benefit in the resurrection has left many western churches with nothing useful or positive to say about the spiritual potential of humankind. Instead, forensic atonement theory based solely on the cross has deformed the acquisition of practical holiness into a deadening and legalistic moralism bereft of any Christian beauty or truth. In some traditions all that are left now are tiresome obsessions with “issues” and the ideologically driven nagging and control freakery commonly mistaken for prophecy and discipleship. If I was a spiritually open and interested enquirer after Christianity in the west right now, the mainline Christian denominations would be the very last place I would turn. In fact this is borne out by the statistics with such churches emptying their memberships at an alarming rate. But are the Orthodox in the west doing any better?

Well, inside or churches of course, the Paschal light of the Risen Christ burns brightly but you might be forgiven for thinking that Christ was raised for the Orthodox rather than for all humankind. We have tended to make Jesus our “possession” not deliberately or in a mean spirited way but by dismissing western Christian culture as incapable of being salvaged in anything other than the very long term. It just seems too much of an imaginative jump for some to consider Orthodoxy eventually becoming just as embedded in the Christian west as in the Christian east.

This is actually not so much a failure of imagination as a failure of faith and even perhaps a failure in our collective confidence in the power of the Orthodox faith (or rather God through the Orthodox faith) to change lives. Which is more difficult to believe though - that Christ has been raised from his three day burial in the tomb or that these dry bones of western Christianity can live again by the enlivening power of the Holy Spirit? Surely the later is driven by the former? Do we have “good news” or don’t we? Is that good news for us or for all? Does God wish all men to be saved or just those that currently belong to our churches?

Will the Orthodox again become an “Easter people” (St. Augustine) with life for the world or will we just keep that to ourselves for “safety’s sake”? God forbid. In the words of St. Paul, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.” What is that gospel? Since Christ lives, all may live in Him. It’s quite a straightforward message really; we just need to make it known to all without insisting first that they attend an evening course in a foreign language.

Bunnies and Blood

2007-04-04T08:40:00.000Z

“ Brits will on average be enjoying over 3.5 eggs each over the Easter weekend alone. But over a quarter don’t know why handing them out symbolises the birth of Jesus. . . .” (Press release from one prominent UK supermarket chain)

I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised. Such is the appalling ignorance today across large sections of western societies concerning the significance of Easter that not only do many people not know even the most basic features of the Christian faith but also, amusingly perhaps, such a howler can slip through unnoticed.

You see, bunnies and blood just don't mix. Bitter death and stuffing yourself with chocolate don't connect (well, not in the gospel sense anyway!) How have we come to this sorry state of affairs?

The primary culprit in all of this, collectively, is actually the churches ... and that includes the Orthodox Church. We have become apologetic, almost embarrassed about our beliefs. We don't want to upset anybody. I might be wrong (correct me if I am) but some years ago a Protestant Church in the UK tried to substitute the fish sign for the cross as its public logo. Mercifully there was such an outcry that both were eventually incorporated. In times past there used to be street processions on Good Friday. Shopping has displaced all that. We wouldn't want to get in the way would we? Inconvenience people? Disturb the consumerist status quo? Not likely.

With the Orthodox Churches in the UK it is little better. In Orthodox countries of course, it's quite different. Everything stops for Pascha. But, what do the Orthodox do when they find themselves in the west? Keep their heads down that's what they do. Keep it all behind closed doors. Of course, there are glorious exceptions across all the churches but I am talking here about a general trend and that is quite worrying.

The first charge against Christians was “these who have turned the world upside down have come here too." (Acts 17:6). Nowadays I doubt we could make the idol vibrate let alone upturn it. We have become moral and spiritual cowards, a disgrace to the name 'Christian.' "Doing our best" in a feeble kind of way just isn't good enough anymore. We need to recover our nerve and stand up for what we believe in; indeed ... live it, proclaim it, die for it!

No, bunnies and blood don't mix at all.

Fast Disappearing?

2007-02-24T23:13:00.000Z

As the Church moves into the heart of Great Lent the unusual quality of her witness becomes increasingly apparent. The Roman Catholic Church has largely abandoned fasting in ordinary parish life although it still features in stricter monastic observance and in some "specialised" lay societies. Independent evangelicals still fast with prayer but can hardly be said to consider Lent as a special time for this practice.

None of this should cause Orthodox to indulge in pharisaic pride. Fasting is a secret thing, a tryst between God and Man whereby we prioritise His jealous love for us in the totality of a surrendered life. If we step back and admire our zeal in keeping the commandments then we have already broken all of them by a single act of pride.

So is the Fast disappearing in Orthodoxy? Well, that must depend partly on the individual state of each soul upon which only God may judge. However, we must rightly ask whether or not fasting is not succumbing to a narrow minded legalism on the one hand and an extreme laxity on the other. The legalists would have us debate endlessly the difference between vegetable oil and olive oil; whether it is proper to eat caviar on Lazarus Saturday and so on. Those sliding into non-observance are also legalists in that they still think of a "duty" to be somehow "argued around."

In order that the spirit of our actual fasting might match the ideals of the season we perhaps need to take stock again of the primary reason for fasting. Raising money for the poor, knowing what it feels like to be hungry and such are only secondary and derivative effects. The primary focus must be the redemption of whole personality, body and soul.

A measure of self discipline in my life enables my will to be strengthened and my passions to be rendered subject to the work of the Holy Spirit for salvation. Fasting is the key which opens up my God-given potentiality to be His servant without any other competing claim. Fasting purifies my soul and my body so that my entire personality becomes radiant with the presence of the Living Christ. This is my entrance into the joyous victory of Pascha which is my liberation from the tyranny of death, evil and sin. This is why we fast.

Christ the True Light

2007-02-01T14:16:00.000Z

The Meeting of Our Lord (Candlemass - 2 February)

Luke 2
29 “ Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word; 30 for my eyes have seen Your salvation 31 which You have prepared before the face of all peoples, 32 a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Your people Israel.”

The Feast of the Meeting of the Lord is technically a feast of the Mother of God in the Orthodox Church corresponding to the day on which St. Mary, according to Jewish law, attended a ceremony of purification 40 days after giving birth, making our celebration of course on 2nd February. It was then normal for the child to be presented to God in the Temple, which here happened to our Lord. The blessed Simeon and prophetess Anna rejoiced to see the long awaited Messiah whom they immediately recognised in the Christ Child. It is in the song of praise of St. Simeon that we hear that Christ is a light to the Gentiles and the glory of God’s people, Israel. It is on this feast, therefore, that we bless candles, a tradition common to both the Christ east and the Christian west, signifying that Christ is the Light of the World and that his followers are called to receive and reflect this Light in their own lives.

I have assembled 12 key texts from the Scriptures to show just how important the belief in God as light is in the Holy Scriptures:-

Genesis 1:3
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

Psalm 27:1
The LORD is my light and my salvation; Whom shall I fear? The LORD is the strength of my life; Of whom shall I be afraid?

Psalm 36:9
For with You is the fountain of life; In Your light we see light.

Isaiah 9:2
The people who walked in darkness Have seen a great light; Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, Upon them a light has shined.

Isaiah 60:1
Arise, shine; For your light has come! And the glory of the LORD is risen upon you.

Matthew 4:16
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, And upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death Light has dawned.”

Matthew 17:1
Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves; 2 and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light. 3 And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him.

John 1:4
In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it ….9 That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.

John 8:12
Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”

2 Corinthians 4:6
For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

1 John 1:5
This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.

Revelation 21:23
The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light.

It is fitting therefore that we bless our candles this night for in lighting them we affirm our faith in God as OUR Light and that by His Light we shall be guided, illumined, transfigured.

A consideration of the properties of natural light may help us to appreciate why the Uncreated, who is God, chose to reveal Himself in a way analogous to the properties of created light. In making this comparison though we would do well to remember that it is only an approximation we are dealing with as the Uncreated Light of the Trinity is entirely different to any created light although, after St. Gregory Palamas, we insist on the visibility of both.

