This is a wodnerful bit from Irenaeus whose feast day was the 28th.
Why did God let man fall into sin? Irenaeus answers that it was that man might have reason to praise him. Irenaeus uses a parellel with Jonah and the whale.
Long-suffering therefore was God, when man became a defaulter, as foreseeing that victory which should be granted to him through the Word. For, when strength was made perfect in weakness, it showed the kindness and transcendent power of God.
For as He patiently suffered Jonah to be swallowed by the whale, not that he should be swallowed up and perish altogether, but that, having been cast out again, he might be the more subject to God, and might glorify Him the more who had conferred upon him such an unhoped-for deliverance, and might bring the Ninevites to a lasting repentance, so that they should be converted to the Lord, who would deliver them from death, having been struck with awe by that portent which had been wrought in Jonah's case, as the Scripture says of them, "And they returned each from his evil way, and the unrighteousness which was in their hands, saying, Who knows if God will repent, and turn away His anger from us, and we shall not perish?"
—so also, from the beginning, did God permit man to be swallowed up by the great whale, who was the author of transgression, not that he should perish altogether when so engulphed; but, arranging and preparing the plan of salvation, which was accomplished by the Word, through the sign of Jonah, for those who held the same opinion as Jonah regarding the Lord, and who confessed, and said, "I am a servant of the Lord, and I worship the Lord God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land."
[This was done] that man, receiving an unhoped-for salvation from God, might rise from the dead, and glorify God, and repeat that word which was uttered in prophecy by Jonah: "I cried by reason of my affliction to the Lord my God, and He heard me out of the belly of hell;" and that he might always continue glorifying God, and giving thanks without ceasing, for that salvation which he has derived from Him, that no flesh should glory in the Lord's presence and that man should never adopt an opposite opinion with regard to God, supposing that the incorruptibility which belongs to him is his own naturally, and by thus not holding the truth, should boast with empty superciliousness, as if he were naturally like to God.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
Going to the Ocean
I will be away from the blog for about a week or so. This is a picture of the beach we are headed for. Ocean Isle, NC. Aaaahhhhh.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
The magnitude of this ministry
I came across this online. No references but it sounds like John.
I know my own soul, how feeble and puny it is: I know the magnitude of this ministry, and the great difficulty of the work; for more stormy billows vex the soul of the priest than the gales which disturb the sea.
John Chrysostom
I know my own soul, how feeble and puny it is: I know the magnitude of this ministry, and the great difficulty of the work; for more stormy billows vex the soul of the priest than the gales which disturb the sea.
John Chrysostom
Communion with Hummer drivers?
The LA Times take on the Vatican's new "Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road" .
This week, the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers issued commandments, along with a suggestion that drivers perform the sign of the cross before switching on the ignition. It also recommended reciting the Catholic rosary, whose "rhythm and gentle repetition does not distract the driver's attention," as the council put it.
Roadways "shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm," states the second commandment.
Sarcasm mode on
Sorry, but I am not in fellowship with peopel who drive Hummers!
Sarcasm mode off
This week, the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers issued commandments, along with a suggestion that drivers perform the sign of the cross before switching on the ignition. It also recommended reciting the Catholic rosary, whose "rhythm and gentle repetition does not distract the driver's attention," as the council put it.
Roadways "shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm," states the second commandment.
Sarcasm mode on
Sorry, but I am not in fellowship with peopel who drive Hummers!
Sarcasm mode off
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The world is like the sea to us
Let us, therefore, in the faith of the disciples, hold frequent converse with our Master. For the world is like the sea to us, my brethren, of which it is written, ‘This is the great and wide sea, there go the ships; the Leviathan, which Thou hast created to play therein.
We float on this sea, as with the wind, through our own free-will, for every one directs his course according to his will, and either, under the pilotage of the Word, he enters into rest, or, laid hold on by pleasure, he suffers shipwreck, and is in peril by storm. For as in the ocean there are storms and waves, so in the world there are many afflictions and trials. The unbelieving therefore ‘when affliction or persecution ariseth is offended as the Lord said. For not being confirmed in the faith, and having his regard towards temporal things, he cannot resist the difficulties which arise from afflictions. But like that house, built on the sand by the foolish man, so he, being without understanding, falls before the assault of temptations, as it were by the winds.
But the saints, having their senses exercised in self-possession, and being strong in faith, and understanding the word, do not faint under trials; but although, from time to time, circumstances of greater trial are set against them, yet they continue faithful, and awaking the Lord Who is with them, they are delivered. So, passing through water and fire, they find relief and duly keep the feast, offering up prayers with thanksgiving to God Who has redeemed them. For either being tempted they are known, like Abraham, or suffering they are approved, like Job, or being oppressed and deceitfully treated, like Joseph, they patiently endure it, or being persecuted, they are not overtaken; but as it is written, through God they ‘leap over the wall of wickedness, which divides and separates between brethren, and turns them from the truth.
In this manner the blessed Paul, when he took pleasure in infirmities, in reproach, in necessities, in persecutions, and in distresses for Christ, rejoiced, and wished all of us to rejoice saying, ‘Rejoice always; in everything give thanks.
Athanasius, Festal Letter 19.
We float on this sea, as with the wind, through our own free-will, for every one directs his course according to his will, and either, under the pilotage of the Word, he enters into rest, or, laid hold on by pleasure, he suffers shipwreck, and is in peril by storm. For as in the ocean there are storms and waves, so in the world there are many afflictions and trials. The unbelieving therefore ‘when affliction or persecution ariseth is offended as the Lord said. For not being confirmed in the faith, and having his regard towards temporal things, he cannot resist the difficulties which arise from afflictions. But like that house, built on the sand by the foolish man, so he, being without understanding, falls before the assault of temptations, as it were by the winds.
But the saints, having their senses exercised in self-possession, and being strong in faith, and understanding the word, do not faint under trials; but although, from time to time, circumstances of greater trial are set against them, yet they continue faithful, and awaking the Lord Who is with them, they are delivered. So, passing through water and fire, they find relief and duly keep the feast, offering up prayers with thanksgiving to God Who has redeemed them. For either being tempted they are known, like Abraham, or suffering they are approved, like Job, or being oppressed and deceitfully treated, like Joseph, they patiently endure it, or being persecuted, they are not overtaken; but as it is written, through God they ‘leap over the wall of wickedness, which divides and separates between brethren, and turns them from the truth.
In this manner the blessed Paul, when he took pleasure in infirmities, in reproach, in necessities, in persecutions, and in distresses for Christ, rejoiced, and wished all of us to rejoice saying, ‘Rejoice always; in everything give thanks.
Athanasius, Festal Letter 19.
The Summer of love?
With a hat tip to Mere Comments, here are two contrasting articles on the Summer of love, 1967, in San Francisco. Both are worth reading in their entirety.
The first is very positive with the spin being that the ideals of peace and questioning authority and environmentalism were lasting goods that came from the 60's.
I resonate more with the second one. Dawn Eden wonders where the love really was.
A bit:
WHEN it comes to inappropriate names, "Summer of Love" has to be right up there with "Joy Division," the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves.
Helms would later boast on his Web site that the event "sowed the seeds of a compassionate idealism which still lives in the hearts of many of our own and subsequent generations." He pointed to the organizers' efforts to feed the runaways. Other Summer of Love chroniclers note that the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in the summer of 1967, still help the needy today.
The irony is that there would have been no need to feed those runaways, nor to care for so many drug abusers, alcoholics and venereal-disease victims, had Helms - who succumbed to hepatitis C at 63 - and his compatriots not encouraged youths to flood San Francisco. And for what, exactly? Drugs, to be sure, and "free love" - "free," as opposed to the kind that costs money, apparently.
Thanks to the Pill and a counterculture that defined rebellion as annoying one's parents, thousands of youths became guinea pigs in a kind of mass experiment propagated by prurient Beat Generation relics such as Helms, Allen Ginsberg (died at 70, hepatitis and liver cancer) and Ken Kesey (died at 66, liver cancer). They were told that they would overcome the superficial consumerism in which they had been raised, reaching a higher spiritual level by uniting their minds to drugs and their bodies to willing takers. Instead, they themselves became products to be consumed - victimized by pushers, treated as sexual objects to be disposed of, or corrupted into predators.
The first is very positive with the spin being that the ideals of peace and questioning authority and environmentalism were lasting goods that came from the 60's.
I resonate more with the second one. Dawn Eden wonders where the love really was.
A bit:
WHEN it comes to inappropriate names, "Summer of Love" has to be right up there with "Joy Division," the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves.
Helms would later boast on his Web site that the event "sowed the seeds of a compassionate idealism which still lives in the hearts of many of our own and subsequent generations." He pointed to the organizers' efforts to feed the runaways. Other Summer of Love chroniclers note that the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in the summer of 1967, still help the needy today.
The irony is that there would have been no need to feed those runaways, nor to care for so many drug abusers, alcoholics and venereal-disease victims, had Helms - who succumbed to hepatitis C at 63 - and his compatriots not encouraged youths to flood San Francisco. And for what, exactly? Drugs, to be sure, and "free love" - "free," as opposed to the kind that costs money, apparently.
Thanks to the Pill and a counterculture that defined rebellion as annoying one's parents, thousands of youths became guinea pigs in a kind of mass experiment propagated by prurient Beat Generation relics such as Helms, Allen Ginsberg (died at 70, hepatitis and liver cancer) and Ken Kesey (died at 66, liver cancer). They were told that they would overcome the superficial consumerism in which they had been raised, reaching a higher spiritual level by uniting their minds to drugs and their bodies to willing takers. Instead, they themselves became products to be consumed - victimized by pushers, treated as sexual objects to be disposed of, or corrupted into predators.
Where the arts were too liberal
An alumnus mourns the death of Antioch College a progressive college in ohio which is closing. As he mourns its closing he deals forthrightly wiht much fo teh foolishness that came with the upheaval of teh 1960's.
The name of the article is "Where the Arts Were too Liberal". Here is a bit:
For the increasingly vocal radical members of the community, change wasn’t going far enough or fast enough. They wanted revolution, but out there in the middle of the cornfields the only “bourgeois” thing to fight was Antioch College itself. The let’s-try-anything, free-thinking society of 1968 evolved into a catastrophic blend of legitimate paranoia (Nixon did keep enemies lists, and the F.B.I. did infiltrate campuses) and postadolescent melodrama. In 1973, a strike trashed the campus and effectively destroyed Antioch’s spirit of community. The next year, student enrollment was down by half.
...
Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal trends in education became entrenched. Since it is always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small group than a large one, as the student body dwindled, free expression and freedom of thought were crushed under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the 1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college became a place not for education, but for indoctrination. Everyone was on the same page, a little to the left of The Nation in worldview.