Created light has a speed no one may exceed. So spoke Einstein and this law has been proved exhaustively countless times since his day. In like manner God may not in any way be exceeded. His Light, being Himself in his energies is far more glorious and excellent than any created light.

Created light comes in little packets of energy or quanta. These have the extraordinary property of being both waves, that is electromagnetic radiation, and particles or photons. Moreover, being pure energy these quantum packets are without mass. In like manner God is both One and Trinity. The Fathers sometimes described God analogously in terms of the sun together with its heat and light. Science tells us that in the physical world tells us that things can be more than one things at once … so why do Unitarians have so many problems with the Trinity and other heresies with person of Christ? Be that as it may even the mass-less quality of the photon can instruct us. God is without heaviness; simple in Himself and all pervading … just like light. So, the Uncreated has certain affinities in essence and character with the created, in this case with the glorious light!

If this were the whole story of God as Light we might marvel but there would be no implication for our own being. As it is our faith takes us much further and deeper than this. Whether it is in the famous conversation between Nicholas Motovilov and St. Seraphim of Sarov when the saint shone like us the sun amidst the falling snow or in the famous encounter between the two desert fathers, Abba Joseph and Abba Lot, when we read that believers may also become “all flame,” in God, it becomes clear that we are called to shine with the Light of Christ, a lamp that must be placed on the stand and not be hidden.

So at this feast of Candlemass when we receive Christ the True Light let us take care to cleanse the lamp of our souls and bodies that they might become transparent to the burning Light of Christ within, for in this we shall be saved when we become, All-Light.

The Goldilocks Enigma

2007-01-17T19:14:00.000Z

Why is the Universe "just right" for life?
If in 2007 you ever read an accessible page-turning account of what we know about the universe from cosmology and particle physics, read this book before any other. (If you are reading this Dr. Davies, I want some commission please!) The ability of this scientist to write lucidly for a popular audience is well known. He hasn't disappointed here. The book deals with the apparent suitability of the Cosmos for life and mind, its fine tuning for observers such as you and I, (sometimes called the anthropic principle). It looks at all the options fairly; that is, sympathetically and critically in the light of the evidence and the rigour of the arguments maintained for each. Not until the last chapter does he declare his own hand. It is with this last summary chapter that I now wish to deal.

Dr. Davies classifies those who ask the "Big Questions" about the "Universe, Life and Everything" into eight categories, (nine if you allow for the subdivision of the second into two variants). I can only summarise the summary here in my own words which, although inadequate, can at least get us all thinking.

Option "A" - The Absurd Universe
The Universe is a fluke. It just is as it is. It came to be by chance and now all we can do is look for laws that will help us, albeit in a very limited way, to make some sort of sense of it all. There is no God / gods, no purpose, no significance in existence or life. Dependable truth is truth tested by the scientific method. All talk about origins and meanings is merely conjecture unrooted in anything verifiable (or falsifiable) and, therefore, of little or no worth.

Option "B" - The Unique Universe
(1) Stronger Version - The Universe exists necessarily as both single and unique. It is governed at a deep and, as yet, unattained level by a single "Theory of Everything" which, when cracked, will leave any hypothetical God with nothing to do ... except perhaps to "breathe fire into the equations." When this "Theory of Everything" is attained there will only be the fine details to be worked out.
(2) Weaker Version - This Universe could have been otherwise, yet it isn't since, simply, it is the only one that both works and sustains observers. Why this is so is either a mystery or an absurdity.

Option "C" - The Multiverse
This is but one of a finite or infinite set of universes in which a finite or infinite set of realities necessarily exist, (there is a scientific basis for such suppositions - it isn't simply a "refuge for atheists" who resist the alleged special character of this one!) This shifts the Big Questions up a level and remains controversial until such time as it can be tested as the new "Big Idea." The anthropic principle is very weak here since this Universe is but one viable universe in a set of sterile ones; no surprise then that we are here to observe it.

Option "D" - Intelligent Design
The fine tuning of the Cosmos for life, the evidences of "design for life" is neither a fluke nor happy accident in an infinite set of "failed universes." It is what it suggests - a design crying out for a Designer. However, for the agnostic or atheist this alone cannot substantiate the existence of God since it stops the argument at God ... or any other Designer of Choice, a Committee of gods or a simulation of an advanced Meta-Civilisation for example. This fails to satisfy the non-theistic rationalist who needs a self sufficient cause for the Cosmos. Neither ideology nor faith can be banished to the sidelines, respectively, for both atheist and theist alike. Each has a starting point even though reasons are adduced for the persuasiveness of both.

Option "E" - The Life Principle
This is not the usual teleology that we associate with the Creator (design for a final outworked purpose) but rather of the immanent sort that takes the emergence of life as evidence that the Universe has created life to make itself self aware en route to the final merging of Cosmos and Mind in the far future.

Option "F" - The Self Explaining Universe
Without divine causation from nothing the Universe must make itself in a closed causal loop. This universe would be (and is) a reality that depends on participating observers, life. "F" is therefore an extension of "E" dealing with origins and the emergent properties of the Cosmos.

Option "G" - The Fake Universe
This is the "D" variant presupposing experienced reality as a simulation and, statistically speaking, overwhelmingly likely to be a faked reality in the Multiverse option.

Option "H" - An Altar to an Unknown Theory!

What do I think?

It seems to me that what divides these theories between theist and atheist / agnostic is the ideological or faith presupposition that lies behind each account. Dr. Davies is honest and recognises this himself. Rarely does a scientist of the atheist sort simply deal with the evidence. Rarely does a theologian simply accept naked faith. Perhaps there is hope in engaging both schools in a dialogue by encouraging that transparent honesty that Dr. Davies shows in his wonderful book. Get it from Amazon.

Have another date dear?

2006-12-29T22:27:00.000Z

I'm sorry but I can't wish you a Happy New Year for another 84 days! Why? Well somebody decided in 1752 in England that we would overturn the tradition of five centuries (before 13th century, New Year started at Christmas), and switch New Year from Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation, 25th March) to 1st January which, although it had and has religious significance (St. Basil, Circumcision), was certainly not the reason for the change - at least in England ... the reasons were commercial; Mammon rather than God.

Of course in 1752 the UK also moved on to the Gregorian Calendar, 170 years later than on mainland Europe. There were riots that year as labourers lost 11 days pay in a shortened working month. In 1900 an extra leap day was dropped to adjust the calendar. This explains why the fiscal year ends on 5th April (25th March, Julian Calendar) as it was on this day that the tax men collected taxes as they toured the Medieval Annunciation Spring Fairs - and so began our long love affair with the Inland Revenue!

Oh, and don't get me started on Christmas! "Oh, you Orthodox ... you have a different Christmas don't you?" 'Groan,' you think, 'short or long explanation'? Do I even bother? Oh well, long explanation it is. Well, the Greek Church and tradition has the same calendar as the west. So for us it's the same date for Christmas .... which, by the way we call "Nativity." The Slav tradition and Jerusalem keep to the 'old' Julian Calendar which is now 13 days behind the Gregorian Civil Calendar, (still awake? ... good!). So, when it's 25th December in Moscow on the local Church Calendar it's actually 7th January on the civil (Gregorian) Calendar. (At this point either or both of you are wishing that the topic had never been raised). So even in Russia it's not REALLY 7th January. OK? Maybe not ...

What about Easter? Why does it keep floating about? The UK government has been trying to "tidy things up" and cajole the churches into having a fixed date for decades. So far, (thank God), the churches have not blinked first. It's all to do with the phases of the moon dear and the vernal equinox ... oh, and for the Orthodox, "after Passover." Hands off! We need something left that will infuriate the bean counters at the Treasury. For how long though? The State has been eroding Christian holy-days in England since Henry "The Butcher" VIII decided that the peasants weren't productive enough and had too much time off. The UK now has the lowest number of public holidays in Europe. It's something to do with the Protestant Work Ethic ... but that rant will have to wait for another time.

Happy New Year!

Fr. Gregory

St. Gregory the Theologian on The Incarnation

2006-12-26T12:50:00.000Z

The very Son of God, older than the ages, the invisible, the incomprehensible, the incorporeal, the beginning of beginning, the light of light, the fountain of life and immortality, the image of the archetype, the immovable seal, the perfect likeness, the definition and word of the Father: he it is who comes to his own image and takes our nature for the good of our nature, and unites himself to an intelligent soul for the good of my soul, to purify like by like. He takes to himself all that is human, except for sin. He was conceived by the Virgin Mary, who had been first prepared in soul and body by the Spirit; his coming to birth had to be treated with honour, virginity had to receive new honour. He comes forth as God, in the human nature he has taken, one being, made of two contrary elements, flesh and spirit. Spirit gave divinity, flesh received it.

He who makes rich is made poor; he takes on the poverty of my flesh, that I may gain the riches of his divinity. He who is full is made empty; he is emptied for a brief space of his glory, that I may share in his fullness. What is this wealth of goodness? What is this mystery that surrounds me? I received the likeness of God, but failed to keep it. He takes on my flesh, to bring salvation to the image, immortality to the flesh. He enters into a second union with us, a union far more wonderful than the first.

Holiness had to be brought to man by the humanity assumed by one who was God, so that God might overcome the tyrant by force and so deliver us and lead us back to himself through the mediation of his Son. The Son arranged this for the honour of the Father, to whom the Son is clearly obedient in all things.

The Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep, came in search of the straying sheep to the mountains and hills on which you used to offer sacrifice. When he found it, he took it on the shoulders that bore the wood of the cross, and led it back to the life of heaven.

Christ, the light of all lights, follows John, the lamp that goes before him. The Word of God follows the voice in the wilderness; the bridegroom follows the bridegroom’s friend, who prepares a worthy people for the Lord by cleansing them by water in preparation for the Spirit.

We need God to take our flesh and die, that we might live. We have died with him, that we may be purified. We have risen again with him, because we have died with him. We have been glorified with him, because we have risen again with him.

Superheroes Revisited

2006-12-14T19:18:00.000Z

(I apologise for my absence from this blog. There have been many commitments this Autumn that have cut back my online work but I can now return to share a few ideas and invite your comments).

Who would have thought that the comic book heroes of the 1940’s, starting with Superman in 1938 would have travelled so well in the popular imagination? These figures seem to have an enduring popularity and they have of course, now migrated to the Big Screen. Much of the exhilaration of these stories concerns the superhuman abilities of the hero matched against the tyranny and unmitigated evil of the adversary. However, much of pathos of the hero or heroine consists in the loss of such powers for we would have no interest in a victory that was uncomplicated or effortless.

Christmas is a time when we commemorate the coming of God to earth as a Man in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Even some Christians though have a peculiar understanding of Christ that relates more to Superman that it does to the Saviour of the Church’s confession. Jesus, however, does not conquer evil by some superhuman ability nor does his power wax and wane to make him more attractive to his followers. He conquers death “by death” as the Orthodox Easter hymn has it. In the Incarnation he “empties himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7). The victory of God is manifest precisely in this apparent defeat … that the promised Messiah dies. The resurrection of Christ is activated by his sacrifice, the laying down of His life for all as both God and Man, healing the breach between the two occasioned by human sin.

This is not good “box office” yet Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” shows the converting power of this Good News of God’s love in that so many people paid good money to hear this old, old story … yet ever new in each generation.

So, this Christmas time we celebrate not the “all conquering hero” but the Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief; the one in whom there is total victory … but at a price and that price calls us to lay down our lives for both the sake of others and through that for our own salvation.

It's Good to Talk

2006-09-29T22:15:00.000Z

“It’s good to talk.” So went an advertising campaign in recent years for a telecoms company. It is indeed good to talk … “Jaw-jaw is better than War-war" as the great Sir Winston Churchill said pithily.

Communication, language specifically, is one vital element in our distinctive humanity. Thinking is inconceivable (literally) without language, social interaction is enhanced by language, God is praised in words or heeded to in silence.

Is it good to talk to everyone? I believe so, yes. Even when facing a hostile presence? Still I say yes. A story is told of St. Nicholas of Japan that one of his first converts was an enraged xenophobic Samurai warrior, a certain Sawabe intent on decapitation who was disarmed with the saints Godly words.

So should we talk to aliens? These scientist believe so … Dr. Alexander Zaitsev, Charles M. Chafer, and Richard Braastad. Of course. attempts on a small scale have already been made as the linked article explains. However, the low powered beacons and artefacts so far sent into space will probably prove to be proverbial needles in vast haystacks. Something more grand is being talked about with M.E.T.I., (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). So far we have been listening but not really talking. Intelligent life may be rare even if life itself is rather common. Why, therefore, should we not talk?

Back to St. Nicholas of Japan. He didn’t flinch before Sawabe, he engaged. Some may think this counsel hopelessly naïve. After all, any alien intelligence we encounter in our galactic chatter will almost certainly be vastly more intelligent and advanced than ourselves … which is OK if our partners are benevolent but what if they harbour malice or even merely think that we are flies to be swatted for the sake of a greater harmony and tidiness, (after all we don’t have a very good track record on this planet). Of course, there are risks involved but are we really going to be silent, cowering in the corner in the cosmic vastness, mean spirited and hoping that no one will notice us? I hope not. It’s time to talk.

The Deep End

2006-08-31T13:13:00.000Z

O LORD, how great are Your works!
Your thoughts are very deep. (Psalm 92:5)
When He had stopped speaking, He said to Simon,“Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” (Luke 5:4)

For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.
(1 Corinthians 2:10b)

There are many people who are content to paddle around in the shallow end of the Christian Church. They prefer this child's depth but they will not see that even a child, after it has learned how to swim, will immediately seek out the deep end of the pool for a richer experience. Those who stay in the shallow end are denied this richer experience and by denying themselves the skill of strong swimming they can compromise their own safety and the safety of others who one day might need saving.

The parallels with the spiritual life are clear. God does not intend us to waste our time and spiritual capacities in shallow believing and living. He yearns for us to get closer to Him, to "dive in." Of course, to do this one needs confidence in Him to make this commitment. We need to trust Him that the deep of His Love is a safe plunge; safe that is in terms of being held securely by Him. It may not, though, be without risk for the giving and receiving of Love is never immune to rejection and criticism.

Jesus knew all of this of course when he instructed his disciples immediately prior to his Passion. He strengthened and emboldened them by reminding them that if the world hated Him it would hate them also, (John 15:17-19). It's good to be realistic about the cost of this deeper walk with God but we really do not have an option as Christians. We must walk this road or else we shall be in parlous state of those who, seeking to save their lives, lose them. It's "dive in" or get "washed up."

Shall we, therefore, now and without delay, dive in to the deeper end of God's love? Shall we resolve to give more and receive less, to worship more selflessly, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to strike out for God where others have feared to tread? Shall we? He waits on our answer.

Jesus is Coming ... Armageddon Anyone?

2006-08-06T23:29:00.000Z

61 years ago this very day, the obscene atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and cursed huanity with its diabolical light. Today is also the feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ when saints Peter, James and John beheld the divine saving Light of the Saviour. Today also in the middle east the conflict escalated even at the same time as the great powers dithered with their fine sounding UN resolutions signifying in terms of justice ... absolutely nothing.

The present crisis in the Middle East, however, cannot I believe be truly understood without addressing the phenomenon of Christian Zionism, particularly as expressed in America.