The name of the article is "Where the Arts Were too Liberal". Here is a bit:
For the increasingly vocal radical members of the community, change wasn’t going far enough or fast enough. They wanted revolution, but out there in the middle of the cornfields the only “bourgeois” thing to fight was Antioch College itself. The let’s-try-anything, free-thinking society of 1968 evolved into a catastrophic blend of legitimate paranoia (Nixon did keep enemies lists, and the F.B.I. did infiltrate campuses) and postadolescent melodrama. In 1973, a strike trashed the campus and effectively destroyed Antioch’s spirit of community. The next year, student enrollment was down by half.
...
Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal trends in education became entrenched. Since it is always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small group than a large one, as the student body dwindled, free expression and freedom of thought were crushed under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the 1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college became a place not for education, but for indoctrination. Everyone was on the same page, a little to the left of The Nation in worldview.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Love's austere and lonely offices
A fine bit of poetry by one Robert Hayden reflecting on a father's love.
HT: Mere Comments and Anthony Esolen
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then from cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
HT: Mere Comments and Anthony Esolen
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then from cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Free Gift, Enlightenment, Perfection and Cleansing
Clement of Alexandria on the many names and benefits of baptism:
When the Lord was baptized, a voice loudly sounded from heaven, as a witness to him who was beloved: 'You are my beloved Son; this day have I begotten you. ' ...
This is what happens with us, whose model the Lord made himself. When we are baptized, we are enlightened; being enlightened, we become adopted sons; becoming adopted sons, we are made perfect; and becoming perfect, we are made divine. 'I have said,' it is written, 'you are gods and all the sons of the Most High'.
This ceremony is often called 'free gift', 'enlightenment', 'perfection' and 'cleansing' -
'cleansing,' because through it we are completely purified of our sins;
'free gift,' because by it punishments due to our sins are remitted;
'enlightenment,' since by it we behold the wonderful holy light of salvation, that is, it enables us to see God clearly;
finally, we call it 'perfection' as needing nothing further, for what more does he need who possesses the knowledge of God?
Paedagogus, 6.:25-26, Fathers of the Church 23, cited in Maxwell Johnson, The Rites of Chrisian Initiation, p. 53.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Superchristological and Homoousiosis
This made me laugh out loud. A patristic sing along. Pointed out by The Way of the Fathers. You can find it here.
To the tune of "Supercalafragalisticexpialadocius"
...Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Superchristological and Homoousiosis
Even though the sound of them is something quite atrocious
You can always count on them to anathemize your Gnosis
Superchristological and Homoousiosis
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Now Origen and Arius were quite a clever pair.
Immutable divinity make Logos out of air.
But then one day Saint Nicholas gave Arius a slap--
and told them if they can't recant, they ought to shut their trap!
[chorus] Oh, Superchristological and Homoousiosis...
One Prosopon, two Ousia are in one Hypostasis.
At Chalcedon this formula gave our faith its basis.
You can argue that you don't know what this means,
But don't you go and try to say there's a "Physis" in between!
[chorus] Oh, Superchristological and Homoousiosis...
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Now freedom and autonomy are something to be praised,
But when it comes to human sin, these words must be rephrased,
For Pelagius was too confident that we could work it out--
And Augustine said *massa damnata* is what it's all about.
[chorus] Oh, Superchristological and Homoousiosis...
Heresies are arguments that you might find attractive,
But just remember in this case the Church is quite reactive.
So play it safe and memorize these words we sing together,
'Cause in the end you'll find, my friend, that we may live forever.
[chorus] Oh, Superchristological and Homoousiosis
Even though the sound of them is something quite atrocious
You can always count on them to anathematize your Gnosis
Superchristological and Homoousiosis
-Lyrics by Dan Idzikowski
To the tune of "Supercalafragalisticexpialadocius"
...Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Superchristological and Homoousiosis
Even though the sound of them is something quite atrocious
You can always count on them to anathemize your Gnosis
Superchristological and Homoousiosis
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Now Origen and Arius were quite a clever pair.
Immutable divinity make Logos out of air.
But then one day Saint Nicholas gave Arius a slap--
and told them if they can't recant, they ought to shut their trap!
[chorus] Oh, Superchristological and Homoousiosis...
One Prosopon, two Ousia are in one Hypostasis.
At Chalcedon this formula gave our faith its basis.
You can argue that you don't know what this means,
But don't you go and try to say there's a "Physis" in between!
[chorus] Oh, Superchristological and Homoousiosis...
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle um diddle ay
Now freedom and autonomy are something to be praised,
But when it comes to human sin, these words must be rephrased,
For Pelagius was too confident that we could work it out--
And Augustine said *massa damnata* is what it's all about.
[chorus] Oh, Superchristological and Homoousiosis...
Heresies are arguments that you might find attractive,
But just remember in this case the Church is quite reactive.
So play it safe and memorize these words we sing together,
'Cause in the end you'll find, my friend, that we may live forever.
[chorus] Oh, Superchristological and Homoousiosis
Even though the sound of them is something quite atrocious
You can always count on them to anathematize your Gnosis
Superchristological and Homoousiosis
-Lyrics by Dan Idzikowski
Threading the maze of life and death
Gregory the Great on Christ as the one leads us through the maze of life and death.
From The Way of the Fathers
People lost in the corridors of mazes can navigate the twists and turns and blind alleys, if they happen to find someone who has been through it all before. They can get to the end by following behind — which they could not do, if they did not follow their leader step by step. So I beg you to listen: our human minds cannot thread the maze of this life unless we pursue that same path as He did. He was once in it, yet He got beyond the difficulties that hemmed Him in. By the maze I mean that prison of death that leaves no exit and encloses the miserable human race…
He, the Man from above, took death upon Himself. He was buried in the earth, and He returned back to life on the third day. So everyone who is joined to Him by virtue of His body may look forward to the same happy ending.
From The Way of the Fathers
People lost in the corridors of mazes can navigate the twists and turns and blind alleys, if they happen to find someone who has been through it all before. They can get to the end by following behind — which they could not do, if they did not follow their leader step by step. So I beg you to listen: our human minds cannot thread the maze of this life unless we pursue that same path as He did. He was once in it, yet He got beyond the difficulties that hemmed Him in. By the maze I mean that prison of death that leaves no exit and encloses the miserable human race…
He, the Man from above, took death upon Himself. He was buried in the earth, and He returned back to life on the third day. So everyone who is joined to Him by virtue of His body may look forward to the same happy ending.
Rome Reborn
If you have any interest in the ancient world at all, this is cool. a computer recreation of the ancient city of Rome. You can walk the streets, go into buildings.
HT: Thoughts on Antiquity
HT: Thoughts on Antiquity
Thursday, June 14, 2007
The saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled
A political liberal whacks the liberals. Deliciously written. Fun to read.
A taste:
At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.
The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.
A taste:
At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.
The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Turning from west to east
You began by entering the outer room of the baptistery. You faced westward, heard a voice commanding you to stretch out your hand, and renounce Satan as though to his face … you are told to stretch out your hand, and to address the devil as if he were before you: I renounce you, Satan.
I will tell you now, for you need to know, why you face westward. The west is the quarter from which darkness appears to us; now the devil is darkness, and wields his power in darkness. So we look to the west as a symbolic gesture, and renounce the leader of shadow and darkness ... The second phrase you are instructed to recite is: and all your works. The works of Satan are all wickedness; this you must also renounce, for when one escapes a tyrant, one surely escapes his weapons as well. So every form of sin is numbered amongst the devil's works. ...
Next you say: and all your pomp. The devil's pomp is the mad world of the stage, horse-racing, hunting, and all such futility. Also included in the pomp of the devil are the meat, loaves, and other offerings suspended during the festivals in honour of idols, and polluted by the invocation of abominable demons. ...
Your next words are: and all your worship. The devil's worship is prayer in pagan temples, honour paid to lifeless idols, kindling lamps and burning incense by fountains or rivers ..., and similar rites. So do not practise them. Augury, divination, watching for omens, wearing amulets, writing on leaves, sorcery and other such evil practices are the worship of the devil. These, then, you must avoid. ...
… When you renounce Satan, you trample underfoot your entire covenant with him, and abrogate your former treaty with Hell. The gates of God's Paradise are open to you, that garden which God I planted in the east and from which our first parent was expelled for his transgression.
When you turned from west to east, the region of light, you symbolized this change of allegiance. Then you were told to say: I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and in one baptism of repentance.
Upon entering [the inner room of the baptistery] you took off your clothing and this symbolised your stripping off ‘the old nature with its practices’. Stripped naked, in this too you were imitating Christ naked on the cross, who in his darkness 'disarmed the principalities and powers' and on the wood of the cross publicly 'triumphed over them.'
Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis, various selections, taken from Maxwell Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation, Liturgical Press, 1999, 95-96.
I will tell you now, for you need to know, why you face westward. The west is the quarter from which darkness appears to us; now the devil is darkness, and wields his power in darkness. So we look to the west as a symbolic gesture, and renounce the leader of shadow and darkness ... The second phrase you are instructed to recite is: and all your works. The works of Satan are all wickedness; this you must also renounce, for when one escapes a tyrant, one surely escapes his weapons as well. So every form of sin is numbered amongst the devil's works. ...
Next you say: and all your pomp. The devil's pomp is the mad world of the stage, horse-racing, hunting, and all such futility. Also included in the pomp of the devil are the meat, loaves, and other offerings suspended during the festivals in honour of idols, and polluted by the invocation of abominable demons. ...
Your next words are: and all your worship. The devil's worship is prayer in pagan temples, honour paid to lifeless idols, kindling lamps and burning incense by fountains or rivers ..., and similar rites. So do not practise them. Augury, divination, watching for omens, wearing amulets, writing on leaves, sorcery and other such evil practices are the worship of the devil. These, then, you must avoid. ...
… When you renounce Satan, you trample underfoot your entire covenant with him, and abrogate your former treaty with Hell. The gates of God's Paradise are open to you, that garden which God I planted in the east and from which our first parent was expelled for his transgression.
When you turned from west to east, the region of light, you symbolized this change of allegiance. Then you were told to say: I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and in one baptism of repentance.
Upon entering [the inner room of the baptistery] you took off your clothing and this symbolised your stripping off ‘the old nature with its practices’. Stripped naked, in this too you were imitating Christ naked on the cross, who in his darkness 'disarmed the principalities and powers' and on the wood of the cross publicly 'triumphed over them.'
Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis, various selections, taken from Maxwell Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation, Liturgical Press, 1999, 95-96.
File this under stupid government
Apparently, it's dangerous to go against the status quo in North Carolina. Bob Teixeira, a guitar teacher from Charlotte, decided to take a stand against American dependence on foreign oil. He spent US$1,200 to convert his 1981 Mercedes diesel to run on biodiesel. And unlike most biodiesel converts, who scrounge waste cooking oil to run their cars for free, he bought vegetable oil from Costco in 5-gallon jugs, which cost him about a third again what diesel was running at the time.