There is a thinly concealed infrastructure problem to Christian Zionism ... the post Darby resurgence of chiliasm ... the supposed 1000 year reign of Christ ON EARTH before or after his second coming. Some early church fathers used this to combat a world hating over spiritualised eschatology they encountered with the gnostics but when this battle had been won, chiliasm was abandoned for its weaknesses had been exposed as a rehabilitation of the Jewish idea of a very earthy messianism contrasted with the Orthodox doctrine that the resurrection is a NEW creation ... not this one tarted up a bit after a bit of death and destruction. Don't get "left behind" and all that!

The 19th century recovery of chiliasm in America was really an attempt to recover an ALLEGED more Jewish type of authentic Christianity whereas in fact the polemic against Hellenism and dualism was way off mark. Arguably this was in part promoted by the Catholic medieval west which had indeed imbibed elements of pagan pre-Christian Hellenism through the classical component of the Renaissance and the west's love affair with Aristotle. These 19th century American revivalist Protestants hadn't a clue though what Orthodox Christianity was really about so they ended up compounding one error with another.

My main point is that chiliasm opened up the unholy love affair between Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism (largely a secular phenomenon) since on the Christian side, the return of Israel to the Promised Land was held to be the essential trigger for Christ's second coming, the 1000 year reign and Armageddon.

The political fallout of this has been devastating in the Middle East. The European sense of the need for reparation after the Holocaust coincided with American need to get the Jews back to "biblical Israel." Who gives a damn though about the Arabs and pre-Islamic indigenous non-Jews who had lived in Palestine for nearly 1300 / 1900 years respectively, (both Christian and Muslim)? ... Europe must deal with its conscience and America it's eschatological planning.

All you need to do then is characterise any dissent from this programmme as anti-Semitic and you have the seedcorn for a conflict that I truly believe could escalate to a Third World War and the brutal repression of both Christianity and Judaism by militant Islamism seeking restoration of the caliphate and revenge against the infidel, (and, no, I am not Islamophobic either ... I just recognise how aggrieved humans tend to react).

America (and Israel) believe that you can solve the problems of "Middle Earth" (the "arc of extremism") by "shock and awe" (stick) and democracy and dollars (carrot). What they don't realise is that the Arabs ain't frightened any more nor can they be bought off. For them this is a matter of justice and ideas - and death is an acceptable price in the pursuit of these goals; even if this includes the death of fellow Muslims in ideological purges and the settling of old scores (Shi'a - Sunni).

Curiously, therefore, I believe that an ideological and theological front has to be opened against Christian Zionism in revivalist America. Sadly, I think that it might be already too late for that. Some of these nutters are actually looking forward to Armageddon, God help us, (literally).

For an excellent critique of chiliasm by a more orthodox preterist Protestant theologian ... go here ... (his position is very close to that of Orthodoxy as far as I can see).

"Why the Early Church Finally Rejected Premillennialism"

Lebanongrad

2006-07-21T09:47:00.000Z

This is a report and comment on the current situation in the Lebanon from a Lebanese Orthodox Christian of the Patriarchate of Antioch.

Lebanongrad: 25 days of hell (updated 5th August)

Facts

* On Wednesday 12 July, early morning, Israel began its open destructive war against its weak northern neighbour Lebanon.

* On Thursday 13, the Israelis created a land, sea and air blockade around Lebanon.

* From the very beginning, no part of Lebanon was safe: the South, Beirut (i.e. the capital), Mount Lebanon, the North and the Beqaa Valley. Southern Lebanon became a burnt land, and Beirut a levelled land.

* The Israeli Army has a massive arsenal of destruction at its disposal with very advanced technology capable of attack over land, sea, and air. During their current bombing they are using phosphoric and other chemical and other weapons forbidden by international laws.

* They are targeting innocent civilians breaking all international laws and principals of the civilised world and all human conventions. They have already committed carnage and numerous massacres amongst Lebanese civilians. This is an immoral, unjust, inhuman and barbaric war. These are WAR CRIMES.

* The Israeli Army is bombing fiercely the country by land, sea and air. They are systematically destroying the entire civilian infrastructure: airports, ports, bridges, roads, highways, dams, electricity factories, water factories, telephone and mobile towers and cables, petrol stations, food factories, hospitals and infirmaries, ambulances and fire brigades, schools and universities, TV's and radios, etc. In addition, they are also bombing religious places, Christian and Muslim alike, and civilian houses. This is what we call state sponsored terrorism.

* There is a shortage of food, water, medication, shelters, petrol and gas. The water, electricity and telecommunications, have been cut. As a result of this, there is a great fear of disease spreading.

* People are living in great despair, depression, fear, panic and terror. It is a huge tragedy, disaster, and catastrophe. All Lebanese, Christian and Muslim, are hostages under the Israelis’ fire and terrorism.

* This aggressive and fierce bombing is affecting all Lebanese without any exception, Christian and Muslim alike, including the Orthodox Christian community (that belongs to the Patriarchate of Antioch).

* Tuesday 18, at around noon, the Israeli Army bombed - by land and air - the old Orthodox Church of St. George in Rashaiya Fakhar (Hasbaiya, Southern Lebanon) as well as its meeting house, the parish priest house and the Orthodox School with 15 bombs, some of them are phosphoric. It destroyed the southern wall of the church and caused a big fire in it. At that time, many parishioners were hiding and praying with their parish priest asking God’s protection. Ten were burnt and wounded. I have to mention that there was a white flag flying on top of the church.

* Since Wednesday 19, the Israeli Army is trying to invade the country after turning it to a burnt land.

* On Friday 28th July at around noon, the Israeli Air Forces bombed and destroyed the Maronite Catholic Church in Safad Battikh (Southern Lebanon).

* As at 4th August ...
- Thousands of tonnes of Israeli bombs have been dropped on Lebanon every day
- More than 1000 civilians killed, more than one third of them are children (without counting those who are still under the rubble).
- More than 3500 civilians wounded and burnt.
- More than 1,000,000 civilian refugees living in schools, playgrounds, garages, car parks, tents or even in the open air
- More than 200,000 civilians have left the country
- More than 6 billion dollars (approximately 3 billion pounds) has been lost.

* To summarise all that in one word, it is ‘HELL’. From now on you can call Lebanon ‘Lebanongrad’.

The World’s Silence

* The worst of all, ‘the civilised world’ is watching ‘Lebanongrad’ burning; like Nero watching Rome burning.

* On Friday 14, during the Security Council meeting in New York, the US raised a veto against any resolution to condemn Israel. Ever since then, President George Bush has been giving statements that he is against any ceasefire. On Sunday 16, during the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg, he repeated the same statement.

* On Tuesday 18, the UK began to evacuate its citizens from ‘dangerous’ Lebanon. The Americans, French, Germans, and other European countries are also evacuating tens of thousands of their citizens stuck there,
leaving behind the Lebanese suffering alone.

* On Wednesday 19, Prime Minister Tony Blair repeated what Bush was saying that he is also against any ceasefire. Ever since then, Mr. Blair has been giving statements that he is against any ceasefire.

* On Monday 24, Mr. Blair described the situation in Lebanon as a "catastrophe."

Hope and Request

* We have a very powerful mass constructive weapon in hand: Prayer.
Please, pray, pray and pray.
Pray that God grant Lebanon and its people the peace from above, protect them, end their suffering and have mercy on them.

* Pray, especially, for our Orthodox Metropolitans and all their clergy, monks and parishioners.
Remember:
- Elias of Tyre and Sidon (Southern Lebanon)
- Elias of Beirut
- George of Byblos and Botrys (Mount Lebanon)
- Elias of Tripoli and Koura (Northern Lebanon)
- Paul of Akkar (Northern Lebanon)
- Spiridon of Baalbeck and Zahleh (Beqaa Valley)

Cafeteria Christianity

2006-06-03T08:14:00.000Z

Pick 'n Mix Religion

"We've trivialized God," said Larry Crabb, a Christian psychologist and popular author. "...God is the butler who serves you for one reason: to give you a happy life. We've turned Him into a divine Prozac."