What was the response of the state?
Despite his good intentions, the state fined Teixeira $1,000 for not paying motor-fuel taxes. North Carolina officials also told him that to legally use veggie oil here, he'd have to first post a $2,500 bond.
Mr. Teixeira found a sympathetic ear in state Senator Stan Bingham (R-Surprisingly), who runs his diesel Volkswagen with used soybean oil and stenciled his driver's door with the words "Hello Soybean Goodbye OPEC. Powered by soybean oil." (Oddly, it was a similar sign that alerted the authorities to Mr. Teixeira's non-petrochemical fuel.)
I read it here.
What was the response of the state?
Despite his good intentions, the state fined Teixeira $1,000 for not paying motor-fuel taxes. North Carolina officials also told him that to legally use veggie oil here, he'd have to first post a $2,500 bond.
Mr. Teixeira found a sympathetic ear in state Senator Stan Bingham (R-Surprisingly), who runs his diesel Volkswagen with used soybean oil and stenciled his driver's door with the words "Hello Soybean Goodbye OPEC. Powered by soybean oil." (Oddly, it was a similar sign that alerted the authorities to Mr. Teixeira's non-petrochemical fuel.)
I read it here.
Sub Biblical transformation
Christianity Today has some good things to say about how transformation language and sociology and buzz word leadership ideas are infecting the church with sub-biblical ways of life.
A taste:
In our managerial age, we instinctively look to "leadership principles" and "keys to effectiveness" to "master" dysfunctional congregations. Some of this arises from a sincere desire to help the church be the church. Yet some of it is pure hubris and vain imagination, thinking that with organization-speak we can transform the church. Worse still, organization-speak has a way of deafening our ears to the unique language of Scripture. Only that language can open our eyes to see "the glory of the Lord," the one reality that transforms us into Christ's image "from one degree of glory to another."
A taste:
In our managerial age, we instinctively look to "leadership principles" and "keys to effectiveness" to "master" dysfunctional congregations. Some of this arises from a sincere desire to help the church be the church. Yet some of it is pure hubris and vain imagination, thinking that with organization-speak we can transform the church. Worse still, organization-speak has a way of deafening our ears to the unique language of Scripture. Only that language can open our eyes to see "the glory of the Lord," the one reality that transforms us into Christ's image "from one degree of glory to another."
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
Sunday brunch or church?
An unbeliever's take on shopping for a church. Interesting to hear a prospect's take on attempts to recruit her and her family.
Blogging the Bible
I only ran across this today when it is ending but this is an interesting series of blog posts on Slate. The blogger is a Jewish person who is by his own account pretty lax, non-observant. He decides to read the entire OT and blog about it.
It is not a pious account, nor obviously a Christian one. It is what happens when, as the author says, an ignorant person picks up the Bible. It is, if you are a teacher of the Bible, what someone in your adult membership class might think when reading the Bible for the first time. It is not reverent or theologically astute. It is fascinating and thought provoking.
The whole thing is here.
It is not a pious account, nor obviously a Christian one. It is what happens when, as the author says, an ignorant person picks up the Bible. It is, if you are a teacher of the Bible, what someone in your adult membership class might think when reading the Bible for the first time. It is not reverent or theologically astute. It is fascinating and thought provoking.
The whole thing is here.
Jesus as a young Fred Rogers with facial hair
Its not just that Antony Esolen pokes holes in just the right spots of all the vacuous silliness around us. He does it with such delightful invective it is a joy to read even as you share his righteous anger.
Read it all at Mere Comments but here are just a few of the phrases you will enjoy:
The sisters in the local convent apparently dodder their way through a labyrinth they have mowed in their backyard; this is their way of making physical the inextricabilis error in which they have long been wandering. Whether they find Jesus or a Minotaur at the center of it is not clear.
Most of them turn Jesus into a young Fred Rogers with facial hair.
Read it all at Mere Comments but here are just a few of the phrases you will enjoy:
The sisters in the local convent apparently dodder their way through a labyrinth they have mowed in their backyard; this is their way of making physical the inextricabilis error in which they have long been wandering. Whether they find Jesus or a Minotaur at the center of it is not clear.
Most of them turn Jesus into a young Fred Rogers with facial hair.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Luther on the widow at Nain, Luke 7
Excerpts from one of three sermons on this text that Luther preached. (Three that I know of in English.) For Luther it is all about God's work and our inability to work and only to receive when we are at the very depths of despair and nothingness.
For today's lesson was not written for the sake of this widow, but for the instruction and help of all who should hear this Gospel until the end of the world, among whom we also have been reckoned.
In the first place notice what lovingkindness and grace were shown to this woman by Christ. We must truly confess she did not merit them; for she is going out of the city with her friends, where there is nothing but crying and weeping. The good woman thought of nothing as little as that she should again lead back her son into the city alive, and for this reason she does not desire it, nor does she ask it, much less has she deserved it. She never thought of such a thing that Christ should come hither; yea, she did not at the time know Christ nor did she know anything of his helping the people. Here all merit and preparations for meeting him are out of the question.
Now all this has been written to the end that just as here this deed of mercy befell this widow freely and entirely of grace, only because it solicited Christ's sympathy,
so from this we can draw the general rule that applies to all the merciful deeds of God, that they all overtake us without our merits, even before we seek them. He lays the foundation and makes the beginning. But why does he pity us? In this way it continues to be the grace of God. Otherwise, if we deserved it, it would not be grace. And if it be of grace, then we can say to him: Thou art a gracious God, thou doest good also to them who deserve it not.
...
At times God permits some man to fall into anxiety and need, into pain and distress, so that the world seems as though it had no God, and it makes a person blind, lame, dropsical, and lets anyone die, as here the widow's son; for they are his creatures, he can do with them what he will. Now, why does he do this? He does it in such an abundance only that we may continually experience his lovingkindness.
... Now, the woman went ahead and did not know what God had given her; but she was soon obliged to experience it. For before she turns around, and she thinks she is the safest, God comes, tries the wife a little and teaches her certain things, takes her husband and her son, This all has been written for us that we might have an example and learn to acknowledge God when he blesses us with a healthy body, a bright countenance, and bestows upon us other blessings. He does not give them to the end that you should rejoice in them; but that you may know what to think of him. When he takes a member out of your family, permits your wife to die, or destroys one of your eyes, all this is done that you may see what you have enjoyed from him.
And this is now the common teaching through all the Gospels, that we may see what kind of a God we have. It is also shown us here in this Gospel that God will forsake no one; therefore he permits the wife to see in a new light what kind of a God she has. For when she was forsaken and had neither son nor husband, then Christ manifests himself to her and says: Learn to believe, trust God, know him to whom death and life are alike: have a good heart, be of good courage, weep not, there is no need of it. He then goes and awakens the dead, and gives him again to his mother.
This and like miracles God does that the heart may learn how it should be disposed to him and what it may expect from him. As now this wife was fully convinced that there was no hope for her son, that it was impossible for her to receive him back alive again; yea, if one had said to her: Before an hour your son will be alive again, she would have regarded it as impossible and said: It is more possible for the heavens to fall than for my son to live again. Behold, here comes God before she looks around, and does what she never dared to ask of him, as it is impossible, and he restores her son alive to her again.
But why does God do this? He permits man to fall so deeply into danger and anxiety, until no help or advice is within reach, and still he desires that we should not doubt, but trust in him who out of an impossible thing can make something possible, and make something out of nothing.
If you are so deep in sin that your heart denies you all grace and the mercy of God and makes you think there is no hope for you, as many consciences are ensnared by such anxiety and distress; then turn about and look here how friendly and graciously God allows himself to be pictured by Christ in this Gospel; that you may observe that he means it well with you from his heart; and that he is not here either to condemn or excommunicate you, but to preserve your soul forever. For this purpose such miracles and wonderful works are held before our eyes, and they also serve to the end, that we may see. As God here helps this widow in a temporal way through Christ, so he will help us not only bodily, but much more spiritually, and our soul forever, if we only put our hope in him.
You can read it all here.
Augustine on the widow at Nain
Augustine on the widow at Nain.
All believers are moved when they hear the accounts of the miracles wrought by Jesus, our Lord and Savior, though they are affected by them in different ways. Some are astounded at his wonderful physical cures, but have not yet learned to discern the greater miracles that lie beyond the world of sense. Others marvel that the miracles that they hear of our Lord working on people's bodies are now being accomplished more wonderfully in their souls.
No Christian should doubt that even today the dead are being raised to life. Yet, while everyone has eyes capable of seeing the dead rise in the way the widow's son rose, as we have just heard in the gospel, the ability to see the spiritually dead arise is possessed only by those who have themselves experienced a spiritual resurrection.
It is a greater thing to raise what will live for ever than to raise what must die again. When the young man in the gospel was raised, his widowed mother rejoiced; when souls are daily raised from spiritual death, mother Church rejoices. The young man was dead in body, these latter are dead in spirit. Those who witnessed the lad's visible death mourned openly and visibly, but the invisible death of the dead in spirit was neither seen nor thought about.
The Lord Jesus sought out those he knew to be dead; he alone knew they were dead, and he alone could make them live again. Unless he had come to raise the dead the apostle would not have said: "Rise up." "Sleeper", of course, makes you think of someone slumbering, but when the apostle goes on to say rise from the dead, you realize that he really means a dead person. The visibly dead are often said to be sleeping; and indeed for one who has power to wake them they really are only sleeping. A person is dead as far as you are concerned if he does not waken no matter how much you slap or pinch or even wound him. But for Christ the young man he commanded to rise was only sleeping, because he immediately got up. Christ raises the dead from their graves more easily than another can rouse a sleeper from his bed.
Our Lord Jesus Christ wished us to understand that what he did for people's bodies he also did for their souls. He did not work miracles merely for miracles' sake; his object was that his deeds might arouse wonder in the beholders and reveal the truth to those capable of understanding.
A person who sees the letters in a beautifully written book without being able to read them will praise the skill of the copyist because he admires the graceful shape of the letters, but the purpose and meaning of these letters he does not grasp. What he sees with his eyes prompts him to praise, but his mind is not enriched with knowledge. Another, praising the artistry, will also grasp the meaning; one, that is, who is able not only to see what everyone else sees but also to read it, which is a skill that has to be learned. So too, those who observed Christ's miracles without grasping their purpose and the meaning they had for those able to understand, simply admired the deeds. Others went further: they admired the deeds and also grasped the meaning. As pupils in the school of Christ, we must be such as these.
From "Journey with the Fathers, Series C" (Sermon 98, 1-3: PL 38, 591-592)
All believers are moved when they hear the accounts of the miracles wrought by Jesus, our Lord and Savior, though they are affected by them in different ways. Some are astounded at his wonderful physical cures, but have not yet learned to discern the greater miracles that lie beyond the world of sense. Others marvel that the miracles that they hear of our Lord working on people's bodies are now being accomplished more wonderfully in their souls.
No Christian should doubt that even today the dead are being raised to life. Yet, while everyone has eyes capable of seeing the dead rise in the way the widow's son rose, as we have just heard in the gospel, the ability to see the spiritually dead arise is possessed only by those who have themselves experienced a spiritual resurrection.
It is a greater thing to raise what will live for ever than to raise what must die again. When the young man in the gospel was raised, his widowed mother rejoiced; when souls are daily raised from spiritual death, mother Church rejoices. The young man was dead in body, these latter are dead in spirit. Those who witnessed the lad's visible death mourned openly and visibly, but the invisible death of the dead in spirit was neither seen nor thought about.
The Lord Jesus sought out those he knew to be dead; he alone knew they were dead, and he alone could make them live again. Unless he had come to raise the dead the apostle would not have said: "Rise up." "Sleeper", of course, makes you think of someone slumbering, but when the apostle goes on to say rise from the dead, you realize that he really means a dead person. The visibly dead are often said to be sleeping; and indeed for one who has power to wake them they really are only sleeping. A person is dead as far as you are concerned if he does not waken no matter how much you slap or pinch or even wound him. But for Christ the young man he commanded to rise was only sleeping, because he immediately got up. Christ raises the dead from their graves more easily than another can rouse a sleeper from his bed.
Our Lord Jesus Christ wished us to understand that what he did for people's bodies he also did for their souls. He did not work miracles merely for miracles' sake; his object was that his deeds might arouse wonder in the beholders and reveal the truth to those capable of understanding.
A person who sees the letters in a beautifully written book without being able to read them will praise the skill of the copyist because he admires the graceful shape of the letters, but the purpose and meaning of these letters he does not grasp. What he sees with his eyes prompts him to praise, but his mind is not enriched with knowledge. Another, praising the artistry, will also grasp the meaning; one, that is, who is able not only to see what everyone else sees but also to read it, which is a skill that has to be learned. So too, those who observed Christ's miracles without grasping their purpose and the meaning they had for those able to understand, simply admired the deeds. Others went further: they admired the deeds and also grasped the meaning. As pupils in the school of Christ, we must be such as these.
From "Journey with the Fathers, Series C" (Sermon 98, 1-3: PL 38, 591-592)
Cyril of Alexandria on the widow of Nain
Cyril of Alexandria on the Widow of Nain, Luke 7.
It is interesting to read Cyril's comments here (taken online here)and compare them with Augustine's which I will post in a separate entry.
Cyril speaks of death as corruption. He is speaking of physical death attendant upon sin. He speaks of our flesh set free from death. He speaks of the physical touch of Jesus and the importance of his life giving flesh.
Augustine completely spiritualizes the reading to the level of souls and spiritual rebirth. Augustine, of course, would not have denied the physical resurrection Jesus bring but it is interesting to see how they approach the text.
For that dead man was being buried, and many friends were conducting him to his tomb. But there meets him the Life and Resurrection, even Christ: for He is the Destroyer of death and of corruption: He it is "in Whom we live and move and are:" He it is Who has restored the nature of man to that which it originally was; and has set free our death-fraught flesh from the bonds of death. He had mercy upon the woman, and that her tears might be stopped, He commanded, saying, "Weep not." And immediately the cause of her weeping was done away: how, or by what method? He touched the bier, and by the utterance of his godlike word, made him who was lying thereon return again to life: for He said, "Young man, I say unto thee. Arise;" and immediately that which was commanded was done: the actual accomplishment attended upon the words, "And that dead man, it says, sat up, and began to speak, and He gave him to his mother."
...
Those persons therefore who were restored to life by the power of Christ, we take as a pledge of the hope prepared for us of a resurrection of the dead: and these were, this young man, and Lazarus of Bethany, and the daughter of the chief of the synagogue. And this truth the company of the holy prophets proclaimed before: for the blessed Isaiah said, "The dead shall arise, and those in the graves shall be restored to life: for the dew from Thee is healing to them." And by dew he means the life-giving operation of Christ, which is by the instrumentality of the Holy Ghost. And the Psalmist bears witness, thus speaking concerning them in words addressed to God the Saviour of us all. "When Thou turnest away Thy face they are troubled, and return to their dust. Thou sendest Thy Spirit, and they are created, and Thou renewest the face of the ground."
For it was by reason of Adam's transgression of the commandment that we, having our faces turned away from God, returned to our dust: for the sentence of God upon human nature was, "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return:" but at the time of the consummation of this world, the face of the earth shall be renewed: for God the Father by the Son in the Spirit will give life to all those who are laid within it.
It is death that has brought men to old age and corruption: death therefore has made old, that is to say, has corrupted: for "that which is made old, and is growing aged, is near corruption," as Scripture saith: but Christ renews, in that He is "the Life." For He Who in the beginning created, is able again to renew unto incorruption and life. For one may well affirm that it is the office of one and the same energy and power, to effect both the one and the other. As therefore the prophet Isaiah says, "'He hath swallowed up death, having become mighty." And again, "The Lord hath taken away all weeping from every countenance. He hath taken away the reproach of the people from all the earth."
By the reproach of the people he means sin, which disgraces and depraves men: and which, together with destruction, shall be slain, and sorrow and death shall perish, and the tears cease which are shed on its account.
Disbelieve not therefore the resurrection of the dead; for long ago Christ wrought it among us with a Godlike majesty. And let no man say, that He Who raised two, for instance, or three, and effected thus much, is not thoroughly sufficient for the life also of us all. Such words, foul with utter ignorance, are simply ridiculous. Right rather is it for us to understand, that He is the Life, and the Life-giver by nature. And how can the Life be insufficient for making all alive? It would be the same thing as to say in one's excessive folly, that the Light also is sufficient indeed for little things, but not for the Universe.
He therefore arose who was descending to his grave. And the manner of his rising is plain to see; "for He touched, it says, the bier, and said, Young man, I say unto thee, arise." And yet how was not a word enough for raising him who was lying there? For what is there difficult to it, or past |135 accomplishment? What is more powerful than the Word of God? Why then did He not effect the miracle by a word only, but also touched the bier? It was, my beloved, that thou mightest learn that the holy body of Christ is effectual for the salvation of man. For the flesh of the Almighty Word is the body of life, and was clothed with His might. For consider, that iron, when brought into contact with fire, produces the effects of lire, and fulfils its functions; so, because it became the flesh of the Word, Who gives life to all, it therefore also has the power of giving life, and annihilates the influence of death and corruption 20. May our Lord Jesus Christ also touch us, that delivering us from evil works, even from fleshly lusts, He may unite us to the assemblies of the saints; for He is the giver of all good, by Whom, and with Whom, to God the Father, be praise and dominion, with the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, Amen.
It is interesting to read Cyril's comments here (taken online here)and compare them with Augustine's which I will post in a separate entry.
Cyril speaks of death as corruption. He is speaking of physical death attendant upon sin. He speaks of our flesh set free from death. He speaks of the physical touch of Jesus and the importance of his life giving flesh.
Augustine completely spiritualizes the reading to the level of souls and spiritual rebirth. Augustine, of course, would not have denied the physical resurrection Jesus bring but it is interesting to see how they approach the text.
For that dead man was being buried, and many friends were conducting him to his tomb. But there meets him the Life and Resurrection, even Christ: for He is the Destroyer of death and of corruption: He it is "in Whom we live and move and are:" He it is Who has restored the nature of man to that which it originally was; and has set free our death-fraught flesh from the bonds of death. He had mercy upon the woman, and that her tears might be stopped, He commanded, saying, "Weep not." And immediately the cause of her weeping was done away: how, or by what method? He touched the bier, and by the utterance of his godlike word, made him who was lying thereon return again to life: for He said, "Young man, I say unto thee. Arise;" and immediately that which was commanded was done: the actual accomplishment attended upon the words, "And that dead man, it says, sat up, and began to speak, and He gave him to his mother."
...
Those persons therefore who were restored to life by the power of Christ, we take as a pledge of the hope prepared for us of a resurrection of the dead: and these were, this young man, and Lazarus of Bethany, and the daughter of the chief of the synagogue. And this truth the company of the holy prophets proclaimed before: for the blessed Isaiah said, "The dead shall arise, and those in the graves shall be restored to life: for the dew from Thee is healing to them." And by dew he means the life-giving operation of Christ, which is by the instrumentality of the Holy Ghost. And the Psalmist bears witness, thus speaking concerning them in words addressed to God the Saviour of us all. "When Thou turnest away Thy face they are troubled, and return to their dust. Thou sendest Thy Spirit, and they are created, and Thou renewest the face of the ground."
For it was by reason of Adam's transgression of the commandment that we, having our faces turned away from God, returned to our dust: for the sentence of God upon human nature was, "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return:" but at the time of the consummation of this world, the face of the earth shall be renewed: for God the Father by the Son in the Spirit will give life to all those who are laid within it.
It is death that has brought men to old age and corruption: death therefore has made old, that is to say, has corrupted: for "that which is made old, and is growing aged, is near corruption," as Scripture saith: but Christ renews, in that He is "the Life." For He Who in the beginning created, is able again to renew unto incorruption and life. For one may well affirm that it is the office of one and the same energy and power, to effect both the one and the other. As therefore the prophet Isaiah says, "'He hath swallowed up death, having become mighty." And again, "The Lord hath taken away all weeping from every countenance. He hath taken away the reproach of the people from all the earth."
By the reproach of the people he means sin, which disgraces and depraves men: and which, together with destruction, shall be slain, and sorrow and death shall perish, and the tears cease which are shed on its account.
Disbelieve not therefore the resurrection of the dead; for long ago Christ wrought it among us with a Godlike majesty. And let no man say, that He Who raised two, for instance, or three, and effected thus much, is not thoroughly sufficient for the life also of us all. Such words, foul with utter ignorance, are simply ridiculous. Right rather is it for us to understand, that He is the Life, and the Life-giver by nature. And how can the Life be insufficient for making all alive? It would be the same thing as to say in one's excessive folly, that the Light also is sufficient indeed for little things, but not for the Universe.
He therefore arose who was descending to his grave. And the manner of his rising is plain to see; "for He touched, it says, the bier, and said, Young man, I say unto thee, arise." And yet how was not a word enough for raising him who was lying there? For what is there difficult to it, or past |135 accomplishment? What is more powerful than the Word of God? Why then did He not effect the miracle by a word only, but also touched the bier? It was, my beloved, that thou mightest learn that the holy body of Christ is effectual for the salvation of man. For the flesh of the Almighty Word is the body of life, and was clothed with His might. For consider, that iron, when brought into contact with fire, produces the effects of lire, and fulfils its functions; so, because it became the flesh of the Word, Who gives life to all, it therefore also has the power of giving life, and annihilates the influence of death and corruption 20. May our Lord Jesus Christ also touch us, that delivering us from evil works, even from fleshly lusts, He may unite us to the assemblies of the saints; for He is the giver of all good, by Whom, and with Whom, to God the Father, be praise and dominion, with the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, Amen.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Augustine's new CD
Actually, its not new, only the format. And it is not really a CD. It is a bunch of mp3 files.