You know what's worse that having no faith at all? Having a self select "Do It Yourself" (DIY) faith; a faith where God is exquisitely tailored to my own needs, preferences and opinions. Because this commits the sin of making God in my image rather than accepting the consequences of being made in His, cafeteria religion is the most beguiling and "spiritual" of all idolatries. It is beguiling because Christianity recognises the legitimacy of doctrinal dissent when an informed conscience dictates. However, this bears no true relation to cafeteria religion whatsoever. In this scheme of things no formal received teaching (tradition) is to be accepted at all. The great "I" is the measure of all things. The serpent in the garden of Eden suggested an autonomy from God as the basis for a moral life. DIY religion goes the whole way and makes autonomy into God.

On the grounds that we need to know what God has revealed concerning our lives and how they should be lived all pastors of any church need to ask themselves some rather awkward questions:-

(1) Does my church maintain any formal teaching on sex, money and self will? (There are many other sins but these 3 most personal ones are a good litmus test for my purpose here).
(2) Do I accept that teaching?
(3) If I don't accept aspects of that teaching, am I still prepared to teach it?
(4) If I am not prepared to teach it, how do I handle the discrepancy between my ordination responsibilities and my own position?
(5) If I am prepared to teach it (accepting or not accepting it myself) is this "words only" from the pulpit or do I try and apply this teaching in my pastoral ministry?
(6) Does my church require of me or does it expect me to develop a network of consequences (however they might be defined) for consistent and unrepentant violations of that teaching, first in myself and then in the community for which I am responsible?
(7) Is this network of consequences, this pastoral discipline, effectively communicated to the community?
(8) Is it consistently applied?
(9) Do I "go the extra mile" to begin to restore those who show the slightest sign of a change of heart?
(10) To whom on earth (as well as in heaven) am I accountable for the exercise of this ministry?

This may prove to be a very challenging and tough set of questions for those of us exercising pastoral leadership as church leaders but if we don't address them we might as well just cave in and practice cafeteria religion ourselves: in which case we also perhaps need to ask whether or not we are doing the right job.

God and Caesar

2006-05-18T22:40:00.000Z

Sts. Constantine and Helen (feast: 21 May)

St. Constantine was the first Christian Roman Emperor who legalised Christianity by the Edict of Milan in 313 AD and convened the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 AD. St. Constantine embraced Christianity after seeing a vision of the Cross at the battle of the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 AD. He was not, however, baptised until shortly before his death in 337 AD, and that by an heretical Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia.

Some Christians (not Orthodox) have bitterly criticised Constantine’s legacy to the Church, claiming that his conversion was opportunist and his real motives political, to unite the Empire. Moreover they claim that he fatally compromised the Church’s independence. The Orthodox Church does not hold this view but rather receives Constantine as a saint, not necessarily for his holiness or his abilities as a theologian but for his leadership and protection of the Church.

What ought then to be the relationship between the Church and the State, at least in societies where Christianity is the majority religion? Christians, societies and churches have tussled with these issues for centuries and different models of that relationship have been tried. Some, having flatly rejected the value of Constantine’s legacy, have secularised the State and separated it from any form of religious activity or influence. France and the United States might fall into that category. Interestingly, both countries acquired their modern identities by overthrowing or fleeing from an oppressive regime. However, whereas atheism did take root in France after the 1789 Revolution it did not after the US Declaration of Independence in 1776. This maybe because the French Church was hopelessly compromised by its support of the ruling class whereas the churches in America had acquired their identity and purpose precisely be resisting Anglican — State conformity back in England and fleeing to the American colonies to build a new and freer society, (or so it is claimed!). In earlier times in the West the papacy had come into conflict with rising medieval European nationalism and had even claimed the right to install and depose monarchs should they breach Church discipline. It is no accident then that the rising secular powers in the Medieval period should enlist the support of Protestantism in resisting the temporal claims of Rome. It is no less surprising that the Enlightenment should prove to be the fatal undoing of the very idea of a Christian society when the western Church had such an appalling record of interference in political processes … but can all this be laid at the feet of St. Constantine? I think not and for the following reasons:-

To an Orthodox observer it seems that the west in the second millennium lurched between battles between Church and State and a later tendency to deny the Church any place in the political realm. Neither option commends itself to the Orthodox understanding of sacred and secular realms, Church and Caesar. In the Christian East there never developed an antagonism of quite this order between Church and State and this is true even when the Church had to exist as a second class ethnic state under Islam or when it had to endure the sustained assault of a vicious atheistic State in the Soviet period. The ideal relationship between Church and State which was more or less successfully achieved in the Byzantine period of the Eastern Roman Empire was characterised by “synergeia” … a cooperative and complementary assignment of roles. The Church was responsible for the moral and spiritual leadership and transformation of the society; the State in the person of the Emperor for the rule of law, the promotion of commerce and civilisation and the protection of the Church. Both bishop and monarch were God’s agents in pursuing distinct but coordinated goals for the common good and even a reflection of and participation in the Kingdom of God on earth. Such lofty goals and bipartite cooperation seem to have been rapidly lost in the West after it drifted further and further away from Orthodoxy. By the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th Century the very idea of a Christian society seemed to many to be either an absurdity or a dangerous proposition.

Orthodoxy with its very different understanding of the relationship between the Church and the State has now taken root in the west but it does not as yet have the penetration and influence on the ground to practice a more harmonious model of Church State relations. More pressing perhaps is the question of how the Church can realistically engage with a multifaith liberal democratic polity for such a system has rarely if ever been encountered before the modern era.

It might seem that the inexorable trend towards secularisation and separation of Church and State is the only way to go but I think this is a false and dangerous conclusion. No society can avoid asking searching questions about its identity and common values and these inevitably bear the imprint of the image of God in humans and in human affairs. Perhaps Caesar and God can make peace in the west by dismantling the power relations that have distorted this relationship and instead replace these with models of service and dialogue. For this to work there must be no privileged place at the high table of the State but the State would do well to have places for all. The disestablishment of the Church of England, the reform of the House of Lords and a more community based local politics would go a long way to achieving these aims.

No society that aspires to be Christian can now simply return to the era of Constantine but what it could take from this synthesis is precisely the synergeia that would bring back a proper spiritual dimension to our public discourse and social policy. God and Caesar need not be enemies. If enemies they must be then only martyrdom will be the seed of change.

The Paschal Oration of St. Gregory the Theologian

2006-03-27T19:31:00.000Z

St. Gregory Nazianzen

Many indeed are the miracles of that time: God crucified; the sun darkened and again rekindled; for it was fitting that the creatures should suffer with their Creator; the veil rent; the Blood and Water shed from His Side; the one as from a man, the other as above man; the rocks rent for the Rock's sake; the dead raised for a pledge of the final Resurrection of all men; the Signs at the Sepulchre and after the Sepulchre, which none can worthily celebrate; and yet none of these equal to the Miracle of my salvation. A few drops of Blood recreate the whole world, and become to all men what rennet is to milk, drawing us together and compressing us into unity.

It's OK to Fail!

2006-03-01T22:09:00.000Z

Sit up!

We live in a culture in which high achievement is prized above all things. Celebrity culture canonises the saints of "can do" leaving most of the rest of us feeling pretty miserable that we are not as rich, as famous, as high achieving as these public icons. A certain amount of "moral failure" can be tolerated in most; unless you are a politician that is or a celebrity on the slide of disfavour. This is mostly hypocrisy though since many are far less inclined to apply the same moral standards to their own behaviour and lives. What is certainly not recognised is the positive aspect of failure, and, indeed, it's universality.

First, let's tackle universality. For every 1 winner there are 99 losers. As they say "it matters rather how one plays the game." Next, none of us is perfect. We need to cut each other a little slack; we need to practice mercy. It's OK to fail means it's OK to try even if you don't succeed. How many times did you, for example, not answer a question at school, even if you thought you might be right, simply because you didn't want to be seen to fail? Maybe the teachers or your parents put too much emphasis on getting it right rather than having a go. How many people have been disabled by this fear? I dread to think!