But, here you can listen to Augustine's City of God or Confessions online or download them to an Ipod or burn them to a CD.
Cool.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Simon Chan
Christianity Today online has a fascinating interview with a Korean Pentecostal professor of theology, Simon Chan, who speaks very wisely about liturgy, mission and communion. It is worth reading in its entirety but here is a bit:
You have written a great deal about liturgical theology, but missional theology seems more popular these days.
I think that missional theology is a very positive development. But some missional theology has not gone far enough. It hasn't asked, What is the mission of the Trinity? And the answer to that question is communion. Ultimately, all things are to be brought back into communion with the triune God. Communion is the ultimate end, not mission.
If we see communion as central to the life of the church, we are going to have an important place for mission. And this is reflected in the ancient fourfold structure of worship: gathering, proclaiming the Word, celebrating the Eucharist, and going out into the world. The last, of course, is mission. But mission takes its place within a larger structure. It is this sense of communion that the evangelical world especially needs. Communion is not just introspection or fellowship among ourselves. It involves, ultimately, seeing God and seeing the heart of God as well, which is his love for the world.
In many services today, the dismissal into the world is quite perfunctory. But if you go to an Orthodox service, you'll be amazed at the elaborate way in which the end of the service is conducted. It's not just a word of dismissal—there are whole prayers and litanies that prepare us to go back out into the world.
But a high-definition video screen seems to bring us much closer to the preacher. Does that sense of intimacy happen in liturgical worship?
The traditional liturgy doesn't exist primarily to foster interpersonal relationships. It operates on a very different paradigm. In the liturgy we are, in a very real sense, objectively recognizing God for who he is. And in the midst of proclaiming who God is, we encounter God. At the end of the day, we may not be particularly drawn toward individuals, but in a good liturgy, we are drawn to God. We recognize him for who he is.
What do we need to learn and unlearn about making disciples?
We need to rediscover this ancient word, catechism. In a way, it is very straightforward. Its purpose is to help people become the body of Christ and be incorporated into the church. And I don't think that the modern church can improve very much on what has already been given: the creeds, the great commandments, the Lord's Prayer. Those are the basic things that help the church develop its identity as the church of Jesus Christ. We can certainly add other training programs, but I think the catechism should be central to any training of disciples.
Now, the traditional approach was rote learning, asking questions and memorizing the responses. That may not be the most useful approach now, although it's surprising how some of those things we learn by rote stick at the back of our minds for a lifetime. But there are many other things that need to be addressed as the church enters into new contexts. The basic content of the catechism needs to address contextual issues.
You have written a great deal about liturgical theology, but missional theology seems more popular these days.
I think that missional theology is a very positive development. But some missional theology has not gone far enough. It hasn't asked, What is the mission of the Trinity? And the answer to that question is communion. Ultimately, all things are to be brought back into communion with the triune God. Communion is the ultimate end, not mission.
If we see communion as central to the life of the church, we are going to have an important place for mission. And this is reflected in the ancient fourfold structure of worship: gathering, proclaiming the Word, celebrating the Eucharist, and going out into the world. The last, of course, is mission. But mission takes its place within a larger structure. It is this sense of communion that the evangelical world especially needs. Communion is not just introspection or fellowship among ourselves. It involves, ultimately, seeing God and seeing the heart of God as well, which is his love for the world.
In many services today, the dismissal into the world is quite perfunctory. But if you go to an Orthodox service, you'll be amazed at the elaborate way in which the end of the service is conducted. It's not just a word of dismissal—there are whole prayers and litanies that prepare us to go back out into the world.
But a high-definition video screen seems to bring us much closer to the preacher. Does that sense of intimacy happen in liturgical worship?
The traditional liturgy doesn't exist primarily to foster interpersonal relationships. It operates on a very different paradigm. In the liturgy we are, in a very real sense, objectively recognizing God for who he is. And in the midst of proclaiming who God is, we encounter God. At the end of the day, we may not be particularly drawn toward individuals, but in a good liturgy, we are drawn to God. We recognize him for who he is.
What do we need to learn and unlearn about making disciples?
We need to rediscover this ancient word, catechism. In a way, it is very straightforward. Its purpose is to help people become the body of Christ and be incorporated into the church. And I don't think that the modern church can improve very much on what has already been given: the creeds, the great commandments, the Lord's Prayer. Those are the basic things that help the church develop its identity as the church of Jesus Christ. We can certainly add other training programs, but I think the catechism should be central to any training of disciples.
Now, the traditional approach was rote learning, asking questions and memorizing the responses. That may not be the most useful approach now, although it's surprising how some of those things we learn by rote stick at the back of our minds for a lifetime. But there are many other things that need to be addressed as the church enters into new contexts. The basic content of the catechism needs to address contextual issues.
How the greater part of the body of the Church is like a dead and motionless carcase
John Chrysostom on what we call inactives and what he calls that which resembles "a dead motionless carcase".
It is somehow conforting that the same ills and sinfulness we face the fathers faced as well. And Chrysostom's words are so on target, so delightfully brutal, you could use them today in a parish council meeting or elders meeting or even a sermon, properly adapted.
How am I distressed, think you, when I call to mind that on the festival days the multitudes assembled resemble the broad expanse of the sea, but now not even the smallest part of that multitude is gathered together here? Where are they now who oppress us with their presence on the feast days? I look for them, and am grieved on their account when I mark what a multitude are perishing of those who are in the way of salvation, how large a loss of brethren I sustain, how few are reached by the things which concern salvation, and how the greater part of the body of the Church is like a dead and motionless carcase.
“And what concern is that to us?” you say. The greatest possible concern if you pay no attention to your brethren, if you do not exhort and advise, if you put no constraint on them, and do not forcibly drag them hither, and lead them away out of their deep indolence. For that one ought not to be useful to himself alone, but also to many others, Christ declared plainly, when He called us salt, and leaven, and light.
For these things are useful and profitable to others. For a lamp does not shine for itself, but for those who are sitting in darkness: and thou art a lamp not that thou mayest enjoy the light by thyself, but that thou mayest bring back yonder man who has gone astray. For what profit is a lamp if it does not give light to him who sits in darkness? and what profit is a Christian when he benefits no one, neither leads any one back to virtue?
Again salt is not an astringent to itself but braces up those parts of the body which have decayed, and prevents them from falling to pieces and perishing. Even so do thou, since God has appointed thee to be spiritual salt, bind and brace up the decayed members, that is the indolent and sordid brethren, and having rescued them from their indolence as from some form of corruption, unite them to the rest of the body of the Church.
And this is the reason why He called you leaven: for leaven also does not leaven itself, but, little though it is, it affects the whole lump however big it may be. So also do ye: although ye are few in number, yet be ye many and powerful in faith, and in zeal towards God. As then the leaven is not weak on account of its littleness, but prevails owing to its inherent heat, and the force of its natural quality, so ye also will be able to bring back a far larger number than yourselves, if you will, to the same degree of zeal as your own.
Now if they make the summer season their excuse: for I hear of their saying things of this kind, “the present stifling heat is excessive, the scorching sun is intolerable, we cannot bear being trampled and crushed in the crowd, and to be steaming all over with perspiration and oppressed by the heat and confined space:” I am ashamed of them, believe me: for such excuses are womanish: indeed even in their case who have softer bodies, and a weaker nature, such pretexts do not suffice for justification.
Nevertheless, even if it seems a disgrace to make a reply to a defence of this kind, yet is it necessary. For if they put forward such excuses as these and do not blush, much more does it behove us not to be ashamed of replying to these things. What then am I to say to those who advance these pretexts? I would remind them of the three children in the furnace and the flame, who when they saw the fire encircling them on all sides, enveloping their mouth and their eyes and even their breath, did not cease singing that sacred and mystical hymn to God, in company with the universe, but standing in the midst of the pyre sent up their song of praise to the common Lord of all with greater cheerfulness than they who abide in some flowery field and together with these three children I should think it proper to remind them also of the lions which were in Babylon, and of Daniel and the den and not of this one only but also of another den, and the prophet Jeremiah, and the mire in which he was smothered up to the neck. And emerging from these dens, I would conduct these persons who put forward heat as an excuse into the prison and exhibit Paul to them there, and Silas bound fast in the stocks, covered with bruises and wounds lacerated all over their body with a mass of stripes, yet singing praises to God at midnight and celebrating their holy vigil.
For is it not a monstrous thing that those holy men, both in the furnace and the fire, and the den, and amongst wild beasts, and mire, and in a prison and the stocks, and amidst stripes and gaolers, and intolerable sufferings, never complained of any of these things, but were continually uttering prayers and sacred songs with much energy and fervent zeal, whilst we who have not undergone any of their innumerable sufferings small or great, neglect our own salvation on account of a scorching sun and a little short lived heat and toil, and forsaking the assembly wander away, depraving ourselves by going to meetings which are thoroughly unwholesome?
When the dew of the divine oracles is so abundant dost thou make heat thy excuse? “The water which I will give him,” saith Christ “shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" and again; “He that believeth on me as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” Tell me; when thou hast spiritual wells and rivers, art thou afraid of material heat? Now in the market place where there is so much turmoil and crowding, and scorching wind, how is it that you do not make suffocation and heat an excuse for absenting yourself? For it is impossible for you to say that there you can enjoy a cooler temperature, and that all the heat is concentrated here with us:—the truth is exactly the reverse; here indeed owing to the pavement floor, and to the construction of the building in other respects (for it is carried up to a vast height), the air is lighter and cooler: whereas there the sun is strong in every direction, and there is much crowding, and vapour and dust, and other things which add to discomfort far more than these. Whence it is plain that these senseless excuses are the offspring of indolence and of a supine disposition, destitute of the fire of the Holy Spirit.
To those who had not attended the assembly, 2.
It is somehow conforting that the same ills and sinfulness we face the fathers faced as well. And Chrysostom's words are so on target, so delightfully brutal, you could use them today in a parish council meeting or elders meeting or even a sermon, properly adapted.
How am I distressed, think you, when I call to mind that on the festival days the multitudes assembled resemble the broad expanse of the sea, but now not even the smallest part of that multitude is gathered together here? Where are they now who oppress us with their presence on the feast days? I look for them, and am grieved on their account when I mark what a multitude are perishing of those who are in the way of salvation, how large a loss of brethren I sustain, how few are reached by the things which concern salvation, and how the greater part of the body of the Church is like a dead and motionless carcase.