Next, the positive aspect of failure. My father always use to say:- "He who never makes a mistake never learns anything." Quite so, dad. Failure is necessary as part of the learning process. Success at all costs leads to despair, ignorance and a lack of endurance. "If at first you don't succeed .... give up!" No, this is not the way. Embrace failure and learn how to improve next time round. Success is truly built on failure.

Applying this to Christianity we come up with some interesting conclusions. When failure seems to have the last word, success is actually just round the corner. The supreme example of this of course is he crucifixion of our Lord. By all accounts this was a failure by the promised Messiah. Yet in the teeth of defeat, even death itself, God works the victory of his death destroying life. It wasn't what the disciples expected. Their grief shows that. They should have known better though because the Scriptures prophesied that the Christ would suffer, (Isaiah 52:13-53:12). God himself had to submit to a criminal's death in order to deal with human criminality, the criminality of our sin. He died that we might live. This is the ultimate parable of failure, the paradox of strength through weakness.

Interestingly, St. Paul himself experienced this logic of the cross in his own experience of the trials and tribulations of being an apostle. They are a timely reminder of the necessity of embracing failure in the world's eyes that victory might be ours in the hands of God ... against whom there is no witness. Listen to St. Paul and learn of the blessing of failure:-

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you. [2 Corinthians 4:7-12]

So let's us say with confidence "Failure is OK!" We might then begin to live again without that paralysing fear of failure and REALLY achieve something!

Orthodoxy and Creationism

2006-02-24T23:04:00.001Z

Designed for Life

In the last ten years or more an ancient supposed conflict between Christianity and Science has re-emerged in the west and more especially in America. After years of public ridicule occasioned by so called Young Earth Creationists mounting exhibitions of Adam and Eve walking with dinosaurs on a 5000 year old earth, the creationist movement has changed its tactic. Now the name of the game is “Intelligent Design,” an attempt to show that science on its own cannot account for the complexity of life without the intervention of a Cosmic Designer, which some might wish to call God although, publicly, the Intelligent Design movement has not gone that far.

What all of these creationist movements do is to try and impose on science a theological agenda that by the terms of its own method of enquiry, it cannot and must not accommodate, for it is no business of science to “prove” God one way or another. Arguably, creationism only encourages extreme reactions from such people as Richard Dawkins who trespass in turn in the realm of theology with an ignorance and dogmatism matched only by their own mortal enemies, the meddling fundamentalists of the American Deep South and Midwest.

Let us not be deceived by this conflict which is serious. The implications for those who subscribe to both God as creator and evolution as his method are dire. Christianity as a whole is being associated with narrow-minded irrational bigotry and, in turn, a widespread ignorance of science and its claims threatens, even in this technological age, to throw us back into an era of superstition and ignorance. Those Christians with other voices must stand up and be heard before it is too late. They too must join this debate.

It is my contention that in all of this sabre rattling and jockeying for position we have a phoney war, a tragic and unnecessary conflict that does great harm both to science and Christianity. Moreover I also assert that these problems are themselves caused on the Christian side by the inerrantist, literalist, ‘sola scriptura’ assumptions of conservative Protestantism. In offering alternatives to these problematic beliefs I shall suggest that there are resources for Christian thinking and theological reflection on the nature of creation in Orthodox Christianity which, happily, are also shared in part at least by other Christian traditions.

So, in the midst of this conflict we must ask: “what is wrong with Creationism?” What are the faulty assumptions in this debate that lead to each side anathematising the other? Is there a better way that could see science and faith in harmony once more?

First we need to clear up the language, for words especially have been used in this war as weapons without much clarity as to their former and present meanings. In present usage ‘creationism’ can mean two radically different things:-

(1) In the use of atheism or religions and philosophies that do not believe that there is a god who creates, creationism means the doctrine of any manner of Creator God or gods. This not only rules out biblical cosmologies but also modern theistic evolutionary variants based on a critical use of biblical texts. As Richard Dawkins has said of those defending both God and evolution, the notion of a Creator God is gratuitous once evolution and natural selection is accepted. In this of course, he agrees with his creationist antagonists. As Laplace once declared:- “God? I have no need of that hypothesis.”

(2) In the use of certain fundamentalist Christians creationism means the doctrine that God created the heavens and the earth precisely and literally as the book of Genesis describes it. This use includes different schools of interpretation since Genesis itself is obscure on a number of points even from a literalist point of view. Thus we have Young Earth Creationists who believe that humans walked with dinosaurs on a 5000 year old earth and others who share the same aversion to evolution but see Genesis as applying over a much longer timescale. The Young Earth Creationists have a lot of explaining to do as they confront the fossil record. The usual tactic is to suppose that God for some bizarre reason deliberately fooled humanity by planting fossils that were much younger than they now appear to be. The Old Earth Creationists at least don’t try and falsify history but they still fall into the same trap of supposing that the Bible is an ageless science textbook.

Note that in both usages of “creationism”, both sides of the debate resolutely resist the idea that evolution is not only compatible with belief in a Creator God but also might enhance that belief. Those holding to this excluded view of theistic evolution might be tempted to declare “a plague on both your houses!” and withdraw from the arena. That would be a tragedy, however, for both science and Christianity for the simple reason that the world is watching with bewildered amusement. Many are concluding that either Christianity really is bankrupt in that it cannot absorb new insights about the world or on the other hand that science cannot be trusted to unearth the truths of the Cosmos. The battle lines have been drawn and both sides stand to be mortally wounded as the conflict escalates. We desperately need to move the debate onto new ground where this unnecessary and damaging clash may cease.

Some suppose that Intelligent Design might provide this new ground. Here is an approach that declares itself to be only scientific in its method; challenging some if not all of the tenets of evolution on Darwin’s own territory. In the main Intelligent Design is justified by the theory of “irreducible complexity” and the alleged irrationality of chaotically generated order.

On “irreducible complexity” such protagonists as Michael Behe have argued that the flagellum of a certain species of swimming bacterium, acting like a miniature biological outboard motor, cannot possibly have assembled itself entire and complete by evolution because no component part can work at a simpler level on its own, a prerequisite of the evolutionary account of such adaptive features. This has proven to be a classic example of the discredited God-of-the-gaps “we can’t explain this” approach. However, It wasn’t difficult to prove the independent viability of certain individual components of the flagellum and with these discoveries, Behe’s argument failed spectacularly. It has been the same with every other “we can’t explain this” example presented by proponents of Intelligent Design. Every gap in our knowledge has been subsequently filled by science. This has happened many, many times before in the history of the relations between theology and science. You would have thought that Christian apologists would have learned the lesson by now. This can be a difficult message to hear but a necessary one … an Intelligent Designer isn’t required to explain anything at all. God is not the solution to a difficult equation. He is something else entirely.

This, of course, has not stopped creationists, both crude and sophisticated, attempting to get textbooks changed in American public schools so as to allow for Intelligent Design. In this they pursue a relentless onslaught on what they see as Godless science in the classroom. They hope to convince a whole generation by stealth that Darwin got it wrong! Under the guise of intellectual humility and the provisionality of all human truth seeking, they try to show that evolution is “only a theory.” On this basis the inverse square law of gravitational attraction is “only a theory” but those who deny it would do well to watch their step anytime they walk along the edge of a cliff!