“And what concern is that to us?” you say. The greatest possible concern if you pay no attention to your brethren, if you do not exhort and advise, if you put no constraint on them, and do not forcibly drag them hither, and lead them away out of their deep indolence. For that one ought not to be useful to himself alone, but also to many others, Christ declared plainly, when He called us salt, and leaven, and light.
For these things are useful and profitable to others. For a lamp does not shine for itself, but for those who are sitting in darkness: and thou art a lamp not that thou mayest enjoy the light by thyself, but that thou mayest bring back yonder man who has gone astray. For what profit is a lamp if it does not give light to him who sits in darkness? and what profit is a Christian when he benefits no one, neither leads any one back to virtue?
Again salt is not an astringent to itself but braces up those parts of the body which have decayed, and prevents them from falling to pieces and perishing. Even so do thou, since God has appointed thee to be spiritual salt, bind and brace up the decayed members, that is the indolent and sordid brethren, and having rescued them from their indolence as from some form of corruption, unite them to the rest of the body of the Church.
And this is the reason why He called you leaven: for leaven also does not leaven itself, but, little though it is, it affects the whole lump however big it may be. So also do ye: although ye are few in number, yet be ye many and powerful in faith, and in zeal towards God. As then the leaven is not weak on account of its littleness, but prevails owing to its inherent heat, and the force of its natural quality, so ye also will be able to bring back a far larger number than yourselves, if you will, to the same degree of zeal as your own.
Now if they make the summer season their excuse: for I hear of their saying things of this kind, “the present stifling heat is excessive, the scorching sun is intolerable, we cannot bear being trampled and crushed in the crowd, and to be steaming all over with perspiration and oppressed by the heat and confined space:” I am ashamed of them, believe me: for such excuses are womanish: indeed even in their case who have softer bodies, and a weaker nature, such pretexts do not suffice for justification.
Nevertheless, even if it seems a disgrace to make a reply to a defence of this kind, yet is it necessary. For if they put forward such excuses as these and do not blush, much more does it behove us not to be ashamed of replying to these things. What then am I to say to those who advance these pretexts? I would remind them of the three children in the furnace and the flame, who when they saw the fire encircling them on all sides, enveloping their mouth and their eyes and even their breath, did not cease singing that sacred and mystical hymn to God, in company with the universe, but standing in the midst of the pyre sent up their song of praise to the common Lord of all with greater cheerfulness than they who abide in some flowery field and together with these three children I should think it proper to remind them also of the lions which were in Babylon, and of Daniel and the den and not of this one only but also of another den, and the prophet Jeremiah, and the mire in which he was smothered up to the neck. And emerging from these dens, I would conduct these persons who put forward heat as an excuse into the prison and exhibit Paul to them there, and Silas bound fast in the stocks, covered with bruises and wounds lacerated all over their body with a mass of stripes, yet singing praises to God at midnight and celebrating their holy vigil.
For is it not a monstrous thing that those holy men, both in the furnace and the fire, and the den, and amongst wild beasts, and mire, and in a prison and the stocks, and amidst stripes and gaolers, and intolerable sufferings, never complained of any of these things, but were continually uttering prayers and sacred songs with much energy and fervent zeal, whilst we who have not undergone any of their innumerable sufferings small or great, neglect our own salvation on account of a scorching sun and a little short lived heat and toil, and forsaking the assembly wander away, depraving ourselves by going to meetings which are thoroughly unwholesome?
When the dew of the divine oracles is so abundant dost thou make heat thy excuse? “The water which I will give him,” saith Christ “shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" and again; “He that believeth on me as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” Tell me; when thou hast spiritual wells and rivers, art thou afraid of material heat? Now in the market place where there is so much turmoil and crowding, and scorching wind, how is it that you do not make suffocation and heat an excuse for absenting yourself? For it is impossible for you to say that there you can enjoy a cooler temperature, and that all the heat is concentrated here with us:—the truth is exactly the reverse; here indeed owing to the pavement floor, and to the construction of the building in other respects (for it is carried up to a vast height), the air is lighter and cooler: whereas there the sun is strong in every direction, and there is much crowding, and vapour and dust, and other things which add to discomfort far more than these. Whence it is plain that these senseless excuses are the offspring of indolence and of a supine disposition, destitute of the fire of the Holy Spirit.
To those who had not attended the assembly, 2.
Small Town Churches
Here is nice AP story on small rural churches and the challenges that come with them. It focuses especially on Methodists but what it speaks of is applicable across denominational lines. Also TMatt at Get Religion has some worthwhile comments on the story.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Essay by Hopko
With a hat tip to Pastor Weedon and to Christopher Orr, I pass along a very fine essay by Father Thomas Hopko former Dean of St. Vladimir's seminary.
5.30.2007
SVS Commencement Address
By Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko
Dean Emeritus, St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary
May 19, 2007
Your Beatitude Metropolitan Herman, Your Grace Bishop Antoun, Your Grace Bishop Titus, Father Dean Erickson, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and most especially the honored members of the Class of 2007: Glory to Jesus Christ!
I am delighted to speak to you at this commencement ceremony today. This honor is especially significant for me since I came to this school as a student exactly a half century ago, in September 1957.
For forty of the last fifty years I was officially connected with St. Vladimir's. I was a student for six years, and, after five years as a pastor in Ohio, I returned to the seminary where I served as a teacher and pastor for thirty-four years until my retirement five years ago. This school gave me my spiritual life and my spiritual family. It also gave me my wife, and our children and grandchildren, for which I am inexpressibly grateful.
Father Erickson and the seminary faculty asked me to tell you today what I believe to be the most important things that I learned in the last fifty years. They asked me to do this in about twenty minutes. So what can I tell you in my remaining nineteen?
The first and most important thing is that we are boundlessly loved by God who blesses us to love Him boundlessly in return.
I can also tell you that we can love God as He loves us only by faith and grace, by His own divine power, and that we prove our love for Him by loving everyone and everything, beginning with our worst enemies, just as He does, with the very same love with which He loves us, the very Love that He Himself is.
And I can tell you that being loved by God, and loving Him in return, is the greatest joy given to creatures, and that without it there is no real and lasting happiness for humanity.
And I can also tell you, alas, that such loving is always a violent, brutal and bloody affair.
The God who is merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, who gives us his divine life and peace and joy forever, is first of all the Divine Lover who wounds His beloved, and then hides from her, hoping to be sought and found. He is the Father who chastens and disciplines His children. He is the Vinekeeper who cuts and prunes His vines so that they bear much fruit. He is the Jeweler who burns His gold in His divine fire so that it would be purged of all impurities. And He is the Potter who continually smashes and refashions and re-bakes His muddy clay so that it can be the earthen vessel that He wants it
to be, capable of bearing His own transcendent grace and power and glory and peace.
I learned that all of these terrible teachings of the Holy Scriptures and the saints are real and true. And so I became convinced that God's Gospel in His Son Jesus is really and truly God's final act on earth. It is the act in which God's Word is now not simply inscribed in letters on pages of parchment, but is personally incarnate as a human being in his own human body and blood. And so I became convinced of the truth of all truths: that the ultimate revelation of God as Love and the ultimate revelation of humanity's love for God, are both to be found in the bloody
corpse of a dead Jew, hanging on a cross between two criminals, outside the walls of Jerusalem, executed at the hands of Gentiles, by the instigation of his own people's leaders, in the most painful, cursed, shameful and wretched death that a human being -- and especially a Jew -- can possibly die.
So to the measure that we are honest and faithful, and try to keep God's commandments, and repent for our failures and sins, we come to know, and to know ever more clearly and deeply as time goes by, what we have learned here at St. Vladimir's. We come to know by experience that the Word of God (ho logos tou theou) is always and necessarily the word of the Cross (ho logos tou stavrou). And -- in language befitting a commencement ceremony at an Orthodox graduate school of theology -- we come to see that true theologia is always stavrologia. And real orthodoxia is always paradoxia. And that there is no theosis without kenosis.
Theology is stavrology and Orthodoxy is paradoxy: the almighty God reveals Himself as an infinitely humble, totally self-emptying and absolutely ruthless and relentless lover of sinners. And men and women made in His image and likeness must be the same. Thus we come to see that as there is no resurrection without crucifixion, there is also no sanctification without suffering, no glorification without humiliation; no deification without degradation; and no life without death. We learn, in a word, the truth of the early Christian hymn recorded in Holy Scripture:
If we have died with him, we shall also live with him;
if we endure with him, we shall also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful -
for he cannot deny himself. (2Tim 2.11-13)
According to the Gospel, therefore, those who wish to be wise are constrained to be fools. Those who would be great become small. Those who would be first put themselves last. Those who rule, serve as slaves. Those who would be rich make themselves poor. Those who want to be strong become weak. And those who desire to find and fulfill themselves as persons deny and empty themselves for the sake of the Gospel. And, finally, and most important of all, those who want really to live have really to die. They voluntarily die, in truth and in love, to everyone and everything that is not God and of God.
And so, once again, if we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that though we can know about God through formal theological education, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus. And we can only do this by faith and grace through the Holy Spirit's abiding power.
When we speak about "taking up our crosses" and "bearing our burdens" in imitation of Christ, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, we also learn by painful experience that the crosses we take up and the burdens we bear must be those that God gives us, and not those that we ourselves choose and desire. Thus we become convinced that when our burdens are unbearable and our crosses crush us in joyless misery -- and we become dark, depressed, despondent and desperate -- the reasons are evident. Either we are choosing our own crosses and burdens, and rejecting those sent to us by our merciful God whose thoughts and ways are not ours; or we are attempting to carry our crosses and bear our burdens by our own powers, and not by God's grace and strength given to us by Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Church.
And so we come to another conviction: The Church -- the communion of faith and love (as St. Ignatius of Antioch defined it: henosis agapis kai pisteos), the community of saints who are Christ's own very "members" as his body and bride -- is essential to our human being and life. We
cannot be human beings -- still less, Christians and saints -- by ourselves.
We need God and his wise and faithful servants. We need God's commandments and living examples of their fulfillment. We need the Church's scriptures, sacraments, services and saints. And we need one another. As Tertullian said centuries ago, "One Christian is no Christian." And as the Russian proverb puts it, "The only thing that a person can do alone is perish." Like it or not, we are "members of one another" in God. If we like it, it is life and paradise. If we reject it, it is death and hell.
So, in the end, because everything is about the true God and Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the Church's scriptures, sacraments, services and saints, and God's love, wisdom, truth and power, so too, therefore, is everything about the most important and Godlike reality of all, what St. John Climakos called "thrice-holy humility": the humility of God himself that cannot be defined but can only be seen and adored in the crucified Christ, and in those who, by faith and grace, are co-crucified with Him.