The other target of Intelligent Design has been the alleged inability of chaos and randomness to generate order from within itself and without exterior agency. This is perhaps the most ignorant argument of all, since even in the most chaotic of systems, such as the weather and quantum indeterminacy, there is order at a different level of scale through the operation of natural laws and probabilistic effects. Even when such laws are based on probability they make testable predictions concerning natural phenomena. The pervasiveness of order and the emergence of complexity through physical reactivity do not require any direct supernatural intervention for their accomplishment. God does not need to keep tweaking Creation for it to work. Even life itself can emerge from within wholly natural processes given enough time for the cosmic shake out of randomness to generate the primal building blocks of life. “Surely,” it might be objected, “there must be a Designer to animate these blocks into life!” Well, aside from the biblical respectability of such a view taken at face value, (Genesis 2:7), this animation is not necessary given that life is at its most basic level is simply a reproducible system of embodied data transmission driven by energetic chemical reactions. It is self-sustaining once the connections are made and these connections are built into molecular reactivity that in turn is sustained by the behaviour of particles and forces condensing out of the Big Bang through its initial conditions and subsequent unfolding history. Of course, animal life in general and human life in particular is much more than this but the complexity that evolves “mind” is truly built into the system from the beginning. That’s the beauty and real power of God’s creative activity, so much from so little. Truly there is no “God-in-the-machine,” no “God-of-the-gaps” needed to explain how natural processes work. God has ordered each part of creation so that it has power to evolve “under its own steam” as it were.

Some might still object at this stage of the argument that a scientific world view leaves no room at all for a God who intervenes in his creation. If he is not needed to explain either for the motions of the planets or the tremulous vibrations of life and thought then what USE is he? The answer of course is “no use at all.” The wrong question has been asked, itself based on a faulty premise. As I hope I have shown thus far, God is not a term for that which we do not as yet know. God is not a substitute for understanding the fibres of created reality. Faith searches deeper than this. It reaches beyond all phenomena accessible to rationality to a level of meaning embedded in the every aspect of a Cosmos that God himself has made creative according to his purpose. No room needs to be made for God. He is the Word, the Logos behind all things that create.

In pre-Christian Greek philosophy the logos (pl. logoi) was the divine reason embedded in the Cosmos giving it form and meaning. There was no place where this fecundity was absent, no time when it was not operational. St. John, writing for a very early Gentile Greek congregation, in his gospel prologue (John 1:1-18), felt very comfortable in taking the extremely radical step of equating this logos (word but more than word) with the Hellenised recension of the Hebraic "Word" of God and then making this Greek / Hebraic logos embodied as Christ.

This fusion can be read in two different directions although it is sadly only too often read in one. The first is that Christ is the apex of that divine fecundity for humans in the flesh. The second neglected direction is that this Christ henceforth is the cosmic Logos ... God in other words becomes for monotheism not only the transcendent God of Judaism who may not be named but also now the rational immanent fecund principle of the Cosmos' own generative power. This also is Christ. Not for nothing then does St. John therefore speak of the Logos in these terms in the first verse, (I have changed "Word" back to "Logos" as in the Greek original):-

"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." (John 1:1-3)

Now the interesting thing is that this passage is read in the Orthodox Church not at Christmas as in the west but at Easter. In other words, the Logos is to be understood in the Orthodox East as the Christ Pantocrator, astoundingly, something human embedded in the Cosmos itself which is the principle of its liberation from corruption and decay, the resurrection. We are a very long way here from the sickly sentimental piety of Jesus meek and mild, just as limited and bound on earth as in his own psyche. The New Creation of the Christian Gospel is literally just that … a new creation.

What bearing does this have on an Orthodox understanding of creation? Simply this, God is not in the gaps. There are no gaps for the Logos lies behind All and the Whole. The Whole is where Christ is, and in him the Whole is where we are also called to ascend. Therefore since Christ as Logos is the Whole (St. Paul talks of the "pleroma" the fullness, Ephesians 1:23) anything at all that human wisdom discovers about the Cosmos is a facet of his glory and presence. This of course is a hermeneutic for Christians. No one is expecting those of other religions and none to accept this vision short of faith. However, it does mean, for Christians at least, that all science, no matter what it discovers, is Christomorphic, Christ-shaped. Our understanding of Christ is growing therefore in step with human knowledge. There is no conflict, no antagonism between science and Orthodox Christianity. How could there be? One is a reflection of the other ... in the Logos.

The difference then this faith makes to the story of the Cosmos concerns a certain way of looking at life and venerating it as a vehicle of the Holy Spirit’s creativity; of the Word’s power, of the Love of God. This religious truth is not subject to verification, nor can it be falsified. Only those with an impoverished notion of truth limited to the realm of provable assertions will exclude this beauty embedded in the Cosmos, this divine imprint of the Creator who has so arranged His world as to make it not only the object of wonder but also the subject of rational enquiry.

What then are the theological resources for such a view of Creator and creation or is this just a convenient modernist readjustment to inconvenient facts? If an Orthodox priest is to dignify such an exposition with the title “Orthodox” he had better be able to show that such an understanding is both compatible with and indicated by Scripture and Tradition. We have already referred to St. John’s prologue but we need more evidence than this to make a persuasive case.

First, however, we must deal with two little problems entitled “biblical literalism” and “biblical sufficiency.” These are precepts of the conservative Protestant world and as I indicated earlier, they could easily account for the impasse that such traditions encounter when matching biblical truth against truth claims seen as antithetical to the scriptures. If the scriptures bear literal and unchanging truth for all time then there will always be a problem with accommodating advancing knowledge in any sphere of human activity. If the scriptures are sufficient for faith then one must ask why are there so many biblical interpretations and idiosyncratic sectarian doctrines generated by groups who uniformly hold to this view. Creationism constitutes a perfect example of this hermeneutical dilemma in fundamentalist Christianity. The Bible says that God made the earth in 6 days about 7000 years ago yet astronomy tells us that the Universe has evolved over the last 13 billion years and it is still changing, still creating.

There are only two possible responses for biblical literalism and biblical sufficiency. Either science is wrong or Genesis must be tweaked to make it appear to accommodate a longer timescale. There can be no such choice with the theory of evolution though. This is something that no creationist can stomach. Not only is it not in the Bible but it would have us believe that humans are not special, not made from scratch in the image and likeness of God … or so they think! Orthodox Christianity, and indeed other Christian traditions refute both biblical literalism and biblical sufficiency. From the New Testament writers to the Fathers and beyond there have existed several ways of interpreting the biblical text, historically if that is appropriate, typologically or allegorically if that is where the spiritual sense lies. No patristic biblical commentator felt constrained by the Scriptures thus interpreted to deny any aspect of truth discovered in other spheres of human activity. This attitude is characterised by St. Augustine in a commentary on Genesis from which I shall quote at length. This will connect what I am claiming about Orthodox biblical interpretation to the more positive aspects of Orthodoxy’s contribution to this debate. St. Augustine said this:-

"Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?"

[Saint Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book 1, Chapter 19]

Without knowledge you might be excused for thinking that St. Augustine was alive today and writing for today. Sadly, maybe little changes. What is presented here is an approach taken by the Fathers more generally to the relationship between revealed truth and the natural sciences and humanities. This attitude is found even in the first 300 years when the Church was persecuted by the world. St. Justin the Philosopher, (165), a martyr no less, saw Christ as the fulfilment of classical Greek religious impulses with Plato as a type of Greek “Moses.” Clement of Alexandria in this same period (215) wrote the following:-

“Scripture gives the common name of wisdom to all the earthly sciences and arts generally, everything that the human mind can achieve… for every art and every knowledge comes from God.”
[Clement of Alexandria]

It is true that some Fathers were less accommodating. Tertullian (who was later to go AWOL with the Montanists) declaimed: “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” Nonetheless, Christians rarely despised secular learning as such and after the legalisation of Christianity a much stronger position emerged. The Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century welcomed the sciences and arts as handsmaids to theology. St. Gregory Theologian, my patron was a notable poet theologian. Here are some of his insights:-

“Just as in subtle musical harmony every string produces a different sound, one high, another low, so also the Artist and Creator-Word, having installed different inventors for various occupations and arts, has given everything in the possession of all those who wish in order to tie us by the bonds of fellowship and love of man and make our life more civilised.” [St. Gregory the Theologian]

“every one who has an intellect recognises scholarship as a primary blessing for us. And not only this noble scholarship of our own, which… has as its subject only salvation and the beauty of what is contemplated by the mind, but also the external scholarship which many Christians abhor out of ignorance as unreliable, dangerous and diverting from God”.
[St. Gregory the Theologian, 389]

and from St. Basil the Great,
“external sciences are not without use” [St. Basil the Great, 379]

For two millennia Orthodox theologising has proceeded on this basis. We cannot survey this whole period but to complete the witness let us consider two more recent Russian thinkers, the first a saint of the 19th century, St. Philaret of Moscow, (1867).