Thus, if we have become convinced of anything at all as Orthodox Christians, we are convinced that human beings are not autonomous. The proclamation and defense of human autonomy is the most insidious lie of our day, especially here in North America, and in the Western and Westernized worlds generally. Humans beings are by nature heteronomous. Another law (heteros nomos) is always working in our minds and members. This "other law" is either the law of God, the law of Christ, the law of the Holy Spirit, the law of liberty and life that can only
be recognized, received and realized by holy humility, or it is the law of sin and death. (cf. Romans 7-8) When the law within us is God's law, then we are who we really are, and we are sane and free. But when that law is the law of sin and death, then we are not ourselves, and we are
insane, enslaved and sold to sin.
More than fifteen hundred years ago St. Anthony the Great declared that "a time is coming when people will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us.'" (Saying 25)
It may well be that the time that St. Anthony foresaw is now upon us, or at least is rapidly approaching, at least in the West. And because of what we have learned, we know what we have to do about it. The same St Anthony, with all holy people, has told us. I urge you, and, if I could, I would command you, to read St. Anthony's thirty-eight sayings in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Everything we need to know in order to live is there for us in its simplest and clearest form.
Abba Anthony first tells us that when we are plagued by whirling thoughts (logismoi) and worn down by an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness and futility (akedia), which we will be in this sinful world, we must simply and diligently work and pray, by pure devotion and sheer obedience. We must pay attention to ourselves and mind our own business. We must do our work, and let God -- and other people -- do theirs.
He also tells us that whoever we are, we should always have God before our eyes; and whatever we do, we should always do according to the testimony of the Holy Scriptures; and wherever we are, we should not easily leave that place.
He further tells us (with his friend Abba Pambo) not to trust in our own righteousness, not to worry about the past, and to guard our mouths and our stomachs. He tells us to take responsibility for our own behavior, and to expect to be ferociously tempted to our very last breath. He tells us that there is no salvation for us without trial and temptation, and that without being tested, no person can be healed, illumined and perfected. He tells us that each one of us has our own unique life, that no two people are the same, and that each of us has to be the person that God made us to be (as Fr Paul Lazor, my dearest friend, so often says) where we are, when we are, with whom we are, from whom we are, and such as we are, according to God's inscrutable providence.
Anthony also tells us, as do all the saints, that our life and our death begin and end with our fellow human beings. He insists that if we have gained our neighbor, we have gained our God, but if we have scandalized our neighbor, we have sinned against Christ. He says that all of our ascetical disciplines, including our scholarly studies, are means to an end; they are not ends in themselves. The end is discernment (diakrisis) and dispassion (apatheia) and the knowledge (epignosis) of God through keeping His commandments, the first and greatest of which is love (agape). And he teaches that our only hope to escape the countless snares of this world that seek to enslave us is found in one thing alone: Christ-like humility, with "a broken, contrite and humble heart," as the psalmist says, being our sole "sacrifice acceptable to God." (Psalm 51.17)
"I saw all the snares the enemy spreads out over all the world" Abba Anthony said, "and I cried out groaning, 'What can get through from such snares?' Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Humility'." (Saying 7)
An extended explanation of St. Anthony's teachings, and those of our Christian saints generally, may be found in a book published in 1867 in Russia. It is by St. Ignaty Brianchaninoff, and is called in English The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. I am convinced that
every committed Christian, surely every seminary graduate, should feel obliged to read this book, meditating especially on its first part about the absolute necessity of keeping God's evangelical commandments (evangelskii zapovedy), accompanied by St Ignaty's dire warnings to religious people -- especially those with theological educations and ascetical inclinations and mystical desires-- who may fail to keep the commandments of the Gospel because they accept the lie that they are "not like other people" as they surrender to the delusion -- the fiercest and most destructive of all delusions for religious people -- that they are especially gifted, zealous and illumined. For, as my beloved Professor Serge Verhovskoy never tired of warning: "The worst of all sins is the lie, and the worst of all lies is the lie about God, and worst of all lies about God is the lie about God and me."
I would also recommend today, and, again, if I could, I would also insist that all thinking Christians, and surely all seminary students and graduates, be required to read one other book that contains, in my view, the most incisive analysis of what has happened to humanity in the last fifty years. It is C. S. Lewis's prophetic masterpiece written in 1944 called The Abolition of Man. This slender volume should be read slowly, methodically and carefully many times over. Parts of it, which I have read more than ten times, are still unclear to me. But its main point is crystal clear.
Lewis says that for human beings to see, know, love, adore and offer fitting thanksgiving for all that is good, true and beautiful in human life, and so to remain fully and truly human, they must possess and cultivate the uniquely human faculty that differentiates them from angels and beasts, and, we must also add today, from the artificial intelligence of electronic technology. Lewis calls this faculty the "Tao." He says that it may also be called the "image of God" or the "spark of divinity" or the Law or the Logos or the Heart. (Today, if he knew Orthodox literature, he might have also said that it may be called the Nous.) Whatever one calls it, it is the faculty whereby human beings intuit and contemplate the basic truths of human being and life that ground all ratiocination, discourse, conversation and disputation. Lewis claimed in 1944 that if the methods of education prevailing in the schools of his day prove to be successful,
this uniquely human faculty will be obliterated, and human beings as we have known them will no longer exist. It will literally be "the abolition of man."
I am convinced that what Lewis foresaw has happened, and is still happening with ever more catastrophic consequences, in our Western and Westernized worlds. It happens that men and women who once were human are simply no longer so. They have become nothing but minds and matter, brains and bodies, computers and consumers, calculators and copulators, constructers and cloners who believe that they are free and powerful but who are in fact being destroyed by the very "Nature" that they wish to conquer as they are enslaved to an oligarchy of "Conditioners" who are themselves enslaved and destroyed by their insane strivings to define, design, manage and manipulate a world and a humanity bereft of the God who boundlessly loves them.
Others have seen and said similar things to what C. S. Lewis saw and said: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Stern, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Thomas Merton, the alleged atheist Anton Chekhov, and my most beloved Flannery O'Connor are among my personal favorites.
The challenge and joy -- and the pain and discomfort -- of reading such extraordinarily gifted people as these, whom the members of the Class of 2007 have most likely not read for their courses at St. Vladimir's (but who knows what the new curriculum will bring?), still lies before them. And this tells us why this present graduation ceremony is called a "commencement." It is a beginning of new things -- many wonderful and challenging and convincing new things -- that we wish for the men and women completing their studies at St. Vladimir's Seminary this day.
And this brings us to the last conviction that I may share with you today: Every day, by God's grace, brings us a new beginning. We are all always "commencing" a new spiritual adventure in living and loving as God lives and loves. It is never over. And it is never too late to start anew.
I congratulate the Class of 2007 for their remarkable achievements. I congratulate their families, friends and teachers, and all who cared for them during their time at the seminary. I pray that the Merciful Lord will bless, guide and protect them in every way as they "commence" this new stage of their lives. And I thank God and the seminary faculty for the privilege and honor of addressing them, and you all, here today.
5.30.2007
SVS Commencement Address
By Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko
Dean Emeritus, St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary
May 19, 2007
Your Beatitude Metropolitan Herman, Your Grace Bishop Antoun, Your Grace Bishop Titus, Father Dean Erickson, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and most especially the honored members of the Class of 2007: Glory to Jesus Christ!
I am delighted to speak to you at this commencement ceremony today. This honor is especially significant for me since I came to this school as a student exactly a half century ago, in September 1957.
For forty of the last fifty years I was officially connected with St. Vladimir's. I was a student for six years, and, after five years as a pastor in Ohio, I returned to the seminary where I served as a teacher and pastor for thirty-four years until my retirement five years ago. This school gave me my spiritual life and my spiritual family. It also gave me my wife, and our children and grandchildren, for which I am inexpressibly grateful.
Father Erickson and the seminary faculty asked me to tell you today what I believe to be the most important things that I learned in the last fifty years. They asked me to do this in about twenty minutes. So what can I tell you in my remaining nineteen?
The first and most important thing is that we are boundlessly loved by God who blesses us to love Him boundlessly in return.
I can also tell you that we can love God as He loves us only by faith and grace, by His own divine power, and that we prove our love for Him by loving everyone and everything, beginning with our worst enemies, just as He does, with the very same love with which He loves us, the very Love that He Himself is.
And I can tell you that being loved by God, and loving Him in return, is the greatest joy given to creatures, and that without it there is no real and lasting happiness for humanity.
And I can also tell you, alas, that such loving is always a violent, brutal and bloody affair.
The God who is merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, who gives us his divine life and peace and joy forever, is first of all the Divine Lover who wounds His beloved, and then hides from her, hoping to be sought and found. He is the Father who chastens and disciplines His children. He is the Vinekeeper who cuts and prunes His vines so that they bear much fruit. He is the Jeweler who burns His gold in His divine fire so that it would be purged of all impurities. And He is the Potter who continually smashes and refashions and re-bakes His muddy clay so that it can be the earthen vessel that He wants it
to be, capable of bearing His own transcendent grace and power and glory and peace.
I learned that all of these terrible teachings of the Holy Scriptures and the saints are real and true. And so I became convinced that God's Gospel in His Son Jesus is really and truly God's final act on earth. It is the act in which God's Word is now not simply inscribed in letters on pages of parchment, but is personally incarnate as a human being in his own human body and blood. And so I became convinced of the truth of all truths: that the ultimate revelation of God as Love and the ultimate revelation of humanity's love for God, are both to be found in the bloody
corpse of a dead Jew, hanging on a cross between two criminals, outside the walls of Jerusalem, executed at the hands of Gentiles, by the instigation of his own people's leaders, in the most painful, cursed, shameful and wretched death that a human being -- and especially a Jew -- can possibly die.
So to the measure that we are honest and faithful, and try to keep God's commandments, and repent for our failures and sins, we come to know, and to know ever more clearly and deeply as time goes by, what we have learned here at St. Vladimir's. We come to know by experience that the Word of God (ho logos tou theou) is always and necessarily the word of the Cross (ho logos tou stavrou). And -- in language befitting a commencement ceremony at an Orthodox graduate school of theology -- we come to see that true theologia is always stavrologia. And real orthodoxia is always paradoxia. And that there is no theosis without kenosis.
Theology is stavrology and Orthodoxy is paradoxy: the almighty God reveals Himself as an infinitely humble, totally self-emptying and absolutely ruthless and relentless lover of sinners. And men and women made in His image and likeness must be the same. Thus we come to see that as there is no resurrection without crucifixion, there is also no sanctification without suffering, no glorification without humiliation; no deification without degradation; and no life without death. We learn, in a word, the truth of the early Christian hymn recorded in Holy Scripture:
If we have died with him, we shall also live with him;
if we endure with him, we shall also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful -
for he cannot deny himself. (2Tim 2.11-13)
According to the Gospel, therefore, those who wish to be wise are constrained to be fools. Those who would be great become small. Those who would be first put themselves last. Those who rule, serve as slaves. Those who would be rich make themselves poor. Those who want to be strong become weak. And those who desire to find and fulfill themselves as persons deny and empty themselves for the sake of the Gospel. And, finally, and most important of all, those who want really to live have really to die. They voluntarily die, in truth and in love, to everyone and everything that is not God and of God.