“The faith in Christ is not in conflict with the true knowledge, because it is not in union with ignorance”.

The second reflects the work of a contemporary Russian Orthodox deacon, Andrey Kuraev, who has done much to remind the Russian Church of the harmony between science and faith. In a lecture arguing for a more positive evaluation of evolution he based this on Genesis itself but in a quite unforced manner. He refers both to St. Philaret and St. Basil:

“In the Book of Genesis God names every creature and by this naming calls every creature from the abyss of non-being. In the lovely expression of St. Philaret of Moscow, the creative "Word articulates all creatures into being." What we see here in Genesis is a dialogue. The call produces a response to God's life-giving action. "The earth germinates, but it does not sprout that which it has but transforms that which it does not have, as much as God gives the strength to act," wrote St. Basil the Great. The seeds of life are not found in the earth; rather, "God’s word creates beings" and plants these in earth, which, in turn, germinates them. Earth is unable to be fertile by itself, yet there is no reason to downplay its role: "Let the earth bring forth by itself without having any need of help from without." While life proceeds from earth, the very life-giving ability of matter is a gift of the Creator.” ….
“On the other hand, unprejudiced reading of Scripture makes one notice a certain degree of activity that created matter has. It is not written that "God created grass," but, "Let the earth bring forth grass." Later on, God is depicted not as simply creating life out of nothing but as calling on waters so that they may "bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life." ….
“The emergence of life in the Book of Genesis is both evolutionary (as earth is producing plants and simple organisms), and also a "leap towards life," occurring by the order of God.”
“God calls the Earth to a synergy, to a creativity that is indicative of the God-given internal creative abilities of the Earth. Different stages in the history of Creation open with God’s call upon "earth." The world, being called to growth and development, acts in cooperation with God. This theme of cooperation of God and His creation appears in the Bible long before the creation of man. The fact that the earth in response to the Word is producing life indicates that it is not merely a lifeless substance, out of which an external action is "moulding life," overcoming inert matter. The Bible is unlike the Vedanta, and matter in it is not a synonym of death and non-being.
This is how St. Basil is describing this creative response in his Homily V: "See how, at this short word, at this brief command, the cold and sterile earth travailed and hastened to bring forth its fruit, as it casts away its sad and dismal covering to clothe itself in a more brilliant robe, proud of its proper adornment and displaying the infinite variety of plants."

Could there be a clearer indication of the compatibility of a truly Christian understanding of creation and the task of science? Yet how can it be that some Christians, in this case the Orthodox, can speak in such positive terms about evolution and others, self-styled creationists, find this so difficult? A possible answer to this question lies in the manner of theologising, even the faith itself. Speaking personally I do often wonder if we have more to celebrate and share as Orthodox Christians with agnostic scientists than with the militant fundamentalists who now as so often before bring our faith into disrepute … as they also once did in the time St. Augustine! Perhaps we may also hope that in this dialogue Orthodox theological reflection on the wonders of creation will be deepened and refined by the insights of contemporary science. We have all got some catching up to do!

(c) Fr. Gregory Hallam

Sleepers Awake!

2006-01-31T23:42:00.000Z

Legislation is going through Parliament at the moment to make an offence of "Incitement to Religious Hatred." The sense of decency which usually characterises the British temperament in these matters might lead one to assume that this was a rather obvious and uncomplicated matter. However, TV cameras outside the Mother of All Parliaments reveal an unusual assembly of evangelical Christians, atheists, and comedians. All feel that their legitimate freedom of expression would be curtailed by this legislation. The way things look, they may be right.

That was the situation earlier in the day. However, as I write this the vote from the Commons has hit the news. The Government has failed to set the bar on incitement at its preferred lower level of abuse, insult and reckless comment. This is a great relief. There must be provable intent to incite hatred for the law to apply. For the moment we are free to utter offensive comments about beliefs AND the persons holding those beliefs ... so it's open season on Iain Paisley again!

Richard Dawkins recently shared his views with millions of people on TV that "religion is the root of all evil." This deeply offended me as a Christian yet I wouldn't dream of curtailing his right to insult my faith, even recklessly without intention, (were that possible!). Are some opinions to be favoured above others? Who will judge what is insulting and what is not? The person aggrieved? With some over sensitive souls that can be like asking a hypochondriac to judge his own health. Ought we not to have the right to expect a certain degree of robustness on behalf of those who views and beliefs are attacked in public? Are not our deeply cherished freedoms, so dearly won through times of oppression and conflict worth more than the sensibilities of those who have a democratic right of rebuttal and response? Must we really countenance self censorship because we don't want to upset anyone? I really do hope not.

If this was the only example of Government heavy handedness in relation to freedom of speech that would be bad enough, but it is not. It is now unlawful to demonstrate within one kilometre of Parliament and under that law a woman was arrested recently for simply reading out a list of British servicemen and women who had been killed in Iraq. Obviously she was a very dangerous terrorist! The poor woman had actually informed the police in advance. One can only conclude that the Government simply finds contrary opinions to its own policies unacceptable and once again terrorism is a useful cover for that.

The only possible response to this attempt of the State to crack down on our freedoms is to exercise them even more robustly and freely. That will require a sea change in the attitudes of many British people who, frankly, after the 1980's have become politically quite passive. There are signs that many ordinary people are waking up to the threats to our freedoms ranging from legislation such as this to the ever encroaching reach of surveillance technology. Increasingly it is people precisely with beliefs that are leading this reaction. Far from being the opium of the people religion is proving to be its smelling salts. 'Sleepers awake' indeed!

Forthcoming Lecture

2006-01-30T20:39:00.000Z

Do you live within reach of Manchester?

On Thursday 23rd February, I shall deliver a lecture at the Manchester Metropolitan University on "Orthodoxy and Creationism." (You will gather from the quotes in the last Blog post that we don't approve!)

This lecture will take place in a room in the Geoffrey Manton Building, (check at Reception), Rosamond Street West, off Oxford Road, Manchester, (opposite the Aquatics Centre) from 7.00pm to 9.00pm. All are welcome. A donation of £1 is suggested toward costs but this is not mandatory. Here is a Map Link.

6 Days? It ain't necessarily so!

2006-01-28T23:38:00.000Z

As a curtain raiser on a lecture I shall be giving at Manchester Metropolitan University in February, here are some quotes from the Church Fathers directly relevant to Creationism and Intelligent Design.

St. Augustine

"Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?"

[Saint Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book 1, Chapter 19]

Other Witnesses Ancient and Modern

“Scripture gives the common name of wisdom to all the earthly sciences and arts generally, everything that the human mind can achieve… for every art and every knowledge comes from God.”

[Clement of Alexandria]

“Just as in subtle musical harmony every string produces a different sound, one high, another low, so also the Artist and Creator-Word, having installed different inventors for various occupations and arts, has given everything in the possession of all those who wish in order to tie us by the bonds of fellowship and love of man and make our life more civilised.”

[St. Gregory the Theologian]

“Every one who has an intellect recognises scholarship as a primary blessing for us. And not only this noble scholarship of our own, which… has as its subject only salvation and the beauty of what is contemplated by the mind, but also the external scholarship which many Christians abhor out of ignorance as unreliable, dangerous and diverting from God”.

[St. Gregory the Theologian]

“external sciences are not without use”

[St. Basil the Great]

“The faith in Christ is not in conflict with the true knowledge, because it is not in union with ignorance”.

[St. Philaret of Moscow]