And so, once again, if we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that though we can know about God through formal theological education, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus. And we can only do this by faith and grace through the Holy Spirit's abiding power.
When we speak about "taking up our crosses" and "bearing our burdens" in imitation of Christ, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, we also learn by painful experience that the crosses we take up and the burdens we bear must be those that God gives us, and not those that we ourselves choose and desire. Thus we become convinced that when our burdens are unbearable and our crosses crush us in joyless misery -- and we become dark, depressed, despondent and desperate -- the reasons are evident. Either we are choosing our own crosses and burdens, and rejecting those sent to us by our merciful God whose thoughts and ways are not ours; or we are attempting to carry our crosses and bear our burdens by our own powers, and not by God's grace and strength given to us by Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Church.
And so we come to another conviction: The Church -- the communion of faith and love (as St. Ignatius of Antioch defined it: henosis agapis kai pisteos), the community of saints who are Christ's own very "members" as his body and bride -- is essential to our human being and life. We
cannot be human beings -- still less, Christians and saints -- by ourselves.
We need God and his wise and faithful servants. We need God's commandments and living examples of their fulfillment. We need the Church's scriptures, sacraments, services and saints. And we need one another. As Tertullian said centuries ago, "One Christian is no Christian." And as the Russian proverb puts it, "The only thing that a person can do alone is perish." Like it or not, we are "members of one another" in God. If we like it, it is life and paradise. If we reject it, it is death and hell.
So, in the end, because everything is about the true God and Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the Church's scriptures, sacraments, services and saints, and God's love, wisdom, truth and power, so too, therefore, is everything about the most important and Godlike reality of all, what St. John Climakos called "thrice-holy humility": the humility of God himself that cannot be defined but can only be seen and adored in the crucified Christ, and in those who, by faith and grace, are co-crucified with Him.
Thus, if we have become convinced of anything at all as Orthodox Christians, we are convinced that human beings are not autonomous. The proclamation and defense of human autonomy is the most insidious lie of our day, especially here in North America, and in the Western and Westernized worlds generally. Humans beings are by nature heteronomous. Another law (heteros nomos) is always working in our minds and members. This "other law" is either the law of God, the law of Christ, the law of the Holy Spirit, the law of liberty and life that can only
be recognized, received and realized by holy humility, or it is the law of sin and death. (cf. Romans 7-8) When the law within us is God's law, then we are who we really are, and we are sane and free. But when that law is the law of sin and death, then we are not ourselves, and we are
insane, enslaved and sold to sin.
More than fifteen hundred years ago St. Anthony the Great declared that "a time is coming when people will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us.'" (Saying 25)
It may well be that the time that St. Anthony foresaw is now upon us, or at least is rapidly approaching, at least in the West. And because of what we have learned, we know what we have to do about it. The same St Anthony, with all holy people, has told us. I urge you, and, if I could, I would command you, to read St. Anthony's thirty-eight sayings in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Everything we need to know in order to live is there for us in its simplest and clearest form.
Abba Anthony first tells us that when we are plagued by whirling thoughts (logismoi) and worn down by an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness and futility (akedia), which we will be in this sinful world, we must simply and diligently work and pray, by pure devotion and sheer obedience. We must pay attention to ourselves and mind our own business. We must do our work, and let God -- and other people -- do theirs.
He also tells us that whoever we are, we should always have God before our eyes; and whatever we do, we should always do according to the testimony of the Holy Scriptures; and wherever we are, we should not easily leave that place.
He further tells us (with his friend Abba Pambo) not to trust in our own righteousness, not to worry about the past, and to guard our mouths and our stomachs. He tells us to take responsibility for our own behavior, and to expect to be ferociously tempted to our very last breath. He tells us that there is no salvation for us without trial and temptation, and that without being tested, no person can be healed, illumined and perfected. He tells us that each one of us has our own unique life, that no two people are the same, and that each of us has to be the person that God made us to be (as Fr Paul Lazor, my dearest friend, so often says) where we are, when we are, with whom we are, from whom we are, and such as we are, according to God's inscrutable providence.
Anthony also tells us, as do all the saints, that our life and our death begin and end with our fellow human beings. He insists that if we have gained our neighbor, we have gained our God, but if we have scandalized our neighbor, we have sinned against Christ. He says that all of our ascetical disciplines, including our scholarly studies, are means to an end; they are not ends in themselves. The end is discernment (diakrisis) and dispassion (apatheia) and the knowledge (epignosis) of God through keeping His commandments, the first and greatest of which is love (agape). And he teaches that our only hope to escape the countless snares of this world that seek to enslave us is found in one thing alone: Christ-like humility, with "a broken, contrite and humble heart," as the psalmist says, being our sole "sacrifice acceptable to God." (Psalm 51.17)
"I saw all the snares the enemy spreads out over all the world" Abba Anthony said, "and I cried out groaning, 'What can get through from such snares?' Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Humility'." (Saying 7)
An extended explanation of St. Anthony's teachings, and those of our Christian saints generally, may be found in a book published in 1867 in Russia. It is by St. Ignaty Brianchaninoff, and is called in English The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. I am convinced that
every committed Christian, surely every seminary graduate, should feel obliged to read this book, meditating especially on its first part about the absolute necessity of keeping God's evangelical commandments (evangelskii zapovedy), accompanied by St Ignaty's dire warnings to religious people -- especially those with theological educations and ascetical inclinations and mystical desires-- who may fail to keep the commandments of the Gospel because they accept the lie that they are "not like other people" as they surrender to the delusion -- the fiercest and most destructive of all delusions for religious people -- that they are especially gifted, zealous and illumined. For, as my beloved Professor Serge Verhovskoy never tired of warning: "The worst of all sins is the lie, and the worst of all lies is the lie about God, and worst of all lies about God is the lie about God and me."
I would also recommend today, and, again, if I could, I would also insist that all thinking Christians, and surely all seminary students and graduates, be required to read one other book that contains, in my view, the most incisive analysis of what has happened to humanity in the last fifty years. It is C. S. Lewis's prophetic masterpiece written in 1944 called The Abolition of Man. This slender volume should be read slowly, methodically and carefully many times over. Parts of it, which I have read more than ten times, are still unclear to me. But its main point is crystal clear.
Lewis says that for human beings to see, know, love, adore and offer fitting thanksgiving for all that is good, true and beautiful in human life, and so to remain fully and truly human, they must possess and cultivate the uniquely human faculty that differentiates them from angels and beasts, and, we must also add today, from the artificial intelligence of electronic technology. Lewis calls this faculty the "Tao." He says that it may also be called the "image of God" or the "spark of divinity" or the Law or the Logos or the Heart. (Today, if he knew Orthodox literature, he might have also said that it may be called the Nous.) Whatever one calls it, it is the faculty whereby human beings intuit and contemplate the basic truths of human being and life that ground all ratiocination, discourse, conversation and disputation. Lewis claimed in 1944 that if the methods of education prevailing in the schools of his day prove to be successful,
this uniquely human faculty will be obliterated, and human beings as we have known them will no longer exist. It will literally be "the abolition of man."
I am convinced that what Lewis foresaw has happened, and is still happening with ever more catastrophic consequences, in our Western and Westernized worlds. It happens that men and women who once were human are simply no longer so. They have become nothing but minds and matter, brains and bodies, computers and consumers, calculators and copulators, constructers and cloners who believe that they are free and powerful but who are in fact being destroyed by the very "Nature" that they wish to conquer as they are enslaved to an oligarchy of "Conditioners" who are themselves enslaved and destroyed by their insane strivings to define, design, manage and manipulate a world and a humanity bereft of the God who boundlessly loves them.
Others have seen and said similar things to what C. S. Lewis saw and said: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Stern, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Thomas Merton, the alleged atheist Anton Chekhov, and my most beloved Flannery O'Connor are among my personal favorites.
The challenge and joy -- and the pain and discomfort -- of reading such extraordinarily gifted people as these, whom the members of the Class of 2007 have most likely not read for their courses at St. Vladimir's (but who knows what the new curriculum will bring?), still lies before them. And this tells us why this present graduation ceremony is called a "commencement." It is a beginning of new things -- many wonderful and challenging and convincing new things -- that we wish for the men and women completing their studies at St. Vladimir's Seminary this day.
And this brings us to the last conviction that I may share with you today: Every day, by God's grace, brings us a new beginning. We are all always "commencing" a new spiritual adventure in living and loving as God lives and loves. It is never over. And it is never too late to start anew.
I congratulate the Class of 2007 for their remarkable achievements. I congratulate their families, friends and teachers, and all who cared for them during their time at the seminary. I pray that the Merciful Lord will bless, guide and protect them in every way as they "commence" this new stage of their lives. And I thank God and the seminary faculty for the privilege and honor of addressing them, and you all, here today.
We are what we sing
In this thoughtful article on the CT website, scholar Mark Noll contends that the hymns of evangelicalism are the heart of its faith. We are what we sing. True, true true, also Lutherans and any other Christian group.
In another CT website article Mark Galli argues that Christian education has become too focused and confined to the classroom. Better Christian education happens in worship, community and a shared life centered around shared beliefs and experiences and values.
In another CT website article Mark Galli argues that Christian education has become too focused and confined to the classroom. Better Christian education happens in worship, community and a shared life centered around shared beliefs and experiences and values.
Time : wasted or well spent?
Here is my excuse: Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent .
It has taken me years to make tentative peace with my stops and starts during work. Every morning I vow to become a morning person, starting full speed out of the gate. And every morning I daydream, shuffle papers, read e-mail messages and visit blogs, and somehow it is time for lunch. Then, at about 2 p.m., a sense of urgency kicks in, and I write steadily, until about 5 or 6, when I revert to the little-of-this, some-of-that style of the morning.
Over the years I have come to see that the hours away from the writing are the time when the real work gets done. When a paragraph turns itself this way and that in a corner of my brain even while my fingers are buying books on Amazon.com. What appears to be wasted time is really jell time. This redefinition only makes me feel a little less guilty.
It has taken me years to make tentative peace with my stops and starts during work. Every morning I vow to become a morning person, starting full speed out of the gate. And every morning I daydream, shuffle papers, read e-mail messages and visit blogs, and somehow it is time for lunch. Then, at about 2 p.m., a sense of urgency kicks in, and I write steadily, until about 5 or 6, when I revert to the little-of-this, some-of-that style of the morning.
Over the years I have come to see that the hours away from the writing are the time when the real work gets done. When a paragraph turns itself this way and that in a corner of my brain even while my fingers are buying books on Amazon.com. What appears to be wasted time is really jell time. This redefinition only makes me feel a little less guilty.
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